mellowed light, for the sunset glories had faded into exquisite gradations of pale tint from gold to sapphire, for some time before the minster towers of York were visible, rising cold and grey against the eastern sky -those minster towers, which, seen from afar over the wide cultivated vale, so fitly mark the chief cathedral city of the northern province. And then, pacing round the vast cathedral by moonlight, how solemn and impressive it looked when the rising moon lighted up its grey shadowy mass; and the dim outline, far above, of soaring roofs, and towers, and lonely pinnacles rose under the starry vault of summer night, and the gigantic buttresses and forms of traceried stone stood out in the soft radiance relieved by deepest shadow, and the buildings of the Cathedral-close stood in their quaint dark forms around. At such a time, when the busy inhabitants are at length silent, and the streets, but lately thronged, are empty, images of the past come to take the place of actual life, and one is tempted to retrospect and contemplation. I thought of the days when no Christian minster hallowed this spot; and of the long space of time, from the coming of the Sixth Legion to Britain in the reign of Hadrian down to the departure of the Romans, during which York was the principal station of the whole province, and (more than London) the altera Roma of Britain, the residence of Roman emperors on their visits and of imperial legates in their absence, and the place where the emperors Severus and Constantius Chlorus died. I thought of the times when Eboracum-pre-eminent among Roman stations-stood here with all its temples, palaces, villas, and baths, the city enclosed by a wall with a rampart mound on the inner side and a fosse without, and four strong towers at the angles (of which a finely preserved specimen remains to this day in the Museum Gardens), and four gates, from which ran military roads that connected it with the roads which traversed Britain in every direction and crossed its lonely wastes and primeval forests, the road to the north for some distance out of the city being bordered by the tombs and memorials of the dead. And then, after a long, dark interval, during which the Saxons set up Thor and Woden in the shrines consecrated by Helena, came the days when Anglo-Saxon bishops reared at York a Christian church amidst the ruins of the Roman town; for there, twelve hundred and thirty years ago, Edwin, King of Northumbria-renouncing the superstitions of his fathers-received baptism at the hands of Paulinus; so that if Canterbury became what it did from the circumstance that Ethelbert, King of Kent, was there converted by Augustine the brothermissionary of Paulinus, York was the scene of an event not less conspicuous in the history of the northern province. Wherever the Roman founded a colony he carried there the arts and luxuries of Rome, and he has left elaborate pavements and other remains to tell of his footsteps and abode under our northern skies; and, in like manner, elaborate churches and episcopal schools of learning rose where the early bishops set up the standards of Christ; and so eminent had the school of York become in the eighth century, that scholars resorted to it even from the empire of Charlemagne, and the illustrious Aleuin sent to this his native city for classical manuscripts that could not be found in France. And just as, in the days of the Romans, ships built in the Roman ports of Chichester and Colchester resorted to York, so, in Alcuin's time, it was a great mercantile emporium, visited by vessels from foreign ports, and was at all events one of the greatest, if not the chief, of Anglo-Saxon cities.

But if a walk by moonlight beneath the towers of the great minster which, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, succeeded to the cathedral of the Anglo-Saxon bishops, tempts to retrospect, the whole aspect of the old city, even by garish day, seems to reflect the times when medieval York stood the shocks of war, and acquired its renown in the history of England. Many of its old buildings have yielded in modern days to progress and other enemies within the walls; but still there are few of our historic cities that retain features more characteristic of bygone times than York. Half the churches, and many of the houses with overhanging and ornamented fronts, so characteristic of the Tudor and the Stuart days, have disappeared, but York still affords some interesting specimens of early domestic architecture; and you see gateways under which Plantagenets have passed, and portals from which you almost expect them to reappear, and a few tavern signs that look as if they might have been familiar to Froissart and Chaucer. There are even some streets (Stonegate, for instance) which are so antique in aspect, that the imagination loves to repeople them with the moving pageants they witnessed in bygone times; but the present aspect of York must be very unlike what it was in the days when the pious old city rejoiced in more than forty parish churches, as it did when Henry V. and his queen were at York, on their "progress" after her magnificent coronation. The Augustine, Dominican, Gilbertine, Carmelite, Franciscan, and Benedictine orders had then their monasteries here, the chief and oldest of them being St. Mary's Abbey, a Norman foundation, of the church of which, as rebuilt in the thirteenth century, the beautiful and well-known ruins dignify the Museum gardens. There were also sixteen hospitals, or charitable foundations, the chief of which was the wealthy Hospital of St. Leonard (separated from St. Mary's only by the Roman vallum and tower), and this house claimed Athelstan for its founder. Of none of these establishments do more than a few walls here and there remain; but many of their churches (having been parochial) still exist, and several of them present specimens of Norman work-indeed, the tower of the old parochial church of St. Mary, Bishophill, is believed to have been built before the Norman Conquest, with Roman materials, and to have seen the days of Edward the Confessor, when the missionary monks of Evesham (on their tour of visitation to the ancient seats of religion in the Northumbrian province) came to York, which was even then the first city of northern England, leading one poor mule, which carried their books and vestments-humble pioneers of a long line of magnificent and wealthy churchmen. Mr. Davies, in an excellent communication to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, has assisted us to form a pleasing imaginary survey of the picturesque assemblage of architectural objects of beauty and grandeur which must have been beheld in the days of the Plantagenets, when church towers and stately monastic buildings, amid their luxurious gardens, met the eye in every direction, the great minster itself towering above them all. In speaking of the use of Roman materials in existing structures, I should have mentioned that for the unique sculptured arch which was removed from the ruined Dominican church of St. Nicholas and is now attached to the church of St. Margaret (a poor and comparatively modern building), an age of sixteen centuries has been claimed, and a pre-eminence in beauty over all the specimens of British-Roman art that have come down to our time: it is supposed to have been originally part of the

