PREFACE. "Still to ourselves in every place consign'd, Our own felicity we make or find."-GOLDSMITH. IN free and happy England there are four kinds of slavery, which of late, as the Author ventures to suggest, have increased, are increasing, and ought to be diminished:-first, the slavery of overdone education; secondly, the slavery of overworked needle-women; thirdly, the slavery of intemperance; and, fourthly, the slavery, worse than all united, of Romanism. As it has been thought by some readers that the Author exaggerates the masquerading of life carried on in this country now by the Jesuits, a clergyman of the Episcopal Church in London, and one of the most popular preachers there, with whom she recently became acquainted, answers for the truth of the following incident; and many similar may be found in her "Popish Legends." At a public meeting for religious purposes, a friend of his, sitting on the platform, observed a respectablelooking man, evidently a country farmer, in close conference with a person in a brown-paper cap, such as is worn by journeymencarpenters. The dialogue became audible, and he was astonished at the knowledge and talent of the head enclosed in a paper-cap. The farmer was completely beaten in argument on religion, and no wonder; for when the working-man, in cap and apron, turned accidentally round, the gentleman at once recognized an old acquaintance, whom he had long known as a Jesuit priest. The Author asked herself, one day, whether, before sitting down finally in the arm-chair of retirement, and before her pen has grown grey in the inkstand of fiction, she might not attempt to weave a story in which the evil of all these heavy yokes might be warningly portrayed; and, after much anxious consideration, the following pages resulted from that experiment. The Author's zeal on the subject of premature education received a new impulse lately, after visiting a celebrated Infant School where the young pupils are the wonder and admiration of all visitors on account of their marvellous acquirements. She was retiring from the examination, feeling that she would have herself made a very inadequate scholar beside these pupils of six years old, when the principal landed proprietor of the neighbourhood said, with a look of perplexity, "It is very strange that all these children turn out in after life almost idiots! The master who teaches our elder boys assures me they never make any progress after leaving this school! He much prefers a boy that has never been taught anything, to the very cleverest pupil from our Infant School! As no one individual, in her own family or elsewhere, ever sees the Author's works till they are in the press, she feels a very anxious diffidence when first beholding them "in fair print. rather than in ugly manuscript," prepared for trial before a private as well as a public tribunal; though she has a most grateful sense of the generous partiality with which her now very numerous volumesthirty in number-have been received. The pleasing recreation of writing these pages must at length be resigned; and though few occupations are so agreeable as to wander through the pleasant fields of fancy, yet that indulgence becomes at last only too enticing. There is a time for all things; and the Author would not have allowed herself this relaxation again, did she not fully believe that the reading of harmless fiction, as an occasional amusement, is actually beneficial to young and old, besides being a cheerful occupation for her own leisure. A matter-of-fact, heavy, sensible education, without anything to enliven the imagination, will "make Jack a very dull boy." He learns in the wise little nursery-books to know for certain that "a sheep, when killed, becomes mutton, and the wool makes flannel; or, in more mature years, that there are three angles to a triangle; but his mind runs on from youth to age like a railway between embankments, rather than like a flowery path across the meadow. In the school-room now, memory is considered all in all; while modern fanatics in education apparently consider that imagination should be extinguished as an enemy to man, rather than cherished as a friend; yet are not its uses recognised in Holy Scripture itself by the introduction of allegories and parables? In the glorious apprenticeship of human life, it becomes necessary to send the mind frequently onward, beyond all that appears tangible around, to an unseen world; while the imagination only, when put to its highest use, can paint those scenes which we are told that "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard." Even the faculty of dreaming in our sleep is an attribute of our nature, in which Divine Providence, without giving parents or tutors a choice, appoints that fancy shall predominate over reason; but there are very few teachers in the present day who would not think it a better arrangement if their pupils could be made to dream sensible and instructive dreams. One night they would devote to geographical dreaming, another for grammatical, and a third for the use of the globes. But, after all, the old way succeeded very well in bringing forth poets, philosophers, soldiers, and Christians, fit for every duty of life, as well as ready for another and a better world; therefore still may memory and imagination be long allowed to grow up, like the Siamese twins, united and inseparable! "Oh, should this book, my leisure's best resource, Chase but a sigh, or charm a care to rest, In one good deed a fleeting hour employ, Or flush one faded cheek with honest joy, Blest were my lines, though limited their sphere, Though short their date as he who traced them here."-ROGERS. TORCHESTER ABBEY; OB, CROSS PURPOSES. CHAPTER I. "These struggling tides of life that seem That rolls to its appointed end."-BRYANT. A MAN of yesterday, a rich, ostentatious upstart, anxious to aggrandize his family by obtaining for himself a distinguished place in aristocratic society, cannot commit a more fatal blunder in his tactics than to purchase the ancient, timehonoured residence of some decayed old family, long respected in a very select and exclusive neighbourhood. All Middlesex was in a storm of indignation and astonishment when it first became announced throughout that very consequential county, that the ancient seat of the Earls of Brentford had been purchased by an East-end millionaire from Russell-square, and that Alderman Brownlow, the Crosus of Cheapside, had actually presumed, with his vulgar, every-day money, to purchase Torchester Abbey ! "It is too shocking! too ridiculous! too dreadful!" exclaimed old General Plantagenet, thrusting his thumbs into the arm-holes of his waistcoat, and walking hurriedly up and down his library at Athelstane Tower. "What! an alderman and an alderman-ess to be my nearest neighbours! Shoppy sort of people like these to be the successors of a time-out-ofmind family like the Brentfords! To see Torchester Abbey, with its broad terraces, its pointed arches, and its grand old windows, degraded under my very nose into a City villa, by a City Midas, turning all he touches into gold! "It is most aggravating, no doubt," replied Mr. Terence O'Grady, a demure, quiet-looking young man, who held a sort of undefined position in the house. No one could ever find out how he had stormed the fortress of Athelstane Tower, and effected a lodgement at the dinner-table; but he had no very obvious business there, and evidently no intention ever to go away, so long as he could, by subservient flattery, keep his place. “To you, General, whose origin is lost in the mists of antiquity, and whose honoured name appears in the roll of Battle Abbey, I can conceive what it must be for one of the noble old régime, and of our ancient Roman Catholic faith, to see that old place disfigured by the good-humoured rotundity of a fat, bon-vivant alderman, bursting with turtle and champagne ! "Look there, O'Grady," said the General, who was pacing up and down his room in a storm of indignation; "look at the noble deer-park, the forests, the farms, the lakes, the islands, and the swarthy old trees, all visible from my window, and all vulgarized into mere gilt-gingerbread by my consciousness of who has hung out his figure-head there!" "Yes, General; and the Abbey itself degraded! a perfect Vatican inside and out for taste and splendour! I am told that the nouveau-riche proprietor has actually bought all the plate, fixtures, and family portraits. The old cavaliers will start out of their frames, or spring out of their tombs, at such an indignity, and the old coronets will turn themselves upside down!" Though the Earl of Brentford had long been considered throughout the fashionable world as in a state of graceful and refined bankruptcy, yet his friends were so accustomed to hear him jocularly sighing or laughing over his pauper state, and expressing himself in a style of gentlemanlike dissatisfaction with the times generally, that they could not bring themselves to apprehend any such catastrophe as a real matter-of-fact break-up. Even after Torchester Abbey had been advertised for many months to be sold, or let, or, in short, got rid of on any terms, it seemed scarcely credible that Alderman Brownlow had been presumptuous enough to buy it. If the worthy old citizen had stolen the property, General Plantagenet and his aristocratic contemporaries |