to their valets; my worthy help is a hero to me:”  so saith my journal.  Here’s another extract, after two slight earthquakes at Brieg, and Turtman (Turris Magna);—­“Again a bad accident.  One of our spirited wheelers got his hind leg over the pole in going down a hill:  at once there was a chaos of fallen horses and entangled harness, and but for the screw machine drag locking both hind-wheels we must have been upset and smashed,—­as it was, the scrambling and kicking at first was frightful; but Paterfamilias dragged the younger children out into the road, and other help was nigh at hand, and the providential calm that comes over fallen horses after their initiatory struggle was at hand too, and in due time matters were righted:  that those two fiery stallions did not kick everything to pieces, and that all four steeds did not gallop us to destruction, was due, under Providence, to the skill and courage of our good Pierre and the patient Muscatelli.”—­Railways have since superseded all this peril, and cost, and care:  and trains now go through the Simplon, instead of “good horses, six to the heavy carriage, four to the light one,” pulling us steadily and slowly over it:  thus losing the splendid scenery climaxed by the Devil’s Bridge:  but let moderns be thankful.  “Paterfamilias’s Diary” has long been out of print, and its author is glad that he made at the time a full record of the happy past, and recommends its perusal to any one who can find a copy anywhere.  My friend, the late Major Hely, who claimed an Irish peerage, was very fond of this “Diary,” and thought it “the best book of travels he had ever read.”

Guernsey.

Guernsey is another of the spots where your author has lived and written, though neither long nor much.  He comes, as is well known, of an ancient Sarnian family, as mentioned before.  As to any writings of mine about insular matters while sojourning there occasionally, they are confined to some druidical verses about certain cromlechs, a few other poems, as one given below—­“A Night-Sail in the Race of Alderney,”—­and in chief that in which I “Raised the Haro,” which saved the most picturesque part of Castle Cornet from destruction by some artillery engineer.  Here is the poem, supposing some may wish to see it:  especially as it does not appear in my only extant volume of poems, Gall & Inglis.  It occurs (I think solely) in Hall & Virtue’s extinct edition of my Ballads and Poems, 1853, and is there headed “’The Clameur de Haro,’ an old Norman appeal to the Sovereign, 1850":—­

    “Haro, Haro! a l’aide, mon Prince! 
      A loyal people calls;
    Bring out Duke Rollo’s Norman lance
    To stay destruction’s fell advance
      Against the Castle walls: 
    Haro, Haro! a l’aide, ma Reine! 
    Thy duteous children not in vain
    Plead for old Cornet yet again,
      To spare it, ere it falls!