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For sport alone pursues the cruel chase, Amid the beamings of the gentle days. Upbraid, ye ravening tribes, our wanton rage, For hunger kindles you, and lawless want; But lavish fed, in nature's bounty roll'd, To joy at anguish, and delight in blood, Is what your horrid bosoms never knew. So sings the muse of "The Seasons" on the one side; on the other, we have "the ay of the last minstrel" in praise of "Fowling," the "rev. John Vincent, B. A. curate of Constantine, Cornwall," whose "passion for rural sports, and the beauties of nature," gave birth to a poem where nature and sport were to be the only features of the picture," and wherein

he thus describes.

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Full of th' expected sport my heart beats high,

And with impatient step I haste to reach
The stubbles, where the scatter'd ears afford
A sweet repast to the yet heedless game.
How my brave dogs o'er the broad furrows
bound,

Quart'ring their ground exactly. Ah! that point

Answers my eager hopes, and fills my breast
With joy unspeakable. How close they lie!
Whilst to the spot with steady pace I tend.
Now from the ground with noisy wing they
burst,

And dart away. My victim singled out,
In his aerial course falls short, nor skims
Th' adjoining hedge o'er which the rest unhurt
Have pass'd. Now let us from that lofty hedge
Survey with heedful eye the country round;
That we may bend our course once more to

meet

The scatter'd covey: for no marker waits Upon my steps, though hill and valley here, With shrubby copse, and far extended brake Of high-grown furze, alternate rise around.

Inviting is the view,-far to the right In rows of dusky green, potatoes stretch, With turnips mingled of a livelier hue. Towards the vale, fenc d by the prickly furze That down the hill irregularly slopes, Upwards they seem'd to fly; nor is their flight Long at this early season. Let us beat, With diligence and speed restrain'd, the ground,

Making each circuit good.

Near yonder hedge-row where high grass

and ferns

The secret hollow shade, my pointers stand. How beautiful they look! with outstretch'd tails,

With heads immovable and eyes fast fix'd, One fore-leg rais'd and bent, the other firm, Advancing forward, presses on the ground! Convolv'd and flutt'ring on the blood-stain'd earth,

The partridge lies:-thus one by one they fall, Save what with happier fate escape untouch'd,

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The pen of a country gentleman communicates an account of a remarkable character created by "love of the gun."

THE LOSCOE MISER.

For the Every-Day Book.

About sixty years ago, at Loscoe, a small village in Derbyshire, lived James Woolley, notorious for three things, the very good clocks he made, his eccentric system of farming, and the very great care he took of his money. He was, like Elwes and Dancer, an old bachelor, and for the same reason, it was a favourite maxim with him, and ever upon his lips, that "fine wives and fine gardens are mighty expensive things:" he consequently kept at a very respectful distance from both. He had, indeed, an unconquerable dread of any thing "fine," or that approached in any way that awful and ghost-like term "expensive."

It would seem that Woolley's avaricious bias, was not, as is generally the case, his first ruling passion, though a phrenolo gist, might entertain a different opinion "When young," says Blackner in his History of Nottinghamshire, “he was partiai to shooting; but being detected at his sport upon the estate of the depraved

William Andrew Horne, Esq. of Butterly (who was executed on the 11th of December, 1759, at Nottingham, for the murder of a child) and compelled by him to pay the penalty, he made a vow never to cease from labour, except when nature_compelled him, till he had obtained sufficient property to justify him in following his favourite sport, without dreading the frowns of his haughty neighbour. He accordingly fell to work, and continued at it till he was weary, when he rested, and "to it again," a plan which he pursued without any regard to night or day. He denied himself the use of an ordinary bed, and of every other comfort, as well as necessary, except of the meanest kind. But when he had acquired property to qualify him to carry a gun, he had lost all relish for the sport; and he continued to labour at clock-making, except when he found an opportunity of trafficking in land, till he had amassed a considerable fortune, which he bequeathed to one of his relations. I believe he died about 1770."

It must have been a singular spectacle to any one except Woolley's neighbours, who were the daily observers of his habits, to have seen a man worth upwards of 20,0001. up at five in the morning brushing away with his bare feet the dew as he fetched up his cows from the pasture, his shoes and stockings carefully held under his arm to prevent them from being injured by the wet; though, by the by, a glance at them would have satisfied any one they had but little to fear from the dew or any thing else. A penny loaf boiled in a small piece of linen, made him an excellent pudding; this with a halfpenny worth of small beer from the village alehouse was his more than ordinary dinner, and rarely sported unless on holydays, or when he had a friend or tenant to share the luxury.

