360 PICTUKES OF THE PAST. 



cling group of cottages about the same relative proportion, as 

 well as something of the same relationship, there stands, in 

 the foreground of our picture, an old quaint-looking residence, 

 itself a cottage, but distinguished from the lesser and lowlier 

 of the assemblage by its magnitude, its flight of steps ascending 

 from the pathway to the garden gate, its surrounding shrub- 

 bery and flanking fir-trees, its trellised porch and arched door- 

 way, its casemented bay-windows, and its clustered chimneys, 

 from whence (our landscape is a winter one) the smoke is as- 

 cending through the frosty air in sturdy upright columns, that 

 tell, indisputably, of comfort and of cookery within. Three 

 other pictures (family and domestic portraits) we must take 

 down, next, from our memory- furnished gallery. All are of 

 dwellers in the cottage just described, the principal residence, 



and eke the vicarage, of the village of H . 



First, we have its reverend master, of build substantial and 

 air unpretending as his abode, of middle age, middle stature, 

 and mediocre features, a man altogether made up of middlings, 

 except that he seems invested with a portion more than mid- 

 dling of indolent good humour. Most easy vicar ! dearly did 

 we love thee ; but only in proportion to thy claims upon our 

 young affections. Thou wert our kind uncle, and, much more, 

 scarcely less a father unto us than to thine own only little 

 daughter Lucy ; and thou wert, moreover, our tutor, our 

 earliest instructor in much of varied knowledge, truly more 

 varied than profound. Thyself an entomologist (albeit of no 



