"In another part of this little book," says his biographer, "shortly before his death he had inserted a memorandum, intimating that the sum of eleven pounds was due to him from the London publishers. It was a cruel fate to be compelled to turn literary drudge, with four-and-twenty shillings a month for wages, and more cruel still to be doomed to suffer all the pains of hunger because those wages were not paid!"

Such was the life of Chatterton. His fate is too well known; and so little sensation did the awful death of this

occasion, that it was long before his friends heard any thing of him. He was buried without ceremony, among paupers in Shoe Lane; his identity could with difficulty be established when the fact was known.

In all the annals of literature there is nothing resembling the history of this boy-poet; he stands alone. Never did any other youth of the same years, even under the most favorable circumstances, produce works of the same high order; and never was child of genius treated by his country with such unfeeling contempt, with such an iron and unrelenting harshness of neglect. The fate of Francis Hilary Gilbert, a French writer, has been compared to that of Chatterton; but, besides that Gilbert was a man of forty-three, and had no claims to the genius of Chatterton, being a writer on veterinary medicine and rural economy, he destroyed himself because the government, which had sent him to Spain, neglected to send him his remittances, not from neglect of a whole nation. Except in the mere facts of destitution and suicide, there is little resemblance in the characters, claims, or fates of the two men. Chatterton's death has furnished a tragedy to the French stage from the pen of Alfred de Vigny.

The haunts of Chatterton lie within a narrow space. He was not one of those whom fate or fortune allows to traverse many lands; Bristol and London were his only places of residence. In London, little can now be known of his haunts: that he frequented Vauxhall and Marylebone Gardens; resorted to the Chapter Coffee-house; that he lived nine weeks at Mr. Walmsley's, a plasterer, in Shoreditch; and then removed to Mrs. Angel's, dress-maker, No. 4 Brook-street, Holborn, comprises nearly the totality of his homes and haunts in London. Where Mr. Walmsley's house was can not now be ascertained; the Chapter Coffee-house still retains its old situation, but has long ceased to be the resort "of all the literary characters" of London; Vauxhall is in its deserted old age, and Marylebone Gardens are, like many other gardens of Chatterton's time, now overrun, not with weeds, but houses. No. 4 Brook-street, Holborn, would be an interesting number if it remained; but, as if every thing connected with the history of this ill-fated youth, except his fame, should be condemned to the most singular fatality, there is no No. 4; it is swallowed up by an enormous furniture warehouse, Steffenoni's, fronting into Holborn, and occupying what used to be numbers one, two, three, and four of Brook-street. Thus the whole of the interior of these houses has been cleared away, and they have been converted into one long show-shop below, and as long manufacturing shops above. In this form they have been for the last eighteen years; and previous to that time, I am told, were occupied by an equally extensive ironmongery concern. Thus all memory of the particular spot which was the room of Chatterton, and where he committed the suicide, is rooted out. What is still more strange, the very same fate has attended his place of sepulture. He was buried among the paupers in Shoe Lane; so little was known or cared about him and his fate, that it was some time, as stated, before his friends learned the sad story; in the mean time, the exact site of his grave was wellnigh become unknown. It appears, however, from inquiries which I have made, that the spot was recognized; and when the public became at length aware of the genius that had been suffered to perish in despair, a headstone was erected by subscription among some admirers of his productions. With the rapid revolutions of property which now take place, especially in the metropolis and other large cities; with new plans and improvements, which in their progress seem to spare nothing of the past, however sacred, we have already seen, in the course of these volumes, how many traces of the resorts and dwellings of our poets have vanished from among us. The very resting-place of Chatterton could not escape the ungenial character of his fate. London, which seemed to refuse to know him when alive, refused a quiet repose to his ashes. To lie among the paupers of Shoe Lane was, one would have thought, a sufficiently abject lot for so proud and soaring a nature; but fortune had still another spite in reserve for his remains! The burial-ground in Shoe Lane, one of those inclosures of the dead which a dignitary of the Church has asserted to be guarded and guarantied against all violence and change by the ceremony of consecration, was sold to form Farringdon market; and tombs and memorials of the deceased disappeared to make way for the shambles and cabbage stalls of the living. Was there no lover of literature, no venerator of genius to take the alarm; to step in and see that the bones and the headstone of Chatterton were removed to the grave-yard which still is attached to St. Andrew's Church? It appears not. Neglected in death as in life, the headstone was pulled up, the bones of the poet were left to share the fate of those of his pauper comrades, and it is now most probable that they are scattered—Heaven knows where! for I am assured, on good authority, that houses are now built on the spot where this unfortunate youth lay. If houses are built, most likely cellars were dug to those houses; and then the bones of Chatterton—where are they? Echo may answer—where?

