I her earnings were their sole support. At such | blue sky over it without a speck of cloud: times he had often urged her to try to gain a am sure I have seen something of this somelittle by sitting as a model for artists, but she where or other." had always managed to turn him from this idea, having been always on these occasions fortunately, or providentially, pretty well supplied with work from the warehouse. But there was one part of her conversation which sank deep into my mind, though at the time it might not seem to have possessed a significance proportioned to the impression it produced. "Yet I seem to remember somewhere or other that is not Paris," said she, after bringing her story up to the time of our meeting. "It may be some dream of early childhood, or an idea drawn from some picture I may have seen long long ago; but sometimes when I am at work I sit trying and trying to distinguish between the real and the unreal in my early recollections. I try to find a beginning to these flitting visionsI try to find an end to them, but all in vain. There is something that I cannot understand. But stay!......there it is......gone again! How clearly it came upon me just now! It is many years since I have seen it so clearly." "Seen what, Stephanie?" "That face. I have sometimes asked my mother if I ever had a brother, but she always wept so at such times, that I never pressed the question. I have sometimes asked my father, but he has always met the question with such angry words and looks, thanking heaven for giving him no more than one burden, that I have never been able to pursue the inquiry with him either. But there is a face in my early recollections that I cannot account for. It comes back upon me most fitfully, but ever as I grow older it seems to grow older too, till as I saw it but this moment it seemed looking on me with the matured love of a manly brother." "What other recollections haunt you besides this?" "None very striking certainly, and yet I often wonder where it can have been that I have seen so many oranges growing, and so many little green lizards creeping, or basking in a brighter sunlight than I ever see in Paris. Then too, there is a rolling river, and yet it is not the Seine; and then I remember a little chapel among the oranges-a very little one, and an altar in it, and some one holding me up to kiss the picture of a beautiful saint over the altar; at least it seems to me that I recollect all this; and yet sometimes it is all so dim and unreal that perhaps it is only the lingering impression of some story that my mother may have told me when I was very young. Are you haunted by any such memories ?"" "None that I cannot account for." "That reminds me too," cried Stephanie, "I am sure I have seen the sea. When I am unhappy my dreams are full of great mountains of waters moving onwards for ever; and when I am happy, I sometimes dream of a great plain of crystal, with no pathway upon it, and a bright THE LAST NIGHT. Within the old familiar room, We sped the wine from hand to hand, And strove to speak of common things, And forced our tongues from whisperings Which might have left us all unmanned. Broad jest and merry tale went round Old jests, old tales, but hailed by shout And silence close upon the room- A dirge succeed our boisterous glee The empty spaces where had been The dead man's chair, the ancient screen; And veiled the blankness of the wall. Night settled: silence fell at last. Our thoughts at freedom backward flew ; A dead voice filled the void of sound, The kindly heart and look and tone, Each other's shadowy hands we pressed; A shimmering radiance swept the lawn With waving shadows, quivering light; And momently the eastern night Grew pallid towards a moonlight-dawn. Through open windows crept a sound Of low-breathed trebles: side by side We watched two sombre figures glide Like ghosts athwart the dappled ground. We rose and joined them. Cold and still The large moon lightened half the sky, Slant-silvering the elm-trees by, And bringing near the white-sailed mill. "Unthankful. Oh! the days gone by! "Prove a wild dream! Oh! she would learn Her passion sank in sobs: a calm In Gilead. Thus the night drew on ; The night slid by; the shadows fell O'er all the garden, as the moon Sank slowly from her highest noon; And so in shade we said "Farewell." J. A. "MOTHER AND CHILD ARE DOING WELL." BY MRS. ABDY. 'Tis a simple phrase, yet methinks 'tis fraught Will those, now claiming our tender care, The love of a Mother is not shown By gentle, endearing words alone : If example fail to lend its aid; "Tis sad when a Mother's wishes roam From her quiet hearth and her peaceful home : 'Tis sad on the lot of a child to dwell, Whose Mother wearies in doing well. But a Mother loving, and firm, and kind, The roving thoughts, and the wayward will- But I could not thus my praise bestow, MOONLIGHT. BY ADA TREVANION. The misty landscape fades upon the sight, Across the level ocean in the East The pearl hues grow; and the dark mountain side And solemn woods, whose birds their songs have ceased, Rise from the dusk, bathed in an argent tide. And now a gentle vision comes to me, While all is hushed, and witching dreams have power; I see a form that I may never see At any time but at the moonlight hour. She hath a mournful face most angel fair, I sit with half-closed eyes, and dream, and