sing a couple of "turns," one early in the evening, the other late. During the interval they are perhaps sent to "the front," i.e., amongst the audience, and it is an understood thing that if drink be offered, it must not be refused. No matter if vice be encouraged, it is "for the good of the house." The second "turn "is frequently a failure, and for obvious reasons. But the proprietor has lost nothing, and if his victim didn't drink, she wouldn't long keep her engagement. Poor girls! in a year or two their voices are completely cracked, and they have no resource but the workhouse or the streets. It is not one girl in ten that can stand the ordeal of life in the country. It is consolatory to reflect that in leading establishments such as the Oxford and Alhambra, proceedings of the kind we have referred to would be quite without precedent. With regard to the origin of the various performers, they have as a rule sprung from the stage or the "saw-dust; their fathers have been strolling actors, clowns, harlequins, acrobats, etc. We could name some clever gymnasts now in receipt of good salaries who formerly earned a livelihood by wandering from town to town, or from village to village, and performing in the, London streets. Some of the best acrobats are foreigners, and the high-sounding Italian names in the programmes are not always fictitious. In halls where there are musical selections, the leading tenors and soprani are generally broken-down members of English or Italian Opera Companies. The exertion of singing in a selection is comparatively small, the vocal powers are not severely taxed, and though the position is hardly one of éclat, it brings in between five and six pounds a week. A lady, once a "star" of some magnitude at the Italian Opera, condescended to take an engagement at Day's concert room in Birmingham. A leading tenor at one of the principal London musichalls, held a post of honour at Covent Garden Theatre. At leading establishments it is usual to employ one or two really excellent singers to maintain the reputation of the house, and a gentleman or a lady in such a position is able to earn from fifteen to twenty pounds a week. The great advantage of a situation of this kind is that the performer has a regular salary to depend upon, whereas if he aimed at a more dignified position, say as a member of a travelling opera company, or an attendant at concerts, his earnings, though they might be in some instances large, would as a rule be extremely precarious. The chairman at a music-hall is generally a "professional." He may have been the principal basso, or the pianist. He announces the titles of the different pieces, and if a disturbance occurs, he is supposed to exert himself in endeavouring to quell it. He must be a man who can face an audience, and if there is a delay in the arrival of any performer, he is sometimes required to "take a turn." His salary may vary from a couple of pounds to fifty shillings a week. At good halls it is usual to hold a lady or gentleman in reserve, to supply any unlookedfor hiatus in the performance, and the occupants of such a post earn a weekly salary of from thirty-five shillings to a couple of pounds. The attendants at a music-hall are usually old soldiers, or policemen who have been tempted from the "force," by the prospect of higher wages. They are men of sober and respectable character, and rarely, if ever, broken-down members of the theatrical profession. A good deal might be written about concert-room advertisements and music-hall literature-both of them interesting subjectsbut our space is limited, and we may possibly treat of these and kindred topics in some future paper. ARTHUR OGILVY. IN AN ENGLISH PARK. WERE a distinguished foreigner to apply to me to show him the most characteristic feature of England in my neighbourhood, I should not take him to our local Snowdon or Lodore, or to a paper-mill, or a cotton factory, but to one of our ancestral parks. There is nothing like them on the continent. Fontainebleau is too much of a forest, St. Cloud is lamentably deficient in the lush thick grass which is the glory of Great Britain, and the German parks are either too wild or too formal. The great beauty of an English park arises from the charms of nature it possesses, coupled with the unobtrusive presence of care and art. The first glance shows that though it is allowed to grow at its own sweet will, a hidden supervision of master, bailiff, woodman, carpenter, &c., is continually exercised over it. Vegetation is never suffered to become rampant; timber is aided in growing, and improved upon and carefully guarded from injury of cattle. It is not once in three years, perhaps, that the ladies of the household ever enter the skiff and row on the lake, yet its waters are kept pellucid; no weeds may overgrow it, the swans expatiate upon its glassy surface in summer as well as their wilder brethren, the widgeon, in winter. All is very peaceful and homelike. It is centuries since the roar of culverins and musketry was heard in the quiet