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ence of climate and the weather, there is scarce a change that can come over opinion, or affect the people in even their purely physical concerns, which does not more or less fully index itself in the statute-book. The autumn of 1845, in which I travelled over England, was ungenial and lowering, and I saw wheaten fields deeply tinged with brown,- an effect of the soaking rains, - and large tracts of diseased potatoes. A season equally bad, however, twenty years ago would have failed to influence the politics of the country. Its frequent storms might have desolated the fruits of the earth, but they would have made no impression on the Statutes at Large. But the storms of 1845 proved greatly more influential. They were included in the cycle of rapid change, and annihilated at once the Protectionist policy and party of the empire. And amid the fermenting components of English society there may be detected elements of revolution in their first causes, destined, apparently, to exercise an influence on public affairs at least not less considerable than the rains and tempests of the Autumn of Forty-Five. The growing Tractarianism of the National Church threatens to work greater changes than the bad potatoes; and the semi-infidel liberalism of the country, fast passing into an aggressive power, than the damaged corn.

The reader will find in the following pages, as from these remarks be may be led to anticipate, scarce any personal anecdote or adventure they here and there record a brief dialogue by the way-side, or in some humble lodging-house, and here and there a solitary stroll through a wood, or a thoughtful lounge in a quarry; but

ther is considerably more of eye and ear in them, of things seen

and heard, — than of aught else. They index, however, not much of what he might be led equally to expect, those diagnostic symptom3 impressed on the face of society, that indicate the extensive changes, secular and ecclesiastical, which seem so peculiarly characteristic of the time. The journey of which they form a record was undertaken purely for purposes of relaxation, in that state of indifferent health, and consequent languor, which an over-strain of the mental faculties usually induces, and in which, like the sick animal that secludes itself from the herd, man prefers walking apart from his kind, to seeking them out in the bustle and turmoil of active life, there to note peculiarities of aspect or character, like an adventurous artist taking sketches amid the heat of a battle. They will, however, lead the reader who accompanies me in my rambles considerably out of the usual route of the tourist, into sequestered corners, associated with the rich literature of England, or amid rocks and caverns, in which the geologist finds curious trace of the history of the country as it existed during the long cycles of the bygone creations. I trust I need scarce apologize to the general reader for my frequent transitions from the actual state of things to those extinct states which obtained in what is now England, during the geologic periods. The art, so peculiar to the present age, of deciphering the ancient hieroglyphics sculptured on the rocks of our country, is gradually extending from the few to the many it will be comparatively a common accomplishment half a generation hence; and when the hard names of the science shall

have become familiar enough no longer to obscure its poetry, it will be found that what I have attempted to do will be done, proportionally to their measure of ability, by travellers generally. In hazarding the prediction, I build on the fact, that it is according to the intellectual nature of man to delight in the metaphor and the simile,

-in pictures of the past and dreams of the future, in short, in

whatever introduces amid one set of figures palpable to the senses another visible but to the imagination, and thus blends the ideal with the actual, like some fanciful allegorist, sculptor, or painter, who mixes up with his groups of real personages qualities and dispositions embodied in human form,-angelic virtues with wings growing out of their shoulders, and brutal vices furnished with tails and claws. And it is impossible, such being the mental constitution of the species, to see the events of other creations legibly engraved all around, as with an iron pen, on the face of nature, without letting the mind loose to expatiate on those historic periods to which the record so graphically refers. The geologist in our own country feels himself in exactly the circumstances of the traveller who journeys amid the deserts of Sinai, and sees the front of almost every precipice roughened with antique inscriptions of which he has just discovered the key,—inscriptions that transport him from the silence and solitude of the present, to a darkly remote past, when the loneliness of the wilderness was cheered by the white glitter of unnumbered tents, and the breeze, as it murmured by, went laden with the cheerful hum of a great people.

It may be judged, I am afraid, that to some of the localities I

devoted too much and to some too little time, in proportion to the degree of interest which attached to them. The Leasowes detained me considerably longer than Stratford-on-Avon; and I oftener refer to Shenstone than to Shakspeare. It will, I trust, be found, however, that I was influenced in such cases by no suspicious sympathy with the little and the mediocre; and that, if I preferred at times the less fertile to the richer and better field, it has been simply, not because I failed to estimate their comparative values, but because I found a positive though scanty harvest awaiting me on the one, and on the other the originally luxuriant swathe cut down and carried away, and but a vacant breadth of stubble left to the belated gleaner. Besides, it is not in his character as a merely tasteful versifier, but as a master in the art of developing the beauties of landscape, that I have had occasion to refer to Shenstone. He is introduced to the reader as the author of the Leasowes, -a work which cost him more thought and labor than all his other compositions put together, and which the general reader, who has to prosecute his travels by the fire-side, can study but at second hand, - -as it now exists in sketches such as mine, or as it existed, at the death of its author, in the more elaborate description of Dodsley. It is thus not to a minor poet that I have devoted a chapter or two, but to a fine rural poem, some two or three hundred acres in extent, that cannot be printed, and that exists nowhere in duplicate.

It does matter considerably in some things that a man's cradle should have been rocked to the north of the Tweed; and as I have been at less pains to suppress in my writings the peculiarities of the

Scot and the Presbyterian than is perhaps common with my countryfolk and brother Churchmen, the Englishman will detect much in these pages to remind him that mine was rocked to the north of the Tweed very decidedly. I trust, however, that if he deem me in the main a not ill-natured companion, he may feel inclined to make as large allowances for the peculiar prejudices of my training as he sees me making on most occasions for the peculiar prejudices of his; that he may forgive me my partialities to my own poor country, if they do not greatly warp my judgment nor swallow up my love for my kind; that he may tolerate my Presbyterianism, if he find it rendering a reason for its preferences, and not very bigoted in its dislikes; and, in short, that we may part friends, not enemies, if he can conclude, without over-straining his charity, that I have communicated fairly, and in no invidious spirit, my First Impres sions of England and its People.

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