dream All things which are around me and above Ramsgate, 1860. THE CHARTER HOUSE: (A Sketch of Historical London), BY GODFREY TURNER. The pensioners on the bounty of Thomas Sutton of pious memory, are subject to strict sumptuary laws, whereof the following will speak in instance-" None to wear weapon, long hair, coloured boots, spurs, or coloured shoes, feathers in their hats, or any ruffianlike or unseemly apparel, but such as becomes hospitalmen to wear." It is painfully difficult to imagine what might be the consequence if one of those old gentleman should turn out some fine morning in the garb of an ancient swaggerer. There is extant among the heirlooms of my family, a portrait of a Poor Brother of the Charter House, before he came to be a Poor Brother. His appearance in effigy is what might be called dandified; though certainly not in the least like that described above. He wears no weapon, though attired in the uniform of the City Artillery Company. As to his hair, it is in the fashion attributed to Brutus, on the hypothesis that any noble Roman of that name wore his hair in the fashion of a haycock; and as to my relation's boots, they do not appear at all in this portrait, which is a half-length, but I think there can be no reasonable doubt of their being well blacked and polished; and as to his hat, it is a cocked one, and is tucked, like a waiter's napkin, under my relation's left-arm, and is as innocent of feathers as a newly-hatched alligator; and as to his apparel generally, it is not by any means ruffianlike, according to the conventional ideas of integumentary ruffianism, but is rather calculated to impress a beholder with the belief that my relation would just as soon have clad himself in the airy costume of a South Sea Islander, as in the quaintly truculent fancy-dress interdicted by the authorities of the Charter House. You know as much, very likely, of that honoured precinct as I can pretend to tell you. You have a sort of impression that Nicholas Hopkins was "a monk of the Chartreux," and you care to settle the point in your mind for the sake only of a fine scene of Shakspeare's. You know that the existing charity is a mere child in arms, compared with the original Charter House, though it has maintained its present condition for two centuries and a half; that the place was a princely residence formerly, and a convent before that, and a plague-pit before that, coming to be an almshouse and school in the reign of King James the First; that it was founded as such by Thomas Sutton, citizen and girdler; that by the benevolent founder's direction, the eighty pensioners ought to be (and, let me add, in defiance of those injurious italics, which I find repeated by so many London historians, are) decayed * gentlemen, merchants, and soldiers; that of the forty-four youths who are lodged, boarded, and taught, under provisions of the same endowment, twenty-nine are sent to the Universities, with each an allowance of twenty pounds a year for eight years, while the rest are apprenticed to suitable trades; that there are nine ecclesiastical preferments in the patronage of this hospital, all to be bestowed on Carthusian scholars; and that it may possibly be a good thing to be acquainted with a governor whose appointment of a pensioner or a pupil is next in rotation. You know, too, that the closing chapters of "The Newcomes owe very much of their charm to the author's love of the locality and to his characteristic appreciation of its assemblage of boyhood and old age. You recollect how the simple hearted Christian soldier and gentleman answered to the Spectre's call, amid the scenes of his rosy youth, and said, as he had said in that fresh morning time, "I am here." And you have, alas for me! read Washington Irving, You, good reader, Whig or Tory, English or American, have felt it a pleasure and privilege to be admitted to the recesses of that gracefully conservative mind. In short, I can tell you no new facts about the Charter House, nor moralize the old ones into any new similes. Why should I? What in the whole wide world of births, deaths, and marriages-what in the annals of politics and prize-fights-what in the name of novelty is new? Tell me where is Fancy bred now-a-days? Where is the fountain of new and interesting fact? I have looked into Noorthonck, on the earnest recommendation of Mr. William Hone, who tells me, in that perennially interesting "Year Book" of his, that Noorthonck may be deemed the best historian of London," and I have certainly found nothing whatever in Noorthonck that is either new or suggestive anent the Charter House. It may be that Hone was thinking of Maitland, who has something more to say, "but not much, on the subject; or of Stow who has a good deal, and of the right sort. There are plates in Stow and Maitland both, which represent the whole of the Charter House in a bird's-eye view. Perhaps the picture thus afforded us is quite singular, in that it represents so large an extent of buildings in London at a distant date, exactly as the pile would be represented now; for, though much has been re *It appears on the records of the Charter House that Henry Siddons was bound over to his uncle, John Phillip Kemble, "to learn the histrionic art and mystery.” moved, nothing has been changed since the carliest of these two historians made his famous "Survey." But there