tions" to have been reserved for themselves; but it was played. Invitations for half the county had been sent out, and nearly all the people were coming: the wicked old lord from the Park, who has twelve wives alive already they say, and is looking out for a thirteenth; and both the borough members; and the man that keeps the hounds. I saw "Men.Eligible," opposite to his name in mamma's private list; but that is no concern of mine, I can tell her. Then there was the archdeacon, and a heap of High Church curates, and the officers of the troop at Cheshant besides. But we girls didn't fear any of these as we did our own sex. It positively made me cold to think of Lady Blowdale and the four Miss Blowdales, and of those abominable Miss Kimples, and of the gay widow of Wormwood Hall, and of that rector's wife. How they will praise and compliment us all night long, thought I, and pick us to pieces cruelly for the next six months to come. Lilly will be "affected," and Carry "foolish;" Anne will be "lack-a-daisical," and I shall be "bold;" and "I never saw you, my dear, with such a colour before," the Rev. Mrs. Snapdragon will say a politeness I shall not be able to repay, for I have seen her many times with just the same; but it was too late to think of such things then. Moreover, at the last moment almost, Mr. Harris wrote to say his grandpapa had had a fit, and was given over. I thought Uncle John would have had another when that dreadful letter arrived.

"Why couldn't his grandpapa have waited till next week? Why hadn't L'Estrange said that his friend's grandpapa was subject to fits? Would Annie-dearest Annie-object to let the footman make love to her in the unavoidable absence of the strange gentleman ?"

Annie, however, who had retired to the prompter's box in tears, declared she wouldn't submit to it; the Captain whistled "Pop goes the Weasel" to the measure of the "Dead March in Saul;" Mr. Stokes was using the most awful words his French could suggest, and Uncle John translating them into English, when in rushed Mr. Hughes from the railway station, with news that he had telegraphed for a friend of his-one Mr. Rooke-from London, and that he would be down by the next train.

"My son, my long lost son!" ejaculated Uncle John, from the dresspiece, as he threw himself into Leonard's arms.

"There's sixty thousand pounds upon the mantelshelf, and it's yours," said Mr. Stokes, from the first farce.

"If the thanks of a lonely maiden are worthy of your acceptance, sir, take them, oh, take them for Mr. Rooke," misquoted Annie from the second. We were lifted from the lowest depths at once to comparative independence. We were certain the new actor would do capitally-how absurd not to have thought of him before! It was decreed that he was to be locked up over the stables immediately after his arrival, and denied all other nutriment until he had finished his rôles; we ourselves had been at them for three weeks, and were only just perfected. Our copies of "Lacy's Acting Edition" were a disgraceful sight, tumbled, and thumbed, and torn beyond belief; we had found them in our pockets in the most sacred places, and had caught ourselves responding from them on the most unfit occasions. Some of them had been distributed over the village by mistake for tracts, and had been even read and digested as

works of an edifying nature. We had been also made to walk out, two and two, for mutual interrogation and the perfection of our characters. Indeed, no lessons in the world were ever learnt so well and so pleasantly as at Uncle John's academy for both sexes down at Cheshant.

We all drove down to the station to hail our deliverer. He was a fresh-coloured young man, of nervous temperament, and didn't seem to understand us all quite at first. I suppose our stage names-under which the manager insisted upon introducing us-rather confused him. "Now Annie, you get next to him in the rumble, and tell him what he's got to say and do; for," said my uncle, in quotation, "this is no time for false delicacy, Jemima Anne."

And how soon we did get acquainted, and how pleased we all were with him immediately! And this, indeed, is one of the pleasantest attributes of private theatricals, that there is no preliminary coldness and ceremony, but we either like one another or not, at once. Three nights from that very day Mr. Rooke was in our boudoir, and Carry and I were putting vermilion on his nose. All besides the captain, too, we had to furnish with moustachios of burnt cork, and very often to wash them off again for them between the pieces. What charming occupation on wet days was that constructing of play-bills with medieval characters and modern jokes. Mr. Pugin himself could not have done it better than Mr. Stokes; but the captain wasted more than an acre of gold in the illuminations" enough," Leonard said, severely, "to cover all his brass." On fine days we ravaged the conservatory, and stripped the laurels and the holly trees to deck the supper-room; Annie and Mr. Rooke brought home a prize of mistletoe between them from some out-of-the-way place, which occasioned immense scandal, and heightened their colour very agreeably; we spent an enormous time on the scenery, and Uncle John took an hour and a half in getting through a very small window-frame, which, in opposition to the general opinion, he wished to demonstrate was "practicable." It was indeed a merry, merry Christmas time.

