sixteenth centuries, that its vast sylvan riches were beginning to show symptoms of exhaustion. In North Germany numerous edicts were issued before A.D. 1600 for the preservation of the woods. It is recorded of a certain Duke Augustus of Saxony, that on his walks, he always carried a hollow brass rod filled with acorns, to drop one by one into the ground. There are three things, Melanchthon used to say, which will fail before the end of the world comes: good friends, good money, and fire-wood. The Thirty Years' War effectually adjourned the last of these complaints to another age. The forest covered again whole tracts which had been under cultivation. What with the diminution of people, and what with the increase of wood, no need of the old kind seems to have been again felt until the middle of the eighteenth century; and it is said that the forests had then become so overgrown, that the tempestuous seasons which prevailed in 1780-1790 destroyed many square miles of them. Germany went back in cultivation, and in public spirit and independence, even more than in mere numbers; it required a Frederick the Great to raise her again after a hundred years, and that but partially; and even the Germany of the nineteenth century, in which political lags so far behind every other class of thought, bears the impress of that long reign of darkness and terror which broke down the medieval spirit of self-govern

ment.

A VISIT TO MARSTON MOOR,

MAY 1861.

THE two bloodiest battles ever fought on English ground, and between Englishmen, took place in the plain southwest of York, and within a few miles of each other. The first on that snowy Palm Sunday of 1461, at Towton, when Edward, at the head of his southern army, discomfited the Lancastrians of the north with such a slaughter, that Southey was almost justified in his laureate-like vaunt

Half the blood which there was spent
Had sufficed to win again

Anjou and ill-yielded Maine,

Normandy and Aquitaine.

The second in the long Midsummer twilight of July 2, 1644, when Fairfax and Rupert, tired of manoeuvrings for which neither had genius nor appetite, met on Marston Moor to have it out, like two schoolboys in the " 'fightingground,' and left some four thousand British dead as the evidence of their brilliant but unnecessary valour. The name of Marston Moor appeals, perhaps, more to the imagination than that of any other field of our great civil war: partly from a certain amount of poetry and romance which has been expended on it; partly because it was (though indirectly rather than directly) the most important action, and turning-point of the contest; while at the same time its features are very confusedly represented in ordinary narratives. This is owing in great measure to the brief and fierce character of the struggle, which, with its

many changes of fortune, was fought out between seven o'clock and night: somewhat also to the want of historians. All the penmen were absent: Clarendon with the king; Whitelock in London; Ludlow in the south; all too distant to get accounts of the engagement, except from hearsay some time after. We have the stories of some eye-witnesses, such as the Reverend Mr. Ashe, chaplain with Lord Manchester's force; the Scottish Captain Stuart, who gives the Presbyterian version; Leonard Watson, scoutmaster to Oliver Cromwell, who tells his tale in a way satisfactory to the Independents; and the unfortunate Royalist, Sir Henry Slingsby, who afterwards died for his cause on the scaffold. Sir Henry lived close by, at Red House, in Moor Monkton, and his notices of the ground, with which he was so familiar, are valuable. There is also Fairfax's own modest and spirited account; and a few rather indistinct passages cited by Eliot Warburton, in his Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers,' from the so-called 'Diary of Prince Rupert.' But each witness saw only that portion of the battle-piece in which he was himself engaged; no practised writer of the day took the trouble to condense and analyse the narratives. Modern accounts, says Carlyle, are worthless;' poor Eliot Warburton's only a spirited romance; Mr. Forster's vivid incidental sketches too slight for our present purpose. But an exception must now be made for Mr. Sanford ('Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion'), whose accuracy in describing the ground I have had occasion to test, and whose copious historical narrative can scarcely be more than abridged. Some portions of it, however, are not easy to understand, and some of his authorities seem questionable.

6

The readiest approach to the battle-field at this day is from Marston station, six miles from York, on the Knaresborough line. Hence a lane leads for about two miles

waste, partly marshy and partly sandy, but affording firm was unenclosed, and formed part of a large tract of level

passes over ground which in the time of the civil wars. SS.W. until it strikes the village of Long Marston. It

footing for cavalry at Midsummer; known in various parts of it by the names of Marston, Tockwith, Hessam, and Monkton Moors. Westward from this lane lies the scene of action.

The lane ends at the western extremity of Long Marston; a straggling place, as its name implies, built along a road running nearly east and west; that is, nearly at right angles to the said lane. It is a village more pleasing to the eye of a member of the Antiquarian Society, than of a sanitary reformer. Its detached, poor-looking red-brick cottages, with thatched roofs higher than the walls, its two or three granges, alehouses, and blacksmiths' shops, present an appearance very little different from that which they must have exhibited to Fairfax's troopers: nay, many of them have doubtless stood with little change since the battle. From the west end of Marston, the road (or, rather, broad country lane) continues in the same direction, a little north of west, for nearly a mile and a half, until it reaches Tockwith, another straggling hamlet. Going from Marston to Tockwith, the visitor has on his left (south) a slightly rising ground: this is the hill' of the contemporary narratives, on which the Parliament's army was drawn up. This rising ground is covered now, as it was then, with corn-fields; but now enclosed, then open arable.' In its higher part, a field, with a single conspicuous tree, called Clump Hill by the neighbours, served, according to tradition, as the head-quarters for the rebel leaders. On his right (north), the traveller has the square enclosures which occupy the level ground, formerly the Moor.* And the road in question (which we will call

The exact division between moor and field it is not easy to trace. It is important in the account of the battle, because the Royalist line was protected, in front by the enclosure, ditch, &c., which constituted this division. In Griffiths's large Map of Yorkshire (1771) Marston Moor proper is repre