this he again went into retirement in Arlington Street, Camden Town. Paralysis came upon him the year before his death, and he died on July 25, 1814, after a period of bodily helplessness, and, we fear, of privation. The Gentieman's Magazine, in recording the event, speaks of "the influence of his scngs upon our gallant tars" as an acknowledged and familiar fact. Of his private life it says that he was "improvident," but his improvidence, it adds, "chiefly appeared in a too hospitable style of living," for "he was never a gamester, nor addicted to the bottle." It is to be regretted that we cannot speak of his domestic life with commendation. He had excellent qualities, as has been amply shown already, and he did good service in his time to England and English literature. But in a professed biographical sketch it is wrong to omit any important feature of a man's history; and it must be honestly narrated of Charles Dibdin, that after his first marriage he formed an illicit connection with a chorus-singer at Drury Lane, Mrs. Davenet, by whom he was father of Charles and Thomas Dibdin, also song-writers and dramatists; and that he deserted his mistress for another woman, as he had deserted his wife for his first mistress.* He afterwards married the successor of Mrs. Davenet, who, as well as her daughter, survived him. To them, it must be added, he was constant and tender; and they placed on his modest tombstone, in St. Martin's, Camden Town, the celebrated verses from his "Tom Bowling: "—

His form was of the manliest beauty,

His heart was kind and soft,
Faithful, below, he did his duty,
But now he 's gone aloft.

To part of this high praise Dibdin was certainly entitled; and there are many epitaphs which are wholly false. He rests in a bleak churchyard, now closed,-originally a colony of the dead removed from the parish of St. Martin's to that of St. Pancras, and situated just on the north side of Pratt Street, Camden Town. His monument, enclosed in a railing, stands as nearly as possible in the centre, and close to a somewhat dismal willow tree. An admirer planted a bay-tree at the head of the grave a few years ago; but according to "the gardener of that ground" it does not thrive, perhaps from some occult sympathy with the waning renown of "the poor inhabitant below." Let us hope that there is a period of renewed life in store for the bay and the singer. Dibdin's songs and memory are things that we should be sorry to let die,-the rather that a Dibdin for Ironclads is a kind of poet whom we are not likely to see arise during the remainder of our pilgrimage.

my life

66

but I

* Memoir by GEORGE HOGARTH, p. xxii., xxiii. "I never offended my father in "writes Thomas Dibdin in his Autobiography, never received a shilling from him." (Vol. ii., p. 226.)

592

Abonhoe.

That which a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

CHAPTER I.

AVONHOE.

HAT which strikes a foreigner most in the general aspect of England is the evidence of the long absence of struggle and war shown by the unwalled villages, the scattered cottages, the undefended country-houses. In Germany the traveller crosses mile after mile of cultivated land without a habitation, then he reaches a miserable mass of wretched streets, shut in by confining walls with an armed gateway, and a castle which has either been at perpetual war with the village, or its most exacting protector. In France, in the same way, the cottages seem to have clung together like sheep for help, under the shelter of some seigneur who has too often been their worst foe.

In England every man has lived so long under the shadow of his own apple-tree and gooseberry-bush, that we have forgotten how much wretchedness we have been spared. As an old soldier who had been in most of the later European wars once said, pointing to the trunk of an old white rose against a cottage which certainly had not attained such a size under a hundred years, "Tiens!" said he, "what a tale that tells! Oh, if you could conceive the havoc when friend as well as foe cuts and tears down for fuel, and pillages for food, even if he pays! but you have rever heard or seen such things in England, and do not even know how much you have to be thankful for!"

There is one district, however. even in England, which was so well fought over at the time of our last trial of the kind, that even yet cannonballs and bits of armour (strange combination for our ideas of war) are turned up by the plough. The old manor-houses are full of papers connected with the period: old portraits, curious tombs, brasses, relics

of all kinds abound. It is a very historical region; the stirring nature of the events has left such impress on the country that they are still its most important feature, and no modern manufacturing towns nor trim "gentlemen's seats" have as yet laid waste the old memories. Two hundred years have pretty nearly effaced the traces of the civil wars elsewhere, but looking over the wide plain which stretches far and fertile in the centre of England, one cannot but think continually of the fierce fights which once raged there.

A number of promontories or headlands, many miles apart, stand out in the sea of plain, flat as the sea itself, and where it must once have rolled. On one "the king" occupied a camp; another was the look-out of Cromwell; far off is a lone house which was defended by a lady and cannonaded in no chivalrous spirit by Prince Rupert; on a fourth was fought one of the most important battles of the war; while at Avonhoe lie the foundations and remains of rather a large manor-house, fortified by its owner, "a most true and loyal gentleman," taken after a regular siege by "Colonel Cromwell," and burnt down on the approach of the king's forces. It had been rebuilt and again pulled down in later times.

In the excessive flatness of the valley a small eminence tells, and though hardly to be called a hill in a really hilly country, there was something very beautiful in the little headland, which stood out boldly with a steep side to the plain. The remains of an old avenue of very large trees led along the top of the hill to where once the house had stood, with its terraces and gardens all plainly marked in the great green carpet of grass, but hardly a stone of which remained one on another. Behind it stood a beautiful and elaborately carved church, strangely out of keeping with the few wretched scattered cottages which were all that remained of the little settlement. It looked more like a dainty college chapel than a village church, and though utterly neglected, and in some places almost ruinous, the carved woodwork, the altar, tombs, brasses, and stone canopies, the painted glass of the enormous Henry VII. windows, testified to the former grandeur of the family who had reared it.

The great house stood back a little with its dependencies (God's house included), and sheltered from the wind; but on the extreme point of the hill, in the most exposed place it could find, stood a little old farmhouse, so small indeed that nowadays it would hardly rank above a cottage. The time for small kingdoms is evidently at an end. Of how many sovereignties are England and France composed, not to mention the Italy and Germany which we have seen grow up under our own eyes? The big rat is eating out the little rat everywhere, and the little mill and the small farm are fast going the way of the Dukes of Parma and the Kings of Hanover.

Benyam, that is Benjamin the son of Amaziah (his surname, Pangbourne, might as well have not existed, for it was never used), * the

* Surnames fifty years ago were almost as uncommon in the district as in the days of the Plantagenets.

VOL. XVII.-No. 101.

29.