from another passage in the same play:--

"West of this place, down in the neighbour bottom.
The _rank of osiers_ by the murmuring stream,
Left on your right hand brings you to the place."

The customs and amusements of Northamptonshire, which are frequently
noticed in these volumes, were identical with those of the neighbouring
county of Warwick, and, in like manner illustrate very clearly many
passages in the great dramatist.--_Miss Baker's "Glossary of
Northamptonshire Words." (Quoted by the London Athenaeum_.)

[037] Mrs. Hemans once took up her abode for some weeks with Wordsworth
at Rydal Mount, and was so charmed with the country around, that she was
induced to take a cottage called _Dove's Nest_, which over-looked the
lake of Windermere. But tourists and idlers so haunted her retreat and
so worried her for autographs and Album contributions, that she was
obliged to make her escape. Her little cottage and garden in the village
of Wavertree, near Liverpool, seem to have met the fate which has
befallen so many of the residences of the poets. "Mrs. Hemans's little
flower-garden" (says a late visitor) "was no more--but rank grass and
weeds sprang up luxuriously; many of the windows were broken; the
entrance gate was off its hinges: the vine in front of the house trailed
along the ground, and a board, with '_This house to let_' upon it, was
nailed on the door. I entered the deserted garden and looked into the
little parlour--once so full of taste and elegance; it was gloomy and
cheerless. The paper was spotted with damp, and spiders had built their
webs in the corner. As I mused on the uncertainty of human life, I
exclaimed with the eloquent Burke,--'What shadows we are, and what
shadows we pursue!'"

The beautiful grounds of the late Professor Wilson at Elleray, we are
told by Mr. Howitt in his interesting "_Homes and Haunts of the British
Poets_" have also been sadly changed. "Steam," he says, "as little as
time, has respected the sanctity of the poet's home, but has drawn its
roaring iron steeds opposite to its gate and has menaced to rush through
it and lay waste its charmed solitude. In plain words, I saw the stages
of a projected railway running in an ominous line across the very lawn
and before the windows of Elleray." I believe the whole place has been
purchased by a Railway Company.

[038] In Churton's _Rail Book of England_, published about three years
ago, Pope's Villa is thus noticed--"No