quaint angles, as a staring, white-washed, Gothic villa with the paint not yet dry.  Oh! there is certainly no denying that thou art the primest of Quakers, Mr. Chapel, one that will not countenance a belle, but lookest right onward in smooth and demure solidity, with that strip of white path in front of thy brown gravel waistcoat, and the ample skirts of thy road-coloured surtout; not so your neighbour Sturdy, him with his chimney like an ink bottle, upright in his button hole, and his pen-like poplar in his hand; he is equally uncompromising, but looks with an eye of stern regard upon that gay sprig of myrtle with his roof of a hat, jauntily clapped on one side, and a towering charming feather, streaming like smoke in the breeze.  But whither have my vagaries led me—­here I am once more in the dullest of dull country towns, over which strides the gouty old dean, like a Gothic arch across a cathedral city; and see how the wealthy innkeeper dangles his broad medal (sign of his having been in the yeomanry) that swings to the wind like the banner of his troop—­how contemptuously he eyes that solid looking overseer, the workhouse, with his right and lefthand men the executioners of the law—­Stocks and Cage—­oh! turn away—­there is that villanous cross barred gripe the Jail—­enough, enough, indeed.

LAVATERIELLO.

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MANNERS & CUSTOMS OF ALL NATIONS.

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CURIOUS CEREMONY OF DRIVING DEER THROUGH THE WATER (FORMERLY PRACTISED) IN LYME PARK, CHESHIRE.

(For The Mirror.)

Ormerod, in his splendid History of Cheshire, says, “The park of Lyme, which is very extensive, is celebrated for the fine flavour of its venison, and contains a herd of wild cattle, the remains of a breed which has been kept here from time immemorial, and is supposed indigenous.  In the last century a custom was observed here of driving the deer round the park about Midsummer, or rather earlier, collecting them in a body before the house, and then swimming them through a pool of water, with which the exhibition terminated.”  There is a large print of it by Vivares, after a painting by T. Smith, representing Lyme Park during the performance of the annual ceremony, with the great Vale of Cheshire and Lancashire, as far as the Rivington Hills in the distance, and in the foreground the great body of the deer passing through the pool, the last just entering it, and the old stags emerging on the opposite bank, two of which are contending with their fore-feet, the horns at that season being too tender to combat with.  This “art of driving the deer” like a herd of ordinary cattle, is stated on a monument, at Disley, to have been first perfected by Joseph Watson, who died in 1753, at the age of 104, “having been park-keeper at Lyme more than sixty-four years.”  The custom, however, appears not to have been peculiar to Lyme, as Dr. Whitaker describes, in his Account of Townley, (the seat of a collateral line of Legh,) “near the summit of the park, and where it declines to the south, the remains of a large pool, through which tradition reports that the deer were driven by their keepers in the manner still practised in the park at Lyme."[8]