Roman Temple of the Sun. And, according to tradition, upon the site of St. Helen's Church, Yorkshire maidens celebrated the rites of Italy, for there the Roman Temple of Diana is said to have stood.

I mention these churches of York only by way of indicating the antiquity of its features; many other ecclesiastical structures in the city are very interesting; and as to the minster itself, a description of that glorious pile alone would of course fill a volume. Of ancient military architecture many examples remain besides the Roman multangular tower already mentioned, and the famous Edwardian walls. There are Micklegate-bar and Monkgate-bar, fine specimens of architecture of the age of Edward III., and the picturesque old circular fortress which rises on the mound that was the keep of the Norman castle of York, and has acquired the name of Clifford's Tower.

Of the domestic architecture of our sturdy forefathers there are still a few specimens, especially the old houses which were formerly the town "inns" (or mansions) of noble Yorkshire families, and which are lighted up in their fading dignity by some rays of history, from their having been associated with the great name of Percy, or Howard, or Clifford, or some other family of renown. And there is, besides, the old manor-house in which parliaments, and the meetings of the sanguinary "Council of the North," under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, were held, and in which King Charles the Martyr resided; and the Hospitium, or guest-house of St. Mary's Abbey, in which the Yorkshire Philosophical Society have appropriately lodged the Roman statues, altars, and other antiquities found in the vicinity; the pavement discovered between the railway station and Micklegate, on the spot where a Roman villa stood, and the pavements from Collingham and Tadcaster, have also been recently laid down here; their coloured tessera are of bold design, but the style and workmanship are rude compared with those of the pavements extant in Italy. The Guildhall, too, is a fine building, and though it does not date from the time of the Plantagenets, it reminds a visitor of that scene in the municipal history of York, when Richard II., taking off his own sword, presented it to the then mayor, to be borne before him and his successors, to whom the Sovereign thenceforth decreed the dignity of Lord Mayor. Most of the English monarchs have at some time resided in York, and formerly they took up their abode in the monastery of the Friars Minors, or some other extensive and princely monastic house. The celebration at York of the festivities on the marriage of the Scottish king with Margaret, daughter of Henry III.; the reception of another princess-Margaret, daughter of Henry VII.-on her bridal journey to Scotland; and the visit of that monarch to York in the first year of his reign, when a pair of organs and a musician were hired, at the expense of twelvepence, to grace the pageant exhibited on the king's entry at Micklegate-bar, are amongst its regal memories.

But I am not writing a guide-book, nor attempting to indicate even the most remarkable of the antiquities of York. If it were within the scope of this article, I might pass from the silent stones of the old metropolitan city to the living wonders of agriculture that brought such a confluence of visitors on this occasion, and might describe some of the animals collected on the Yorkshire Agricultural Society's Show-ground: the prize cattle (there was many an ox with a back as flat and broad as a table); the fabulously fattened porkers; the fine symmetrical horses, worthy the