Let us now quit the desecrated scene of the poet's interment, and, returning to Bristol, seek that of his birth: we shall seek it equally in vain! The house of his birth, and the last narrow house of his remains, are alike swept away from the earth! Chatterton was born on Redcliffe Hill, in a back court behind the row of houses facing the northwest side of St. Mary's churchyard; the row of houses and its back courts have all been pulled down and rebuilt. The house in which Chatterton was born was behind a shop nearly opposite the northwest corner of the church; and the monument to the young poet, lately erected by subscription, has been very appropriately placed in a line between this house and the north porch of the church in which he professed to have found the Rowley MSS. This monument is a Gothic erection, much resembling an ancient cross, and on the top stands Chatterton, in the dress of Colston's school, and with an unfolded roll of parchment in his hand. This monument was erected under the care and from the design of John Britton, the antiquary, who, so much to his honor, long zealously exerted himself to rescue Chatterton's memory from apparent neglect in his native city. The man who can gaze on this monument; can contemplate the boyish figure and face of the juvenile poet; can glance from this quarter, where he was born in poverty, to that old porch, where he planned the scheme of his fame; and can call to mind what he was and what he did without the profoundest sensations of wonder and regret, may safely pass through life without fear of an astonishment. It is, in my opinion, one of the most affecting objects in Great Britain. How much, then, is that feeling of sympathy and regret augmented when you approach, and, upon the monument, read the very words written by the inspired boy himself for his supposed monument, and inserted in his "will."

One of the spots in Bristol which we should visit with the intensest interest connected with the history of Chatterton, would be the office of Lambert the attorney, where he wrote the finest of his poems attributed to Rowley. The first office of this person was on St. John's Steps, but he left this during Chatterton's abode with him; and, ceasing to be an office, it does not now seem to be exactly known in which house it was. From this place he removed to the house now occupied by Mr. Short, silversmith, in Cornhill, opposite to the Exchange; and here Chatterton probably wrote the greater portion of Rowley's poems. Another favorite haunt of Chatterton's, Redcliffe Meadow, is now no longer a meadow, but is built all over; so rapidly has about seventy years eradicated the footsteps of the poet in his native place. There are two objects, however, which, from their public character, remain, and are likely to remain, unchanged, and around which the recollections of Chatterton and his singular history will forever vividly cling: these are, Colston's School, and the Church of St. Mary's.

The school in Pyle-street, where he was sent at five years of age, and which his father had taught, I believe no longer exists. The school on St. Augustine's Back exists, and is likely to exist. It is one of those endowments founded by the great merchants of England, which, if they had been preserved from the harpy and perverting fingers of trustees, would now suffice to educate the whole nation. This school, founded at a comparatively recent date, and in the midst of an active city like Bristol, seems to be well administered. There you find an ample school-room, dining-hall, chapel, and spacious bed-rooms, all kept in most clean and healthy order; a hundred boys, in their long, blue, full-skirted coats and scarlet stockings, exactly as they were in the days of Chatterton. You may look on them, and realize to yourself precisely how Chatterton and his schoolfellows looked when he was busy there devouring books of history, poetry, and antiquities, and planning the Burgum pedigree, and the like. Take any fair boy of a similar age; let him be one of the oldest and most attractive—for, says his biographer, "there was a stateliness and a manly bearing in Chatterton beyond what might have been expected from his years." "He had a proud air," says Mrs. Edkins, and, according to the general evidence, he was as remarkable for the prematurity of his person as he was for that of his intellect and imagination. His mien and manner were exceedingly prepossessing; his eyes were gray, but piercingly brilliant; and when he was animated in conversation, or excited by any passing event, the fire flashed and rolled in the lower part of the orbs in a wonderful and almost fearful way. Mr. Calcott characterized Chatterton's eye "as a kind of hawk's eye, and thought we could see his soul through it." As with Byron, "one eye was more remarkable than the other; and its lightning-like flashes had something about them supernaturally grand." Take some fine, clever-looking lad, then, from the crowd, and you will find such, and you will feel the strangest astonishment in imagining such a boy appearing before the grave citizen Burgum with his pedigree, and within a few years afterward acting so daring and yet so glorious a part before the whole world.

