truth uttered than in the couplet of Wordsworth-- "Minds that have nothing to confer Find little to perceive." To the philosophic stranger, however, even this prosaic occupancy of historic places is not without its pleasurable, because humorous, significance. Such an observer in England will sometimes be amused as well as impressed by a sudden sense of the singular incidental position into which--partly through the lapse of years, and partly through a peculiarity of national character--the scenes of famous events, not to say the events themselves, have gradually drifted. I thought of this one night, when, in Whitehall Gardens, I was looking at the statue of James the Second, and a courteous policeman came up and silently turned the light of his bull's-eye upon the inscription. A scene of more incongruous elements, or one suggestive of a more serio-comic contrast, could not be imagined. I thought of it again when standing on the village green near Barnet, and viewing, amid surroundings both pastoral and ludicrous, the column which there commemorates the defeat and death of the great Earl of Warwick, and, consequently, the final triumph of the Grown over the last of the Barons of England. It was toward the close of a cool summer day, and of a long drive through the beautiful hedgerows of sweet and verdurous Middlesex, that I came to the villages of Barnet and Hadley, and went over the field of King Edward's victory,--that fatal glorious field, on which Gloster showed such resolute valour, and where Neville, supreme and magnificent in disaster, fought on foot, to make sure that himself might go down in the stormy death of all his hopes. More than four hundred years have drifted by since that misty April morning when the star of Warwick was quenched in blood, and ten thousand men were slaughtered to end the strife between the Barons and the Crown; yet the results of that conflict are living facts in the government of England now, and in the fortunes of her inhabitants. If you were unaware of the solid simplicity and proud reticence of the English character,--leading it to merge all its shining deeds in one continuous fabric of achievement, like jewels set in a cloth of gold,--you might expect to find this spot adorned with a structure of more than common splendour. What you actually do find there is a plain monument, standing in the middle of a common, at the junction of several roads,--the chief of which are those leading to Hatfield and St. Albans, in Hertfordshire,--and on one side of this column you may read, in letters of faded black, the comprehensive statement that "Here was fought the famous battle between Edward the Fourth and the Earl of Warwick, April 14th, anno 1471, in which the Earl was defeated and slain."¹ ¹ The words "stick no bills" have been intrusively added, just below this inscription. Illustration: "Column on Barnet Battle-Field."