Catholic, but during the first seven years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, which were all he lived to see, the Catholics generally came to their Parish Churches until forbidden by the Pope's Bull. It remained, therefore, for his son, who was eighteen years of age at his father's death, to declare himself; and he conformed to the usage of the English Church. He resided entirely at Westacre, with an occasional visit to Court, keeping open-handed hospitality, and slightly embarrassing the estate, though, like his father, he had only one child. He was a favourer of the Papists, and once or twice was in trouble on that account; but being perfectly loyal, and a very popular man, he was rather a favourite with the Queen, who always noticed him when he came to Court, and was wont to say that "the dry crust Dick Inglesant gave a Papist should never choke him while she lived." He lived beyond the term of years usual in his family, and died in 1629, at the age of eighty-two, having been for the last twenty years of his life, since the death of the Queen, entirely under the guidance of his son, very much to his own advantage, as during those black years for the Papists, he would most probably have committed imprudences which might have been his ruin. His son, whose name was Eustace, was a shrewd lawyer and courtier. He was much more than his father-a Papist at heart, but he conformed strictly to the English Church, and possessed considerable indirect influence at Court. He was thought much of by the Catholics, who regarded him as one of their most powerful friends. He married young, in 1593, but he had no children by his first wife, who died in 1610; and in 1620 he married again, a Catholic lady who was his ward. With this lady he came to reside at Westacre; but two years after, his wife died in giving birth to two boys; and, disgusted with the country, he left the two infants to their grandfather's care and returned to London, visiting Westacre, however, regularly at intervals; where, with a small number of servants, the old gentleman, totally forgetful of his old hospitality, and of his friends the Papists, spent his last days with the greatest delight, in anxiously watching over his little grandchildren. They were beautiful boys, so exactly alike that it was impossible to tell them apart, and from their earliest infancy so united in love to each other that they became a proverb in the neighbourhood. The eldest was named Eustace, after his father; but the

youngest, at the entreaty of his young mother-uttered in her faint and dying voice, as the children lay before her during the few moments that were given her in mercy to look at them before her eyes were closed on these dearly purchased treasures and all other earthly things-was named John, after her brother, a Seminary priest of Douay, executed in England for saying mass, and refusing the oath of supremacy.

Little need be told of the infancy of these boys: traditions remain, as in other cases, of their likeness to each other, needing different coloured ribbons to distinguish them; and of the old man's anxious doting care over them. Many a pretty group, doubtless, they made, on warm summer afternoons, on the shady terrace; but the old grandfather died when they were seven years old, and slept with his father beneath the Chapel floor. After the funeral, Eustace Inglesant had intended taking both the children back with him to London, but he had discoveredor fancied he had discovered that the youngest was sickly, and would be better for the country air; and therefore kept him at Westacre, when he returned to the city with his brother. The truth appears to be that he was a worldly, selfish man, and while fully conscious of the advantage of an heir, he was by no means desirous of giving himself more trouble than was necessary about either of his children. The old Priory, however, was, at this time, not a bad place to bring up a child in, though it had been neglected during the last ten or eleven years; though the woods were overgrown, and the oaks came up, in places, close to the house; though the Prior's fish-ponds had transformed themselves into a large pool or lake; though the garden was a tangled wilderness, and centaury, woodsorrel, and sour herbs covered the ground; though the old courtyard and the Chapel itself were mouldering and ruinous, yet the air of the rich vales in the north of Wiltshire is more healthy than that of the higher downs, which are often covered with fogs when the vales are clear, and the sky is bright and serene. It was remarked that people lived longer in the valleys than at places that would be supposed peculiarly healthy on the hills; that they sang better in the churches; and that books and rooms were not so damp and mouldy in the low situations as they were in those which stood very high, with no river or marsh near them. The fogs at times, indeed, came down into the valleys; and in the courtyard of the Priory dim forms had been seen flitting through

the mist, in reality the shadows of the spectators thrown upon the mist itself, from the light of a lanthorn. Such sights as these in such a place, so haunted by the memories of the past, gave rise to many strange stories—to which young Inglesant listened with wonder, as he did, also, to others of the ignis fatuus, which, called by the people "Kit of the Candlestick," used, about Michaelmas, to be very common on the downs, and to wander down to the valleys across the low boggy grounds— stories of its leading travellers astray, and fascinating them. The boy grew up among such strange stories, and lived, indeed, in the old world that was gone for ever. His grandfather's dimly remembered anecdotes were again and again recalled by others, all of the same kind, which he heard every day. Stories of the rood in the Chapel, of the mass wafer with its mysterious awfulness and power; of the processions and midnight singing at the Priory. The country was full of the scattered spoil of the monasteries ; old and precious manuscripts were used everywhere by the schoolboys for covering their books, and for the covers of music; and the glovers of Malmsbury wrapped their goods in them. In the churchyards the yew-trees stood thick and undecayed, scarcely grown again from the last lopping to supply boughs for the archers of the King's army. story was common of the Becket's path, along which he had been used to pass when curé priest at Winterbourn, and which could be seen through the deepest snow, or if ploughed up and sown with corn. Indeed the path itself could be seen within a pleasant ride across the downs from Westacre.

