NOTES — ORIGINAL AND SELECTED 179 



The following is a table of statistics for the last 15 years, the record 

 readings being distinguished by an asterisk :— • 



MISCELLANEA. 



Queen Elizabeth's Lodge and Epping Forest.— By a strange 

 coincidence I had occasion to-day to refer to a volume of Household Words for 

 1851. Under date May loth —just half-a-century ago to the day — wherein is 

 an article on " Epping Forest " which from its internal evidence is from the 

 pen of Charles Dickens. No railway then passed through the district, Hain- 

 hault Forest was yet undisturbed and unstubbed, though but two years later 

 it was speedily and ruthlessly destroyed ; and the nearest station was at Ilford, 

 some three miles distant. Some years ago I had marked this in my copy for 

 a notice in the Essex Naturalist, but had quite forgotten it, but I think the 

 extract concerning Queen Elizabeth's Lodge is worthy of reiteration in our 

 journal. It is, however, not a portion of the article itself, but a quotation 

 from William Howitt's Year Book of the Country : — 



" We take one long view from a hill top of the far spread country, and 

 mount our own vehicles, and away. Away ! but whither ! To the Old Lodge 

 of Queen Bess. Old Lodge! the hand of the past is impressed upon thee! 

 and has given thee a character. It has invested thee with the poetry of 

 nature. Storms roaring through the huge elms that stand near— old com- 

 panions ; fierce winters beating on thy steep, gabled roof, and tinting thy 

 framed walls; autumns and springs and hot-baking summer — a long series- 

 come across the imagination, as we think of thee. The broad easy oaken 

 staircase up which the heroine of the Armada, and the Queen of Scots 

 tragedy, is said to have ridden to her dining room, the tapestried chamber, 

 and the banqueting hall please me ; but, far more, the ancient desolateness 



without and around I We walk for miles in green glades, 



and beneath the close covert of the green boughs of the hornbeam trees. . 



