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THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX

TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

schemes were aimed against the throne itself, having for a principal object to free Mary, Queen of Scots, from her imprisonment, and in all probability to secure to her the English succession. Without much consideration, as the result showed, they raised the standard of rebellion, bells were rung backwards in the various parishes to encourage the people to revolt, and, marching onwards, they assaulted and took Barnard Castle. But Lord Sussex was now at hand with numbers fully equal to their own, the Earl of Warwick was about to follow with a yet larger army, and the rebels hastily retreated towards Scotland. Neither Norfolk, nor the Earl of Westmorland, at this juncture showed themselves equal to the parts they had undertaken. In the very moment when courage was most requisite to their safety, both vacillated, and the timidity of the leaders naturally enough communicated itself to their adherents, who, as they were less interested in the result, might with reason be expected to shrink from a cause, which was so weakly maintained by those most likely to benefit from its hazards. Finding that his followers began to fall off, the Earl of Westmorland flung down the sword he had so rashly taken up, and was fortunate enough to make his escape into the Netherlands. There he died an exile, in 1584. His estates of course were forfeited for his rebellion; and in the subsequent reign they were consigned for sale to certain citizens of London, when Sir Henry Vane, knight, purchased Raby Castle and the demesnes therewith connected. From him they have regularly and lineally descended to the present possessor.

The castle is beautifully situated on a moderate declivity, about one mile north from Staindrop, on the east side of an extensive forest. It stands upon a rocky foundation, surrounded with an embrasured

wall and parapet, enclosing about two acres of land; but from its scite the building does not seem to be particularly well adapted for purposes of defence. The outward area of the castle has only one entrance, which is on the north side through a gateway, defended by two square towers, and flanked by a parapet with turrets. The inner area has two entrances; one modern, and opened by the late Earl; the other ancient, towards the west, with a double gate. This last is the principal entrance to the castle.

The hall is of immense extent, bearing ample witness to the oligarchical spirit of the age in which it was erected. Over it is a banqueting room, where the ancient baronial festivals were celebrated, and in this immense building seven hundred knights were said to have been feasted at the same time. At the west end is a stone gallery, where the minstrels sate and played during the repast, according to that incomprehensible union which seems ever to have prevailed between poetry and barbarity. To provide a fitting feast for so numerous an assembly and their retainers, there is a kitchen below with three chimneys, and narrow passages in the walls, through which the ready meal was served up into the banqueting room above, while the oven was so capacious that it has since been converted into a wine cellar. Its extent may be yet farther inferred from the fact that the sides of it are divided into ten compartments, each of which is large enough to contain a hogshead of wine in bottles.

There is little of historical recollection connected with Raby Castle, beyond what has been briefly noticed, and of romance, nothing; or if the ghosts and fairies, familiar to such places, have at any time haunted these walls, the very legends that recorded them are forgotten.

OUR SOLILOQUY.

ARGUMENT.

THE COURT MAGAZINE—a figure as sylph-like as the poetical reader taketh that of Lady Emmeline Wortley to be, with orbs "stolen from Heaven, and which it is religion to adore"-ruminates. She contemplates with admiration and awe the surface of the globe, and reverts, by way of contrast, to a citizen's villa. Thence she digresses to herself, confesses her pedigree, and folding her wings, shows what a magazine is not. She discourseth to herself of books and their troubles, and then falls into a speculation upon her own Portrait Gallery, the Ariadnes, the Altheas, and divers other wonders of England. Her imagination next apostrophises the Aristocracy. Pursuing this train of thinking, she loses herself in a dissertation upon Love, in the course of which she becomes scandalously personal. Hazlitt and Coleridge, Petrarch and Milton, Wyatt, and Roland, Surrey and Pope, and many other individuals equally respectable, are freely introduced into her unaccountable rhapsody. She next takes inexcusable liberties with the characters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her husband, and then branches off into some reflections upon courtly marriages, illustrated by examples drawn from the age of Henry VIII. Her vagrant fancy diverges into a consideration of the month of May, and after chiding the seasons for their irregularity, she finds fault with Southwell the poet, and brings in Ben Jonson to set him right. Apostrophizing May, she becomes egotistical, and goes asleep singing Milton's "Song on May-morning.”

FLOWER-GIRDLED earth!-marvellous is thy beauty, which is as young as when the First Pair ranged thy primeval solitudes what a chaos of bewildering things-actual and ideal, visible and unseen, generated by the hand and the head, Passions, Interests, Instincts-crowd upon thy agitated surface. From the pale strand of the unexplored Pole to the waters of the melting South, a mighty multitude of men and their associations throng like visions in the fantastic panorama of the Imagination: the vast thought sweeps before it all our petty feelings of local and circumscribed attachments, and we lose the consciousness of self, with its fine-spun threads of emotion, its struggling importance, and its incessant bustle, in the contemplation of that miracle of Life which we cannot grasp with all the toil and striving of our labouring brains.

