" I honour the sentiment, sir," replied the stranger, "it is this mixture of heart with the senses which gives to nature, and art too, their best attractions. The simple beauty of this church, and the perfect quiet of its precincts, are the cause of an almost daily visit which I make to them; so that I could envy Dr. W - his parsonage there, who has it hourly before his eyes."

"It is, indeed, close,” said I.

"Some people say too close," replied he; " but I don't agree with them (though they are persons of taste), if only for the reason you gave just now-for the sentiment it inspires. For unless you can apply to such proximity the old adage, 'the nearer the church the farther from God, I will not quarrel with it. You will observe, too, that as a mere matter of taste, distinct from all notions of piety, it is a very pleasing object: its windows of the truest gothic, and its towers and ivy-clothed battlements, which our modern Wrens and Joneses make most essential to all their would-if-you-could attempts to turn the nineteenth into the fifteenth or sixteenth century, -are genuine. By-the-bye, have you ever made out, what I never could, why ivy is always given to Bacchus, as well as to a church porch? He is called, you know, ' ivy-crowned;' how can such a venerable plant belong to such a jolly god, loving, as it does, the oldest and even most ruined places, far from all vestige of peopled cheerfulness?"

I thought the remark original, but could not resolve the question.

"Well," continued the stranger, " it is only a pity that by a touch of his pencil, Mr. (naming a celebrated architect) cannot inspire the breast with the realities of the notions which he endeavours to present to it through the eye. That belfry, calling the real simple folk to church, and those few thinly scattered tombstones, where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,' speak more to the soul, than the most costly fictitious representations of what is wanted, but never obtained, by this fashionable rage for the sentimental. All that building and planting can do can never reach the effect upon the imagination, or inspire the associations of real veneration and piety, which the mere view of this simple church, rustic as it is, never fails to generate."

I assented willingly to all this, when the gentleman

went on.

" I have been told that not long ago a great master of the art admitted to one of his rich employers, for whom he had built just such a tower as that before us, and which he had been admirably successful in ' ivy mantling,' as he called it, that they could not always command a moping owl to complain to the It would be so classical, he said, of an evening, to be sure of being able to quote

moon.

'The moping owl does to the moon complain.'

"Mr. Longcloth," continued the stranger, "the gentleman who patronized him, and was a wealthy wool stapler, caught at it, and the peasantry, tempted by a large reward, robbed all the owls in the neigh

bourhood, of the young owlets, or their eggs, in order to breed up a sufficiency of these sentimental birds, so immortalized by the poet; but the owlets all died, and though some were hatched from the eggs under hens, they were all killed by their step-mothers, as soon as they discovered what an ugly unnatural brood they had produced."

I laughed heartily at this anecdote, which did not displease the gentleman, who, perhaps upon the strength of it, entered into a longer discourse with me, chiefly upon matters of taste in regard to landscapes, buildings, and the comparative claims upon our admiration of nature and art. In these he gave so decided a preference to the former, that he seemed to undervalue the latter; and though he shewed much skill in his argument, and indeed much mind upon every thing, I told him so.

"You are not the first," said he, "who has made the observation, and some of the quizzers presume to call me Old Primitive, because I think primitive tastes, that is, those which nature first prompts, the most sure of giving pleasure, and that they ought, therefore, to be followed, both in our moral conduct and our works of art."

I asked an explanation, and he went on.

"What I mean is, that I prefer the appearance of convenience and comfort to grandeur and the most splendid decorations of art without them. That is my first item in the catalogue. Next, in all sights and sounds I abide by the same rule. Those that speak to us of social happiness, the affections, the gratification of our

wants, come infinitely, in my mind, before those which merely gratify our taste for the gorgeous or refined.

"Do you want an example? look at that smoke that curls among the trees of the wood below. It gives signs of habitation; it tells that there is a man or woman there, and with them, human nature; and, from the proof that there is fire, probably of human comfort. Do you think that a pilgrim in the desert, helpless and solitary-perhaps hungry-would not prefer this to the most beautiful works of art, even those of Palmyra, should he suddenly encounter them, without such an accompaniment ? *

" I remember," continued the gentleman, "when this first struck me: it was at the magnificent Fontainbleau, where the smoke of a chimney issuing through the thatch of a cottage in the forest, gave me a pleasanter feeling than all the gilded ceilings and wainscots in the cold saloons of the palace. So also, the sight of a mere candle in a casement to a traveller in the night; the tolling of a bell from a church, or a workman's yard; or the sight of a little squire's house, in a sheltered dale, when we fall suddenly upon it amid heaths and downs; in short, whatever shews man in his comforts and natural habits, is more interesting than what exhibits him in his pride. You read Milton, no doubt, young gentleman-read, and admire him?"

I assented; a little struck with his rapidity. "Then you may remember the wish of the be

nighted brothers, lost in the wood, in Comus:

'Might we but hear

The folded flocks penn'd in their wattled cotes,
Or sound of pastoral reed, with oaten stops,
Or whistle from the lodge, or village cock
Count the night watches to his feathery dames.””

I was much moved with the energy he infused into all this, as well as the justness and good taste of the observation, and was about to remark as much, when he proceeded:

"Hence I prize obvious utility-that is, obvious adaptation of means to ends-before ornament; that is, naked ornament without this utility. This is, even in its mere self, one of the sources of the beautiful, and so Burke considers it, in, I allow, an extreme case-the snout of a swine, so plainly designed to root up the ground in quest of food."

Again I was impressed with the strong feeling and eagerness shewn by the stranger, on a subject I had never before considered, and began both to respect, and to wonder who he was who thus condescended to talk to me so willingly, and, as I thought, so well. He was plainly a man of mind, and something of an enthusiast, but not in my eyes the worse for that.

After a few more observations in the same strain, the church clock striking mid-day, he pulled out his