tains. Although there is a monotony in the valley scenes, yet the closeness of the mountain steeps, that almost impend over the beautiful ruin of this abbey, now open to the sky, with its grassy cloisters; a certain majestic plainness in their very sterility; the sort of olive-tinted light they shed over its greened grey walls, and double row of pointed arches, harmonize more finely with the character of these reliques, which are naked of ivy and foliage, than forest scenery would have done. Religion seems scarcely to have lost any of her influence by the fall and desertion of that her peculiar abode; the yellowed and dim vastness of such scenery, viewed through the yawning apertures, by this cloudless moon, affect the mind with such a congenial tone, that fancy almost hears the low anthem swelling on the wind along with the babble of the river-brook, for it is little. more, and readily conjures up the gentle ghost of the monk out of his coffin of stone beneath, to stand inviting a belated traveller of the vale of Ewias, or some goat-herd lost in the wild ravines of the Black Mountains, to a night's rest and refreshment, at the low-browed arch door of the refectory. Memory paints the startled figure of that knight, who, in hunting a deer, came suddenly on the ruins of that hermitage of the patron saint, and instantly exchanged the sword and panoply for the crucifix and the shirt of hair, smitten with a passion for solitude and religion by the sacred solemnity of the scene.

And here it is time to return to my present position within the ruin. I entreat the reader to guess what objects called back my retrospective fancy from the reign of William Rufus; from the warrior-hunter standing awestruck at the peeping of the hermitage ruin, through tangled wildwood, forgetful of his lost deer; and of the fury of the chase, as that holier fury and the peace of God came upon him. Not owls, not ivy, not ghosts, but, "in the glimpses of the moon," drunken men playing at skittles! the ninepins set up in the grand and venerable side aisle!! a table and pipes in the open green area!!! spirits rising awfully from the yet roofed remains of the ruin, but only revealing themselves to one sense-the olfactory: in plain terms, Llanthony Abbey is converted into an alehouse. Bearing testimony, as I can, to the civility, &c. of the host and hostess, I cannot reconcile myself at all to this metamorphose, effected by the proprietor, who is, I believe, abroad; for it cannot be denied, that the total demolition of such a monument of bygone days would not be a whit more effective

in obliterating wholly that influence on our minds, for the sake of which, chiefly, taste desires its preservation, than such a perversion of its uses. That a solemn sublime religious ruin should attract so many tasteful visitants as to require the accommodation of an inn, is creditable to the national feeling; but that it should itself be converted into a house of call, to meet that want, produces the grotesque, not of beauty, but absurdity. It reminds me of that solemn-thoughted shoemaker I've heard of, who set upright his own coffin, as a memento mori for ever in his eye; but, growing familiar with it, deemed it as well to make some living use of it, so, clapping in partitions, sate and cobbled and sang in it, making it serve him below as a stall, and above for a pantry.

Misappropriations like this, of a beautiful antiquity, constitute a sort of heresy in taste, against which all true devotees ought to remonstrate; and I do, for one, the humblest, hereby enter my protest against it. Reviewing in a flying way what has struck me on my last gipsy expedition, I recall with regret many similar apostacies from the true taste, which I think I cannot do better than present in form at the tribunal of your Magazine. The editors thereof possess, for ought I can find to the contrary, quite as legitimate a "right divine" to exert a censorship over such matters, in the most picturesque of Principalities, as the conductor of a daily or other periodical doth, to harangue all England, through a leading article, about its duties, rebellion passive or active, overthrow of the peers, or what not. If those London worthies may with applause take Britain and her constitution under their wing, far more may the former this miniature Britain, and her beauty, under their especial tutelage. At least, the taste for peace and the woods, and the waterfalls, must be as worthy of fostering as that for democracy, aristocracy, limited or uncontrolled monarchy; for each of which, and ultra, it seems the delightful task of parts of the press "to rear," heedless of the bloodshed to which their crude and confident opinions might lead. But I would propose a still more defined censorship. There are really offences against taste, which, like those against our honour, though not cognisable by any known tribunal, as not assaulting person or property, do yet outrage feelings quite as delicate, and almost as sensitive to pain as that "thing called honour." Imagine a world-weary wight, pitching on some green spot among the mountains of his retreat, where "to set up his ever

lasting rest." It is pastoral, secluded, rustic, really Welsh. A year elapses ere his plans are completed, or just time enough for some money-making speculator to avail himself of some waterfall or cavern, or only the picturesque of the spot, to use as a raree-show, for the drawing of company. Up starts "the hotel," and a row of cockney lodging-houses with knockers, a shop with brass-railed front, (à la Fleetstreet,) full fronting the poor hypochondriac lover of Nature and her wildness, shaming his half-hidden hermitage by their eternal stare, as the carousing guests, grooms, coachmen, &c. do the pensive tenant himself. The experiment fails: the "hotel" shrinks into a huge, dingy, dilapidated pot-house; the tenantless shops go to decay, or lodge the poorer poor, and thus, with bepatched panes and wildered forecourt, and thresholds of earth, noisy with pauper infants on the parish, the whole still stand in beggarly finery and squalid fashion, substituting a loathsome, a too real melancholy, for that fine and imaginative melancholy an elegant mind seeks, and finds in the mossy roofs and wild-rock street, and the lowings and lone watch-dog bark, of the Welsh village by sunset, or the hamlet in the woods yellowed by autumn. Or more fatal still to his prospects, some wealthy retired citizen falls in love with Wales for its beauty and its grandeur, and rather likes its cheap living; so there he bivouacs for life, and erecting his enormous tent, (alas! of granite and oak, not sailcloth,) it so besprawls the romantic site as to "bring all Paradise before your eyes"--the Paradise of cockneys.

