THE GATHERER.

Hood's Comic Annual for 1833.—Mr. Hood's announcement of his forthcoming volume is in the very vein of the work itself. He writes to his publisher:—"The report of my death, I can assure you is premature, but I am equally obliged to you for your tribute of putting up shutters and wearing a crape hatband. I suspect your friend and informant, Mr. Livingstone—(it should be Gravestone)—drew his inference from a dark passage in Miss Sheridan's Preface which states that, 'of the three Comic Annuals which started at the same time, the Comic Offering alone remains.' The two defuncts therein referred to are the 'Falstaff' and 'The Humorist,' which I understand have put an end to themselves.

"If you should still entertain any doubts, you will shortly have ten thousand impressions to the contrary; for I intend to contradict my demys by fresh octavos. The Comic Annual for 1833, with its usual complement of plates—mind, not coffin-plates—to appear as heretofore, in November, will give the lie, I trust, not merely to my departure, but even to anything like a serious illness: and a novel, about the same time, will help to prove that I am not in a state of de-composition.

"I should have relieved your joint anxieties some days earlier, but till I met Mr. Livingstone, at Bury, I was really not alive to my death."

Cartoons at Hampton Court.[¹⁴]—I mentioned in my last, that I had formed an acquaintance with Holloway, who has been sometime occupied in copying in black chalks the Cartoons of Raphael in this palace. It will be a magnificent work, and admirably executed, for he finishes them as highly as a miniature; his chalk-pencils are of a superior quality, and he cuts them to the finest point: but he says they will only serve to work with on vellum, or on fine skin. He is an eccentric genius, deeply read in Scripture history, which he expounds in the most methodistical tone; but it is very delightful and instructive to listen to his observations on the beauties and merits of these masterpieces of Raphael. A Madame Bouiller, an interesting French emigrant is also occupied on the same subjects. She is patronized by West, who has given her permission to study here; and says that he never saw such masterly artist touches of the crayon as hers. Her style is large heads, after the size and manner of the French; therefore the figures in the Cartoons are particularly adapted for her pencil.

I found poor Holloway this morning foaming with rage in the Cartoon Gallery. Some person has written against the Cartoons, denominating them "washed daubs." No doubt it is either the pen of envy and malignity, or of ignorance: n'importe, it has wounded the feelings of a superior artist and a good man, who worships with religious enthusiasm those works of Raphael, and who has spent so many years in perfecting his engravings of them. It was a grotesque scene to behold Madame Bouiller pacing after Holloway up and down the gallery, with all the grimaces and vivacity of a Frenchwoman, and re-echoing his furious lamentations.

Edinburgh (by Mr. Cobbett).—I thought that Bristol, taking in its heights and Clifton, and its rocks and its river, was the finest city in the world; but Edinburgh, with its castle, its hills, its pretty little sea-port, conveniently detached from it, its vale of rich land lying all around, its lofty hills in the back ground, its views across the Frith;—I think little of its streets and rows of fine houses, though all built of stone, and though everything in London and Bath is beggary to these; I think nothing of Holyrood House; but I think a great deal of the fine and well-ordered streets of shops—of the regularity which you perceive everywhere in the management of business; and I think still more of the absence of all that foppishness, and that affectation of carelessness, and that insolent assumption of superiority, that you see in almost all the young men that you meet with in the fashionable parts of the great towns in England. I was not disappointed; for I expected to find Edinburgh the finest city in the kingdom. Conversations at Newcastle, and with many Scotch gentlemen for years past, had prepared me for this; but still the reality has greatly surpassed every idea that I had formed about it. The people, however, still exceed the place: here all is civility; you do not meet with rudeness, or even with the want of a disposition to oblige, even in persons in the lowest state of life. A friend took me round the environs of the city; he had a turnpike ticket, received at the first gate, which cleared five or six gates. It was sufficient for him to tell the future gatekeepers that he had it. When I saw that, I said to myself, "Nota bene: Gate-keepers take people's word in Scotland—a thing that I have not seen before since I left Long Island."

King John—died at Swinshead Abbey, in Lincolnshire; his body was interred at Worcester; his bowels in Croxton Abbey Church, in Leicestershire, the abbot being his physician; and his heart at Croxden, in Staffordshire. Perhaps the most precious portion of his relics would be the hand that signed Magna Charta. (See page 279.)

The River Dove.—The fertility of the land on the upper parts of this river has always been proverbial: "as rich as Dove" being applied to any spot highly forced. The land has a perpetual verdure, and the spring-floods of the river are very gratifying to the land-occupiers, who have this proverb—

In April, Dove's flood

Is worth a king's good.

It is also said of Dove's banks in spring, that a stick laid down there over-night shall not be found next morning for grass.

St. Hellen's Well, near Rushton Spencer, in Staffordshire, is remarkable in superstitious history, for some singular qualities. It sometimes becomes suddenly dry, after a constant discharge of water for eight or ten years. This happens as well in wet as in dry seasons, and always at the beginning of May, when the springs are commonly esteemed highest; and so it usually continues till Martinmas, November 12, following. The people formerly imagined, that when this happened there would soon follow some stupendous calamity of famine, war, or some other national disaster, or change. It is said that it grew dry before the civil war, and again before the beheading of Charles I.; against the great scarcity of corn in 1670; and in 1679, when the miscalled Popish plot was discovered; but we do not hear that St. Hellen's Well withheld its supplies previous to, or upon, the breaking out of the last calamitous war.

