haughty Constance Trefusis. Magnificent she looked in some geraniumhued dress, as light and brilliant as summer clouds, with the rose tint of sunset on them, and large white water-lilies in her massive raven hair, turned back à l'impératrice off her low brow, under which her eyes shot such dangerous Parthian glances. One could hardly wonder that De Vigne offended past redemption the Duchess of Mangoldwurzel, ruined himself for life with his aunt, the Marchioness of Marquetrie, annoyed beyond hope of pardon the Countess of Ormolu, the five baronesses, all the ladies in their own right, all the great heiresses, all the county princesses royal, all the archery-party beauties, and, careless of rank, right, or comment, opened the ball with-the Trefusis. It was her triumph par excellence, and she knew it. She knew enough of De Vigne to know that what he dared to begin he would dare to follow out, and that the more animadversion he provoked, the more certainly would he persevere in his own will.

"We have lost the game!" said Sabretasche to me, as he passed me, waltzing with Adelina Ferrers.

It was true. De Vigne waltzed that same waltz with Constance Trefusis; I can see him as if it were last evening, whirling her round, the white lilies of her bouquet de corsage crushed against his breast, her forehead resting on his shoulder, his moustaches touching her hair as he whispered in her ear, his face glad, proud, eager, impassioned; while the county feminines sneered and whispered behind their fans, what could De Vigne possibly see in that woman? and the men swore what a deuced fine creature she was, and wondered what Trefusis she might be.

of

And that waltz over, De Vigne gave her his arm and led her out of the ball-room to take some ice, and, when the ice was disposed of, strolled on with her into the conservatories-those matchless conservatories, thanks to Lady Flora, brilliant as the glories of the tropics, and odorous as a rich Indian night, with the fragrance exhaling from citron and cypress groves, and the heavy clusters of magnolias and mangoes. There, in that atmosphere, that hour, so suited to banish prudence and fan the fires passion-there, to the woman beside him, glorious as one of the West Indian flowers above their heads, but chill and unmoved at heart, as one of their brilliant and waxen petals-De Vigne poured out in terse and glowing words the love that she had so madly and strangely awakened, laying generously and trustfully, as knight of old laid his spoils and his life at his queen's feet, his home, his name, his honour before Constance Trefusis. She simulated tenderness to perfection; she threw it into her lustrous eyes, she forced it into her blushing cheek, it trembled in her softened voice, it glanced upwards under her tinted lashes. It was all a lie, but a lie marvellously well acted; and when De Vigne bent over her, covering her lips with passionate caresses, drinking in with every breath a fresh draught of intoxication, his heart beating loud and quick with the triumph of success, was it a marvel that De Vigne forgot his past, his future, his own experience, others' warnings, anything and everything, save the Present, in its full and triumphant delirium ?

NORTHUMBERLAND.*

"NORTHUMBERLAND," says Mr. William Sidney Gibson, the learned and distinguished author of the Memoir before us, "affords a tempting field, not only to the naturalist and the sketcher, but to the antiquary and the student of county history. The wild and mountainous nature of a great part of the county, the peculiarities of its architectural monuments, the dialect and character of its population, all mark Northumberland by striking features. Its remoteness, the separate nationality (so to speak) which it retained during many centuries, and the slight intercourse with the rest of the kingdom formerly enjoyed by its inhabitants, combined, moreover, to give this part of England many distinguishing peculiarities. Then, too, its traditions and associations with bygone times are full of character and interest; and perhaps there is not a county where the present is seen in more striking contrast with the past, for works of the "stone age" constructed by British tribes-probably the contemporaries of the unknown founders of Stonehenge and Carnac-enduring remains of Roman military occupation, feudal structures, and towers of refuge and defence, are here the characteristic representatives of times gone by. But the Celtic inhabitants of Northumbria have been succeeded by a hardy and industrious people, who, instead of fashioning rude weapons of war and chase in earthy huts, raise coal, build ships, and manufacture iron for the world; and a walled town and thinly scattered villages that were ravaged by the moss-trooper, have given place to crowded haunts, spreading habitations, and a rapid extension of commercial enterprise and mining industry. To the stony ways that were traversed by the Roman legions, turnpike roads and railways have succeeded; lands formerly swept by the border robber now adorn a tale of peace and plenty at local agricultural meetings; and the waters of the Rede and the North Tyne, that in former times often reddened to the beacon fires on Scottish foray, flow through pastoral and even fertile landscapes. Thriving plantations wave on lands that continued to be wastes at the beginning of even the present century, and on many a height the plough traverses camps and graves of ancient Britons. Agriculture-pursued in the days of the Romans and in the feudal ages under protection of stone walls and towers -now obliterates in its progress the defences which it no longer needs. At the mouth of the Tyne, in places where, so lately as a century ago, crops of corn were raised amidst the rude "schelings" of fishermen, a populous seaport has risen, which draws its harvests from the deep, and has at length wrested from Newcastle independence and a share in the conservancy of the river; and that town, which was defended through the middle ages by massive walls, has spread within the last thirty years far and wide beyond their circuit, and become a centre of railway traffic and manufacturing industry, with a population numbering a hundred

thousand souls.