North and East Ridings of Yorkshire; the woolly Cotteswold and Leicester sheep; the fine specimens of those short-horned cattle which have acquired such world-wide fame; and other agricultural productions of the great grazing district of the West Riding. But I will pass to the Museum gardens, where the vigilant committee had brought together many relics of what Lord Derby might call a pre-scientific age-medals of a pre-historic world. There were organic fossils from the protozoic limestones of Wenlock and Dudley on the one hand, and from the tertiary beds of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight upon the other; there were beautiful specimens of that extraordinary zoophite, the Lily Encrinite, from the mountain limestone near Richmond, some of which (the stem tapering to the root) seem to belong to an undescribed genus; there were fossil sponges from the Flamborough chalk, and a magnificent series of agates from Scarborough. And viewing these relics, the thoughts reverted to pre-Adamite days, and looking over the now cultivated vale of York, bordered by the chalk-wolds, and stretching to the Cleveland hills, I thought of the upraising of those older heights, of the excavation of Yorkshire's romantic dales, and the clothing of its once submarine land with verdure; of the elephants and other gigantic carnivora, whose remains are enclosed in the caves they inhabited by a drift deposit of the boulder-clay period-animals which ranged the forests of Yorkshire long before the Romans established a colony here-long, indeed, before even the aboriginal Britons inhabited the country. In a distant geological age, the sea as yet covered all but the western area of Yorkshire ; in other words, it was only in the mountainous district of the county that any land had risen. Upon the submarine bed, which then stretched eastward from the foot of the Penine hills, the lias, with all its saurians and ammonites, was in that age beginning to be deposited. The London basin is supposed to have been then a great estuary; and isolated heights (like the present Isle of Sheppey at the mouth of the Thames) seem to have been spice islands, inhabited by animals and plants now found only in the tropics. A petrified ichthyosaurus-a combination of fish and alligator, a mouster which had the body of a whale, the head of a saurian reptile, and the paddle of a fish-was shown from the lias of Whitbyan impressive relic of that pre-Adamite world in which a lizard larger than the elephant ranged the woods and plains of Kent, and a dragon as strange as romancer ever feigned, flew in the air.

But it was pleasant to turn from these formidable petrifactions of geological antiquity to the fair forms that were moving in the warm sunshine on the fragrant lawn, or inspecting the human and historical antiquities displayed in the Museum. These embraced all kinds of objects: from necklaces that had adorned English beauties in the Stuart reigns, to signets that were used by tawny potentates of India; rude stone weapons of ancient Britons, to elaborate ornaments of Chinese ladies; manuscripts brought from the chapter library (which is kept, by the way, in the exquisite chapel of St. Stephen, the only remaining structure of the archbishop's palace), to the inkstand presented by Garrick to Kemble, and carved from the mulberry-tree which Shakspeare planted. And so, rejoicing that the days of ichthyosauri, Brigantes, Romans, and mediaval conquerors had passed away, but wishing that some of the glow and fervour of the monastic times could again fill the vast cathedral, I bade farewell to York.

W. S. G.

INDIA.

BY CYRUS REDDING.

WE stated last month that the present position of our affairs in India required we should set aside details of individual suffering, which are calculated only to stimulate revenge, and not to remedy disorder. These, however soul-harrowing, are the result, more or less, of similar calamities everywhere. War and a rebellion, which in a Christian country would be called efforts to shake off a foreign yoke, show the same painful picture, increased in horror in the present instance by the savage character of the native population and the close connexion of the sufferers with our own hearths. That the revolt must and will be put down, we fully be lieve. Prompt means have been adopted for that purpose; nor can the most inveterate oppositionist of the present government make against it a charge of procrastination, or that it has not in this respect exceeded expectation. With a tolerably accurate recollection of preceding expeditions, and the delays attending them, for a long period, we affirm that in. no case, except in the embarkation of the Guards for Portugal in 1826a mere handful of men sent the distance of a week's sail, under Mr. Canning's ministry-can we find a parallel approaching it, and that expedition in magnitude was insignificant to the present. Thirty thousand men despatched half round the globe in a week or two, under Lord Palmerston's vigorous use of the national resources, speaks loudly not only the activity of the government, but the real power of the country. Some of the papers disaffected to the ministry got up the chance of invasion again from the side of France, because the troops were sent away. In such a case, thirty thousand men would hardly suffice to save England, if they had remained. The army, always ready to do its duty, was happily never in a position to require its services for such a purpose. But the arm that has saved England again and again remains at present on our own shores, in a more formidable state than ever, strengthened by steam-power far beyond the force of that arm with our neighbours. It is supposed, too, by these ignorant people, that we should be blind to the preparations on the other side of the Channel for such a purpose; and, lastly, if it were possible, which it is not, to muster a force of sufficient magnitude unobserved, we are to assume that our neighbours will violate the law of nations, and attempt that in which they must ultimately be foiled. Such alarms are raised here for party purposes, or from sheer ignorance of the means to be adopted, if such a measure were feasible. The destruction of a coast town-the utmost mischief that could ensue-would never pay the cost of an expedition, which must be sacrificed at the additional expense of a nation's honour.. We wander a little from the subject; but to pass over such croakings, and their end as connected with the present topic, was impossible.

We insisted in our last on the necessity for the abolition of the East India Company. We assert such an abolition to be a duty to God and to humanity. "Oil and water might as easily be brought to coalesce as good government and the commercial principle, that is, if a great nation like