possessed before him, all Doves and Daniels, in uninterrupted succession from time immemorial, farther than register or titledeeds could ascend. The little church called Chapel le Dale stands about a bow shot from the family house. There they had all been carried to the font; there they had each led his bride to the altar; and thither they had, each in his turn, been borne upon the shoulders of their friends and neighbours. Earth to earth they had been consigned there for so many generations, that half of the soil of the churchyard consisted. of their remains. A hermit who might wish his grave to be as quiet as his cell, could imagine no fitter resting place. On three sides there was an irregular low stone wall, rather to mark the limits of the sacred ground, than to inclose it; on the fourth it was bounded by the brook whose waters proceed by a subterraneous channel from Wethercote cave. Two or three alders and rowan trees hung over the brook, and shed their leaves and seeds into the stream. Some bushy hazels grew at intervals along the lines of the wall; and a few ash trees, as the winds had sown them. To the east and west some fields adjoined it, in that state of half cultivation which gives a human character to solitude: to the south, on the other side the brook, the common, with its limestone rocks peering everywhere above ground, extended to the foot of Ingleborough. A craggy hill, feathered with birch, sheltered it from the north. 'The turf was as soft and fine as that of the adjoining hills; it was seldom broken, so scanty was the population to which it was appropriated; scarcely a thistle or a nettle deformed it, and the few tombstones which had been placed there were now themselves half-buried. The sheep came over the wall when they listed, and sometimes took shelter in the porch from the storm. Their voices, and the cry of the kite wheeling above, were the only sounds which were heard there, except when the single bell which hung in its niche over the entrance tinkled for service on the Sabbath day, or with a slower tongue gave notice that one of the children of the soil was returning to the earth from which he sprung.' The house of the Doves was to the east of the church, under the same hill, and with the same brook in front; and the intervening fields belonged to the family. It was a low house, having before it a little garden of that size and character which showed that the inhabitants could afford to bestow a thought upon something more than mere bodily wants. 'You entered between two yew trees clipt to the fashion of two pawns. There were hollyhocks and sunflowers displaying themselves above the wall; roses and sweet peas under the windows, and the everlasting pea climbing the porch. The rest of the garden lay behind the house, partly on the slope of the hill. It had a hedge of gooseberry bushes, a few apple-trees, pot-herbs in abundance, onions, cabbages, turnips and carrots; potatoes had hardly yet yet found their way into these remote parts; and in a sheltered spot under the crag, open to the south, were six bee-hives which made the family perfectly independent of West India produce. Tea was in those days as little known as potatoes, and for all other things honey supplied the place of sugar. The house consisted of seven rooms, the dairy and cellar included, which were both upon the ground floor. As you entered the kitchen, there was on the right one of those open chimneys which afford more comfort in a winter's evening than the finest register stove; in front of the chimney stood a wooden bee-hive chair, and on each side was a long oak seat with a back to it, the seats serving as chests in which the oaten bread was kept. They were of the darkest brown, and well polished by constant use. On the back of each were the same initials as those over the door, with the date 1610. The great oak table, and the chest which held the house-linen, bore the same date. The chimney was well hung with bacon; the rack which covered half the ceiling bore equal marks of plenty; mutton hams were suspended from other parts of the ceiling; and there was an odour of cheese from the adjoining dairy, which the turf fire, though perpetual as that of the Magi, or of the Vestal Virgins, did not overpower. A few pewter dishes were ranged above the trenchers, opposite the door on a conspicuous shelf. The other treasures of the family were in an open triangular cupboard, fixed in one of the corners of the best kitchen, half way from the floor, and touching the ceiling. They consisted of a silver saucepan, a silver goblet, and four apostle spoons. Here also King Charles's Golden Rules were pasted against the wall, and a large print of Daniel in the Lions' Den. The lions were bedaubed with yellow, and the prophet was bedaubed with blue, with a red patch upon each of his cheeks: if he had been like his picture he might have frightened the Lions; but happily there were no "judges" in the family, and it had been bought for its name's sake. Six black chairs were ranged along the wall, where they were seldom disturbed from their array. They had been purchased by Daniel the grandfather upon his marriage, and were the most costly purchase that had ever been made in the family; for the goblet was a legacy. The backs were higher than the head of the tallest man when seated; the seats flat and shallow, set in a round frame, unaccommodating in their material, more unaccommodating in shape; the backs also were of wood rising straight up, and ornamented with balls and lozenges and embossments; and the legs and cross bars were adorned in the same taste. Over the chimney were two peacocks' feathers, some of the dry silky pods of the honesty flower, and one of those large "sinuous shells" so finely described by Landor; "Of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed In the sun's palace porch-where, when unyoked, Shake one, and it awakens-then apply Its polished lips to your attentive ear, And And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.” The three apartments above served equally for store-rooms and bedchambers. William Dove, the brother, slept in one, and Agatha, the maid, or Haggy, as she was called, in another."-vol. i. pp. 57-63. Immediately after this we have a dissertation on the already, we believe, merely Antiquarian topic of craniology—and then, much to our relief, reappears Daniel the elder. A catalogue of his library is introduced as follows: 'Happily for Daniel, he lived before the age of magazines, reviews, cyclopædias, elegant extracts, and literary newspapers, so that he gathered the fruit of knowledge for himself, instead of receiving it from the dirty fingers of a retail vender. His books were few in number, but they were all weighty either in matter or in size. They consisted of the Morte d'Arthur in the fine black-letter edition of Copland-Plutarch's Morals and Pliny's Natural History, two goodly folios, full as an egg of meat-and both translated by that old worthy, Philemon, who, for the service he rendered to his contemporaries and to his countrymen, deserves to be called the best of the Hollands, without disparaging either the Lord or the Doctor of that appellation- &c. &c. We pass over most of the catalogue. The close of it must be given, as it serves so well to bring in one of the most charming visions of happiness in humble life, that ever poet or painter dreamt of. We print in italics some of the author's golden sententiæ. 