Who could think of sitting in Rosamond's bower, eating "pinkeyes?" Or in a grotto,

With wild thyme, and the gadding vine o'ergrown,

munching "purple kidneys?" Faugh!-the Wild Irish Girl, herself, would shudder at such an inconvenance. A Parliament of sentimental damsels would turn the agricultural interest upside down; the corn-fields would be turned into fields of mignionette, the hop-gardens into groves of myrtle, and the Board of Trade would be exclusively engaged in securing the carnation trade with France, and our commerce in hyacinths and tulips with the Dutch.

Do any of our readers remember the celebrated Signor Pastorelli, who paid England a visit some years since? His advertisements, in the form of a circular letter, ran as follows:

"Signor Pastorelli, from Arcadia, presents his compliments to the ladies of England, and has the honour to inform them that he has arrived in this country with a new and complete assortment of every article in the sylvan and pastoral line. He ventures to assert, that such a superb variety of crooks was never before presented to the shepherdesses of Great Britain. His chapeau de paille d'Arcadie will be admitted a paragon of rural elegance and beauty. The most cursory inspection of his ivory rakes, tortoiseshell spades, and alabaster milkpails, will give unbounded satisfaction.

"The Signor solicits particular attention to his far-famed pipe, made after the exact model of the instrument on which the Roman swains played in the time of Signor Virgilio; and to his incomparable Eolian harp, which performs the choicest serenades when it is laid on a bank of violets in a southerly breeze.

"Pastorelli begs also to state that he is professor of the art of billing and cooing, in which he gives lessons (twelve for one guinea).

"His dove-quill pens for love-letters are recommended; also his couleur-de-rose ink, which has the admirable property of making the most insipid note that a lady or gentleman can indite, seem the wittiest and most agreeable billet-doux to the individual who has the happiness to receive it.

"Lambs taught to skip quadrilles and gallopades.

"Bees taught to hum the Irish melodies, as originally written by Monsieur L'Amour.

"N.B.-One or two dying swans for sale. Immediate application

necessary.

"Thatched House,

"May 1."

The sentimentalist, however, loves the country of the fancy, not the country as it is in fact. No people are so soon wearied and disgusted with a rural life as those who prepare for it under the tuition of the Shenstones and Pastorellis. Nothing can be more remote from the reality than the romance. For one pair of cooing doves, there are in every farm in England twenty pair of gabbling geese, as many of waddling ducks, the same proportion of turkeys, the same of barn

door fowl, a feathered band that makes a very excellent figure indeed upon plate and platter, but which the pastoral poets, with one accord, abandon to the poulterer and the cook.

Take the sentimentalist from the sheepcot to the pigsty, and see how the change will affect him; yet a swine is as rural as a sheep, although he is not commonly petted in his pighood, and perhaps never decorated with knots of ribbon. The sight of a bona fide shepherd is the best of all remedies for the diseased imagination, that fancies all the flocks in the empire tended by Arcadian youths prattling eclogues from sunrise to sunset.

How picturesque is a thatched cottage, imbosomed in trees, seen from the opposite side of a stream or valley!

In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, your picturesque cottage is as dark as a dungeon, as damp as a fen, as low as a cock-pit, and as prolific of insect life as an ant-hill, or a decayed cheese. I have seen an enchanting one, where you could gather mushrooms on the floor of the kitchen, study the whole science of entomology in the bedchambers, amuse yourself with rat-catching in the drawing-room, and compose a treatise upon all the winds of Heaven from a personal experience of their relative impetuosities, as you sat at dinner in the parlour. Perhaps there is no better test of a genuine love of the country than living in a cottage to enjoy it. But there are cottages in the air as well as castles in the air, and visionary people will continue to build both to the end of the chapter.

Numbers there are who repair to the country for retirement and repose after a life of business and care. Having over-drudged themselves in the city, they conclude that they can only have relaxation by leaving it; and accordingly they rush into the fields, and sometimes take to agriculture at sixty. There is no character more diverting to others, and more wretched in himself, than a sexagenarian citizen transmuted into a farmer.

