(one hundred and fifty giant vessels, with nineteen
thousand soldiers, eight thousand sailors,
two hundred galley slaves, and two thousand
brass cannon) set sail towards England. Not
one half of the vessels ever returned to Spain.
East Tilbury Church lost its tower at the south-
west angle, from the battering of the Dutch
vessels when they burnt our fleet in the Medway
—a shame and disgrace that required much
blood to wipe out. The ancient ferry was at
Tilbury, and here Claudius is supposed to have
crossed the Thames to follow the Britons into
Kent. The old Roman road, at Higham Causeway,
can still be traced. At Little Thurrock,
close by Tilbury, there is a field in which are
curious passages and caverns cut in the chalk.
Some people call them "Dane's Holes," and
think they were places of retreat; others term
them Cynobelin's gold mines; while a few
believe them to have been ancient British
granaries. West Tilbury (twenty-four miles
from London) has a church with a wooden
spire, the tower having fallen from the blows of
time or of Dutch cannon. St. Chad, a Saxon
bishop, mentioned by the Venerable Bede, who
converted the Saxons of Essex in 630, had his
episcopal see here. Gathering together a flock
of the servants of Christ, he taught them to
observe the discipline of a regular life, as far
as those rude people were then capable.

A coast of low sandy downs, trenched with
water-courses, and resounding with the booms
of heavy guns—that is Shoeburyness, where the
great guns are tried and the armour-plates
tested. There are the furrows of a Danish
camp round the headland (take care of the
cannon-balls), and Roman arms have been also
found hard by, so Romans must have camped
near where our Artillery do now. There is an
old Essex tradition that under Maplin sands lies
buried an ancient city. From the headland of
Shoeburyness to beyond St. Osyth's Point the
coast is a dreary succession of low, flat, aguish
marshes, broad sandy shoals or flat swamps,
and green seaweed-blackened cliffs, within the
sea wall of mournful sandy plains, haunted
by sea-fowl and lined by the creeks of the
Blackwater. Mr. Walcott has painted a picture
of this part of Essex, which is quite a bit of
Ruysdael in words. "Essex," he says, "is
like a large ship at anchor; there is a wild
misty light in the neutral-tinted landscape; a
silent repose in those wide motionless plains,
dreary and spacious, ever struggling with the
ocean for existence (land and sea of one colour),
subject to inundations by waves, which are
again constrained by man to retire, dykes, and
walls, and whistling reeds, and the only sign of
habitation is—

A lonely cottage, where we see,
Stretched far and wide, the waste enormous marsh,
Where, from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenched waters race from sky to sky."

Braintree, to which the crow next skims, was
a great station for pilgrims bound, in the time
of Erasmus, to the shrine of our Lady of
Walsingham, in Norfolk. No doubt the ordinary
professional pilgrim was rather a scurvy,
thievish, lying fellow; but amongst the devout
bands were people of all ranks and classes, and
even Henry the Eighth, when young, plodded
there barefoot from Bursham.

CHOPS.

A WELL-KNOWN writer on the art of cooking
begins a treatise on broiling with a somewhat
apposite parable. He supposes Antonio to
have met his friend Bassanio on the Rialto, or
somewhere else in the city, and in the fulness
of his heart to have asked him home to dine,
at Belmont Villa. Just, however, as the cab
drives up to the door, it suddenly strikes him
that Portia having dined with the youngsters
in the nursery, at two o'clock, it is just possible
that the gastronomical resources of the
establishment are at a low ebb, and that a cold
mutton bone is hardly the thing to put before
a guest, who behaved as handsomely as
Bassanio did when Antonio got into the unhappy
scrape with the Jews. The first greetings over,
a secret council, composed of Antonio, Portia
and Nerissa, is held in the passage to consider
what they can scramble together for dinner.
Poor Portia is ready to cry with vexation,
Nerissa calls forth her most acid expression of
countenance, and at last the unhappy Antonio
is petrified by hearing that it is absolutely
impossible to give their guest anything for dinner
but—chops. There is nothing for it, therefore,
but to return to poor Bassanio, who is fidgetting
hungrily on the drawing-room sofa, and
murmur something in his ear to the effect that
Portia is unhappily in delicate health—indeed,
she never quite recovered from the fright that
horrid Jew gave her, that Nerissa's temper is
none of the sweetest, and that the neighbourhood
is singularly ill-supplied with good
butchers. So Bassanio is taken up to the
best bedroom to wash his hands, the largest-
wheeled hansom on the rank is brought to
the door, and in twenty minutes more the two
friends are comfortably seated in the cosiest
box in the coffee-room of the Cock, in Fleet-
street. Antonio has entirely regained his
equanimity, and answers the queries of the head
waiter, to whom they were both well-known
in their bachelor days, by ordering—chops,
the bare mention of which during the proceedings
of the domestic conclave had frozen the
very marrow in Antonio's bones, and curdled
every drop of blood in his veins.

To a foreigner, Antonio's behaviour would
have appeared in the highest degree absurdly
inconsistent; but to ourselves it presents
nothing either absurd or anomalous. The chop,
as we all know, is the alpha and the omega, the
first and the last, the best and the worst of
British dishes.

Who that has ever been a bachelor, or a
sojourner at the sea-side, does not know the
lodging-house chop—the drab, thin, leathery,
tasteless, greasy morsel of flesh, fried in its
own fat in a dirty frying-pan, and reminding