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This tree was a few years in imminent danger of losing its life, and the axe had been actually laid to its root, when it was saved by the remonstrances of the University, headed, I believe, by the Warden of Wadham, the then Vice-Chancellor.

66 'Upon the top of Heddington Hill, by Oxford, on the left hand as we go to Heddington, just at the brow of the branch of the Roman way that falls down upon Marston-lane, is an elm, that is commonly called and known by the name of Jo. Pullen's tree, it having been planted by the care of the late Mr Josiah Pullen, of Magdalen Hall, who used to walk to that place every day, sometimes twice a-day if tolerable weather, from Magdalen Hall and back again, in the space of half an hour. This gentle man was a great walker, and some walks he would call a mug of twopenny, and others a mug of threepenny, &c., according to the difference of the air of each place."

We must suppose, from Hearne having left it without mention, that the story of the said Mr Pullen having hung himself on the branches of this tree is mythological.

From J. Pullen, Esq., we pass to Fair Rosamond, who is associated with Godstow Priory near Oxford.

"Samuel Gale, Esq., writes me, and in a letter dated from London the 3d instant, that he hath lately and accidentally purchased an antient, but fine, picture of the beautiful Rosamond. 'Tis painted on a panel of wainscott, and represents her in a three-quarter proportion, dressed in the habit of the times, a straight bodied gown of changeable red velvet, with large square sleeves of black flowered damask facings, turned up above the bend of her arms, and close sleeves of pearl-coloured satin puffed out, but buttoned at the wrist, appearing from under the large ones. She has several rings set with pretious stones on her finger. The heart covered with a fine flowered linnen, gathered close at the neck, like a ruff. Her face is charmingly fair, with a fine blush in her cheeks; her hair, of a dark brown, parted with a seam from the middle of her forehead upwards under her coifure, which is very plain; but a gold lace appears above it, and that covered with a small cap of black silk. She is looking very intently on the fatal cup, which she holds in one hand and the cover in the other, as going to drink it. Before her is a table

covered with black damask, on which there lies a prayer-book open, writt in the antient black character. The whole piece is extremely well preserved. Mr Gale takes it to have been done about

Henry the Seventh's time."

Poor Mr Hearne would have been stigmatised by Shakespeare as a man fit for treason, stratagem, and wiles, from the way in which he speaks of Handel. What would he have said, asks Dr Bliss, if he had known that the Oxford Theatre would become one of the scenes of Madame Goldschmidt's vocal triumphs? But Hanand this explains it all. del comes from the land of Whigs,

"One Handel, a foreigner (who, as they say, was born at Hannover), being desired to come to Oxford, to perform in musick this act, in which he hath great skill, is come down, the vice-chancellor (Dr Holmes) having requested him to do so, and, as an encouragement, to allow him the benefit of the theater both

before the act begins and after it. Accordingly, he hath published papers for a performance to-day, at 5s. a ticket. This performance began a little after 5 o'clock in the evening. This is an innovation. The players might be as well permitted to come and act. The vice

chancellor is much blamed for it. In this, however, he is to be commended, for reviving our acts, which ought to be annual, which might easily be brought about, provided the statutes were strictly followed, and all such innovations (which exhaust gentlemen's pockets, and are incentives to lewdness) were hindered.

July 6.-The players being denied coming to Oxford by the vice-chancellor, and that very rightly, though they might as well have been here as Handel and (his lowsy crew), a great number of forreign fidlers, they went to Abbington, and yesterday began to act there, at which were present many Gownsmen from Oxford."

I have given you enough extracts from Dr Bliss's collection of Hearne's Memoirs, which, by the way, is enappendices, to give an idea of the riched by most copious and valuable man, and in some measure of the feelings of the time in which he lived.

