WARMINSTER  , a

market town in the Westbury parliamentary division of Wiltshire, England, rook' m . W. by S. of Lon-don by the Great Western railway . Pop. of urban district (190') 5547 . Its white stone houses form a long curve between the uplands of Salisbury Plain,which sweep away towards the north and east, and the tract of park and meadow land lying south and west . The cruciform church of St Denys has a 14th-century south porch and tower . St Lawrence's chapel, a chantry built under Edward I., was bought by the townsfolk at the Reformation . Warminster has also a free school established in 1707, a missionary college, a training home for lady missionaries and a reformatory for boys . Besides a silk mill, malthouses and engineering and agricultural implement works, there is a brisk trade in farm produce . Warminster appears in Domesday, and was a royal manor whose tenant was bound to provide, when required, a night's lodging for the king and his retinue . This privilege was enforced by George III. when he visited Longleat . The meeting of roads from Bath, Frome, Shaftesbury and Salisbury made Warminster a busy coaching centre . Eastward, within 2 m., there are two, great British camps: Battlesbury, almost impregnable save essayist and novelist, was born of Puritan ancestry, in Plainfield, Massachusetts, on the 12th of September 1829 .

From his

sixth to his fourteenth year he lived in Charlemont, Mass., the scene of the experiences pictured in his delightful study of childhood, Being a Boy (1877) . He removed thence to Cazenovia, New York, and in 1851 graduated from Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y . He worked with a surveying party in Missouri; studied law at the university of Pennsylvania; practised in Chicago (1856–186o); was assistant editor (186o) and editor (1861–1867) of The Hartford Press, and after The Press was merged into The Hartford Courant, was co-editor with Joseph R . Hawley; in '884 he joined the editorial staff of Harper's Magazine, for which he conducted "The Editor's Drawer" until 1892, when he took charge of " The Editor's Study." He died in Hartford on the loth of October 1900 . He travelled widely, lectured frequently, and was actively interested in prison reform, city park supervision and other movements for the public good . He was the first president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and, at the time of his death, was president of the American Social Science Association . He first attracted attention by the reflective sketches entitled My Summer in a Garden (187o; first published in The Hartford Courant), popular for their abounding and refined humour and mellow personal charm, their wholesome love of out-door things, their suggestive comment on life and affairs, and their delicately finished style, qualities that suggest the work of Washington Irving . Among his other works are Saunterings (descriptions of travel in eastern Europe, 1872) and Back-Log Studies (1872); Baddeck, and That Sort of Thing (1874), travels in Nova Scotia and elsewhere; My Winter on the Nile (1876); In the Levant (1876); In the Wilderness (1878); A Roundabout Journey, in Europe (1883); On Horseback, in the Southern States (1888); Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada (1889); Our Italy, southern California (1891); The Relation of Literature to Life (1896); The People for Whom Shakespeare Wrote (1897); and Fashions in Literature (1902) . He also edited " The American Men of Letters " series, to which he contributed an excellent biography of Washington Irving (1881), and edited a large " Library of the World's Best Literature." His other works include his graceful essays, As We Were Saying (1891) and As We Go (1893); and his novels, The Gilded Age (in collaboration with Mark Twain, 1873); Their Pilgrimage (1886); A Little Journey in the World (1889); The Golden House (1894); and That Fortune (1889) . See the biographical sketch by T . R . Lounsbury in the Complete Writings (15 vols., Hartford, 1904) of Warner .