himself. There we
are in the middle of vexed questions, with the beautiful pile of Melrose
threatening every moment to fall about our ears!

Our business now, however, is to get over the bridge, which after the
excitement of one dispute with a pugnacious carrier, and another with a
saucy groom, whose caracoling horse had well nigh leaped over the
parapets on either side; after some backing of other carriages, and some
danger of being forced back to our own, we at last achieve, and enter
unscathed, the pleasant village of Caversham.

To the left, through a highly ornamented lodge, lies the road to the
ancient seat of the Blounts, another house made famous by Pope, where
the fair ladies of his love, the sisters Martha and Teresa, lived and
died. A fine old place it is; and a picturesque road leads to it,
winding through a tract called the Warren, between the high
chalk-cliffs, clothed with trees of all varieties, that for so many
miles fence in the northern side of the Thames, and the lordly river
itself, now concealed by tall elms, now open and shining in the full
light of the summer sun. There is not such a flower bank in Oxfordshire
as Caversham Warren.

Our way, however, leads straight on. A few miles further, and a turn to
the right conducts us to one of the grand old village churches, which
give so much of character to English landscape. A large and beautiful
pile it is. The tower half clothed with ivy, standing with its charming
vicarage and its pretty vicarage-garden on a high eminence, overhanging
one of the finest bends of the great river. A woody lane leads from the
church to the bottom of the chalk-cliff, one side of which stands out
from the road below, like a promontory, surmounted by the laurel hedges
and flowery arbors of the vicarage-garden, and crested by a noble cedar
of Lebanon. This is Shiplake church, famed far and near for its
magnificent oak carving, and the rich painted glass of its windows,
collected, long before such adornments were fashionable, by the fine
taste of the late vicar, and therefore filled with the very choicest
specimens of mediaeval art, chiefly obtained from the remains of the
celebrated Abbey of St. Bertin, near St. Omers, sacked during the first
French Revolution. In this church Alfred Tennyson was married. Blessings
be upon him! I never saw the great Poet in my life, but thousands who
never may have seen him either, but who owe to his poetry the purest and
richest intellect