gave a good idea of the splendid ceremony; and she added, "The Queen highly approves Sir John Lawrence's addresses, and is truly rejoiced to see the good and friendly feeling which seems to pervade the chiefs, and cannot fail to lead to lasting good."

Twelve years after the Lahore Durbar, another Viceroy sent home his military secretary to enlighten the ministry of the day, as one "whose opinion on the frontier is worth that of twenty Lawrences!"

Lord Lawrence is credited with the policy of "masterly inactivity;" and his own decision as to advance beyond the Indus was founded on no slight grounds. We must not touch the question of "natural" or " scientific" frontier. We believe, however, that if Afghanistan had been annexed in Lord Dalhousie's time it would have now been as loyal as the Punjab, under men of the Lawrence school.

be called the poem of the English forest. It is nearly a hundred years since the appearance of the first edition of "Gilpin's Forest Scenery," and since then it has appeared in other garbs, but never in so delightful an attire as the present, with notes, and an introduction by Mr. Heath, the faithful and enthusiastic delineator of our ferns and our forest trees. Here, he has reproduced, in his own attractive manner, the forest scenes of Gilpin's delightful sketches, and, as they reflect themselves on the eye, they transfer the reader to the open chase, the still glade, or the noble clump of ancient forest kings.

William Gilpin was a very highly estimable minister of our English Church; his affectionate rambles in search of the picturesque objects of nature in no degree interfered with his duties as a clergyman. Born in Cumberland, a lineal descendant of Bernard Gilpin, famous in the Protestant Reformation as the Apostle of the North, after following, with very eminent success, for some years the profession of a schoolmaster, he was presented to the_living of Boldre, near Lymington, in the New Forest, by one of his pupils, William Mitford, the historian of Greece, and there he died in 1804, at the age of eighty. His remains rest in Boldre churchyard, beneath the shadow of the field maple to which he refers in his "Forest Scenery," and which our readers will easily realise in the accompanying engraving from Mr. Heath's refreshing and breezy volume. Many pages might be filled with references to the several other works, and the varied and extensive excursions of this interesting lover of nature. In his travels it was his habit to sketch such objects, and especially groups of trees, as presented impressive and beautiful combinations, and the reader will surely feel something of the artist's glow of delight in the accompanying engravings, which have been redrawn from the sketches by Gilpin's pencil-the effect of an evening sun in a forest, and that which is called a group of well-balanced trees.

History, politics, even the dramatic presentations of fiction, and many another subject in which men seek refreshment, come attended and even stamped by the cares and anxieties from which the mind desires to find an escape; but how delightful, aided by a book such as Gilpin's, to plunge into the woods, and, even while sitting by the study or the parlour fire, to escape among the trees, there to find an "interval of grateful shade." There is great truth in the words of Lord Beaconsfield, in a letter to Mr. Heath, the present editor of the "Forest Scenery;" "I am not surprised," says his lordship, "that the ancients worshipped trees; lakes and mountains, however glorious for a time, in time weary,-sylvan scenery never palls." We are writing this paper in Islington. Here, probably, more than two hundred years since, Cowley wrote his grand lyric on Solitude :

And then the poet closes by his reference to "a village less than Islington.' In some such frame of feeling visions of woodlands and of trees may come to the tired citizen compelled to go far beyond Islington now to find a village solitude.

"Within the sunlit forest,

Our roof the bright blue sky,

Where fountains flow, and wild flowers blow,
To lift the heart on high:

When high above the tree-tops

The lark is soaring free;

Where streams the light through broken clouds
His speckled breast to see;
While softly, in the pauses

Of song, re-echoed wide,

The cushat's coo, the linnet's lay,
O'er rill and river glide!"

England has not been supposed to be preeminent for her trees; but it is not a matter for doubt it is, we suppose, certain that in no other region do we find the mingled majesty and beauty of English woodland scenes. Shall we not quote, for the thousandth time, the well-known lines of Pope ?—

"Let India boast her plants, nor envy we

The weeping amber or the balmy tree,

While by our oaks the precious loads are borne,
And realms commanded which those trees adorn."

