To Thames's banks, which fragrant breezes fill,
Or where the Muses sport on Cooper's Hill:
On Cooper's Hill eternal wreaths shall grow,

While lasts the mountain, or while Thames shall flow.

With what extreme accuracy of description the poet has embraced all beneath his ken! Turning cityward,

Under his proud survey the city lies,

And like a mist beneath a hill doth rise,

Whose state and wealth, the business and the crowd,

Seem, at this distance, but a darker cloud,

And is to him, who rightly things esteems,

No other in effect than what it seems:

Where, with like haste, through several ways they run,

Some to undo, and some to be undone.

While luxury and wealth, like war and peace,

Are each the other's ruin and increase;

As rivers lost in seas, some secret vein

Thence reconveys, there to be lost again.
Oh! happiness of sweet retired content,
At once to be secure and innocent.

Then, turning to the second great feature of the landscape, hear the poet

Windsor the next (where Mars with Venus dwells,

Beauty with Strength) above the valley swells

Into my eye, and doth itself present

With such an easy and unforced ascent,

That no stupendous precipice denies
Access, no horror turns away our eyes:
But such a rise as doth at once invite

A pleasure and a reverence from the sight.

Then, withdrawing the eye from the remote landscape, the poet finishes, with exquisite pencil, the foreground of his picture :

My eye descending from the hill surveys

Where Thames among the wanton valleys strays :
Thames the most loved of all the ocean's sons

By his old sire, to his embraces runs,

Hasting to pay his tribute to the sea,

Like mortal life to meet eternity;

Though with those streams he no resemblance hold
Whose foam is amber, and their gravel gold;
His genuine and less guilty wealth to explore,
Search not his bottom, but survey his shore,
O'er which he kindly spreads his spacious wing,
And hatches plenty for the ensuing spring;
Nor then destroys it with too fond a stay,
Like mothers which their infants overlay ;

Nor with a sudden and impetuous wave,

Like profuse kings, resumes the wealth he gave.

No unexpected inundations spoil

The mower's hopes, nor mock the ploughman's toil,

But, godlike, his unwearied bounty flows;

First loves to do, then loves the good he does.

Nor are his blessings to his banks confined,

But free and common as the sea or wind.
Then, he to boast, or to disperse his stores,
Full of the tributes of his grateful shores,
Visits the world, and in his flying Towers

Brings home to us, and makes both Indies ours;
Finds wealth where 'tis, bestows it where it wants,
Cities in deserts, woods in cities plants.

So that to us no thing, no place is strange,

While his broad bosom is the world's exchange.

Having now embraced the greater portion of the vicinage of Windsor to the south and east, retracing our steps to Colnbrook, we again resume our

route to

SLOUGH, only distinguished as having been the residence of the celebrated Herschel; here several discoveries were made by that astronomer, with the assistance of his forty-foot telescope, measuring nearly five feet across, and reflecting the light from a concave polished mirror five feet in diameter. The mechanism of this wondrous instrument, as well as of the subordinate machinery by which it was elevated, depressed, and turned upon its axis, has been greatly admired, and is detailed at length in the Philosophical Transactions.

The usual route of the tourist, leaving the railway at Slough, is now to Windsor Castle, but we must crave his pardon if we detain him from that wondrous pile, only so long as we may embrace the delightful vicinage, to the north and west of Windsor, than which there is no scenery more richly endowed with natural beauty, nor hallowed by associations of higher interest.

STOKE POGES is nearly two miles north-west from Slough, six miles north-west of Colnbrook, and four from Windsor. The present name of the place is derived from the fact of Amicia de Stoke bringing the manor in marriage to Robert Poges, one of the knights of the shire in the twelfth century. His grand-daughter and heiress, Egidia, marrying Sir John Molyns, treasurer of the chamber to King Edward the Third, the estate came into possession of that family. Sir John had a licence from the king to fortify and embattle a mansion here. From Sir John Molyns this manor

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descended by female heirs to the families of Huntingdon and Hastings. Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, rebuilt the manor-house in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The estate was soon after seized by the crown for a debt.

Sir Edward Coke, attorney-general in the beginning of the seventeenth century, entertained Queen Elizabeth very sumptuously at this place, presenting her majesty with jewels to the value of a thousand or twelve hundred pounds. Twenty-four years later, this celebrated lawyer being out of favour with the crown, and having quitted his high station, was obliged, very much against his will, to serve the office of sheriff for the county, and it was thought by his friends a great degradation that he who had filled one of the highest situations on the Bench should attend on the judges at the assizes. Sir John Villiers, eldest brother of the Duke of Buckingham, married Sir Edward Coke's only daughter; and this manor (then held by lease) having been settled on him at the time of his marriage, he was, in 1619, created a peer by the title of Baron Villiers, of Stoke Poges, and Viscount Purbeck. Lord Purbeck succeeded to the estate after the death of Sir Edward Coke. The house was settled on his lady, who was relict of Sir William Hatton. There appears to have been but little harmony between them; during the latter part of their lives they lived separately; and so eager was she to take possession, that upon a premature report of his death, we are told she hastened down with her brother, Lord Wimbledon, for that purpose; but meeting his physician near Colnbrook, and hearing from him tidings of her husband's amendment, she returned, much disappointed, to London. This great man seems to have been peculiarly unfortunate towards the close of his life, and to have suffered much from domestic affliction, his only daughter, Lady Purbeck, eloping from her husband with Sir Robert Howard. Lady Purbeck was sentenced by the High Commission Court to do penance in a white sheet at the Savoy church; she escaped this sentence by flight, but it hung over her for a long time. The year after her father's death, she and Sir Robert Howard were taken into custody, and committed to different prisons-she to the Gate-house, and Sir Robert to the Fleet, where he suffered a tedious imprisonment. Lady Purbeck escaped from prison disguised in male apparel, and got over to France. The government demanded her from that Court, but whether she was given up, or returned and submitted to the sentence, is not known. It is certain that, some years after

