This may be what they all mean; but he who writes thus is an honest man who will not lay perjury upon his soul, and there is something in the sanctity of an oath yet. We may be in the rereward of the fashion; but we have had some little experience, and we have seen one ready to dispose of his enemy by any means, however foul, one whom no consideration of humanity could touch, hesitate and turn pale when obliged to call on GOD to bear witness that the lie on his lips was the truth. In this improving age there is an inclination to tamper with these safeguards rather overmuch, and it is not the less dangerous for being sanctioned by some well-meaning persons. Let us pause before we

break down what is still a barrier to conscientious men. our autobiographer's pedigree.

But to

The family of which he is the representative emigrated into Yorkshire from Waterton, in the island of Axeholme, in Lincolnshire; and, as if in illustration of the name and their ottercrest, Walton Hall, where his ancestors have been for some centuries, stands also upon an island, surrounded by a lake of twenty-five acres in extent, in the well-wooded and securely wallgirt park. Through his grandmother, on the father's side, he comes, in a direct line, from Sir Thomas More; and by the mother's side he is akin to the Bedingfelds, of Oxburgh, to the Charltons, of Hazelside, and the Swinburnes, of Capheaton,'-all of them families which would have rejoiced the heart of Master Mumblazon himself.

'In remote times,' says Mr. Waterton, some of my ancestors were sufficiently notorious to have had their names handed down to posterity. They fought at Cressy, and at Agincourt, and at Marston Moor. Sir Robert Waterton was governor of Pontefract Castle, and had charge of King Richard II.'-[Not when the unhappy monarch was murdered we hope.]-Sir Hugh Waterton was executor to his sovereign's will, and guardian to his daughters. Another ancestor was sent into France by the king, with orders to contract a royal marriage. He was allowed thirteen shillings a-day for his trouble and travelling expenses. Another was Lord Chancellor of England, and preferred to lose his head rather than sacrifice his conscience. Another was master of the horse, and was deprived both of his commission and his estate, on the same account as the former. His descendants seemed determined to perpetuate their claim to the soil; for they sent a bailiff once in every seven years to dig up a sod on the territory. I was the first to discontinue this septennial act, seeing law and length of time against us.'-p. xvi.

The Watertons were a race of good old English gentlemen, holding fast the faith of their fathers, and clinging to it the more devotedly, the more they endured for its sake

'The darker their fortune, the brighter their pure love burn'd, Till shame into glory, till fear into zeal was turn'd.'

Part

Le Park estate was among the losses which tenacious Romanism. But we must let Mr. Le story, and he tells it with all the unction of a

Cf Henry VIII. things had gone on swimmingly for add it does not appear that any of them had ever been

Neque in his quisquam damnatus et exsul."

de sway of that ferocious brute, there was a sad reverse of

**Ex illo fuere, ac retro sublapsa referri,

Soes Danaum.”

Chence the tide of fortune left their shore, Ai obb'd much faster than it flow'd before.” sk our disasters was briefly this:-The king fell scandalously Auxom lass, and he wished to make her his lawful wife,

ng that his most virtuous queen was still alive. Having he head of the Church for a divorce, his request was not ed wh, although Martin Luther, the apostate friar and creedad dlowed the Margrave of Hesse to have two wives at one 4.de time. Upon this refusal, our royal goat became exceedChievous “Audax omnia perpeti ruit per vetitum nefas."

ed himself to be made head of the church, he suppressed monaderies, and squandered their revenues amongst gamesters, mounicbanks, and apostates. The poor, by his villanies, were

great misery, and they took to evil ways in order to keep oul together. During this merciless reign, seventy-two thouacu were hanged for thieving.'-pp. xvi. xvii.

relice system of those days appears to have been rather But to proceed:

Queen Mary's days'-[Smithfield to wit] In good Queen says there was a short tide of flood in our favour; and Thomas of Walton Hall was High Sheriff of York. This was the last cosaton held by our family. The succeeding reigns brought pa of reproach and indignity upon us. We were declared

apable of serving our country; we were held up to the scorn deholed multitude, as damnable idolaters; and we were uncereMy mated out of our tenements: our only crime being a conon adherence to the creed of our ancestors, professed by England long centuries before the Reformation. So determined were a religionists that we should grope our way to heaven along the good gloomy path which they had laid out for us, that they pey twenty pounds a-month, by way of penalty, for refusing incriod parson read prayers in the church of Sandal Magna: conorable edifice had been stripped of its altar, its crucifix, its da tabernacle, and all its holy ornaments, not for the love of 1, lost for the private use and benefit of those who had laid their hands upon them. My ancestors acted wisely. I myself

(as

(as I have already told the public in a printed letter) would rather run the risk of going to hell with St. Edward the Confessor, Venerable Bede, and St. Thomas of Canterbury, than make a dash at heaven in company with Harry VIII., Queen Bess, and Dutch William.'-pp. xvii. xviii.

