of active good will and lasting friendship did the gift of a shilling here and there engender! Why, if you gave a waiter half-a-crown you might kick him downstairs, not that he was servile or cowardly -only forbearing and good-humoured, and, knowing your innate generosity, willing to pardon your freaks. Think of the delightful descriptions of inns which Harry Fielding has left us, and even Toby Smollett, the humorous and cantankerous Scot! Well, the Cyclopean ironmasters have stormed and taken that Heaven from us that joyous High-road Heaven, with all its fair Inns and kind inhabitants-There are no suppers at the King's Arms, Bagshot, any more; the Lion at Barnet has dropped his old tail for ever; and as for the King's Arms at Sevenoaks, I declare that only three weeks since I heard one of the daughters of the house playing a sonata of Thalberg's, which she concluded with a neat Italian song from Norma! Where are the coachmen and all their coats? The barmaids and their red, smiling cheeks? the posthorn (first and second turn out), the comfortable old jingling yellow postchaises and the post-boys? Let us hope that some other world has been found for them-some happy cloudy, and to us unknown, post-futurum !-O fie! . . . Here the huge engine gives a last scream, and going slowly through an avenue of brick kilns and flaming furnaces, and huge engines that have digested their red-hot loads of charcoal, we stop at a brilliant arcade, and the policemen shout out BRISTOL.

II.

IN BRISTOL CITY.

THE Royal Western Hotel is a vast edifice which will commodiously lodge the biggest traveller, and make a day at Bristol a very pleasant one to a stranger. The morning is well spent in a drive over the noble downs of Clifton, where the Bristol merchants have built for themselves a set of fine gleaming white palaces, where there is a Zoological Garden for those who have a desire to see the brute beasts, and magnificent prospects of rock, wood, and river for persons who prefer the picturesque, where the curious in doctor's stuff may taste the waters of the springs, and individuals nautically inclined have an opportunity of seeing the enormousest Iron Steam-boat that ever was known. There are, moreover, to be visited all sorts of fine terraces; we clamber up the steeps on which the new town is

built, and below are the queerest streets of the old, with great gaunt haunted-looking lodging houses in which our ancestors took pleasure. Then there are the quays, with the Irish boat continually arriving, herds of pigs are discharged from the same, and the squeaking and grunting of those quadrupeds, with the roars and gesticulations of their driver, are profitable subjects for observation, as need hardly here be said. Double is the excitement if one of those interesting passengers from Cork or Waterford happens to tumble into the water-no word of mine can paint the effect produced by an incident of this romantic nature, to which I had the fortune to be witness. If the animal had not been saved I should not, of course, have spoken of the matter in this light way, but saved he was. Alas! he is mostly pork by this time. Part of him has gone off in crackling unnaturally stuffed with sage and onions, part of him is in the tub no doubt, in brine much salter than that from which he escaped.

Of Bristol itself, although they say that of late years, and since the alteration in West Indian affairs, its prosperity has greatly decreased, indeed one can only say that it seems to bear its misfortunes most cheerfully, and must have been so rich as to have plenty to fall back upon when the evil day came. It is the most comfortable city I ever saw, with a plentiful florid John Bull appearance that does one good to see. The river seems wonderfully full of ships for a failing place, there is great bustle on the quays, and along them the most delightful old-fashioned warehouses, alehouses, and quaint old shops with outlandish wares. India goods, feathers, parrots, shells, monkeys, old china-such things a old-fashioned mariners used to bring home from their voyagesperhaps they have never been sold since the old days, they look old and queer enough to make one think so.

There are some grand houses, too, in the streets of the old English sort; with carved wood, and gables, and low porches, and the whole side of the houses covered with glass. Corn Street and Wine Street are rich-sounding names, and the streets so christened look becomingly prosperous. Here stand banks, Commercial Buildings, Athenæums, and handsome rich-looking shops, not having the tawdry Regent Street splendour, but a comfort of their own. They look warm in spite of all that is said about the decadence of the town. The Bristolians have a proper contempt, as I should presume, for art (though I did not visit the Bristol Exhibition, which stands in a street on a steep hill near the hotel which

appears to be entirely inhabited by doctors); but the print-shops were hung with the worst prints I ever saw-among them a series by a temperance painter representing the Drunkard's Progress (very well meaning but most odious in execution) and I have caught a view of the same performances in many of the Southern towns through which I have been. In the windows of the book shops tracts and such sort of theology seemed to be the chief objects exhibited; numbers of Quakers were in the streets, numbers of men and ladies with dissenting physiognomies (though it may appear rather bold in a stranger to attempt to judge of people at first glance by the art of their clothes or the appearance of their hair and hats), and great numbers of chapels likewise flourished all about.

