October 10

1826. Oxford and Cambridge Terms begin.

CHRONOLOGY.

On Sunday, October 10, 1742, during the time of worship, the roof of the church of Fearn, in Ross-shire, Scotland, fell suddenly in, and sixty people were killed, besides the wounded. The gentry whose seats were in the niches, and the preacher by falling under the sounding-board were preserved.*

date at which the church was built is uncertain, but it may be conjectured in the sixth century, for in the year 704, king John fixed an episcopal see at, and Aldhelm was consecrated the first bishop of Sherborne, in 705, and enjoyed the bishopric four years. Aldhelm died in 709, is said to be the first who introduced poetry into England, to have obtained a proficiency in music, and the first Eng lishman who ever wrote in Latin.

To the present time Pack Monday fair, is annually announced three or four weeks previous by all the little urchins who can procure and blow a cow's horn, parading the streets in the evenings, and sending forth the different tones of their horny

DORSETSHIRE

To the Editor of the Every-Day Book. Sherborne, September, 1826. Sir,-Having promised to furnish an account of our fair, I now take the liberty of handing it to you for insertion in your very entertaining work.

This fail is annually held on the first Monday after the 10th of October, and is a mart for the sale of horses, cows, fat and lean oxen, sheep, lambs, and pigs; cloth, earthenware, onions, wall and hazle nuts, apples, fruit trees, and the usual nick nacks for children, toys, gingerbread, sweetmeats, sugar plums, &c. &c. with drapery, hats, bonnets, caps, ribands, &c. for the country belles, of whom, when the weather is favourable, a great number is drawn together from the neighbouring villages.

Tradition relates that this fair originated at the termination of the building of the church, when the people who had been employed about it packed up their tools, and held a fair or wake, in the churchyard, blowing cows' horns in their rejoicing, which at that time was perhaps the most common music in use. The

Gentleman's Magazine,

↑ Hutchins, in his History of Dorset," says, this "Fair is held in the churchyard,; on the first Monday after the feast of St. Michael, (O. S.) and is a great holyday for the inhabitants of the town and neighbourhood. It is ushered in by the ringing of the great bell, at a very early hour in the morning, and by the boys and young men perambulating the

street with cows' horns, to the no small annoyance of their less wakeful neighbours. It has been an immemorial custom in Sherborne, for the boys to blow horns in the evenings in the streets, for some weeks before the fair."

The fair has been removed from the churchyard about six or seven years, and is now held on a spacious parade, in a street not far from the church.

pan for a drum, to render the sweet sound more delicious, and not unfrequently a whistle-pipe or a fife is added to the band. The clock's striking twelve on the Sunday night previous, is the summons for ushering in the fair, when the boys assemble with their horns, and parade the town with a noisy shout, and prepare to forage for fuel to light a bonfire, generally of straw, obtained from some of the neighbouring farmyards, which are sure to be plundered, without respect to the owners, if they have not been fortunate enough to secure the material in some safe part of their premises. In this way the youths enjoy themselves in boisterous triumph, to the annoyance of the sleeping part of the inhabitants, many of whom deplore, whilst others, who entertain respect for old customs, delight in the deafening mirth. At four o'clock the great bell is rang for a quarter of an hour. From this time, the bustle commences by the preparations for the coming scene: stalls erecting, windows cleaning and de corating, shepherds and drovers going forth for their flocks and herds, which are depastured for the night in the neighbouring fields, and every individual seems on the alert. The business in the sheep and cattle fairs (which are held in different fields, nearly in the centre of the town, and well attended by the gentlemen farmers, of Dorset, Somerset, and Devon} takes precedence, and is generally concluded by twelve o'clock, when what is called the in-fair begins to wear the appearance of business-like activity, and from this time till three or four o'clock more business is transacted in the shop, counting-house, parlour, hall, and kitchen,

than at any other time of the day, it being a custom of the tradespeople to have their yearly accounts settled about this time, and scarcely a draper, grocer, hatter, ironmonger, bookseller, or other respect able tradesman, but is provided with an ample store of beef and home-brewed October, for the welcome of their numerous customers, few of whom depart without taking quantum suff. of the old English fare placed before them.