precincts of these parks. No revolution ever drove the owners into exile. From the Tudor princes father has handed down the domain in undisturbed succession to son. See! there is the hope of the estate at present being led under the chestnut-trees on a donkey by that page in buttons. The terrier that follows with the nurse is aristocratic to the backbone. The very rooks overhead caw in a far more pretentious manner than their vulgar bucolic brethren in anybody's ploughed fields in the next parish. It is curious how the influences of a long descent affect all the dependents on such a property. Good easy men, they saunter to and fro from work morning and evening pretty much to-day as they did yesterday, and as they fully intend to do to-morrow. Sir Hubert would never dream of dismissing his tenantry, born and bred like their fathers on his estate. Everything on such a place has a tendency to slide into an easy, good-natured kind of groove. The gardeners step into the servants'-hall and drink beer whenever they like. The quantity of corn and hay consumed in the stables is enormous. Whoever takes the trouble to inquire into such things? They were always done; and the present generation takes due care to keep up the traditions. The head groom has a house and salary better than most curates. Many governesses would think themselves passing rich had they but half the money the cook receives for her services. What an enviable post has the village schoolmistress, with her trim house and garden by the side of the park, and ruddy-faced charges, who curtsey and bow to every well clad person, as if this were the first article of their duty to their neighbours. Petted by the ladies from the great house, who so often bring them down oranges and cakes,-what a wonderful contrast they present to a London ragged school with its pale faces and squalid garments! The next great charm of an English park, besides this immemorial peacefulness, consists in the abundance and beauty of its timber. This is essentially the product of long descent and lapse of centuries, strict entails, and fine rentrolls. However poor the family may be, it abates no whit of dignity so long as its noble elms overshadow the Hall. Nothing short of famine or ruin staring him in the face would tempt the heir to fell them. He may be hard hit on the turf, cheated out of thousands by some pettifogging lawyer or rascally agent, but he will retrench, go abroad, sell the family portraits, melt down the plate, emigrate, do anything sooner than touch a stick of his ancestral timber. The feeling is an estimable one, teaching us to respect the sanctities of home, the associations connected with bygone generations; and so long as the fine old places scattered over England are allowed by the railways to exist, so long will the true gentleman and hospitable host be found in the country. The parvenu can vie with Lucullus in raising palaces and laying out magnificent gardens, but the one thing money will not buy is fine timber. It is easy to discern from afar through every county of our land Parks with oak and chestnut shady, Parks and ordered gardens great, Built for pleasure and for state. There are the curving clouds of verdure cutting the sky and fading into masses of light blue shadow in the distance, umbrosa cacumina in very deed. As we draw near, clumps of luxuriant foliage meet our eye, with floods of light pouring between the boles, and casting black depths of gloom beneath the tiers of leafage, spires of silver fir rising behind all, or feathery-sprayed birches attending upon the monarch of the glades, whose "knotty knees are well hidden in fern, and "branchy roots" driven far into the earth, like his brother of Sumner-place The fairest-spoken tree Besides this beauty of curves and lights or shadows, another fine effect which landscape gardeners sometimes obtrusively aim at, but which seems to come unsought to an old park, results from the happy blending of colour. The lighter tints of birch and beech are relieved by the sombre monotony of the oak, or the deep-green verdure of towering elms. In spring with pink and white thorns, many flowery-coned chestnut-trees, the riant colours of the purple beech (so different from the dark foliage it acquires later in the year), and the varied greenery of the newest pines somewhat sparingly interpersed, this effect is charming. The changeful character of these beauties is of course heightened by the broken ground of which every fine park is composed. Here will be a level space, an oasis of light amidst the surrounding forest-shades; penetrate them, and you enter a glade ruddy with bracken, the favourite haunt of the deer. Skirt it to yonder clump of larches, and the ground falls to a babbling rivulet overhung here and there with primæval thorn bushes, lichen-bearded, gnarled and riven with age. The air is cool here in the dog-days, tufts of hartstongue have grown on the banks undisturbed since William the Norman hunted in the adjacent chase: lady-fern and plumed shieldferns and the commanding