However, we had one horror, and that was peeping between the curtains, and seeing the audience getting larger and larger. This was something awful. We wished ourselves far enough from Cheshant then, and forgot at once and simultaneously the whole of our parts; but in front of the footlights self-possession and memory as suddenly returned to us, and applause, and bouquets, and sherry-negus at the side-scenes, seemed almost the three things on earth that were most worth our living for.

Our only misadventure was the temporary absence of the captain, who did not appear during the dress-piece at his proper time; but he was found, in about five minutes, in uncle's magistrate's room, revolving slowly, in full uniform, upon a music-stool in front of the looking-glass.

P.S.-The modesty that declines to describe a performance which was a success, will, I trust, be appreciated.

BY-WAYS OF HISTORY.

WILMER'S "DE HOMINE REPLEGIANDO."

MEN who journey over the great high-roads, connecting one capital, city, or emporium of commerce with another, as they roll or whirl on their way, are seldom aware, and as seldom care to be told, that down the green lanes or by-roads which branch off from the main line may lie objects of interest or beauty, such as the ivied ruin-the primitive parish church, with its rich architecture or quaint epitaph-the Henrician or Elizabethan manor-house of the olden time, containing probably its small modest gallery of select pictures, collected by "The Squire" of other days, before picture-dealing had become a refinement of rascality, or the manufacture of originals a handicraft of modern art-in short, such a traveller must often pass by many of those places or objects which make travel a pleasure instead of a toil, and diversify the note-book of the tourist with something better than dates, hotel bills, or those statistics of commerce and crime, too often the correlatives of each other. The matter-of-fact man of business, who lives and toils but to " get through his commissions," and "have done with it," would deem it lost labour to turn aside or pause a moment for the examination of these by-way objects of interest; but the man who travels to store his mind, and imprint "sun-pictures" upon his memory for the fireside evenings of life, will often recal such détours and divergences from the monotonous main road, as the pleasantest, and by no means the least profitable part of his travelling expenditure, whether of time or money.

These remarks will apply as well to the great trunk-lines of history as of travel. No doubt there are men of firm purpose, ostrich digestion, and small imaginative power, who can plod through, and as they go, digest, a standard history from cover to cover, who can grapple with and master the main facts (the capital cities of the volume); inform themselves of all that need be known of the stirring past to remove them out of the category of "historical ignoramus;" and yet these men may miss completely those illustrative incidents and characteristic traits, with which others find it pleasant and useful to relieve the tedium of solemn historic narrative. Heretofore the historian proper has too generally thought it beneath the dignity of his calling to garnish his heavy narrative with trivial tale or contemporary occurrence, though these would, in few words, have given more of the life and reality of events than whole sections of platitudes could convey. It seems to have been reserved for our times to produce a species of writing which proves that history may be lively without being incorrect, and that an episode drawn from 66 Mémoires pour Servir" may throw more light upon the events of its date than a volume of after-drawn elaborate speculations.

Raphael painted "flat heresy" against the recognised and established Madonna type when he first put forth his Madonnas of flesh and blood, and we have no doubt that Carlyle's "French Revolution" (telling its story by striking episodes) and Macaulay's England, enlivened and embellished as it is by everything of contemporary and wayside illustration which the writer's felicitous style and omnifarious reading could introduce, will in time revolutionise historic writing. "mere essayists," as they are slightingly called, may be deemed by

These

some to degrade the old historic epic, as it used to be constructed by authors who "drew men as they ought to be, not as they are;" who designed heroes and demi-gods, and not men and women. But we feel

persuaded that this latter essay style will supersede that against which it rebels, and will go down to posterity as chiefly admirable in this—that while others "drew pictures, and did no more," it shows the "very age and body of the time" of which it is treating.

I am not going to write history-far from it—but with the editor's kind leave I do propose now and again, after having driven down some of the "by-ways of history," and peered into odd out-of-the-way nooks and corners, to come back again and tell his readers what I have found there. To repeat to them anything which others have said before would argue a presumption of a better style than I pretend to, but if I can now and again light upon some quaint or curious incident, either forgotten, or from its very minuteness passed over by those looking for more important information, and if I can produce this in a readable form, my object will be answered, and the reader, I hope, neither unamused nor disimproved by the perusal.

Turning over the pages, or (to carry out my original illustration) plodding along the main line of a heavy folio of "Revolution Tracts," the other day, I was attracted by the odd title with which I have headed this paper, and at once turned aside to investigate it.

