same barge at whose slow pace, but a little while ago, we laughed so contemptuously. Onwards now, and across the bridge-a quaint old one, with little triangular recesses in it for pedestrians to take shelter in when carts are crossing. Over the bridge, into the town-the town? Yes: but if we want to cross the street we must climb the hill! On the eastern side of the main street, the ground rises eighty or a hundred feet; on which high ground stands the church, and the gravestones are higher than the chimneys over the way. if there were any poets among the good friars, | faster; for, with shame be it spoken, this is the they must have had a happy life. Six hundred years ago; and, now, we can hear the railwaywhistle within a mile. How all is changed since then! When yonder stones were raised by Grey's workmen, Saint Louis was alive and reigning how much that one statement means! They have gone away, those old monks. Their high enthusiasm, as years went by, broke down; the spirit which once reigned within these walls, and made them sacred, passed out from the cloister into the world; and, as it left the cloister, worldliness and unbelief and vice crept in to fill its place. Then, when at last the appointed hour arrived, and when monkish laziness and greed and profligacy were to be tolerated in England no more, the friars were swept out utterly. Henry VIII., taking the land from those who no longer were able to possess itthough once worthiest of all-gave it to his wise and trusty councillor, Sir Henry Wyatt, of Allington Castle (Allington, which we shall visit presently). From him it went to his son, the poet; from him, to his, the leader of the Kentish | rebellion, in Mary's time; and, after his execution, it reverted to the Crown. Then, Elizabeth granted it to John Sedley, who settled here and kept up the family; and lo! as the years again went on, there was born in yonder walls (walls that have echoed with the midnight prayers of pious men) that estimable personage, Sir Charles Sedley. Poor Aylesford Priory! From the Carmelites, you come down to this remarkable ornament of the pure Court of Charles II! Afterwards, the place passed into more respectable hands; and we must endeavour to forget Sir Charles. Poor fellow! When all his debauchery and loose, witty, immoral talk were over, he lived to see his own daughter dishonoured; and rose into somewhat higher feelings ere he died. At least, in his age, he was inspired by an honest hatred, and that, though but a bad companion for a man, was surely a better one than any he had had in his "brilliant" youth. Surely, as he grew old, all that "brilliancy" must have seemed very poor and stale to him; and it is probable that in his fatherly agony, he may have prayed God to become once more a little boy, and to ramble about Aylesford lanes, and bathe, on bright afternoons, here, in the river. All those feasts, and all that wit and daring, and the memory of his gay doings with Rochester and Charles; what was it all worth to the poor broken-down old man? No man reads him now, and his name has faded almost entirely away from the memory of us all-as it was right that it should. Again we say, let us try to forget the poor wit and rake; and let us all go and live better lives. Look out there! Whilst we have been musing upon thirteenth-century friars and seventeenthcentury profligates, we have not noticed yonder market-boat; but now the horse that draws it on is close upon us, and the rope nearly drags us from our seat. Up and away. Let us get on The Carmelite story was an old one: but it is quite fresh and modern compared to some of the other tales about this little gem of a place. Some of its associations go back, not to Carmelites, or Benedictines, or Dominicans, but to Druids. For it was at Aylesford that a great battle was fought between our old friends Hengist and Horsa on the one side, and Vortimer the British prince on the other-a tough, stern fight, in which at last the Saxons were utterly routed. They left their chief (Horsa) dead upon the field; but Vortimer's brother (Catigern) also perished; and, if we had another hour or so to spare, we would walk round and show you his tomb. It lies but a mile or two away from the town, and is well-known to all antiquaries as Kit's Coty House, which name Dryasdust, being in a communicative mood, thus interprets: :-"Catigern's (vulgo Cat's) house built with Coity stones," stones of a peculiar height and size. Again, when the Saxons had possessed themselves of all England, and were, in their turn, threatened by new invaders, there was fierce fighting here in Alfred's time between them and the Danes: and yet, again, when the cause was almost lost, and these new invaders were becoming irresistible, it was in this neighbourhood that Edmund Ironsides gained his last battles. Probably, this Aylesford was then but a cluster of mud-and-straw hovels amid the woods; now, it is what we see. May we not hope for some similar progress during the next thousand years, when the. Kent of to-day shall seem to those who then live much as the Kent of Vortimer's time seems to us now? It is high noon: we shall not meet with a prettier resting-place to-day: why not stop here and dine, instead of tramping on to Maidstone? Surely it will be pleasanter to stay in yonder old inn, whose back-room looks out upon the river, than to fag on and stop at a town hotel? Let us see what bill of fare the landlord can offer. The landlord is not visible. The landlady informs us that she and her family are just about to commence operations