The oak is a truly national tree; not among all the monarchs of the forest is there one, we believe, so truly representative of our national character-rugged, gnarled, and surly, but strong and sturdy, the growth of centuries, so that amidst its umbrageous boughs it may be truly said, "The century-living crow might grow old and die amidst its branches." There is a pleasant little parable of Sir Arthur Helps in the first series of "The Friends in Council," which very truly sets forth at once the character of the oak itself and the region which it adorns. Referring to some previous observation, Ellesmere says:"They put me in mind of a conversation between a complacent poplar and a grim old oak which I heard the other day. The poplar said that it grew up quite straight, heavenwards, that all its branches pointed the same way, and always had done so. Turning to the oak, which it had been talking at before for some time, the poplar went on to remark that it did not wish to say anything unfriendly to a brother of the forest, but those warped and twisted branches seemed to show strange struggles. The tall thing concluded its oration by saying that it grew up very fast, and that when it had done growing it did not suffer itself to be made into huge floating engines of destruction. But different trees had different tastes. There was then a sound from the old oak like an 'oh,' or a 'whew,' or perhaps it was only the wind amongst its resisting branches; and the gaunt creature said that it had had ugly winds from without and cross-grained impulses from within; that it knew it had thrown out awkwardly a branch here and a branch there, which would never come quite right again, it feared; that men

worked it up sometimes for good and sometimes for evil, but that, at any rate, it had not lived for nothing."

Some ages before Gilpin published his "Forest Scenery," the gentle John Evelyn, the attached friend of Charles I, published his "Sylva;" and it is singular that no modern editor gives us a new edition, with necessary notes, and pleasant illustrations of this voice from the woods; for if not, like Gilpin, graceful, "Sylva" is not less than the literary monarch of English dendrology-it is an ancient strain of simple piety, a record of amusing superstitions about trees, and multifarious reading,

the congenial companion and faithful friend of the good bishop, Jeremy Taylor.

But that pleasing reference of John Evelyn to the word of Isaiah, "As the days of a tree are the days of my people," reminds us how trees have often been likened to human beings. The elder Scaliger laughed at Erasmus, whom he supposed to be the first modern author who conceived that plants and trees were affected with a certain kind of human sensation; but Dante appears to have travelled among the moderns in that fancy. And Wordsworth was not far away from it when he said,

all pervaded by a kind of parental feeling with which this beautiful old English gentleman regarded these dear objects of his affection. It was written for the purpose of rousing England to guard her trees, prophesying the dire consequences to the nation if the populations of the forests should be permitted to decline and to decay, and invoking the gentlemen of the soil to serve the future generations by planting trees. In a very sweet spirit, the amiable author says, "It is observed that planters are often blessed with health and old age; according to the Prophet Isaiah, As the days of a tree are the days of my people.' Hæc scripsi octogenarius; and shall, if God protract my years, and continue my health, be continually planting, till it shall please Him to transplant me into those glorious regions above, planted with perennial groves, and trees bearing immortal fruit." Surely very sweetly said, and it reveals the heart of one worthy to be, as he was,

6

"I heard a thousand blended notes,

As, in a grove, I sat, reclined,

In that sweet mood, when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

Through primrose tufts, in that green hour,
The periwinkle trailed its leaves;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys what it receives!"

We need neither to laugh at nor agree with Erasmus or Wordsworth, and yet, assuredly, a tree is a living being; and there are few, if any, of the functions which belong to the human frame which it does not perform. It eats, it drinks, it respires, it digests, it secretes, it excretes, it assimilates, it circulates, and it undergoes all those changes in its various organs by processes analagous to those of respiration and digestion in animals. A living body is distinguished from an inorganic

like an old man passing from bough to bough, and pressing a frosty kiss on the leaves, and then says,

"Old trees by night are like men in thought,

By poetry to silence wrought;

They stand so still, and they look so wise,
With folded arms and half-shut eyes,
More shadowy than the shade they cast

When the wan moonlight on the river passed."