'Latimer and Du Bartas he used sometimes to read aloud on Sundays; and if the departed take cognizance of what passes on earth-and poets derive any satisfaction from that posthumous applause which is generally the only reward of those who deserve it-Sylvester might have found some compensation for the undeserved neglect into which his works had sunk, by the full and devout delight which his rattling rhymes and quaint collocations afforded to this reader. The silvertongued Sylvester, however, was reserved for a Sabbath book; as a week-day author, Daniel preferred Pliny, for the same reason that bread and cheese, or a rasher of hung mutton, contented his palate better than a syllabub. He frequently regretted that so knowing a writer had never seen or heard of Wethercote and Yordas caves- -the ebbing and flowing spring at Giggleswick, Malham Cove, and Gordale Scar-that he might have described them among the wonders of the world. Omne ignotum pro magnifico, is a maxim which will not in all cases hold good. There are things which we do not undervalue because we are familiar with them, but which are admired the more the more thoroughly they are known and understood; it is thus with the grand objects of nature and the finest works of art,—with whatsoever is truly great and excellent. Daniel was not deficient in imagination; but no description of places which he had never seen, however exaggerated, (as (as such things always are) impressed him so strongly as these objects. in his own neighbourhood, which he had known from childhood. Three or four times in his life it had happened that strangers with a curiosity as uncommon in that age as it is general in this, came from afar to visit these wonders of the West Riding, and Daniel accompa nied them with a delight such as he never experienced on any other occasion. 6 Refusing all reward for such services, the strangers to whom he officiated as a guide, though they perceived that he was an extraordinary person, were little aware how much information he had acquired, and of how strange a kind. His talk with them did not go beyond the subjects which the scenes they came to visit naturally suggested, and they wondered more at the questions he asked, than at anything which he advanced himself. For his disposition was naturally shy, and that which had been bashfulness in youth assumed the appearance of reserve as he advanced in life; for having none to communicate with upon his favorite studies, he lived in an intellectual world of his own, a mental solitude as complete as that of Alexander Selkirk or Robinson Crusoe. Even to the curate, his conversation, if he had touched upon his books, would have been heathen Greek; and to speak the truth plainly, without knowing a letter of that language, he knew more about the Greeks, than nine-tenths of the clergy at that time, including all the dissenters, and than nine-tenths of the schoolmasters also.' We must remember that this history opens in the year 1723 :'Our good Daniel had none of that confidence which so usually and so unpleasantly characterizes self-taught men. In fact, he was by no means aware of the extent of his acquirements, all that he knew in this kind having been acquired for amusement-not for use. He had never attempted to teach himself anything. These books had lain in his way in boyhood, or fallen in it afterwards, and the perusal of them, intently as it was followed, was always accounted by him to be nothing more than recreation. None of his daily business had ever been neglected for it; he cultivated his fields and his garden, repaired his walls, looked to the stable, tended his cows and salved his sheep, as diligently and as contentedly as if he had possessed neither capacity nor inclination for any higher employments. Yet Daniel was one of those men, who, if disposition and aptitude were not overruled by circumstances, would have grown pale with study, instead of being bronzed and hardened by sun, and wind, and rain. There were in him undeveloped talents which might have raised him to distinction as an antiquary, a virtuoso of the Royal Society, a poet, or a theologian, to whichever course the bias in his ball of fortune had inclined. But he had not a particle of envy in his composition. He thought, indeed, that if he had had grammar-learning in his youth like the curate, he would have made more use of it; but there was nothing either of the sourness or bitterness (call it which you please) of repining, in this natural reflection. Never indeed was any man more contented with doing his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him. And well he might be so, for no man ever passed through the world with less to disquiet or to sour him. Bred up in habits which secured the continuance of that humble but sure independence to which he was born, he had never known what it was to be anxious for the future. At the age of twenty-five he had brought home a wife, the daughter of a little landholder like himself, with fifteen pounds for her portion; and the true-love of his youth proved to him a faithful helpmate in those years when the dream of life is over, and we live in its realities. If at any time there had been some alloy in his happiness, it was when there appeared reason to suppose that in him his family would be extinct; for, though no man knows what parental feelings are till he has experienced them, and Daniel, therefore, knew not the whole value of that which he had never enjoyed, the desire of progeny is natural to the heart of man; and though Daniel had neither large estates, nor an illustrious name to transmit, it was an unwelcome thought, that the little portion of the earth which had belonged to his fathers time out of mind should pass into the possession of some stranger, who would tread on their graves and his own, without any regard to the dust that lay beneath. That uneasy apprehension was removed after he had been married fifteen years, when to the great joy of both parents, because they had long ceased to entertain any hope of such an event, their wishes were fulfilled in the birth of a son. This, their only child, was healthy, apt and docile, to all appearance as happily disposed in mind and body as a father's heart could wish. If they had fine weather for winning their hay or shearing their corn, they thanked God for it; if the season proved unfavourable, the labour was only a little the more and the crop a little the worse. Their stations secured them from want, and they had no wish beyond it. What more had Daniel to desire?' The following passage in the divine Du Bartas,' old Daniel, we are told, used to read with peculiar satisfaction, applying it to himself: O thrice, thrice happy he, who shuns the cares His fields' bounds bound his thoughts: he never sups, Milk, cheese, and fruit, (fruits of his own endeavour) Sly pettifoggers, wranglers at the bar, But |