I knew a hosier who underwent this ridiculous metamorphosis. Until he left his counter, he could just as easily have squared the circle as explained the difference between a plough and a harrow. Had you shown him a field of wheat and told him it was an oaken copse, he would have implicitly believed you. I found him one day amongst his cabbages, hunting for a rose; and his acquaintance with animals was such, that I have no doubt he verified the proverb by " by going to the goat's house to look for wool." You may guess what a fortune he made by farming, and what a happy life he led, between his losses and disappointments, the frauds committed on him, and the ridicule of the whole neighbourhood. His family made pets of every beast and bird on the estate, so that his table in the country was as ill-furnished as in town it had been remarkable for its vulgar profusion. With poultry in the greatest abundance, you might as well have looked for a roast ostrich as a roast duck at Newborough; the ducks were under the patronage of Miss Amelia, and they waddled about with an air of assurance, as much as to say, "We are not to be eaten.”

One day I had the following dialogue with dame Pluck, the hen-wife, in the farmyard:

66

Those are fine, fat chickens, Mrs. Pluck."

"Yes, surely, sir; they gets plenty to eat, so they do."

"There's a nice pair for boiling; shall we have them to-morrow?" "Them's the mistress's chickens, sir."

"I know they are, but they are just fit to be killed."

"Kill the mistress's chickens! I wonder what she'd say, sir, if she heard you talk of killing her chickens!"

"They are pets, I see; well, I love ducks as well; there's a plump one; I hope I'll soon see you on the dish, my fine fellow."

"If Miss Amelia has no objection, I have none," answered Mrs. Pluck.

"Objection to ducks!"

"Only to roasting them, sir; nobody ever saw a duck roasted, or a chicken boiled in this house, since Mr. Chubb came to it."

"Eat nothing but geese and turkeys!"

"Eat the geese!-eat my master's geese! I never saw such a gentleman for eating."

"Well, the turkeys! May I have a boiled turkey?"

"Master Dickey, will you let one of your turkeys be put in the pot and boiled for this gentleman's dinner?" cried Mrs. Pluck to Mr. Chubb's third boy, who happened at the moment to enter the yard.

Master Dickey returned an indignant negative, although I could perceive he would have sacrificed his mother's chickens and his sister's ducks with little scruple.

My resentment was prodigious'; loving poultry from my youth up, and surrounded with the fattest chickens, geese, and turkeys, without the prospect of tasting a merrythought or a drumstick of one of them, it occurred to me to set fire to the hen-house some dark night, and thus lay in a store of roast-fowl for the season. But I contented myself with taking advantage one day of Mrs. Pluck's absence from her post to shoot a pair of the fattest chickens, which I deposited in my gamebag, and returning with my gun on my shoulder, presented them to the citizen and his lady as a brace of partridges! The chickens were missed, and Mrs. Chubb plucked a crow with Mrs. Pluck upon the subject, but the murder I perpetrated, and the trick I played, are secrets from the Chubb family to this hour.

But more people leave town to worry and destroy the animal kingdom than to cherish and protect them. However, I am not going to deliver myself of a diatribe against sportsmen, although I do not think them entitled to style themselves true lovers of the country, any more than the classes I have already mentioned, or many others which I must leave untouched.

I know I shall be expected to explain, before I conclude, what I consider the true love of the country to consist in. This expectation I do not mean to satisfy at present. Perhaps I may do so on some future occasion; perhaps I may not.

ON the morning following the recital of the Vicar of Clearstream's adventures I rose with the lark and sallied forth, like a schoolmaster, rod in hand.

As the trout rose at the same time, and my flies fell killingly on the surface of the river, I soon filled my creel. After weighing and inspecting each fish individually, and under the advice of mine host selecting the best-conditioned, I carried them with me to the vicarage, where, as the reader will be pleased to remember, I had promised to take my meals.

I was greeted with nods and becks and wreathed smiles by the vicar and his children, who, the morning task being ended, were waiting in the garden to receive me.