Now, (according to an old saying,) is the town alive. John takesJoan to see the shows, -there he finds the giant-bere the learned pig-the giantess and dwarf-the menagerie of wild beasts-the conjuror-and Mr. Merry Andrew cracking his jokes with his quondam master. Here it is "Walk up, walk up, ladies and gentlemen, we are now going to begin, be in time, the price is only twopence." Here is Mr. Warr's merry round-about, with a horse or a coach for a halfpenny."Here is Rebecca Swain with her black and red cock, and lucky-bag, who bawls out, "Come, my little lucky rogues, and try your fortune for a halfpenny, all prizes and no blanks, a faint heart never wins a fair lady."--Here is pricking in the garter.-Raffling for gingerbread, with the cry of "one in ; who makes two, the more the merrier."-Here is the Sheffield hardwareman, sporting a worn-out wig and huge pair of spectacles, offering, in lots, a box of razors, knives, scissors, &c., each lot of which he modestly says, " is worth seven shillings, but he'll not be too hard on the gaping crowd, he'll not take seven, nor six, nor five, nor four, nor three, nor

A tall and portly dame, six feet full, with a particular screw of the mouth, and whom the writer

recollects when he was a mere child, thirty years ago; none who have seen and heard her once, but will recollect her as long as they live.

two, but one shilling for the lot,-going at one shilling-sold again and the money paid."-Here are two earthenware-men bawling their shilling's worth one against the other, and quaffing beer to each other's luck from that necessary and convenient chamber utensil that has modestly usurped the name of the great river Po. Here is poor Will, with a basket of gingerbread, crying "toss or buy." There is a smirking little lad pinning two girls together by their gowns, whilst his companion cracks a Waterloo bang-up in their faces. Here stands John with his mouth wide open, and Joan with her sloe-black ogles stretched to their extremity at a fine painted shawl, which Cheap John is offering for next to nothing; and here is a hundred other contrivances to draw the "browns" from the pockets of the unwary, and tickle the fancies of the curious; and sometimes the rogue of a pickpocket extracting farmer Anybody's watch or money from his pockets.

This is Pack Monday fair, till evening throws on her dark veil, when the visiters in taking their farewell, stroll through the rows of gingerbread stalls, where the spruce Mrs. or Miss Sugarplum pops the cover of her nut-cannister forth, with "buy some nice nuts, do taste, sir, (or ma'me,) and treat your companion with a paper of nuts." By this time the country folks are for jogging home,and vehicles and horses of every description on the move, and the bustle nearly over, with the exception of what is to be met with at the inns, where the lads and lasses so disposed, on the light fantastic toe, assisted by the merry scraping of the fiddler, finish the fun, frolic, and pastime of Pack Monday Fair.

I am, &c.

R. T.

lines accurately. Their import impressed me in my boyhood, and one fine summer's afternoon, a year or two ago, I involuntarily repeated them while musing beside that part of the "New River" represented in the engraving. I had strolled to "the Compasses," when "the garden," as the landlord calls it, was free from the nuisance of" company;" and thither I afterwards deluded an artist, who continues to" use the house," and supplies me with the drawing of this sequestered nook.

This "gentle river" meanders through countless spots of surprising beauty and variety within ten miles of town. When I was a boy I thought "Sadler's Well's arch," opposite the "Sir Hugh Myddelton," (a house immortalized by Hogarth,) the prime part of the river; for there, by the aid of a penny line, and a ha'porth of gentles and blood-worms, "mixed," bought of old Turpin, who kept the little fishing-tackle shop, the last house by the river's side, at the end next St. John'sstreet-road, I essayed to gudgeon gudgeons. But the "prime" gudgeon-fishing, then, was at "the Coffin," through which the stream flows after burying itself at the Thatched-house, under Islington road, to Colebrooke-row, within half a stone's throw of a cottage, endeared to me, in later years, by its being the abode of " as much virtue as can live.". Past the Thatched-house, towards Canonbury, there was the "Horse-shoe," now no more, and the enchanting rear-since despoiled-of the gardens to the retreats of Canonbury-place; and all along the river to the pleasant village of Hornsey, there were delightful retirements on its banks, so "far from the busy haunts of men," that only a few solitary wanderers seemed to know them. Since then, I have gone "over the hills and far away," to see it sweetly flowing at Enfield Chase, near many a "cottage of content," as I have conceived the lowly dwellings to be, which there skirt it, with their little gardens, not too trim, whence the inmates cross the neat iron bridges of the "New River Company," which, thinking of "auld Lang syne," I could almost wish were of

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wood. Further on, the river gracefully recedes into the pleasant grounds of the late Mr. Gough the antiquary, who, if he chiefly wrote on the manners and remains of old times, had an especial love and kind feeling for the amiable and picturesque of our own. Pursuing the river thence to Theobalds, it presents to the contemplative man's recreation," temptations that old Walton himself might have coveted to fall in his way: and why may we not "suppose that the vicinity of the New River, to the place of his habitation, might sometimes tempt him out, whose loss he so pathetically mentions, to spend an afternoon there." He tells "the honest angler," that the writing of his book was the "recreation of a recreation," and familiarly says, "the whole discourse is, or rather was, a picture of my own disposition, especially in such days and times as I have laid aside business, and gone a fishing with honest Nat: and R. Roe; but they are gone, and with them most of my pleasant hours,— even as a shadow that passeth away and returns not."

