But the armoury and the great gallery--these are the places in which a flood of historic light pours in upon you, and the spirit of the past is made so palpable, that you forget your real existence in this utilitarian century; you forget reform in all its shapes--ballot, household suffrage, triennial parliaments; you forget the cry of the church and king; and the counter-cry from a million of eager voices, for liberty of hearth and faith; you forget that all around you, from the very walls that surround you to the distant sea, is nothing but fields cultivated like gardens, secured by gates and fences, and tenfold more costly and powerful parchment, to their particular owners; you forget that towns stand by hundreds, and villages by thousands, filled with a busy, an inquisitive, a reading, thinking, aspiring and irresistible population; and that all the institutions, the opinions, the loves and doings of the times when these things before you were matters of familiar life, are gone, or are going, for ever: that, Another race has been, and other palms are won. Yes, mighty and impressive as these things are; deeply as they visit your daily thought and nightly dreams; woven as they are with the thread of your existence, and your hopes and belief of the future ages,--yes, potent as they are, they vanish for a time. Here are swords, helmets, coats of mail, and plate-armour standing up in its own massiveness; shells from which the active bodies which moved them, have long ago disappeared. Here are buff-coats, ponderous boots, and huge spurs; broad hats, with sweeping feathers, and chains of gold, crosses and amulets, which make the past for ever in time, the past for ever in spirit, come back again with a vivid and intoxicating effect. You gaze upon arms and relics which figured in all the battles and pilgrimages, the desperate strifes and extravagant pageants of our ancestors; you behold things which link your fancies to all the romantic ages of European history. You forget the present; and exist amid forests, the stern strength of castles and the venerable quiet of convents. You are ready to listen to the distant bell of the abbey; for news of the crusaders; you expect as you ride through the woods, to stumble upon the abode of the hermit. These arms and fragments before you, were in the battles of Cressy and Poictiers; in the wars of the Roses; in the Tourney of the Field of Cloth-of-Gold; that mail, on the back of some stout knight, climbed over the ramparts of Ascalon, or of Jerusalem itself; and those, bringing you down the stream of events, are the equipments of Cavaliers and of Puritan leaders, when the spirit of feudalism and that of progression came so rudely into strife as to shake the kingdom like an earthquake. You step into the gallery, and there are the very men whose iron habiliments you have been contemplating; there are the rude portraitures of the warriors of an earlier day; and there are the Sidneys, the