The

The boy's first instructor was the old curate of the Chapel, who taught him his Church Catechism and his Latin grammar. This man appears to have been one of those ministers so despised by the Puritans as mere grammar scholars," who knew better how to read a homily than to make a sermon; yet John Inglesant learnt of him more good lessons than he did, as he himself owned, afterwards from many popular sermons; and in his old age he acknowledged that he believed the only thing that had kept him back in after years and under great temptations, from formally joining the communion of the Church of Rome, was some faint prejudice, some lingering dislike, grounded on the old man's teaching. Other teachers, of a different kind, the child had in plenty. The old servants who still remained in the house; the woodsmen and charcoal burners; the village

girls whom the housekeeper hired from year to year at Malmsbury fair; the old housekeeper who had been his mother's maid, and whom the boy looked on as his mother, and who could coax him to her lap when he was quite a tall boy, by telling him stories of his mother; one or two falconers or huntsmen who lingered about the place, or watched the woods for game for the gentry around. When he was ten years old, in 1632, the curate of the Chapel died; and Mr. Inglesant did not at once replace him, for reasons which will appear presently. John led a broken scholastic life for a year, going to school when it was fine enough to make a pleasant walk attractive to -, where the Vicar taught some boys their grammar and Latin Terence in the Church itself; and where there was a tradition that the great antiquary, Master Camden, Clarencieux King of Arms, coming on his survey to examine the Church, found him, and spoke to him and his scholars. At the end of a year, however, his father coming into the country, arranged for him to go to school at Ashley, where he was to stay in the house with the Vicar, a famous schoolmaster in the West country. This gentleman, who was a delicate and little person, and had an easy and attractive way of teaching, was a Greek scholar and a Platonist, a Rosicrucian and a believer in alchemy and astrology. He found in little Inglesant an apt pupil, an apprehensive and inquisitive boy, mild of spirit, and very susceptible of fascination, strongly given to superstition and romance; of an inventive imagination though not a retentive memory; given to day-dreaming, and,—what is more often found in children than some may think, though perhaps they could not name it,-metaphysical speculation. The Vicar taught his boys in the hall of his Vicarage-a large room with a porch, and armorial bearings in the stained glass in the windows. Out of this opened a closet or parlour where he kept his books, and in this he would sit after school was over, writing his learned treatises, most of which he would read to John Inglesant, some of them in Latin. This, with his readings in Plato, assisted by his eager interest, gave John, as he grew older, a considerable acquaintance with both languages, so that he could read most books in either of them, and turn over the remnants of the old world learning that still remained in the Prior's library, with that lazy facility which always gives a meaning, though often an incorrect one-not always a matter of regret to an imaginative reader, as adding a charm, and,

where his own thought is happy, a beauty. Here he imbibed that mysterious Platonic philosophy, which —seen through the reflected rays of Christianity—becomes, as his master taught him, in some sort a foreshadowing of it, as the innocent and heroic life of Socrates, commended and admired by Christians as well as heathens, together with his august death, may be thought, in some measure, to have borne the image of Christ; and, indeed, not without some mystery of purpose, and preparation of men for Christianity, has been so magnified among men. Here, too, he eagerly drank in his master's Rosicrucian theories of spiritual existences: of the vital congruity and three several vehicles of the soul; the terrestrial, in which the soul should be so trained that she may stay as short a time as possible in the second or aerial, but proceed at once to the third, the ethereal, or celestial; "that heavenly chariot, carrying us, in triumph, to the great happiness of the soul of man." Of the aerial genii, and souls separate, and of their converse with one another, and with mankind. Of their dress, beauty, and outward form; of their pleasures and entertainments, from the Divinest harmony of the higher orders, who, with voices perfectly imitating the passionate utterance of their devout minds, melt their souls into Divine love, and lose themselves in joy in God; while all nature is transformed by them to a quintessence of crystalline beauty by the chemical power of the spirit of nature, acting on pure essences. Of the feastings and wild dances of the lower and deeply lapsed, in whom some sad and fantastic imitation of the higher orders is to be traced; and of those aerial wanderers to whom poetical philosophers or philosophical poets have given the rivers and springs-the mountains and groves; with the Dii Tutelares of cities and countries; and the Lares familiares, who love the warmth of families and the homely converse of men. These studies are but a part of the course of which occult chemistry and the lore of the stars form a part; and that mysterious Platonism which teaches that Pindar's story of the Argo is only a secret recipe for the philosopher's stone; and which pretends that at this distance of time the life of Priam can be read more surely in the stars than in history.

More than three years passed in these pursuits, when Inglesant, now a tall, handsome, dreamy-looking boy of fourteen, was suddenly recalled to Westacre by his father, who had unexpectedly arrived from London. His master, who was very fond