your privileges but poorly. You are master of
waters flowing at this moment, perhaps in the
river of Judæa, or floating in clouds over some
spicy island of the tropics, bound hither after
many changes. There are lilies and violets
ordered for you in millions, acres of sunshine
in daily instalments, and dew nightly in
proportion. There are throats to be tuned with
song, and wings to be painted with red and
gold, blue and yellow, thousands of them, and
all tributary to you. Your corn is ordered to
be sheathed in silk and lifted high to the sun.
Your grain is to be duly bearded and stemmed.
There is perfume distilling for your clover, and
juices for your grasses and fruit. Ice will be
here for your wine, shade for your refreshment
at noon, breezes, showers, and snow-flakes, all
in their season, and all " deeded to you for forty
dollars the acre." Gods ! what a copyhold of
property for a fallen world !"

Then he commends brook and bridge, old
trees, a portly and venerable toad, a spoilt
family of squirrels, a pair of Phœbe birds, and
a merry Bob o' Lincoln, and " in the shady
depths of a small glen, among the wild flowers
and music, the music of the brook bubbling
over rocky steps, a spot sacred to love and
memory."

This was the grave of an infant daughter, of
whom he wrote:

     A child that we have loved is gone to heaven,
     And by this gate of flowers she pass'd away.

In the American sense Mr. Willis was not an
earnest man. He espoused no ism. He was a
tasteful literary man, with such genius as our
quotations show. His heart was given to
his family and friends, though he evinced some
mild attachment for the union in the time of
the war.

Probably the following is what his countrymen
would call the most " radical " of all the
prose or poetry he has written:

     The shadows lay along Broadway,
          'Twas near the twilight tide,
     And slowly there a lady fair
          Was walking in her pride.
     Alone walk'd she, but viewlessly
          Walk'd spirits by her side.

     Peace charm'd the street beneath her feet,
          And honour charm'd the air,
     And all astir look'd kind on her,
          And call'd her good and fair ;
     For all God ever gave to her
          She kept with chary care.

     She kept with care her beauties rare
          From lovers warm and true,
     For her heart was cold to all but gold,
          And the rich came not to woo.
     But honour'd well are charms to sell,
          If priests the selling do.

     Now walking there was one more fair,
          A slight girl, lily-pale,
     And she had unseen company
          To make the spirit quail.
     'Twixt want and scorn she walked forlorn,
          And nothing could avail ;

     No mercy now can clear her brow,
          For this world's peace to pray :
     For as love's wild prayer dissolved in air,
          Her woman's heart gave way.
     But the sin, forgiven by Christ in heaven,
          By man is curst alway.

The last twenty years of Mr. Willis's life were
spent in an earnest fight to keep death from his
door. In spite of bleeding lungs and other
alarming consumptive symptoms, he succeeded,
by living in country air, by horseback exercise,
and general hygienic caution and precaution,
in keeping alive, and much of the time at work,
for the last third part of his threescore years.

OLD STORIES RE-TOLD.

THE BURDETT RIOTS.

A STRANGER seated in the gallery of the
House of Commons, and looking down on the
rival benches any night between 1807 and 1835,
would have observed, conspicuous in the van of
the Liberal party, a tall, thin country gentleman,
with a loose blue-tail coat and gilt buttons, a
very long buff kerseymere waistcoat, and light-
coloured knee-breeches. This gentleman (a
fox-hunter, one might almost swear) had a thin
angular face, sunken eyes, and a large aquiline
aristocratic nose. His complexion was healthy,
ruddy, and characteristic of a sanguine temperament.
If the stranger were a hunting man,
and ever attended the Quorn meets, he would
have recognised Sir Francis Burdett, the popular
member for Westminster, a fox-hunter who
rode straight across country, with rather more
pluck than judgment, and who, when astride
his favourite hunter, Lempson, Merry once
compared to a pair of compasses across a telescope.

Sir Francis, the fourth baronet of an ancient
and distinguished Warwickshire family, was
born in 1770. Educated at Westminster and
Oxford, and making the grand tour,
witnessed the French Revolution. As a thoughtful
spectator, he attended the meetings of the
National Assembly, and had the good sense to see
that amid all the excesses committed by newly
liberated slaves and the unfit persons who first
directed their actions, a great and beneficial
change had taken place. He returned to
England in 1793, and married Sophia, youngest
daughter of Thomas Coutts, the celebrated
banker, who had married his two other daughters
to the Marquis of Bute and the Earl of Guildford.
Returned to parliament for Boroughbridge
in 1796, with Scott, afterwards Lord
Eldon, the most petrified and Chinese of all
the Tories, Burdett early distinguished himself
by a chivalrous opposition to whatever was
opposed to liberty and the common weal.
The brave young squire took to politics with
all a fox-hunter's enthusiasm and fervour. He
charged the woolsack as Melton men charge
a bullfinch, and rode at the ministers as a
Pytchley highflyer dashes at a five-barred gate.
He was courageous and eloquent, his voice
clear and shrill as a trumpet. Disdaining office,