Whitby, Sept. 25th.

Dear Julia,

I slept rather late after my yesterday’s fatigues, and did not leave Scarborough till two o’clock. The road to Whitby is very hilly, and the aspect of the country singular. As far as the eye can reach, neither tree, house, wall, nor hedge;—nothing but an endless sea of wavy hills, often of a strange regularity of form, like heaps of rubbish shot down, thickly overgrown with heather, which at a near view presents the most beautiful shades of purple and red, but at a distance sheds one uniform dingy brown over the whole landscape, promising a rich harvest to grouse-shooters. Nothing breaks the uniformity but a number of white spots moving slowly here and there—the down sheep, with their black faces and fine wool. About three miles from Whitby, as you descend from the hilly country, the scene gradually changes, and near the town becomes very romantic. Meanwhile English cleanliness and elegance sensibly diminish. Whitby is exactly like an old German town; without ‘trottoirs,’ equally dirty, and with as narrow streets.

Probably few strangers of any ‘apparence’ visit this miserable place; or whether they took me for somebody else I know not,—but so it was, that they besieged me like some strange animal, and did not let me depart without an escort of at least a hundred people, who crowded round me, very good-naturedly indeed, but rather too pressingly, and examined me from head to foot. I could not help thinking of a droll anecdote the Duke of Leeds told me. This nobleman was very affable with his tenants and people; one of them came up to him one day when he was riding, and told him he had a great favour to beg of him. The Duke asked him what it was. The man replied, after some hesitation, that he had a little boy who plagued him day and night to let him see the Duke, and that as His Grace was now close to his cottage, he would perhaps do him the great favour to let his son look at him. The Duke readily consented, and rode laughing to the cottage, where the delighted father ran in and fetched his child. The boy stood amazed, looking at the middle-aged gentleman of not very commanding exterior before him, of whose greatness and power he had heard so much; gazed at him a long time; then touched him; and suddenly asked, “Can you swim?” “No, my good boy,” said the Duke. “Can you fly?” “No, I can’t fly neither.” “Then I like father’s drake better, for he can do both.”

Whitby has a harbour shut in between very picturesque rocks, with a handsome granite pier stretching far into the sea, from which you have a fine view of the town. The ruins of the celebrated abbey, standing on an abrupt crag, are peculiarly beautiful. It was founded by a King of Northumberland in the sixth century, and is now the property of some private individual, who does nothing for the preservation of this sublime memorial of ancient greatness. His cattle feed among its mouldering walls, which are so choked with dirt and rubbish that I could hardly approach to see them. I alighted by the light of the young moon, and was enchanted by the romantic effect,—lofty columns, darting up into the air like the slender trunks of pines; long rows of windows in good preservation, and many finely executed ornaments about them, still as perfect as if the wind of the first autumn now played among their ample arches. Other parts were quite altered and decayed, and many a frightful face lay scattered about, grinning at me in the moonlight. Near the abbey is a very ancient church, which is still used, and is surrounded by hundreds of moss-grown gravestones.

I am lodged in a humble but very comfortable country inn, kept by two sisters, whose civility is of that sort which springs from real good-nature and zeal, and not from regard to pelf alone. As I asked for a book they brought me the Chronicle of Whitby, which I turned over, while the wind roared as loudly without, as it does round our good castle of M——. In this Chronicle is a valuation of lands in the seventh century, in which Whitby, with its appurtenances, is rated at sixty shillings!

I find from it, that the vast and magnificent abbey has been destroyed neither by fire nor by violence, but was delivered over by more silent tyranny to the tooth of time. Henry the Eighth confiscated this with the rest, and sold it, even to the stones of the building. Fortunately, after several houses in the town had been built of the materials, an ancestor of the present possessor bought what remained, which has ever since been left ‘in statu quo.’

Guisborough:—Evening.

