How pleasant it is to read one of our poets in a foreign country! I pass from page to page, as I used from meadow to meadow, not omitting to enjoy the style by the way.

Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures,

While the landscape round it measures;

Russet lawns and fallows grey,

Observe the colouring!

Mark the nicety!

Where the nibbling flocks do stray;

Mountains

Mountains! what does he mean by that?

Mountains on whose barren breast

The labouring clouds do often rest.

Genoa pitched in the vale of Thames! He must have seen Genoa by a sort of unnatural second sight. I beg you to look upon this as an impertinent vision, foreign to the subject, or only brought in to shew the beauty of the rest by the force of contrast.

Meadows trim, with daisies pied,

There he comes home again.

Shallow brooks, and rivers wide:
Towers and battlements it sees,
Bosomed high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies,
The Cynosure of neighbouring eyes:
Hard by, a cottage chimney smokes
From betwixt two aged oaks.

Complete justice is never done to a fine passage in a poet, if you do not know the one that preceded it: just as a new key in a musician demands a comparison with that of the previous air. How admirably contrasted, and yet with the properest and mellowest gradation, is the richness and elevation of this passage about the tufted trees and the high-born beauty in their turrets, with the " two aged oaks" and the peasant's habitation that smokes between them!-Alas, there are no such oaks here, and no such tufted trees!-Do you remember our picnics on the grass in the Hampstead fields? Do you remember our books, our lounges, our trios, our crowns of field flowers for heads "not our own?" Do you recollect that strange Centaur of a squire, who came riding in his meadows with a monster of a footman behind him, and could not help being delighted at seeing our dinner trespassing on his premises?

I fancy you discern to what all this leads,--the sketch that I promised you a long while back, of pleasant memories connected with the country about London; similar to those which I have touched upon in a former Indicator connected with the inside of it. You are right. I could not delay it longer, if I would.

Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade!

Ah, fields beloved in vain!

Where once my careless childhood strayed,

A stranger yet to pain!

I feel the gales that from ye blow

A momentary bliss bestow,

As waving fresh their gladsome wing,

My weary soul they seem to soothe,

And, redolent of joy and youth,

To breathe a second spring.

And yet the fields are not "beloved in vain :" neither was my childhood a stranger to suffering. My life has had strong lights and shades upon it from its commencement; but upon the whole I am grateful; and the pleasures I have enjoyed make me love even the memory of some of the pains.

A dram of sweet is worth a pound of sour.

How could Gray say that his fields were "beloved in vain," when the sight of them, in pain and melancholy, could still please him in this manner; and when he cultivated flowers in his college window to the last? Nature is never beloved in vain. ́ Shakspeare, after running the whole round of humanity, went to live and to die among his native fields. Rousseau's botany never forsook him. The oaks are firm friends; and we can love the most blooming of roses in our old age.

In taking my circuit round London, I will begin with the East, in order that I may end with the North. It is the least pleasant side, yet two out of our four greatest names in poetry are connected with it,Spenser and Milton. I have already noticed that Spenser was born in East Smithfield. Bunhill Fields has the most unromantic of sounds, and yet there Milton not only lived, but seems to have delighted to live. It is probably the "noble suburban spot," of which he speaks in his Latin poems, and contained the elm trees of which he was so fond. I do not remember whether I have mentioned before, that Steele amused himself with a laboratory at Poplar. You may gather from some of the works of De Foe, who was a hosier in Cornhill, that he was a great walker about the neighbourhood of the river. An unaccustomed eye, suddenly emerging from the narrow streets upon Tower-hill, is met by a crowd of grand and tragical recollections,-by murdered patriots and heroes, infants, lovers, and kings. There breathed out the souls of the Raleighs and Sydneys. There Hutchinson prepared himself to die in patient endurance; and Guilford Dudley and Jane Grey went one after the other to the public axe, instead of the retirement that suited their innocence. The death of another Jane, whom Lady Jane perhaps would not have despised, though others might, is said to have given its name to Shoreditch. Jane Shore, the life of the voluptuous retirements of Edward IV. and the friend of all who wanted assistance, was seen there in her old age, wrinkled, and gathering water-cresses. What a difference from the picture of her, in which she is described as having risen "out of her bed in the morning, having nothing on but a rich mantle cast under one arm over her shoulder, and sitting in a chair, on which her naked arm did lie!" This portrait, by the way, argues a taste, and an eye for colouring, which one should hardly have looked for in the paintings of those times. It was perhaps the work of an Italian. But I shall never get out of town. Of Hackney and all that region, famous for giving a name to Hackney coaches, I know nothing more illustrious than what is said of it in a quaint periodical work, which I have met with somewhere;-namely, that

Homerton and Clapton do declare,

The many country seats that there are there.