I dare not say that I am, and yet I cannot say that I never was, an angler; for I well remember where, though I cannot tell when, within a year, I was enticed to

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go a fishing," as the saying is, which I have sometimes imagined was derived from Walton's motto on the title of his book:-"Simon Peter said, I go a fishing: and they said, we also will go with thee.-John xxi. 3." This passage is not in all the editions of the "Complete Angler," but it was engraven on the titlepage of the first edition, printed in 1653. Allow me to refer to one of "captain Wharton's almanacs," as old Lilly calls them in his "Life and Times," and point out what was, perhaps, the earliest advertisement of Walton's work: it is on the back of the dedication leaf to "HEMEROSCOPEION: Anni Eræ Christianæ 1654." The almanac was published of course in the preceding year, which was the year wherein Walton's work was printed.

This advertisement I deem a bibliomaniacal curiosity. Only think of the first edition of Walton as a "booke of eighteen-pence price!" and imagine the good old man on the day of publication, walking from his house "on the north side of Fleet-street, two doors west of the end of Chancery-lane," to his publisher and neighbour just by, "Richard Marriot, in S. Dunstan's Churchyard," for the purpose of inquiring "how" the book "went off." There is, or lately was, a large fish in effigy, at a fishing-tackle maker's in Fleet-street, near Bell-yard, which, whenever I saw it, after I first read Walton's work, many years ago, reminded me of him, and his pleasant book, and its delightful ditties, and brought him before me, sitting on "a primrose bank" turning his "present thoughts into verse"

THE ANGLER'S WISH.

I in these flowery meads would be:
These crystal streams should solace me;
To whose harmonious bubbling noise
I with my angle would rejoice:
Sit here, and see the turtle-dove
Court his chaste mate to acts of love :

Or, on that bank, feel the west wind
Breathe health and plenty: please my mind,
To see sweet dew-drops kiss these flowers,
And then washed off by April showers :
Here, hear my Kenna sing a song;
There, see a blackbird feed her young,

Or a leverock build her nest:
Here, give my weary spirits rest,
And raise my low-pitch'd thoughts above
Earth, or what poor mortals love:

Thus, free from law-suits and the noise
Of princes' courts, I would rejoice:

Or, with my Bryan, and a book,
Loiter long days near Shawford-brook ;
There sit by him, and eat my meat,
There see the sun both rise and set;
There bid good morning to next day;
There meditate my time away;

And angle on; and beg to have
A quiet passage to a welcome grave.

NATURALISTS' CALENDAR. Mean Temperature... 52. 05.

October 11

This is "Old Michaelmas Day."

"DUNCAN'S VICTORY." On the 11th of October, 1797, admiral

Duncan obtained a splendid victory over the Dutch fleet off Camperdown, near the isle of Texel, on the coast of Holland. For this memorable achievement he was created a viscount, with a pension of two thousand pounds per annum. His lordship died on the 4th of August, 1804; be was born at Dundee, in Scotland, on the After the battle of 1st of July, 1731. Camperdown was decided, he called his crew together in the presence of the captured Dutch admiral, who was greatly affected by the scene, and Duncan kneeling on the deck, with every man under his command," solemnly and pathetically offered up praise and thanksgiving to the God of battles;-strongly proving the truth of the assertion, that piety and courage should be inseparably allied, and that the latter without the former loses its principal virtue."*

NATURALISTS' CALENDAR.

Mean Temperature.... 51 82.

October 12.

CHRONOLOGY,

On the 12th of October, 1748, was born at St. John's near Worcester, Mr. William Butler, the author of "Chronological, Biographical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Exercises," an excellent work, for young persons especially, a useful compendium in every library, and one to which the editor of the Every-Day Bark has been indebted as a ready guide to many interesting and important events.

In the seventh edition of Mr. Butler's work just mentioned, we are informed by his son, Mr. John Olding Butler, that his father was educated in the city of Worcester. Having acquired considerable knowledge, and especially an excellent style of penmanship, he in 1765 repaired to the metropolis, and commenced his career as a teacher of writing and geography. In these branches of education he attained the highest repute on account of the improvements which were introduced by him in his mode of instruction. His copies were derived from the sources of geography, history, and biographical memoirs. A yet more extensive and permanent benefit was conferred upon young persons by the many useful and ingenious

* Butler's Chronological ExerciseL