and yet we have lately been gravely told | been completely forgotten that the Lake so by writers who must have ignored district lay far away from the northern Milton and all his grand pictures of earth highroad, separated by wide moors and and sky, and Spenser and the glorious almost impassable ways, while the charlandscapes he has painted in his Faery acteristics of its inhabitants in the old Queen, and Drayton, who touched off, time were such, that the travelling trader though with a ruder pencil, so many willingly led his pack-horses a long way truly English scenes, and Beaumont and about, rather than encounter the CumFletcher and Shakespeare; and foremost berland reivers, whose boast it was that and earliest of all, the father of English they could carry off everything "that poetry, Chaucer, who looked abroad on was not too hot or too heavy," and one the face of nature five hundred years ago of whom is reported to have bitterly exwith the loving enthusiasm of Words- claimed when contemplating a huge hayworth himself, and whose "Boke of the stack, "an ye had but four legs, ye Duchesse," and that sweetest of all his should gang." poems, the "Floure and the Lefe," might form a veritable landscape album. Wherefore, because our grand old poets did not visit the Lakes and the Highlands, are they to be taunted with indifference to nature?

That public taste in the days of our great-grandfathers was not so inclined to excursions and tours as in the present day, is readily conceded. But we think we have supplied a sufficient reason for it-if the highways presented so many difficulties, who could think of venturing upon byways? And even if our greatgrandfathers preferred the blossoming hedgerows and lovely scenery of Kent, or the fair landscapes round Bath, to more rugged views, who shall blame them? Beauty is various, and every variety of natural scenery has a charm of its own. It is as well, too, to remember that, in regard to popular taste, there is a fashion in scenery just as there is in dress or furniture. Scores who annually fall into due raptures at the sight of Helvellyn and Ben Lomond, would some eighty years ago just as rapturously have admired the formal flower-beds, the clipped trees, and "les grands eaux" of Versailles.

We are, however, gossiping about travellers and tourists, while a lady with a very pleasant volume, filled with pleasant illustrations, is awaiting our notice. But the remarks we have made are scarcely out of place, inasmuch as it has been chiefly in reference to mountain scenery especially that of the Lake country-that all these grievous charges against our forefathers have been made; just as though they deserved censure for not admiring what they really never had a chance of seeing. It seems to have

But those days of the strong hand. passed away; a peaceful agricultural race succeeded; but still "the North" was a name of distrust, if not of fear, from the days of the revolution to "the Forty-five." There was the stronghold of Jacobitism; there plot after plot had been arranged, and from thence came the warmest English adherents of the Pretender-Armstrong, Fenwick, and, most to be pitied of all, hapless Derwentwater with their misguided but devoted followers, whose heads for so many years frowned grimly above Carlisle gates. What inducement had our great grandfathers to visit such a region?

And thus the eighteenth century passed away; but ere its close the French Revolution had turned old usages upsidedown. What changes in dress, in furniture, in social habits; and how eagerly the youth of their day flung aside broidered waistcoat, and ruffles, and silk stockings, for the loose coat and pantaloon; and how soon after, rejoicing in their simple garb, they set forth on pedestrian expeditions-a mode of travelling until then totally unknown, save to packmen and tinkers. How must the old conservatives of that day have shaken their heads and prophesied ruin, when the young gentleman who might have ordered his postchaise in a laudable and orthodox way, shouldered his wallet, and set forth with a walking-stick to wander like a very gypsy! It is very suggestive, too, to observe how, with that long closing of the Continent against us, the excursive habits of Englishmen were compelled to find scope at home, and how many of those wild and picturesque localities now visited by