This was any thing but pleasant. True, I could have retained the subject-matter of the essay; but then I should have had to change the title, and this I should have been very sorry to do, as the title had suggested the subject, and though consisting but of two short words, seemed to have grown and expanded as I worked out my theory, and arranged my little plot in my mind. So I finally decided upon writing the paper and using the title as I originally intended. I felt sure that my good friend, the original inventor, would not accuse me of "the untradesmanlike falsehood" of endeavouring to palm off my article as "the same concern;" and I knew equally well that the public would very speedily appreciate the difference between us. At the other establishment, ladies and gentlemen, you will find scholarship which has ripened under the most peaceful and happy influences, great sweetness of heart developed in the exercise of the holiest of callings, much natural geniality expressed in admirable language, and penned at the writer's leisure; here, I cannot offer you any of these qualities, nor indeed any thing save a few quaint recollections of bygone days. Still, such as they are, here they are: if the chance perusal of this paper sends any one to the Recreations, it will not have been written in vain; and if my friend's name were Laertes (it isn't! the "Rev. Laertes" scarcely sounds clerical!), I would say to him:

"I'll be your foil, Laertes: in mine ignorance

Your skill shall, like a star in the darkest night,
Stick fiery off, indeed."

Early Summer Days do not recur to me very pleasantly; indeed, I have a vivid remembrance of their various discomforts. Heavens! what miseries children go through, which in later life we are able to prevent! Childhood the happiest time, indeed! The mere matter of thirst entirely destroys that illusion for me. A very hot summer afternoon, in a stifling classroom, the windows on the Wardour-Street-antique principle, only opening a little way, and that under a complicated arrangement of rope and pulley unknown to the smaller boys; a terrific glare from the gravelled playground and the fives wall immediately opposite; two or three besotted bluebottles very much delighted with the Macassered head of a young gentleman, evidently his mamma's pet; various boys, in different stages of sleepiness, grinding up the dead languages in very mill-borse fashion; an usher, with his Master's gown pushed as far down his back as possible, listening wearily to a young gentleman's objections to hear Lydia's praises of Telephus's rosy neck (as mentioned by the poet Horace); and-a maniac. Myself, the last mentioned, tormented with a raging thirst which I had no opportunity of slaking, having had one half-pint of a curious decoc tion humorously designated beer with my dinner, having taken a great deal of violent exercise since, and seeing no chance of further drink for at least a couple of hours. I am certain that my early days were greatly overshadowed by this dreadful thirst. At a preparatory school we used to take long walks in the summer afternoons along broad glaring country

roads, covered with flying squadrons of blinding dust-clouds, which blew down our wretched throats, and was never laid until the advent of the evening milk-and-water. How I used to envy the labourers on the settles outside the public-houses, wiping their heated brows with the never-failing blue-cotton handkerchief with white spots, carried in the crown of the hat, and plunging their seething faces into the frothing porter-pot; the Irish harvestmen, who would rest from their toil as our dull little procession passed by the hedge, and would look at us wonderingly, draining meanwhile some battered tin flask or miniature wooden barrel; the horses, who so thoroughly enjoy their drink, taking one long draught, then raising their heads from the trough, looking round, and re-burying their noses in the water! Sunday afternoons, too, of Summer Days, stand out dismally. Dinner of cold roast beef (no hot meat, nothing so sinful), at one o'clock, flanked with salads of the most pungent mustard and cress, prepared with a singularly titillating and thirst-inspiring sauce. Then a course of religious book called (if I remember rightly) Theophilus Anglicanus, very orthodox, very erudite, and not particularly intelligible; then a rasping head-brushing; then to church. Ah, the stivy pew, with such scanty allotted space even for one's then littleness of limb; the hot afternoon sun, unchecked by blind of any sort, glaring down upon our devoted little heads; the occasional glimpse of the green churchyard, with its heaving billows of graves, and its band of bold but common children playing about, and stinging us "young gentlemen" into jealousy by their freedom; the dreary monotonous voice of the clergyman hammering away on subjects to us utterly incomprehensible; the gradual oblivion of all passing around and about us; the impotent attempts to keep awake; the sudden nod forward, from which we started up into a momentary state of preternatural activity; and then the happy two minutes' excursion into Dreamland, from which we were suddenly recalled by the sharp dig of the usher's knuckles into the tenderest portion of our spinal anatomy!