Osmunda, Aspleniums, and Lastraas, the pretty little filmy fern and its half-brother the bristle-fern amongst the rarest of our native treasures, uncurl and woo the grateful moisture and die into mould annually, unknowing and unknown of fern collectors and Wardian cases. Once more we climb the mossy bank, and irresistibly sit down on the summit as the eye wanders over a fair expanse of country, tilth and pasture, grange and village and forest, one succeeding another into the bluest distance where some grand cathedral (like Lincoln from the Ermine Street) closes the view, or the Malverns glitter, "Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream"" It is impossible to write on an English park without resorting to poetry, for all poetry is in its many changing beauties. From the solitary glade marked by one lightning-riven ash-tree (where tradition reports that the second Sir Arthur was visibly carried off by the arch fiend, for his sins against the poor) to the mere, where the water-lily nightly "Folds her sweetness up And slips into the bosom of the lake," and the carp slowly sail round and round by day, as they did when Queen Elizabeth came here on a progress, every step and every glance discloses a fresh scene which reminds us of some favourite poetry. In the quietude of a moonlit night in July, or on the dreariest day of December, when winter hastens to involve grass and trees in his heavy snow-mantle, there is always something to admire in an English park. Though no sound is to be heard, in the one case you can trace the delicate leaf-work against the unclouded blue; in the other, the huge skeletons of boughs overawe you with their grim desolation. I speak not of the red and yellow tints of autumn, for to my mind spring is when the park is in its glory, just when the first few sunny days of the year have come, and the oaks are timidly unclosing their crisped palegreen foliage, while ashes still without a vestige of leaf, look like black and wintry spectres come to trouble joy. The rooks and jackdaws scarcely deign to notice your approach. They know no gun can be fired at them on that sacred ground. Thrushes sing blithely from the old elms; sheep run anxiously to look up truant lambs; stray sunbeams glint among the trees, and the soft April airs tempt you to declare no beauty of vast glacier and dark Alpine ravine can cheer the heart like the peaceful tenderness of an English home-scene. Let Creswick paint its beech avenue, and Linnell flood the Western wolds beyond with his sunset; I have depicted as much as pen can describe of its delights. Beside the above beauties which are in a manner common to all English parks, every notable park ought to have a distinguishing feature of its own. None can very well surpass Windsor in the hoar antiquity of its trees, although some giant oaks of no despicable age and girth may be found at Welbeck and Clumber Parks, clearings from or part of old Sherwood Forest. But many are dignified by choice trees of one or more kinds, as Carclew, with its conifers; Bicton, with its fine avenue of araucarias; and Bushey with its chestnuts. Blenheim, again, is remarkable from its trees being disposed in squares according to the order of battle drawn up by the great Duke at his celebrated victory. At Brocklesby Park, North Lincolnshire, the wonder is, not that the timber is fine, but that it has grown so well in an ungenial climate. The same may be said of other parks where constant care and skilful arboriculture conquer nature. Other causes besides fine trees make parks celebrated. Chillingham with its wild cattle, Chatsworth with its conservatories, are instances. All shams in a park where natural objects grow so luxuriantly, are detestable. Thus we have seen in one what appeared to be the ruins of an old priory, but which were artificially built up some fifty years ago, when taste was at its lowest ebb, and which internally do duty as a cowshed. Similarly the old-looking portal, with its machicolations and battlements, that meets the eye on entering some parks, but which is really a lodge, all stucco, bricks and whitewash, is like a jarring tone amidst nature's manifold harmonies. Such monstrosities remind the wayfarer of Bacon's caustic remark on "making of knots or figures with divers coloured earths" in a princely garden: "they be but toys; you may see as good sights many times in tarts.". Ice-houses, again, with Palladian porticoes in front, or modern hermitages used for picnics, are equally out of place in the simple greenery of an English park. The absurdity of the latter fancy is brought out in the story of the footman, who at one such park had to run down quickly to the under-keeper on the arrival of visitors, and order him to put on his serge-gown and flowing beard, and get out his wooden bowl and platter before they reached the hermitage! There is no need to ascribe this to Joe Miller, when we remember Lord Byron and his boon companions carousing in the dress of monks within the sombre precincts of Newstead Abbey. One of the greatest