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as is this incomprehensible Image of creation, each individual of the countless tribes is occupied with his inch of earth as profoundly and as exclusively as if the whole domain of the animated world were embraced in that speck of clay. While volcanic islands are springing up in the midst of oceans, breaking tides and casting off the currents into other directions-while myriads of men are pressing on the retreats of the wolf and the antelope, and converting the lairs of the wild creatures of the forests into towns and corn-fields—while a heaving continent is cracking, and a thousand homesteads are sinking into the sudden gulf, in the midst of their festive pleasures, their holyday fêtes, their ringing laughter, and their sunlight pomp—while argosies, freighted with the wealth of nations, are floating serenely over remote seas to carry gladness and civilisation to the ends of the earth-your proud citizen, retired to Twickenham or to Putney, ensconced in the golden felicity of a plum, believes, heartily and wholly, that the fate of the world depends upon the next vestry meeting, for which he has been preparing a speech upon parish abuses, for the last month.

Well has William Howitt said, 66 God

bless the mountains!" And glorious in the majesty of freedom are the mountains, that, from their summits, survey the great scheme of mingled woods, and rivers, and cities, and extending plains to the horizon's verge. The Andes, "giant of the Western Star," the Apennines, the Alps, the Pyrennees-inequalities so vast, that to us who scramble at their base, they seem like separate worlds. Then the forests,—Alsatia, with its dark and poetical superstitionsthe wondrous stretches of Canada-the impervious labyrinths of the whole of Northern America-the trackless depths of Germany, and the savage wilds of the irreclaimable Ukraine. And rivers,-the Guadalquiver, dancing with song- the Rhine, the Moselle, and the Garonne, with the rich grape suffusing their glowing tides the Rhone, the "arrowy Rhone," and the Danube, running between banks of legends—the graceful and poetical Wye -the royal Seine-the Meuse, and the Ourt, uniting under the walls of Liege to terminate that exquisite valley which we try to describe in the phrase of le petit Switzerland. But these wonders are nothing to your retired citizen. He is taken up with his villa and his grounds. Mountains! he has a Grecian mountain; what are the Alps to him? Forests!-he has a wilderness, an invention that would puzzle a Red Indian. Rivers!—he has a cascade, and a pond with gold and silver fish, and a brook with gudgeons in it; and then he stands fishing in a straw hat, and a lemoncoloured jacket, with one hand in his pocket, and a face full of intense agitation. If he catch a minnow, he would snap his fingers at Lake Ontario!

Considerate reader, we have our own world—a world of many phases, in which we are sometimes tempted to think that an amount of interest concentrates which embraces the whole circumference of the sphere on which we move. Honoured be the names of Faust and Caxton; they anticipated steam, and were in advance of railways. We speak to you through lips of type, that hath such lungs that its voice will be heard on the pinnacle of the Himalaya range as easily as in the adjacent space of Cavendish Square. We-the Court Magazine-not Maga, nor Regina, but a new emanation of immortal Mind-a less definite, but a more spiritual creation -a birth between Hebe and Ganymede, a roseate, joyous, bounding spirit, touching VOL. X.-NO. V.—MAY, 1837.

lightly the earthly surface to which it is not akin, but gazing earnestly into the ways of men, their abodes and usages, their hearts, their hidden impulses, their suppressed thoughts. Like the bird that raises the dew into upper air upon its wings, and scatters it in the rejoicing beams of the sun, we suffer the burthen of earth's experience only to cast it abroad that it may be wafted on the winds to the extremities of space.

We are alone, and we commune with our own nature, testing its capabilities by things with which it is associate. The comprehensive intellect that embraces the whole area of the Quick and the Deadthe Universe, that is made up of more species than science has yet drawn into its vocabulary. Principles, Systems, Codes, are all composed of particles which, in the aggregate, constitute one great result. Let the citizen glory in his scrap of freehold— let him swagger over his stunted lawnlet him sleep and dream of his shrubs, his bantam, and his new gig. He is an atom, an indispensable atom in the great scheme. Were he to worry himself about philosophy, he would go mad, and be detached from the mass of which he now forms an almost invisible part.

So it is with us. We are engrossed in the scenes that surround us. What if the circle be of greater circumference, and more profound depth-the occupation is identical. However widely our sympathies extend, a Magazine is a magazine. You cannot embellish Pluto with the winged feet, nor invest Vulcan with the attributes, of Apollo. This consideration places us at once upon our proper ground. The functions we exercise are prescribed, limited, definite. We cannot, for example, perform any of the utilities of a tramway or a tunnel; we cannot expel the comet from its orbit, and traverse the illimitable void for countless ages, visiting in our track the confines of Saturn, (the planet of wedlock), and dipping for cool air into the Milky Way; nor can we execute the offices of a rook which, perched on the topmost bough of some antique tree, screams itself to death. But our uses are manifold nevertheless : like the old woman's crow, if we do not fly, we think.

And, of a verity, we have much in these times to think about. The Babel of books is a world by itself, more perplexing than the Cretan labyrinth, more toilsome

HH

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