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Cahie. 



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 Archaeological 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 

 archaeological 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 