To the admirers of genius, and the sympathizers with the strange fate of Chatterton, a visit to this school must always be a peculiar gratification; and under the improved management of improved times, and that of a zealous committee, and so excellent a master as the present one, Mr. Wilson, that gratification will be perfect. All is so airy, fresh, and cheerful; there is such a spirit of order evinced even in the careful rolling up of their Sunday suits, with their broad, silver-plated belt clasps, each arranged in its proper place, on shelves in the clothes-room, under every boy's own number; and yet without that order degenerating into severity, but the contrary, that you can not help feeling the grand beneficence of those wealthy merchants who, like Edward Colston, make their riches do their generous will forever; who become thereby the actual fathers of their native cities to all generations; who roll in every year of the world's progress some huge stone of anxiety from the hearts of poor widows; who clear the way before the unfriended, but active and worthy lad; who put forth their invisible hands from the heaven of their rest, and become the genuine guardian angels of the orphan race forever and ever; raising from those who would otherwise have been outcasts and ignorant laborers, aspiring and useful men, tradesmen of substance, merchants the true enrichers of their country, and fathers of happy families. How glorious is such a lot! how noble is such an appropriation of wealth! how enviable is such a fame! And among such men there were few more truly admirable than Edward Colston. He was worthy to have been lifted by Chatterton to the side of the magnificent Canynge, and one can not help wondering that he says so little about this great benefactor of his city.

Edward Colston was not merely the founder of this school for the clothing, maintaining, and apprenticing of one hundred boys, at a charge of about £40,000, but he also founded another school in Temple-street, to clothe and maintain forty boys, at a cost of £3000; and he left £8500 for an alms-house for twelve men and twelve women, with 6s. per week to the chief brother, and 3s. per week to the rest, with coals, &c.; £600 for the maintaining of six sailors in the Merchants' Alms-house; £1500 to clothe, maintain, instruct, and apprentice six boys; £200 to the Mint Work-house; £500 to rebuild the Boys' Hospital; £200 to put out poor children; £1200 to be given, in £100 a year, for twelve years, to apprentice the boys with, £10 each for his school; £1230 to beautify different churches in the city; £2500 to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London; and £2000 to Christ Church School in London; £500 to St. Thomas's Hospital; £500 to Bethlehem Hospital; £200 to New Work-house in Bishopsgate Without; £300 to the Society for Propagating the Gospel; £900 for educating and clothing twelve poor boys and twelve girls, at £45 yearly, at Mortlake in Surrey; to build and endow an alms-house at Sheen in Surrey, sum not stated; £6000 to augment poor livings; besides various other sums for charitable purposes. All this property did this noble man thus bestow on the needs of his poorer brethren, without forgetting, as is often the case on great occasions, those of his own blood relatives, to whom he bequeathed the princely sum of £100,000. But, like an able and wise merchant, he did not merely bequeath these munificent funds, but "he performed all these charitable works in his lifetime; invested revenues for their support in trustees' hands; lived to see the trusts justly executed, as they are at this day; and saw with his own eyes the good effects of all his establishments." Great, too, as were these bequests, they were not the result of hoarding during a long, penurious life, as is often the case, to leave a boastful name at his death; his whole life was like the latter end of it. True, he did not marry, and when urged to it, used to reply, with a sort of pleasantness, "Every helpless widow is my wife, and her distressed orphans my children." "He was a most successful merchant," says Barrett, in his History of Bristol, "and never insured a ship, and never lost one." He lived first in Small-street, Bristol, but having so much business in London, and being chosen to represent the city, he removed thither, and afterward lived, as he advanced in years, a very retired life, at Mortlake, in Surrey. His daily existence was one of the noblest acts of Christian benevolence; and his private donations were not less than his public. He sent at one time £3000 to relieve and free debtors in Ludgate, by a private hand; freed yearly those confined for small debts in Whitechapel Prison and the Marshalsea; sent £1000 to relieve distress in Whitechapel; twice a week distributed beef and broth to all the poor around him; and were any sailor suffering or cast away in his employ, his family afterward found a sure asylum in him.