Prodigious Elm.—At Field, adjoining Rushton Spencer, grew a prodigious witch elm, which was felled in 1680. Two able workmen were five days in stocking or felling it. It was 120 feet in length; at the butt-end it was seven yards in circumference; its girth was 25-1/2 feet in the middle. Fourteen loads of firewood, as much as six oxen could draw, broke off in the fall; there were 47 loads more fire-wood cut from the top; they were compelled to fasten two saws together, and put three men to each end, to cut the body of it asunder. Out of this tree were cut 80 pairs of naves for carriage-wheels, and 8,000 feet of sawn timber in boards and planks, at six score per cent.—which, for the sawing only, as the price of labour then was, came to the sum of 12l.

Newcastle-under-Line.—The right of election in this borough has been several times the subject of parliamentary investigation. At the last inquiry, the greater part of the borough appeared to be the property of the Marquess of Stafford; and it was found customary for the burgesses to live ten, fifteen, and even twenty years in the houses, without payment of rent!

Monument to a Faithful Servant.—In the church of King's Swinford, Staffordshire, is a plain stone, erected by Joseph Scott, Esq., and his wife, in memory of Elizabeth Harrison, who had been thirty years in their service, and had conducted herself with such integrity, and anxiety for her master's interest, as drew from him the following epitaph:

While flattering praises from oblivion save,

The rich, and splendour decorates the grave,

Let this plain stone, O Harrison, proclaim

Thy humble fortune and thy honest fame.

In work unwearied, labour knew no end—

In all things faithful, everywhere a friend;

Herself forgot, she toiled with generous zeal,

And knew no interest but her master's weal.

'Midst the rude storms that shook his ev'ning day,

No wealth could bribe her, and no power dismay;

Her patrons' love she dwelt on e'en in death,

And dying, blest them with her latest breath.

She departed this life June 19, 1797. Aged 50 years.

Farewell, thou best of servants—may the tear

That sorrow trickled o'er thy parting bier,

Prove to thy happy shade our fond regard,

And all thy virtues find their full reward.

*** Mr. Warwick, on the Ostrich, in our next.

Footnote 1: [(return)]
Rhodes's Peak Scenery, Part IV.

Footnote 2: [(return)]
Britton's Architect. Antiq. ii. 86.

Footnote 3: [(return)]
Rhodes's Peak Scenery, Part iv. p. 4.—One of the oldest of these structures at present in the kingdom, is Moreton Hall in Cheshire, which, though a highly-ornamented building, is entirely composed of wood, and was erected at a time before stone was generally used even for the lower apartments. The earliest date about this ancient remain is 1559.

Footnote 4: [(return)]
Hist. Middle Ages, vol. iii., p. 420.

Footnote 5: [(return)]
Hist. of Whalley. In Strutt's view of Manners, we have an inventory of furniture in the house of Mr. Richard Fermor, ancestor of the Earl of Pomfret, at Easton in Northamptonshire, and another in that of Sir Adrian Foskewe. Both these houses appear to have been of the dimensions and arrangement mentioned. And even in houses of a more ample extent, the bi-section of the ground-plot by an entrance-passage, was, I believe, universal, and is a proof of antiquity. Haddon Hall and Penshurst still display this ancient arrangement, which has been altered in some old houses. About the reign of James I., or, perhaps, a little sooner, architects began to perceive the additional grandeur of entering the great hall at once. This apartment subsequently gave its name to the whole house.—See an interesting paper on Old English Halls, Mirror, vol. xviii. p. 92-108.

Footnote 6: [(return)]
Hist. Middle Ages, vol. iii., p. 423.—The most remarkable fragment of early building which I have any where found mentioned is at a house in Berkshire, called Appleton, where there exists a sort of prodigy, an entrance-passage with circular arches in the Saxon style, which must probably be as old as the reign of Henry II. No other private house in England can, I presume, boast of such a monument of antiquity.

Footnote 7: [(return)]
Vide Introduction to Owen's Translations of the Elegies of Llywarch Hen.

Footnote 8: [(return)]
Gaelic Antiquities, p. 21.

Footnote 9: [(return)]
Vide Richard of Cirencester.

Footnote 10: [(return)]
Herodotus describes the subject more minutely.

Footnote 11: [(return)]
See also "the Druids and their Times," from the German of Wieland, p. 20 of the present volume.

Footnote 12: [(return)]
The shortest and most convenient passage from France to England appears to have been from Whitsand to Dover. The tenure of certain lands in Coperland near Dover, was the service of holding the King's Head between Dover and Whitsand whenever he crossed there.

Footnote 13: [(return)]
Some curious facts in the economy of the Ostrich will be found at page 262 of the present volume.

Footnote 14: [(return)]
From the Private Correspondence of a Woman of Fashion.

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