r Thomas Boleyn actually resided in the vicinity, and
that his daughter was accidentally among the guests at that princely
entertainment. I know it is contended, that this interview took place
at York House, Whitehall; but Shakespeare makes the King come by
Water; and York House, Battersea, was beyond all doubt a residence of
Wolsey, and is provided with a creek from the Thames, for the evident
purpose of facilitating intercourse by water. Besides, the owner
informed me, that a few years since he had pulled down a superb room,
called "the ball-room," the pannels of which were curiously painted,
and the divisions silvered. He also stated that the room had a dome
and a richly ornamented ceiling, and that he once saw an ancient
print, representing the first interview of Henry VIII. with Anne
Boleyn, in which the room was portrayed exactly like the one that, in
modernizing his house, he had found it necessary to destroy.

My polite host took me to his green-house, and shewed me a fine
specimen of that wonder of the second degree of organized
existence--an American aloe, about to put forth its blossoms. Its
vigorous upright stem was twelve feet high, and its head promised a
rich profusion of splendid flowers. It is indeed no fable, that this
perennial plant grows about a hundred years (a few more or less,)
before it blooms; and, after yielding its seed, the stem withers and
dies! I could not avoid being struck with the lesson which this
centenarian affords to the Pride of man, when, on asking its owner,
how he knew that it was a hundred years old, he informed me that "it
had been in his possession the half of his life," that is, the mighty
period of five-and-twenty years! "That it had previously been the
property of the Hon. Mrs. ----," whose name, in spite of her _honour_,
is now as lost to fame as she herself is lost to that existence which
gave rise to any self-importance! That he "had heard, that, before
_her time_, it belonged to Lord ----," a name which I have also
forgotten, because it was unnecessary to remember it, the common-place
peer having also exhausted the measure of his days since our
still-flourishing aloe was in its dawn! "Ah, Sir," said I, "so the
aloe has seen out all those who vainly called it their property--They
have been swept away, generation after generation, yet it still
survives a living commentary on their utter insignificance; and it
laughs at the proud assumption of those who called themselves