They tell me, however (is this true?) that I am to like a place a little more to the north, the name of which I shall not allow myself to be sure of till I hear further advices. Let it be as good a name as you

can; for I shall “like it most horribly." I remember now that I used to go that way to bathe. Besides, you have C. L. The great men of the court of Elizabeth must have resided much about the neighbourhood of Stoke Newington and Highbury, for every old mansion thereabout is dignified with the title of one of her palaces. At Stoke Newington lived the late Dr. Aikin, who was a clever, man, and did good; though he should not have said, that Spenser's Epithalamium "wants only judicious curtailment to make it a very pleasing piece." I would as lief have had the bride curtailed, had I been the hero of it. Dr. Aikin's sister, Mrs. Barbauld, still renders the place interesting by her residence. Here lived Dr. Watts, whose logical head did not hinder his little frail person from being hypochondriacal, and whose hypochondria unfortunately drove him into Calvinism instead of the bowlinggreen. But I believe he extricated himself at last. There wants a good account of the last years of men who get rid of their superstitions, as well as of those who are said to have been overcome by them.

To return to the river's side, and cross the water. At Greenwich, famous for its green woods and white sails,-for its old weather-beaten pensioners, who sit eyeing the placid stream, and for lasses who kiss their mother earth all the way down hill in fair time, and their cousin John at the bottom of it,-Queen Elizabeth held her court; such a court, as princes and courtiers can seldom contrive to muster up. Flattery there had a sort of right; and accordingly the old Queen was a nymph" to the last, scorching up the Hattons and Raleighs with the retrospective beauties of seventy. Furthermore, she walked abroad among them with a wrinkled face, black teeth, little sparkling grey eyes, a hand and arm so white that it transported even Dutch young gentlemen, and a new gown for every day in the year. How she contrived to maintain her charms, while dancing and playing on the lute, in order to convince a Scotch ambassador of her juvenility, who was to look through a crevice, none but a Scotchman can say; and accordingly I leave it to Sir Walter. If he discovers something to venerate in the fumbling of King James, he will surely not be at a loss in the tumbling of old Elizabeth. At Redriff (vainly spelt Rotherhithe) some story-book hero cuts a figure; but I cannot remember his name. Down the Kent-road, Chaucer's pilgrims took their way to Canterbury, telling stories that have outlasted St. Thomas's shrine, and will outlast a thousand others. I think I see him now, looking downwards; the Wife of Bath grinning; the Friars and Summoners in all their varieties of hypocrisy and impudence; the Squire dancing on his horse, conscious of the Prioress; the experienced Knight, his father; the busy Serjeant at Law, who seemed still "busier than he was;" the reckless Sailor; the unhealthy Cook; the lean meek scholar, upon his lean horse; the lean cholerick Steward, upon his plump one; the bull of a Miller; &c. &c. and Harry Baillie, the host, venting his admiration of a pathetic story in a volley of oaths. Kent-street derives a minor lustre from Goldsmith's Madam Blaze. Newington Butts, as its name denotes, was famous for archery. With the suburb fields, that now contain prisons and bedlams, the great poets and wits of Shakespeare's time must have been conversant, owing to the neighbourhood of the theatre in the Borough. Their Club at the Mermaid in Cornhill was as convenient a spot as they could well chuse between the theatre on one hand, and the court and

