'that the world has known, never sworn to, and never broken.' A strong evidence of Penn's sagacity is the fact, that not one drop of Quaker blood was ever shed by an Indian; and forty years elapsed from the date of the treaty, ere a red man was slain by a white in Pennsylvania. The murder was an atrocious one, but the Indians themselves prayed that the murderer's life might be spared. It was spared; but he died in a very short time, and they then said, the Great Spirit had avenged their brother. It will be thought that Penn made a capital bargain, in the purchase of Pennsylvania for £16,000; but in his lifetime, he drew little but trouble from his investment. The settlers withheld his dues, disobeyed his orders, and invaded his rights; and he was kept in constant disquiet by intrigues for the nullification of his charter. Distracted by these cares, he left his English property to the care of a steward, who plundered him mercilessly; and his later years were saddened with severe pecuniary distress. He was twice married, and in both cases to admirable women. His eldest son, a promising youth, he lost just as he verged on manhood; and a second son, by riotous living, brought himself to an early grave, trying Penn's fatherly heart with many sorrows. Multiplied afflictions did not, however, sour his noble nature, nor weaken his settled faith in truth and goodness.! Penn's intimacy with James II. exposed him, in his own day, to much suspicion, which yet survives. It ought to be remembered, that Admiral Penn and James were friends; that the admiral, at death, consigned his son William to his guardianship; and that between James and his ward there sprung up feelings apparently amounting to affection. While James was king, Penn sometimes visited him daily, and persuaded him to acts of clemency, otherwise unattainable. Penn scorned as a Quaker, James hated as a Catholic, could sympathise as brothers in adversity. Penn, by nature, was kindly, and abounding in that charity which thinketh no evil; and taking the worst view of James's character, it is in nowise surprising that Penn should have been the victim of his duplicity. It is well known that rogues could do little mischief, if it were not so easy to make good men their tools. There was very little of that asceticism about Penn which is thought to belong to at least early -Quakerism. The furniture of his houses was equal in ornament and comfort to that of any gentleman of his time. His table abounded in every real luxury. He was fond of fine horses, and had a passion for boating. The ladies of his household dressed like gentlewomen-wore caps and buckles, silk gowns and golden ornaments. Penn had no less than four wigs in America, all purchased the same year, at a cost of nearly £20. To innocent dances and country fairs he not only made no objection, but patronised them with his own and his family's presence. William Penn, after a lingering illness of three or four years, in which his mind suffered, but not painfully, died at Ruscombe on the 30th July 1718, and was buried at the secluded village of Jordans, in Buckinghamshire. No stone marks the spot, although many a pilgrim visits the grave. GRAY AND HIS ELEGY. GRAY AND HIS ELEGY. Sprung of a harsh and unamiable father, but favoured with a mother of opposite characterrising from a youth spent in comparatively humble circumstances-Thomas Gray became, in his mature years, a devoted college-student, a poet, a man of refined taste, and an exemplifier of all the virtues. There is not a more irreproachable character in English literature. The portraits of the bard give us the idea of a very good-looking man. He was unfitted, however, for success in society, by an insuperable taciturnity. The only reproach ever intimated against him by his college-associates, was that of fastidiousness. We may fairly suspect the truth on this point to be, that he shrunk from the coarse and boisterous enjoyments in which the greater number of them indulged. He had a weakness, in the form of a nervous dread of fire. His chamber in St Peter's College, Cambridge, being in a second-floor, he thought it very likely that, in case of a conflagration, his exit by the stairs might be cut off. He therefore caused an iron bar to be fixed by arms projecting from the outside of his window, designing by a rope tied GRAY'S WINDOW, ST PETER'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. thereto to descend to the ground, in the event of a fire occurring. This excessive caution, as it appeared to his brother-collegiates, raised a spirit of practical joking in them; and one evening, not long after the fire-escape had been fixed up, a party of them came from a merry-making, and thundered at the door of Gray, with loud cries of Fire! fire! fire!' The nervous poet started from bed, flew to his window, and descended by his rope into the vacant ground below, where of GRAY AND HIS ELEGY. THE BOOK OF DAYS. course he was saluted with bursts of laughter by his friends. Gray's delicate nature was so much shocked by this rough affair, that he deserted Peter's College, and took up his residence in Pembroke. The window with the iron apparatus is still shewn, and is faithfully represented on the preceding page. Among popular English poems, there is none more deservedly distinguished than Gray's Elegy. It appeals to a