is no need to be beholden to Noorthonck, or to Stow or Maitland either. The exhaustive volumes of Charles Knight have appeared since Hone paid his gratuitous compliment to the dry and meagre historian of 1773. Nay, there is yet a work which will be found to excel any and all of these, in the information it contains respecting the Charter House. That work is no other than the Charter House itself. As a discriminative critic would say, "it will repay perusal." Divided into three books, each relating to a distinct epoch, the history is writ in solid brick and stone, which all who choose may study. It is thrown freely open by its custodians; and there are few such records worthies to be read and re-read by the city peripatetic. that his fame in the law seems a thing scarcely to be wondered at. A grant of the property had been made to the yeoman and the groom of the King's "hails and tents ;" and Sir Edward prevailed on these very simple persons to give up their right to him for an annuity of £10 a piece. From my Lord North, the Charter House and its lands passed to Sir Thomas Audley--not exactly on the same terms, we may imagine, as those above named. With Sir Thomas Audley's daughter the whole went to Thomas Duke of Norfolk, the same that was beheaded by Queen Elizabeth, for treasons manifold and dire. The confiscation of the ducal estates being remitted, as we have seen, this ground of the Charter House, and all the edifices thereon, remained in possession of the Howard family; and in the service of that family was a young man of great intellectual promise, named Thomas Sutton. It was not Of all the odd angles of London, that north- by a hidden course of money-grubbing, but by west angle of Charter House Square, in which the exercise of the highest mental power, and the entrance to the Charter House is situate, is by a career of conspicuous brightness, that this the oddest on the map of my cockney experience; gentleman advanced himself to be unquesand of all the trim oases in the dirty deserts of tionably the richest merchant of his time. I metropolitan slum-life, Charter House Square like to believe the best of some men, and the itself is the very trimmest. The quaint houses worst of others; and I make a point of believing which bound it on three sides bespeak a wise that this Sutton was offered a peerage by James accommodation of old-fashioned ways and modern on condition that he would make Prince Charles improvements. They resemble old people who his sole heir; and that he chose rather to leave have cheerfully kept pace with the time, but his worldly wealth in a righteous and charitable have not sacrificed their prescriptive venerable-cause, and to remain till death, and after death ness. It is a hale old age; a lusty winter, frosty but kindly. Those carved doorways are youthful in the brightness of their paint; those curtained windows tell of a quiet, well-to-do air of youthfulness within. Youthful too, and something beside, are the faces which now and then come to those windows, and peep out upon the green enclosure of the squares. It is the story of the Charter House, as written in its walls and chambers, that I now propose to glance at; and albeit I can promise to supply no learned annotations, I will ask the reader to accompany me: The gates by which we enter the domain of the Charter House is in the architecture, I observe, of Henry VIII. There is the badge of the Dukes of Norfolk on either post. Alas! "the Howard's lion fell," in a succeeding reign, less gloriously than at Flodden; and it was by an act of more than Royal grace, and more than Elizabethan clemency, that the Virgin Queen forbore to seize the estates of the traitor whose life was justly forfeited. The gate beyond, which was the outer gate of the monastery, stands in remembrance of the last monastic days. Prior Houghton and other ecclesiastics, who refused to acknowledge the Protestant King's supremacy, were executed at Tyburn, and their quarters set over divers gates of the city, one part of Houghton's body being left to putrefy above the gate of his own convent. The end of religious houses in England was then at hand. When this one sank, Sir Edward North, afterwards Lord North, "a famous lawyer," obtained the land so cheaply in the hearts of many grateful generations, plain Thomas Sutton. It is a strange circumstance that he should be dubbed "Sir" Thomas, in Washington Irving's delightful essay, "London Antiques." I can find nowhere the authority for thus entitling him, and must conclude that the genial American was paying too courtly a deference to English institutions. One would think that on Sutton's tomb, at all events, the monosyllabic dignity would find place, were there warrant for it, knightly or baronetal. But on that highly decorated mausoleum, with all its Dutch display of symbolical devices, the honest name of Thomas Sutton appears, without so much as the plainest handle of any sort or kind. Sir Walter Manny, Lord of Hainault, who founded the monastery of the Chartreux as early as 1371, was a very different gentleman. He, like Sutton, however, personified all that was noble and generous in the spirit of his age; and perhaps, after all, it is not so much between the natures of the men, as between the characters of a warlike and a peaceful time, that the true contrast lies. In Froissart there is a very glowing