6 it as the first year of my being settled in a permanent situation, and made anew the best resolutions I was equal to forming, that I would do what I could to curb all spirit of repining, and to content myself calmly, unresistingly at least, with my destiny.' She has mistaken the real nature of the permanent situation.' It is no fault of hers that she is unfitted for it; it is no fault of her royal benefactors -for they wished to be so-that her promotion is degradation. Her destiny is an unnatural one, and she must repine. The habitués of a court have their own exclusive associations of rank and ambition, of fashion and parade, to console then for the inconveniences of the 'honour' in which they live. But the literary lady's-maid-what sympathy has she? The Queen is condescending, but reserved; the King has his what? what? as he has with every one; the Princesses are affable; the Equerries are polite; celebrities, though of a somewhat heavy character, come sometimes to the tearoom-Mr. De Luc the geologist, Mr. Bryant the mythologist, and Dr. Herschel the astronomer. But she meets Thomas Warton, the poet, in a hasty walk, and she must turn a deaf ear to his raptures, for she dare not ask him to her room. No man must come there; no lady, not in the permitted list. Her correspondence with Madame de Genlis is forbidden. She is allowed to attend one day at the trial of Warren Hastings. Edmund Burke- -a name that then stank in the court nostrils-espies her, and places himself by her side. Oh, Fanny, there are eyes upon you! You stammer as your old friend—the greatest man of his time— looks in your unaccustomed face with a familiar look of sincere affection. The tie is broken. He is the same; but you must wear a mask. We see the shadow of Fanny Burney as illness gradually steals upon her. It must come. If she does not send that letter of resignation so often proposed, there will be a tear or two in the Lodge at Windsor for the little woman that was so clever and so pleasant, and yet so fidgety and unhappy. What could have ailed her? She had 'two new gowns and everything handsome' about her. The letter was sent; and Fanny soon grew well at Norbury park, and wrote Camilla,' and married a pleasant émigré, and had a cottage of her own in the lovely valley of the Mole, and died at near ninety. We hope she was more at home in a foreign land than in that ugly Lodge at Windsor, of which, most happily, not a brick is left. THE FARMER'S KITCHEN. DOES any one now read The Farmer's Boy,' by Robert Bloomfield? I have before me the edition of 1803, at which time it is recorded that twenty-six thousand copies had been sold since the first publication of the poem in 1800. Byron has left a contemptuous notice of Bloomfield in the 'English Bards.' But The Farmer's Boy,' for all that, will not be wholly forgotten. It is a truthful poem, founded upon accurate observation of common things, and describing the most familiar incidents and feelings with a rare fidelity —rare, amidst the conventional generalities of the versemaking of that day. At a very early age I had means of testing the truth of its descriptions. Let me give, from my own recollections, a picture of a farmer's household, not long after the time when Bloomfield's poem was first published. On one of the roads from Windsor to Binfield, in the parish of Warfield, stands, or stood, a small farm-house, with gabled roof and latticed windows. A rude woodbinecovered porch led into a broad passage, which would have been dark had not the great oaken door generally stood open. To the right of the passage was a large kitchen, beyond which loomed a sacred room-the parlour-unopened except on rare occasions of festivity. To this grange I travelled in a jolting cart, on a spring afternoon, seated by the side of the good wife, who had carried her butter and eggs and fowls to market, and was now returning home, proud of her gains, from whose accumulations she boasted that she well-nigh paid the rent of the little farm. I was in feeble health; and a summer's run was decreed for me, out of the way of school and books. My life for six months was very like playing at Farmer's Boy. That small bed-room where I slept, with its worm-eaten floor and undraperied lattices, was, I suspect, not very perfect in its arrangements for ventilation; but then neither door nor window shut close, and the free air, redolent of heath and furze, found its way in, and did its purifying offices after an imperfect fashion. The first morning began my new country life-and a very novel life it was. It was Sunday. The house was quiet; and when I crept down into the kitchen, I found my friend the farmer's wife preparing breakfast. On one side of that family room was a large oaken table covered with huge basins, and a mighty loaf; over a turf fire hung an enormous skillet, full to the brim with simmering milk. One by one three or four young men dropped in, jauntily dressed in the cleanest smock-frocks the son of the house had a smart Sunday coat, with an expansive nosegay of daffodils and wallflowers. They sat quietly down at the oak table, and their portions of milk were distributed to each. Now entered the farmer -of whom I still think with deep respect-a yeoman of simple habits but of large intelligence. He had been in the household of the Governor of Pennsylvania before the War of Independence; and could tell me of a wonderful man named Franklin, whom he had known; and of the Torpedo, on which he had seen Governor Walsh make experiments; and of lightning drawn from the clouds. The farmer, his wife, and the little boy who had come to dwell with them, sat down at a round table nearer the fire. Sunday was a great day in that household. There was the cheerful walk to church; the anticipations of the coming dinner, not loud but earnest; the promise of the afternoon cricket. Returned from church, the kitchen had been somewhat changed in appearance since the morning; the oak table was moved into the centre, and covered with a coarse cloth as white as the May-blossom; the turf fire gave out a fierce heat, almost unbearable by the urchin who sat on a low stool, turning, with no mechanical aid, the spit which rested upon two andirons, or dogs, and supported in his labour by the grateful fragrance of the steaming beef. To that Sunday dinner-the one dinner of fresh meat for the week-all sat down; and a happy meal it was, with no lack even of dainties for there was a flowing bowl of cream to make palatable the hard suet pudding, and a large vinegar-bottle with notches in the cork to besprinkle the cabbage, and a Dutch cheese-and if I dream not, a taste from a flask that immerged mysteriously from a corner cupboard. Then came the cricket and trap-ball of Southern England, yawns in the twilight, a glimmering candle, the chapter in the Family Bible, and an early bed. I was The morning of Monday was a busier scene. roused at six; but the common breakfast was over. The skillet had been boiled at five; the farmer was off to sell a calf; the ploughmen had taken their teams a-field. The kitchen was solitary. I should have thought myself alone in that world, but for a noisy companionship of chickens and ducklings, that came freely in to pick the crumbs off the floor. I wandered into the farm-yard, ankle deep in muck. In a shed I found my hostess, not disdaining to milk her petted cows. Her hand and her eye were everywhere-from the cow-stall to the dairy, from the hen's nest to the fatting-coop. Are there any such wives left amongst us ? Bloomfield has described the milking-time, pretty much as I saw it in those primitive days: 'Forth comes the Maid, and like the morning smiles; A friendly tripod forms their humble seat, The full-charg'd udder yields its willing streams; As unambitious too that cheerful aid The Mistress yields beside her rosy Maid; |