HARLINGTON is a small straggling village, about a mile and a half north-west of Cranford, and nearer to Southall and Hayes, and also some three miles south of Uxbridge It is in the Hundred of Elthorne and Union of Staines. The village contains several very old cottages, probably of the sixteenth century; much of the parish is still devoted to market gardens, and especially to cherry orchards, which impart to the lanes in the locality a green and shady aspect.

Good brick earth is obtained on the surface, especially in the northern part, though gravel predominates below, and the result is that much brick-making is carried on in the neighbourhood. In 1871 this parish contained inhabited houses to the number of 254, whilst the population amounted to 1,296 souls. According to the

census returns for 1881 the number of the inhabitants had increased to 1,538. The acreage of the parish is set down at 1,464, and the rateable value at £11,433.

The name of Harlington appears to have been originally spelt Herdington, or Herdyngton. Under the former name it is mentioned in " Domesday Book" as a manor answering for ten hides, and having "land for six ploughs," and held under Earl Roger by Alured and Olaf. It speaks of a priest as owning half a hide of land there, and of twelve villani, holding half a virgate each; mention is made also of eight cottagers and one bondsman. Its whole value is given as one hundred shillings. "It is taxed," writes the author of the Antiquarian Cabinet, "in the ancient valors at nine marks yearly. In the

and the east window, of post-Reformation Gothic, cannot fail to remind visitors of Oriel and Wadham Colleges at Oxford. The church altogether is, perhaps, the best specimen of a medieval country church in all the Middlesex valley of the Thames. It is rendered all the more picturesque by a fine yew-tree-said to be 700 years old-on the south side of the churchyard, and a noble cedar in the vicarage garden adjoining it on the north.

In the church are brasses to members of the Lovell family, and one, half-length, to John Yarmouth, a former rector, who is duly robed in the Eucharistic vestments. On the north wall of the chancel is the monument of Dr. Joseph Trapp, rector of this parish in 1732-47, and some time Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. He died in 1747. His monument bears the following lines :

the north side of the chancel-is thought by some antiquarians to be the reredos of an altar. The registers, which commence in 1540, are in fairly good condition; they are curious as containing the names of many "travellers "—one result of the parish being situated just one day's tramp on the great road to the west from London.

Among former rectors was a John of Tewkesbury, who was the author of some learned books; and also John Kyte, who resigned the living in 1510; he was probably the same person who was sent as ambassador to Spain, and died in 1537 Bishop of Carlisle. He was a native of London, and is buried at Stepney.

The magnificent old yew-tree in the churchyard above referred to grows now in a healthy and natural fashion; but, as shown in our illustration taken early in the present century, it used to be clipped

You stand on vast eternity's dread brink;
Faith and repentance, piety and prayer,
Despise this world, the next be all your care.
Thus, while my tomb the solemn silence breaks,
And to the eye this cold dumb marble speaks,
Tho' dead I preach: if e'er with ill success,
Living, I strove th' important truth to press,
Your precious, your immortal souls to save;
Hear me, at least, oh, hear me from my grave."

Dr. Trapp's want of poetical ability, as exemplified in his attempts to translate Virgil and Milton, is recorded in some severe epigrams. There is a portrait of him in the Bodleian Library.

The Bennets, Lords Tankervilie, are still buried here, though the family have long lived in Northumberland. On the floor is a memorial to Charles, Earl of Tankerville, who died in 1767; and the last earl, who died in 1859, has also a memorial here. There are also monuments to various members of the family of Lord De Tabley, his first wife having been a De Salis.

There are some fine modern tombs and two painted windows erected in memory of members of the family of De Salis of Dawley Court, whose fortunes were founded in this country by one Peter de Salis, sent hither as envoy in 1709 from the Emperor Joseph I.

A fresco painting on the south wall of the nave was discovered on removing the monument of Sir John Bennet, Lord Ossulston, who died in the year 1695. The monument, which has been replaced, has upon it busts of Lord Ossulston and his two wives.

Affixed to the south wall of the nave is a carved hour-glass of oak, thought by some to be of the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The Easter sepulchre-a handsome piece of stone carving on

by the parish clerk, John Saxy, affixed to a large copper-plate engraving, it would seem that in 1729 this yew-tree was upwards of fifty feet high. It was surrounded at the base by a circular seat, over which hung a large canopy, formed by the dark boughs of the tree, in the words of this rural poet

"So thick, so fine, so full, so wide,

A troop of Guards might under 't ride."

