first I deemed some dignitary of the Latin Church), who was converted by Whitefield in 1762, and who lived to the age of ninety-six, and who was "not unlike Whitefield both in person and piety." Doubtless this Chinnor double of the great preacher was a wonder of the village up to his death about twenty years ago. Farther on, I passed Chinnor Church, evidently in a state of architectural disturbance, and turned into the Crown for ale and topographic information. Here I had the honour of being taken for an exciseman, and the good people were evidently much relieved at finding that I was only a harmless wanderer. Nothing would do but that I should see the interior of the church, just restored, and to be opened by the Bishop of Oxford in two days. Indefatigable prelate! Only a few days previously I had travelled with him from Twyford to Slough; he had been chairman at a Wargrave Missionary Meeting one day, and was to lay a foundation-stone near Eton the next; and his fidus Achates most accurately defined the Twyford porters as "the laziest beggars that ever stepped." And now I find him about to illuminate Chinnor in the Chilterns, village which Rupert burnt on the fatal morning of Chalgrove. "The Apostles," said mine hostess, "are not come from Oxford yet." It was a curious intimation. A high honour for Bishop Wilberforce if indeed the Apostles were to meet him. But the statement referred to certain famous paintings of the Apostles, the work of Sir James Thornhill. I accompanied the village pedagogue to see the interior, which seemed to be restored in excellent taste. The expense is borne, I am told, by Sir W. Musgrave, who is both patron and rector, and Mr. Turner, a landowner in the parish. Banks, of Wolverhampton, was named as the architect.

From Chinnor to Stokenchurch the walk is beautiful exceedingly. The soft swerve of the chalk hills is crowned with beech-woods. Those Chiltern hills have the true mammal curve; the goddess Hertha seems to sleep among them. From the hill-terrace you look over a vast expanse of plain, chequered with ever-moving shadow and light. Those beech-woods are noted for plenteous wild-flowers. I, no botanist, did not stay to seek hellebore, or mountain-madwort, or musk and birds'nest orchis. As the road swerved, far on the left I could see West Wycombe Church, built by that Lord le Despencer who held quasimonastic revel at Medmenham Abbey. It is a strange edifice inside; and I believe the great ball on its tower was built for a banquetingroom; but I leave all this till I go Through Bucks.

Here I asked my way of a buxom young woman, who seemed to think devouring half-ripe gooseberries the pleasantest thing in life; and was told, after a somewhat complex direction, that I couldn't mistake. Never trust "You can't mistake," coming from the lips of rustic maidenhood. Can't you? Only try those devious paths through the dense Stokenchurch woodlands. She can't mistake, of course; she goes to church, or to meet her sweetheart, that way; but you will find it no easy matter to solve the silvan ænigma. Country folk, with the kindest

intentions, often perplex the inquirer from their ignorance of the amount of his ignorance; they speak of a series of cultivated fields as "the Common," because it was a common twenty years ago; they direct you to turn at the Crown or the Lion, never for a moment supposing that you can know nothing of the little public-house which is the centre of their small geography. I think we too often err in our dealings with the poorer classes from a similar ignorance of their ignorance.

However, I managed to reach Stokenchurch through the steep beautiful woods, and was extremely glad to get away again-for there was a fair in full swing, and an ill-odour of beer and tobacco, and an example of well-dressed half-idiocy throwing sticks at toys. The gipsies mustered in force, looking natural and picturesque in comparison with the slouching clodhoppers in Sunday clothing. One black-haired, blackeyed girl, with a marigold handkerchief for head-dress, might have served as George Borrow's "Ursula." Swings and merry-go-rounds delighted the children. A couple of the country-police looked on contemptuously.

Adrian Scrope, one of the regicides, was owner of Wormsley Park; it now belongs to Mr. Fane, M.P. for Oxfordshire, and one of the numerous militia and volunteer colonels whom we find in the House. A county M.P. is just as naturally a colonel of militia as a borough M.P. is a director of limited-liability companies. The next village on my route, reached by a lane that seemed endless, was Fingest, with a quaint old church and a ghost-story. The spectre was one Burghersh, Bishop of Lincoln, who could not rest in his grave till the ground which he had taken from the common to enlarge his park had been restored. I wish Earl Spencer, Lord of the Manor of Wimbledon, could have a short interview with this episcopal phantom.