feeling which is all but universal-a tendency to moralise when alone in a churchyard ; and thus it is enabled to take hold of the most common-place minds. There are several curious circumstances connected with its publication worth recording. For some time after it was written, Gray shewed it round among his friends, but said nothing about publishing it. After a time, he became bolder, and even allowed copies of it to circulate in manuscript, until, at last, through the carelessness of Horace Walpole or it may have been from a friendly wish of his to see it universally admired, as he felt it would be a copy fell into the hands of the editor of The Magazine of Magazines, who immediately sent the poet word that he meant to print it. Gray had now no alternative but to print it himself; and accordingly wrote at once to Horace Walpole, with special directions to that end. I have but one bad way left,' he writes, 'to escape the honour they would inflict upon me: and therefore am obliged to desire you would make Dodsley print it immediately (which may be done in less than a week's time) from your copy, but without my name.' It seems, he would have us think it a great infliction to be admired by the public. However, Walpole did as he was bid, and had it printed in all haste; adding an advertisement, at Gray's request, in which he informs the reader that the publication is entirely due to an unavoidable accident. Dodsley, after all, was too late. It first saw the light in The Magazine of Magazines, February 1751. Some imaginary literary wag is made to rise in a convivial assembly, and thus announce it: 'Gentlemen, give me leave to soothe my own melancholy, and amuse you in a most noble manner, with a full copy of verses by the very ingenious Mr Gray, of Peterhouse, Cambridge. They are stanzas written in a country churchyard.' Then follow the verses. A few days afterwards, Dodsley's edition appeared, in quarto, anonymously, price sixpence, with An Elegy wrote in a Country Churchyard for its title, and the title-page duly adorned with cross-bones, skulls, and hourglasses. But The original manuscript of the Elegy is still in existence. It is written on four sides of a doubled half sheet of yellow foolscap, in a neat legible hand, with a crow-quill. Gray bequeathed it, among other papers, to Mr Mason, who wrote his life; Mr Mason left it, with the rest of the manuscripts, to his curate, Mr Bright; and Mr Bright's son sold the lot in 1845, when the Elegy fell to Mr Penn, of Manor House, Stoke Pogeis, for £100. In 1854, it was again in the market, and was purchased for £131 by Mr Robert Charles Wrightson. A photographed Facsimile of the Original Autograph Manuscript of Gray's Elegy, was published in 1862, by Messrs Sampson Low and Son. Curious and interesting differences exist between the first draft and the printed copy: numerous alterations GRAY AND HIS ELEGY. were afterwards made, and as many as six verses, which appear in the manuscript, were omitted. Perhaps the most interesting of all the emendations was that made in verse 15 of the printed poem; in which Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell were severally substituted for Cato, Tully, and Caesar: it is said that this judicious change was suggested by Mason. Verse 19, as the poem now stands, is— They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.' 'For thee, who, mindful of th' unhonour'd dead, Thy once-loved haunt, this long deserted shade.' To linger in the lonely walks of Fate, Hark how the sacred calm that reigns around No more with Reason and thyself at strife, Give anxious cares and endless wishes room; But through the cool, sequester'd vale of life Pursue the silent tenor of thy doom.' The change which Gray made is tolerably clear. While o'er the heath we hied, our labours done, By hands unseen are frequent vi'lets found; And little footsteps lightly print the ground.' The company that then assembled to study and pursue research, was composed of a man that writes for Lord Royston, a man that writes for Dr Burton of York, a third that writes for the emperor of Germany or Dr Pocock; Dr Stukely, who writes for himself, the very worst person he could write for; and I, who only read to know if there is anything worth writing. Gray further mentions a comfortable fact. "The keepers have broken off all intercourse with one another, and only lower a silent defiance as they pass by.' The admirable mother of Gray-who had set up a millinery shop to support her children, when deserted by her unworthy husband-was buried in the churchyard of Stoke Pogeis, near Eton, with an epitaph by the poet containing this most touching passage: The careful tender mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive her.' It seems to be generally concluded that he conceived himself as musing in this burialground when he composed the Elegy. He himself was interred there beside the worshipped grave of his mother. In one of the final verses of the Elegy there is a clause not unworthy of comment, as a historical expression of the intellectual condition of the English peasantry in the eighteenth century. Approach and read-for thou canst read,' says the hoary-headed swain to the stranger. It is here assumed that, as a rule, an English peasant was unable to read. A Scottish poet would not have had occasion to make the same