THE BONFIRES.

IF the dead of old time that lie buried within silent camps, by Druid circles, or on the topmost ridge of many a lonely, wind-a wept hill in England and in Wales could on Tuesday night have crept from out the barrows where they sleep, the sight that would have met their eyes had not seemed strange. The chief- tain of a forgotten race, the victor or the vanquished in a battle of which no record now remains, whose barrow lies in the very entrance of the great camp at Doleberry, had he stolen from his grave and looked out upon the summer night, would have beheld no unfamiliar spectacle. The summits of Mendip would have been flaring behind him. In front and on either hand, the promontories that run into the Severn Sea would have been crowned with fire; bat such a sight would have been without wonder for one who every year at the same season had seen the bonfires lighted, and hills and hillsides ablaze. Again, if at Stonehenge the tenants of the three hundred mounds which lie scattered through the plain that holds the great, grey stones of the Druids were once again to have stood upon the green turf of the Downs, they would have had no thought that their race and their worship had passed away for ever. To every hill in England the nameless and forgotten races who reared the Stone Temples at Avebary and Stonehenge, who piled the mighty earthworks of Silbury and of Sinodun Hill, who heaped over the ashes of their dead the long or the narrow grave- mounds of our uplands, were wont on the 21st day of Jane, the epoch of the Summer Solstice, to gather, in order to burn there those mysterious fires which even the Christian Church dared not extinguish, but which she hallowed by transferring their celebration to one of her own most sacred festivals. But, that the Baal fires might be lighted on the vigil of St. John, the day was changed; and had the Druids who planned Stonehenge with so perfect a knowledge of the sun's path in the heavens that every year, on the day of the June Solstice, the beams of the sun, as it rises over the horizon, are thrown exactly in line with the altar-stone and the solitary pillar called the Friar's Head, awakened in the middle age, they might have thought their learning had been half-forgotten, and the sacred worship had grown debased in use. On Tuesday, however—so strange is the irony of circumstance—the rejoicings of a Christian people for their Sovereign's reign fell exactly on the most awful and the most solemn festival of the heathen year. Stranger still, the means by which we celebrated our joy were the very means used by our nameless precursors on this island's soil. We dare not call them ancestors, for who can tell if their blood mixes with ours, or if they had withered and vanished long before Celt and Teuton swarmed into Britain ?

It is such a thought as this—a thought almost dreadful from the dimness and horror that enshrouds the first celebrants of the hill festivals of fire who now lie within their barrows—that gives to the celebration of the Queen's Jubilee by beacon- fires an imaginative thrill and impulse strange and inexpressible. But thie is not the only or most general pleasure of mental and sensuous association that is derived from the bonfires. A purely literary association exercises here a paramount influence. Who is there who has not had his pulses set throbbing and tingling by Macaulay's -" Ballad of the Armada" ? Who, as he has read of the bonfires, has not felt the verses within him stimu- lating the imagination, and informing with life the barest record of the fires that engirdled England on Tuesday night Wherever the English tongue is spoken, Macaulay's ballad has made a mere list of hills the most exciting of the Jubilee records. The poet or historian who uses his imagination to describe a past event which will never be seen again, has the advantage that his description cannot be brought to the test. Macaulay, when he described the signal-fires that told the approach of the Spaniards, might well have thought that his ballad would never be brought to the test. Yet that is what has happened, and well has the ballad passed the ordeaL If Con- stantinople could be rebuilt, and the description in the "Decline and Fall" be verified, or if the battles of Frederick the Great could be fought again, would Gibbon and Carlyle escape as well? With Macaulay, every particular point emphasised by him has been shown to be true, every incident dwelt on as picturesque has shown itself especially striking. Splendid are the lines that tell how,— " Far on the deep, the Spaniard saw, along each Southern shire, Cape beyond cape, in endless range, those twinkling points of fire."

How striking, merely as a poetic fancy, is the picture of the would.be invaders out at sea beholding the land they had come to conquer flashing its defiance of preparation ! But how far snore vivid and magnificent becomes the passage when we know absolutely as we know now, that this was exactly what the Spaniard must have seen, and did see. The very sight was seen from the Channel on Tuesday night. The bald statement of the fact, as reported in the Globe from Plymouth, is better than any quantity of illustrative comment:—" The • Thalia' arrived here early this morning from Malta and Gibraltar, bringing the crews of the ' Carysfort ' and Albacore,' some invalids, &c. Coming up Channel last night, the beacon.fires on various points of the Cornish coast were observed. It was a magnificent sight." Macaulay's picture, indeed, is in every detail perfect. Though there has not yet been time to put forth any connected record of the way in which the signal-fires were taken up, we know how,—

" Southward from Surrey's pleasant hills, flew those bright couriers forth,

High on bleak Hampstead's swarthy moor they started for the North; And on, and on, without a pause, =tired they bounded still : All night from tower to tower they sprang ; they sprang from hill to hill."