I had written a note to Lord Mulgrave, the proprietor of a great alum-work, and of a beautiful house and park on the sea-shore, begging permission to see them. He sent me a very polite answer, and a groom on horseback to conduct me. This aggravated the yesterday’s misery; and the chief magistrate of the little town now though fit to becompliment me by the mission of two of his colleagues, who were also secretaries of the Museum, which they proposed to show me. As it contains many very curious fossils found in this neighbourhood, I accepted their offer. Half the town was collected again, and followed us, with an ‘arriÈre garde’ of a very noisy ‘jeunesse.’ In the Museum I found a number of the members assembled, and a blooming company of ladies, from whose attractive faces I was continually forced to turn away my eyes to look at a crocodile or a petrified fish. The two secretaries had divided the duties between them:—one did the honours of the fish and amphibia; the other of the quadrupeds, birds, and minerals: and both were so zealous that I should see everything in their respective departments, while some dilettanti were no less eager to show me other things, that I had need of the hundred eyes of Argus to take in all. The thing which interested me the most was an Esquimaux canoe with the fishing apparatus complete, presented by Captain Parry. It is made entirely of whalebone and seal-skins, and so light that one can scarcely conceive how it can encounter the sea. It is tolerably long; but in the centre, at its greatest breadth, scarcely a foot across; the whole is enclosed like a box, with the exception of a round hole in the middle, in which the Esquimaux sits and balances his little bark with a double oar. The petrifactions of all kinds, as well of existing as of antediluvian animals and plants, are extremely numerous and fine, and the large crocodile, almost perfect, is certainly ‘unique’ in its kind. The gentlemen insisted on accompanying me back to my inn, whither we were attended by the usual ‘cortÈge.’ As I drove off, a dreadful hurrah resounded, and several of the children of both sexes did not quit me till they found it impossible to keep pace with the horses.

I now drove slowly along the beach, conducted by Lord Mulgrave’s servant. I alighted to walk, and amused myself with picking up little stones of the most brilliant colours which covered the beach. In an hour we reached the alum-work, which lies in the most romantic situation, between the abrupt cliffs overhanging the sea. I examined it all very minutely, as you will see by the accompanying letter to the A—— D——.

I had to go back along a path which seemed fit only for goats, and of the inconveniences of which the overseer had advertized me. Sometimes it was scarcely a foot broad, and at its sides rose a smooth alum rock of two hundred feet perpendicular height. Along such paths, many of which intersect the rocks, the men work, and hew away the alum ore which lies near the surface. This affords the strangest spectacle you can imagine: the men appear to hang to the wall of rock like swallows, and are often obliged to be pulled up by ropes. Below, in the valley, are large cars for carrying away the ore, which is incessantly heard clattering down the rocks. It took me two hours to see all; and I then drove to the house, where Lord Mulgrave’s son (the earl himself being ill of the gout) regaled me very hospitably with an excellent luncheon, and conducted me about the park. It is indebted for its greatest beauties to Nature, to whose rocks, brooks, and wooded glens, you have access through very judiciously-cut roads, some German miles in length. From the house you look from under high oaks and beeches along a velvet turf, upon the sea, covered with a hundred sails. One of the greatest ornaments of the park is the old castle,—a ruin believed to have been originally a Roman fort, and afterwards the castle of the Saxon prince Wanda. At a later period it was given to the ancestor of the present family by King John, as a reward for the murder of the young prince, so touchingly described by Shakspeare. The view from the old battlements is wild and picturesque. In the new castle, which was built fifty years ago in the Gothic style, I was much struck with the portrait of a female ancestor of the present earl, who must have been lovely and no less original; for she is painted in deep mourning, and yet she sits smiling at a window with this inscription in old English: “Since my husband’s love was but a jest, so is my mourning but a jest.”

Young Mr. Phipps told me that a strange accident occurred on a ridge of slate-rocks which run into the sea near the house.—Two girls were sitting on a cliff with their backs to the sea; a sharp fragment of the slate split off from the rock high above them, and falling with increasing velocity cut off the head of one of them, (who was earnestly talking to the other,) so clean, that it rolled to a distance on the sand, while the trunk remained unmoved. The parents are still living in the village.

Ripon, Sept. 27th.

I slept through the night very well in my carriage, breakfasted in the garden of a pretty inn, and then hastened to Studley Park, which contains the famous ruins of Fountain’s Abbey, esteemed the largest and most beautiful in England. They far exceeded my expectation, as did the park.—I must describe them to you as I saw them.