Why did not Chatterton, who, by the splendid provision of this man, received his education and advance into life, resound the praises of Edward Colston as loudly as he did those of William Canynge? There is no doubt that it was because time had not sufficiently clothed with its poetic hues the latter merchant as it had the former. Canynge, too, as the builder of Redcliffe Church, was to him an object of profound admiration. This church is the most lively monument of the memory of Chatterton. His mother is said to have lived on Redcliffe Hill, nearly opposite to the upper gate of this church, at the corner of Colston's parade; this must have been when he was apprentice at Lambert's, and also probably before, while he was at Colston's school. The houses standing there now, however, are too large and good for a woman in her circumstances to have occupied; and it is therefore probable that this abode of his, too, must have been pulled down. We turn, then, to the church itself, as the sole building of his resort, next to Colston's school, which remains as he used to see it. A noble and spacious church it is, as we have stated, of the lightest and most beautiful architecture. The graceful, lofty columns and pointed arches of its aisles; the richly-groined roof; and the fine extent of the view from east to west, being no less than 197 feet, and the height of the middle cross aisle, 54 feet, with a proportionate breadth from north to south, fills you, on entering, with a feeling of the highest admiration and pleasure. What does not a little surprise you is to find in the church, where the great painted altar-piece used to hang, now as large a painting of the Ascension, with two side pieces, one representing the stone being rolled away from the sepulcher of our Savior, and the other the three Maries come to visit the empty tomb; and those by no other artist than—Hogarth! The curiosity of such a fact makes these paintings a matter of intense interest; and if we can not place them on a par with such things from the hands of the old masters, we must allow that they are full of talent, and wonderful for a man whose ordinary walk was extremely different.

Another object of interest is the tomb of Admiral Penn, the father of the founder of Pennsylvania, which is in the pavement of the south aisle, with this inscription: "Here lieth the body of Sir William Penn, who departed this life the 16th of September, 1674. Dum clavum teneam." On a pillar near hang two or three decayed banners, a black cuirass and helmet, gantlets and swords, with his escutcheon and motto. Not being aware that Admiral Penn lay buried here, I can not describe the singular feeling which the sight of these remnants of aristocratic pageantry, suspended above the tomb of the father of the great Quaker of Pennsylvania, gave me; suspended, too, in one of the proudest temples of that proud national church, the downfall of which this very man predicted on his death-bed: "Son William, if you and your friends continue faithful to that which has been made known to you, you will make an end of priests and priestcraft to the end of the world."

In the south transept stand conspicuously the tomb and effigies of William Canygne. These are striking objects in connection with the history of Chatterton. Here you behold the very forms which, from the early dawn of his life, filled the mind of the poet-child with the deepest sense of admiration. It was here, before these recumbent figures, that he used to be found sitting in profound thought; and when the reading of the wealth, the princely merchant state, and the munificent deeds of William Canynge had arrayed the inanimate stone with the hues of long-past life and the halo of solemn and beautiful deeds—the raising of this fair church, the most beautiful of all—then was it these which became the germ of the great Rowley fable; Canynge, the ancient and magnificent, now the merchant, and now the shaven priest and dean, arose once more at the touch of the inspired boy, and played his part, not as a citizen of Bristol, but as a citizen of the world. These effigies are singular in themselves. First, you have William Canynge and Joan his wife, lying on an altar-tomb in full proportion, under a canopy handsomely carved in freestone; then, not far off, you have Canynge again carved in alabaster, lying along in his priest's robes as Dean of Westbury, with hands lifted up as in devotion, and a large book under his head. It is rare, and almost unique, to have two monuments of the same person side by side, and that in two different characters, yet still little would these have attracted notice over a thousand other goodly tombs in our churches, had they not chanced to attract the attention of this little charity-boy, the descendant of the sextons of the church.