Now I am not prepared to say that this unfortunate sufferer would be justified in dispatching an instant card of invitation to coffee and pistols,-to a morning's shooting, at or over each other's cerebral manors, as becomes good neighbours; but certainly many a man has been doomed to death without benefit of clergy, by the law of honour, for a less injury: for my part, I would walk a mile daily to take the "lie direct" in form, from any such antipicturesque gentleman, far sooner than suffer the stare direct of his porticoed, castellated, fire-coloured brick "mansion," all day long. A tweak of the nose? what is it to that more provoking twist suffered by one's organ of "rurality"-"lovingness," (a perfect dislocation of one's mood, "on golden hinges turning,") when, on turning a corner of a mountain for the paradise of its recess roaring with cataracts, which fancy looked for,-behold! some "Paradise Row;" and on flouncing past the nauseous apparition, re

dolent of the washing-tub, and snuffing for a breeze of the pleasant morning mountains, to stumble on Mount Pleasant! Now as these abominations may not warrant indictment, let there be erected in Wales a Parliament of Taste, that may take cognisance of them, after the fashion of those parliaments of love, (equally romantic and philosophical,) believed to have formerly existed in France. Ours we might call a "Parliament of Love of Nature."

What code of penal inflictions should be drawn up and inscribed on the bark of the beech, or engraven on the smooth face of a rock overnodded by wild vines, must be matter for future resolve; but a few modes of deterring evil-doers suggest themselves, as worthy of the notice of this conservative body. Whatever gentleman-settler in Wales should hereafter think fit to live in a castle instead of a house, or set bricklayers and masons to work to make ruins instead of repairing ruins, to give a touch of romance to his cabbage-ground, or beautify the view from the stables, let him be posted as a man of bad taste in the nearest wateringplace, not by name, but a drawing of his fine creation; which, hanging in the head inn room, could not fail to elicit from some visitors of better taste such free criticism as might not otherwise meet the gentleman's ear in ten years. If posting a man as a poltroon by name, for liking to live, be according to law (of honour), this kind of posting a man for a pretender, and a destructive (of the picturesque,) must be allowed to violate no law of humanity or right.

The prototypes of my parliament, those "courts of love,' holden in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries, discussed in the most solemn legislatorial manner such questions of grave import as these:-"Whether jealousy be inseparable from love?-Whether matrimony be necessarily fatal to love?" A dame de chateau acted as our speaker of the She went farther and issued her arrets (according to the phraseology of that time.) If this appear a little ludicrous, be it remembered that in the gallant days of the Troubadours, with whom the conceit originated, the world seemed to have nothing at all to do, but to love. These courts, therefore, concerned the business of the world; and were not so absurb, even if conducted with all the pomp which the historians of Italy impute to them, in the chivalric eyes of knights, as in ours. How pleasant must it have been to hear some scarfed and crested Joe Hume calculating the number of negatives from the lips of a besieged fair one, which ought to be held to make an affirmative, and

amounting to a promise, the breach of which should be a ground of appeal to the House! But, if we are to believe what we are assured, these courts were often engaged on complaints of serious injury, (arising out of affaires de la cœur,) as well as frivolities. On the same principle, abundance of business would await our Parliament of Taste, of no frivolous kind, though still connected with that ultra-conservative spirit of reverence toward the beauty of Nature, on which it should be founded, as its prototypes were on the same sensitiveness to female beauty.

I reason, or prate, on the assumption that every tasteful pilgrim to Wales becomes pro tempore as devoted a lover of nature as ever did one of those knights, defying each other to mortal combat for some charmer, once seen or peeped at through a lattice, become of such divine incognita, and hence, equally ready to consider that "there is nothing in the world to be done but to see" nature. Assuredly they can say, with Falstaff, that they "come sweating with desire to see her." For my part, I was always more vulnerable in the eye than in the heart, and have suffered more severely from an eye-sore on the fair face of landscape, than ever did one of those heroes from the sorest wrong ever suffered by the dame adored, even on her very frontispiece.

One of those seria nuga, and the most serious my present pilgrimage, or gipsy crusade against the anti-rural Saracen, hath presented me with, is nakedness of churchyards, not by niggard nature's fault, but man's. I mean that I have found the dead sleeping without their old accustomed roof over their head,-their own by prescriptive right, the black ceiling of the yew's antiquity. That "only constant mourner o'er the dead" has been felled like common wood to feed the domestic fire, and by the last hands in which we might have expected to find the sacrilegious axe,-those of the church minister. Wishing most sincerely to every clergyman the enjoyment of all due respect and every comfort, warm toes inclusive, I cannot think so ill of the church system of remuneration in Wales, as to believe that poverty, and not the will, is consenting to this unparalleled act,—a species of desecration equally revolting to taste and true felling.

I happen to reside in a small town where it has been practised, as I am told, by a former incumbent; and nothing can be more striking than the bald deformity of the grey tower without that fine and solemn adjunct, so general in our churchyards, the grand gloom of "the funereal yew."