194 Calne. 
bare and shapeless, the trees not venerable, and the town itself 
irregular, which is its only beauty.” 
You will probably be of opinion that when he penned this melan- 
choly account of you Mr. Hartley Coleridge was himself also suffering 
from the tyranny—not perhaps of opium, but —of indigestion, or a 
bad toothache ; so we will say no more of him: but give a word or 
two to another critic of the same jaundiced temperament, who has 
written that “ Calne has all the aspect of a place that has past its 
prime.” 
Past its prime forsooth! I would rather be disposed to say that 
it has not yet reached its prime. Within the last twenty years or 
so Calne has shown signs of fresh youth. It hardly falls within 
the province of my paper to dwell upon modern improvements here ; 
for you will remember that we are an Archeological Society : and 
that our business is to save from total oblivion things that are past, 
not those which are fresh and new. ‘The fresh and new will become 
archeological in course of time; so that it is to be hoped that some 
one may be found in Calne who will do for the present what we are 
trying to do for the past ; and he may depend upon it his collections 
for the history of what is now going on will by and by be sought 
after as interesting and valuable. 
By way of salve to your feelings, sore and wounded as they must 
be by such barbarous opinions of Calne, I will now give a more 
agreeable one ; that of a very distinguished occasional resident, the 
author of the charming Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb. In one of 
his earlier letters to the London Magazine, describing his “ School- 
day Reminiscences,” he is bitterly lamenting his condition as a poor 
friendless lad at Christ’s Hospital, in London, condemned to pass 
the holidays at school because his parents lived so far away. “ Oh,” 
he says, “ the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early home- 
stead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those 
unfledged years! How, in my dreams, would my native town [please 
note those two words], far in the West, come back, with its Church 
and trees and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the 
anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne, in Wiltshire!” 
Now, reading those touching lines, would you not, would not every 