upon "a small leg of mutton:" if we like we may join them; but there is nothing else. With hearty thanks for the invitation, we decline it, and march on. Why, there are three of us; and the idea of “ small leg of mutton" amongst three! No, we cannot dine at Aylesford. a We resume our journey. The road is now almost entirely through hop-gardens-and that man must be a very strange animal who is dis-, satisfied with such a road. At a distance, indeed, the hop-gardens are less striking than one is apt to fancy; but go close up to them, mark the twining, curling grace of the plant, and the luxurious down-dropping of the bunches, and you will find a singular richness in the scene. Most of the hops are gathered by this time, and in the gardens which we pass the pickers are not now at work. We rather rejoice that they are not; for the spectacle of human squalor and abject misery which many of them present must spoil the enjoyment of any scenery. The poor fellows are chiefly Irish: they work for little or nothing, and live upon ditto, and are yet a merry lot. But their filth, their rags, their utter want of comfort and of cleanliness-these, in the expressive language of penny-a-liners, "are more easily imagined than described." In the cholera year, down at Farleigh (near Maidstone), they died like rotten sheep. God help them! and God help, also, those poor English labourers who, not being able to live in mere rags and utter destitution, see their wages cut down by these much-enduring Celts! It is a most painful subject, this. We have seen an English labourer, a man stout enough, and with a brave cheery look, though he was evidently terribly poor, burst out into a flood of tears-tears which are so terrible when men shed them!-as, he spoke of these poor Irish: how they brought wages down, wherever they came, and how, being always somewhat dirty, even with money in their pockets, and having always a look of misery upon them, they could get charity whilst he could not. On the other hand, what could one say if one of these Irish asked alms? Could one ask him to refuse work and bread, because, by accepting them on low terms, he would injure his class in England? His answer would be simple-" I am hungry!" We have passed the Rock of Malta, and Gibraltar is in sight (the intelligent reader will perceive that we speak of two inns thus designated), at the latter of which we rest. It is a famous place for Maidstone pick-nickers, and here, at least, we feel confident of a dinner. It is a right pleasant place at which to dine, standing as it does close beside the Medway, a mile or more away from Maidstone, and with the remains of Allington Castle just opposite. We catch a waiter, and make inquiries with an eagerness to which the above-cited penny-a-liner's phrase is singularly applicable. Surely the Fates are against us. At this "Gibraltar" there is nothing left but eggs and bacon! Even so be it. We submit. We decline to trudge on to Maidstone. Eggs and bacon, after all, are very good traveller's fare, and we lived upon them once in Dartmoor for some days with no small relish. Let us make the best of it. Come hither, youthful waiter: we would fain speak to thee. Listen! Persicos odi, puer, apparatus; | But stop! You are possibly not acquainted with the writings of Quintus Horatius Flaccus ? We will translate the verses for you, with that freedom which is the birthright of a Briton: "Boy, learn from me to scorn and hate And sumptuous dinners, turtle, and white-bait! Fried eggs and bacon, bread, and bitter beer Whilst the dinner is preparing, let us see Allington Castle. We are paddled across; have a short, but agreeable interview with a young Kentish lady, who is in some way connected with the ruins; and then, fearless of "No thoroughfare" board, we enter. The place is a sad wreck: part of it is incorporated into a farmer's dwelling-house. Most of the old staircases are blocked up the walls are shaky and shattered. Where the moat was, is a stagnant ditch, all overgrown with duckweed; and the place altogether has been so altered, so rebuilt, so "improved," that it is at first difficult to make out even its outlines. However, even the "improvements" date, some of them, from the seventeenth century; and the outer walls, though half fallen, are as perfect, perhaps, as one would wish them. With a good guide, or with more antiquarian lore than we possess, a day might be spent here very profitably. Allington Castle" was, in the Saxon time, but was demolished by the Danes. When the Conqueror shared_the spoils of England among his followers, Earl Warren rebuilt it; and it was added to and alaltered, evidently, through many succeeding reigns. There is little recorded of its history, and the one name connected with it is that of Wyatt. The first of the family who possessed it was Sir Henry, who had been imprisoned by Richard III. as a Lancastrian, and whom Henry VII., on his accession, took into special favour. Sir Henry came down here to live, and in 1503 there was born to him his son Thomas. Six years after, Henry VIII. began his reign, and he continued his father's favour to Sir Henry. Thomas is known to all as a poet, and deserves to be known also as an acute and able diplomatist. He was one of Henry's ablest servants, and that is saying a great deal; for Henry VIII. "knew a man"! A true and a brave one was Sir Thomas-no mere dreamy poet, though he sang of dreams and love; but a man of keen, quick insight, broad genial nature, and unaffected piety. He was a man who, after breathing his phantasy in