Our readers will remember how peculiarly effective in its place in the ballad is the rhetorical effect of the line :—

" Till like volcanoes flared to Heaven the stormy hills of Wales."

The accounts, though as yet meagre, show that the appearance of the loftier mountains was just such as the lines describe. Six immense beacons were lighted on the highest peaks of the Berwyn range in Wales. Snowdon had its bonfire, and all the highest and most conspicuous hill-tope were taken advantage • of. Macaulay has emphasised particularly how the beacons spread,—

" Till twelve fair counties saw the blaze on Malvern's lonely height, Till streamed in crimson on the wind the Wrekin's crest of light."

Perhaps stimulated by these lines, or else recognising its position in the centre of England, Malvern seems to have been first to take up the notion of the Jabilee beacons. The way in which the Malvern Hills stand out from the plain, and the narrowness of their summits, make them peculiarly suitable for being the centre from which to spread general illumination. It is evident from the accounts that the "twelve fair counties" responded to the signal-rocket sent up from the Worcestershire Beacon ; but as to whether

" . . . Belvoir's lordly terraces the sign to Lincoln sent e'

or whether

. . . Lincoln sped the message on o'er the wide vale of Trent,"

we have not seen any record ; nor, again, if

. . broad and fierce, the star came forth on Ely's stately fans,"

—though that was certainly arranged for. The last, the most often quoted, and perhaps the most striking line of the whole ballad, was, however, enacted and found true. Beyond all doubt

. . the red glare of Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle."

The reports say that the light of the bonfires on Skiddaw and on Saddleback, though so far distant, was distinctly seen from Carlisle.

It can never be too much regretted that Macaulay did not complete his poem. He had just reached the Lakes, and his description of how the fires shone out on Red Screes, the Langdale Pikes, Helvellyn, Scawfell, and Black Combo and High Street, would have taught us how to understand clearly the accounts from Cumberland and Westmoreland, which without it are a little difficult to disentangle. How vividly would Macaulay have realised for us the extraordinary romance of the beacon lighted on High Street, the hill along whose back goes the paved way of the Romans ? Cer- tainly the rhetorician who knew so well how to interweave the lore and the association of place and of history, would have had his opportunity there. Probably the scene at the Lakes was the most striking in England. The mountains of Cumberland and Westmoreland stand so near together that it is possible to see almost the whole of them at once. It seems that by 11 o'clock, from the Old Man no less than 106 fires could be seen blazing at once. "As the night grew darker, the glare of the fires was more intense," and from all sides "magnificent fire- works were everywhere being discharged." The spectacle, indeed, must have been one of extraordinary splendour, though, unfor- tunately, not one that is likely to be repeated for many years. It was once the good fortune of the present writer to see the Valley of Cortina, in the Dolomites, illuminated by a ring of bonfires on the hills immediately surrounding the valley. Magni- ficent as was the sight, it cannot have been anything to what was to be seen from the Old Man. At Cortina, the bonfires could only be built upon the lower hills, for the ridge of mountains that form the ultimate gate of the valley are limestone pyramids of ten and eleven thousand feet high, capped with eternal snow, and thus the fires did not flare against the sky-line, but were overpowered by the imminent masses of the hills that towered above them. At the Lakes, the beacons were on the highest summits of the whole range, and so stood out in the vault of the summer night, with nothing above them. Perhaps next in splendour of effect to the spectacle seen from the Old Man was either that seen from Malvern or from Newbury. The scene from the Beacon Hill at Newbury was of the most impressive character. The hill, an ancient British stronghold, com- mands so wide a view that no less than seventy fires were visible. To quote the words of the Times' correspondent,—" On every side the horizon was alive with the flames of the bonfires and the constant rise of signal rockets." It would be impossible to find space to tell of all the picturesque effects produced by the beacons; of how Exmoor and Dartmoor and the hills of Corn- wall played their part, and of how Ireland and Scotland joined in the celebration. It is to be hoped that when the accounts have all come in, some one who knows the Ordnance Map of England well enough to realise the hills and moan- tains of England as a whole, will collate the different descrip- tions, and give us a complete picture of what took place. A good permanent record of the beacons lighted, and of the places from which they were visible, would be extremely interesting and valuable. It it said that the officers of the Ordnance Survey were specially engaged in watching the result of the signalling by rockets—for it must be remembered that the sign was given from hill to hill by the rockets, not by beacons, which were lighted at fixed times—and in considering whether such means might not prove practically useful in case of the breakdown of other means of communication in time of war. It will be very interesting to hear how long it took to convey the message to light up from Malvern to Skiddaw. We trust that the calcula- tion has been made and will be published.