had crept under his own little table, was
looking out between its legs, trembling
like a whipped monkey in its cage, and
ejaculating in a piteous voice, "Gentlemen!" and
"Order! " at unequal intervals. Fitzblazer
was adjuring his friends not to drop the Tory
reporter upon any account—and, especially,
not upon him—until the enemy had first let
fall the Liberal gentleman; because, in the
action for damages that needs must follow, it
would be everything to be able to prove the
other party the aggressors. The two victims
hung above, in air, frantically clinging to
their supporters with as much eagerness
as if they had been their friends. While,
between the two, the third and untouched
litterateur was busily employed in taking
notes for a humorous description of the
events which were occurring to his brethren.
From eight o'clock until ten—at which
hour the meeting was advertised to close
—continued interruptions from voices,
sarcastic, antagonistic, and ludicrous, put all
political business out of the question. In
remonstrance, recrimination, and, in more
than one instance, even in physical conflict,
all idea of the primary object of our
assembling, all thought of Mr. Carelittel and
his parliamentary misdeeds, were clean
forgotten.

BOSCOBEL.

TURNING off at the little tavern (or hotel,
as they love to phrase it in the old romances)
at Ivetsey Bank, midway upon the highroad
from Lichfield to Shrewsbury, and wandering
across country for about a mile further
southwards, one comes upon the ancient
tenement of Boscobel, just as Charles Stuart
came upon it for the first time in the grey
of a celebrated September Saturday morning.
It remains there to this hour intact,
looking still like nothing else than a quaint
old forest-lodge—with this sole difference, that
its former chequer-work of black timber and
white plaster has given place to the less
picturesque appearance of a house uniformly
cemented. Situated in the vicinity of
Cannock Chase and Tong Castle, immediately
upon the borders of Shropshire, and closely
adjoining Staffordshire, this romantic and
historical dwelling was secreted then in a
lonelier site than it occupies in these more
populous and more civilised times, being
insulated, two hundred years back in what
was then a mere wilderness. A windy,
hilly, sandy common, forming the centre of
the demesne, was surrounded by pleasant
woodlands of considerable extent; the beauty
of the whole sylvan solitude being
sufficiently indicated by the Italian bosco-bello,
otherwise fair-wood, giving the origin of its
melodious designation. Ah, dear old Boscobel!
I delight to haunt thee: clambering up the
steep, ramshackle staircases, peering through
every dingy lattice, rapping the wainscots for
the sliding panels with knuckles of untiring
inquisitiveness, prying again and yet again
into the secret places—the Priests' Holes—
just as they were of yore in the days when
Boscobel was the abode of Catholic recusants.

It signifies little enough to me, as I maunder
about the place dreamily, who chances
at the moment to be my cicerone, provided
only I know my guide by long acquaintance
to be thoroughly trustworthy.

No better-beloved attendant in a stroll at
Boscobel have I, than Mistress Anne Wyndham
of Trent, provided that very charming
lady comes to me irresistibly in her rustling
silks—the bearer of her one literary offspring,
her queer, little, old-fashioned, prattling Claustrum
Regale Reseratum! Supposing her
ladyship to begin especially with one delicious
sentence—a sentence I have come long since
to know by heart—wherein she explains
the reason of her turning bookmaker, to be,
her loyal solicitude "that the truth of his
Majesty's escape might appear in its native
beauty and splendour; that as every dust of
gold is gold, and every ray of light is light,
so every jot and tittle of truth being truth,
not one grain of the treasure, not one beam
of the lustre of this story might be lost or
clouded; it being so rare, so excellent, that
Aged Time, out of all the archives of
antiquity, can hardly produce a parallel."

There is something consolatory, remembering
how Charles afterwards, when monarch,
allowed the Dutch war-ships to ride
insolently at anchor unmolested in the Thames,
while he himself, by a more deplorable
abnegation of his kingly authority, degenerated
into the craven pensioner of Louis the
Fourteenth—there is something consolatory in the
recollection that here at least, in the flush
of his early manhood, Charles Stuart dis-
played personal valour and dignity. I rather
like than otherwise to hear all about what one
may call the heroic taking in which the young
king was at the close of that desperate fight
under the walls of old Worcester. I like to
watch him, then, as he returns dusty and
breathless from leading that last bootless
charge of the cavalier troopers at Perrywood,
and when with dinted breastplate, and a broken
plume, he was constrained, by reason of an.
overturned ammunition-waggon, to dismount
at Sudbury Gate, entering the city on foot in
the midst of the general confusion. There—
putting off his heavy armour, and taking
freshly to horse—do I not catch glimpses
of him riding up and down the streets half-
distracted? Imploring men and officers—
vainly, vainly—to turn even then, and stand
at bay in very desperation! " I had rather
you would shoot me dead," he cries out
at last in anguish, "than keep me alive to
see the sad consequences of this fatal
day." Fruitlessly, all this: the die is
cast—the doom is spoken. And, by six of
the clock on that autumnal evening, King
Charles, heart-sore and dispirited, rides out of