The way leads through a majestic wood, first to a steep hill, and then, at an abrupt turn, to a green valley about three or four hundred feet wide, in the centre of which is a little river broken into various natural waterfalls. On one side of the valley is a considerable chain of hills, overgrown with venerable ashes, beeches, and oaks; on the other, an abrupt wall of rock overhung with trailing plants, and also crowned with old trees. The whole end of the valley is closed by the ruins and the lofty towers of the abbey. You will easily form some conception of the vastness of these ruins, when I tell you that the buildings belonging to the abbey, when entire, covered fifteen acres of ground, and that the ruins now cover four. The nave of the church, great part of the walls of which are still standing, is three hundred and fifty-one feet in length, the oriel window fifty feet high, and the tower, though partly fallen down, a hundred and sixty-six feet high. The architecture is of the best period—the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—as simple as it is grand. A gateway leads from the church to the cloister, three hundred feet long and forty-two wide; a second to the cloister garden, which is cultivated as a flower-garden by its present possessor, and surrounded by various picturesque ruins,—the library, court and chapter-house. The vaulted ceiling of the latter, like the RÖmer in Marienburg, is supported by a single pillar in the centre. The groined roof of the kitchen is constructed, with consummate skill, without any support. Near it is the magnificent confectory, a hundred and eight feet long and forty-five wide:—this was, of course, the crown and glory of the abbey, which was famed for its luxury and dissoluteness. In the church are many monuments—one of Lord Mowbray in full chain armour, carved in stone; further on, several abbots; and lastly, a stone coffin, which contained the mortal remains of Harry Percy. Above it is an angel, in good preservation, and beneath it the date 1283, very distinct. At the top of the tower is a Latin inscription in gigantic Gothic letters, which proclaims from on high these beautiful and appropriate words, “Glory and praise to God alone through all ages!” The whole ruin is hung with draperies of ivy and creeping plants, and majestic trees here and there wave their tops above it. The river winds by, and a few steps further on, turns the old abbey-mill, which is still in use; as if to teach the lesson, that when power and magnificence pass away, the useful retains its modest existence. At a short distance behind the abbey stands the old dwelling of the proprietor, which was built out of the fallen stones of the ruins in the sixteenth century. This, too, is highly picturesque, though of course in a far less noble style. Its walled gardens with their high-cut yew hedges, and regular, trim flower-beds; and the mixture of objects comparatively modern, yet now fast acquiring a claim to antiquity, give the fancy an agreeable and spacious field to expatiate in. Here are perhaps the oldest yews in England. One, which is thought to be a thousand years old, is thirty feet in circumference in the thickest part of its stem. Among the carvings in the house are those of two old knights taken from the abbey, with the inscription, probably modern, ‘Sic transit gloria mundi.’ The decay of Fountain’s Abbey, too, is to be attributed to the suppression of monasteries under Henry the Eighth.

Leaving the abbey, in half an hour you reach a beautiful and finely kept pleasure-ground, which is rendered peculiarly delightful by its diversity of hill and vale, noble trees, and well-placed clumps; though rather encumbered with a multitude of old-fashioned summer-houses, temples, and worthless leaden statues. In one of these temples, dedicated to the Gods of antiquity, stands a bust of—Nero! But these slight defects might easily be removed, while such a combination of natural beauty can rarely be met with. At the end of the deer-park stands the house of the proprietress, an elderly single lady of large fortune. I met her in the garden, and was invited by her to luncheon, which I gladly accepted, as my long walk had made me very hungry.

To return to the ruin.—Giving way to my critical vein, I must add one thing,—which is, that while too little care is bestowed upon Whitby, too much is bestowed upon this. Not a loose stone lies on the ground, which is mowed as smooth as a carpet. The old cloister garden is laid out in a too modern taste; and were this poetic structure mine, I would immediately set out about creating a little more artificial wildness about it; for the whole ought to partake of that air of half-decayed grandeur which has the greatest power over the imagination.

After my return to Ripon I visited the church there—another beautiful remnant of antiquity, with a choir full of the richest carvings. There is a subterranean arched room—a sort of catacomb, adorned with skulls and bones,—in which I busied myself a long while with my favourite craniological researches. Among these human ruins was a skull so strikingly like my own, that it even struck the clerk. What may the old boy have been?—perhaps myself in another garment? Nobody could give me any account of this house of bone. There was the genuine French skull of an emigrant priest, which the clerk himself had smuggled in. He looked so polite and so talkative, that I fancied he would have said, ‘Monsieur, j’ai l’honneur de vous prÉsenter mes respects; vous Êtes trop poli de venir nous rendre visite. Nous avons si rarement l’occasion de causer ici!’ It was a well bred skull—that you saw at the first glance; my portrait, on the other hand, looked very thoughtful and silent. It would be odd enough if one thus stood over one’s own old bones.

Harrowgate, Sept. 28th.

This bathing place is much after the fashion of ours, and more social than most of the English ones. People meet at ‘table d’hÔte,’ at tea, and at the waters, and thus easily become acquainted. The place consists of two villages, both pretty and cheerful, and situated in a beautiful fertile country. Unfortunately, the weather is now dreadful: it rains incessantly; and the sulphureous water I drank to-day has made me so ill that I cannot leave my room.

