NOTES—ORIGINAL AND SELECTED 179
The following is a table of statistics for the last 15 years, the record
readings being distinguished by an asterisk :—
MISCELLANEA.
Queen Elizabeth's Lodge and Epping Forest.—By a strange
coincidence I had occasion to-day to refer to a volume of Household Words for
1851. Under date May 10th —just half-a-century ago to the day—wherein is
an article on "Epping Forest" which from its internal evidence is from the
pen of Charles Dickens. No railway then passed through the district, Hain-
hault Forest was yet undisturbed and unstubbed, though but two years later
it was speedily and ruthlessly destroyed ; and the nearest station was at Ilford,
some three miles distant. Some years ago I had marked this in my copy for
a notice in the Essex Naturalist, but had quite forgotten it, but I think the
extract concerning Queen Elizabeth's Lodge is worthy of reiteration in our
journal. It is, however, not a portion of the article itself, but a quotation
from William Howitt's Year Book of the Country :—
"We take one long view from a hill top of the far spread country, and
mount our own vehicles, and away. Away ! but whither ! To the Old Lodge
of Queen Bess. Old Lodge! the hand of the past is impressed upon thee!
and has given thee a character. It has invested thee with the poetry of
nature. Storms roaring through the huge elms that stand near—old com-
panions ; fierce winters beating on thy steep, gabled roof, and tinting thy
framed walls; autumns and springs and hot-baking summer—along series —
come across the imagination, as we think of thee. The broad easy oaken
staircase up which the heroine of the Armada, and the Queen of Scots
tragedy, is said to have ridden to her dining room, the tapestried chamber,
and the banqueting hall please me; but, far more, the ancient desolateness
without and around!.......We walk for miles in green glades,
and beneath the close covert of the green boughs of the hornbeam trees. . .