* A Memoir on Northumberland, descriptive of its Scenery, Monuments, and History. By William Sidney Gibson, M.A., &c. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. Newcastle-on-Tyne: F. and W. Dodsworth and Robert Robinson.

Northumberland is, in its northern, central, and western regions, a country of mountainous hills, and of broad tracts of sombre moorland and brown heathery wastes. On the frontiers these hilly moors rise into bolder and more mountainous forms. "Cheviots' mountains lone" overlook scenes to which the ballads of old, as well as the genius of Scott, have given an undying charm, and many a spot is celebrated in border annals; but the great Cheviot Forest is gone, and the red deer exist only

in song.

In the south-western part of Northumberland are the elevated regions of the lead-mining district and the sterile lonely fells of millstone-grit and limestone rock. The aspect of the higher portion of this mining district is well described as almost unrelieved by cultivated lands; the heights are for a great part of the year commonly wrapped in mists, and snow lies in the higher fells until summer. In the school maintained at Allenheads by Mr. Beaumont, a gossiping writer, Mr. Walter White, says he found, out of fifty children assembled on some occasion a year or two ago, only five boys who had seen wheat growing, and three who had beheld the sea.

The prevailing features of this part of the country are bleak wild fells, traversed by few roads, with patches of fir planted here and there on the steep slopes. It is stated by Mr. Sopwith, F.R.S., and President of the British Meteorological Society, that the maximum temperature of the district of Allenheads is nearly coincident with the minimum temperature of Bywell,-a place seated about twenty miles distant in the valley of the Tyne, and about twelve miles westward from Newcastle. In the elevated region described, the quantity of rain is in some years double that which falls in Middlesex; insomuch that Mr. Walter White congratulates the inhabitants on having employment underground out of the way of bad weather! But Nature, if not remarkable for geniality as regards sky and climate in this high moorland country, has been bountiful beneath the surface. The quantity of lead produced from Mr. Beaumont's mines at Allenheads, and at the adjacent mining settlements of Coalcleugh and St. John's, Weardale (a part of the parish of Stanhope), is understood to have amounted to nine or ten thousand tons annually. Galena (from which it is well known the lead of commerce is derived) is the most abundant of the minerals; and some of the ores are exceedingly rich in silver.

We remember, now many years back, taking a geological ramble across these barren fells-a rough country to be sure, but we had just come from the Lead-hills of Dumfries-shire, and the south gained by the comparison. We called, as in duty bound, at Alston Moor, upon the scientific notability of the place, Mr. H. L. Pattinson, a gentleman of most quiet, unassuming manners, who had specimens of the various strata around, cut out and arranged like bricks, according to the order of their succession. Alston Moor should have a monument to Mr. Pattinson's memory, for it was he who enriched that already wealthy mining district by the discovery of the most economical process for the separation of silver from lead, founded on the simple natural law that melted lead will crystallise while silver remains fluid.

This important mining-field, Mr. Gibson tells us, was, like the mines of Cornwall and Wales, certainly known to the Romans, of whose station at Whitley (near the town of Alston, and on the "Maiden Way" from Caervoran on the Wall to Kirby Thore) there are some interesting remains. When the Roman legions penetrated from York to Carlisle, their path took them from the rich mining-fields of Yorkshire and

Durham to cross this yet richer land of mineral wealth beyond; and the mines of the Derwent Valley (now proposed to be made accessible by a railway), the mines of Allendale and Tynedale, and those of the Cumbrian frontier, all lay within the province guarded by the Roman Wall. In the days of the Anglo-Norman kings the mines were profitably worked under protection of the crown, and yielded surprising quantities of silver. In those days the miners found their fuel in the forest tracts around, and until comparatively recent times the hill-sides, now so barren, and hardly yielding scanty pasturage for sheep, were clothed with their native wood. Northumberland owes much of its picturesque scenery to the basaltic rocks. They form some of its most remarkable eminences, especially on a part of the line of the Roman Wall; they occur also amongst stratified formations, and they traverse the county in the form of dykes. On the line of the Roman Wall, we find that its builders availed themselves of the bold, precipitous escarpments, and carried the wall in many places over the basaltic crags. A crest near Wall-town, which was formerly crowned by a mile-castle of the wall, is eight hundred feet above the level of the sea. In this district, populous in the days of Roman military occupation, but now an almost uninhabited waste, the lonely sheets of water known as the Northumbrian Lakes reflect the basaltic cliffs. In the northern part of the county, also, the basalt forms rocky eminences of great height (in one place five hundred feet above the level of the sea), on some of which elevations Saxons or Normans raised their castles, as at Bamburgh, Holy Island, and Dunstanburgh, where the magnificent rocks of columnar basalt rise a hundred feet above the surging waves. At Bamburgh, to the northward (an important citadel from the days of the Northumbrian kings), the draw-well was excavated through seventy-five feet of basaltic rock, and a like thickness of the underlying sandstone-a fine-grained, reddish-tinted rock. The basalt is even thicker on the adjacent rocky islets of Farne.