country seats of Elizabeth on the two sides of the water on the other. Camberwell was lately remarkable for the proud villa of a Quaker physician. Clapham looks unnatural, with its bankers' houses on a bit of wild common. Armstrong in his poem upon preserving health recommends Dulwich as "yet unspoiled by art." I believe it still retains its character, though more houses have come, and the gypsies gone away. It touches upon Norwood. Here is Dulwich college, founded by one of Shakspeare's fellow-players, Allen, a name which seems to belong to people of worth. I know one myself. The original of Fielding's Allworthy was another: and the first countenance I remember at school was an Allen's,-so good and handsome, that an old stall-woman ́against whom he happened to run in the street, and to turn round upon in the course of her abuse, exclaimed, "Confound your great, ugly, driving sweet face, God bless it!" Poor Allen! he died aboard ship, a surgeon, vainly forewarned by Roderick Random. What had his blushing maiden face to do in a gang-way? And yet what would the hard places of the world become, if such faces never shone on them! -To Dulwich college Sir Francis Bourgeois bequeathed his collection of pictures, which it is a holiday to go and see. Between Dulwich and Beckenham is a pretty, rustic, out-of-the way spot, called Penge, which an acquaintance of yours thinks the charmingest place in the world. Her first child was born at Beckenham. The white spire of Beckenham church, issuing out of the trees, is a truly English and sylvan spectacle. I think Johnson was in the habit of visiting somebody at Beckenham. In the church is Gray's epitaph on Mrs. Clarke, "Lo! where the silent marble weeps." Sydenham, another pretty village with a green, has long been the residence of Mr. Campbell. Lewisham was immortalised by Queen Elizabeth in a strain of alliterative abuse, which not being a queen, I want the face to repeat. Returning westward, we come to Thrale and Johnson at Streatham. There Mrs. Thrale encouraged his bile with good dinners, and soothed it with gay curtains; and there, it seems, he had two desks on each side a window, upon which he used to write his Lives of the Poets,-a "mechanical operation of the spirit" somewhat too prophetic of the point of criticism at which he would stop short. But admiration ever be paid to the hero of Boswell, and reverence to the good Samaritan who took up the female in the street, and put her to bed while other people were chattering! At Merton, a pretty place with a pretty appellation (so at least it seemed to me, when I spent my holidays there) lived the illustrious little withered lion, Nelson. But it once contained a personage much more interesting in my eyes; wit, an aunt of mine; a true West Indian of the best sort, somewhat wilful, very idle and generous, and a lady to the heart of her. If the mention of these two personages together looks like an anticlimax, take the following out of a master of the "bon goût," which I think beats it hollow. It is Chaulien addressing the Countess of Stafford :

Vous n'aurez jamais besoin
De Muse qui vous anime,
Ni qu' Apollon prenne soin
De vous montrer le sublime;
Car vous trouverez chez vous
Dans un Oncle fort aimable,
Un maître plus que capable
De vous former au bon goût.

66

But what has this impertinent Frenchman to do with one's young days and one's natural affections? Talking of Queen Elizabeth and her Nymphals, I remember writing an elegy on the death of this kinswoman, in which I called her 66 a nymph" also, though she was between fifty and sixty. Why did she not live to be called a damsel? There was such an elegance about her in my eye, that I never thought her wrinkled face old. And where are you, dear cousin F. that in the pride of your tuckers and dressed locks you are not still calling me petit garçon," and throwing down peaches from the trees to my adoring eyes? What had trouble to do with your warm strip of West-Indianism, that it did not dance and flutter all its life in perpetual youth? She had the cruelty to give me a little chrystal heart, as if it signified nothing to the "petit garçon;" and I wore it next my own at school, with an infinite mixture of pride and pensiveness. Few things are better than these fancies, or even the recollections of them; and those that are, partake of the same character. Let me try as I may, I feel I have nothing greater, much less happier in me, than I had when a boy; nor can I do any thing better than draw out, as it were, what was in me then. Business has only made me uneasy to others, and remorseful to myself. My tasks take another direction. I am formed by nature to suffer and imagine alone, or in company with some friend; and in public to do nothing but impart a sense of the joys which love and patience reward me with.

But what have the peach trees done with me, that I stand here in a dream, when I have to make half the circuit of London? Yet I must not forget the little river Wandle, which runs by Merton, and in which I once saw a vision bright and ideal as any in a picture. It was nothing, too, but a girl with long flaxen hair and blue eyes, washing some linen with naked feet among the pebbles. Her hair was flaxenest of the flaxen; her eyes blue as sapphire;-it was August; and the

---Cærule stream, rambling in pebble-stone,
Crept under moss as green as any gourd.

What she must have thought of me in my school petticoats, I know not; but her surprise had the advantage of fixing her in a beautiful posture, and making her open all her blue eyes. I wish Mr. Wordsworth had flourished then, and set "us youth" upon attempting to write naturally. I made a copy of verses" afterwards upon the Wandle, which might have been a little better for it. When I met with the lines upon it in Drayton's Polyolbion, the vision came upon me again in all its beauty, only not quite so "plump."

દંપ

Then Wandal cometh in, the Mole's beloved mate,
So amiable, so fair, so pure, so delicate,

;

So plump, so full, so fresh, her eyes so wondrous clear
And first unto her lord at Wandsworth doth appear,
That in the goodly court of their great sovereign Thames,
There might no other speech be had amongst the streams
But only of this nymph, sweet Wandal, what she wore,
Of her complexion, grace, and how herself she bore.

POLYOLB. Song 17.

At Wimbledon, when a child, I was taken to see Horne Tooke, who patted me on the head, and gave me a very different benediction `from the bishop. In a wood near the same place I saw, many years after