9

For in gone years they of my race

Had 'mong the hills their dwelling-place :

In an old mansion that doth stand

As in the heart of fairy land.

In the "merrie days of England" Lullingfworth was a scene.

of joyous feftivities, but Charles Mackay fays of it now

Still lifts its gables quaint;
And in the evening sun

Its windows, as of yore,

Still gleam with ruddy light,
Reflected from the west.

Closely resembling, by the intereft they excite and the pleafing affociations with which they are connected, are the few road-fide inns that may ftill be seen in fome parts of the country. The screaming locomotive now hurries along with its eager crowd of pleasure-feekers, or its care-worn worshippers of Mammon, high up on lofty embankments, or low down in deep cuttings or darkfome tunnels ;-fields, trees, manfions, abbeys, caftles, are paffed; but what knows or cares those helpless, train-bound throngs of the charms or beauties of those rural scenes, as they haften to the dreary ftucco terminus to which they are booked? The village and the wayfide inn are deferted ;-happily, however, fome few of them are rescued from total oblivion by fuch defcriptions as that of the May-pole, by Charles Dickens, in his ftory of "Barnaby Rudge:"—

"The May-pole was an old building with more gable ends than a lazy man would care to count on a funny day; huge zigzag chimneys, out of which it feemed as though even smoke could not choose but come in more than naturally fantastic shapes imparted to it in its tortuous progrefs. The place was faid to have been built in the days of King Henry the Eighth; and there was a legend not only that Queen Elizabeth had slept there

one night while upon a hunting excursion, but that next morning, while standing on a mounting-block before the door, with one foot in the stirrup, the virgin monarch had then and there boxed and cuffed an unlucky page for fome neglect of duty. The Maypole was really an old house, a very old house. Its windows were old diamond-pane lattices; its floors were funken and uneven; its ceilings blackened by the hand of time and heavy with maffive beams. Over the doorway was an ancient porch, quaintly and grotesquely carved. With its overhanging ftories, drowsy little panes of glass, and front bulging out and projecting over the pathway, the old house looked as if it were nodding in its sleep. Indeed, it needed no very great ftretch of fancy to detect in it other resemblances to humanity. The bricks of which it was built had originally been a deep dark red, but had grown yellow and difcoloured like an old man's fkin; the sturdy timber had decayed like teeth; and here and there the ivy, like a warm garment to comfort it in its age, wrapped its green leaves closely round the time-worn walls."