trusted, in the best sense, to "illustrate" his subject. Whatever one's
predilections for previous presentments, it is impossible to resist Sir
Roger (young, slim, and handsome), carving the perverse widow's name
upon a tree-trunk; or Sir Roger at bowls, or riding to hounds, or
listening--with grave courtesy--to Will Wimble's long-winded and
circumstantial account of the taking of the historic jack. Nor is the
conception less happy of that amorous fine-gentleman ancestor of the
Coverleys who first made love by squeezing the hand; or of that other
Knight of the Shire who so narrowly escaped being killed in the Civil
Wars because he was sent out of the field upon a private message, the
day before Cromwell's "crowning mercy,"--the battle of Worcester. But
the varied embodiments of these, and of Mrs. Betty Arable ("the great
fortune"), of Ephraim the Quaker, and the rest, are not all. The figures
are set in their fitting environment; they ride their own horses, hallo
to their own dogs, and eat and drink in their own dark-panelled rooms
that look out on the pleached alleys of their ancient gardens. They live
and move in their own passed-away atmosphere of association; and a
faithful effort has moreover been made to realise each separate scene
with strict relation to its text.

All of the "Coverley" series came out in the _English Illustrated_. So
also did the designs for the next book, the _Coaching Days and Coaching
Ways_ of Mr. Outram Tristram, 1888. Here Mr. Thomson had a topographical
collaborator, Mr. Herbert Railton, who did the major part of the very
effective drawings in this kind. But Mr. Thomson's contributions may
fairly be said to have exhausted the "romance" of the road. Inns and
inn-yards, hosts and ostlers and chambermaids, stage-coachmen,
toll-keepers, mail-coaches struggling in snow-drifts, mail-coaches held
up by highwaymen, overturns, elopements, cast shoes, snapped poles, lost
linch-pins,--all the episodes and moving accidents of bygone travel on