Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub

seen

remained locked, while a spiked plate | each of the four town gates. In Montpressed upon the tongue, so as effectually gomery, it was not used as a seat at all, to preclude its owner making any use of the culprit having to stand upon it with it. The branks, however, was not pecu- naked feet and dishevelled hair. In liar to Staffordshire; it was in use in Scotland, alewives convicted of selling Scotland centuries ago. In 1574, two bad ale were set upon the cuck-stool, quarrelsome Glasgow bodies were bound while the liquor was distributed to the over to keep the peace, on pain of being poor folk, for whom, however bad it might "brankit." Pennant says the authorities be, it was considered apparently good of Langholm, in Dumfriesshire, always drink enough. In 1572 a new cuckingkept one in readiness for immediate use, stool cost the parish of Kingston-uponand plenty of specimens are yet to be Thames 7s. 6d. for timber, 3s. for ironin different places in England. work, 4s. 1od. for wheels and brasses, One preserved at Walton-on-Thames is and 8s. for the matting; a total outlay of of thin iron, with a less terrible bit than L.1, 3s. 4d.—no mean item in parochial that of the Staffordshire branks, being expenditure, as money went three hunonly a piece of flat iron some two inches dred years ago. The ducking-stool was long, to keep the wearer's tongue quiet a strong chair fastened to the end of a by simple pressure. This instrument pole, or beam, projecting over a river, bears the date of 1633 on an inscription well, or water-trough. We do not know running: that we can better Misson's description of it: "They fasten an armchair to the end of two strong beams, twelve or fifteen feet long, and parallel to each other. The chair hangs upon a sort of axle,

Chester presents Walton with a bridle

To curb women's tongues that talk so idle

a couplet explained by a story of a Mr. Chester losing an estate through a mis-on which it plays freely, so as always chief-making woman's tongue, and commemorating his loss by presenting Walton with its scolds' bridle. Dr. Plot, the Staffordshire historian, is loud in his praise of this odd device for reforming clamorous women. "I look upon it,' says he, "as much to be preferred to the cucking-stool, which not only endangers the health of the party, but also gives the tongue liberty 'twixt every dip, to neither of which this is liable; it being such a bridle for the tongue as not only quite deprives them of speech, but brings shame for the transgression, and humility thereupon, before it is taken off."

The worthy antiquary was mistaken in supposing the cucking-stool to be one and the same thing with the duckingstool, whereas it had nothing whatever to do with the cold-water cure for hot-tempered shrews. Borlase calls it "the seat of infamy," whereon Cornish scolds were condemned to abide the derision of passers-by for such time as the bailiffs of the manor thought the occasion demanded. In Leicester it was customary to set the offender upon the stool at her own door, and then carry her in turn to

to remain in the horizontal position. The scold being well fastened in her chair, the two beams are then placed, as near to the centre as possible, across a post on the water-side; and being lifted up behind, the chair, of course, drops into the cold element." However inferior in efficacy to the branks, the duckingstool had the advantage in affording more amusement to on-lookers. Amusing to spectators, no doubt, but it was a cruel pastime, and has very properly gone out of use.

Some queans with inveterate habits of scolding were not to be cured by the watery ordeal: in 1681, a Mrs. Finch, who had been ducked three several times, was convicted as a common scold for a fourth time, and fined three marks, the Court of King's Bench ordering her to be in prison till she paid the fine. In 1745, the hostess of the Queen's Head, at Kingston in Surrey, was ducked under Kingston Bridge. This is the latest instance we know of, in England at least; but a woman named Mary Davis underwent the like discipline somewhere in America so lately as 1818.

It is the best printed paper in Chicago.
Its Commercial Epitome can be relied upon.
It employs the Best Talent.

Its columns are devoted to Financial and Commercial Matters.
Its selections on Current Events are pithy and readable.

Its Letters on RISING CITIES have become very popular.
Its DRY GOODS PRICE CURRENT is carefully corrected.
Its GROCERS PRICE CURRENT is full and explicit.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

THREE SONNETS. By Emily Pfeiffer, 450 THE LAST Tryst, .

MISCELLANY,

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY
LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON.

[ocr errors]

451

[ocr errors]

472

[ocr errors]

479

489

[ocr errors]

499

506

[ocr errors]

508

[ocr errors]

510

[ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.

For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club the LIVING Age with another periodical.