Other such beings are probably to be found in libraries now; Dominie Sampson being the model of the class, studious, sensitive, gentle, and re

tiring, innocent as maidens who have been brought up at home, but prejudiced to the backbone. The Jacobite warmth is not surprising, considering the severity with which the intrusive dynasty treated a conscientious adherence to the expelled one. And it is curious, in these days, to see how strongly people could feel for a cause which was of no mercantile value to the community, and by which, as individuals, they were not likely to enrich themselves. Because common sense, expediency, wealth, and talent, were enlisted on the side of the Revolution, chivalry, generosity, and political innocence, were naturally drawn to the other side, and as naturally went to the wall, which is the common fate of the harmlessness of the dove when unattended with the wisdom of the serpent,

"Victrix causa Diis placuit sed victa Catoni." It was a great struggle between Prose and Poetry with Great Britain for a battle-field; and Prose, being the best tactician, gained the honours of the day, and has kept them ever since. And the severity of the victorious party is perfectly consistent with human nature. Practical men are generally unmerciful towards those acted upon by principles which they cannot understand, even though not by nature cruel. But a little more wisdom would have shown them that the very disinterested loyalty of the Jacobites made them the best subjects in the world of a master who understood how to govern them, and that it was most inexpedient to visit their risings with the penalties enacted against rebellion. That it was unjust I do not say, for every government, once constituted, has a right to protect itself by extreme measures against revolution, and revolution is such a nuisance that, although it may be morally perfectly justifiable to effect it, those who make the attempt ought always to be required to put their heads in pawn, as a penalty to be paid in case of failure. Few will doubt now that the conduct of the Whigs towards the earlier Tories was a great political blunder, as those who represented them in after times have been found the stanchest sup

porters of the Throne and the Church, and, indeed, the only true friends of the liberties of the people. For the Whigs, professing democratic principles which they have ever hated in their hearts, have sold the interests of the people to the aristocracy of wealth, degrading, at the same time, the value of rank, so that the highest nobility of blood has become almost a matter of ridicule, unless it rests on a broad basis of acres or funded property. The principle on which the Whigs have ever served the Crown, beginning with the supporters of William of Orange, is simply as an institution useful to their own aggrandisement. Loyalty in its divine essence, one of the most unselfish feelings that ever animated the heart of man, and connected with all the holiest and tenderest relationships-duty to God as a heavenly Father, duty to parents, duty to the magistrate, and duty to one's country

has ever been to them a mere word without meaning-a sound without a sense. That the Stuarts presumed too much on the loyalty of their followers, and cruelly abused it, is at the same time not to be denied. Charles I. took liberties with it, but, schooled by misfortune, would have acted better at the last had he succeeded in saving his crown; Charles II. played with it in cruel wantonness, as in the disgrace of Clarendon; James II. malignantly outraged it, and richly deserved his fate, as far as he personally was concerned; but it lived through his treachery, and it survived the undutiful elevation of Mary II., and the feelingless imbecility of Anne, to rally round the nearest of kin to them. The coarse natures of the first and second Georges had not the tact to perceive that conciliation was their policy; and it remained for George III., a monarch whose intellectual powers have of late years been unjustly disparaged, but whose practical shrewdness and straightforward manliness of character demand for his memory a better judgment, to heal the old wounds, and conciliate the Tories to himself. When George III. was advised by his own police that the young Pretender was in London, and informed his Minister of to the entreaties of the tr

fact,

tionary he replied, that he intended to suffer the young man to depart in peace, as he felt strong enough to defy his machinations. Since that time the house of Brunswick has found its truest source of strength in the attachment of the Tory party—an attachment which has left nothing to be desired in its hearty acquiescence in the blameless rule of Victoria, who now feels her sacred person most secure and most at home in those mountain fastnesses which were once the very hotbeds of Jacobite rebellion. It may be said that, in the present reign, the old distinction of parties has virtually ceased. In the last it passed through a new phase, the Tory party representing, at the time of the Reform fever, the Conservative element, and the Whig the revolutionary or destructive. Still the same names were applied, though with a weaker application. They are even less properly applicable now, when the only true parties, if parties there be, are the party of the Towns, or elastic and graduated Wealth, and the party of the Country, still clinging to the remains of Feudality, or graduated and inelastic Rank-one commercial and cosmopolite, loving material comfort and abundance better than political honour or national security; and the other patriotic and national, deeming national greatness, preparedness for war, and ancestral freedom in subordination to law, connected with social happiness, of more account than the enrichment of a few millionaires at the expense of the industrious masses, or the increase of facilities for deluging the world with the tasteless abortions of the cottonfactories. The Ultra-radicals are still a party apart-some honest, some dishonest, some attaching themselves to the Town party, some to the party of the Country, or dividing on different questions, but generally consisting of

those conscious to themselves of merits unrecognised by the world at large, and only to be pacified by the loaves and fishes of office.

