242 

 THE SORROWS OF IGNORANCE, 



(A WAKING DREAM.) 



" How are the mighty fallen !" 



A FEW evenings after the English Reform Bill had received the royal 

 assent, the close of a desultory walk brought me under the park wall, 

 which is, I believe, all the masonry of which the ever memorable borough 

 of Gatton has for many centuries been able to boast. The bats and owls 

 the only materials for a constituency that have existed there within the 

 memory of man, hovered and hooted about me, as usual, in solitary 

 places at twilight. The former were very numerous, and I fancied there 

 was something of a slow solemnity in the manner in which they per- 

 formed their blind evolutions, as if they sympathised with the sorrows 

 of my Lord Monson. The owl, too, from the ivy -grown and gnarled 

 trunks of the oaks and elms, seemed to scream more piteously than she 

 was wont : it was impossible not to imagine that she, likewise, mourned 

 the fate of the borough, and had the reforming ministry in her eye, as 

 she complained to the moon which was then rising, 



" Of such as wandering near her sacred bower 

 Molest her ancient solitary reign." 



It was difficult, in such a spot, to avoid falling into reflections of a poll - 

 tical nature ; and it was no less difficult, at such an hour, to preserv 

 those reflections in any thing like a regular logical order. The though? 

 varied and flickered like the lights and shadows of the scenery thj 

 suggested them. Although I grow tired of my vain attempts to kee 

 them in their ranks ; and, suffering them to straggle as they pleaset 

 followed them wherever they chose to lead me, until the state of min 

 itself altered, and I fell into that peculiar mode of thinking, which th 

 French call reverie, and Locke, " dreaming with the eyes open." 



This mental trance, if such it may be called, had continued not mani 

 moments, when the loud lamentations of a female voice pierced my ear> 

 and turning about in the direction whence the sound came, I perceived 

 under the shadow of one of the patrician trees, and seated on a moss- 

 grown fragment of stone, which looked as if it had in Plantagenet or 

 Tudor times been part of some human habitation, the form, or apparition 

 of an aged woman in mourning weeds, wailing and wringing her hands, 

 as under the pressure of some intolerable and gigantic sorrow. Her 

 stature was more than the ordinary height of even the tallest of her sex ; 

 and her carriage, even in the abandonment of her distress, had a certain 

 haughty air, which would have indicated a lady of the highest aristo- 

 cracy, had it been possible, even in a dream, to imagine a Duchess 

 Dowager in such a situation, at such an hour. Her features I was 

 unable to read with any accuracy ; as far, however, as the distance, the 

 depth of the shadow, and the sable mantle which enveloped almost her 

 whole person in its ample folds permitted me to judge, they were noble, 

 if not royal. On the whole, but for a certain unearthliness which cha- 

 racterized the figure, one might have fancied it that of a lady who had 

 borne a Duke of Newcastle, or an Earl of Lonsdale. 



Deeply as I was affected with pity at the sight of a woman stricken 



