and twenty of these squares, none of which are smaller than the Place Vendôme; and many are nearly as large as the Place de Louis XV. One of the largest of these is Grosvenor Square. The centre is occupied by a garden, laid out with an eye to uniformity, and, at the same time, to the concealment of it. It is covered with turf, and planted with trees, shrubs, flowers, &c., and intersected by gravel-walks; and the whole is enclosed by handsome iron rails. No one has access to these gardens but the inhabitants of each square respectively; and you never see any one walking in them but nursery-maids with children. Immediately outside the iron-railing there is a wide-paved carriage-way; beyond that a foot-path of smooth flat stones; and then the houses. Of the ranges of houses that form the extremity of the square, it is singular that there are not two alike. You may easily guess the strange effect of this, in so large a range of buildings. Some are of stone, and others stuccoed, but the chief part are of different-coloured bricks; and the style of architecture is different in them all-or rather there is no style at all in any. There is no uniformity even in their heights,—which produces a worse effect than any thing else. They are all very low, most of them having only two stories, and none more than three.

In trying to discover whether any good can be imagined to result from this irregular style of building, I have found, or fancied, that each particular house, being thus marked and distinguished from its neighbour, suggests the idea of property much more readily than it would do if all were alike :-and this feeling is no unimportant one in the consideration of an Englishman :-so that it is probable the sum of pleasure gained by the owner of each house being able to think of, and recognise it as his own, is greater than would result from the admiration of strangers, if the various buildings had formed one grand and uniform whole. And this feeling is never disturbed by two or more families residing in one house-at least in this part of the town. Where lodgings are to be let, it is generally in a row of small houses which are all alike, and not one of which, perhaps, actually belongs to the inhabitant of it, but the whole to some one person, who has probably called the street or place by his own name. There is no country

in the world where the feeling of property is so restless and intense as it is in England. Those who have money here generally embark it in something that they can set their mark upon, so as to look at it, and call it their own. An Englishman does not seem to be sure that his house will not be claimed by some one else, unless he makes it unlike all others, and puts his name upon it :-he cannot be certain that his little plot of land will not escape from under his feet, until he has hemmed it in by a high paling, or a thick impenetrable hedge.

In my next I shall tell you something of the most remarkable public buildings; and in the order, or rather the disorder, in which they occur in my walks, and in my note-book.

D. S. F.

TABLE TALK.-NO. IV.

Burleigh House.

BURLEIGH, thy groves are leafless, thy walls are naked— "And dull, cold winter does inhabit here.".

The yellow evening rays gleam through thy fretted Gothic windows, but I only feel the rustling of withered branches strike chill to my breast; it was not so twenty years ago. Thy groves were leafless then as now; it was the middle of winter twice that I visited thee before; but the lark mounted in the sky, and the sun smote my youthful blood with its slant ray, and the ploughman whistled as he drove his team afield; Hope spread out its glad vistas through thy fair domains, oh, Burleigh! Fancy decked thy walls with works of sovereign art, and it was spring, not winter, in my breast. All was the same, like a petrifaction of the mind-the same things in the same places; but their effect was not the same upon me. I was twenty years the worse for wear and tear. What was become of the never-ending studious thoughts that brought their own reward or promised good to mankind? of the tears that started welcome and unbidden? of the sighs that whispered future peace? of the smiles that shone, not in my face, indeed, but that cheered my heart, and made a sunshine there when all was gloom around? That fairy vision-that invisible glory, by which I was once attended-ushered into life, had left my side, and "faded to the light of common day," and I saw what was, or had been-not what might lie hid in Time's bright circle and golden chaplet! Perhaps this is the characteristic difference between youth and a later period of life— that we learn to take things more as we find them, call them more by their right names; that we feel the warmth of summer, but the winter's cold as well; that we see beauties, but can spy defects in the fairest face; and no longer look at every thing through the genial atmosphere of our own existence. We grow more literal and less credulous every day, lose much enjoyment, and gain some useful, and more useless knowledge. The second time I passed along the road that skirts Burleigh Park, the morning was dank and " ways were mire." I saw and felt it not my mind was otherwise engaged. Ah! thought I, there is that fine old head by Rembrandt; there, within those cold grey walls, the painter of old age is enshrined, immortalised in some of his inimitable works. The name of Rembrandt lives in the fame of him who stamped it with renown, while the name of Burleigh is kept up by the present owner. An artist survives in the issue of his brain to all posterity-a lord is nothing without the issue of his body lawfully begotten, and is lost in a long line of illustrious ancestors. So much higher is genius than rank-such is the difference between fame and title! A great man in one way bestrides two centuries-it requires twenty generations of a noble house to keep alive the memory of the first founder for the same length of time. So I reasoned, and was not a little proud of my discovery.

