146 SURREY-LEITH HILL. arbitrary, and hardly under any other rule that the common sense of mankind. The noble institution of the jury on one hand, and on the other, the right of pardoning in the sovereign, correct all. May 20.-We have made our first sortie from London, to see what the spring was out of its smoke and dust, 30 miles off, in the county of Surrey. The surface of the country is gently waving, covered with pasturage of the finest green, with numerous flocks of sheep, and herds of cattle; here and there groves of forest trees, but little arable land, few inclosures, and great heathy commons. All this is very beautiful, and pleases me extremely; but surprises me equally. So near this Colossus of a town, with its 800,000 mouths to feed, I should have expected to see everywhere fields of corn for men, and of clover and sainfoin for animals; everywhere the plough,-no trees but fruittrees, no pastures, and, above all, no heath. We do not lose certainly by the exchange; but I do not understand how the proprietors of this valuable land calculate. I should suppose that all this beautiful country belongs to people of fortune, who think more of its beauty than its produce, and the conjecture is very much strengthened, by the appearance of multitudes of good-looking houses, half-mansion, half-cottage, but evidently inhabited by persons of taste and opulence. I measured at Weston two abeles of twelve feet in circumference; several elms, and a young oak exceeded that size; the branches of a chesnut covered a space of a hundred feet in diameter. We were taken to a hill, (Leith Hill) 1000 feet above the level of the sea, from whence there is a most extensive view:-North, the dome of St Paul's shrouded in smoke, and even Hampstead and SURREY SPRING-SIR FRANCIS BURDETT. 147 Highgate beyond; south, a narrow streak in the horizon, which shines on a bright day, and which is the sea. The two extremities, London and the sea, are here sixty miles apart; the eye commands the whole interval. This spot is marked by a tower, built by an honourable gentleman, member of several successive Parliaments, who is buried here, and has secured, by this means, an immortality which he was afraid the ingratitude of his country might refuse to his long services. The spring has been here cold and late; horsechesnuts are only beginning to shew their blossoms; the hawthorn not yet; apple-trees have not lost theirs. The thermometer varies from 45° to 60°; a fire is still very acceptable. On our return to London, we found Sir Francis Burdett again before the public. He has instituted a suit in the court of King's Bench against the Speaker of the House of Commons, who gave the order for his arrest, stating his damages at L.30,000, against the sergeant-at-arms who arrested him, and against the governor of the Tower, (Lord Moira) who detained him. The Parliament has been employed for some days past, in debating whether the authority of any court is to be acknowledged in a question of privileges. The records of the House have been searched for precedents. They found many of the lower members of the law, such as attorneys, bailiffs, &c. &c. and even some judges, arrested by the authority of Parliament, for meddling indiscreetly in things relating to privilege; yet the committee who reported these facts, was of opinion that the Speaker, &c. should enter their plea before the court, condescending, out of courtesy, to state their reasons for what had been done; but, if the judges should proceed farther, 148 LONDON-SIR FRANCIS BURDETI. the House of Commons would probably impeach them. The debates on this question have been very animated, ingenious, and argumentative. I observed particularly the speeches of Lord Erskine in the upper house, Sir Samuel Romilly and Mr Ponsonby in the Commons. To a disinterested by-stander all this heat and jarring of contradictory authorities, the manifest exaggeration of all they say and do, appear out of all proportion to the importance of the case, and it is impossible not to feel surprise and disgust. On the other hand, it must be remembered, that it is only at the point of contact of the different powers, and on their mutual boundaries, that any collision can take place, and that the importance of the dispute is not to be estimated by its immediate object, but by its consequences. Soldiers defend, to the last drop of their blood, a breach which is only a heap of stones, for the sake of the place behind, which must fall if the enemy succeed in making a lodgement. The importance of constitutional forms, and the danger of their infraction in a government like this, are very happily illustrated in the following passage of an old English poem (Hudibras): As when the sea breaks o'er its bounds May 25.-I wished much to see Strawberry Hill, the house of Lord Orford, better known in France under the name of Horace Walpole, by his colloquial wit, and his letter of the King of Prus STRAWBERRY HILL. 149 sia to Jean Jaques,-so French, that the latter ascribed it to D'Alembert, in his factum against David Hume. I knew that Mr Walpole had the passion of minor antiquities, painted windows, snuff-boxes, and historical baubles of all sorts. He laughed at his own taste, but I had no idea it was with so much reason. Strawberry Hill is a Gothic baby-house; the windows chequered like Harlequin's coat, with all the colours of the rainbow: narrow passages lead, through small doors, to rooms like closets. On the wall hung the coatof-mail of our Francis I. mentioned in the correspondence of Madame du Deffand, but looking too short for that Prince, who was a tall and stout knight. We were shewn the portraits of his favourite Madame de Sevigné, of Madame de Grignan, of Madame de la Fayette. The ink-stand of Madame de Sevigné was on the table. Cela donne à penser! Time, with its frightful rapidity, has already carried so far from us Walpole, Madame du Deffand, Voltaire, d'Alembert, and all that society of which the Duke and Duchess of Choiseul were the centre, that the period in which they lived seems now blended with the age of Louis XIV.; and their manners more like those described by Madame de Sevigné, than the manners of the present day. The last twenty years have covered, with their funeral crape and their blood, with their folly and their splendour, the space of centuries, in the memory of men. They have dug an abyss between the times that preceded and followed; and, forming a new era in history, future generations will say, before or after the French revolution, as before or after the fall of the Roman empire,-before or after the dark ages. Strawberry Hill, notwithstanding its name, is 150 STRAWBERRY HILL-RICHMOND. quite flat, even low, and seems damp; the road, passing close by, is covered with a pointed gothic arch of elms, forming a very appropriate avenue. The aspect of the house is melancholy; the grounds are well carpeted with green, and shaded with large trees, the usual decoration here. The King loves astronomy, and has an observatory in the little park of Richmond, called the King's Paddock. It is furnished with a large telescope of Herschell; a transit instrument of eight feet, through which we saw Venus crossing the meridian; a vertical instrument of twelve feet for zenith observations; a mural of eight feet of rays; an equatorial telescope, and several other instruments less considerable :-a few models of machines; among them one to determine the lateral pressure of arches; a collection of German minerals; and a good apparatus for philosophical experiments. His majesty happened to be at the observatory some years ago to observe an occultation of a planet, when a deer pursued from Windsor crossed the river, leaped over the park palings, followed by the dogs, and was taken at the foot of the observatory, precisely at the moment of the occultation. We took the liberty of inquiring whether the attention of his Majesty had been proof against this interruption, and were answered that a cloud had unfortunately interposed just then, otherwise nothing could have taken off his Majesty's attention. The King's Paddock is a dead flat, without any other view than its own meadows and scattered trees, but that is really enough. English park trees have a character of picturesque magnificence, unequalled anywhere else, and a few of them on a lawn constitute alone a landscape. They form the principal charm of |