Summer Days of artist and student life in Germany! grand days these, full of glorious indolence and insouciance, redolent of youth and health and high spirits, and carelessness of the world's opinion. Not very particular about dress then, about the cut of the velvet lounging-coat or the plaid trousers; utterly ignorant of Piver's gloves, or indeed of gloves of any kind; very loose about the throat, and not very starched about the behaviour. Mornings passed in lounging from studio to studio,-in watching the glorious "Lenore" grow beneath Lessing's magic pencil, in listening to old Hildebrandt's lectures on art and recollections of bygone maestri, in sitting for an atrocious caricature of an "Englander" (plaid trousers, telescope, Murray's Handbook, bouledogue, and all complete), sketched by Karl in black and white crayon on the wall of his atelier, in unintermittent pipe-smoking every where and with all. Afternoons in the blue vine-clad mountains, or in the thick pine-forests, with two or three chosen companions, talking, not the metaphysical stuff which English novelists would fain make pass current as the stock conversation of all

German youth, but pleasant quips and cranks, and scandal about our friends, or romance-romance in which, O mihi præteritos! we then firmly believed. Then to coffee in some pleasant public garden, where the simple German matrons and frauleins, by no means unattractive, with their deep blue eyes, their hands which, instead of "offering early flowers," bore knitting-needles and stocking-wool, and their masses of light hair, moved pleasantly among us. Then for a swim with the stream in the rapid Rhine, and then the abends essen. The supper at the students' Kneipe, the steaming portion of reh-bok, the hüring-salad, the Bairisch bier,-the mighty pipes, the madcap frolics of the Bürschen; and the walk homeward in the mellow moonlight, a mob of fantasticallydressed lads, with their arms round each other's necks, with sweetly-attuned voices,

"Marching along, fifty-score strong,

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song."

I lay down my pen after writing these words; and, as I contrast the scenes which have risen before me with the enormous respectability of my present life, with all its tax-paying, church-going, and society-fearing associations, I can scarcely believe that such things ever have been. And yet this feeling must be common to us all. The grave shovel-hatted dean, who takes his daughters up to Commemoration, as he hears the shouting on the river's banks, and sees the panting crew pass by, their oars flashing in the evening sun, must recollect when he felt proud of pulling stroke in the Brasenose boat, ay, even prouder than he does now of having written that crushing pamphlet on Essays and Reviews. The middle-aged solicitor, in excellent practice, cannot find it in his heart to be savage with his articled clerk, who drops into Gray's Inn at noon with bleared eyes and a rather shaky hand, when he thinks of himself as the young boy who came up from Gloucestershire, and thought it the height of honour to be introduced by a fellow-clerk to Mr. Rhodes of the Cider Cellars, some twenty years ago. The subtle editor smiles somewhat grimly as he runs his pen through an extra bitterly-turned sarcasm or stinging personality in the manuscript article of the youngest member of his staff, as he remembers how he himself wrote when he first joined the press, ere Time had worn him into slovenry," or at all events shown him the uselessness of paper-warfare. It is pleasant, however, for me to think that my old associations are easily revivable, that they have been many times renewed, that they will spring again, please Heaven, ere next I make my bow to the readers of Temple Bar. A visit to the Continent has an immediate effect: difficulties, worries, editorial troubles, official anxieties, domestic annoyances-all fall off my back on Dover pier, like Christian's burden, and are left on this side the Channel; and with the white crockery, the black coffee, the Belgian horn-bearing guards, and the quaintly-named Flemish stations, come back lightness of heart, elasticity of spirits, and a rejuvenescence unknown to me on the banks of the Thames.

VOL. III.

D

And this reminds me that for the full enjoyment of Summer Days' holiday it is necessary that the occasions should be rare, and that the gratification should be hardly earned. As you find that regular residents in seaside watering-places scarcely ever bathe in, sail on, or walk by the margin of the sea, so you will remark that the man with a country-house and pleasant grounds in a lovely situation has very little real appreciation of their delights, but, as it were, acts as steward of them for us, his hard-working city-friends. It is his normal state to be surrounded by the loveliness of Nature; he takes it all for granted, and cannot understand the vividness of our enjoyment on coming to it after the close application, the dusty toil, the brick-and-mortar contemplation of eleven months. His nostrils are not sensitive to the exquisite delight of the fresh air, which rushes in when you throw your bedroom-window open early in the morning, and lean out inhaling the thousand sweets of the flowers; he never sits listening by the half-hour together to the murmuring of the brook, the dripping of the mill-wheel, or the rush of the weir; he cannot know the thorough enjoyment of that solemn stillness, that peaceful quiet, which above all is so entrancing to the man in populous city pent, whose ear is accustomed to the rattle of the cabs, the roar of the steamengine, and the hum of the many-footed multitude. There are some persons-notably certain grim Scotchmen who imagine themselves humorists who delight in speaking of some of us as "Cockney writers," and imagine that by the application of the term they have cast an eternal slur upon us; but they are not aware, these silly fellows, that your Cockney has generally the keenest appreciation of those natural beauties from a frequent intercourse with which he is, by circumstances, debarred; and that a primrose by the river's brim is not to him merely a yellow primrose and nothing more, but a very wonderful and beautiful flower, productive of far more admiration in his mind than it is in that of the countryman who passes by scores of primrose-banks every day of his life, and looks upon them as mere weeds and ditch-furniture.

