Wherever crowds

All

brightly, out came another creature. were assembled,-wherever royalty was to be looked upon, and the sounds of military music summoned the fair ones of Windsor and Eton to the gay parade,-there was Sir John Dinely. The roquelaure was cast aside, and then were disclosed the treasures which it concealed -the embroidered coat, the silk-flowered waistcoat, the nether garments of faded velvet, carefully meeting the dirty silk stocking, which terminated in the half-polished shoe surmounted by the dingy silver buckle. The old wig, on great occasions, was newly powdered, and the best cocked-hat was brought forth, with a tarnished lace edging. There walked, then, on Windsor Terrace, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one who might have sat for the costume of the days of George II. other days were to him as nothing. He had dreams of ancient genealogies; and of alliances still subsisting between himself and the first families of the land; and of mansions described in Nash's History of Worcestershire,' with marble halls and "superb gates;" and of possessions that ought to be his own, which would place him upon an equality with the noblest and the wealthiest. A little money to be expended in law proceedings was to make these dreams realities. That money was to be obtained through a wife. To secure for himself a wife was the business of his existence; to display himself properly where women "most do congregate, was the object of his savings; to be constantly in the public eye was his glory and his hope. The man had not a particle of levity in these proceedings. His face had a grave and intellectual character; his deportment was staid and dignified. He had a wonderful discrimination in avoiding the tittering girls with whose faces he was familiar. But perchance some buxom matron or timid maiden who had seen him for the first time gazed upon the apparition with surprise and curiosity: he approached. With the air of one bred in courts, he made his most profound bow; and taking a printed paper from his pocket, reverently presented it and withdrew. We give an extract from one of these documents which is before us:

"For a wife.

"As the prospect of my marriage has much increased lately, I am determined to take the best means to discover the lady most liberal in her esteem, by giving her fourteen days more to make her quickest steps towards matrimony, from the date of this paper until eleven o'clock the next morning; and as the contest evidently will be superb, honourable, sacred, and lawfully affectionate, pray do not let false delicacy interrupt you. ***An eminent attorney here is lately returned from a view of my very superb gates before my capital house, built in the form of the queen's house. I have ordered him, or the next eminent attorney here, who can satisfy you of my possession in my estate, and every desirable particular concerning it, to make you the most liberal settlement you can desire, to the vast extent of three hundred thousand pounds." And then come some verses, concluding thus:

"A beautiful page shall carefully hold

Your ladyship's train surrounded with gold."

6

Was this man mad? He had a monomania certainly; but in other matters he was the shrewdest man we ever knew. He was reserved and sarcastic to most persons,for too frequently was he insulted; but to those who were kind to him he displayed no common mind. Our childish curiosity about this singular person became, as we grew older, mixed with a respectful and higher interest. He was unfortunate. His misfortunes were inscribed in no less terrible a page than that book over which many a boy has wept and trembled the Newgate Calendar.' In one of these volumes we had read that on the 17th of January, 1741, a dismal tragedy had occurred at Bristol. There were two brothers who had become enemies on account of the entail of property. The elder was Sir John Dinely Goodyere, baronet, the younger, Samuel Dinely Goodyere, a captain in the navy, commanding the Ruby ship of war. The two brothers had long ceased to meet; but a common friend, at the request of the younger, brought them together. They dined at his

