who was forced to recant, and to carry his | Eton schoolboy, the anxious maiden, the faggot with the best grace he could. match-making mother, the resolute woSince that time, without going into the farther particulars recorded by Mr. Gairdner, it may suffice to say, that full examination by the most competent judges in England has removed all reasonable doubt of authenticity. And if the fifth volume be unquestionably genuine, there can be no cause left for entertaining any suspicion respecting the other four, although their originals have so strangely vanished. The contents of the unbound volumes have apparently made their way into many hands. What Mr. Philip Frere could discover, he made over to the British Museum, where they rest at last. Much has probably perished. But the genuineness of the whole work is, as it were, indisputably established by secondary evidence; and Mr. Gairdner was quite right in not delaying his publication for the possibility of their reappearance. "There is no apparent reason," he says, in self-justification, "why MSS. which have remained undiscovered for more than eighty years should not remain so eighty years longer, if the indifference or the accident, whatever it may be, which has caused them to be overlooked, be made an argument against turning to the best account those which we virtually possess." man of business, the poor cousin, the family counsellor, the chief of the house himself, full of party politics, but fuller still of plans of pecuniary gain and personal aggrandisement — are there, all busy as they on earth were busy, and as, with superficial differences only, their descendants of the twelfth generation are busy to this day. The lesson is a very obvious one, but it is not therefore the less strange to some of our preconceived notions, nor the less amusing. The other feature which we would notice is one in which the Paston times the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries generally did nevertheless exhibit characteristics somewhat peculiarly their own. It was an age in which the two great methods of enforcing claims and rights — private war and litigation - were mingled together, or alternated with each other, after a fashion scarcely comprehensible either in more civilized or in less civilized days. All the Paston family are deeply engaged in endless lawsuits. The progress of these suits, the hopes and discouragements of the parties, present a constant and somewhat wearisome store of family communication. But yet, at the same time, people were very far indeed from having renounced the earlier and more On the infinite historical value of these summary method of self-defence and relics of old English life it is quite un- retaliation. "Why don't you take good necessary to dilate. They have furnished cudgels, and settle it?" says Counsellor a mine of raw material, for these eighty Pleydell to Dandie Dinmont, touching years past, to our most industrious ex- his march-suit with Jock of Dawstonplorers. Probably, to those who have Cleugh. "Odd, sir! we tried that three studied the correspondence in a general times already; but I dinna ken; we're way, there are two features which have both gey good at single stick, and it come most prominently into notice. The could na weel be judged." "Then take first is the fundamental likeness which broadswords, and be damned to you, as they establish between the aspect of your fathers did before you." "Aweel, society in their age, and in our or any sir, if ye think it wadna be again the After all, the tastes, interests, fam- law, it's all one to Dandie." "Social deily attachments, personal hopes and fears velopment," in the Paston neighborhood, of men, "quicquid agunt homines," do had just reached the same point of not vary so much in the course of centu- ambiguity as among Scott's imaginary ries as our first fancies would lead us to Liddesdale borderers. An instance or imagine. The metal is the same, the two, out of a great number, will illustrate setting only different. In the "Paston our meaning. John Paston (1448) is disLetters" we meet with personages of the turbed in his claim to the manor of Gresbetter class in all periods of life. The ham by Lord Molynes. His lordship age. The 774 "listened to the counsels of John Hey- description. Altogether the perusal is apt to don of Baconsthorpe, a lawyer, who had give us an impression that Sir John would been sheriff and also recorder of Nor- have made an acute and able, though perhaps wich, and whom the gentry of Norfolk not very high-minded solicitor. looked upon with anything but good forms and processes of the law is probably familiarity shown even by Fastolf with all the will." Heydon persuaded Lord Molynes due not so much to the peculiarities of his perthat his claim was good; and Lord Mo-sonal character as to the fact that a knowledge lynes, "without more ado, went in and of legal technicalities was much more widely took possession." To go to law with Lord diffused in that day than in ours. . . . The Molynes, "a powerful young nobleman 'Paston Letters" afford ample evidence that connected with various wealthy and in- every man who had property to protect, if not fluential families," was no light under-every well-educated woman also, was perfectly taking for an esquire. Paston first tried well versed in the ordinary forms of legal prothe intercession of the Church through the medium of Bishop Waynflete; but this also failed him. Then he resorted to reprisals. He cesses. Altogether, these disclosures to a certain extent remind us of the state of things of which some of us have made took and held possession of the mansion; and personal experience, and others have for some time without opposition. But at last, heard and read at secondhand, as prevawhile John Paston was away in the country on lent in some of the Western States of business, there came before the mansion at America in recent or present days. The Gresham a company of a thousand