Doubtless this resemblance was accidental; but Paley was an admirable thief. Property, in his hands, bears compound interest. He plundered his brethren like a genius; a peculiarity which, according to Warburton, made Virgil an original author, and Blackmore an imitator:-" for they certainly were borrowers alike.”

JULY THE FIFTH.

E have in Berks a few picturesque old houses scattered up and down, and they always contribute a most pleasing interest to a country walk. The villages round Cambridge abound in them. In Kent, the half-timbered houses are distinguished by the name of wood-noggin, because the pieces of timber used in the framing are called wood-nogs, nogging "being a species of brickwork carried up in panels between quarters." Sometimes flowers and patterns are worked in the plaster. At Newnham, near Feversham, is a house of this description, with a red ground and white flowers. The half-timber houses of Cheshire, familiarly known as "post and pan houses," are often very picture-like; and we have only to look at the works of the old masters, to recognise the value of

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these architectural embellishments. Ostade adapted and combined them with wonderful skill. His buildings of unequal height are thrown into different degrees of perspective; the sides, in the words of Price, being " varied by projecting windows and iron; by sheds supported by brackets, with flowerpots on them; by the light, airy, and detached appearance of cages hung out from the wall; by porches and trellises of various construction, often covered with vine or ivy." We observe the same kind of effect in the "chateau " of Rubens.

The

turrets gleam among the trees; thin smoke just vanishes into cloud; the sun glows on the windows. Add an antique balustrade, a footbridge with anglers leaning over it, a few peasants, a fowler, windmill sails faintly seen in the distance-slight circumstances and what a composition they make ! Modern improvements are rapidly dismantling our old cities. The German traveller Kohl mentions Salisbury as the only town in England, where he saw a large number of houses with thatched roofs, and sprinkled with moss.

JULY THE SIXTH.

OW variable is taste! Kames censured Thomson for what he called his licentious use of personification, particularly with regard to abstract terms; and he specifies the following verses:

"O vale of bliss! O softly swelling hills!

On which the Power of cultivation lies,

And joys to see the wonders of his toil."

SUMMER. 1423.

says,

"We

The book of Kames appeared in 1762. Three years
afterwards Goldsmith collected his pleasing Essays,
in which he quotes the same lines, and
cannot conceive a more beautiful image than that
of the Genius of Agriculture, distinguished by the
implements of his Art, imbrowned with labour,
glowing with health, crowned with a garland of
foliage, flower and fruit, lying stretched at his ease
on the brow of a gentle swelling hill, and contem-
plating with pleasure the happy effects of his own
industry." Here the critic excels the poet. But
Chatterton surpasses both in this picture :

"When autumn, bare and sunburnt, doth appear,
With his gold hand gilding the falling leaf,

Bringing up Winter to fulfil the year,

Bearing upon his back the ripen'd sheaf."

JULY THE SEVENTH.

OOKED over a little volume showing the obligations of literature to the mothers of

England. Our greatest monarch opens the record. Asser relates, that Alfred was tempted into learning to read by the splendour of a MS. which his mother promised him. There is a well-known story of Chatterton's faculties being awakened by the illumined capitals of some French music. But the early passion for books was never developed more strikingly than in Tasso and Shenstone, though with such unequal results. Tasso, in his eighth year, began his studies with the rising sun, and was so impatient for the hour, that his mother often sent him to school with a lantern. Shenstone's mother quieted him for the night by wrapping up a piece of wood in the shape of a book, and putting it under his pillow. Burns caught the music of old ballads from his mother singing at her wheel.

No incident in the sad story of Bloomfield is so pleasing as the return to the home of his childhood, after a wearisome absence of twelve years. He took the Farmer's Boy in his hand, a present for his mother. He had not forgotten the eventful

morning when she travelled with him to London, and left him with his elder brother in one of the dismallest courts of that great city," with a charge, as he valued a mother's blessing, to watch over him, to set good examples for him, and never to forget that he had lost his father."

Bishop Jewell had his mother's name engraved on a signet-ring; and Lord Bacon poured his heart into one short sentence in his will:-"For my burial, I desire it may be in St. Michael's Church, near St. Alban's; there was my mother buried.” At Dulwich, in a dark gown trimmed with fur, holding a book, we see the mother of Rubens, who, losing his father in childhood, was reared by her watchful tenderness. Pope wrote no lines more affecting than the four inscribed on the column to his mother in the garden at Twickenham. By Cowper's verses on his mother's picture we might place the letter of Gray: "It is long since I heard you were gone in haste to Yorkshire, on account of your mother's illness; and the same letter informed me that she was recovered, otherwise I had then wrote to you to beg you would take care of her, and to inform you that I had discovered a thing very little known, which is, that in one's whole life one can never have any more than a single mother." After his death, her clothes were found in the trunk as she left them, her son never having had courage to open it and distribute the legacies. Two cele