started on a delightful drive across the valley. It was a beautiful afternoon, and our route took us through a great variety of country scenes. Now we skirted the base of the Malverns; and now reached the picturesque Church of Little Malvern; and now descended, amid overhanging trees, into the valley of the Severn, partly darkened by the stretching shadow of the hills, and partly glittering with reflections of the descending sun. My friend V——, who seemed to have friends everywhere, was so well acquainted with the neighbouring gentry, that he was quite at liberty to enliven our drive, by leaving the high road and crossing the park of this or that beautiful residence which happened to lie in our way. Thus we gained fine views of several elegant mansions and their surrounding grounds. At the lodge of one of these parks, as we entered, I was struck with a curious tree, called the peacock yew, from the showy _pavonazetto_ of its foliage: but the oddities of nature, after all, are far less attractive than her ordinary beauties. At last we re-crossed the Severn, and entered Tewksbury. It has been justly remarked that this place appears to have stood still for five hundred years. Its massive abbey, with its magnificent Anglo-Norman tower, has the advantage therefore of standing in the company of contemporary walls and roofs, instead of being an insulated lump of Mediævalism, in a mass of nineteenth century brick and plaster. I was wholly unprepared for so splendid a specimen of cathedral architecture as this abbey proved to be; and when I entered the sacred place, I was quite overwhelmed with its effect. It is of great length, and the aisles are separated from the nave by a series of immense Saxon pillars, which convey an idea of strength and sombre dignity wholly different from the impressions produced by the light and springing shafts of the perpendicular and decorated Gothic. Its great window is a solitary example of such vast and solemn combinations of proportion and detail; its Norman arches being deeply recessed in the gigantic wall, and its height commensurately sublime. While we surveyed this stupendous interior, the rich shadows and faint illuminations produced by the close of day, greatly heightened the impressiveness of the architecture and the awful associations of this ancient sanctuary and cemetery. It was indeed sublime to reflect that under the shade of these walls was waged the last battle of the House of Lancaster, and that the noble ashes of its heroes were everywhere under foot, as we paced its aisles. We surveyed one after another the tombs of Clarence, of Somerset, of Wenlock, and De Clifford, moralizing on the Providence which reduced the Norman blood of England just in the time and manner best suited to give the Commons room to rise; and which laid these proud patricians in the dust, that out of the dust might spring the freedom and the power which now invest the world with Anglo-Saxon glory. God only is wise—God only