the churchyard; on the withered sycamore beneath whose shade he must have played; and finally, through the courtesy of the rector, the Hon. and Rev. Charles Dundas, on the parsonage, now scarcely recognisable for the same. from the improvement it has received at the hand of wealth guided by the eye of taste, though old Jeffrey's room still retains much of its ghostliness. The day that revealed to us all these and sundry memorabilities is one to be noted with chalk in our calendar.

The lower ground of the isle of Axholme, in the midst. of which Epworth stands, had from time immemorial been subject to almost constant submersion from the river, and was little better than a Mere, the title Leland gives it in his Itinerary. Its value, however, was so obvious to the eyes of both natives and foreigners, that a charter to drain this whole country side was given to Cornelius Vermuyden in the time of the Stuarts, and the thing was done, to the rescue of a considerable part of the king's chase from the dominion of the lawless waters, and to the increase of the arable and pasture land of the neighbourhood, to the extent of many thousand acres of "a fine rich brown loam, than which there is none more fertile in England." To this parish the father of our hero was presented in the year 1693, as a reward for his merits in defending from the press the Revolution of 1688. The living was of inconsiderable amount, under £200 per annum, but by no means contemptible to a waiter upon Providence, whose clerical income had never before averaged £50 per year, and was the more agreeable as it promised to lead to something better, since the ground of his present advancement was the recognition in high places of the opportune loyalty of the literary parson. Here, with a regularly