I went to the Cathedral, a venerable old place, though of no great beauty, which stands on one side of a solemn-looking old square, with dark brick houses and large trees all around. The Square was pretty well filled with nurseries and their maids, but the Cathedral was quite empty. There were not four people, I think (besides the officials), to hear the service, of all the hundreds, thousands, swarming in the city. The organ is beautiful, the choruses of the anthem were charmingly sung by the boys of the choir, and there was a very old quavering tenor who piped out the solo parts with a voice woefully out of tune. I don't know why, but there was something pleasant in the very badness of his singing. I felt a respect for the old tenor. He seemed to say, ' Here I am, I am a hundred years old, and have lost my voice long, long ago—but I am faithful to the old singing-desk, though nobody cares for my singing, nor for what I sing. Go to the Ebenezer or the New Jerusalem, and you will hear five hundred lusty throats roaring, but of all the hundred thousand in this city not one is there to sing the good old anthems. I am the last of the Choristers-the poor old worn-out Cathedral swan, and though I die I will sing!' So he quavered out Jubilate and Alleluia to the best of his weak old lungs, the boys taking their parts with their rich fresh soaring voices, and then talking aside to each other or looking quite indifferent. The moment the anthem was over the organist (or a respectable person in black whom I took to be the organist) slunk down the loft-stairs, and gave a smooth to his hat and went his way. He did not wait for the prayer. It has always been a wonder to me how people ever dare to do such a thing-turning their backs upon What no man writing lightly in a magazine has a right to name. I would lay a

wager, however, that if a man were asked to dine with a Duke he would not leave the table the moment he had eaten enough-he would wait at least until he had the signal for rising. It is only in cathedrals that gentlemen and ladies permit themselves this act of impertinence-dropping in just to the part of the feast they like, and then sauntering out again, as if they had honoured the place by coming at all. I was pleased to see a little ragged beggar-boy with naked feet, who sate humbly in the transept, and waited very attentively all the service through; and I should like to have been a great prince, and to have taken him to a broker's shop, and have given him a handsome suit of clothes with brass buttons, and the best pair of bluchers in all Bristol. As it was, I presented him with a slight donation of twopence, at which gift he seemed very much surprised.

He would not have come there to beg, that is clear, for there were only four for a congregation besides himself.

The church is decorated with some of the most hideous ornaments, of the fashion of some fifty or sixty years back-urns and willows innumerable: with epitaphs stating that Mr. This, late of the Island of Barbadoes, or Mr. Tother, late of Jamaica, lie buried near this spot. They were chiefly dedicated to persons of the West Indies Interest, who (from these documents) must have been without exception the most virtuous and noble-minded creatures that ever adorned this or any other island. There is a very weak Basso Relievo by Bacon in honour of Sterne's Mrs. Draper, and some stout old monuments of James and Elizabeth's time.

III.

CHEPSTOW AND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD.

THE rain had poured heavily during the first day of our arrival at Chepstow and it was vain to attempt to see any of the beauties of the place; only the writer of this, having indiscreetly scrambled up a hill on the opposite bank of the Wye, had the pleasure of sitting perdu under a thickset hedge for full an hour and a half while the rain poured down. As that great author sat under the hedge he had the misfortune to behold an artist, who had been perched upon a nook of the cliff making a drawing of the town, run away dripping, Nature having covered his drawing over with a transparent wash of her own preparing, and presently afterwards the celebrated

literary man rising from his shelter, as there was nothing else for it, had the good luck to find (though, to be sure, the good luck might have come a little earlier) that there was refuge hard by in a little alehouse that goes by the pretty name of The Bonny Thatch.

At The Bonny Thatch was a policeman drying his wet shins at a snug fire, and a pretty little coquette of a landlady's daughter, a pretty maid and a landlady who had been pretty once, nay is for the matter of that at this present writing, there they were all seated in a window shelling peas. To them presently came two ladies wet through though in pattens, who without ceremony began to arrange their garments in a little shed just outside the door, refusing, however, any offers of aid which some kind wags-from within made them. An old dog lay asleep by the fire, on which a pot with a piece of bacon was boiling; near the dog on a carved sort of bench that goes along one side of the room an old landlord was similarly dozing. The room was just six feet two inches and three-quarters in height between the beams and about nine feet square-dark, neat, pretty and comfortable. I should have passed the day there with pleasure, for presently came in various characters-a gentleman whose cart stood in the yard and who arrived with a load of coals, a labourer— I am sorry to say tipsy, though at that early hour in the day-an old tramper with an oiled-skin hat on which was written One of Nelson's veterans.' This old tramper, having had to do with brimstone and charcoal in his early life when the two sent forth shots among the French, was now compelled to deal with the former articles in a much more humble though useful shape. He had a little store of matches by which he made believe to get a livelihood, and accepted a sixpence with perfect willingness, uttering at the same time a long string of tabernacular phrases which were by no means too pleasant to hear. Well, the lay preachers of fancy denominations have done this for us, and the most sacred of all names, which a man ought to go down on his knees before he uttered, is bandied about by every prating vagabond with a familiarity that makes one sad to hear.

I should like to have had this fellow out of the conventicle and upon the deck; he had served with Nelson and Collingwood, he said, and afterwards with Admiral Pellew who was made Lord Exmouth (please lay the emphasis on the mouth): but the fact was the landlady, being a person of very genteel turn of mind (indeed as I learned afterwards she had been ladies' maid to a respectable family), would not allow one to remain in the snug little Fieldingian kitchen,