Passing through a hamlet whose name I have forgotten, I reach Hambleden, a pleasant village, at which I should have been tempted to delay, only that I am in Berkshire now, and that I mean to get home to supper. The church is a handsome one; and quaint old Quarles has adorned it with an epitaph upon his sister, Sir Cope D'Oyley's wife, who, according to her poetic relation,

"Was in spirit a Jael,

Rebecca in grace, in heart an Abigail;

In works a Dorcas, to the church a Hannah,

And to her spouse Susannah;

Prudently simple, providently wary,

To the world a Martha, and to heaven a Mary."

Now comes Medmenham, a secluded village under the hill, and my way lies to the right to meet old Thames again. The bargees of Thames are often chaffed with the question, "Who ate puppy-pie under Marlow Bridge?" For the landlord of the inn at Medmenham Ferry, hearing that a raid on his larder was planned, baked a litter of young puppies in a pie, which the unlucky bargemen devoured with much gusto

VOL. XV.

I

under Marlow Bridge. "Puppy-pie" makes a bargee furious to this day. They are a humorous race at Medmenham, evidently; even as they were when they frightened Lord le Despencer and his Franciscans amid their orgies, by lowering a great monkey down the chimney in some grotesque costume. Mr. Scott Murray, to my thinking, has not improved the old abbey by his recent alterations. I one day asked his head workman what they were doing, and received for answer: "We're a renowating the old place, sir-making it look more ancientlike."

Here, again, I find festival. The pretty little inn is crammed with drinkers. What a pity that the working-man's holiday is so completely an affair of beer and pipes! Imagine a holiday in Italy or Southern France, with light wine in graceful flasks, and dancers equally graceful under the great chestnut-trees! Would the English labourer like his tobacco as well if it were of higher quality, or his beer as well if it were freed from stupefying drugs, and served in something more elegant than those hideous pint-pots? I don't see why not. Ale and cider, well made and pure, are as wholesome and refreshing as the weak wines of the Continent; but it is too frequently the object of brewer and beerretailer to produce a liquid which shall excite instead of quenching thirst. Of course, greater cheapness is the financier's affair; but greater purity lies with the producer. Equally, of course, so long as beer looks like thick broth, no vendor will put it in a clear bright glass. So the luckless lout drinks liquid dirt from an opaque vessel, until his head would ache horribly, if a long course of such dissipation had not deprived his brain of all sensitiveness.

A charmed sunset paints the west as I cross the ferry. Distance improves the spectacle: from the farther side there seems some beauty in the groups dancing to a cracked fiddle on the lawn-in the remoter and gayer group, who are noisily playing the immortal game of kiss-inthe-ring. Down beyond the Danesfield Woods a white cloud of steam marks the approach of a boat, chartered to carry home the holidaykeepers. I sit on the green bank and lave my somewhat weary feet. The scene of gaiety looks pleasant enough beyond that shining river and beneath the mellow light of that softening sunset. I remember a certain song:

"Sing, maiden, sing, as we slowly glide
Over the ferry at even-tide!"

But for me there is no music here. So, rising to pass homeward, I become suddenly aware of a balloon high above me, sprung I know not whence, silently voyaging I know not whither. That floating spheroid, traversing the pathless and unmapped air, adds strange beauty to the scene by the mystery of its isolation. I watch it gliding swiftly away above the wooded hills, till it fades into the depths of the dim gray eastern sky.

C.

Blondes versus Brunettes.

FROM the creation of the world down to the present times there has been, says M. Ausone de Chancel, in his clever and amusing book Le Livre des Blondes, an unceasing struggle between the two antagonistic principles symbolised by the colours dark and fair-blonde and brunette. Daylight and all that belongs to it, bright flowers and tuneful birds, virtuous thoughts and meritorious actions, loyal friendships and the pure joys of the domestic hearth,-all that makes earth truly enjoyable, must be classed together as fair. On the other hand, the appanage of the dark is the funereal veil of night, the triple-faced hypocritical moon, the whole hideous tribe of ghouls, sprites, bats, vampires, owls, robbers, clandestine amours, and gloomy death. In the beginning there was but one colour to mankind. By degrees white degenerated into copper-colour, while that, again, became intensified into black. The most beautiful object of creation is a golden-haired fair-complexioned woman, with eyes blue as the periwinkle or the forget-me-not. In the absence of any positive proof to the contrary, we may accept Milton's assurance that Eve, "fairest of her daughters," had tresses of golden hue; and in like manner the artists of all ages have represented the Madonna as a pure blonde; for the mythical black virgins attributed to St. Luke are evidently nothing more than Byzantine copies of Egyptian representations of Isis and Horus.

