typical or figurative manner. Besides the
seven days of the week, there were Jewish
feasts or festivals connected with a period
of seven weeks; seven times seven years
constituted a jubilee or period of rejoicing;
the candlestick of Moses had seven
branches, &c. Then there are the many
passages relating in various ways, and
at different eras in the Biblical narrative,
to the Seven Churches of Asia, the
Seven Wise Men, the Seven Gifts of the
Holy Ghost, the Seventh Day of the
Seventh Month, the freeing of bondmen in
the Seventh Year, the Seven Mysterious
Seals, the Seven Symbolical Trumpets, the
Seven Heads of the Dragon, the Seven
Angels, the Seven Witnesses, &c. The
Roman Catholic Church is rich in
Number Seven, in doctrine and in ritual.
There are the Seven Deadly Sins, the
Seven Sacraments, the Seven Canonical
Hours, the Seven Joys and Seven Sorrows
of the Virgin Mary, and the Seven
Penitential Psalms. The canonical hours
here mentioned are the times fixed for
divine service in the churches; they divide
the ecclesiastical day into seven parts; and
besides having a mystical relation to
certain sacred occurrences, they are
regarded as symbolising the seven days of
creation, the seven times a day that the
just man falls, the seven graces of the Holy
Spirit, the seven divisions of the Lord's
Prayer, and other applications of Number
Seven. There is in Lambeth Palace
library a manuscript about four
centuries old, in which the seven hours are
connected with the seven periods of man's
life, as follows: morning, infancy;
midmorrow, childhood; undern, school age;
midday, the knightly age; nones or high
noon, the kingly age; midovernoon, elderly;
evensong, declining. It is interesting to
compare this with Shakespeare's Seven
Ages of Man, as depicted by melancholy
Jacques in As You Like It. There is a
still older MS. illuminated in an elaborate
manner. It represents a wheel cut into
seven rays, and composed of seven concentric
cordons, which with the rays form seven
times seven compartments; seven of these
compartments contain the Seven Petitions
of the Lord's Prayer; seven others, the
Seven Sacraments; seven others, the Seven
Spiritual Arms of Justice; seven others, the
Seven Works of Mercy; seven others, the
Seven Virtues; seven others, the Seven
Deadly Sins; and the last seven, the Seven
Gifts of the Holy Ghost—all beautifully
written and painted.

Departing from these serious matters,
we find Number Seven in favour in all
sorts of mundane and social affairs. There
were the Seven Stones of the Arabs, and
the Seven Tripods of Agamemnon. There
were the Seven Wonders of the World,
and the Seven Hills on which more than
one celebrated city is said to be built.
There were the Seven Planets and the
Seven Stars—the former, cruelly
disturbed in number and put out of joint by
modern astronomical discoveries; the latter,
applicable either to the seven principal
stars in Orion, or to those in the Great
Bear, or to the beautiful little Pleiades.
There were the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,
whose sound nap lasted two hundred and
twenty-nine years, and who have had
companions in the Seven Mohammedan Sleepers,
and the Seven Sleepers of the North. We
are told that there are seven liberal arts,
seven senses, seven notes in music, and
seven colours in the rainbow, neither more
nor less. For some special inquiries, there
is a jury of seven matrons. There used to
be, more frequently than at present, a period
of seven years' apprenticeship; and many a
malefactor has had occasion to know that
seven years was a frequent duration for a
sentence of transportation. Some years ago,
there was a Septuagenarian Club proposed,
in which every member was to be seven
times ten years old or upwards: all young
fellows between sixty-five and seventy
entering it simply as cadets. Seven Oaks
have, as we know, given a name to a pleasant
place in Kent; and Dean Stanley describes
seven oaks standing in a line, at a particular
spot in Palestine, associated in the minds
of the natives with a very strange legend.
When Cain (the legend runs) killed his
brother Abel, he was punished by being
compelled to carry the dead body during
the long period of five hundred years, and to
bury it in this spot; he planted his staff to
mark the spot, and out of this staff grew
up the seven oak trees.

Who can tell us anything about the
Seven Sisters; the name of seven elm trees
at Tottenham, which have also given their
name to the road from thence to Upper
Holloway? In Bedwell's History of Tottenham,
written nearly two hundred and forty
years ago, he describes Page-green, by the
side of the high road at that village, and a
group of seven elm-trees in a circle, with a
walnut-tree in the centre. He says: "This
tree hath this many yeares stod there, and
it is observed yearely to live and beare
leavs, and yet to stand at a stay, that is, to