My words were many, but in words few and well-chosen, He, 66 "As if sweet honey by the touch of gold were sweeter made. Even in good Saturn's day, 'twas hard to find a heart all pure, When all was poor that now is rich, and low that's now sublime; And gather'd reeds were all the couch from which he drain'd the wine; An earthen Jove, and of base clay the bolt that arm'd his hand. When with wild-flowers the fane was deck'd that now with jewels gleams, And his own sheep the senator fed near the rural streams; When gently woo'd by healthy sleep the rustic warrior lay On straw, and praised above all down a truss of bristling hay; The more he drinks, the more within the thirsty fever reigns. * The allusion here, and in the following lines, is to the different strenæ, or NewYear's gifts, which used to be given by the Romans. All things are prized by price; to wealth all honours now are sure; The ancient brass of Rome should I, the ancient Janus, slight? Brass was their wealth of old; though now the better omen's gold, We praise the ancients, and 'tis well; but use our modern ways- Here, where Rome stands, wild copse green grew; the busy forum now * The old Roman as, with the double head on one side and a ship on the reverse, is well known among numismatists. †The Tuscan flood is a common appellation for the Tiber, as rising in Etruria, and forming the ancient boundary between that country and Latium, opposite Rome. A silly etymology-from lateo, to lurk; mentioned also by Virgil.—Æn. viii. 323. "The Romans gave the name of Jani to arches like that of Temple-Ear in London, under which people passed from one street into another. They were always double; people entering by one and going out by the other, every one keeping to the right. The temple or gateway mentioned in this place, adjacent to the ox and the fish markets, was built by Duilius."-KEIGHTLEY. VOL. LVII. NO. CCCI, G "As there is now, so then there was, a slope by which you go Was raised; there sprinkled meal and cake smokes mingled with the flame." "But this say further, why thy gates in war are open, why In peace are closed? whereto the god thus gave the prompt reply; "That till her sons fierce war have quench'd, and crush'd the crude revolt, Rome to receive the homeward host may keep unbarr'd the bolt; In peace my locks are closed, that none may causeless leave his home, Scann'd east and west, and all that's spread beneath the ethereal blue; TO A BLIND GIRL. I do not sigh as some may sigh, I do not weep as some may weep, A glorious boon! Thou shalt not view No need to heed the frosty air, No need to heed the blasts that chafe, Thou shalt not mark the silent change Thou shalt not watch the slow decay, Nor see the ivy clasp the fane, Nor trace upon the column gray Ours is the darkness-thine the light. Within thy brow a glory plays; Shrine, blossom, dewdrop, all are bright With quenchless rays. J. D. THE FORCED SALE. A LARGE red briek house, with a multitude of gable-ends, and rows of small, dingy-looking windows, had hidden itself for many generations in a clump of fine old trees in a large green field-almost qualified to take rank as a park-at a distance of six or seven miles from St Paul's. In the days of the good Queen Anne, the city lay comfortably huddled up round the cathedral church, and looked upon her sister of Westminster as too far removed, and of too lofty a rank, to be visited except on rare occasions. London was then contained within reasonable limits, and it was easy to walk round her boundaries; you could even point out the precise spot at which the town ended and the country began. The inhabitants of the large brick house, known by the name of Surbridge Hall, at rare intervals, and then only to visit the shops, undertook the journey into the city; and, unless in the stillest of autumn evenings, when the enormous tongue of the metropolitan clock made itself audible on the Surbridge lawn, they might have forgotten that such a place as the capital was within fifty miles. That generation died off; and London had begun to put out feelers in all directions, and had outgrown the ancient limits. Streets began to move out a little way into the country for change of air; and, in making their usual shopping-visits to the great city, the inhabitants of Surbridge Hall had now to drive through a short row of houses, where the elders of the party remembered nothing but a hedge. That generation also died out; and the city, like an old dowager who has once been a beauty, and boasted of a waist, grew out of all shape. There were squares and crescents rising in every quarter; and the white tops of chimneys, and the blue dinginess of roofs, became visible from the upper windows of Surbridge Hall, The proprietor, terrified perhaps by the approach of such neighbours, advertised the Hall for sale, speedily found a purchaser, and, somewhere about the beginning of this century, the old family name of the Walronds disap peared from the country, and Surbridge Hall became the property of William Wilkins, Esq. We may observe that, much about the same time, the name of the senior partner disappeared from the door of a dingy-looking house in Riches Court, and the firm of Wilkins & Roe was deprived of its larger half. The old lion-rampant, that had stood on its hind-legs for so many years on the top of one of the piers of the entrance gates, as if in act to spring upon the deer that lay ruminating on the top of the other, was now displaced; and, in a few days, his position was taken by a plaster-ofParis cast of Hebe, benevolently holding forth an empty goblet towards the thirsty statue of Apollo which did