all carried away slaves, for this man had so laden his ship with goods for Spain, that his guns were useless, though the ship carried sixty guns. He called for brandy; and after he had well drunken, and all his men, which were near two hundred, he called for arms and cleared the deck as well as he could, resolving to fight rather than lose his ship, which was worth thirty thousand pounds. This was sad for us passengers; but my husband bade us be sure to keep in the cabin, and the women not to appear, which would make the Turks think that we were a man-of-war, but if they saw women, they would take us for a merchant and board us. He went upon the deck, and took a gun, and bandoliers, and sword, and with the rest of the ship's company stood upon deck expecting the arrival of the Turkish man-of-war. This beast, the captain, had locked me up in the cabin; I knocked and called long to no purpose, until at length the cabin-boy came and opened the door: I, all in tears, desired him to be so good as to give me his blue thrum cap he wore, and his tarred coat, which he did, and I gave him half-a-crown, and putting them on, and flinging away my night-clothes, I crept up softly and stood upon the deck by my husband's side, as free from sickness and fear as, I confess, from discretion; but it was the effect of that passion which I could never master.

By this time the two vessels were engaged in parley, and so well satisfied with speech and sight of each other's forces, that the Turk's man-of-war tacked about, and we continued our course. But when your father saw it convenient to retreat, looking upon me he blessed himself, and snatched me up in his arms, saying, "Good God, that love can make this change!" and though he seemingly chid me, he would laugh at it as often as he remembered that voyage.

*

On the 2nd of September, 1651, was fought the battle of Worcester, when the king being missing, and I hearing nothing of your father being dead or alive for three days, it is inexpressible in what affliction I was. I neither ate nor slept, but trembled at every motion I heard, expecting the fatal news, which at last came, and mentioned that your father was a prisoner. Then, with some hope, I went to London, to find out my husband, wheresoever he was carried. On my coming to London, I met a messenger from him with a letter, which advised me of his condition, and told me he was very civilly treated. I said little more than that I should be in some room at Charing Cross, where he had a promise from his keeper that he should rest in my company at dinnertime. This was meant as a very great favour to him. I expected him with impatience, and, on the day appointed, provided a dinner and a room, as I was ordered, in which I was with my father, and some more of my friends, where we saw hundreds of poor soldiers, both English and Scotch, march almost naked on foot, and many on horseback. At

last came the captain and two soldiers with your father, who was very cheerful in appearance. After he had spoken to me, and saluted me and his friends, he said, "Pray let us not lose time, for I know not how little I have to spare. This is the chance of war; nothing venture nothing have; and so let us sit down, and be merry while we may." Then, taking my hand and kissing me, he said, "Cease weeping; no other thing upon earth can move me: remember we are all at God's disposal.” Then he told us how kind the captain had been to him, and that the people as he passed offered him money, and brought him good things; and that particularly Lady Denham, at Boston House, would have given him all the money she had in the house, but he returned her thanks, and told her that he had so ill kept his own, that he would not tempt his governor with more but that if she would give him a shirt or two, and some handkerchiefs, he would keep them as long as he could for her sake. She fetched him some shifts of her own, and some handkerchiefs, saying, that she was ashamed to give them to him, but having none of her son's shirts at home, she desired him to wear them. Thus passed the time till orders came to carry my husband to Whitehall, where, in a little room, (yet standing in the Bowling-green,) he was kept prisoner without the speech of any (so far as they knew) for ten weeks, and in expectation of death. They then examined him, and at last he grew so ill in health, by the cold and hard marches he had undergone, and being pent up in a room close and small, that the scurvy brought him down almost to death's door. During the time of his imprisonment I failed not constantly, when the clock struck four in the morning, to go, with a dark lanthorn in my hand, all alone and on foot, from my lodgings in Chancery Lane, at my cousin Young's, to Whitehall, by the entry that went out of King Street into the Bowling-green. There I would go under his window, and call him softly. He, excepting the first time, never afterwards failed to put out his head at the first call. Thus we talked together, and sometimes I was so wet with rain that it went in at my neck and out at the heels. My husband directed me how to make my addresses for his delivery to the General Cromwell, who had a great respect for your father, and would have bought him off to his service upon any terms.

118.-RURAL LIFE IN ENGLAND.

WASHINGTON IRVING. [WASHINGTON IRVING may be considered the head of that numerous band of prose writers which the United States have produced during the last thirty years. His 'Sketch Book,' which was published in England in 1820, at once raised him to a distinguished eminence as a writer of elegant tastes and just feelings. Many of the papers in that work are on subjects of English manners and scenery. The sentiments which Mr. Irving expressed of the land of his fathers have done much

to cherish in America a kind regard for our habits and associations. Other writers have taken less friendly views; and it must be owned that we have many sins to answer for ourselves, of fomenting differences, and encouraging prejudices, which ought never to exist among those who speak a common language, have a common literature, and are brethren "by titles manifold." Mr. Irving is also the author of a very clever and original work of fiction, 'Knickerbocker's History of New York,' -of 'Bracebridge Hall;' of 'Tales of a Traveller;' of 'The Life and Voyages of Columbus;' of 'The Conquest of Granada;' of 'Astoria,' &c. &c. It is one of the disgraces of our own day (a disgrace which will soon compel a remedy), that the works of Mr. Irving, as a foreigner, have no protection in the English laws of copyright, although some of the more important were originally published in this country. The law should be rendered just, without the least regard to transatlantic notions of justice.]

The stranger who would form a correct opinion of the English character, must not confine his observations to the metropolis. He must go forth into the country; he must sojourn in villages and hamlets; he must visit castles, villas, farm-houses, cottages; he must wander through parks and gardens; along hedges and green lanes; he must loiter about country churches; attend wakes and fairs, and other rural festivals; and cope with the people in all their conditions, and all their habits and humours.

