a regiment, and marched against the Pretender in 1745 and lying in that recess, you see one of the cannon-balls bestowed upon us when the Castle was besieged by Cromwell.

One thing, which I remember well as a child, has been removed; on yonder shelf was the stuffed skin of a huge seal, often pointed out to me by my nurse, as the great toad of old, which my ancestry used to keep in the donjon to feed upon their captives; and to which, as an ancient legend run, (doubtlessly derived from as authentic a source) the Marquis of Berkeley was supposed to have abandoned his two children. But come, let us proceed : an arched opening in the lower end of the hall, shows us the main entrance of the Castle; and the massive door being opened, we find ourselves in the centre of the inner court. Above our heads, and forming an arch over the door by which we have just egressed, are the two rib bones of a whale ; the treacherous tide of the Severn having left the Leviathan within the royalty of the Castle.

And now, gentle or ungentle reader, though I

have not introduced you to one half of the interesting features of the halls of my fathers, handed down to us to the present moment, in one continuous male line, since the time of the Conquest, still I have said enough to give you some idea of the sort of place to which we have journeyed so comfortably, or otherwise, together; and I must now leave you to amuse yourself as you can, either by coaxing an acquaintance with yonder old mastiff, who sits so gravely in the sun, or by counting the eyes in the tail of that peacock, which struts so proudly around him, while I follow the wanderings of my mind, unfettered by colloquial interruption.

After an absence of some years from the much loved place of our nativity, the first of any length that has occurred since our natal day, what a flood of recollections rush upon the mind, as each well remembered object once more presses on the view; like the hand of a dear old friend held forth to welcome our return.

It was my lot to leave these scenes at the tender age of boyhood, being then but eleven years old,

and not to return to them again till seven years had passed, and I had nearly grown to man's estate. This space seems but short, when the ways of the world are new and therefore beautiful; but there is no period in the existence of humanity, during which the change in life is so complete as at the respective ages I have mentioned.

At the time to which I now allude, having been called into the country by the business of a brother's contest for the city of Gloucester, I resolved to seize the first favourable moment that might occur, for paying the much-loved and well-remembered scene a visit; and such an opportunity offering, I shut myself up in a post-chaise, and arrived at the Castle by the road I have just described. I would not have had a companion with me for worlds-my heart was too full to speak without a tear; I had not seen the place since I left it at my father's death, and my brain was so loaded with recollections pleasing and melancholy, that I had not a thought to bestow on anything unconnected with the associations around me. In what an unspeakable excite

ment and delight did I wander through the groves and gardens; each bush and corner endeared to me by the remembrance of some childish adventure, which though trivial in itself, when compared with later events, still made a deeper impression on the then more susceptible mind, than circumstances of far graver power have since been able to effect. The quaintly cut figures of the old yew hedge by the side of the Bowling Green, (one of them a subject of childish fear, shaped something in the form of a giant man, into whose awful mouth the gardener used to insert a tobacco pipe, and whose staring optics were supposed to have an especial regard to the grapes and green-gages on the opposite wall), were coupled with a thousand well remembered gambols; one of which, my first warlike achievement, is more deeply impressed on my mind than the rest; so much so, that I cannot help inflicting it upon my readers.

Not to be behind-hand with our primeval ancestors, I had, when about eight years old, been seen taking some of the forbidden fruit, most probably

by one of the under gardeners; and on having received a reproof, I enquired of one of the kindest nurses* that ever breathed, who it was that had given the information? To deter me in future from a like offence, she solemnly replied, that it was the old man of the yew hedge. This aroused in my bosom a spark of animosity which I almost fancy to be alive at the present moment; and resolving to be revenged, and taking the earliest opportunity of escaping from the immediate observation of my attendants, I left them one morning walking on the terrace in front of the hot-houses, near the spot where, scarcely two years before, I had broken my leg, in jumping down upon the lawn. Running round by the upper part of the Bowling Green, with a stone in my hand, I passed in front of my enemy, who I thought seemed to smile in derision of the contemplated act; and, mustering up sufficient force, in an agony of rage and fear, I flung my missile so truly, that it struck and knocked out the very eye that seemed most to have me within its

* Now Housekeeper at the Castle.