Hence, probably, it is that superstition has many stories to tell about trees. Gilpin recites the story of the groaning tree of Badesley, a village about two miles from Lymington in the New Forest. A cottager and his wife heard frequently a strange noise behind their house, like that of a person in extreme agony. At first the man attempted to believe that it must be the bellowing of the stags in the forest. By degrees all the neighbours heard it, and it began to be much talked about, and it was discovered to proceed from an elm-a young and vigorous tree to all appearance perfectly sound. Royalty came to inquire into it; the groaning tree became an object of universal interest to all the country round; the sound seemed to arise from its root; a pamphlet was written about it. At last the landlord bored a hole in its trunk; after this it never groaned. Then it was rooted up, but nothing appeared which led to any discovery; only it was believed there was no trick in the affair, but that some natural cause existed though never understood. But, if space permitted, plenty of suggestive stories are at hand which might hint to superstitious minds the sympathy of

trees.

Many of our readers will, perhaps, regard such illustrations as sentimental; but we think we have furnished some reasons for that sympathetic sense of companionship, that kind of human kinship, which men have felt in the presence of forest scenery; and those who, not contented with feeling, desire to moralise, find, as Gilpin found amongst his trees, quiescent as to ordinary observers they might seem, happy illustrations of a busy life, industry and activity pervading every part of the tree, and exhibiting itself further, as he says, like other communities, in little elbowings, jostlings, thwartings, and oppositions, in which some gain and others lose.

Our paper has been interlaced, perhaps it may be thought too copiously, by references to the words of the poets; but there is one of whom we eminently love to think among our English treesCowper. How many of his words breathe the meditative spirit of the woods, as when, by the babbling brook and beneath the shimmering boughs, he says, in a noble passage, of which we shall, however, only quote a word or two,

"The walk still verdant under oaks and elms,
Whose outspread branches overarch the glade.
The roof though moveable through all its length
As the wind sways it, has yet well sufficed,
And intercepting in their silent fall
The frequent flakes, has kept a path for me.

We have, as we intended, restricted our observations of forest scenery hitherto to the woodlands of our own country, but before we close our paper we must glance at the wonderful forests of other lands, especially of those dense populations of ancient trees which excite the wonder of the traveller in the New World. It is not so wonderful now, however, to read of these as when, seventy-five years since, the fascinating pen of Humboldt seemed by its graphic descriptions to transfer their impressions, as conveyed to his mind, to the stay-at-home travellers in Europe. Compared with such scenes, we know nothing of forest scenery here. Sherwood, Epping, and the New Forests, with all their magnificent relics of ancient trees, are only parks, appendages to the habitations of culture and taste; and even Fontainebleau and the Black Forest, and other such pieces of European woodland, are little more. In these the feelings are gently stirred and fancy and imagination are moved, but in harmonious concord with civilised sensations. How different the vast and wide-extending scenes which Humboldt explored!-trees, and the forests in which they stand, alike gigantic in the deep stillness of interminable wildernesses, well calculated to lift imagination upon the wings of awe and terror; where vegetable life appears in the freshness of unbroken and unmitigated grandeur; where trunks of trees have been for ages concealed beneath a thick carpet of verdure, and the same creeping plants which run along the ground climb to the tops of the highest trees, and even then manage to pass over from one to the other at the height of a hundred feet. Well may Humboldt say, "Nature here, to European eyes, presents herself under an aspect altogether unlooked for." In the midst of such profound recesses, even in his travels in that comparatively distant time, Humboldt found, in those most awful and beautiful sequestrations, solitary habitations-men who, apparently flying from society, found the delightful climate and the magnificent scenery around them sufficient for life. In one such habitation he describes a solitary forest spot, where, sitting at nightfall with his friend, he saw in the distance, as in the steppes of the Orinoco, the surface of the ocean supporting the starry canopy of the heaven, the tree beneath which he sat, the luminous insects fluttering in the air, the constellations glittering in the south. In the midst of exotic nature he fancied that his ear caught the tinkling of a cow-bell, and it seemed like the echo of sounds from beyond the seas; so far from his native land, and yet, as by a magic power, the cow-bell transporting his sympathies from one hemisphere to another. Forest scenery indeed!