assumption regarding his humble countrymen-thanks to the Scottish parish schools, instituted at the Revolution. SALE OF THE OLD GATES OF LONDON. A sale of three of the City gates, on the 30th of July 1760, marked, in a singular way, a dividingpoint between the old and the modern history of London. The English metropolis, like most large and important cities in the middle ages, was bounded by a wall and a ditch; and in this wall were openings or gates for the passage of foot and vehicle traffic. Beginning from the east, this fortified boundary commenced with the famous Tower of London, itself a vast assemblage of gates and fortified posts. Advancing thence nearly northward, the wall extended to Eld-gate or Aldgate, which defended the approach by the great highway from Essex. This was probably the oldest of all the City gates. In 1215, during the civil war between King John and the barons, the citizens aided the latter in entering London by Aldgate; and soon afterwards, the gate, being very ruinous and dilapidated, was replaced by one strongly built of stone. This new one (a double gate with portcullis) remained till the time of Queen Elizabeth, when it was replaced by another more ornamental than warlike. This was one of the three gates finally removed in 1760. The wall extended nearly north-west from Aldgate to Bishopsgate, which guarded the great road from Cambridge. This gate was not among the oldest of the series, but is supposed to have been built about the reign of Henry II. At first there were no means of exit from the City between Aldgate and Aldersgate; and this extra gate was opened rather to furnish additional accommodation, than for any defensive purpose. The gate was in a ruinous state from the SALE OF THE OLD GATES OF LONDON. time of Edward VI. to that of James I., when it was replaced by a new one; and this latter was finally removed early in the last century. The wall stretched westward from Bishopsgate to Moorgate; of which Stow says: 'I find that Thomas Falconer, mayor about the year 1415, the third of Henry V., caused the wall of the city to be broken near unto Coleman Street, and there builded a postern, now called Moorgate, upon the moorside, where was never gate before. This gate he made for ease of the citizens that way to pass upon causeys [causeways] into the fields for their recreation; for the same field was at that time a marsh. Indeed, all the country immediately outside the city, from Bishopsgate to Aldersgate, was very fenny and marshy, giving rise to the names Moorfields and Finsbury (Fensbury). Moorgate was rebuilt in 1472, and pulled down about the middle of the last century, the stones being used to repair the piers of London Bridge. The next gate was Cripplegate, a postern or minor gate like Moorgate, but much more ancient; it was many times rebuilt, and was, like the other gates, used as a prison. The name, Stow says, 'so called of cripples begging there.' This was one of the three gates finally pulled down in 1760. The City wall extended thence to Elders-gate or Aldersgate, one of the oldest of the series, and also one of the largest. The ancient structure, crumbling with age, was replaced by a new and very ornamental one in the time of James I.; and this latter gave way to the street improvers early in the last century. The next gate was Newgate. In the AngloNorman times, there were only three City gatesAldgate, Aldersgate, and Ludgate; and no person could leave the city westward at any point between the two last-named gates. To remedy this inconvenience, Newgate was built about the time of Henry I., the designation 'new' being, of course, only comparative. After being rebuilt and repaired several times, Newgate and its prison were burned down by Lord George Gordon's mob in 1780; the prison was replaced by a much larger and stronger one, but the gate was not rebuilt. The City wall extended from Newgate to Ludgate, which was the oldest of the series except Aldgate and Aldersgate, and the one with which the greatest number of historical events was connected. After many rebuildings and repairings, Ludgate was one of the three which were pulled down in 1760. It must not be supposed that Dowgate, Billingsgate, and St John's Gate were necessarily City gates; the first and second were landing-places on the river-side, the third was the gate belonging to the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. As to the Bars -such as Temple Bar, Holborn Bar, and Smithfield Bar-they were subsidiary or exterior barriers, bearing some such relation to 'the City without the walls, as the gates bore to the City within the walls,' but smaller, and of inferior strength. The announcement in the public journals, concerning the destruction of three of the gates on the 30th of July 1760, was simply to the effect that Mr Blagden, a carpenter of Coleman Street, gave £91 for the old materials of Cripplegate, £148 for Ludgate, and £177, 10s. for Aldgate; undertaking to have all the rubbish removed by the end of September. Thus ended our old City gates, except Newgate, which the rioters put an end to twenty years later. IGNATIUS LOYOLA. JULY 31. THE BOOK OF DAYS. TWO LOVERS KILLED BY LIGHTNING. Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish soldier and hidalgo with hot Biscayan blood,' was, in 1521, assisting in the defence of Pampeluna against the French, when a cannon-ball fractured his right leg and a splinter injured his left. He was carried to the neighbouring castle of Loyola, and in the weary months during which he lay stretched upon his couch, he tried to while away the time in reading the Lives of the Saints. He was only thirty; he had a strong and vehement will; he had led a wild and vicious life; and had burned for military glory. As it was evident that for him henceforward the part of the soldier was barred, the question arose, Why might he not be a saint, and rival St Francis and St Dominic? He decided to try. He tore himself from his kindred and friends, and made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In the church of the Virgin at Mount Serrat, he hung up his arms, and vowed constant obedience to God and the church. Dressed as a beggar, and in the practice of the severest austerities, he reached Jerusalem on the 4th of September 1523. On his return to Spain, at the age of thirty-three, he resumed his education, which had been neglected from childhood, and laboriously from the rudiments of grammar worked his way through a full university course, making no secret of his ignorance. The rigour of his life, and the rebukes he administered to lax ecclesiastics, not unfrequently brought him into trouble as a Pharisaic meddler. In an He went to Paris in 1528, and at the university he made the acquaintance of Xavier, Faber, Lainez, Bobadilla, and Rodriguez, five students whom he inspired with his own devout fervour, underground chapel of the church of Montmartre, on the 15th of August 1534, the six enthusiasts took the solemn vows of celibacy, poverty, and the devotion of their lives to the care of Christians, and the conversion of infidels. Such was the beginning of the famous Society of Jesus. The plan of the new order was laid before Pope Paul III., who raised several objections to it; but, on the engagement that Jesuits should in all matters yield implicit obedience to the holy see, he granted them a constitution in a bull, dated the 27th of September 1540. Loyola was elected president, and was established at Rome as director of the movements of the society. Very opportunely did the Jesuits come to the service of the popedom. Unhampered by the routine of other ecclesiastical orders, they undertook services for which they alone were fit; and, as sharp-shooters and skirmishers, became the most annoying and dangerous antagonists of Protestantism. To a certain freedom of action the Jesuit united the advantages of perfect discipline; obedience was his primary duty, He used his faculties, but their action was controlled by a central authority; every command had to be wrought out with all his skill and energy, without questioning, and at all hazards. It was the aim of the society to discover and develop the peculiar genius of all its members, and then to apply them to the aggrandisement of the church. Soon the presence of the new order, and the fame of its missionaries, spread throughout the world, and successive popes gladly increased the numbers and enlarged the privileges of the society. Loyola brought more ardour than intellect to the institution of Jesuitism. The perfection of its mechanism, which Cardinal Richelieu pronounced a masterpiece of policy, was due to James Lainez, who succeeded Loyola as president. Worn out with labours and privations, Loyola died on the 31st of July 1556, aged sixty-five. He was canonised as a saint in 1622, and his festival is celebrated on the 31st of July. TWO LOVERS KILLED BY LIGHTNING. It was on the 31st of July 1718, that the affecting incident occurred to which Pope, Gay, and Thomson severally adverted-the instantaneous killing of two rustic lovers by a lightning-stroke. At Stanton-Harcourt, about nine miles west of Oxford, are the remains of a very old mansion, belonging to the family of the Harcourts, consisting chiefly of a domestic chapel in a tower, and two or three rooms over it. Pope spent two summers in this old building, with the hearty assent of the Harcourts, who had been lords of the manor for more than seven hundred years. One room, in which he finished the Fifth Book of his Iliad, obtained, on that account, the name of 'Pope's Study.' Gay often visited him there; and it is in one of Gay's letters that the catastrophe, which occurred in a neighbouring field, is thus narrated: John Hewit was a well-set man of about twenty-five. Sarah Drew might be called comely rather than beautiful, and was about the same age. They had passed through the various labours of the year together with the greatest satisfaction. Their love was the talk of the whole neighbourhood, for scandal never affirmed that they had other views than the lawful possession of each other in marriage. It was that very morning that they had obtained the consent of her parents; and it was but till the next week that they had to wait to be happy. Perhaps in the interval of their work they were talking of years afterwards. PARTRIDGE, THE ALMANAC-MAKER. The fifty lines (in 'Summer') 'Young Celadon And his Amelia were a matchless pair,' relate an episode of the same character as the sad story of John Hewit and Sarah Drew, with the exception that the poet kills the maiden but not the lover. TESTIMONIALS TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY their wedding-clothes, and