Some ten feet higher up again was another smaller canopy, above which the tree towered up solid, till its topmost leaves formed a sort of nest in the shape of a globe, with a cock or hen seated above it.

"A weather-cock, who gapes to crow it, 'The globe is mine and all below it,'' of the tree, thatwrites the rhymer, who adds his deliberate opinion

"It yields to Harlington a fame

Much louder than its Earldom's name."

Without going quite so far as the worthy clerk,

we may state that the tree, until it ceased to be clipped, some half century ago, was the great curiosity of the place, and was visited by scores of persons. It is thought to be as old as the Conquest, and it is still one of the largest yewtrees in the home counties: its branches formerly reached to the church porch, and are said to have covered a space of 150 feet. The clipping and clearing of the tree was a village holiday, as important in its way and in its place as the scouring of the White Horse on the Berkshire Downs. The last occasion on which it was clipped was in 1825.

In our view of the church the old yew does not appear to be so high as when sung of by the parish clerk. It figures also in Loudon's "Arboretum Britannicum," but in that work its dimensions are exaggerated.

The fantastic idea of thus clipping the yew-tree was a survival of the old formal style of gardening which prevailed under our Tudor and Stuart sovereigns.

The charities in this parish are considerable. One rector, named Cooper, left an annual sum to the clerk for repairing his tomb; but this reverend gentleman's body has been removed from his grave to another part of the churchyard; the benefaction, however, remains. Some land was left to the bellringers to provide them a leg of pork for dinner on Guy Fawkes' Day, and this is called the Pork Half-Acre. The land has since been sold for £100, and the proceeds invested for their benefit; and about fourteen acres were set apart for the poor at the last enclosure, in lieu of their ancient right to cut turf.

Dawley Court, in this parish, once the residence of the great Lord Bolingbroke, is no longer standing, except the steward's apartments, or what is said to have been the laundry, consisting of two fine rooms. This for many years has been the only building on the estate, the remainder of the land having been cut up into prosaic brickfields.

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will be remembered as a member of the "Cabal Ministry," and who was raised to the peerage in 1663 as Viscount Thetford and Earl of Arlington. His lordship meant to choose this place as that from which he should derive his title; but the scribes of the Herald's College, or some other officials, were not as attentive to their "H's" as they should have been, and so, when the patent reached his hands, or when he read his new dignity in the Gazette, he found that he had been created Earl, not of Harlington, but of "Arlington." It was too late for any alteration to have been made, for "the proof had been worked off," so Arlington he remained; and the street which runs out of Piccadilly towards St. James's Palace is Arlington also.

The Arlington coronet is now merged in the ducal title of Grafton, through the marriage of the first duke with Lady Isabella Bennet, only daughter of the above-mentioned earl; consequently, the Duke of Grafton reckons among his inferior titles the barony of " Arlington, of Harlington, county of Middlesex."

From the Bennets Dawley Court passed to the celebrated Lord Bolingbroke, and became his favourite country house, or, as he liked to style it, his "farm." He lived here during a memorable period of his eventful life, the time of his estrangement from public affairs, and from the gay world as well. To use his own figurative language,

The manor-house at Dawley must have been a spacious structure; it was the residence of the Lovells and of the Bennets before it came into the hands of Lord Bolingbroke. Its succeeding owner, Lord Uxbridge, is said to have built round it a wall nearly a mile long, to keep out the smallpox.

Dawley became the property of the Bennets early in the sixteenth century. Sir John Bennet, who appears to have been the first of that name residing here, was a distinguished member of Parliament in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and was judge of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury in the reign of James I. In 1617 he was sent as ambassador to Brussels, to interrogate the archduke on behalf of his royal master, the King of Great Britain, concerning a libel written and published, as it was supposed, by Erycius Puteanus, in his Imperial Highness's dominions. His eldest son and successor, Sir John Bennet, of Dawley, ancestor of the Earls of Tankerville, received the honour of knighthood in the lifetime of his father at Theobalds, in 1616. He was the father of Henry Bennet, who

but for the sake of the hermit; for here he found that the insects which used to hum and buzz about him in the sunshine fled to men of more prosperous fortune, and forsook him when in the shade." Here he was often visited by "Glorious John Dryden."

Lord Bolingbroke adorned his house with paintings of rustic subjects, "trophies of rakes, spades, prongs," &c. (as Pope tells us in a letter addressed by him from hence to Swift), and over the door he placed an inscription, slightly altered from Horace :

"Satis beatus ruris honoribus."