account of Sir Walter, who came to England in the train of Philippa of Hainault, and liked the country so well that he stayed in it. Very few of his countrymen who attended the fair princess did the like, or remained long after her marriage with Edward III. Let us think kindly of the chivalric, pious, and tender Lord of Hainault, who abode long in our land, to do brave and virtuous deeds, and whose bones rest peaceably under these cloisters. Before Sir Walter Manny built the Chartreux, thou, too, Elizabeth Jeffkins, who wast matron of the school, and wast called " Mother," light lie the earth upon thee, and be thy familiar title written as the choicest of epitaphs on hearts that shall yet wax old. this part of London was open ground. In the middle of the fourteenth century, a plague spread itself over great part of England, and raged in London with such fury that, according to Stow, "scarce the tenth person of all sorts was left alive." Ralph Stratford, Bishop of London, purchased a plot of ground near Smithfield, that was known as "no man's land." For no man, nor woman either, was this ground bought by good Bishop Stratford; but for those who had been men and women once, and, rest their souls, were dead of the plague. Fifty thousand of them were buried here in the course of a twelvemonth. The Friary cart of St. John's had little rest of its wheels in all that time. Twenty years or more after the pestilence, Sir Walter, in conjunction with Simon Ludbury, who had then succeeded Ralph Stratford as Bishop of London, founded a convent for monks of the Carthusian order, a branch of the Benedictine. Perhaps the site was chosen because of its peculiarly happy and convenient associations, the monks being enabled to gratify their holy desires by becoming a set of living tombstones. Here for two centuries, or nearly, did they continue to mortify, leaving a blank for the history of their monastic establishment, until called into sudden and disagreeable prominence by the Protestant bluffness of the Tudor Blue-pel his absence. It is to be observed, by the way, beard. The buildings which are now inhabited by the Poor Brethren are, as may be supposed, the latest architectural branch of the Charter House. Our guide (one of the servants of the hospital) informs us that they were refaced in 1842. But the old form was preserved intact. This portion belongs purely to the time of James; and the school, chapel, dining-hall, and kitchen, together with sundry chambers attached to them, are a mixture of the earlier periods, that of Henry VIII. or Edward VI. predominating largely over the Gothic remains. These are to be traced in some interior portions, but are more conspicuous in the outer walls and cloisters. The dining-hall is Gothic, and the kitchen is yet more primitive in its features. There is a fixed dietary for the Poor Brethren. It is a Tuesday that we have chosen for our visit, and five shoulders of mutton, you observe, are revolving on two spits, whence it will at once appear that Tuesday is roast mutton day. The kitchen does not lack the homely old axiom, "Waste not, want not"-plainly inscribed for the perpetual edification of cooks. But it will strike the visitor as a rather odd circumstance that this exhortation to thrift appears on a gilt turtle-shell. The little chapel, which contains the monument of the founder, Thomas Sutton, is picturesque in its old panelling, carving, and rich colours. Before quitting it, we will take note of a monument erected by the scholars to a beloved second-master, whose sculptured profile betokens a fine mind and a gentle disposition. Cari desiderio capitis Oliveri Walford, etc.; in truth, the face of that mild teacher seems one to be held in affectionate remembrance. And A grave, full-length portrait of Sutton adorns the refectory, and shows the good man to have been the very being we should have chosen to fancy him. If I were so well off as to be a Poor Brother, I would not wish to accept my bounty in the presence of a nobler benefactor. As we have already noticed, this dining-hall belongs partly to the ancient remains of the Chartreux. It is just such a chamber as Mr. Louis Haghe would reproduce to admiration in one of his richly-shadowed pictures. The aspect of the hall, on this occasion of our viewing it, is interesting. The event of the day is at hand. Five snow-white cloths are spread on five long tables, and, by a slight anticipative reach of imagination, we already see the five shoulders of mutton, safely dished and smoking, in the ample hall. Some of the Poor Brothers are too old and weak to take their places at the board which is here spread for their entertainment; but the majority will meet at commons, and will talk, perhaps, of more than one crony, whose infirmities have so increased as to com that a wise rule, fixing the lowest term of years at which a pensioner shall be admitted, is not without its wiser exception-None under fifty shall enter, "unless maimed in war." Let us leave the ancient brotherhood to their thankful enjoyment of creature comforts, in a retreat hallowed by the venerable presence of age and of sacred poverty. WINTER. BY JAMES EDMESTON. Beyond the icy northern deep Arm'd by resistless spells. The bright but powerless sun from far She waves her mighty wand, and, lo! The mad, ungovernable sea Shrinks from her gaze, and turns to stone; G |