John was suiting several sorts of poppies and wild-flowers to her complexion, to choose her a hat for the wedding-day. While they were thus busied (it was between two and three o'clock in the afternoon), the clouds grew black, and such a storm of lightning and thunder ensued, that all the labourers made the best of their way to what shelter the trees and hedges afforded. Sarah was frighted, and fell down in a swoon on a heap of barley; John, who never separated from her, having raked together two or three heaps, the better to secure her from the storm. Immediately after was heard so loud a The following present made to the new recorder of crash as if the heavens had split asunder. Every Nottingham, 1603 A. D., by order of the Hall, affords one was now solicitous for the safety of his neigh-in respect to what are now dignified by the name of a curious instance of the taste and habit of the times, bour, and they called to one another throughout Testimonials. the field. No answer being returned to those who called to our lovers, they stepped to the place where they lay. They perceived the barley all in a smoke, and then spied the faithful pair; John, with one arm about Sarah's neck, and the other held over her, as if to screen her from the lightning. They were struck dead, and stiffened in this tender posture. Sarah's left eye was injured, and there appeared a black spot on her breast. Her lover was all over black; but not the least sign of life was found in either. Attended by their melancholy companions, they were conveyed to the town, and next day were interred in Stanton-Harcourt churchyard. Pope, whether or not he was at Stanton-Harcourt at the time, soon afterwards wrote an epitaph on the hapless young couple : ON TWO LOVERS STRUCK DEAD BY LIGHTNING. 'When eastern lovers feed the funeral fire, On the same pile the faithful pair expire: Here pitying heav'n, that virtue mutual found, And blasted both, that it might neither wound. Hearts so sincere th' Almighty saw well pleased, Sent his own lightning, and the victims seized.' 'Lord Harcourt,' says Mr Robert Carruthers, in his edition of Pope, 'on whose estate the unfortunate pair lived, was apprehensive that the countrypeople would not understand the above, and Pope wrote the subjoined: 'NEAR THIS PLACE LIE THE BODIES OF JOHN HEWIT AND SARAH DREW, AN INDUSTRIOUS YOUNG MAN AND VIRTUOUS YOUNG MAIDEN OF THIS PARISH; WERE IN ONE INSTANT KILLED BY LIGHTNING, Think not, by rigorous judgment seized, Mercy alike to kill or save, This second epitaph was engraved on a stone in Thomson appears to have had this incident in his view when he wrote the Seasons, about nine Wednesday next, present the recorder, Sir Henry 'It is agreed that the town shall, on Pierrepont, with a sugar-loaf, 98.; lemons, 18. 8d.; white wine, one gallon, 28. 8d.; claret, one gallon, 28. 8d.; muskadyne, one pottle, 2s. 8d.; sack, one pottle, 28. ; total 20s. 8d.' Another testimonial was presented by the same town, in the year following, the object of public admiration and bounty in this instance being no less a personage than the Earl of Shrewsbury. Of course the present, intended to convey to his lordship the sense entertained by the burgesses of his high worth and character, must be of a more weighty description than that bestowed on the recorder. Accordingly, it was ordered that 'a veal, a mutton, a lamb, a dozen of chickens, two dozen of rabbits, two dozen of pigeons, and four capons, should be presented to his lordship.' Ours is a day beyond all others for the presentation of Testimonials, but we have never yet heard of a celebrity of the nineteenth century being invited to a public meeting to receive from his friends a testimonial of their esteem, and then having laid at his feet sundry bottles of wine, with sugar and lemons to flavour it; or a good fat calf, a weddersheep, and a lamb of a year old, with dozens of chickens and rabbits to garnish the same, as appears to have been the favourite course with our goodliving' ancestors. PARTRIDGE, THE ALMANAC-MAKER. 6 Partridge, the almanac-maker, of whom mention is made in the article on Written and Printed Almanacs' (page 9,vol. i.), has been so fortunate as to be embalmed in one of the most pleasing poems in the English language-Pope's Rape of the Lock. With a consummation of surprising power and appropriate character, the poet, after the robbery of Belinda's wavy curl has been effected, proceeds to place the stolen object among the constellations. The poem says: 'This the beau-monde shall from the Mall survey, And hail with music its propitious ray; This the blest lover shall for Venus take, And send up prayers from Rosamunda's lake; This PARTRIDGE soon shall view in cloudless skies, When next he looks through Galileo's eyes; And hence the egregious wizard shall foredoom, The fate of Louis and the fall of Rome.' It is strange how sometimes the most worthless of men, as regards posterity, are handed down to fame for the very qualities which it might be hoped would be left in oblivion. What sacrifices would many a sage or poet have made, to be connected with all here, in this case, we find the almanac-making shoetime through Pope and the charming Belinda! Yet maker enjoying a companionship and a celebrity for qualities which, morally, have no virtue or endurance in them, but quite the reverse. |