It is not every body who can be a blonde, and just as little can every body be a brunette. The genuine and veritable blonde should be tall, lissom, blue-eyed, and with an alabaster skin. Her movements should be impressed with that elegant languor which indicates a dreamy but impassioned nature. The blonde would be supremely happy were she not subject to old age, but that creeps upon her while she regrets her native heaven. No matter how dark a woman may have been in the flesh and in her actual life, no sooner does she pass into the region of poesy than straightway she is crowned with auburn tresses. It is thus that the painter and the sculptor-until Mr. Storey struck out another path-have loved to represent Cleopatra, that brownest of brunettes, as a "child of earth with golden hair."

The most perfect blondes are to be found, like every other kind of perfection, in France; for in Germany they are too fat, and in England too lean. Now and then, however, they are to be found, in a comet-like form, in Italy and Spain; and how lovely they can be in the last-named country we may judge from the not less gracious than graceful Empress of the French. And the Spanish blonde is no invention of modern times. Does not Cervantes dwell with rapture on the long fair tresses

of the damsel disguised as a peasant, so long that they reached to her feet, so fair that Apollo himself might have envied them?

The ancients, it is beyond all question, placed the brunette in the second rank. Both Hesiod and Homer ascribe golden hair to the Goddess of Love; and even Minerva, who, though somewhat too much addicted to war and strife, had still enough of the woman in her to be fond of fine dresses, had eyes of azure blue. Diana, again, the prude who banished Calisto from her presence, and then stole down at night to kiss the sleeping Endymion, was fair to a fault, with the eyes of a cat. Vesta, indeed, was dark; but then she was all flesh and no soul, and would have eaten the doves of Venus, could she have caught them and cooked them à la crapaudine. The very fire that was kept ever burning upon her altars was nothing more than the emblem of a wellappointed kitchen; and thus when a priestess suffered the sacred flame to expire, the delinquent was consistently punished by being allowed to perish of hunger. It is true there were two Venuses, of whom the Celestial Venus alone was fair; but what does this prove, except that through degeneracy the Earthly Venus had turned into a brunette? Fair could not be foul, nor foul fair. And the physical charms and defects of the mothers were transmitted in a moral sense to their respective infants. Venus the Blonde gave birth to the chaste Eros; while from Venus the Brunette sprang Anteros, the pretty horsebreaker's favourite groom. That the rosy-fingered Aurora was fair as a summer's dawn no one will deny; and, seeing that Anchises took Venus for one of the "sister Graces three," it is clear that those charming maidens must have been bright and fair as the three Christian virtues commended by St. Paul, of which they were the truest prototypes. Unhappily, modern artists have misunderstood the proper attributes of these Virtues, for they fashion Faith as a Juno, and Hope as a Minerva, although avoiding the capital error of designing Charity as other than Venus Urania. Then, as the Nymphs were the daughters of Nereus and the fair-haired Doris, it is at least probable that one half of them, if not he majority, took after their mother. Indeed we know that it is so; or do we not see them-only slightly more apparelled at St. James's and the Tuileries, in Rotten Row and the Bois de Boulogne, fair as the stars of heaven, with waving sunbeams for locks of hair?

On the other hand, the Parcæ, daughters of swarthy Night, were as dark as their sombre parent, whose dear friends and gossips, the Eumenides, were as black as herself. Juno too, haughty, overbearing, selfish, jealous, not always without cause,-was a brunette of brunettes, and had the eyes of an ox. Proserpine, again, must have belonged to the same category, and in her mean jealousy changed a poor nymph into a pot-herb, because her eyes happened to be blacker than her own. Pandora, it must be admitted, had the fierce coal-black eyes of her fashioner Vulcan, but her complexion and her hair were the gift of the Celestial Venus, and so far she resembled the Laura of Petrarch. And