history of the country, as well as the successive stages and leading incidents of every man's private life. In the absence of any other national music, let us not disdain to appropriate to ourselves that which is undoubtedly our exclusive property— the art of ringing changes upon church bells, whence England has been sometimes termed "the ringing island." Although it be simply a melody, the construction of regular peals is susceptible of considerable science in the variety of interchange, and the diversified succession of consonances in the sounds produced. Many of them bear the names of their composers, who thus bid fair to be rung down to the latest posterity; and that the exercise of taking part in a peal has never been deemed an ignoble amusement, is attested by the fact, that we have several respectable associations for practising and perpetuating the art, particularly one known by the name of the College Youths, of which Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, was, in his youthful days, a member. Exclusively of the delight arising from the melody itself as it floats along, gladdening hill and dale, tower and hamlet, what can be sweeter or more soothing than all the associations of thought connected with a merry peal of village bells? Announcing the Sabbath-morningthe common day of rest, when we all cease from our toils, they remind us that the humblest of those whose lot is labour, will now betake themselves in decent garb and with cheerful looks to the Temple, where all the children of the Great Parent, without distinction of rank, assemble together to offer up their general thanksgivings. Nothing can be more natural than the words which Cowper has put into the mouth of Alexander Selkirk, to express the desolation and solitude of the uninhabited island on which he had been cast. "The sound of the church-going bell, These valleys and rocks never heard; Or smiled when a Sabbath appear'd." Of all the public duties which bells are called upon to perform, the most puzzling and embarrassing must be the due apportionment of their fealty to the old and new monarch, when the former-dies, we were going to say, but kings never die ;-when he ceases to reign, and is under the necessity of laying in the dust the head which has worn a crown. Death is a sad radical: Horace assures us, that even in his days it was a matter of perfect indifference to the ghastly destroyer whether he aimed his dart at the towers of kings, or the hovels of the peasantry; and in these revolutionary times we may be sure that he has lost nothing of his Carbonari spirit. Bells, however, acknowledge the authority of the powers that be; their suffrages obey the influence of the clergy, tolerably shrewd calculators of the most beneficial chances of loyalty, and yet the brazen mourners must sometimes be in a sad dilemma between their sorrow for the loss of the old, and their joy at the accession of the new king. Like Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy, we may imagine them quite at a loss which expression to assume, whether to toll a knell or ring a peal, or strike a serio-comic chord between the two. Affection for the dead might be construed into disaffection for the living, but a reigning VOL. VI. No. 31.-1828. sovereign has so much more power of patronage than a defunct one, that they generally obey the injunction of the royal Henry to his impatient heir, 66 Go, bid the merry bells ring to thine ear That thou art crowned, not that I am dead." Could the bells of even this sequestered village church, said I to myself, recall to us with their iron tongues the various and often contradictory occasions, when the passions of man have called forth their echoes, what a humiliating record of human nature would they present! Accession of king after king, public tumult and struggle, curfew and tocsin, civil and foreign war, victories and peace, generation upon generation knelled into the church-yard, and again a new king or a new war, and fresh victories and another peace, forming but a recommencement of the old circle of events, ever new and yet the same, ever passing away and recurring, in which Nature perpetually moves! Like all other public history, they would announce to us little but suffering and crime; for tranquillity, happiness, and virtue seek not to be trumpeted forth by their brazen clarion: and even if they unfolded to us the annals of private life, how often would they have to tell us of fleeting joys and enduring sorrow, of sanguine hopes and bitter disappointment! Reaching the gate of the church-yard, as this reflection passed through my mind, the first monument I encountered was that of my relative Sir Ralph Wyvill. How well do I remember the morning of his marriage! The ringers loved him, for he would sometimes mingle in their sport. They pulled the ropes with the lusty and willing arms of men who had quaffed his ale and pocketed his money; the bells threw their wide mouths up into the air, and as they roared the glad tidings to the earth, till every hill-top echoed back the sound, they seemed to cry out to the Heavens "Ring out, ye crystal spheres, And let your silver chime Move in melodious time, And let the base of Heaven's deep organ blow." From every octagon brick chimney of the ancient hall, wreaths of smoke streaked the