In some countries, the large cities absorb the wealth and fashion of the nation; they are the only fixed abodes of elegant and intelligent society, and the country is inhabited almost entirely by boorish peasantry. In England, on the contrary, the metropolis is a mere gathering-place, or general rendezvous, of the polite classes, where they devote a small portion of the year to a hurry of gaiety and dissipation, and having indulged this carnival, return again to the apparently more congenial habits of rural life. The various orders of society are therefore diffused over the whole surface of the kingdom, and the most retired neighbourhoods afford specimens of the different ranks.

The English, in fact, are strongly gifted with the rural feeling. They possess a quick sensibility to the beauties of nature, and a keen relish for the pleasures and employments of the country. This passion seems inherent in them. Even the inhabitants of cities, born and brought up among brick walls and bustling streets, enter with facility into rural habits, and evince a turn for rural occupation. The merchant has his snug retreat in the vicinity of the metropolis, where he often displays as much pride and zeal in the cultivation of his flower-garden, and the maturing of his fruits, as he does in the conduct of his business and the success of his commercial enterprises. Even those less fortunate individuals, who are doomed to pass their lives in the midst of din and traffic, contrive to have something that shall remind them of the green aspect of nature. In the most dark and dingy quarters of the city, the

drawing-room window resembles frequently a bank of flowers; every spot capable of vegetation has its grass-plot and flower-bed; and every square its mimic park, laid out with picturesque taste and gleaming with refreshing verdure.

Those who see the Englishman only in town are apt to form an unfavourable opinion of his social character. He is either absorbed in business, or distracted by the thousand engagements that dissipate time, thought, and feeling, in this huge metropolis: he has, therefore, too commonly a look of hurry and abstraction. Wherever he happens to be, he is on the point of going somewhere else; at the moment he is talking on one subject, his mind is wandering to another; and while paying a friendly visit, he is calculating how he shall economize time so as to pay the other visits allotted to the morning. An immense metropolis like London is calculated to make men selfish and uninteresting. In their casual and transient meetings, they can but deal briefly in common-places. They present but the cold superficies of character-its rich and genial qualities have no time to be warmed into a flow.

It is in the country that the Englishman gives scope to his natural feelings. He breaks loose gladly from the cold formalities and negative civilities of town; throws off his habits of shy reserve, and becomes joyous and free-hearted. He manages to collect around him all the conveniences and elegancies of polite life, and to banish its restraint. His country-seat abounds with every requisite, either for studious retirement, tasteful gratification, or rural exercise. Books, paintings, music, horses, dogs, and sporting implements of all kinds, are at hand. He puts no constraint either upon his guests or himself, but in the true spirit of hospitality provides the means of enjoyment, and leaves every one to partake according to his inclination.

The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied nature intently, and discover an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and harmonious combinations. Those charms, which in other countries she lavishes in wild solitudes, are here assembled round the haunts of domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive glances, and spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes.

Nothing can be more imposing than the magnificence of English park scenery. Vast lawns that extend like sheets of vivid green, with here and there clumps of gigantic trees, heaping up rich piles of foliage. The solemn pomp of groves and woodland glades, with the deer trooping in silent herds across them; the hare, bounding away to the covert; or the pheasant, suddenly bursting upon the wing. The brook, taught to wind in the most natural meanderings, or expand into a glassy lake— the sequestered pool, reflecting the quivering trees, with the yellow leaf sleeping on its bosom, and the trout roaming fearlessly about its limpid

waters; while some rustic temple or sylvan statue, grown green and dark with age, gives an air of classic sanctity to the seclusion.

These are but a few of the features of park scenery; but what most delights me, is the creative talent with which the English decorate the unostentatious abodes of middle life. The rudest habitation, the most unpromising and scanty portion of land, in the hands of an Englishman of taste, becomes a little paradise. With a nicely discriminating eye, he seizes at once upon its capabilities, and pictures in his mind the future landscape. The sterile spot grows into loveliness under his hand; and yet the operations of art which produce the effect are scarcely to be perceived. The cherishing and training of some trees; the cautious pruning of others; the nice distribution of flowers and plants of tender and graceful foliage; the introduction of a green slope of velvet turf; the partial opening to a peep of blue distance, or silver gleam of water; all these are managed with a delicate tact, a prevailing yet quiet assiduity, like the magic touchings with which a painter finishes up a favourite picture.

The residence of people of fortune and refinement in the country has diffused a degree of taste and elegance in rural economy that descends to the lowest class. The very labourer, with his thatched cottage and narrow slip of ground, attends to their embellishment. The trim hedge, the grass-plot before the door, the little flower-bed bordered with snug box, the woodbine trained up against the wall, and hanging its blossoms about the lattice, the pot of flowers in the window, the holly providentially planted about the house, to cheat winter of its dreariness, and throw in a semblance of green summer to cheer the fireside; all these bespeak the influence of taste, flowing down from high sources, and pervading the lowest levels of the public mind. If ever Love, as poets sing, delights to visit a cottage, it must be the cottage of an English peasant.

The fondness for rural life among the higher classes of the English has had a great and salutary effect upon the national character. I do not know a finer race of men than the English gentlemen. Instead of the softness and effeminacy which characterize the men of rank in most countries, they exhibit a union of elegance and strength, a robustness of frame and freshness of complexion, which I am inclined to attribute to their living so much in the open air, and pursuing so eagerly the invigorating recreations of the country. These hardy exercises produce also a healthful tone of mind and spirits, and a manliness and simplicity of manners, which even the follies and dissipations of the town cannot easily pervert, and can never entirely destroy. In the country, too, the different orders of society seem to approach more freely, to be more disposed to blend and operate favourably upon each other. The distinctions between them do not appear to be so marked and impass