charms of the country to a meditative mind is to watch a summer evening deepening into night in one of our English parks. First comes the grateful coolness after sunset, when all that is balmy and fragrant amongst flowers and leaves strikes freshest upon the senses; then the last song of the birds for the day succeeds, and the grasshopper ceases his chirping, a partridge calls cheerily to his mate, and once more all is still. Meanwhile the " vapour'broidered blue" falls softly on the distant landscape, and creeps insensibly yet surely adown the green alleys and bushy hedgerows of the park. Now the hedgehog leaves his lair, and rabbits come out in playful troops from the plantations. Hist! they are off in an instant to their holes again! It is the keeper or a gipsy passing on the other side of the bushes. With his retreating footsteps you notice overhead the fitful flight of the bats, there is the little pipistrel, the prettiest of our native bats; and there the morose-looking Rhinolopus, with his curious nasal appendage, reminding us of his tropical kindred in the forests of Guiana. As the shades close in, the last thrush has ended his vigorous strain, and yielded to the "wakeful nightingale." We will finish the picture with Milton's unrivalled touches: She all night long her amorous descant sung; An English park is not only full of poetry, but the chosen home of all that is heroic or romantic in our medieval history. Standing amidst the stately timber and overlooking peaceful glades, the mind goes back at once to the knight who in Norman times held the broad acres of this park under his suzerain, and whenever his services were required was wont to ride forth at the head of his retainers along this hill-side. Advance a step onwards to the troubled times of the early Plantagenets, and the ruins of the old barbican to the left remind us of the civil warfare of the barons of those days. Through that crumbling archway the master rode home triumphant or was carried back on his shield. Many a fair pageant must it have looked down upon in old time, the lord attended by a gallant company going forth to the Crusade (his brass is yet to be seen in the little church below the hill), or returning with a faithful henchman or two to find, like the warriors who came back from Troy, many things changed at home, and his sleuth hound the only one to welcome him. Or perhaps the slanting shadows of evening remind us of quieter memories of the middle ages, highborn dames and damsels setting forth to startle the heron from his retreat and follow the bright-eyed hawks in their precipitate chase, the younger scions of the neighbouring gentry meanwhile fixing their bolts in the crossbows. Anna Marie up with the sun to rouse the deer with hound and horn, Lady Jane Grey deserting Plato to accompany her, the Christmas mummers, the May-day dancings, the thousand fair spectacles of old England, no where so easily as in a well-wooded park can their shadows be raised. Nor are modern days wanting in pleasant memories amidst these bright spots of England, its parks. Who does not remember the cricket and archery parties, and merry makings he has enjoyed in them? A coming of age on one of these properties is still a scene of festivity and mirth; and as you return with dewy morn from the revelry you must not be surprised if John Thomas on the box incontinently drives you into the lake. There are still copses, and woodbine, and forget-me-nots for lovers, and shady walks for sedater old age. The sward is none the less rich and fully as green as in old Sir Egremont's days, who directed in his will that he should be borne round the park he loved so well on his serving men's shoulders before he was laid to rest in the vault. The past meets the present in an English park, and he who dallies in its pleasant precincts with a heart open to nature's influences and full of love to his fellow-men, may find his future not altogether unaffected by the peaceful sights, and home-like sounds, and gentle thoughts amongst which he has been straying. M. G. WATKINS, M.A. THE LAKE. [AFTER LAMARTINE.] ON, on, for evermore we seem to glide, Past new-found meadows flower-starr'd and bright, No hope of turning back, still side by side On, thro' the dark and everlasting night. Can we not ever still time's golden stream, And on its ocean-bosom idly rest? One day! One hour! May we not sweetly dream, Here safely anchored on its glassy breast. O summer lake! to thee the fickle year, Whispers sad secrets which you dare not tell; Mirror'd on thy fair face, I linger near, Where she should come to bid a long farewell. Look in mine eyes! Here where she ever crept I'll sit me down upon this mossy stone, Here where she sadly sigh'd and wildly wept, Here, evermore, I'll sigh and weep alone. Thus, under mighty rocks your hollow groan Bellow'd incessantly, your hideous roar Echoed for ever, thus your dying moan Wash'd the torn splinters to the shelt'ring shore. 'Twas thus the wind-storm raged and shriek'd its song Of desolation round her lonely seat, |