Last, but far most striking of all the haunts of Chatterton, is that muniment room over the north porch. When you ascend the dark and winding stair, and enter this dim and stony hexagon apartment, and see still standing on its floor the seven very chests of the Rowley story, old and moldering, their lids—some of them circular, as if hewn out of solid trees—broken off, and all dirty and worm-eaten, the reality of the strange facts connected with them comes thrillingly upon you. You seem then and there only first and fully to feel how actual and how sad is the story of Thomas Chatterton: that here, indeed, began his wondrous scheme of fame; hence it spread and stood forth as a brilliant mystery for a moment; hence the proud boy gloried in its sudden blaze as in that of a recognizing glory from heaven; and then how

GRAY, AT STOKE-POGIS

The life of Thomas Gray, the author of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, was passed in London, in Cambridge, and at Stoke-Pogis, in Buckinghamshire, except what he spent in traveling, which was considerable. Gray was born in Cornhill, November 26, 1716. His parents were reputable citizens of London; his grandfather was a considerable merchant, but his father, Mr. Philip Gray, Mallet says, though he also followed business, was of an indolent and reserved temper, and therefore rather diminished than increased his paternal fortune. He had many children, of whom Thomas was the fifth; all except him died in their infancy. The business of Gray's father was, like that of Milton's, a money-scrivener. But, unlike Milton's father, Philip Gray was, according to Mallet, not only reserved and indolent, but of a morose, unsocial, and obstinate temper. His indolence led him to neglect the business of his profession; his obstinacy, to build a country house at Wanstead, without acquainting his wife or son of the design, to which he knew they would be very averse, till it was executed. This turned out a loss of two thousand pounds to the family; and the character of the father, which is supposed to have been stamped by bodily ailments, was the occasion of Gray, though an only child, being left with a very narrow patrimony. His mother, to provide for her family, entered into business, independent of her husband, with her sister, Miss Antrobus. The two ladies kept a kind of India warehouse in Cornhill. As clever ladies in business generally do, they succeeded so well, that, on Mr. Gray's death, which happened about the time of the young poet's return from his first trip to the Continent, they retired, and went to join housekeeping with their third sister, Mrs. Rogers, the widow of a gentleman of that name, who had formerly been in the law, and had retired to Burnham, in Buckinghamshire, where we find Gray, on one occasion, describing, in a letter to Walpole, the uncle and the place thus: "The description of a road that your coach-wheels have so often honored, it is needless to give to you; suffice it that I arrived safe at my uncle's, who is a great hunter in imagination. His dogs take up every chair in the house, so I am forced to stand up at this present writing; and though the gout forbids his galloping after them in the field, yet he continues still to regale his ears and nose with their comfortable noise and stink. He holds me mighty cheap, I perceive, for walking when I should ride, and reading when I should hunt. My comfort amid all this is, that I have, at the distance of half a mile, through a green lane, a forest—the vulgar call it a common—all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices; mountains, it is true, that do not ascend much above the clouds, nor are the declivities quite so amazing as Dover Cliff; but just such hills as people who love their necks as well as I do may venture to climb, and crags that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were more dangerous. Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches, and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds:

At the foot of one of these squats me I, il penseroso, and there grow to the trunk for a whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive squirrel gambol around me like Adam in Paradise, before he had Eve; but I think he did not use to read Virgil, as I commonly do there. In this situation I often converse with my Horace—aloud, too; that is, talk to you; but I do not remember that I ever heard you answer me. I beg pardon for taking all the conversation to myself, but it is entirely your own fault. We have old Mr. Southern at a gentleman's house a little way off, who often comes to see us. He is now seventy-seven years old, and has almost wholly lost his memory, but is as agreeable as an old man can be—at least I persuade myself so when I look at him, and think of Isabella and Oronoko."

