record upon the scattered papers on the floor. A few childish curls marked Ned's hair, with love;' the fly-leaf of a Bible, with a loving inscription-giver and recipient now both dead; a prayer-book, pages splashed red where once praying eyes had lingered. The pages of one grimly appropriate book-Drelincourt's Preparation for Death'-were scattered over the whole floor.

To write this story is a distress, to read it must be wellnigh an anguish. Yet we may well endure to know what our countrymen and countrywomen have suffered. Their sufferings are part of the price at which a great empire has been built.

Into what a passion of fury-half generous, half devilish-the soldiers who looked on these things were kindled may well be imagined. It will be remembered that Neill compelled some of the Sepoys captured at Cawnpore, and guilty of a share in this tragedy-high-caste Brahmins-to clean up, under the whip, a few square inches of the blood-stained floor, and then immediately hanged them, burying them in a ditch afterwards. These Brahmins, that is, were first ceremonially defiled, and then executed. That was an inhumanity unworthy of the English name, which Lord Clyde promptly forbade.

Nana Sahib had fled the Palace. Principality, and power, and wealth, all had vanished. He was, like Cain, a fugitive on the face of the earth. In what disguises he hid himself, through what remote and lonely regions he wandered, where he died, or how, no man knows. His name has become an execration, his memory a horror.

The Bebeeghur has disappeared. The site where it once stood is now a beautiful garden. In the centre of the garden, circled with a fringe of ever-sighing cypresses, is a low mound, with fence of open stonework. The circular space within is sunken, and upon the centre of the sunken floor rises the figurenot too artistic, unhappily-of an angel in marble, with clasped hands and outspread wings. On the pedestal runs the inscription: Sacred to the perpetual memory of the great company of Christian people, chiefly women and children, who, near this spot, were cruelly massacred by the followers of the rebel Nana Doondoo Punth, of Bithoor, and cast, the dying and the dead, into the well below, on the 15th day of July, 1857.'

6

(To be continued.)

PROVINCIAL LETTERS.

III. FROM LICHFIELD.

LICH, a dead carcase; whence Lichfield, the field of the dead, a city in Staffordshire, so named from martyred Christians. Salve magna parens.' The quotation is from the great Dictionary of Samuel Johnson, Doctor of Laws. Whether the derivation holds its own in days when both philology and history are no longer experimental sciences, I am not sure; but, quite apart from philology, the description of Lichfield as a field of the dead is an admirably true one. The swarm of visitors who settle down upon the comely city every summer do not come, in the first instance, for the sake of the Cathedral, beautiful as it is, especially as seen from the Minster Pool; they come as to a Campo Santo, a field of the dead. They stare at Johnson's house in the Market Place, and try to fit a story to the bas-reliefs on his monument; they look in at the relics at the Museum; and then, if there is time, they attend a service at the Cathedral and depart. To me, who know no living man in the place, and have the gift of short sight which helps the imagination, Lichfield is not only a field of the dead-it is a city of ghosts. If I go into the Cathedral, the congregation are all in the dress of the eighteenth century, and the Dean I see in his stall is the octogenarian Addenbrooke, whom Johnson in his Journey to the Western Highlands' denounced for proposing to strip the lead from the Cathedral roof, though he afterwards struck out the passage. If I wander through the Museum, the solitary visitor I see there is Boswell affecting an interest in the curious collection brought together by Mr. Richard Green, the apothecary; and on closer examination I am sure the main part of the natural curiosities must be the same. The Queen of Otaheite's hair, given to a love-sick middy in 1773, must have appealed to Boswell's sentimental fancy as to mine; and the gut of a Russian fur seal, measuring sixteen yards, excited the envious admiration of us both. The fine eighteenth-century

I have the advantage, indeed, in the Johnson memorials-the saucer from which the great man ate his morning roll; the silver buckles for which he refused to give more than two guineas; his cribbage-board, drinking-cup, and salt-cellars; though Boswell had seen these in more natural surroundings.

mansions which are freely scattered in the principal streets and suburbs are tenanted for me, not by their present very respectable occupiers, but by the ladies and gentlemen who performed their orbits round the two great suns of Lichfield-Samuel Johnson and Erasmus Darwin. Let me devote this letter to some memories of these extinct satellites.

The former of the twin circles of influence can hardly be called a circle, because its centre was very seldom in Lichfield. It came into existence when the great man paid his annual visit to his native town, and then faded. It was genteel rather than literary; and, unlike the other, its members have little or no claim to remembrance on their own account. That is why, as I kick my heels in the coffee-room of the Three Crowns, it is pleasant to remember them. The Great Cham at times spoke of them respectfully, at other times with gentle sadness. On one occasion he described the inhabitants as a city of philosophers,' and said of them that they were the genteelest in proportion to their wealth and spoke the purest English. But in a letter to Mrs. Thrale he tells her: 'Whatever Burney may think of the celerity of fame, the name of Evelina had never been heard at Lichfield till I brought it. I am afraid my dear townsmen will be mentioned in future days as the last part of this nation that was civilised.'