clear sunshine,-cheerful evidence of the old English hospitality and the extensive preparations for the marriage-feast that were operating within :-friends and relatives were seen interchanging shakes of the hand and cordial congratulations; servants were bustling about in new liveries and huge nosegays;-the smart postilions, with white favours in their caps, were cracking their whips and their jokes at the gate; the train of carriages with be-ribboned and be-flowered coachmen, made a goodly and glittering show ;-gossips and rustics, in their holiday-clothes, clustered about the church-doors and windows;— "Quips and cranks and wanton wiles, flickered upon every countenance; and every tongue prophesied that the happy couple would be permanently blessed, for the bridegroom was young and rich, the maiden fond and fair. Such, however, are the predictions with which every wedding is solemnized; and if the flattering visions of the future prove too often illusory, it is to be attributed to the general lot of humanity, rather than to any inherent defects in the marriage system. Although he seemed to possess all the constituents of conjugal happiness, the sanguine auguries of Sir Ralph's friends were speedily falsified; he parted from his wife, and returned with new ardour to his first loves-the bottle and the chase. On his wedding-day I had seen him, in this very church-yard, step from his carriage flushed with youth and vigour, an elastic specimen of manly beauty. Living to see him crippled, gouty, and infirm, I at last beheld him borne once more to this same spot, and methinks I now hear the deepest-mouthed of those very bells that had rung out such a merry peal on his marriage, "swinging slow with solemn roar" its sad and solitary toll for his burial-Dong! dong! dong! dong!-What a contrast did the scene present! Every shutter was closed in the windows of the old hall-its chimneys were cold and smokeless-the whole house looked forlorn and desolate, as if there were no living thing within it. The once jovial master of that ancient mansion was borne slowly from its gate beneath the sable plumes of a hearse; the gay carriage and the four noble horses, of which he was so proud, followed, as if in mockery of his present state, the servants attesting, by better evidence than their mourning liveries, the sincerity of their grief; a sad procession of coaches with the customary trappings of woe brought up the rear; sorrow was upon every face; the villagers spoke to one another in whispers; a hushing silence reigned among the assemblage, only broken by the deep toll of the passing bell; and thus did I follow the body to the family sepulchre, and heard the hollow rattling of the sand and gravel as they were cast down upon the coffin-lid of the corpse that was once Sir Ralph Wyvill. There is not a dell or cover, a woodland or plain for many miles around, that has not echoed to his Stentorian view hallo! nay even the church itself and the hollow mansions of the dead, for he was no respecter of localities, have rung with the same cry. Where is that tongue now? The huntsman might wind his horn, the whole pack give cry, and the whole field unite their shouts at the very mouth of his vault, without awakening the keen sportsman who sleeps in its deep darkness. That tongue, whose loud smack pronounced a fiat upon claret, from which there was no appeal-what is it now?-a banquet for the worm until both shall be reconverted into dust. And perhaps, ere those bells shall have rung in another new year, and awakened a new race of candidates for the grave, the hand that traces these thoughts, and the eye that reads them, may be laid also in the earth, whithered-decompounded-dust! A DAY IN LONDON. A COUNTRY gentleman, whose habits are retired, uniform, quiet, and withal somewhat studious, on being occasionally hurried up to London, is always much more vividly impressed with the various objects of the singular scene presented by the metropolis, than those can be who reside almost all the year round in town, and whose senses are consequently accustomed and blunted to the stimulus of its imposing movements and its noises. This is precisely my own case. Although no stranger to the multitudinous capital, my latter years have been passed in a tranquil and distant part of England, whilst occasional calls of duty summon me, for a few days, to endure the sounds and sights, and to respire the thick and tepid atmosphere of town. The first idea of one of these journeys is always highly disagreeable to me; and, for a few days before I leave home, I feel a more than usually tender attachment to those objects which endear it to me, and lament, to a degree that I fear would be considered absurd, the interruption of cherished habits of regularity, and the necessity of a temporary absence from scenes and persons familiar to me, and even not always without the power of annoying me. As I generally travel by coach, I look forward with pain to the weary hours. I am to pass on my journey, "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow ;" and see in their termination in London nothing that has power to charm I know not how to account for it, but the approach to, and entrance into London, invariably depresses me. This strange feeling is independent of external circumstances; for I have entered London in youth and health, and not without the power to command its pleasures; but ever as I have approached its barriers, I have seemed to enter the fatal city which was to afford me a gloomy grave. Yet, of all horrors, God preserve me from that of being hurled into the earth by a London sexton, or buried by a London clergyman!