By this agreeable extract, however, we have outstepped the progress of Gray's life. He was educated at Eton, under the care of Mr. Antrobus, his mother's brother, then assistant to Dr. George, and, when he left school in 1734, entered a pensioner at Peterhouse, in Cambridge. It was intended that he should follow the profession of the law, for which his uncle's practice and connections seemed to open a brilliant way. He therefore lived on at college so long as his attendance on the lectures was required, but took no degree. His uncle's death put an end to his prospects of that kind, and he abandoned the idea of the legal profession. When he had been at Cambridge about five years, he agreed to make a tour on the Continent with Horace Walpole, and they proceeded together through France to Italy, where they quarreled and parted, taking different ways. On his return he again went to Cambridge, took the degree of Bachelor of Civil Law, and continued there, without liking the place or its inhabitants, as we are informed by both Johnson and Mallet, or professing to like them. His pleasure lay in wading through huge libraries, out of which, on a vast number of subjects, he extracted a vast amount of information. Such were Gray's assiduous study and research, that the following character of him by a cotemporary, the Rev. Mr. Temple, rector of St. Gluvias, in Cornwall, written a few months after his death, can scarcely be termed overdrawn. "Perhaps he was the most learned man in Europe. He was equally acquainted with the elegant and profound parts of science, and that not superficially, but thoroughly. He knew every branch of history, both natural and civil; had read all the original histories of England, France, and Italy; and was a great antiquarian. Criticism, metaphysics, morals, politics, made a principal part of his plan of study. Voyages and travels of all sorts were his favorite amusement; and he had a fine taste in painting, prints, architecture, and gardening."

He was, in fact, one of the first to open up the Northern antiquities and legendary literature, and most probably was the cause of Mallet turning to this subject; he was also one of the very first, if not the very first person, who began to trace out and distinguish the different orders of Anglo-Gothic architecture, by attention to the date of its creation. These were the studies, enough to occupy a life, which kept him close at Cambridge in his room for years, and once induced him to take lodgings, for about three years, near the British Museum, where he diligently copied from the Harleian and other manuscripts. The death of his most intimate friend, Mr. West, the son of the Chancellor of Ireland, soon after his return from the Continent, tended only the more to fix this habit of retirement and study. He lived on at Peterhouse till 1756, when a curious incident drove him forth. Two or three young men of fortune, who lived in the same staircase, had for some time intentionally disturbed him with their riots, and carried their ill behavior so far as frequently to awaken him at midnight. After having borne their insults longer than might reasonably have been expected, even from a man of less warmth of temper, Mr. Gray complained to the governing part of the society, and not thinking his remonstrance sufficiently attended to, quitted the college. He took up his residence at Pembroke Hall, where he continued to reside till the day of his death, which occurred here in the fifty-fifth year of his age, July 30, 1771, being seized with gout in the stomach while at dinner in the college hall.

He had for the last three years been appointed Professor of History in this college, but such was his indolence, fastidiousness, or aversion to so public a duty, that, to use the words of Johnson, "he was always designing lectures, but never reading them; uneasy at his neglect of duty, and appeasing his uneasiness with designs of reformation, and with a resolution which he believed himself to have made, of resigning the office if he found himself unable to discharge it." He continued thus to vacillate, and held on till his death. A circumstance which attached him more to Pembroke College was, that Mason was elected a fellow of it in 1747; they grew warm friends, and Mason afterward became his biographer.