duty on the other side. The floors in the old hall were new laid, the windows fitted with plate glass, the painting and decoration put into the hands of a Bond-street finisher, who covered the walls with acres of gilding, and hung chandeliers from the ceilings, and placed mirrors upon the walls, till the rooms looked like the show galleries of an upholsterer, and very different from the fine solid habitable apartments they used to be in the time of the late proprietor. And a change nearly as remarkable took place on Mr Wilkins himself as in his house. He attended county meetings, and became learned in rents and agriculture. He built new houses for his tenants, and only regretted he had never learned to ride, or he would have followed the hounds. But though he was no Nimrod, he dressed like one of his sons, and encased his thick legs in top-boots, and generally carried a whip. At last, by dint of good dinners, and voting on the right side at the elections, he became a magistrate; and if Mrs Wilkins had had the politeness to die, he would have married Lady Diana O'Huggomy, the daughter of an Irish earl; but Mrs Wilkins did not die, and Lady Diana ran away with a dancing-master. His son had been eighteen years at the bar, and never had had a brief; his daughters had been twenty years on the world, and never had had an offer; but he still expected to see Richard lord chancellor, and his three girls peeresses. A country gentleman, a county magistrate, perfectly healthy and tolerably rich, was there any thing wanting to Mr Wilkins's felicity? Yes. Alexander the Great was wretched when he had conquered the world, and was ten times happier when he was breaking-in Bucephalus; and Mr Wilkins, if the truth must be told, was very like Alexander the Great, at least in his discontent, and was never so gay as he used to be in the dingy mansion in Riches Court. The dinners he gave were formal, cold affairs, where he never felt at his ease: he could not help thinking that the neighbours quizzed and looked down on him; and, in short, he felt out of his element, and longed sometimes for the free-and-easy dinners he had relished so much in the city. His farm-houses were at last all built, his improvements all completed, and there was no further occupation for either himself or his money. He sometimes drove into Harley Street to see his son, but he found that gentleman also on the rack of idleness, and went home again, wondering how Roe was getting on in the old premises, though never venturing to go near hin-for his family had insisted on a dead cut between the partners, and could not endure the thoughts of Mr Roe coming between the wind and their newly acquired nobility. Time wore on. Old Wilkins grew older. He used to sit at the window of his drawing-room and look towards London, fancying to himself the bustle and stir that were going on, the crowding in Fleet Street, the crush at the Bank; and occasionally imagination conjured up to him the image of an active citizen bustling down towards the Exchange, radiant with success, and filled with activity and hope; and he could scarcely recognise his own identity with that joyous citizen, the William Wilkins of that happier time. The flood of building, which had only reached to within three miles of Surbridge when the Walronds retired to the ark of some estate they retained in Yorkshire, had now increased to such a degree, as to have submerged many of the fields and orchards that lay at a very short 66 distance from the Hall. Willars," with Italian fronts and little greenhouses at the side, took post all along the road, and, from the open windows, sounded in summer evenings the Battle of Prague, or God save the King, so that you walked amidst perpetual music, for no house was so ungenteel as to be without a piano. Surbridge Hall itself ran a great risk of becoming a suburban villa at no distant time; and Mr Wilkins was in some hopes that his family would allow him to consider himself an inhabitant of London once more, and no longer doom him to the cold nothingness of squireship and gentility. But whether they might have relented in this respect can never be known; for while he was meditating a renewal of his acquaintance with his late partner, and an occasional dive into Riches Court, he changed his bed at the Hall for the family vault (newly built) in Surbridge church, and his great-coat and riding-whip for a Roman toga and a long gilt baton, with which he pointed to heaven from the top of a splendid monument near the south wall. Richard now succeeded to the family honours; and as he had married a Miss Gillinghama name which he preferred to his ancestral appellation-he did her the honour to take it to himself, and was duly enrolled in the list of justices as Wilkins Gillingham, Esq. His son was sent to Christchurch, and his three daughters to a fashionable boardingschool. His mother and sisters retired to Tunbridge Wells, and they all began to persuade themselves that Surbridge had been in the family from the time of the Conquest. By way of strengthening their claims to county consideration, it was wisely determined to oppose the building invasion as powerfully as they could. Several farms and fields were bought, plantations were skilfully placed, two or three feet were added to the height of the walls all round the property; and it was hoped that some impression was made on the advancing architectural enemy; for in the speculative year of 1819, a dozen or two of builders were removed to the Queen's Bench, and whole rows of houses were left looking up to heaven, in vain expectation of a roof. Wilkins Gillingham |