Also, the Continental trip in the Summer Days is a thousand times more enjoyable to the man who has but a certain allotted time for leisure, and who is determined to make the most of it, than for those favoured individuals to describe whom custom has given us that happy word "swells." The mere notion of our trip amuses us for weeks beforehand. We track it out in "Bradshaw" and "Murray," and make arrangements as to where we shall be, and what we shall do, on certain days-arrangements which, it is needless to say, are never carried out. We derive great satisfaction from going to Mr. Stanford's for our passport visas, and from looking back at the passport-book, with its old scrawled and blotted lines and stamps, and in thinking of the days when those entries were made, and of the companions who were then with us. There is a pleasure, too, in dragging out the old cow-skin knapsack, which has been on so many tramps across your shoulder-blades (but which your servant, regarding it as a "nasty old thing," has stowed away in the lumber-room), and the

Alpenstock, branded all over with well-known names, each recalling a happy excursion, which has been carefully locked away from the predatory onslaughts of your children. Given good health, an equable temper, a knowledge of French and German, a moderately-lined purse, and a stout pair of walking-shoes, and your Continental tour in the Summer Days cannot fail of being a happy one. The "swell" has a courier to arrange his for him, an insolent varlet, talking a smattering of all languages, but a proficient in none; leagued with a universal band of robbers, of which he is the chief. I have often wondered how I should get on with a courier, and I can only fancy one more useless appendage, and that is a valet ! What the functions of the latter could be, except to look on while I dressed myself, I never could realise.

There are Summer Days' enjoyments for all, however various their taste. Let those who see nothing to admire in the broad open country, in the glorious sunlight, in the waving seas of yellow corn with farmhouses and barns like islands in their midst, in tossing trees or smiling uplands, or the broad blue expanse of ocean, flecked with white sails, dancing against the horizon,-let such turn aside from the dazzling glare, the "landscape winking in the heat," to the solemn aisles of the old cathedral, and there enjoy themselves after their own fashion. Pleasant to them the dead stillness, broken but by their own echoing footsteps; pleasant the dry pungent smell of passed-away mortality; pleasant the cool shade of the cloisterlike aisles. See the old dinted pavement, from which time and traffic have nearly obliterated the sculptured lines, now glowing in the reflected prismatic colours from yonder window: you will not match those colours easily, for the art of staining glass has degenerated, the secret has died out, and the imitations of modern days are coarse and glaring: Mark the elegant symmetry of each arch, the stalwart well-proportioned strength of each buttress; examine the taste in the carving of each worm-eaten oaken stall; note the quaint ugliness of the old brass eagle forming the lectern. You may admire without fear of heterodoxy: this is the real turtle, the genuine article, not the calves'-heads thickening which the Rev. Chasuble Cope serves up to us at St. Genuflex, nor the spurious imitations of St. Barnabas and Wells Street. In the towns of low-lying Belgium, in classic Antwerp, in Ghent (which is growing rather pretentious, and prefers being called Gand), in dear quaint little Bruges (ah, what pleasant memories have I of the Fleur de Blé! though, unlike Mr. Longfellow, I never heard the "Carillon" while lying there), Carillon" while lying there),-you, lover of old church-architecture, shall see enough to make you hug yourself with delight. And not alone there: here in our own dear land, in Poets' Corner, within hail of the cabstand and in sight of the senators who represent us, at Canterbury, at York, at Lincoln, at Ely, at Chichester and Salisbury, and one hundred other places, shall you find food for Summer Days' admiration and meditation. And I have one word for you, my brothers in this faith: fear not to be accused of conventionality; but go, do pilgrimage, to the shrine at Stratford-on-Avon. By the birth