places within the county of York, on divers
occasions, in the sixteenth year of King Richard
the Second's reign, after the Conquest, which
same rhyme follows in these words:

Before the reader tries to dissect the corpus of
this quaint old song, and divine the cause of its
creation, we must remark the poetical exuberance
which insists that the two first lines shall rhyme
together in the slip-slop fashion peculiar to bucolic
sing-song, and that the third line shall entice an
answer on its last syllable from that of the third
line of the adjoining stanza.

It is also as well to remember that Beverley,
one of the scenes of the outrage, enjoyed a
reputation even at that early period for its rhymes
and its music. One of the earliest charters to
the town during the Heptarchy, ran in these
expansively liberal terms:

As free make I thee
As heart can think, and eye can see.

And in the Church of St. Mary of Beverley there
is a pillar which was furnished by the musicians
of the neighbourhood, whose munificence was
recorded by the inscription, "This pillar made
the Minstrels;" and, if I mistake not, a plaster
cast of "this pillar" is to be found at the Crystal
Palace.

I cannot undertake to give the precise. and
exact meaning, word for word, of this purely
rustic Marseillaise: it was a local riot-song, I take
it, with allusions to matters exclusively belonging
to the soken, district, or parish, where it was
composed and sung; but the general interpretation
is, as I fancy, this: Certain friars had been
calumniating the poor people; "this frers, and
other ordres"—i.e. these friars and other orders,
each one holding up the other in wrong and
right, so that in return the common folk vow
that in peace or war they will maintain their
neighbours. "Every one among us is free to
come and go, I can assure you," but "neither
Hobb nor John shall calumniate us. 'Twere
unkind to suffer calumny either from rich or
poor, small or great." And in this resistance
they are determined to stand, wherever they be,
for what is done, to one is done to all.

CASTLES IN THE SEA.

IT is many years ago—perhaps more than
I care to name—since I first saw that
amphibious, dripping, flopping performance at the
Polytechnic Institution, which was intended to
enlighten the visitors upon the manners and
customs of divers and mermaids. I had the
honour of being introduced to the principal
performer. I remember the show-diver as well as
if it was only yesterday: a middle-aged, moody
man, who presented the appearance of a sulky
actor heartily tired of his monotonous work,
or a worn-out, jaded pedestrian, who had got
about half way through a thousand miles in a
thousand successive hours. As he sat upon a
short stool in a dark corner of the building,
between the periods of his immersions, I felt
that he was brooding over the uselessness of his
life, and my young heart offered him its
unsophisticated sympathy.

"How would. you like to be pitted agen an
electrical eel?" he asked.

"Not at all, sir," I answered.

"Very well, then," he returned, "that's what
they're doing with me. They're advertising me
agen that brute at the Adelaide Gallery."

"Indeed, sir," I said.

"I don't like it," he continued, "and I wish
I could get out of it."

Many months after this, I visited the same
place again; and yet I found him sitting on
his stool, as if he had never moved from the
moment I had left him. I came this time with
a party of youths from the academy where I
was being educated, headed by our master, who
taught us science amongst the extras, and
lectured us on certain days, in public places, like
the Polytechnic, under some arrangement which
he had made with the proprietors. I saw
my friend the diver come forward in a
curious, puffy dress, with his head done up in
a goggle-eyed metal helmet, like a giant in the
pantomime. When he rolled slowly and clumsily
over the edge of the pond-basin into the
water, like an unwieldy fish, there were many
of the children who thought he was a bogie, and
especially the boy who stood next, to me, whom
I tried to comfort by telling him that I knew
the performer.

After the usual pennies had been thrown into
the pond, and the diver had brought them up
above the surface, and had tapped them on the
top of his helmet, like an intelligent whale that
had just learnt some juggling trick with coins,
and was rather proud of it, our master took us
aside, and began the lecture of the afternoon
upon diving, and diving bells.

He told us how Aristotle had mentioned
divers' kettles, and Lord Bacon divers' bells,
and how the first-known use was made of them
by two Greeks at Toledo, in 1538, before the