An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY.

THREE SONNETS.

We still might rise, and with one heart agree

TO NATURE IN HER ASCRIBED CHARACTER OF To mar the ruthless "grinding of thy mill!"

UNMEANING AND ALL-PERFORMING FORCE.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[blocks in formation]

THE LAST TRYST.

OVER brown moors and wither'd leas
The angry winds were sweeping;
Over the great grey northern seas,

The crested waves were leaping;
And you and I stood close together,
In the chilling gleam of the wintry weather,
As the bare gaunt branches, overhead,
Shook their lingering leaflets, gold and red,
While in every faltering word we said,
Rang the pitiful wail for the days that were
dead;

For, by the sad seas, 'neath the storm-beat trees,

Our last tryst we were keeping.

I scarce could hear the words you sobbed, Amid your passionate weeping,

Thou art not "calm," but restless as the And the glow from my eager prayer was

[blocks in formation]

robbed,

By the chill around us creeping; From the silent paths, where in summer weather,

Youth, joy, and music had met together,
From the cry of the sea-mews flitting past,
O'er the wild white waves in the bitter blast,
From the breakers that crash'd on the hollow
sand,

From the sough of the breeze o'er the dull

From sea and shore rose "No more, no more," damp land, As our last tryst we were keeping.

There was not a pale bud left, in sooth,

'Mid the dry leaves round us heaping; The bitter harvest of reckless youth,

Time's iron hand was reaping; Our lips still said, "Forever, forever," As the trembling fingers clung together. But even then each sad heart knew What fate and circumstance meant to do, And the mighty billows boom'd like a knell, As we turned apart from that long farewell; And to wind, and rain, and the moaning main, Left the last tryst of our keeping.

All The Year Round.

From The Quarterly Review.
THE ISLE OF WIGHT.*

Of all the southern isles hath held the highest
place,

And evermore hath been the great'st in
Britain's grace.

The name of the Isle of Wight at once calls up ideas of all that is most lovely in scenery and genial in climate. Sung by poets, painted by artists, eulogized by physicians, the favourite resort alike of the pleasure-seeker and the invalid, the artist and the geologist; a household word with Englishmen, which all either have seen or intend to see; few spots in the wide world are more often thought of with loving thankfulness. How many

66 BRITAIN," writes the so-called Nennius,† quoting from the Welsh Triads, "containeth three considerable islands: whereof one lieth over against the Armorican shore, and is called Inis gueith; the second is situated in the navel of the sea between Ireland and Britain, and its name is called Eubonia, that is Manau; another is situated in the furthest verge of the British world beyond the Picts, and is named Orc. So was it said in the proverb of old when one spake of its judges, and kings, 'He judged Britain are the weary labourers of this overwith its three islands."" Other pens worked generation in whose minds it is have described in this "Review" her connected with days or weeks of the northern sisters, "the storm-swept Or- purest happiness snatched from the cades," and the bleak house of the heroic Charlotte de la Tremouille, and the saintly Wilson. It is our present purpose to devote a few pages to the leader of the "laughing train" of "little isles on every

side "

[blocks in formation]

5. The Undercliff of the Isle of Wight. By George A. Martin, M.D. London. 1849. 8vo.

6. The History and Antiquities of the Isle of Wight. By George Hillier. London. 1855. Parts 1 to 4. 4to. 7. Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Surrey, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. London. 1865.

"Nennius," § 8. "The work which bears the name of Nennius was most probably written in the eighth century. It is a compilation made originally without much judgment. Still, however, it contains fragments of earlier works which are of great interest and value." - Guest, "Early English Settlements in South Britain," Transact. of Arch. Inst., Salisbury volume, p. 36. The original of the passage given above is found in one of the Welsh Triads quoted by Dr. Guest in the "Proceedings of the Philological Society," i. 9: "The three primary adjoining islands of the Isle of Britain, Orc, Manaw, and Gwyth, and afterwards the sea broke the land, so that Mon became

an island and in the same manner the isle of Orc was broken."