Such was the general outline of Gray's life. In reading it, we find the most interesting features those which he describes so well in his letters, his travels, and his occasional retreats at Stoke-Pogis. He made a tour into the north of England, to the lakes, and into Scotland; at another time through Worcester, Hereford, Monmouth, and parts of the neighboring counties; and all his details of such rambles, as they are given with an evident zest, are full of life and interest. In his prose, Gray gets out of the stiff and stilted formality of much of his poetry. He forgets his learning and his classical notions, and is at once easy, amiable, witty, and jocose. There was a degree of effeminacy about him, which you see in the portraits of him, which you do not the less detect in his poetry; but his prose gives you a far more attractive idea of him, as he must be in the familiar circle of his friends. On turning to Gray's account of those places which I have visited in various parts of the kingdom, I have always found him seizing on their real features, and impressed with their true spirit. Of this genuine feeling of nature, his account of his visit to the Grande Chartreuse may be taken as a sufficient specimen:

"We took the longest road, which lies through Savoy, on purpose to see a famous monastery called the Grande Chartreuse, and had no reason to think our time lost. After traveling seven days, very slow—for we did not change horses, it being impossible for a chaise to go fast in these roads—we arrived at a little village among the mountains of Savoy, called Echelles, from whence we proceeded on horses, who are used to the way, to the mountain of the Chartreuse. It is six miles to the top; the road runs winding up it, commonly not six feet broad; on the one hand is the rock, with woods of pine-trees hanging over head; on the other a monstrous precipice, almost perpendicular, at the bottom of which rolls a torrent that, sometimes tumbling among the fragments of stone that have fallen from on high, and sometimes precipitating itself down vast descents with a noise like thunder, which is made still greater by the echo from the mountains on each side, concurs to form one of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes I ever beheld. Add to this the strange views made by the crags and cliffs on the other hand; the cascades that in many places throw themselves from the very summit down into the vale and the river below, and many other places impossible to describe—you will conclude we had no occasion to repent of our pains. This place St. Bruno chose to retire to, and upon its very top founded the aforesaid convent, which is the superior of the whole order. When we came there, the two fathers who are commissioned to entertain strangers—for the rest must neither speak to one another nor to any one else—received us very kindly, and set before us a repast of dried fish, eggs, butter, and fruits, all excellent of their kind, and extremely neat. They pressed us to spend the night there, and to stay some days with them, but this we could not do; so they led us about their house, which is, you must think, like a little city; for there are a hundred fathers, besides three hundred servants, that make their clothes, grind their corn, press their wine, and do every thing among themselves. The whole is quite orderly and simple: nothing of finery; but the wonderful decency, and the strange situation, more than supply the place of it. In the evening we descended by the same way, passing through many clouds that were then forming themselves on the mountain's side, and pursued our journey toward Chamberry."

It is, however, at Stoke-Pogis that we seek the most attractive vestiges of Gray. Here he used to spend his vacations, not only when a youth at Eton, but during the whole of his future life, while his mother and his aunts lived. Here it was that his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, his celebrated Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, and his Long Story, were not only written, but were mingled with the circumstances, and all the tenderest feelings of his own life.

His mother and aunts lived at an old-fashioned house in a very retired spot at Stoke, called West End. This house stood in a hollow, much screened by trees. A small stream ran through the garden, and it is said that Gray used to employ himself when here much in this garden, and that many of the trees still remaining are of his planting. On one side of the house extended an upland field, which was planted round so as to give a charming, retired walk; and at the summit of the field was raised an artificial mound, and upon it was built a sort of arcade or summer-house, which gave full prospect of Windsor and Eton. Here Gray used to delight to sit; here he was accustomed to read and write much; and it is just the place to inspire the Ode on Eton College, which lay in the midst of its fine landscape, beautifully in view. The old house inhabited by Gray and his mother has just been pulled down, and replaced by an Elizabethan mansion by the present proprietor, Mr. Penn, of Stoke Park, just by. The garden, of course, has shared in the change, and now stands gay with its fountain and its modern green-house, and, excepting for some fine trees, no longer reminds you of Gray. The woodland walk still remains round the adjoining field, and the summer-house on its summit, though now much cracked by time, and only held together by iron cramps. The trees are now so lofty that they completely obstruct the view, and shut out both Eton and Windsor.