persons, armed with cuirasses and brigandines, with spirit of technical law, and the spirit of guns, bows and arrows, and with every kind of Lynch law, divide the sway between them. offensive and defensive armour. They had The lawyers have on the whole the best also mining instruments, long poles with hooks, of it; they are the real masters of the called cromes, used for pulling down houses, situation; but their influence is largely ladders, pickaxes, and pans with fire burning assisted by that of the bowie-knife and in them. With these formidable instruments the revolver. And one after-growth of they beset the house, at that time occupied this condition of society-a condition only by Margaret Paston and twelve other per-through which probably all communities sons; and having broken open the outer gates, they set to work undermining the very chamber must more or less pass—is the luxuriin which Margaret was. Resistance under the ance of the great legal profession. Our circumstances was impossible. Margaret was English peerage offers abundant evidence forcibly carried out. The house was then of its aspiring tendencies, and at rifled of all that it contained -property esti- period of our history, probably, have the mated by John Paston at 200/- the doorposts foundations of great legal families been were cut asunder, and the place was left little more extensively laid than in the fifteenth better than a ruin. century. no The war of the Roses would seem to Thus much by way of preface to the have cut short the promising quarrel, records of that distinguished Cornish tam Marte quam Mercurio, which the family of which the memoirs have now learned counsellor Heydon had started. been recovered and arranged, with most The character of Sir John Fastolf, of painful and religious care, by its two Caistor Castle, the hero of so large a por-modern representatives Sir Walter Tretion of the correspondence, evidences velyan, of antiquarian celebrity, and Sir quite as forcibly this double characteris- Charles, with whose name and reputatic of the times. He was constantly in tion our readers will have long become arms for the Crown abroad, and occasionally in affairs of his own at home. Nevertheless, as Mr. Gairdner says, "from the general tenor of his letters we should certainly no more suspect him of being the old soldier that he actually was, than of being Shakspeare's fat, disorderly knight." Almost every sentence in them refers to lawsuits and title deeds, extortions and injuries received from others, forged processes altering property, writs of one kind or another to be issued against his adversaries, libels uttered against himself, and matters of the like familiar; a reputation acquired in many which they exhibit, such as would drive so many generations, neither does any the Educational Institute of Scotland to disgrace. What their first recorded despair of reconstructing our orthogra- chronicle shows them, that they remained phy. We notice one minute of "ordinary to the beginning of this present generapayments in August, 3 Edw. VI.," in tion-specimens of that exclusively Engwhich the word "Captain" is spelt in lish character, the English country four different ways in a single page: squire; and a more honourable one the Capitaiene, Capitinge, Capitaigne, Cap- world has not to show. taigne. But the second volume is rich in family correspondence, and its contents, though less copious, fall scarcely short of those of the Paston Letters " themselves in the light which they throw on the domestic life and habits of an ordinary English gentle family from the wars of the Roses to the Restoration. "It seems clear," says a writer on the Antiquities of Cornwall, "from Domesday Book, and the recensions of tenants in capite, that before the Conquest Saxons, and after the Conquest Normans, were the owners of the soil, with very slight exceptions, from the Tamar to the Land's End. It may be feared that scarcely any properly Cornish lineage can establish, on fair grounds, a connection with those named in Domesday, except Trelawney and Trevelyan - the latter no longer inhabiting the county." However this may be, the name of Trevelyan, at all events, is absolutely "autochtonic." English history knows nothing of a period when there was no Trevelyan. - The family however, as we shall see, soon abandoned the narrow limits of the peninsula in which they had their origin, and spread widely, through marriages and purchases, over the adjacent western counties. And what makes their quiet annals really remarkable, and in a certain sense characteristic, is, that such as they were at their origin. as far as their growth can be traced such they have always remained: English gentry, neither more nor less. They never acquired greatness, nor had greatness thrust upon them. They were always well to do that is, the leading branches of the house at all events never wealthy. They never attained a peerage, or any honour beyond a simple baronetcy; but what they had, they preserved. They never deviated into literature, or art, or commerce; scarcely into military adventure. They never rose into eminence in the two gentlemanlike professions to which they furnished recruits - the Church and the Law. They never derogated. They never married into families of high descent, but scrupulously within their own degree. If no historical fame attaches itself to their ancient coat of arms during - What were they really like, these "squires" of old England, who constituted until within the last century so large a proportion of its upper class? No one can be in the least familiar with the outward aspect, even, of the rural districts of great part of South Britain, without being satisfied that they were far more numerous under the Tudors and Stuarts than they are now. Every outlying parish- and we now speak particularly of the distant western and south-western counties, with which the family of Trevelyan is connected * can show its half dozen of farmhouses