Collins, "Ode to Liberty."

noise and smoke of town,

and dreamt away among their merry children on its pebbly beaches, or beneath its ivy-clad rocks, gazing out on the wide expanse of the limitless ocean, drinking in health and refreshment both for mind and body with every breeze! These grateful memories swell into a deeper and more sacred feeling with those who, on the first approach of that fell destroyer of the youngest and loveliest consumption - have borne their loved ones from bleaker and less genial homes to winter on its sunny slopes beneath the sheltering wall of its gigantic downs, and have seen with thankfulness the glow return to the wan cheek and vigour to the enfeebled limbs; or if this has been denied them, and the disease has run its fatal course to its sad end, have at least enjoyed the consolation of knowing that life has been prolonged, suffering lessened, and that the invalids' closing days have been brightened by the loveliness around them: that if their sun has set, it has not set in darkness and gloom.

But it is not every one for whom our island awakens such solemn memories as these, memories which we must almost apologize for referring to. With the artist the Isle of Wight speaks of many a treasured addition to the sketch-book. Many a young observer has, like the lamented Strickland, learnt his first geological lessons in this island, which, in the words

*

of Mr. Hopkins, seems almost to have shaped pinnacled masses left while all been "cut out by Nature for a model about them has yielded to the ceaseless illustrative of the phenomena of stratifica- dash of the breakers. tion;" while a whole host of accom- Towards the centre of the island these plished geologists - including such hon- chalk downs, instead of being limited to oured names as Webster, Sedgwick, and a single narrow wall, form two or three the too early lost Forbes - have here parallel ridges with outliers: here, cut pursued investigations, the fruits of which into combes and dingles with steeply have enriched the scientific world. The sloping sides clothed with rich foliage, or botanist has many a pleasant memory of shagged with aged thorns dwarfed or prizes secured for the "hortus siccus," twisted by the fierce blasts with which among its woods, downs, bogs, and sand- they have had to maintain a lifelong hills, or on the level reefs, fertile in sea- struggle; there, closing in and forming weeds, that fortify its coasts. Indeed, long sequestered glens, or rounding into whatever his tastes may be, no one with smooth elbows, or dipping down their any eye or feeling for the beauties of na- undulating arms into the sand-valleys ture can have visited the Isle of Wight below. As we approach either extremity without acquiescing in the panegyric the ridge diminishes in breadth, being passed upon it by Sir Walter Scott,† as "that beautiful island, which he who has once seen never forgets, through whatever part of the world his future path may carry him."

scarcely a quarter of a mile broad at Afton Down above Freshwater Gate, while the strata more and more nearly approach to verticality, evidenced to the eye by the black lines of flints scoring the white face of the chalk with as much regularity as the lines of a copy-book.

Shank

The rhomboidal form of the Isle of Wight, likened by various observers to a turbot, a bird with expanded wings, and The southern promontory presents a heraldic lozenge, the two diameters another range of chalk downs measuring roughly 23 and 14 miles, is lin, St. Boniface, and St. Catherine's due both to its geological formation and Downs-containing the highest ground to the unequal action of the sea on the coast-line, eating out the softer strata of the Lower Greensand and Wealden beds into the wide concavities of Sandown and Chale Bays, while the harder chalk is left in bold projecting headlands.

The leading feature in the Isle of Wight, both from a geological and picturesque point of view, is the high undulating ridge of bare swelling chalk downs, running from end to end of the island, of which it forms, as it were, the backbone, ruling its whole physical structure, and rising sheer from the sea at either extremity in bold mural precipices honeycombed with caverns, forming the CulverCliffs to the east, and the Main Bench and Needles headland to the west. The Needles themselves are simply shattered remnants of the chalk ridge that once stretched continuously across the channel to the Isle of Purbeck: huge wedge

"Cambridge Essays," 1857, p. 185.
"Surgeon's Daughter," chap. vi.

in the island, little short of 800 feet above the sea-level, throwing off huge pier-like projecting arms northwards into the valley of denudation,- for the most part displaying an undulating surface of the Lower Greensand, sometimes running in ridges, sometimes swelling in isolated hillocks, sometimes furrowed into gullies and watered by the Medina and the Yar and their tiny tributaries,which divides this range from the central ridge.

The axis of the upheaving force which raised the central ridge appears to have coincided with a line drawn from near Sandown Fort to somewhere between Brighston and Brook. At each extremity of this anticlinal line in Compton and Sandown Bays, the Wealden emerges from under the Lower Greensand, and attracts the geologist by its Saurian remains and rafts of fossil trees.

Immediately below the chalk lies the Upper Greensand, whose mural escarpment and shelf-like outline contrasts for

« ПредишнаНапред »