powerful, though rugged verses, could yet be a match for the subtlest courtier of them all, in statecraft. One merit he had not-prudence. Lavishly, carelessly generous, he was too often distressed by pecuniary difficulties. Frank and fearless in his speech, he was sent to the tower. Those who have not read his defence of himself, should lose no time in doing so. It is a piece of fine massive English prose, now rising into indignant eloquence, now overflowing with the honestest, heartiest contempt for his accusers. Even better, are his letters to his son-letters that deserve to be printed in gold, and given even now to young men by their fathers, as a precious gift. It is sad to think that they are so little cared for. The best antidote to Lord Chesterfield is Sir Thomas Wyatt. He was sent to the Tower in 1539: honourably released, he entirely left the court for awhile, came down here, and busied himself in the improvement of his estates. Henry VIII., when satisfied of his innocence, was a generous master to him. Some of his estates, of little value, were exchanged by the king for others of much greater. We read that Sir Thomas built a "seat" close to his castle, and, on the whole, he lived here, as became a gallant gentleman of Kent, in all health and happiness. If, unlike many other gallant gentlemen, he was fond of his books, and wrote verses, yet he redeemed himself in their good opinion by an honest English love of the chase. Holbein's portrait of him must be a likeness: A broad cheery face, the face of a man who would drink his tankard with the best of them, be the first in the chase, and the last to leave the board. In a poetical letter to his friend John Poins, he gives a very pleasant account of the way in which he spent his time, some few verses of which we subjoin. They are less rugged than is his wont. He has been speaking of his dislike for the trickeries of the Court, and continues: Thrice happy would his son have been, had he spent his life in the same way; but he had even more of his father's fiery spirit, was ardently and enthusiastically English, and ready to die rather than submit to what he thought wrong. To him the projected marriage between our Queen Mary and Spanish Philip seemed a match fatal to English interests. Calling his friends together, he commenced what he trusted would be a national movement. On the 25th January, 1553, he rode over into Maidstone, roused the Kentish men, and began the rebellion. On the 11th April of the same year he mounted the scaffold on Tower Hill, and died as he had lived-fearlessly, nobly. Three hundred and four years ago he left Allington Castle for the last time; and the place has been crumbling away, and its stones have been falling, and the long rank grass has grown up around it; and now it is what we see-a ruin, and one of the saddest we know. That a robbercastle on a barren hill should fall and decay seems right; but here, amidst all nature's richness and loveliness, these ruins are inexpressibly painful and affecting. The Medway flows past them, almost as silently as of old around them stand the green luxuriant woods: everything seems eloquent of life and fertility and joy— everything but these sad, grim old walls. It is like seeing an old, weather-beaten, time-worn soldier resting on his staff, whilst a group of village children play round him. You are glad to gaze on their bright young faces, glad to listen to their merry and musical laughter; but, as you turn to look upon the old man-he, who once laughed as loudly as they, and played as wildly, but is now so utterly broken and wearyyour gladness is heavily checked, and you turn away, full of reverence for the old, full of love for the young, but silent and thoughtful and sad. In some such mood, then, we leave Allington Castle, and return-oh, the bathos of the admission!-to dinner. Ah, we are miserable pedestrians this day! We are lazy, disgracefully lazy! Dinner over, we do not push on to Maidstone; we push back the table, draw our chairs to the window, "make ourselves comfortable," and continue so for an hour. . . . . Come, the last pipe is smoked: on no pretence, whatever, have we any right to a longer stay; waiter, accept these coins; gentlemen, march! The sun is setting, broad and red, behind the woods; the old castle grows dim and weird. We walk on, rapidly enough. Just as the twilight begins we are in Maidstone-a good, honest, substantial Kentish town, that has the sense to remain so, and does not endeavour to become a twopenny-halfpenny Regent-street. Maidstone gaol, Maidstone barracks we must leave unvisited, for the time grows short, and the inexorable shade of "Bradshaw," terrific in the twilight, beckons us towards the station. Not quite yet, O Shade! We were never here before, and must make the most of our time. There are many old places here, that it is quite a shame to pass so hurriedly. We must come again, and fraternize with some intelligent inhabitant. Perhaps he will be able to tell us where that "popular preacher" of old times, John Ball, was imprisoned, until Wat Tyler and his men rescued him from his loving brethren in the ministry. He will tell us, perchance, where Sir Thomas Wyatt stood, on that memorable January day, as he called the men of Kent to arms, and they thronged around him, and swore to live and die with him-an oath most bravely kept! He will show us, too, where, in later civil broils, Fairfax stormed into the place in the summer of 1648, and drove the little band of Royalists from post to post, and from house to house, till, borne down by his numbers, and by the dogged, irresistible onset of the old Puritans, they yielded. For, always, this has been a stirring place, and the man who should write a good history of it would deserve the thanks of all students. Half-an-hour yet, oh Shade! We will walk to the old palace, close by the old church-the palace of the Archbishops of Canterbury, one of whom (John Ufford) began its erection in 1348. Having fallen into decay, it was restored by Archbishop Morton-the sage counsellor of Henry VII.