ENGLAND AND ENGLISHMES, BY AN AMERICAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume I, Issue 131, 14 April 1864, Page 4

ENGLAND AND ENGLISHMES, BY AN AMERICAN.

The most interesting work that lias lately appeared is entitled " Our Old Homo," and is from the pell of Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the delightful American writer whose " House with the Seven Gables," "Twice-Told Tales," and other publications, have been received with .such favour by the English public : indeed, his merits were acknowledged in this country long before they were in America. .Mr. Hawthorne was for some years resident in Liverpool as United States consul, and the two volumes he has now published are descriptive sketches ol K-igland and the English, compiled from notes made in his .journal during the years he spent amongst us in that capacity. He visited most ot the spots which are rich in historical associations, and especially spent much time in the neighbourhood of iStratford-on-Avon: and bis book is rich in anecdotes, reflections, and descriptions of scenery of the most rliurming kind, with much quaint humour and delicate limey. Let the following suffice for a sample :— " Lii.i.inoton (' H [i: (■ nya i; I>, nra p. Leamington.— A well-trodden path led across the churchyard; and the irate being oil the latch, we entered, and walked round among the graves and monuments. The latter were chictly headstones, none of which were very old, so far as was discoverable by the dates : some, indeed, in so ancient a cemetery," were ilisagreeahlv new, with inscription glittering; like sunshine, in gold letters. The ground must have been dug over and over again innumerable times, until the soil is made up of what was once human clay, out of which have sprung successive crops of gravestones, that flourish their allotted time, and disappear like the weeds and flowers ill their briefer period. The English climate is very unfavourable to the endurance of memorials in the open air. Twenty years of it suffice to give as much antiquity of aspect, whether to tombstone or edifice, as a hundred years of our drier atmosphere— so soon do the drizzly rains and constant moisture corrode tho surface of marble or freestone. Sculptured edges lose shaipness in a year or two ; yellow lichens overspread a beloved name, and obliterate it while it is yet fresh upon some survivor's heart, -lime knaws an English gravestone with wonderful appetite ; and when the inscriptionjjis quite illegible, the sexton takes the useless slab away, ancl perhaps makes a hearth-stone of it, and digs up the unripe bones which it ineffectually tried to memorialize, and gives the bed to another sleeper. In the Charterstreet burial ground at Salem, and in the old graveyard on tlie hill at Ipswich, 1 have seen more ancient gravestones with legible inscriptions on them than ill any churchyard. And vet the same ungenial climate, hostile as it generally is to the long remembrance of departed people, has sonietiines_ a lovely way of dealing with the records on certain monuments that lie horizontally in the open air. The rain falls into the deep incisions of the letters, and has searcelv time to be dried away before another shower sprinkles the flat stone again, and repleniehes those little reservoirs. The unseen mysterious seeds of mosses find their way into the lettered furrows, and are made to 1 urniinate by the continual moisture and watery sunshine ot the English .-ky; and, by and bye, in a year, or two years, or many years, behold the complete inscription—

Hekf. Liktii tiit. Body, and nil the rest of the tender falsehood—beautifully embossed in raised letters of living' green, u basleliet ot velvet moss on t!it: niitrblo slab ! It becomes more legible, under the skyey influences, alter the world has forgotten the deceased, than when it was fresh from the stone-cutter's hands. It outlives the frrief of friends. I first saw an example of this in ]if'bbinjrton churchyard in Cheshire, and thought that nature must need have had a special tenderness for the person (no noted man, however, in the world's history) so long ago laid beneath that stone, since she tool; such wonderful pains to 'keep his memory green.' Perhaps this proverbial phrase just quoted may hid its origin in the natural phenomenon

here described. While -we rented ourselves on a horizontal monument, -which was elevated just high enough to be a convenient seat, I observed that one of the grave-stones lay very close to the church, —so close that the droppings of the eaves would fall upon it. It .seemed as if the inmate of that grave liad desired to sleep under the church wall. On closer inspection, we iound an almost illegible epitaph on the stone, and with diilicultv made out thlß forloru verse: — Poorly lived, And poorly died, Poorly buried, And no one cried. It would be hard to compress the story of a cold and luckless life, death, and burial into fever words or more impressive ones; at least, we found them in;, pressive, perhaps because we had to re-create the inscription by scraping away the lichens from thte faintly traced letters. The grave was on the shyly and damp side of Hie church, endwise towards it; the head-stone being within about three feet of the foundation wall f so that, unless the poor man was a dwarf, he must have been doubled up to fit him into his final resting-place. Xo wonder that his epitaph murmured against so poor a burial as this! His name, as well as I could make out, was Treco—John Treco', I think —and he died in IS 10, at the age of seventv-four. The grave-stone is so overgrown with grass and weeds, so covered with unsightly lichens, and so crumbly with time and foul weather, that it i 3 qucstionabls whether any body will ever be at tho trouble of deciphering it again. lint there is a quaint and sad kind of enjoyment in defeating (to such slight degree as my pen may do it) the probabilities of oblivion for pool- John Treco, and asking a little sympathy for him, half a century after his death, and making him better and more widely know at least tlmn any other sleeper in Lillington churchyard: lie having been, as appearances go, tho outcast of them all."

Bat, to .-ot of and spoil iill this, the volumes are also full of the most acrid, prejudiced, and unjust observations upon the Kncriish people;. Here he can sec nothing to commend. Knirland is pretty, but English society is unbearable. AVe have all degenerated, and become immeasurably inferior to tlie Yankees.- —Times.