wards, she was in England cohabiting with Sir Robert Howard, was with him in the king's garrison at Oxford, died there, and was buried in St. Mary's Church.

The life of Sir Edward Coke was singularly eventful, and we can find no better opportunity of recording a few particulars of his professional career than now, when we are describing a place with which he was so long and so intimately connected.

Edward Coke was the son of Robert Coke, a gentleman of good family at Mitcham, in Norfolk. He received his rudimentary education at the Free School of Norwich, whence he was removed to Trinity College, Cambridge. From the University he went to London, where he was entered of the Middle Temple, and became soon noted for his talents and diligence. His practice rapidly increased from the time of his being called to the bar, and his lectures, as law reader of Lyon's Inn, were fully attended. He now anticipated fame and fortune, by a marriage with a co-heiress of the Paxton family, and thus to talent and diligence superadded influential connexions and pecuniary independence-a combination of concurring favourable circumstances with which few men can fail in the struggle for name or station.

In that memorable year, the thirty-fifth of Elizabeth, he first sat in Parliament for his native county, and became, as Speaker of the House of Commons, by right of office the first among the gentry of his country.

In 1592 he was appointed Solicitor and soon after Attorney General; he was foremost in the conduct of the multitude of Crown prosecutions of those times, and infamously distinguished himself by the asperity and want of decency with which he treated the unfortunate Earl of Essex. Soon after the accession of James the First, he received the honour of knighthood. His gratitude for this new distinction was publicly displayed in his ungenerous conduct towards the unfortunate Sir Walter Raleigh; the contrast upon the trial of that distinguished man, between the bullying insolence of the Crown lawyer, and the patient yet not unresisting demeanour of the gallant and accomplished prisoner, is one of the most pathetic passages of real life. The clearness and sagacity with which he conducted the evidence against the traitors of the Gunpowder Plot, procured for him the important situation. of Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, from which he was removed to the still more elevated station of Lord Chief Justice of England.

His hitherto uninterrupted career of professional prosperity now began to darken more a lawyer than a courtier, or rather altogether a lawyer and no courtier, his literal expositions of the law were in many instances in opposition to the exaggerated views of that day on the ticklish subject of royal prerogative; his temper was very bad, his bearing offensive, and there was, notwithstanding all his faults, a certain surly integrity, when matter of law was in question, which would not permit him to wrest that law to any other than strictly legal authority. The zeal which he displayed, imprudently as regarded his own interest, in the affair of the murder of Sir Thomas. Overbury, and his prosecution of Somerset and his countess for that crime, made him many enemies; nor did a quarrel with his great rival, Lord Bacon, not less learned and much less scrupulous, at all decrease the disfavour in which he now began to be regarded by the Court. Coke, too, had no taste for the comburation of schismatics and witches-a too frequent occurrence in the reign of the First James: we find Archbishop Abbot writing to the Lord Ellesmere, Chancellor of England, touching the execution of "two blasphemous heretiques," and expressly approving of the exclusion of Coke from all consideration of the legality or illegality of the punishment proposed for the delinquents, saying, "His Majestie did think the judges of the Kinge's Benche to be fittest to deal withall in this argument, as unto whom the knowledge of causes capital doth most ordinarlie appertain; and as I conceived his Highnesse did not muche desire that the Lord Coke should be called thereunto, lest by his singularitie in opinion he should give staye to the businesse." And again, in another letter, Abbot, in a second epistle to the Chancellor, on the fire and faggot business, further states, "Mr. Justice Williams was with me the other day, who maketh no doubt but that the law is cleere to burn them (the heretiques). Hee told mee also of his utter dislike of all the Lord Coke his courses, and that himself and Baron Altham did once very roundly let the Lord Coke know their minde, that he was not such a minister of the law as he did take on him, to deliver what he list for law, and to despise all other. I find the Kinge's attorney and solicitor to be thoroughly resolved in this present businesse (combustion of the heretiques).'

It is no small praise that Coke, with all his professional coarseness and severity, had the germs of honest principles within him, when we find him thus excluded from the counsels in such matters of King James and Archbishop Abbot, and snarled at by a pair of self-seeking lawyers,