our orthography. We notice one minute of ordinary payments in August, 3 Edw. VI.,' in which the word 'Captain is spelt in four different ways in a single page: Capitaiene, Capitinge, Capitaigne, Captaigne. But the second volume is rich in family correspondence, and its contents, though less copious, fall scarcely short of those of the Paston Letters' themselves in the light which they throw on the domestic life and habits of an ordinary English gentle family from the wars of the Roses to the Restoration. 'It seems clear,' says a writer on the Antiquities of Cornwall, from Domesday Book, ' and the recensions of tenants in capite, that before the Con'quest Saxons, and after the Conquest Normans, were the ' owners of the soil, with very slight exceptions, from the Tamar to the Land's End. It may be feared that scarcely any properly Cornish lineage can establish, on fair grounds, a con'nexion with those named in Domesday, except Trelawney and Trevelyan-the latter no longer inhabiting the county.' However this may be, the name of Trevelyan, at all events, is absolutely autochtonic.' English history knows nothing of a period when there was no Trevelyan.

The family however, as we shall see, soon abandoned the narrow limits of the peninsula in which they had their origin, and spread widely, through marriages and purchases, over the adjacent western counties. And what makes their quiet annals really remarkable, and in a certain sense characteristic, is, that such as they were at their origin-as far as their growth can be traced-such they have always remained: English gentry, neither more nor less. They never acquired greatness, nor had greatness thrust upon them. They were always well to do-that is, the leading branches of the house at all eventsnever wealthy. They never attained a peerage, or any honour beyond a simple baronetcy; but what they had, they preserved. They never deviated into literature, or art, or commerce; scarcely into military adventure. They never rose into eminence in the two gentlemanlike professions to which they furnished recruits-the Church and the Law. They never derogated. They never married into families of high descent, but scrupulously within their own degree. If no historical fame attaches itself to their ancient coat of arms during so many generations, neither does any disgrace. What their first recorded chronicle shows them, that they remained to the beginning of this present generation-specimens of that exclusively English character, the English country squire; and a more honourable one the world has not to show.

What were they really like, these 'squires' of old England,

who constituted until within the last century so large a proportion of its upper class? No one can be in the least familiar with the outward aspect, even, of the rural districts of great part of South Britain, without being satisfied that they were far more numerous under the Tudors and Stuarts than they are now. Every outlying parish-and we now speak particularly of the distant western and south-western counties, with which the family of Trevelyan is connected *-can show its half dozen of farmhouses which were once manor-houses; and many a church contains the memorials of some half dozen gentle lineages which their places know no longer. Their modest estates have either been annexed to the possessions of the neighbouring lord, or purchased from the last embarrassed owner by the intruding millionnaire. Their neighbourhood has lost the old kindly feeling which used to bind together the several degrees of society, when each was not so far removed in station from the other. It now knows no middle rank between the owner of the one great house, of whom the beatific vision is conceded to his tenantry for three or four weeks in the year, and the farmer who rents of him as large a tract of land as once constituted the paternal property of a country gentleman. But it has gained in high farming, quick returns, and mercantile value acre by acre. We are not, therefore, anxious to lament over the degeneracy of the times, or to quarrel with those who may sensibly prefer the present to the past. We only wish to restore in imagination that which has become obsolete; and this is not so easy as it might seem. For it is singular, after all, how little of life-like delineation, unexaggerated by romance or satire, has been left in our literature of that special feature of old English society to which we refer. Mr. Trollope, in his recent publication on Australia, tells us that we may find the extinct type of the squire yet surviving in the southern hemisphere :

We know them (the English country gentlemen) very well from plays and novels, and know something of them too from history, as history has of late been written. The ladies' dresses, the books, the equipages, the wines, the kitchens, which are now found in English country houses, were in those days known only in the metropolis, or at the castle of some almost royal nobleman. As were country houses and country life then in England-plentiful, proud, prejudiced, given

Discoursed accidentally about the decay of gentlemen's families in the country, telling us that the old rule was, that a family might remain fifty miles from London one hundred years; one hundred miles from London two hundred years, and so farther or nearer London more or less years.' (Pepys, 1669.)

to hospitality, impatient of contradiction, not highly lettered, healthy, industrious, careful of the main chance, thoughtful of the future, and, above all, conscious-perhaps a little too conscious of their own importance, so now is the house, and so now is the life, of the country gentleman in Australia.'

6

But one circumstance is omitted in this lively parallel, which makes so wide a difference as to render the whole indistinct and incomplete. The Australian squire has, as a rule, no ancestry. He is novus homo altogether. On the contrary, almost all the pride and sentimental interest of the English Armiger's existence rallied round his pedigree. 'He was,' says Macaulay, a member of a proud and powerful aristocracy, and was distinguished by many both of the good and bad qualities 'which belong to aristocrats. His family pride was beyond 'that of a Talbot or a Howard. He knew the genealogies and coats of arms of all his neighbours, and could tell which of 'them had assumed supporters without any right, and which ' of them were so unfortunate as to be grandsons of aldermen.' To parallel him, the child of a world which in this respect at least has passed away, with the child of an upstart world in the southern hemisphere, is to misemploy comparison. The English squire, such as we conceive him, has no modern type left in the world; unless some such still linger among the Junkerthum of Pomerania, or in remote parts of the Spanish Peninsula. That phase of society, in short, to which the oldfashioned squirearchy here depicted belonged, has perished irreparably, with its shortcomings so allied to excellences, its vanity so associated with dignity, its weaknesses so near akin to wisdom.