Once in his life Woolley was convicted of liberality. He had at great labour and expense of time made, what he considered, a clock of considerable value, and, as it was probably too large for common purJoses, he presented it to the corporation of Nottingham, for the exchange. In return he was made a freeman of the town. They could not have conferred on him a greater favour the honour mattered not -but election-dinners were things which powerfully appealed through his stomach to his heart. The first he attended was productive of a ludicrous incident. His

shabby and vagrant appearance nearly excluded him from the scene of good-eating, and even when the burgesses sat down to table, no one seemed disposed to accommodate the miserly old gentleman with a seat. The chairs were quickly filled: having no time to lose, he crept under the table and thrusting up his head forced himself violently into one, but not before he had received some heavy blows on the bare skull.

The most prominent incident in his history, was a ploughing scheme of his own invention. He had long lamented that he kept horses at a great expense for the purposes of husbandry. To have kept a saddle-horse would have been extravagant-and at last fancying he could do without them, they were sold, and the money carefully laid by. This was a triumph-a noble saving! The winter passed away, and his hay and corn-stacks stood undiminished; ploughing time however arrived, and his new plan must be carried into effect. The plough was drawn from its inglorious resting-place, and a score men were summoned from the village to supply the place of horses. At the breakfast-table he was not without fears of a famine-he could starve himself, but a score of brawny villagers, hungry, and anticipating a hard day's work, would eat, and drink too, and must be satisfied. They soon proceeded to the field, where a long continued drought had made the ground almost impenetrable; the day became excessively hot, and the men tugged and puffed to little purpose; they again ate heartily, and drank more good ale than the old man had patience to think of; and difficult as it was, to force the share through the unyielding sward, it was still more difficult to refrain from laughing out at the grotesque figure their group presented. They made many wry faces, and more wry furrows, and spoiled with their feet what they had not ploughed amiss. But this was not all. Had a balloon been sent up from the field it could scarcely have drawn together more intruders; he tried, but in vain, to keep them off; they thronged upon him from all quarters; his gates were all set open or thrown off the hooks; and the fences broken down in every direction. Woolley perceived his error; the men, the rope traces, and the plough were sent home in a hurry, and with some blustering, and many oaths, the trespassers were got rid of. The fences were mended, and the gates re

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BARTHOLOMEW FAIR, 1826.

Another year arrives, and spite of corporation "resolutions," and references to "the committee," and "reports," and "recommendations," to abolish the fair, it is held again. "Now," says an agreeable observer, "Now arrives that Saturnalia of nondescript noise and nonconformity, Bartlemy fair;'-when that prince of peace-officers, the lord mayor, changes his sword of state into a sixpenny trumpet, and becomes the lord of misrule and the patron of pickpockets; and lady Holland's name leads an unlettered mob instead of a lettered one; when Mr. Richardson maintains, during three whole days and a half, a managerial supremacy that must be not a little enviable even in the eyes of Mr. Elliston himself; and Mr. Gyngell holds, during the same period, a scarcely less distinguished station as the Apollo of servant-maids; when the incomparable (not to say eternal) young Master Saunders' rides on horseback to the admiration of all beholders, in the person of his eldest son; and when all the giants in the land, and the dwarfs too, make a general muster, and each proves to be, according to the most correct measurement, at least a foot taller or shorter than any other in the fair, and in fact, the only one worth seeing,-'all the rest being impostors!' In short, when every booth in the fair combines in itself the attractions of all the rest, and so perplexes with its irresistible merit the rapt imagination of the half-holyday schoolboys who have got but sixpence to spend upon the whole, that they eye the outsides of each in a state of pleasing despair, till their leave of absence is expired twice over, and then return home filled with visions of giants and gingerbread

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nuts, and dream all night long of what they have not seen."*

The almanac day for Bartholomew fair, is on the third of the month, which this year fell on a Sunday, and it being prescribed that the fair shall be proclaimed "on or before the third," proclamation was accordingly made, and the fair commenced on Saturday the second of September, 1826. Its appearance on that and subsequent days, proves that it is going out like the lottery, by force of public opinion; for the people no longer buy lottery tickets even in "the last lottery," nor pay as they used to do at "Bartlemy

fair. There were this year only three shows at sixpence, and one at twopence; all the rest were "only a penny."

The sixpenny shows were, Clarke, with riders and tumblers; Richardson, with his tragi-comical company, enacting" Paul Pry;" and wicked Wombwell, with his fellow brutes.

In the twopenny show were four lively little crocodiles about twelve inches long, hatched from the eggs at Peckham, by steam; two larger crocodiles; four cages of fierce rattle snakes; and a dwarf lady..