Living as he did within some six or seven miles of Dawley, Pope was a constant visitor here; and so was Voltaire occasionally, whilst staying in London.

It is said that some of the same wild oxen which are now to be seen at Lord Tankerville's park in Northumberland were kept here in the time of the Bennets; but this is probably an error.

A poem, entitled "Dawley's Farm," in the first

volume of the Gentleman's Magazine, gives us some glimpses of the place as it appeared in

1731

"See, emblem of himself, his villa stand,
Politely finish'd, elegantly grand!
Frugal of ornament, but that the best,
And with all curious negligence express'd.
No gaudy colours deck the rural hall,
Blank light and shade discriminate the wall;
Where through the whole we see his lov'd design,
To please with mildness, without glaring shine,
Himself neglects what must all others charm,
And what he built a palace calls a farm.

Here the proud trophies and the spoils of war Yield to the scythe, the harrow, and the car, To whate'er implement the rustic wields, Whate'er manures the gardens or the fields.

*

Here noble St. John, in his sweet recess,
Sees on the figured wall the stacks of corn
With beauty more than theirs the room adorn ;
Young winged Cupids smiling guide the plow,
And peasants elegantly reap and sow.

O, Britain! but 'tis past. O lost to fame,
The wondrous man, thy glory and thy shame,
Conversing with the mighty minds of old-
Names like his own in time's bright lists enroll'd,
Here splendidly obscure, delighted lives,

And only for his wretched country grieves."

Lady Luxborough, Lord Bolingbroke's sister, mentions the place in one of her letters in terms which fully justify these not very poetical lines. She writes: When my brother Bolingbroke built Dawley, which he chose to call a 'Farm,' he had his hall painted in stone colour, with all the implements of husbandry placed in the manner one sees, or might see, arms and trophies in some general's hall; and it had an effect that pleased everybody."

Voltaire occasionally came here whilst staying in London; and Pope, who lived within some six or seven miles of Dawley, was a constant visitor. In a letter written from hence by Pope to Dean Swift, we find the following:-"I now hold the pen of my Lord Bolingbroke, who is reading your letter between two hay-cocks; but his attention is somewhat diverted by casting his eyes on the clouds-not in admiration of what you say, but for fear of a shower. He is pleased with your placing him in the triumvirate between yourself and me; though he says that he doubts he shall fare like Lepidus, while one of us runs away with all the power, like Augustus, and another with all the pleasures, like Anthony. It is upon a foresight of this that he has fitted up his farm. Now his lordship is run after his cart, I

have a moment left to myself to tell you that I overheard him yesterday agree with a painter for £200 to paint his country hall with trophies of rakes, spades, prongs, &c., and other ornaments, merely to countenance his calling his place a farm."

His lordship, we are told, was happy in possessing "a mind formed for the world at large, and not dependent on the contingencies of court favour"; though it is to be regretted that the poetical warmth of his imagination often led him, in his retired as well as in his busy hours, to flights of dangerous mental indulgence. A temper so ardent could never find a semblance of repose but in

extremes.

"In the earlier days of his character," writes Mr. Disraeli, "Lord Bolingbroke meditated over the formation of a new party-that dream of youthful ambition in a perplexed and discordant age, but destined in English politics to be never more substantial than a vision. More experienced in political life," he continues, "Lord Bolingbroke became aware that he had only to choose between the Whigs and the Tories, and his sagacious intellect, not satisfied with the superficial character of these . . . divisions, penetrated their interior and essential qualities, and discovered, in spite of all the affectation of popular sympathy on the one side, and of admiration of arbitrary power on the other, that his choice was, in fact, a choice between oligarchy and democracy. From the moment that Lord Bolingbroke, in becoming a Tory, embraced the national cause, he devoted himself absolutely to his party; all the energies of his Protean mind were lavished in their service; and although . . . restrained from advocating the cause of the nation in the Senate, his inspiring pen made Walpole tremble in the recesses of the Treasury ; and in a series of writings, unequalled in our literature for their spirited patriotism, their just and profound views, and the golden eloquence in which they are expressed, eradicated from Toryism all those absurd and odious doctrines which Toryism had adventitiously adopted, clearly developed its essential and permanent character, discarded the jus divinum, demolished passive obedience, threw to the winds the doctrine of nonresistance, placed the abdication of James and the accession of George on their right basis, and in the complete reorganisation of the public mind laid the foundation for the future accession of the Tory party to power." But a man of fashion, and fond of society and of politics, Lord Bolingbroke soon found that the country was wearisome, and resolved to part with his beloved Dawley. He sold