THE GATHERER.

Hood's Comic Annual for 1833.—Mr. Hood's announcement of his forthcoming volume is in the very vein of the work itself. He writes to his publisher:—"The report of my death, I can assure you is premature, but I am equally obliged to you for your tribute of putting up shutters and wearing a crape hatband. I suspect your friend and informant, Mr. Livingstone—(it should be Gravestone)—drew his inference from a dark passage in Miss Sheridan's Preface which states that, 'of the three Comic Annuals which started at the same time, the Comic Offering alone remains.' The two defuncts therein referred to are the 'Falstaff' and 'The Humorist,' which I understand have put an end to themselves.

"If you should still entertain any doubts, you will shortly have ten thousand impressions to the contrary; for I intend to contradict my demys by fresh octavos. The Comic Annual for 1833, with its usual complement of plates—mind, not coffin-plates—to appear as heretofore, in November, will give the lie, I trust, not merely to my departure, but even to anything like a serious illness: and a novel, about the same time, will help to prove that I am not in a state of de-composition.

"I should have relieved your joint anxieties some days earlier, but till I met Mr. Livingstone, at Bury, I was really not alive to my death."

I found poor Holloway this morning foaming with rage in the Cartoon Gallery. Some person has written against the Cartoons, denominating them "washed daubs." No doubt it is either the pen of envy and malignity, or of ignorance: n'importe, it has wounded the feelings of a superior artist and a good man, who worships with religious enthusiasm those works of Raphael, and who has spent so many years in perfecting his engravings of them. It was a grotesque scene to behold Madame Bouiller pacing after Holloway up and down the gallery, with all the grimaces and vivacity of a Frenchwoman, and re-echoing his furious lamentations.

Edinburgh (by Mr. Cobbett).—I thought that Bristol, taking in its heights and Clifton, and its rocks and its river, was the finest city in the world; but Edinburgh, with its castle, its hills, its pretty little sea-port, conveniently detached from it, its vale of rich land lying all around, its lofty hills in the back ground, its views across the Frith;—I think little of its streets and rows of fine houses, though all built of stone, and though everything in London and Bath is beggary to these; I think nothing of Holyrood House; but I think a great deal of the fine and well-ordered streets of shops—of the regularity which you perceive everywhere in the management of business; and I think still more of the absence of all that foppishness, and that affectation of carelessness, and that insolent assumption of superiority, that you see in almost all the young men that you meet with in the fashionable parts of the great towns in England. I was not disappointed; for I expected to find Edinburgh the finest city in the kingdom. Conversations at Newcastle, and with many Scotch gentlemen for years past, had prepared me for this; but still the reality has greatly surpassed every idea that I had formed about it. The people, however, still exceed the place: here all is civility; you do not meet with rudeness, or even with the want of a disposition to oblige, even in persons in the lowest state of life. A friend took me round the environs of the city; he had a turnpike ticket, received at the first gate, which cleared five or six gates. It was sufficient for him to tell the future gatekeepers that he had it. When I saw that, I said to myself, "Nota bene: Gate-keepers take people's word in Scotland—a thing that I have not seen before since I left Long Island."

King John—died at Swinshead Abbey, in Lincolnshire; his body was interred at Worcester; his bowels in Croxton Abbey Church, in Leicestershire, the abbot being his physician; and his heart at Croxden, in Staffordshire. Perhaps the most precious portion of his relics would be the hand that signed Magna Charta. (See page 279.)

The River Dove.—The fertility of the land on the upper parts of this river has always been proverbial: "as rich as Dove" being applied to any spot highly forced. The land has a perpetual verdure, and the spring-floods of the river are very gratifying to the land-occupiers, who have this proverb—

It is also said of Dove's banks in spring, that a stick laid down there over-night shall not be found next morning for grass.

St. Hellen's Well, near Rushton Spencer, in Staffordshire, is remarkable in superstitious history, for some singular qualities. It sometimes becomes suddenly dry, after a constant discharge of water for eight or ten years. This happens as well in wet as in dry seasons, and always at the beginning of May, when the springs are commonly esteemed highest; and so it usually continues till Martinmas, November 12, following. The people formerly imagined, that when this happened there would soon follow some stupendous calamity of famine, war, or some other national disaster, or change. It is said that it grew dry before the civil war, and again before the beheading of Charles I.; against the great scarcity of corn in 1670; and in 1679, when the miscalled Popish plot was discovered; but we do not hear that St. Hellen's Well withheld its supplies previous to, or upon, the breaking out of the last calamitous war.

Prodigious Elm.—At Field, adjoining Rushton Spencer, grew a prodigious witch elm, which was felled in 1680. Two able workmen were five days in stocking or felling it. It was 120 feet in length; at the butt-end it was seven yards in circumference; its girth was 25-1/2 feet in the middle. Fourteen loads of firewood, as much as six oxen could draw, broke off in the fall; there were 47 loads more fire-wood cut from the top; they were compelled to fasten two saws together, and put three men to each end, to cut the body of it asunder. Out of this tree were cut 80 pairs of naves for carriage-wheels, and 8,000 feet of sawn timber in boards and planks, at six score per cent.—which, for the sawing only, as the price of labour then was, came to the sum of 12l.

Newcastle-under-Line.—The right of election in this borough has been several times the subject of parliamentary investigation. At the last inquiry, the greater part of the borough appeared to be the property of the Marquess of Stafford; and it was found customary for the burgesses to live ten, fifteen, and even twenty years in the houses, without payment of rent!

Monument to a Faithful Servant.—In the church of King's Swinford, Staffordshire, is a plain stone, erected by Joseph Scott, Esq., and his wife, in memory of Elizabeth Harrison, who had been thirty years in their service, and had conducted herself with such integrity, and anxiety for her master's interest, as drew from him the following epitaph:

She departed this life June 19, 1797. Aged 50 years.

*** Mr. Warwick, on the Ostrich, in our next.

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