September 29th.

These waters do not agree with me at all; nevertheless, I made my way to-day to the World’s End, a short walk here,—‘The World’s End’ being only a neighbouring village, with a pretty view into—the world’s beginning; for as it is round, you may make it begin and end where you will. At ‘table d’hÔte’ I met about seventy other persons. Though the season is nearly over, there are still about a thousand visitors, most of them of the middle classes; for Harrowgate is not one of the fashionable watering places, though it seems to me far more pleasant than the most fashionable Brighton.

An old General of eighty, who was my neighbour at dinner, interested me extremely. He had met with Frederick the Great, Kaunitz, the Emperor Joseph, Mirabeau, and Napoleon, on various occasions of his life, and told me many interesting particulars about them. He had likewise been Governor of Surinam, and of the Isle of France; had commanded for a long time in India, and was now what we call General of Infantry, (next rank to a Field-Marshal.) All this would give him a high station with us:—here, no such thing; and this he remarked himself. “Here,” said he, “the aristocracy is every thing: without family influence, without connexion, without some person of rank by whom a man may be pushed, he may indeed attain a high rank in the army; but, except under some very peculiar circumstances, this gives him no consideration. I am only a baronet,” added he; “yet that empty and trifling hereditary title gives me more consideration than my long services or my high military rank; and I am not called General,—or, as I should be with you, ‘Euer Excellenz,’—but Sir Charles.”

After dinner the company re-assembled to tea, which ended with a little dance.

Leeds, Oct. 1st.

I remained in Harrowgate so long, chiefly in expectation of letters from you, as I had given L—— that address. To-day, then, I found one on my return from my walk: you can think the joy it gave me.

I have accompanied you in thought to Dresden, and drunk your health before the illuminated letters of your name. It is one of my strange peculiarities, that though I was four years in garrison at D——, I never saw either Pillnitz or Moritzburg; so that your description of the latter, with the old Landvoigt, was very interesting to me.

You reproach me with liking better to write than to speak upon certain subjects. You are right on the whole. But this affair,—and indeed all sorts of petitioning,—is so contrary to my nature, that I speak awkwardly and ill, and do better if I write. Besides, failure is not so disagreeable.—But back to my journey.

The magnificent seats in England are really almost countless. One must confine oneself to the most remarkable. Ten miles from Harrowgate I found Harewood Park, a delightful residence;—fine natural wood, with glens, rocks, a copious mountain stream, the ruin of an old castle on a hill,—all situated in the richest country, and with distant views of the Cumberland mountains.

The scene was enlivened in a striking manner. Just as I drove past the house, I saw the possessor, Lord Harewood, with his pack of a hundred hounds, his red-coated huntsmen, and a number of high-mettled horses coming down a hill, on their return from a fox-hunt. I could not avoid going up to him to explain the cause of my being here. I found a tall handsome man, of remarkably winning air, in appearance and manner young and active, in years (which one must be assured of to believe it,) sixty-five. He received me with singular courtesy, said he had had the pleasure of seeing me several times in London, (‘je n’en savais pas un mot,’) and begged me to allow him to show me his park. I entreated him not to give himself the trouble, after the toils of the chase (in which men generally ride five or six German miles full gallop, and leap fifty or sixty hedges and ditches:) but all my entreaties were vain; and this fine old man accompanied me, up hill and down dale, over the whole of his princely domain. What interested me most, as being new to me, was the kennel. Here I saw a hundred and fifty dogs in two perfectly clean rooms, each containing a large bed for seventy-five dogs, and each having its own enclosure in front. There was not the slightest offensive smell, nor the least dirt. In each yard was a tub with running water, and a man armed with a broom, whose whole business it is to keep the ground continually washed, for which purpose he can let the water flow over it at pleasure. The dogs are accustomed to perfect obedience, and keep their bed and room very clean. It is a great art to feed them properly; for to sustain their great exertions, they must be kept very lean, and yet their flesh ought to be as firm as iron. This was perfectly accomplished here; and there could not be a more beautiful sight than these slender, obedient, and happy-looking animals, half of whom were just returned from the chase, and yet seemed quite unwearied. They all lay however on their huge common bed, and looked at us affectionately, wagging their tails; while the other half sprang eagerly and wildly forward, into their court. The stables too, built in a quadrangle at a little distance from the house, were very fine, and contained about thirty noble horses. My carriage had followed, and Lord Harewood now gave the postillion instructions which way to drive through the park, that I might see the most beautiful points, and then sauntered home accompanied by two great water-dogs and a jet-black spaniel. He was in fox-hunting costume,—a scarlet coat that looks like a livery.

