gingerbread in his pockets for them as children, and who was known by them as the “man mushroom,” seeing he was the first who ever had an umbrella in the place!  There was, however, another and a better reason for this name, inasmuch as he built for himself an outer painting-room on a hilltop near which he called Mushroom Hall, because it was just like one (as a picture in our drawing-room testifies), being a circular turret surmounted by a flat broad dome, with overshadowing eaves all round.  This strange summer-house has long vanished.

Anthony came of a good old stock paternally, as the civic archives of Preston, in Lancashire, testify; and his mother was Ann Blackburne, of Marrick Abbey, Yorkshire,—­the title-deeds whereof, old slip parchments and maps from Henry II. to Henry VIII., I found in a chest at Albury, and years after transmitted them to Lord Beaumont, the present owner; albeit, as a boy, I had been allowed to cut off the seals and paste them in a copy-book!  All these deeds, and the history thereof, I had printed in Nichols’s Antiquariana.

* * * * *

The prominent feature of our village, so far as religion is concerned, has for nearly fifty years been the fact of its being the headquarters of the party originated by Edward Irving,—­a full history whereof, impartially and ably written by Mr. Miller of Bicester (whose hospitality I have enjoyed for some days at Kineton), will be found at Kegan Paul’s, if any wish to read it.  I have always lived on kindly terms with my neighbours, though not quite of their faith; excellent are many of them, and I am glad to number such among my friends, specially as on neither side we meddle with each other’s peculiar opinions.  I have known nearly all their twelve apostles, men of mark and learning (especially John Tudor, a great Hebraist, and who was skilled even in Sanscrit and the arrow-headed characters), and eleven of them are among the dead, one only surviving in a vigorous old age to meet (may it be so) the Lord at His coming.

CHAPTER XXXI.

AMERICAN BALLADS.

My American Ballads, perhaps after “Proverbial Philosophy,” the chief cause of my Transatlantic popularities, had their origin at Albury.  The first of these and the most famous, as it induced several friendly replies from American poets, was one whereof this below is the first stanza.  I wrote it in 1850, and read it after dinner to four visitors from over the Atlantic to their great delectation, and of course they sent MS. copies all over the States.  It begins—­

    To Brother Jonathan.

    “Ho! brother, I’m a Britisher,
      A chip of heart of oak,
    That wouldn’t warp or swerve or stir
      From what I thought or spoke;
    And you—­a blunt and honest man,
      Straightforward, kind, and true,
    I tell you, brother Jonathan,
      That you’re a Briton too!”