-I speak this, as Brutus speaks of the Tarquins, "from the bottom of my soul." With the exception of one or two entrances, an arrival in London is preceded by an hour's journey through scenes in which wretchedness and vanity are displayed in colours the most painful to the eye of reflection that can be imagined: the whole picture floats before me at this moment :-The scanty gentility of the better sort of houses; the lugubrious blackness of the few unhappy trees, placed, as in derision, among masses of hasty brick-work; the porter-houses; the coachstands with their complement of watermen, half-pay coachmen, and regular pickpockets; the coffee-shops; the rows of brokers' stalls, each with a seductive pile of squalid finery, and withal the gaudy starvation of exotic women; and the dingy multitudes of men in worn-out black coats, all full of a London look of important wretchedness; and, mingled with these, pompous equipages; pale proud faces, physiognomies fresh from the very heart of the city, marking the wealthy who seem to be driving away into semi-rural life, as if to save their lives:these, with the noise, the crowd, the dull, dispiriting, and carbonaceous atmosphere; glimpses of long streets of busy interested life; thousands of people, not one among whom would care if one died of apoplexy on the spot, and most of whom would rather like the excitement of such a spectacle:-all this is oppressive to a degree that cannot be described, and causes an absolute gasping of the inward soul for the. freshness of rural life and human innocence. These are things which, notwithstanding the hurry with which he is driven to some pestiferous coach-hotel, with its dungeon-offices below and prison-galleries above, on which the sun never yet shone for one bright hour, make his first moments in London hateful to the country gentleman. The character of man is, indeed, altogether worked out unfavourably in London, and the vast city seems to receive you as if only to devour you. Talent, it is true, is highly cultivated and richly rewarded; the intellectual faculties are fully developed and splendidly exercised; whatever is grand in conception, or extensive in operation, is boldly undertaken and skilfully performed; but the good feelings of our nature, the warm, social, uncalculating, and friendly propensities, find no favourable soil. Even in the higher classes there is not, from want of time, or perhaps from the eternal occupation of a town-life, that warmth of feeling which prevails in the peaceful and elegant mansions of the country; whilst, in the middle classes, all that is interested and vain, and in the lower, all that is wicked, foolish and vulgar, is brought forth more prominently and disgustingly ignorance is more presuming, profligacy more gloried in, villainy more open and avowed; and in all, from the very highest to the lowest, forgetfulness of friends ranks among the dignified virtues which adorn prosperity. Some are absorbed in dissipation, others in the pursuit of gain, others in the promotion of profligacy, and many in the refinement and perfection of every kind of fraud, artifice, and crime; whilst feeling and reflection are lost in whirl, and noise, and hurry, and never-ending toil. Thus, at least, it painfully appears to the visitant from the country, on his arrival; and it is not until he is extricated, or drawn a little out of the nucleus of the town, just far enough to feel the fanning benefit of a west wind, and to know that he yet continues to live in a world where sometimes the sky and sometimes the sun is seen, that he begins to breathe, the asthma under which his heart and lungs have laboured so painfully is relieved, and he lives to comfort or to happiness once more. The disagreeable impressions fade rapidly away, and so far from London then appearing a place without pleasures, and those of the highest and most ennobling description, he finds himself perplexed with their variety, and perhaps somewhat at a loss to determine how many may be comprehended in the brief space of two or three long and busy days. Who is there, indeed, with any taste for any thing, with any knowledge or admiration of any art, or any science, or any occupation, or any amusement, that does not admire London? It is in London that the perfection and utmost refinement of human industry and human talent may be contemplated in works, various, endless, and irresistibly attractive. If there be any music in the soul, London is the temple of divinest harmony; there, and there only, the finest singers, and those who touch instruments of music with inspired fingers, may be nightly heard. If there is any fondness for the arts, nowhere in England can that fondness be so fully gratified: the finest works of sculpture and painting, the most ingenious contrivances, and the most beautiful works of genius, are all to be found in London, produced or collected by an industry which seems almost supernatural. If eloquence moves |