Miss Woodward was busily engaged in preparing the morning meal, and as soon as we had exchanged courtesies, the signal was given that all was ready and we took our seats.

I do not know how it is, but I can never enjoy a London breakfast. The hot rolls smell of green baize and look like Smyrna sponges; the white bread seems arid, and reminds one of dead men's bones and bean-flour; the butter is served up in such very diminutive pats, that it seems to hint at its costliness and beg you to be sparing in the use of it; the tea tastes of Thames water with a dash of the flavour caused by the last corpse that was picked up, a fter being dragged for for several days, just opposite the Penitentiary at Millbank. As for a London egg, though you do get your chicken into the bargain, a man must be cracked who ventures to crack the shell of one, unless he is a comparative anatomist, or a positive fool; the broiled ham, as they call it, is a gross insult to all the Bacon family; and the coffee, a compound of burnt beans and chicory, is rendered more filthy by being infused in a patent filterer, which allows all the filth, and none of the flavour, to run through it; as to milk-bah !—whiting and water—it is a most unenticing meal to me-a London breakfast.

Miss Woodward had prepared for us a very different sort of feast. We had home-made bread-white and brown, oven cakes, as sweet and as light as Love himself, a large supply of freshly-made butter, with eggs newly laid and ready to burst their shells with the milky fluid within them: the cream was almost of the consistency of butter,

and, like undergraduate port wine, refused to be poured out. Then the tea, good of its sort, used liberally and infused in the pure water that trickled through the gravel rocks above us, and filtered itself, was delicious. The coffee, newly roasted and ground, made after the olden fashion, and supplied hot from the coffee-pot, filled the parlour with its refreshing odour. The more solid part of the meal consisted of rashers of streaked bacon nicely toasted-not broiled, a brace of trouts grilled, and covered with bread crumbs and chopped mushrooms; a large dish of crayfish, for which Clearstream is justly renowned, and a collared eel, which would have provcked the appetite of an anchorite and caused him to regret, if not forget, his vow as a herb and water totaller. Good as every thing was, it was doubtless rendered better by a three hours' fishing in the open air of a bracing summer's morning.

"Fiat justitia," said I, internally, and justice was done internally.

I had engaged a four-wheeled carriage, which mine host called "a pheayton," and had arranged to drive the vicar and his children over to Winchester, wishing to see the cathedral and other old buildings, for which that town and its neighbourhood are justly celebrated. I had, moreover, selected a bright sovereign, and placed it apart from its companions, as a tip for the son of an old and valued friend, who was studying his humanities in William of Wykeham's college-that is, he was learning to spear trout, spin cockchafers, bait cats, and draw badgers.

L'homme propose-Dieu dispose.

The children were dressing themselves in their best, the vicar was putting on an immaculate white tie, and I was looking out for Boots, who in his other character of ostler had promised to bring down the chaise-trap is, I believe, more correct-when an exceedingly neat landaulet, drawn by a pair of fat and well-fed steeds, and driven by an unctuous and malt-inflamed-faced coachman, was whirled up to the vicarage-gate at the rate of three miles-and-a-half an hour.

The carriage was occupied, I might almost say filled, by a magnificent specimen of a full-grown and flourishing divine-for there was no mistaking his profession. He wore a most correct and carefully-cut frock, shorts and silks, with buckles-large, solid, silver buckles-at his knees and on his instep. His throat was encircled with a fine white stock, and on his hair, which was slightly mixed with gray, or slightly powdered, I could hardly tell which, he wore a hat, which though not decidedly a shovel, displayed a disposition to emulate and imitate the cut episcopal or archidiaconal.

As I was a stranger to him, I retreated from the gate and walked slowly along the shrubbery which ran parallel with the road. Though not partial to eves-dropping, I could not help hearing the following dialogue, as both master and man were blessed with loud voices; although the former spoke in a fine, sonorous bass, and the latter whistled out his words in a snuffling choky kind of treble.

"Haugh-humph!-eh? Zachariah-Zachariah Bond-why-eh? Why do you stand there?" said the master.