which were once manor houses; and many a church contains the memorials of some half dozen gentle lineages which their places know no longer. Their modest estates have either been annexed to the possessions of the neighbouring lord, or purchased from the last embarrassed owner by the intruding millionnaire. Their neighbourhood has lost the old kindly feeling which used to bind together the several degrees of society, when each was not so far removed in station from the other. It now knows no middle rank between the owner of the one great house, of whom the beatific vision is conceded to his tenantry for three or four weeks in the year, and the farmer who rents of him as large a tract of land as once constituted the paternal property of a country gentleman. But it has gained in high farming, quick returns, and mercantile value acre by acre. are not, therefore, anxious to lament over the degeneracy of the times, or to quarrel with those who may sensibly prefer the present to the past. We only wish to restore in imagination that which has become obsolete; and this is not so easy as it might seem. For it is singular, after all, how little of life-like delineation, unexaggerated by romance or satire, has been left in our literature of that special feature of old English Society to which we refer. We Mr. Trollope, in his recent publication men's families in the country, telling us that the old on Australia, tells us that we may find the extinct type of the squire yet surviving in the southern hemisphere: We know them (the English country gentlemen) very well from plays and novels, and know something of them too from history, as history has of late been written. The ladies' dresses, the books, the equipages, the wines, the kitchens, which are now found in English country houses, were in those days known only in the metropolis, or at the castle of some almost royal nobleman. As were country houses and country life then in England. plentiful, proud, prejudiced, given to hospitality, impatient of contradiction, not highly lettered, healthy, industrious, careful of the main chance, thoughtful of the future, and, above all, conscious perhaps a little too conscious of their own importance, so now is the house, and so now is the life, of the country gentleman in Australia. was the little independent gentleman of 300% per annum, who commonly appeared in a plain drab or plush coat, large silver buttons, a jockey cap, and rarely without boots. His travels never exceeded the distance of the country town, and that only at assize and session time, or to attend an election. Once a week he commonly dined at the next market town with the attorneys and justices. This man went to church regularly, read the weekly journal, settled the parochial disputes between the parish officers at the vestry, and afterwards adjourned to the neighboring alehouse, where he usually got drunk for the good of his country. His drink was generally ale, except at Christmas, the 5th of November, or some other gala day, when he would make a bowl of strong brandy punch, garnished with a toast and nutmeg. The mansion of one of these squires was of plaster striped with timber, not unaptly called calamanco work, or of red brick, large casemated bow windows, a But one circumstance is omitted in this porch with seats in it, and over it a study; the eaves of the house well inhabited by swallows, lively parallel which makes so wide a dif- and the court set round with hollyhocks. Near ference as to render the whole indistinct the gate a horseblock for the convenience of and incomplete. The Australian squire mounting. His hall was furnished with flitches has, as a rule, no ancestry. He is novus of bacon, and the mantelpiece with guns and homo altogether. On the contrary, almost | fishing-rods of various dimensions, accomall the pride and sentimental interest of the English Armiger's existence rallied round his pedigree. "He was," says Macaulay, "a member of a proud and powerful aristocracy, and was distinguished by many both of the good and bad qualities which belong to aristocrats. His family pride was beyond that of a Talbot or a Howard. He knew the genealogies and coats of arms of all his neighbours, and could tell which of them had assumed supporters without any right, and which of them were so unfortunate as to be grandsons of aldermen." To parallel him, the child of a world which in this respect at least has passed away, with the child of an upstart world in the southern hemisphere, is to misemploy comparison. The English squire, such as we conceive him, has no modern type left in the world; unless some such still linger among the Junkerthum of Pomerania, or in the remote parts of the Spanish Peninsula. That phase of society, in short, to which the old-fashioned squirearchy here depicted belonged, has perished irreparably, with its shortcomings so allied to excellences, its vanity so associated with nity, its weaknesses so near akin to wisdom. panied by the broadsword, partisan, and dagger borne by his ancestors in the civil wars. (These medieval weapons, pace Captain Grose, are tokens of the life of an earlier day.) In the vacant spaces were posted King Charles's Golden Rules, Vincent Wing's Almanac, and a portrait of the Duke of Marlborough; in his window lay Baker's "Chronicle," Foxe's "Book of Martyrs," "Glanvil on Appari tions," Quincey's "Dispensatory," The Complete Justice," and a Book of Farriery. Alas! these men and these houses are no more; the luxury of the times has obliged them to quit the country, and become the humble dependents of great men, to solicit a place or commission to live in London, to rack their tenants, and draw their rents before due. The venerable mansion in the meantime is suffered to tumble down, or is partly upheld as a farmhouse, till, after a few years, the estate is conveyed to the steward of the neighboring lord, or else to some nabob, contractor, or limb of the law. To comfort ourselves a little