[1] Kennet’s Parochial Antiquities.

[2] Leland says “the hill on which the Keep stands, is large and of a terrible height, and the arx (i.e.) Keep, of it, having three several wards, is the strongest, but not the biggest, that I ever saw in any ancient work in England.”

    [3] Beauties of England and Wales, vol. ii.

The reader may more than once have noticed our predilection for illustrating the castellated antiquities of Britain in our pages.  We have a threefold object in this choice:  first, the architectural investigation of these structures is of untiring interest; the events of their histories are so many links in the annals of our country; while they enable us to take comprehensive glances of the domestic manners of times past, and by contrasting them with the present, to appreciate the peaceful state of society in which we live.

Happily, such means of defence as castles supplied to our ancestors, are no longer requisite.  The towers, ramparts, and battlements that once awed the enemy, or struck terror into an oppressed people, are now mere objects of curiosity, The unlettered peasant gazes upon their ruins with idle wonder; the antiquary explores their flittering masses with admiration and delight.  The breaches of the last siege are unrepaired; the courtyard is choked up and overgrown with luxuriant weeds; the walls become dank and discoloured with rank vegetation; the winds and rains of heaven displace and disintegrate their massive stones; the tempest tears them as in a terrific siege; or the slow and silent devastations of nature go on beneath ivy and mossy crusts obscuring the proud work of man’s hand, and defacing its glories in desert waste.  Such effects the reader may witness in a few of the illustrations of the present volume:  the long tale of conquest upon conquest is told from the Norman sway to the Revolution, in the history of Pontefract Castle (page 50); the picturesqueness of decay in the towers of Wilton (page 306); and the stratagems of war in the mounds and lines of Dunheved.

* * * * *

THE LATE MR. COLTON.

(From a Correspondent.)

The recent death of this eccentric man of letters may perhaps render the following recollections generally interesting.

I remember once spending an afternoon with him at Mr. Tucker’s, quill merchant, Middleton-street, Clerkenwell; when I was delighted with the spontaneous flow of his Latin, his quotations from the ancient and modern poets, and indeed his masterly and eloquent developement of every subject that his acute intellect chose to dilate upon; I was, however, sorry to perceive there was occasionally a want of “holding in” in his conversation upon points which a due self-respect for those acquirements which he possessed, equal to any individual living, should have taught him to have