Who were these pure-speaking philosophers who had not heard of Fanny Burney, four years after London had been taken by storm? First of all, there was a Mrs. Cobb, and her niece Miss Adey, who lived at the Friary. The Friary—a house of the Grey Friars-is one of several mediæval houses still remaining in Lichfield. It stands well back from the road-'an agreeable sequestered place,' as Boswell calls it-in St. John's Street. Both Mrs. Cobb and Miss Adey are somewhat shadowy personages. The only scene in which they figure at all distinctly in Boswell's pages is on the occasion of his visit to Lichfield, when he presented himself at the Friary while the ladies were still at breakfast. In his letter to the Doctor describing the visit he says:

I next went to the Friary, where I at first occasioned some tumult in the ladies, who were not prepared to receive company so early; but my name, which has by wonderful felicity come to be closely associated with yours, soon made all easy; and Mrs. Cobb and Miss Adye re-assumed their seats at the breakfasttable, which they had quitted with some precipitation.

Except for this one brief flash, the great Biography throws no light on the internal economy of the Friary, or on the characters of

its inmates; and the letters of Johnson to his Lichfield correspondents, with their constant conclusion, 'Make my compliments to Mrs. Cobb and Miss Adey,' do not help us any more. To Miss Seward, however, the Swan of Lichfield, of whose prose carollings six volumes were given to an impatient world, we owe several references which make up in acerbity what they probably lack in truth. The occasion of her reference is the death of the elder lady and the appearance of an obituary notice:

You would be sorryish to hear that poor Moll Cobb, as Dr. Johnson used to call her, is gone to her long home. If you saw the ridiculous, puffing, hyperbolic character of her in the public papers, it would make you stare and smile at the credence due to newspaper portraits.... Its author well knew the uniform contempt with which Johnson spoke both of the head and heart of this personage, well as he liked the convenience of her chaise, the taste of her sweetmeats and strawberries,' and the idolatry of her homage. Nauseous therefore was the public and solemn mention of Johnson's friendship for Mrs. Cobb, of whose declaration respecting her in a room full of company here, the panegyrist had so often heard [no doubt from the Swan herself]. How should,' exclaimed Johnson, 'how should Moll Cobb be a wit? Cobb has read nothing, Cobb knows nothing; and where nothing has been put into the brain, nothing can come out of it to any purpose of rational entertainment.'

The Swan then proceeds to allow that Mrs. Cobb's brain had much of shrewd, biting, and humorous satire native to the soil, which had often 'amused very superior minds to her own. The only specimen of this native humour that I have been able to disinter is the calling a certain lady a bank bill' because any one would have been glad to accept her.

The last time I was in Lichfield I stood before the decent eighteenth-century monument in St. Michael's Church to the Lady of the Friary, and was grateful that the Swan had not been asked to choose the epitaph. For the letter I have already quoted from concludes as follows: 'She was a very selfish character, nor knew the warmth of friendship, nor the luxury of bestowing. Yet to her we may apply what Henry V. says of Falstaff,

We could have better spared a better man.'

Is there not preserved in some eighteenth-century memoir the character which the 'biting and humorous satire' of this female Falstaff had given of the 'very superior mind' of the Swan?

Another pair of ladies were two sisters, Mrs. Aston and Mrs. Gastrell, who lived at Stowhill. The former was a maiden lady, the latter a widow-widow, indeed, of that famous clergyman who cut down Shakespeare's mulberry-tree to vex his neighbours. According to Boswell, they had each a house and

garden and pleasure-ground prettily situated upon Stowhill, a gentle eminence adjoining to Lichfield.' Thither Dr. Johnson

used to climb up' once a day on every visit to Lichfield, and when he was in town sent them joint letters and barrels of oysters. The last preserved of the letters is one of the last he ever wrote, and is not one of the least touching in the language:

Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to the Ladies at Stowhill, of whom he would have taken a more formal leave, but that he was willing to spare a ceremony, which he hopes would have been no pleasure to them, and would have been painful to himself.

From the letters collected by the enthusiastic industry of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, and from the pages of Boswell, the impression we get of these ladies is wholly charming. And in Johnsoniana' there is an anecdote that Johnson would sit at a table in the window of one of the houses writing at his 'Lives of the Poets' while these ladies and their sisters chatted round him-a story which would account for certain lapses in that celebrated work. Mrs. Aston in 1771 had a paralytic stroke, and from that time till Johnson's death in 1784 his letters are full of the most anxious inquiries and counsels as to her health. On October 17, 1781, he writes to Mrs. Thrale:

On my way to Lichfield, where I believe Mrs. Aston will be glad to see me. We have known each other long, and by consequence, are both old; and she is paralytick; and if I do not see her soon, I may see her no more in this world.

As the years drew on and all the friends grew more infirm the annual visit took a sadder colour.

The only distinguishing epithets that I find Johnson applying to these ladies are that he calls Mrs. Gastrell 'lively' and Mrs. Aston a very good woman.' For a more definite picture we must again betake ourselves to the imaginative lady, the Swan of Lichfield. No Johnsonian, no lover of Lichfield and its literary ladies, no natural philosopher interested in the working of the feminine literary mind, should fail to read the letter written in reply to Mr. Boswell's request for information about his hero. That gentleman did not print the letter or its contents in his memoirs because, as he said, 'his book was to be a real history, and not a novel; so that we may be grateful to the lady for preserving a copy. I have only room here for the paragraph referring to Mrs. Aston:

You request the conversation that passed between Johnson and myself in company, on the subject of Mrs. Elizabeth Aston, of Stowe Hill, then living, with