house; they exchanged professions of brotherly love. When they separated, the baronet had to pass alone over College Green, at Bristol. He was encountered by six sailors, with the captain of the Ruby at their head. He was seized, gagged, carried to a boat, and thence to the ship-and he was strangled. The vengeance of the law was speedy. The vessel was detained upon suspicion; the crime was fully proved; and the inhuman brother and two of his confederates were hanged within two months. The Sir John Dinely of Windsor was the son of the murderer. That the poor man was perfectly familiar with all the circumstances of this tragedy there can be no doubt; and we have often thought that, shut up in his lonely house, with the horrible recollections of the past lingering about him, it was wonderful that he was not altogether mad. The family estates which might have come to Captain Goodyere were most probably forfeited to the crown. The poor advertiser for a wife alludes to this circumstance in another of his bills:-"Pray, my young charmers, give me a fair hearing; do not let your avaricious guardians unjustly fright you with a false account of a forfeiture." But the estates were not to be recovered; and the penalty for the crime in the second generation was mitigated, we hope, by the innocent delusions by which the son of the guilty brother was buoyed up, even to his dying hour. Sir John Dinely was one morning missing from his due attendance upon the service of St. George's Chapel. His door was broken open. His house was without furniture except a table and a chair or two. The passage by which it was entered was a receptacle for coals. The sitting-room was strewed with printing types -for he used to print his own bills after the rudest fashion; in a small room beyond was stretched the poor man upon a pallet bed. He had studied physic; and he had prescribed for himself not injudiciously, having a few medicines always at hand. He lingered a few days, and then all the dream was over.

COACHES.

In asking our readers to look back to the period when London was without coaches--when no sound of wheels was heard but that of the cart, labouring through the rutty ways, with its load of fire-wood, or beer, or perhaps the king's pots and pans travelling from Westminster to Greenwich-we ask them to exercise a considerable power of imagination. Yet London had no coaches till late in the reign of Elizabeth; and they can scarcely be said to have come into general use till the accession of James. Those who were called by business or pleasure to travel long distances in London, which could not be easily reached by water-conveyance, rode on horses. For several centuries the rich citizens and the courtiers were equestrians. All the records of early pageantry tell us of the magnificence of horsemen. Froissart saw the coronation of Henry IV., and he thus describes the progress of the triumphant Bolingbroke through the city:- "And after dinner the duke departed from the Tower to Westminster, and rode all the way bareheaded! and about his neck the livery of France. He was accompanied with the prince his son, and six dukes, six earls, and eighteen barons, and in all, knights and squires, nine hundred horse. Then the king had on a short coat of cloth of gold, after the manner of Almayne, and he was mounted on a white courser, and the garter on his left leg. Thus the duke rode through London with a great number of lords, every lord's servant in their master's livery; all the burgesses and Lombard merchants in London, and every craft with their livery and device. Thus he was conveyed to Westminster. He was in number six thousand horse."* The old English chroniclers revel in these descriptions. They paint for us, in the most vivid colours, the entry into London of the conqueror of Agincourt; they are most circumstantial in their relations of the welcome of his unhappy

*Lord Berners' Froissart.

son, after the boy had been crowned at Paris, with the king riding amidst flowing conduits, and artificial trees and flowers, and virgins making "heavenly melody," and bishops "in pontificalibus;" and having made his oblations at the cathedral," he took again his steed at the west door of Paul's, and so rode forth to Westminster."* By the ancient "order of crowning the kings and queens of England,” it is prescribed that," the day before the coronation, the king should come from the Tower of London to his palace at Westminster, through the midst of the city, mounted on a horse, handsomely habited, and bare-headed, in the sight of all the people." The citizens were familiar with these splendid equestrian processions, from the earliest times to the era of coaches; and they hung their wooden houses with gay tapestry, and their wives and daughters sate in their most costly dresses in the balconies, and shouts rent the air, and they forgot for a short time that there was little security for life or property against the despot of the hour. They played at these pageants, as they still play, upon a smaller scale themselves; and the lord mayor's horse and henchmen were seen on all solemn occasions of marching watches and Bartholomew fairs. The city dignitaries seldom ride now; although each new sheriff has a horse-block presented to him at his inauguration, that he may climb into the saddle as beseems his gravity. The courtiers kept to their riding processions, down almost to the days of the great civil war; perhaps as a sort of faint shadow of the chivalry that was gone. Garrard tells us, in 1635, how the Duke of Northumberland rode to his installation as a knight of the garter at Windsor with earls, and marquisses, and almost all the young nobility, and many barons, and a competent number of the gentry, near a hundred horse in all. The era of coaches and chairs was then arrived; but the Duke of Northumberland did not hold that they

* Fabyan.

+ Liber Regalis, quoted by Strutt in his 'Manners,' vol. iii. p. 422.

Strafford's Letters, vol. i., p. 427.