In this dreaming mood, dreaming of deathless works and deathless names, I went on to Peterborough, passing, as it were, under an archway of Fame,

-" and still walking under,
Found some new matter to look up and wonder."

I had business there: I will not say what. I could at this time do nothing. I could not write a line-I could not draw a stroke. "I was brutish;" though not "like warlike as the wolf, nor subtle as the fox for prey." In words, in look, in deeds, I was no better than a changeling. Why then do I set so much value on my existence formerly? Oh God! that I could but be for one day, one hour, nay but for an instant, (to feel it in all the plenitude of unconscious bliss, and take one long, last, lingering draught of that full brimming cup of thoughtless freedom,) what then I was-that I might, as in a trance, a waking dream, hear the hoarse murmur of the bargemen, as the Minster tower appeared in the dim twilight, come up from the willowy stream, sounding low and underground like the voice of the bittern-that I might paint that field opposite the window where I lived, and feel that there was a green, dewy moisture in the tone, beyond my pencil's reach, but thus gaining almost a new sense, and watching the birth of new objects without me-that I might stroll down Peterborough bank, (a winter's day,) and see the fresh marshes stretching out in endless level perspective, (as if Paul Potter had painted them,) with the cattle, the windmills, the red-tiled cottages, gleaming in the sun to the very verge of the horizon, and watch the fieldfares in innumerable flocks, gambolling in the air, and sporting in the sun, and racing before the clouds, making summersaults, and dazzling the eye by throwing themselves into a thousand figures and movements —that I might go, as then, a pilgrimage to the town where my mother was born, and visit the poor farm-house where she was brought up, and lean upon the gate where she told me she used to stand when a child of ten years old and look at the setting sun.--I could do all this still, but it would be with different feelings. As our hopes leave us, we lose even our interest and regrets for the past. I had at this time, simple as I seemed, many resources. I could in some sort "play at bowls with the sun or moon;" or, at any rate, there was no question in metaphysics that I could not bandy to and fro, as one might play at cup and ball, for twenty, thirty, forty miles of the great north road, and at it again, the next day, as fresh as ever. I soon get tired of this now, and wonder how I managed formerly. I knew Tom Jones by heart, and was deep in Peregrine Pickle. I was intimately acquainted with all the heroes and heroines of Richardson's romances, and could turn from one to the other as I pleased. I could con over that single passage in Pamela about "her lumpish heart," and never have done admiring the skill of the author and the truth of nature. I had my sports and recreations too, some such as these following:

"To see the sun to bed, and to arise,

Like some hot amourist, with glowing eyes,
Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him,
With all his fires and travelling glories round him.
Sometimes the moon on soft night clouds to rest,
Like beauty nestling in a young man's breast,
And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep
Admiring silence while those lovers sleep.
Sometimes outstretcht, in very idleness,
Nought doing, saying little, thinking less,
To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air,
Go eddying round; and small birds, how they fare,

When Mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn,
Filch'd from the careless Amalthea's horn:

And how the woods berries and worms provide
Without their pains, when earth has nought beside
To answer their small wants.

To view the graceful deer come tripping by,

Then stop and gaze, then turn, and know not why,
Like bashful younkers in society.

To mark the structure of a plant or tree,

And all fair things of earth, how fair they be.

I have wandered far enough from Burleigh-House, but I had some associations about it, which I could not well get rid of, without troubling the reader with them. The Rembrandts disappointed me quite. I could hardly find a trace of the impression which had been inlaid in my imagination. I might as well

"Hunt half a day for a forgotten dream."

