fast acquiring a claim to antiquity, give the fancy an agreeable and spacious field to expatiate in. Here are perhaps the oldest yews in England. One, which is thought to be a thousand years old, is thirty feet in circumference in the thickest part of its stem. Among the carvings in the house are those of two old knights taken from the abbey, with the inscription, probably modern, 'Sic transit gloria mundi.' The decay of Fountain's Abbey, too, is to be attributed to the suppression of monasteries under Henry the Eighth. Leaving the abbey, in half an hour you reach a beautiful and finely kept pleasure-ground, which is rendered peculiarly delightful by its diversity of hill and vale, noble trees, and well-placed clumps; though rather encumbered with a multitude of old-fashioned summer-houses, temples, and worthless leaden statues. In one of these temples, dedicated to the Gods of antiquity, stands a bust of--Nero! But these slight defects might easily be removed, while such a combination of natural beauty can rarely be met with. At the end of the deer-park stands the house of the proprietress, an elderly single lady of large fortune. I met her in the garden, and was invited by her to luncheon, which I gladly accepted, as my long walk had made me very hungry. To return to the ruin.--Giving way to my critical vein, I must add one thing,--which is, that while too little care is bestowed upon Whitby, too much is bestowed upon this. Not a loose stone lies on the ground, which is mowed as smooth as a carpet. The old cloister garden is laid out in a too modern taste; and were this poetic structure mine, I would immediately set out about creating a little more artificial wildness about it; for the whole ought to partake of that air of half-decayed grandeur which has the greatest power over the imagination. After my return to Ripon I visited the church there--another beautiful remnant of antiquity, with a choir full of the richest carvings. There is a subterranean arched room--a sort of catacomb, adorned with skulls and bones,--in which I busied myself a long while with my favourite craniological researches. Among these human ruins was a skull so strikingly like my own, that it even struck the clerk. What may the old boy have been?--perhaps myself in another garment? Nobody could give me any account of this house of bone. There was the genuine French skull of an emigrant priest, which the clerk himself had smuggled in. He looked so polite and so talkative, that I fancied he would have said, 'Monsieur, j'ai l'honneur de vous présenter mes respects; vous êtes trop poli de venir nous rendre visite. Nous avons si rarement l'occasion de causer ici!' It was a well bred skull--that you saw at the first glance; my portrait, on the other hand, looked very thoughtful and silent. It would be odd enough if one thus stood over one's own old bones. _Harrowgate, Sept. 28th._