and whose
hospitable table at Brompton was the resort of the best literary society
of the day. Here my father was a frequent guest, and walking home one
night together from this house, where they had both dined, he made the
acquaintance of a young poet, which soon ripened into intimacy, and
which throughout sixty years, notwithstanding many changes of life,
never died away. This youthful poet had already gained laurels, though
he was only three or four years older than my father, but I am not at
this moment quite aware whether his brow was yet encircled with the
amaranthine wreath of the "Pleasures of Memory."

Some years after this, great vicissitudes unhappily occurred in the
family of Mr. Pye. He was obliged to retire from Parliament, and to sell
his family estate of Faringdon. His Majesty had already, on the death of
Thomas Warton, nominated him Poet Laureat, and after his retirement from
Parliament, the government which he had supported, appointed him a
Commissioner of Police. It was in these days that his friend, Mr. Penn,
of Stoke Park, in Buckinghamshire, presented him with a cottage worthy
of a poet on his beautiful estate; and it was thus my father became
acquainted with the amiable descendant of the most successful of
colonisers, and with that classic domain which the genius of Gray, as it
were, now haunts, and has for ever hallowed, and from which he beheld
with fond and musing eye, those

Distant spires and antique towers,

that no one can now look upon without remembering him. It was amid these
rambles in Stoke Park, amid the scenes of Gray's genius, the elegiac
churchyard, and the picturesque fragments of the Long Story, talking
over the deeds of "Great Rebellion" with the descendants of Cavaliers
and Parliament-men, that my father first imbibed that feeling for the
county of Buckingham, which induced him occasionally to be a dweller in
its limits, and ultimately, more than a quarter of a century afterwards,
to establish his household gods in its heart. And here, perhaps, I may
be permitted to mention a circumstance, which is indeed trifling, and
yet, as a coincidence, not, I think, without interest. Mr. Pye was the
great-grandson of Sir Robert Pye, of Bradenham, who married Anne, the
eldest daughter of Mr. Hampden. How little could my father dream, sixty
years ago, that he would pass the last quarter of his life in the
mansion-house of Bradenham; that his name would become intimately
connected wi