-in 1486. The Reformation came; Cranmer exchanged it for other property, and it then came to the Wyatt's. We have no time to go over it now, though we have heard that it is well worth while to do so. But hark! The organ is playing in the old church, and the waves of sound flow on, and out into the quiet evening air. It grows somewhat cold; a slight mist is rising: still out into the quiet evening air flow the waves of sound, and bring with them summer, and beauty, and joy. Divinest of all music, whether overwhelming the soul with thy strength, or melting us to tears with thy sweetness, sound on; for thou art the fit voice of these grand old temples, and there is scarcely a man, rough and uncouth as he may be, who, hearing thee, has not thought of prayer. Inexorable Shade, at last we obey. Cease thy frantic gesticulations. Go on: we follow thee! As we cross the bridge, the Shade grows pale : as we enter the station, paler yet. We take our tickets; lo! it has vanished' utterly! And now, along by the river, and past the little villages, we ride swiftly homeward. If our bodies are not tired our eyes are. We lean back in the carriage, and doze. Every now and then we are roused up; "Cuck-stone, Stro-o-od, Higham!" the guard shouts, sonorously, swiftly. The station lights flash upon us as we look out: a moment, and we are again on the dark road. Ere long, the stars come forth, in the full glory of an autumn night; and so, when we alight and walk slowly home, we end the day as happily as we began it-a day spent in the fields and the lanes, by the river's bank, and amid memories of the olden time. And now, friends, goodnight, and may we soon have another day together. ABOUT OUR COAL FIRE. BY THE EDITO R. to a time prior to all human tradition, that one can imagine a period when the bituminous and shining coals, making mimic Ætnas in our parlour-grate, were trees and herbage?-when its gaseous spirit was vegetable sap, and its laminated masses veined with glittering ore, green leaves, and flower-gold !-when the buried mine was a "forest primeval!" with running springs, that, being choked by moss-grown trunks, and century-old accumulations of foliage and decaying roots, stretched out into wide swamps, and by the blending of their subtle juices, perfected silently the chemistry of Nature, and so transformed the verdant sod to peat! There is not for us a more delicious half-hour | Megatherium, and other extinct animals, attest in the short circle of the winter's day, than that one of shadows and light subdued the crepusculum, may we not call it, of the hibernal season?-that breathing-time from domestic occupation, or mental toil, between the closing out of night and darkness, and the illumination of lamp or candles; that pleasant period, when the pen is laid down, the book put aside, the work left unfinished-when children take advantage of their mother's leisure to hang about her knees and ask for stories; stories of lightest materials, and yet fraught with everlasting memories, and (because they are so), if she be judicious as well as kind, everlasting morals; that dear half-hour when, with a feeling of in- Methinks, beside our own warm genial hearth, stinctive gratulation, we gather "Round about these wonders (though but coldly told in the our coal fire!" and, even if no beloved hand be language of Science) may raise imagination near to take in ours-no heart to share the retro-sufficiently to lead us by its own light, in spirit, spective thoughts, nor lips to join in the discursive talk it ever wakens-still is there a charm in it even in solitude. Memory never is busier than then, nor imagination more vivid! There is suggestion even in itself. The "faces in the fire" have before now made the subject of a volume; why not the fire itself, or its material, afford us matter for a passing gossip? Is it only in that cold, chaotic room of the Museum, where monsters sprawl in outline on blue lias, and the bones of Mastodon and to this thousand-upon-thousand-years-old scene, this work of ages, sinking still, and still accumulating God's treasure buried for the times to come! We have no means of telling how long these mineral trees flourished on earth-how long a period passed in their transition; but we have recent proof that, as the antique wood died off, another forest-generation filled its place, to add the wreckage of their own green forms to the subterranean work going on beneath them. About ten years ago, the people en gaged in working the Parkfield Colliery, near Wolverhampton, came upon an extraordinary assemblage of stumps of fossil trees, or, rather, the remains of two fossil forests, one above the other. In the upper one, seventy-three trees were counted in about a quarter of an acre; and in the lower, we were told, they appeared to be almost as numerous. But the wonders of these underground laboratories alone surpass those which their discovery has assisted to develope in human ones. Six hundred years have elapsed since the "good men" of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (as King Henry the Third styles them, in his letters patent, dated Westminster, 1st December, 1238) discovered the nature of the material by which they were surrounded; and though these letters patent gave them then and there licence, in answer to their supplication, "to dig coals and stone in the common soil of the town, without the walls thereof, in the place called the Castle Field" (during the King's pleasure), yet a hundred more passed by before sea-coal fires became general; and it is only within the last half century that the mighty uses of this boon to humanity have been almost universally tested-in the lighting of our towns and cities, in supplying those vast furnaces for the manufacture of our iron roads, and for affording fuel for the generating of steam-that great means of our manufacturing and social progress. Your practical commercial men were the first to take advantage of the discovery, and while the rest of the community were loud in condemnation of its uncleanliness, and that which custom, we presume, has quite robbed it of for us-its stench, the chimneys of dyers and brewers rolled forth dark volumes of the sea-coal smoke, and evidenced their faith in its utility. So advantageous, indeed, was it found in these trades, that fifty years later (1280), although still unused as common fuel, the wealth of the town of Newcastle had become doubled, through its traffic in the coal trade. In 1325 we find the first mention made of their foreign exportation, when a French vessel, laden with corn, arrived at that port, and exchanged her cereal cargo for a freight of coals. Still their little value, comparatively speaking, may be inferred from the fact that the Prior of Tynmouth let a colliery, called Heygrave, at Elswick, near Newcastle, in the year 1330, for five pounds per annum, and another in the East Field there for six marks a-year! Indeed, until the reign of Edward the Third, there seems to have been no attempt to render them available for domestic purposes; and when the people began to use them, Stow tells us that the nobility and gentry who resorted to London made a remonstrance to the King against what they called the "sore annoyance and danger of contagion, growing by reason of the stench of burning sea-coal"; upon which His Majesty issued a proclamation against it as a public nuisance, and coal was banished for the time from town. It was in 1358 that we find this monarch granting licences to the men of Newcastle to work coals, not only in the Castle Field, and the Castle Moor, but also allowing those "won" in the fields of Gateshead to be taken across the river Tyne, in boats, to Newcastle, on condition of their paying the usual custom of that port; and afterwards to be sent to any part of the kingdom, either by land or water, but to no place out of it, except Calais, which at this time, it will be remembered, appertained to the English crown. Yet after all this encouragement, which induced the first exportation of coals from Newcastle to the Metropolis, an aristocratic prejudice in favour of andirons, and the dusty wood-fire, extinguished for some time longer the hopes of the merchants and pit-men. The impulse had been given, however (a step taken in advance), and by the dawn of 1400, we find them generally in use, though it was the fashion with some to grumble at the innovation, even as late as the time of Charles II.; and Sir Kenelm Digby, amongst others, complaining of the effect of coal-smoke in the city, observes that, "in the spring-time, when the trees blossom, all the white flowers are sullied with a sooty blackness.." Stow tells us that in 1536, coals sold at Newcastle for 2s. 6d. per chaldron, and in London for 4s. Yet in the latter part of Elizabeth's reign, a duty of 4d. per chaldron upon all coals shipped from the Tyne, granted her by the keelmen and hostmen of Newcastle, in return for certain privileges which she had bestowed upon them, produced the sum of £10,000, an amount which the “Richmond shilling" (said to have originated in this gift to the crown) had nearly doubled at the beginning of the present century. We do not hear of a direct duty on coals till after the great fire of London, when Charles the First levied certain taxes on the article, for the purpose of assisting to defray the expense of rebuilding St. Paul's, and fifty parish churches in the city. But it is to be presumed that the proceeds of this impost formed too weighty an item in the revenue to be forgotten in the hereafter, and it was claimed by Charles the Second as a perquisite of the crown, and appropriated to the use of Charles Lennox, first Duke of Richmond, his natural son by Louise Querouaille, and his heirs for ever, and continued in the Richmond family until 1800, when the Government woke up to the enormity and injustice of the transaction, and purchased the grant, by the annual payment of £19,000-or nearly half a million of money, its equivalent-the increase of the coal trade, up to that period, having raised its value per annum to this amount. From this estimation, we may judge what the "Richmond shilling" would be worth at present, when on an average we find that above 8,500,000 tons are shipped annually from the Tyne for London, and other British ports; besides which, Russia, France, Holland, and other European countries, deal largely with us in this article. The application of steam to almost every branch of manufacture, it use in nautical propulsion, and as a means of locomotion, has rendered the produce of our coal mines too necessary |