and slaughter. The terrors of fanaticism were added to those of natural fear. On the 20th of February a dissenting minister appeared in a boat on the Thames, dressed in a white linen robe, with his long hair flowing over his shoulders, and proclaimed that the Seven Vials of the Book of Revelations were to be poured out upon the city of London. Crime seemed to have lost all dread of the law. On the 22nd of March the Judge at the Assize at Reading, coming out of the church in grand procession, was hustled and robbed of his gold watch and seals. The punishments of the law were horribly unequal. A farmer near Ashford, finding some boys trespassing in his orchard, strikes one of them over the head with a stake. The boy kneels and begs for mercy; but the farmer repeats the blow, and fractures the skull. It was sworn on the defence that the skull was so remarkably thin that a very slight blow would fracture it;' and so, upon this scientific evidence, the farmer was fined a shilling and discharged. Hanging was so common that it became a joke amongst the people. A police-officer saw two men upon a wall in the Hampstead Road, and shortly after one of the two was hanging to a lamp-post. The short man had turned off the tall man; they having, after an agreeable day of drinking and gambling, tossed up which should hang the other. Amidst all this lawlessness, the Prince Regent gave the most magnificent entertainment on record at Carlton House. To crown the horrors of the spring of 1812, Mr. Perceval was assassinated on the 11th of May, in the lobby of the House of Commons. I was for two months in London in a time that is now fearful to read about. But the world went on as usual then; and looking back upon my own limited experience, I do not recollect a merrier season than that first year of the Regency.

That session was one of high political importance :—The settlement of the Royal Household; Orders in Council; Catholic Emancipation; the War in Spain. There was great eloquence in the Commons-the grace of Canningthe vehemence of Brougham-Romilly, grave and earnest

-Perceval, mild and persuasive-the silver voice of Wilberforce-the manly ardour of Whitbread. But what a corps of Reporters! There was ability enough amongst them; but nobody seemed to feel that he was engaged in a grave duty. They were a merry set in the Exchequer coffee-house. A head peeps in, Now, Flaherty.' 'Who's up?' 'Creevey.' 'Oh, I know all he can say—no hurry. You were observing'-' Waiter, another bottle of that old port.'

And then the Saturday evening oratory of the same set that I had met in the gallery, at the Eccentrics,' in May's Buildings. There is a great gathering. A charge against Mr. Howley has been announced at a previous meeting. The charge comes on. Mr. Grant brings the charge-that Mr. Howley is a poet. Mr. Davis is called as witness. He proves that Mr. Howley was an elegiac poet; that he was a lyric poet,—that he wrote an Ode to Winter, beginning 'All hail;' that he had answered an advertisement to the effect that any person competent to write ballads of a superior description, and in serious style, might hear of occupation;'-that he was a descriptive poet, and had written a tender piece, commencing with

How beautiful the country doth appear,

At this time of the year!"

Then various wits spoke for and against the charge; and Mr. Sheil gave an oration upon poetry in general; concluding with a peroration touching the magnificent calm of the poet while there is war, and want, and tumult, and sorrow all around him. 'Oh! there is an earthquake under his feet, and the soil heaves with a tremulous impatience, and the seas rush from their beds, and the air is darkened, and the vulture screams, and the palaces and the temples rock with a wide-spreading and all-involving fury; but he stands erect amidst the convulsion, creeps out of the ruins, sings his song of gladness in the desert, and comes once more into the breeze and the sunshine.' And then Mr. Quin, the editor of The Day,' rushes from his

seat to embrace Mr. Sheil, and says-'Sir, I honour ye. Dine with me to-morrow.'

Then, during that brief intimacy with the renowned and the influential, I had the free admissions of the theatres. What a privilege was that! Drury was in ashes. But there was Covent Garden, with the two Kembles and Young. O'Neil and Kean were not as yet. But there were Munden, and Fawcett, and Emery.

They tell me there are no actors now. Perhaps not. I cannot judge. There are some things that look to me ever fresh, as of old-the face of nature, the smile of love, the gush of poetry, the wisdom above all wisdom. But for meaner things, surely

one.

'Life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim.'

And with this brief experience I went back to my native town, to be one of those who bore the honoured name of best public instructor.' My range of pupils was very limited. I had little honour in my vocation, and less profit. The world in which I lived was a very singular There was the Court atmosphere; and the Collegiate atmosphere; and the Corporate atmosphere-all very much opposed to a free inflation of that air which was called the Liberty of the Press. Yet I was resolved to be independent, and I was unaffectedly patriotic. I hated Napoleon with a true English fervour. That covered some of my sins in not having an undoubting faith in the rulers of the day, with their ex-officio informations. I had some compliments to soothe me. Sir William Herschel came to thank me for telling the people that they were blockheads for attributing the high floods to him;—and the vicar once quoted my leader in a fast-day sermon.

SAINT JOHN'S GATE.

.

WHEN Samuel Johnson first saw St. John's Gate, he 'beheld it with reverence,' as he subsequently told Boswell. But Boswell gives his own interpretation of the cause of this reverence. St. John's Gate, he says, was the place where the Gentleman's Magazine' was originally printed: and he adds, I suppose, indeed, that every young author has had the same kind of feeling for the magazine or periodical publication which has first entertained him.' He continues with happy naïveté, I, myself, recollect such impressions from the "Scots' Magazine." Mr. Croker, in his valuable notes to Boswell's 'Johnson,' has a very rational doubt of the correctness of this explanation: If, as Mr. Boswell supposes, Johnson looked at St. John's Gate as the printingoffice of Cave, surely a less emphatical term than reverence would have been more just. The "Gentleman's Magazine " had been, at this time, but six years before the public, and its contents were, until Johnson himself contributed to improve it, entitled to anything rather than reverence; but it is more probable that Johnson's reverence was excited by the recollections connected with the ancient gate itself, the last relic of the once extensive and magnificent priory of the heroic knights of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, suppressed at the dissolution, and destroyed by successive dilapidations.'

More than a century is passed away since Johnson, from whatever motive, beheld with reverence the old gate of the hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. There it still remains, in a quarter of the town little visited, with scarcely another relic of antiquity immediately about it. Extensive improvements are going forward in its neighbourhood; and