for our loss by looking at the reverse side of the tapestry, let us read Horace Walpole's caricature of these rustic gentry as they appeared to him, a "beau," when occa sionally obliged by hard fate to visit his dig-father's acres in Norfolk : Let us take another sketch from that very encyclopedic collection of matters of interest and amusement, "Chambers's Book of days": Only imagine that I here every day see men, who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the giant work of Prato lino! I shudder when I see them handle their knives in act to carve, and look upon them as Another character, now worn out and gone, savages that devour one another! I should not stare at all more than I do, if yonder alder- | the profits of their living; are reverenced and man at the end of the table was to strike a beloved of their neighbours; live void of facknife into his neighbour's jolly cheek, and cut tions among themselves, at least such as break a brave slice of brown and fat. .. I out into any dangerous excess; and delight not have an aunt here, a family piece of goods, an in bravery of apparel: yet the woman would old remnant of inquisitive hospitality and be very loth to come behind the fashion, in economy, who, to all intents and purposes, is new fangle dress of the manner, if not in costas beefy as her neighbours. She wore me so liness of the matter, which perhaps might overdown with interrogatories that I dreamt all empty their husbands' purses. They converse night she was at my ear, with whos and whys, familiarly together, and often visit one another. and whens and wheres, till at last in my sleep I A gentleman and his wife will ride to make cried out, "For God in Heaven's sake, madam, merry with his next neighbour; and after a day ask me no more questions!" .. I am so or twain, these two couples go to a third, in far from getting used to mankind by living which progress they increase like snowballs, amongst them, that my natural ferocity and till through their burdensome weight they wildness does but every day grow worse. They break again. tire me; they fatigue me; I don't know what to do with them; I don't know what to say to them; I fling open the window and fancy I want air; and when I get by myself, I undress myself, and seem to have had people in my pockets, in my plaits, and on my shoulders! I indeed find this fatigue worse in the country, than in town, because we can avoid it there, and have more resources; but it is there too. (Walpole to Chute, 1743.) "It seems, according to an ancient tradition," say the editors, "alluded to by Bishop Gibson in his edition of Camden's Britannia,' the family of Trevelyan sprang, like Sir Tristrem, from Spenser's submerged land of Lionesse. A small creek near St. Michael's Mount is pointed out as the place where their ancestor landed, and the horse which saved him may be seen swimming on the family shield, with dolphins for its supporters." Strong indeed was the hold which this legend of the land of Lionesse To come a little nearer to our local mark, let us cite John Prince's highflown account in his "Worthies of Devon" (about 1700) of the squirearchy of his fathers' days, such as tradition described-revived in recent days by our poet it, in his native county: laureate at the bottom of the sea beIf we draw nearer home unto our grandsires' had on the Cornish imagination. Even tween the Land's End and the Scillys, and great-grandsires' days, we shall find our ancestors were bold, hardy, and brave to the the latest county historian, the accomlast degree. Our gentry were generous and plished Mr. Davies Gilbert, could scarcenoble, as well in their hospitality at home as ly allude to it without a certain amount in their equipage when they went abroad. of hereditary respect. "The editor," he Persons of quality usually keeping their stables says, "remembers a female relation of of brave horses, and would always have one or the former vicar of St. Erth, who intwo horses of state led by grooms, when they structed by a dream, prepared decoctions travelled from home. Their houses were open of various kinds, and, repairing to the to all comers, where they might meet civil re- Land's End, poured them into the sea ception and a frank entertainment. And their families were academies of virtue and schools with certain incantations, expecting to of education. And the inferior gentry were see the Lionesse country rise immediatewont, instead of sending their children to Lon-ly out of the water, having all its inhabidon, Hackney, Salisbury, &c., to send them tants alive, notwithstanding their long thither to learn breeding and accomplishments. submersion." But this mode and way of living, since coaching and London came so much in vogue, must be acknowledged to be greatly altered from former days. And add Carew's account a century earlier of their neighbours over the Tamar (Survey of Cornwall): — But to leave mythical for real history, we find the Trevelyans settled in Henry III.'s reign at the place from which they derive their name: Trevelyan (add the editors in a note) is believed to be the Celtic equivalent for the Saxon "Milton," and to be compounded of Tre (terra), the Celtic unit of territorial division, and of the inflected form (velin) of the Celtic adaptation of the word mill, as still used in Welsh and Irish. The ancient mill is still there on a creek of Fowey River, below Tre The angle, which so shutteth them in, hath wrought many interchangeable matches with each other's stock, and given beginning to the proverb, that all Cornish gentlemen are cousins; which ended in an injurious consequence, that the King hath there no cousins.velyan. They keep liberal but not costly builded or furnished houses; give kind entertainment to strangers; make even at the year's end with The name is reversed in Velindre (mill-town), which still belongs to them, in the parish of St. Veep, near Lostwithiel; and their first recorded alliance was with Margaret Car |