246 THE SORROWS OF IGNORANCE. 



neracyv and asking triumphantly whether Northumberland, Winchelsea, 

 and Kenyon, to mention but three names out of three hundred, might 

 not vie with the best Barons of Runnimede in inscrutable ignorance and 

 character unimpeached of letters. 



She nodded assent, and to press my advantage I alluded again to 

 Londonderry : it was unfortunate. 



She suddenly recollected that Holderness House had produced a book 

 as well as Clumber Castle; and thus was new fuel thrown on the fire 

 that consumed her. 



" But/' I exclaimed, " but, madam, nothing that the noble authors 

 have written has aught impaired their fame. Had they written like 

 Milton, their speeches and their politics, nay, their very faces would re- 

 trieve their reputations." 



It was all in vain ; she was inconsolable ; the sorrow was rooted too 

 deeply in her heart to be plucked away by any topic I had to urge. She 

 saw in the fate of the rotten boroughs, which she figuratively, yet with 

 propriety, called her children, the sure harbinger of the ruin that hung 

 over herself. With the instinct of approaching dissolution, she seemed 

 to look into futurity, and anticipate the hour when she should be forced 

 to share the exile of her Bourbons at Holyrood, or the confinement of 

 Prince Polignac in the castle of Ham. 



I became now a mute observer of the grief for which it was now clear 

 there was no balm in Gilead. The burthen of her complaint was still 

 Gatton and Old Sarum. She called upon them as if they had tongues 

 to answer her ravings : the only responses she received were from the 

 birds of night, who screamed above and around her in hoarse chorus to 

 her lamentations. Ever and anon she took a wider range, and poured 

 forth a miscellany of sorrow that was enough to move the knotted oaks 

 to pity ; now deploring the influence of the press, now bewailing the effects 

 of mechanics' institutes, now venting her indignation on the Society for 

 the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, now calling on Croker and Southey 

 to redouble their efforts to arrest the march of the human mind. Then 

 she would invoke the Attorney-General, and demand why slept the Six 

 Acts on the statute book. Sometimes her hopes seemed to center in the 

 bench of Bishops, and she designated them her forlorn hope. Blomfield 

 and Philpots she named individually, charging them to remember their 

 pristine virtue, and the principles of their order. She burst forth then 

 into a .thousand blessings on the heads of Wynford and Ellenborough ; 

 and flying straight to the opposite pole, she anathematised Earl Grey, 

 and hurled a fiercer malison than Lear's at the unfortunate Lord High 

 Chancellor. Then succeeded a tender strain, and she wept over wounded 

 Sugden, for none of her offspring were too small to elude her eye. The 

 next but it is in vain to think of cataloguing her woes ; I could as 

 easily count her tears as her grievances. She bewailed even the triumphs 

 of gas, and watered the roads of Mac Adarn with salt drops. 



I was about to make a last effort, and suggest the possibility, of a 

 second Gothic irruption, when the full moon broke from out a dark 

 cloud. 



The spectre vanished with a wild scream, cursing the light. 



When my amazement was subsided, I approached the place where 

 she had been seated, and found that in her precipitate flight she had 

 dropped her leaden tablets. I opened them, and perceived that they 

 contained extracts from Mr. Goulburn's speeches, passages from Irving's 

 sermons, and copious selections from Milman, Croly, and Wilson. 