As for ourselves "here in Oxford," as they say in the "bidding" prayer, we are in a transition state, and I do not yet see my way clearly through the changes. Some day or other I shall have more to say about them. And now I wish you the full enjoyment of this lovely spring weather, such as seems to have been in the olden time in April, and such as I scarcely recollect during the long tenure of office by the Whigs, almost inducing me to hope that Whiggery and the east winds, and the spring-frosts which cut off the apple-blossoms and peachblossoms, and stinted the cider, are all about to die a natural death together. Should such happy consummation come about, you and I will finish next Commemoration one of my best bottles of common-room port; and perhaps you shall have for I cannot promise, not being yet ViceChancellor an honorary Doctor's degree in the Theatre, amidst the plaudits of enthusiastic undergraduates.

"To see good corn upon the rigs, And a gallows put up to hang the Whigs, And the right restored where the right should be!

Oh that is the thing that would wanton me!"

66

as Caleb Balderston sings. But now that the right is restored or maintained in the person of our beloved Queen herself, the "de facto" as well as de jure" representative of the old line of British monarchs, we will drink her health, with a bumper for each of the little ones, not forgetting "la petite dernière," for whose health France makes telegraphic inquiries twice a-day, in the warmth of her new alliance, and only wish all Whigs-a happy release.-Ever yours,

TLEPOLEMUS.

2Q

VOL. LXXXI.-NO. CCCCXCIX.

THE SCULPTURED STONES OF SCOTLAND.

OUR modern system of rapid travelling is perhaps not so favourable to the casual observation of petty wayside objects of interest, as the easy deliberate movements of our grandfathers were. We are swept into a cathedral city or a picturesque mountain-district, and may there pursue our inquiries within a reasonable radius round the centre. But we have been whirled hopelessly away from this secluded Norman parish church, or that fossiliferous deposit, which it would have been so pleasant to have idled over for an hour in the way, though it would not recompense a special journey. Only a keen archæologist will go on a separate mission to a single stone, or a monoglyph, as he will probably term it, if he has deemed it important enough for such a feat. But our grandfathers, when they rode on horseback, or frequented the lazy stage-coach, which encouraged walking up-hill, and had no objection to it anywhere, were often excited to a mysterious and pleasant interest by passing, on some remote country-road, a grey stone of granite or gneiss, covered over with zigzag or knotted ornaments-with dragons and strange beasts with fishes-with men engaged in fighting, or slaying each other, or hunting; sometimes unaccompanied by any vestige of Christianity, but at others subservient to the representation of the great Christian symbol of the cross. Few authors who have written topographically about Scotland, from Hector Boece downwards, have failed to notice these mysterious monuinents. Pennant hunted after them zealously; and Gray the poet, falling on a nest of them near Glammis Castle, mused over them with such reverence for their mysterious character and hoar antiquity, as the author of the Fatal Sisters, and the Descent of Odin, could indulge in with relish. But if these curious monuments be now less in the path of the casual traveller, the zeal of the antiquary has more than compensated for the change by an ardent search after them in their obscure hiding-holes

a search which has developed a mass of archæological material rich and varied beyond the most extravagant hopes of a Pennant or a Grose. After various collections of the "sculptured stones," the climax has been achieved in a volume just issued by the Spalding Club, in which above a hundred of these ancient monuments are fac-similed with marvellous accuracy. The work does credit to the liberality of the Club, and the energetic_zeal of its secretary, Mr Stuart. For the first time they have enabled the archæologist in his closet to carry out a systematic analysis of the new department, for such the magnitude of the collection makes it, in his science. No one can turn over the pages without astonishment. So profuse is the succession of grim and ghastly human figures, of mutilated limbs, of preternatural beasts, birds, and fishes, of dragons, centaurs, and intertwined snakes, of uncouth vehicles, and warlike instruments, and mystic symbols-of chains of interlaced knots and complex zigzags, all crowding on each other, that the tired eye feels as if it had run through a procession of temptations of St Anthony or Faust Sabbaths.

An

And what are we to make of this monumental wealth, which has lain quietly on our native fields while our investigators have been at search in Syria, Egypt, and Mexico? Edipus will probably some day appear to tell us. In the mean time, our object is to call some general attention to a topic surrounded with much interest, and wealthy in provocatives to suggestion and inquiry. To show that there may be a considerable latitude of view on the matter, and more than one way of describing the same object, we present successively two different descriptions of a stone, without thinking it necessary to state where we found them. We give the precedence to the more distinet and specific, if not the more scholarly and philosophic of the two.