In the penny shows were a glass-blower, sitting at work in a glass wig, with rows of curls all over, making pretty little teacups at threepence each, and miniature tobacco pipes for a penny; he was assisted by a wretched looking female, who was a sword-swallower at the last figure, and figured in this by placing her feet on hot iron, and licking a poker nearly red hot with her tongue. In "Brown's grand company from Paris," there were juggling, tight-rope dancing, a learned horse, and playing on the salt-box with a rolling-pin, to a tune which is said to be peculiar to the pastime. The other penny shows were nearly as last year, and silver-haired ladies and dwarfs, more plentiful and less in demand than learned pigs, who, on that account, drew "good houses."

In this year's fair there was not one "up-and-down," or "round-about."

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The west side of Giltspur-street was an attractive mart to certain men of letters;" for the ground was covered with "relics of literature." In the language of my informant, for I did not visit the fair myself, there was a "path of genius" from St. Sepulchre's church to Cock-lane. He mentions that a person, apparently an

• Mirror of the Months

agent of a religious society, was anxiously busy in the fair distributing a bill entitled "Are you prepared to die?"

ROMAN REMAINS AT PENTONVILLE, and

THE WHITE CONDUIT.

I am not learned in the history or the science of phrenology, but, unless I am mistaken, surely in the days of "craniology," the organ of inhabitiveness was called the organ of " travelling." Within the last minute I have felt my head in search of the development. I imagine it must be very palpable to the scientific, for I not only incline to wander but to locate. However that may be, I cannot find it myself for want, I suppose, of a topographical view of the cranium, and I have not a copy of Mr. Cruikshank's "Illustrations of Phr nology" to refer to.

At home, I always .it in the same place if I can make my way to it without disturbing the children; all of whom, by the by, (I speak of the younger ones,) are great sticklers for rights of sitting, and urge their claims on each other with a persistence which takes all my authority to abate. I have a habit, too, at a friend's house of always preferring the seat I dropped into on my first visit; and the same elsewhere. The first time I went to the Chapter Coffee-house, some five-andtwenty years ago, I accidentally found myself alone with old Dr. Buchan, in the same box; it was by the fireplace on the left from Paternoster-row door: poor Robert Heron presently afterwards entered, and then a troop of the doctor's familiars dropped in, one by one; and I sat in the corner, a stranger to all of them, and therefore a silent auditor of their pleasant disputations. At my next appearance I forbore from occupying the same seat, because it would have been an obtrusion on the literary community; but I got into the adjoining box, and that always, for the period of my then frequenting the house, was my coveted box. After an absence of twenty years, I returned to the "Chap ter," and involuntarily stepped to the old spot; it was pre-occupied; and in the doctor's box were other faces, and talkers of other things. I strode away to a distant part of the room to an inviting vacancy, which, from that accident, and my propensity, became my desirable sitting place at every future visit. My strolls abroad are of the same character. I pre

fer walking where I walked when novelty was charming; where I can have the pleasure of recollecting that I formerly felt pleasure of rising to the enjoyment of a spirit hovering over the remains it had animated.

One of my oldest, and therefore one of my still-admired walks is by the way of Islington. I am partial to it, because, when I was eleven years old, I went every evening from my father's, near Red Lionsquare, to a lodging in that village "for a consumption," and returned the following morning. I thus became acquainted with Canonbury, and the Pied Bull, and Barresbury-park, and White Conduithouse; and the intimacy has been kept up until presumptuous takings in, and enclosures, and new buildings, have nearly destroyed it. The old site seems like an old friend who has formed fashionable acquaintanceships, and lost his old heartwarming smiles in the constraint of a new face.

In my last Islington walk, I took a survey of the only remains of the Romar encampment, near Barnesbury-park. This is a quadrangle of about one hundred and thirty feet, surrounded by a fosse or ditch, about five-and-twenty feet wide, and twelve feet deep. It is close to the west side of the present end of the New Road, in a line with Penton-street; immediately opposite to it, on the east side of the road, is built a row of houses, at present uninhabited, called Minervaplace. This quadrangle is supposed to have been the prætorium or head quarters of Suetonius, when he engaged the British queen, Boadicea, about the year 60. The conflict was in the eastward valley below, at the back of Pentonville. Here Boadicea, with her two daughters before her in the same war-chariot, traversed the plain, haranguing her troops; telling them, as Tacitus records, "that it was usual to the Britons to war under the conduct of women," and inciting them to geance for the oppression of public liberty, for the stripes inflicted on her person, for the defilenient of her virgin daughters;' declaring "that in that battic they must remain utterly victorious or utterly pesh such was the firm purpose of her who was a woman; the men, if they pleased, might still enjoy life and bondage." The slaughter was terrible, eighty thousand of the Britons were left dead on the field; it terminated victoriously for the Romans, near Gray's-inn-lane, at the place called "Battle Bridge," in commemoration of the event.

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