Instead of broken wrinkles and indented flesh, I saw hard lines and stained canvass. I had seen better Rembrandts since, and had learned to see Nature better. It was painting my old woman's head and verifying the dim floating notions I had before, that put me up to the right thing. Was it a disadvantage then, that for twenty years I had carried this fine idea in my brain, enriching it from time to time from my observations of nature or art, and raising it as they were raised; or did it much signify that it was disturbed at last? Neither. The picture was nothing to me: it was the idea it had suggested. The one hung on the wall at Burleigh, the other was an heir-loom in my mind. Was it destroyed, because the picture after long absence did not answer to it? No. There were other pictures in the world that did, and objects in nature still more perfect. This is the melancholy privilege of art; it exists chiefly in idea, and leads to nothing beyond itself. If we are disappointed in the character of one we love, it breaks the illusion altogether, for we drew certain consequences from a face. If an old friendship is broken up, we cannot tell how to replace it, without the aid of habit and a length of time. But a picture is nothing but a face, it interests us only in idea. Hence we need never be afraid of raising our standard of taste too high; for the mind rises with it, exalted and refined, and can never be much injured by finding out its casual mistakes. Like the possessor of a splendid collection, who is indifferent to or turns away from common pictures, we have a selecter gallery in our own minds. In this sense, the knowledge of art is its own exceeding great reward. But is there not danger that you may become too fastidious, and have nothing left to admire? None for the conceptions of the human soul cannot rise superior to the power of art; or if they do, then you have surely every reason to be satisfied with them. The mind, in what depends on itself alone, soon rises from defeat unhurt," though its pride may be for a moment "humbled by such rebuke,"

"And in its liquid texture mortal wound

Receives no more than can the fluid air."

As an illustration of the same thing, there are two Claudes at Burleigh, which certainly do not come up to the celebrity of the artist's name. They did not hit me formerly: the sky, the water, the trees

seemed all too blue, too much of the colour of indigo. But I believed, and wondered. I could no longer admire these specimens of the artist at present, but assuredly my admiration of the artist himself was not less than before; for since then, I had seen other works by the same hand,

"Inimitable on earth

By model or by sharing pencil drawn,”—

surpassing every idea that the mind could form of art, except by having seen them. I remember one in particular that Walsh Porter had (a bow-shot beyond all others)-a vernal landscape, an "Hesperian fable true," with a blue unclouded sky, and green trees and grey turrets and the unruffled sea beyond. But never was there sky so soft or trees so clad with spring, such air-drawn towers or such halcyon seas: Zephyr seemed to fan the air, and Nature looked on and smiled. The name of Claude has alone something in it that softens and harmonises the mind. It touches a magic chord. Oh! matchless scenes, oh! orient skies, bright with purple and gold, ye opening glades and distant sunny vales, glittering with fleecy flocks, pour all your enchantment into my soul, let it reflect your chastened image, and forget all meaner things! Perhaps the most affecting tribute to the memory of this great artist is the character drawn of him by an eminent master in his Dream of a Painter.

:

"On a sudden I was surrounded by a thick cloud or mist, and my guide wafted me through the air till we alighted on a most delicious rural spot. I perceived it was the early hour of the morn, when the sun had not risen above the horizon. We were alone, except that at a little distance a young shepherd played on his flageolet as he walked before his herd, conducting them from the fold to the pasture. The elevated pastoral air he played charmed me by its simplicity, and seemed to animate his obedient flock. The atmosphere was clear and perfectly calm and now the rising sun gradually illumined the fine landscape, and began to discover to our view the distant country of immense extent. I stood awhile in expectation of what might next present itself of dazzling splendour, when the only object which appeared to fill this natural grand and simple scene, was a rustic who entered, not far from the place where we stood, who by his habiliments seemed nothing better than a peasant; he led a poor little ass, which was loaded with all the implements required by a painter in his work. After advancing a few paces, he stood still, and with an air of rapture seemed to contemplate the rising sun; he next fell on his knees, directed his eyes towards Heaven, crossed himself, and then went on with eager looks, as if to make choice of the most advantageous spot from which to make his studies as a painter. This,' said my conductor, is that Claude Gelée of Lorraine, who nobly disdaining the low employment to which he was originally bred, left it with all its advantages of competence and ease to embrace his present state of poverty, in order to adorn the world with works of most accomplished excellence.'

There is a little Paul Brill at Burleigh, in the same room with the Rembrandts, that dazzled me many years ago and delighted me the other day. It looked as sparkling as if the sky came through the frame. I found or fancied I found, those pictures the best that I remembered before, though they might in the interval have faded a little to my eyes, or lost some of their original brightness. I did not see the small head of Queen Mary by Holbein, which formerly struck me so forcibly; but I have little doubt of it, for Holbein was a sure hand, he