"At the foot of the " standing stone, leaning

covered over with curious representations carved upon it. One of these is clearly a pair of spectacles, and above them is a cocked hat, with two canes, beautifully ornamented at the handles, lying across the same. There is also the figure of an animal, which some learned persons have called an elephant, but which is more like to a stot of the north country or Highland breed. Farther down there is a coach of a very rude construction, in which a man in an old-fashioned costume is standing up, with a branch of fir in his hand. In the corner below is a comb and a looking-glass, and the whole is surrounded by a border worked in a very genteel pattern. The superstitious people have an idle story, how that a young maiden, very vain of her beauty, was combing her hair at a looking-glass, when Satan came to her in the guise of a well-favoured gentleman, and betted that, before she had done combing of her hair, he would make a road to the top of the hill, on which he could drive her in a chariot. She, not desiring to be beforehand, combed on, and contemplated her beauty, until Satan, having completed the said road, which is pointed out, laid with large whinstones, he drove her thereon in a fiery chariot, and flew away with her in a whirlwind. But this seems an incredible story, and quite useless to account for the figures of the looking-glass, the comb, and the coach, seeing that among the tombs of respectable artisans in the churchyard there are sculptured many articles of the same nature, as shears, axes, hammers, shoemakers' knives, toddy-ladles, and eight-day clocks."

state of action, or the embryotic creation, the type and sum of all specific forms, spontaneously evolved from the union of Buddha and Dharma. The crescent, likened by the vulgar-minded peasantry to a cocked hat, is the embodiment of the all-pervading celestial influence, and the decorated sceptres, or sacred wands of office laid across it, at the mystic angle of forty-five degrees, represent the comprehensive discipline and cosmopolite authority of the conquering Sarsaswete. The figure of the elephant-undoubted evidence of the Oriental origin of this monoglyph-represents the embryo of organised matter, while in the chariot of the sun the neverdying Inis na Bhfiodhlhadth (pronounced fudla), threads the sacred labyrinth, waving a branch of the Mimosa serisha, which has been dipped in a sacred river and dried beneath the influence of Osiris. The figures called a comb and a lookingglass are the lingal emblems of the sacred Phallic worship. The whole hierograph thus combines, in an extremely simple and instructive manner, the symbolisation of Apis, Osiris, Uphon, and Isis, Phallos, Pater Æther, and Mater Terra, Lingam and Yoni, Vishnu, Brama, and Sarsaswete, with their Saktes, Yang and Yiri, Padwa-devi, Viltzli, Pultzli, Baal, Dhanandarah, Sulivahna and Mumbo Jumbo. The surrounding bordure or string-cord, with its intertwining geomètric exemplifications of the objective quadrature and the subjective sphere, represent the unity and comprehensive affinity of the whole. We have here evidently typified the well-known invasion of Scotland, 643 years before the Christian era, by the reformers of the

The other description is as fol- Sabaism and Brahminical fire-worship lows:

"At the commencement of an ascent

marking the superposition of the plutonic trap upon the sedimentary strata, there stands a hierographed monolyth, projecting from the perpendicular, with an orientation E.S.E. S. The Buddhist

triad is conspicuously symbolised by what the peasantry call a pair of spectacles. It consists of two circles, of which the one, having its radius 14 inch wider than the other, is evidently Buddha, the spiritual or divine intellectual essence of the wd, or the efficient underived cause of all; the other is Dharma, the material essence of the world-the plastic underived cause. The ligamen connecting them together completes the sacred triad, with the Sangha derived from and composed of the two others. Here, therefore, is symbolised the collective energy of spirit and matter in the

of the ancient Asiatic races, a circumstance touchingly commemorated in a local legend, which represents a damsel combing her hair-the representation of the unconscious spirit of simple Sabaism, who is whirled away in the chariot of Asoka the conqueror into the regions of eternal light and purity, where the allpervading spirit of unity directs the influences of multiplicity."

We do not profess to adopt implicitly the views announced in either of these lucid descriptions. Perhaps, as sensible people are wont to say, between them. we shall find the truth somewhere At all events, the

true spirit of historical inquiry can only rest on such accurate, unimpassioned, untheory-begotten representations as those contained in the lithographs of the Spalding Club.

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