Mr. Wilmer's "De Homine Replegiando." "Who on earth, when he was on earth," said I to myself, "was Mr. Wilmer?" What is this case, "De Homine Replegiando?" We are not, in our day, unfamiliar with the process of "replevying a chattel or a cow!" but the “replevin of a man!" is something out of the common. I immediately turned to Burnet, to try if this Wilmer could have been an intimate of "P. P., clerk of this parish," but could find no trace of him in the Revolution Bishop's Minutia of Gossip. I then referred to Macaulay's ante-revolution narrative, to see whether he had been down this "by-way" before me. Very probably he had; but, with the greater objects of that stirring day before his mind's eye, he had overlooked this solitary unit of illustrative fact, so I determined to follow the path on which I had stumbled, and at length arrived at what I think an exemplification of the state of things from which "He of the glorious Memory" delivered these kingdoms, the more remarkable, that history has failed to hold it up among those minutiæ of persecution by which it was sought to torment, where it could not bend, the resolute Saxon will into submission to the absolute rule of that doomed Stuart dynasty, of whom, as of their Bourbon cousins, it might have been written, "ils n'ont rien appris, rien oublié.”

Halifax's portrait of Charles II. is a masterpiece, but perhaps the "counterfeit presentment of the two Stuart Brothers," the second James and Charles, was never better drawn or contrasted in miniature than in the antithesis of his "buxom Grace of Bucks" to Burnet. "THE KING could see things if he would”—“ THE DUKE would see things if he could." They had both at heart the same objects, which Charles had the ability to carry through, but not the resolved will; while his brother's infinitely smaller mind held and advanced what it did holdhis religion and his prerogative-with a remarkable tenacity of grasp and purpose. James set all upon the hazard of accomplishing his ends; Charles would have been very glad to attain the same ends, but

would risk nothing to do so. As Scott well puts it, "he had sworn to himself never to kiss the pillow his father slept his last sleep upon." But if he could have cheated England into Popery by those picaroon arts which he had learned during his prince-errantry abroad, or have worried sturdy opposition to death by petty persecutions, which, disarming the nation in detail, would not endanger a national convulsion, there is reason to know, from modern revelations of his private intrigues, that the elder brother was just as willing an agent of the designs of France and Rome as ever the younger was-as willing, but not as "thorough-going." Hence it was that the agencies, put in action by these brothers, were highly characteristic. Charles met and counterplotted "Titus Oates," with the "Rye House" and "Meal-tub” plots, and "did the noble Russel to death by slanderous tongues." James, on the contrary, with high hand and shallow policy, sent his musqueteers to eject the "Fellows of Magdelene," and shipped the seven bishops for the Tower! in sight of a city and nation boiling up to the last point of endurance. Their ends were conformable. "Charles II.," says Junius, "lived and died a hypocrite ;" and James departed, a sullen exile, to end his days in impotent attempts at carrying out plans, to which he seemed to cling the more fondly as they became daily less practicable.

As with the prince so with the people. Sovereigns will ever find courtiers adapting their service to the personal character of the master whose favour they court; and as headlong James found his agencies in the turbulence of Tyrconnel, the rashness of Petre, the fury of Jeffreys, so Charles carried out his purposes through the teazing, worrying chicanery, and vexatious prosecutions of his subtle and pliant men of the law-his Jenkinses, his Joneses, his Norths!-men who ran as breast-high for prerogative as they were ruthless in pursuing "peevish" opposers to death or banishment. To complete the antithesis: as James sat in sullen, formal state at the head of his council-table to discuss with his headlong advisers the courses which led him to ruin, so Charles used to end his stroll in the park by sidling into the snuggery of his pander Chiffiuch, there to "earwig a Scroggs" as to the issue to which he wished a trial to be brought, or to consult with his "cabal" whether it were better to take away the licenses "from the coffee-houses!" or to leave them open and send spies there to countermine the "trepanners of the day."

This is a long by-way. We are slow in arriving at " Mr. Wilmer and his "replegium !" We must be a little longer yet, and go back and forward a little before we can take up his case by the right clue.

Among the marks of pride which went before James's destruction, was the issuing from the press, in the very last year of his reign, in all the pomp of line-engraving and large type, the narrative of "Castlemain's Embassy of Reconciliation and Submission to the Pope." This volume has now fallen low in the lists of curious books; when it is to be had, it may be bought for a trifle, and yet for more than its worth. It was out of date and out of fashion before the close of the very year in which it was printed; and probably those very flatterers, who made their court by their haste to buy it, were equally hasty in destroying and getting rid of the vaunting, vain-glorious volume, which, compiled and composed by the house-steward of the embassy, is minute to tediousness and gossip in describing and delineating not merely the laying out of Castlemain's state banquet at Rome, but also the very carving of the wheels of his state