Let us take another sketch from that very encyclopedic collection of matters of interest and amusement, Chambers's "Book of Days ':

'Another character, now worn out and gone, was the little independent gentleman of 3001. per annum, who commonly appeared in a plain drab or plush coat, large silver buttons, a jockey cap, and rarely without boots. His travels never exceeded the distance of the country town, and that only at assize and session time, or to attend an election. Once a week he commonly dined at the next market town with the attorneys and justices. This man went to church regularly, read the weekly journal, settled the parochial disputes between the parish officers at the vestry, and afterwards adjourned to the neighbouring alehouse, where he usually got drunk for the good of his country. . . . His drink was generally ale, except at Christmas, the 5th of November, or some other gala days, when he would make a bowl of strong brandy punch, garnished with a toast and nutmeg. . . . The mansion of one of these squires was of plaster striped with timber, not unaptly called

calamanco work, or of red brick, large casemated bow windows, a porch with seats in it, and over it a study; the eaves of the house well inhabited by swallows, and the court set round with hollyhocks. Near the gate a horseblock for the convenience of mounting. His hall was furnished with flitches of bacon, and the mantelpiece with guns and fishing-rods of various dimensions, accompanied by the broadsword, partisan, and dagger borne by his ancestors in the civil wars.' (These mediæval weapons, pace Captain Grose, are tokens of the life of an earlier day.) In the vacant spaces were posted King Charles's Golden Rules, Vincent Wing's Almanac, and a portrait of the Duke of Marlborough in his window lay Baker's "Chronicle," Foxe's. "Book of Martyrs," "Glanvil on Apparitions," Quincey's "Dispensatory," "The Complete "Justice," and a Book of Farriery. . . . Alas! these men and these houses are no more; the luxury of the times has obliged them to quit the country, and become the humble dependents of great men, to solicit a place or commission to live in London, to rack their tenants, and draw their rents before due. The venerable mansion in the meantime is suffered to tumble down, or is partly upheld as a farmhouse, till, after a few years, the estate is conveyed to the steward of the neighbouring lord, or else to some nabob, contractor, or limb of the law.'

To comfort ourselves a little for our loss by looking at the reverse side of the tapestry, let us read Horace Walpole's caricature of these rustic gentry as they appeared to him, a 'beau,' when occasionally obliged by hard fate to visit his father's acres in Norfolk:

'Only imagine that I here every day see men, who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the giant work at Pratolino! I shudder when I see them handle their knives in act to carve, and look upon them as savages that devour one another! I should not stare at all more than I do, if yonder alderman at the end of the table was to strike a knife into his neighbour's jolly cheek, and cut a brave slice of brown and fat. . . . I have an aunt here, a family piece of goods, an old remnant of inquisitive hospitality and economy, who, to all intents and purposes, is as beefy as her neighbours. She wore me so down with interrogatories that I dreamt all night she was at my ear, with whos and whys, and whens and wheres, till at last in my sleep I cried out, "For God in "Heaven's sake, madam, ask me no more questions!" I am so far from getting used to mankind by living amongst them, that my natural ferocity and wildness does but every day grow worse. They tire me; they fatigue me; I don't know what to do with them; I don't know what to say to them; I fling open the window and fancy I want air; and when I get by myself, I undress myself, and seem to have had people in my pockets, in my plaits, and on my shoulders! I indeed find this fatigue worse in the country than in town, because we can avoid it there, and have more resources; but it is there too.' (Walpole to Chute, 1743.)

To come a little nearer to our local mark, let us cite John

Prince's highflown account in his Worthies of Devon' (about 1700) of the squirearchy of his fathers' days, such as tradition described it, in his native county:

'If we draw nearer home unto our grandsires' and great-grandsires' days, we shall find our ancestors were bold, hardy, and brave to the last degree. Our gentry were generous and noble, as well in their hospitality at home as in their equipage when they went abroad. Persons of quality usually keeping their stables of brave horses, and would always have one or two horses of state led by grooms, when they travelled from home. Their houses were open to all comers, where they might meet civil reception and a frank entertainment. And their families were academies of virtue and schools of education. And the inferior gentry were wont, instead of sending their children to London, Hackney, Salisbury, &c., to send them thither to learn breeding and accomplishments. But this mode and way of living, since coaching and London came so much in vogue, must be acknowledged to be greatly altered from former days.'

And add Carew's account-a century earlier-of their neighbours over the Tamar (Survey of Cornwall) :—

'The angle, which so shutteth them in, hath wrought many interchangeable matches with each other's stock, and given beginning to the proverb, that all Cornish gentlemen are cousins; which ended in an injurious consequence, that the King hath there no cousins. They keep liberal but not costly builded or furnished houses; give kind entertainment to strangers; make even at the year's end with the profits of their living; are reverenced and beloved of their neighbours; live void of factions among themselves, at least such as break out into any dangerous excess; and delight not in bravery of apparel: yet the women would be very loth to come behind the fashion, in new fangle dress of the manner, if not in costliness of the matter, which perhaps might over-empty their husbands' purses. They converse familiarly together, and often visit one another. A gentleman and his wife will ride to make merry with his next neighbour; and after a day or twain, these two couples go to a third, in which progress they increase like snowballs, till through their burdensome weight they break again.'

'It seems, according to an ancient tradition,' say the editors, alluded to by Bishop Gibson in his edition of Camden's "Britannia," the family of Trevelyan sprang, like Sir Tristrem, from Spenser's submerged land of Lionesse. A small creek near St. Michael's Mount is pointed out as the place where their ancestor landed, and the horse which saved him may be seen swimming on the family shield, with dolphins for its supporters.' Strong indeed was the hold which this legend of the land of Lionesse-revived in recent days by our poet. laureate--at the bottom of the sea between the Land's End and the Scillys, had on the Cornish imagination. Even the