It was at this house, now destroyed, that the two ladies from the Park made their memorable visit, which gave occasion to the Long Story. The facts were these: Gray had finished his Elegy, and had sent it in manuscript to Horace Walpole, by whom it was shown about with great applause. Among the rest of the fashionable world to whom it was thus communicated, Lady Cobham, who now lived at the mansion-house at Stoke-Pogis, had read and admired it. Wishing to make the acquaintance of the author, and hearing that he was so near her, her relatives, Miss Speed and Lady Schaub, then at her house, undertook to bring this about by making him the first visit. He happened to be from home when the ladies arrived at his aunt's solitary mansion; and when he returned, was surprised to find, written on one of his papers in the parlor where he usually read, the following note: "Lady Schaub's compliments to Mr. Gray. She is sorry not to have found him at home, to tell him that Lady Brown is very well." This necessarily obliged him to return the visit, and soon after induced him to compose a ludicrous account of this little adventure for the amusement of the ladies in question. This was a mere jeu d'esprit, and, extravagant as some parts of it are, is certainly very clever; Gray regarded it but as a thing for the occasion, and never included it in his published poems. But Mallet tells us that when it appeared, though only in manuscript, it was handed about, and the most various opinions pronounced on it. By some it was thought a master-piece of original humor; by others, a wild and fantastic farrago. It, in truth, much more resembles his prose, and proves that, if he had not always had the fear of the critics before his eyes, he would have written with far more freedom and life than he often did. We may take a few stanzas, as connected with our further subject:

The ancient pile here mentioned was the Manor-house, Stoke Park, which was then in the possession of Viscountess Cobham. This place and the manor had been in some remarkable hands. The manor was so called from the Pogies, the ancient lords of that name. The heiress of this family, in the reign of Edward the Third, married Lord Molines, who shortly afterward procured a license from the king to convert the manor-house into a castle. From him it descended to the Lords Hungerford, and from them to the Hastings, earls of Huntingdon, and was afterward the residence of Lord-chancellor Hatton. Sir Christopher Hatton had won his promotion with Queen Elizabeth through his graceful person and fine dancing, and is very picturesquely described by Gray, with "his shoe-strings green, high-crowned hat, and satin doublet," leading off the brawls, a sort of figure-dance then in vogue, before the queen. Sir Edward Coke, having married an heiress of the Huntingdon family, became the next possessor; and here, in the year 1601, he was honored with a visit from Elizabeth, whom he entertained in a very sumptuous style. After the death of the Viscountess Cobham, the estate was purchased by Mr. William Penn, chief proprietor of Pennsylvania, a descendant of the celebrated William Penn, the founder of that state.

This old manor-house has since been swept away, as Gray's residence is also, and a large modern mansion now occupies its place. This was built from a design by Wyatt, in 1789, and has since been altered and enlarged. It is built chiefly of brick, and covered with stucco, and consists of a large square center, with two wings. The north, or entrance front, is ornamented with a colonnade, consisting of ten Doric columns, and approached by a flight of steps leading to the Marble Hall. The south front, 196 feet long, is also adorned with a colonnade, consisting of twelve fluted columns of the old Doric order. This is surrounded by a projecting portico of four Ionic columns, sustaining an ornamental pediment; and again, on the top of the house, by a dome.

Stoke Park, thus interesting both on account of these older associations, and of Penn and Gray, is about a couple of miles from Slough. The country is flat, but its monotony is broken up by the noble character and disposition of its woods. Near the house is a fine expanse of water, across which the eye falls on fine views, particularly to the south, of Windsor Castle, Cooper's Hill, and the Forest Woods. About three hundred yards from the north front of the house stands a column, sixty-eight feet high, bearing on the top a colossal statue of Sir Edward Coke, by Rosa. The woods of the park shut out the view of West End House, Gray's occasional residence, but the space is open from the mansion across the park, so as to take in the view both of the church and of a monument erected by the late Mr. Penn to Gray. Alighting from the carriage at a lodge, I entered the park just at the monument. This is composed of fine freestone, and consists of a large sarcophagus, supported on a square pedestal, with inscriptions on each side. Three of them are selected from the Ode to Eton College and the Elegy. They are: