noble kingdom," (to quote his own words,) we might have
perused descriptive pages equal to his own critical and refined review
of Blenheim, or of Powis Castle, and of a character as high and pure, as
those of Thomas Whateley. In proof of this, we need only refer to many
pages in his Essays,--not only when he so well paints the charms of
sequestered nature, whether in its deep recesses, _o'er canopied with
luscious eglantine_,--in the "modest and retired character of a
brook,"--the rural simplicity of a cottage, with its lilacs and fruit
trees, its rustic porch, covered with vine or ivy, but when he dwells on
the ruins and on "the religious calm" of our abbeys,[103] or on our old
mansion-houses, with their terraces, their summer-houses covered with
ivy, and mixed with wild vegetation. And we need farther only to refer
to those feeling pages in his second volume, where he laments that his
own youth and inexperience should (in order to follow the silly folly of
_being in the fashion_,) have doomed to sudden and total destruction an
old paternal garden, with all its embellishments, and whose destruction
revives in these pages all the emotions of his youth; and he concludes
these pages of regret, by candidly confessing, that he gained little but
"much difficulty, expence and dirt," and that he thus detains his
readers in relating what so personally concerns himself, "because there
is nothing so useful to others, however humiliating to ourselves, as
the frank confession of our errors and of their causes. No man can
equally with the person who committed them, impress upon others the
extent of the mischief done, and the regret that follows it." It is
painful to quit pages so interesting as those that immediately follow
this quotation.[104]

There are few objects that the enlightened mind of Sir Uvedale has not
remarked. Take the following as an instance:

"Nothing is so captivating, or seems so much to accord with our ideas of
beauty, as the smiles of a beautiful countenance; yet they have
sometimes a striking mixture of the other character. Of this kind are
those smiles which break out suddenly from a serious, sometimes from
almost a severe countenance, and which, when that gleam is over, leave
no trace of it behind--

_Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth,
And e'er a man has time to say, behold!
The jaws of darkness do devour it up._

There is another smi