The coal mines are, however, the really important formations of Northumberland, and they hold the first place in regard to its mineral wealth and maritime trade. Mr. Gibson computes the extreme length of the coal-field at about forty-eight miles, and its extreme breadth about half its length. The lowest seam worked is at a depth of seventeen hundred feet! The quantity of coal now annually raised from out of this great coal basin exceeds sixteen millions of tons-the total produce from all the British coal mines being estimated at sixty-eight millions, which is four times the quantity raised thirty years ago, yet does it keep constantly increasing in price.

From this glance at the carboniferous formations in which we find stored up the remains of forests that in some pre-Adamite condition of our globe waved in tropical luxuriance on the area now forming the county of Northumberland, it is time to pass to the existing sylva of this part of England. To the regret of the lover of forest trees and ornamental woodland, there are few localities in which Northumberland can boast of fine old timber. Remains of gigantic oaks that grew in its primeval forests have been found in peat-mosses, in spots now either destitute of timber, or where the largest living trees are dwarfs compared to them, or in alluvium of the river banks from Newcastle to the sea, now crowded by objects very unlike forest timber, and more familiar with glowing coke ovens than glistening leaves. In the north of the county, hawthorn and holly, which latter often attains great size and ornamental character, enrich the

denes; and in many a hilly ravine, the snowy blossoms of the thorn in spring, the bright coral berries of the mountain ash in autumn, and those of the holly in winter, contrast with the deep green foliage of the pine and fir. Many fine whitethorns also flourish near old mansions and on river-meadows; but, within the last eighty years, quickset hedges have been generally planted, but the roads and hedge-rows of Northumberland too generally want the adornment and shade of trees, and are destitute of the lines of snowy blossom that in spring perfume the roads in the midland and southern counties. The yew is not common, but some rural churchyards in this county are fitly shadowed by its venerable form, and by the dark perennial foliage that seems so symbolic of duration, and of a life beyond decay.

It is in its river valleys that the most pleasing landscapes of Northumberland are to be found. The valleys of the Tyne, the Derwent, the Aln, the Coquet, and the Wansbeck, are no less remarkable for their monuments of art, relics of the past, and old historical associations, than for the beauty of their scenery:

Glancing from natural features to works of human industry, a curious contrast to these quiet streams, and to the secluded wildness of the higher regions of Tynedale, is presented by the noise and restless traffic on the banks of the Tyne for fourteen miles before it joins the sea. Signs of trade and manufacturing industry accumulate on either bank of the river for some distance above Newcastle: there is the hydraulic-engine and ordnance factory at Elswick, lately extended and made famous by the manufacture of the Armstrong gun; then come the older manufactories of lead and shot, and Stephenson's great locomotive engine works; and acres of workshops standing where not half a century ago were shady walks to which the citizens resorted for rural views; then, below the quays, warehouses, manufactories, and murky smoke of the town, a succession of blast-furnaces and iron-works, ship-building yards, rope-works, coke-ovens, alkali-works, and manufactories of glass, of pottery, and fire-bricks, meet the eye on either side of the river. Wallsend once familiar with the eagles of Roman legions and the raven-banner of Danish sea kings-is now surrounded by the smoke of furnaces and the sounds of industry. Midway between it and the sea are the new "Northumberland Docks ;" and looking thence across the Tyne to Jarrow, we see other new docks (second only to the Victoria Dock in extent), which have been formed in the slake or bay where the Saxon Ecgfrid's little fleet was wont to ride; and now, busy workshops and a forest of masts surround the grey old church tower of the monastery at Jarrow, which Venerable Bede made so famous through the Christian world. And nearer the sea, the populous towns of North and South Shields, vessels on the stocks, and a crowd of shipping afloat, wharfs, coal-staiths, piles of timber, tall chimneys pouring forth smoke, coke-ovens glowing, hammers resounding, and thousands of sooty faces, mark the busy traffic, the active industry, and material riches of the Tyne.

Next to its ecclesiastical antiquities-and from Lindisfarne to Warkworth hermitage these are of a deeply interesting character-there is not any class of historical monuments in this county so characteristic of past times as the remains of its feudal architecture; indeed, to the eye of a traveller, the distinguishing features of Northumberland seem to be the many grey towers that mark its landscapes, and its larger baronial castles. Of the latter class of buildings, the castles of Alnwick, Warkworth, and Prudhoe, Dunstanburgh, Morpeth, and Bothal (of all which only Alnwick is maintained entire), Ford, Chillingham, and Langley were the chief examples; and, besides these, there are the once-royal castles of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Bamburgh, and Wark (the latter now reduced to