Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal the emptiness which age descries."

Even the trees at Beaconsfield had their lesson for the aged poet. He told a correspondent, however, that he had not much joy in wandering through his woods, because he found the trees as bare and withered as himself, with this difference

"That shortly they shall flourish and wax green,
But I still old and withered must be seen,
Yet if vain thoughts fall, like their leaves away,
The nobler part improves with that decay."

As the inevitable end drew near the poet bought a small house at Coleshill, the hamlet where he was born, to placate his poetic sentiment that "a stag, when he is hunted, and near spent, always returns home." But it was in his manor house of Hall Barn at Beaconsfield, and not at Coleshill, that Waller died. And there, in a corner of the churchyard, beneath a lusty tree, he was laid to rest at last. His massive monument, a large sarcophagus of white marble with four urns on a central pyramid, wears well. More than two centuries have passed since it was reared over the remains of Sacharissa's

lover, and it bids fair to outlive other centuries yet. Unfortunately his contention that

""Tis fit the English reader should be told,

In his own language, what this tomb does hold,"

has not been respected in the case of his own memorial. Each of the inscriptions on the four sides of the monument is couched in Latin, so that it is only one here and there of the visitors to Beaconsfield who learns how high was the poetic fame of Waller at the time of his death.

How striking is the contrast between the copious and sonorous Latin on Waller's tomb and the brief and simple English of the tablet to Edmund Burke! The latter must be sought inside the church, on the wall of the south aisle, and near the pew where the great publicist used to worship. That this memorial is so unpretentious, that, in fact, this retired church should have been chosen for the honour of Burke's resting-place, was in obedient harmony with the illustrious statesman's own wishes. When a young man he had expressed a preference for "the southern corner of a country churchyard as his place of rest, desiderating, however, that his remains should " mingle with kindred dust; " and as death drew nigh he stipulated in his will

for a simple funeral, adding, "I desire that no monument beyond a middle-sized tablet, with a small and simple inscription on the church

wall, or on the flag-stone, be erected. I say

this," he concluded, "because I know the partial kindness to me

of some of my friends; but I have had, in my lifetime, but too

much noise and

compliment."

Burke was thirty-eight years

old when he made Beaconsfield his country home. The purchase of Grego

ries, the name of his estate, was made from the Waller manor, and the actual transaction is said to have taken place in the poet's mansion. Various explanations have been offered