This is a downright honest Roman Catholic confession of faith; and, though the shades of Queen Bess' and Dutch William may be rather scandalised at finding themselves in such close intimacy with that of Harry VIII.,' we cannot but admire the tact with which those names are associated in contrast with those of Mr. Waterton's Saints. He may say what he will of Henry VIII., who was a mere monstrous personification of sensuality, affecting the greatest scruples of conscience, and perpetrating, under the mask of decorum, the most cold-blooded cruelties in order to gratify his appetite. The wits of Italy were not far wrong when they compared him to Caligula, Nero, and Domitian. Henry did not, indeed, exhibit the open profligacy of the Romans, for the jealous ruthless tyrant' was a consummate hypocrite; but he was equally the slave of his passions, and not less truculent when they were roused. His innocent victim might have been alluded to less harshly. The buxom lass '—the exceedingly beautiful and spotless Anne Boleyn-the mother of Elizabeth--she whose only fault appears to have been, that—

'She was too fond of her most filthy bargain,'

paid the penalty of the pomp of her gilded hour, and her sufferings might have secured respect, at least, from one whose family had tasted of the tyranny of that bloody king. But thus it is that party spirit, especially if it be tinged with a dash of fanaticism, renders men callous to the undeserved pangs of those who have been the cause of the propagation of opposite opinions.

With such uncompromising sentiments, political, as well as religious, we may easily imagine the reciprocal love and affection which the lords of Walton Hall and Oliver Cromwell must have entertained for each other. The latter, though he did not make a breach in their battlement,' seems to have consoled himself personally for his disappointment, by a feat somewhat similar to that of the Laird of Balmawhapple, when he answered the cannon of Stirling Castle, by discharging his horse-pistol; for, according to Sir George Head, Oliver, when refused admittance, fired his pistol at the oaken gate of Walton Hall, wherein his bullet is still to be seen. His followers avenged the contumacy more substantially, by making prey of all the chattels that could travel upon four legs.

Mr. Waterton has not yet done with the hero of the Boyne, but bestows upon him a kick at parting-after this fashion :

• Dutch

protch William enacted doubly severe penal laws against us: during the reign of that sordid foreigner, some time maxation was at last made m favour of disgenfers; but it was particularly menet that nothing Contamed in the act should be construed to give masse to any papist or

popish zoenenné.' pp. xviii. xix.

Charley is my darling, indeed, breathes throughout these The affecting and the ludicrous are curiously blended in

the following preanges-

My grandfather had the honour of being sent priser to York, a whort time before the battle of Culloden, on account of his well-known genehment to the hereditary rights of kings, in the person of poor Chselby Sheet, who was declared a pretender! On my grandfather's #Asyah, ha Brind Host his horses had been sent to Wakefield, there to be Fapt at hos bverh kepeuse, But the magistrates very graciously allowed Fote the protkliwas a lunce for his own riding, provided the price of it was base from prinda. p. xix.

Alise dos, the strong dislike of the family to the reading of penyser by a married parson' can be no wonder. Mr. WaterPa grebale could have hardly made up his mind to invoke * Messing on their worships; though he might, perhaps, have pared in that otha pat of the litany, which prays that grace may BH My the magistrates to execute justice and to maintain ****** My own father,' continues the Squire, paid double taxes for some years after he came to the estate.'

The passion for ornithology showed itself early in our hero. When nine years of age, he was sent to a school in the north of England, where the large doses of literature administered by a skilful hand, do not seem to have produced the desired effect, but he made a vast proficiency in the art of finding birds' nesis,--a proficiency which his master endeavoured to check by a vigorous course of the same discipline which Thwackum rejoiced in inflicting on Tom Jones, apparently with about the same result. He went through the usual dangers of navigating the horse-pond in a tub, and got capsized accordingly; and, on his return from school he was, thanks to his ruling passion, once within an ace of closing all accounts here below for ever,' in the character of a somnambulist.

About one o'clock in the morning, Monsieur Raquedel, the family chaplain, thought he heard an unusual noise in the apartment next to his bed-room." He arose, and on opening the door of the chamber whence the noise had proceeded, he saw me in the act of lifting up the sash; and he was just in time to save me from going out at a window three stories high. I was fast asleep; and, as soon as he caught hold of me, I gave a loud shrick. I thought I was on my way to a neighbouring wood, in which I knew of a crow's nest.'-p. xxii.

The