I forgot to say that we had first made a tour through the house, which is richly and handsomely furnished, and contains family pictures by Vandyk, Reynolds, and Lawrence, the three best painters of England in their several centuries. There was one work of art in the principal apartment quite peculiar,—red curtains painted on wood, so admirably executed that Rauch himself would have been astounded at the flow of the drapery. Though I was told what they were, I could scarcely believe it till I convinced myself by the touch, so completely deceptive was the imitation of the silken stuff. Another uncommon decoration consisted in having the ceilings of all the rooms of the same designs as the carpets; a very expensive thing, if, as I imagine, the carpets were all woven after the pattern of the ceilings.

The long drive through the park, a good league, was very delightful. The road lay at first along the lake, with a majestic view of the house, and then through the wood to the river, which forms various cascades and little lakes. The wood itself was full of variety,—now thick and almost impervious to the view; then grove-like; then open patches with a dense enclosure; or young copse from which deer were peeping out; or anon a long and narrow vista to the distant mountains.

A nobleman thus situated is a dignified representative of his class; and it is very natural that, thus favoured by nature and by fortune, he should appear kind, benevolent, respectable, and happy, like this noble Earl, whose image will always afford me as delightful and refreshing a subject of recollection, as the beautiful landscape it graces.

Very different from the impression of the day, and yet not less agreeable, was that of the evening. I reached the great manufacturing town of Leeds just in the twilight. A transparent cloud of smoke was diffused over the whole space which it occupies, on and between several hills; a hundred red fires shot upwards into the sky, and as many towering chimneys poured forth columns of black smoke.

The huge manufactories, five stories high, in which every window was illuminated, had a grand and striking effect. Here the toiling artisan labours far into the night. And that some romantic features might not be wanting in the whirl of business and the illumination of industry, two ancient Gothic churches reared their heads above the mass of houses, and the moon poured her silver light upon their towers, and seemed to damp the hard glare of the busy crowd below, with her serene majesty.

Leeds has near 120,000 inhabitants, and yet no representatives in parliament,—because it is a new town: while, as it is well known, many a wretched ruined village sends two members, who are, of course, the creatures of the proprietor. Glaring and monstrous as is this nuisance, the statesmen of England have not yet dared to abate it; perhaps because they fear that any change in so complicated a piece of machinery may be a dangerous operation, to which recourse should be had only in extreme necessity.

Late in the Evening.

I have adapted myself to many English customs,—among others, to cold dinners. As a change they are sometimes wholesome, and, being completely national, are almost always of excellent quality. To-day my solitary table was covered with no less than the following varieties; a cold ham, an awful ‘roast beef,’ a leg of mutton, a piece of roast veal, a hare pie, a partridge, three sorts of pickle, cauli-flowers cooked in water, potatoes, butter, and cheese. That this would have been meat enough to feed a whole party of German burghers, ‘saute aux yeux.’

October 2nd.

The first thing I saw this morning before my windows was the refined contrivance of a grocer, who had not been satisfied with exhibiting, like most of his brethren, a number of Chinese tea-chests, mandarins, and vases, but had put a piece of clockwork in his window, a stately automaton Turk diligently grinding coffee. From hence I proceeded on my further tour. First I visited the Market-hall, a beautiful building, in which the market is held under a glass roof; then the Cloth-hall, an immense room entirely filled with cloth of all sorts and colours; and lastly, the largest cloth manufactory of the place, which is worked by three steam-engines. Here you begin with the raw material (the sorting of the wool,) and finish with the perfect cloth; so that if you took a tailor with you, you might bring your wool in the manufactory in the morning, and come out with a coat made of it in the evening. Our friend R—— actually performed this feat, and wore the coat for a long time with great predilection. The various machines are ingenious in the highest degree; but the stench and the unwholesome air, as well as the dust in many of the operations, must be very unhealthy to the poor workmen, who moreover were all of a dark blue colour. The young man who showed me the manufactory said, however, that the cotton manufactories were much more unhealthy, from the fine and subtle dust; that in them a workman seldom reached his fiftieth year, whereas here there were instances of men of sixty. The Gothic churches which yesterday produced such an effect at a distance, presented nothing remarkable on a nearer inspection; and the town itself, enveloped in an everlasting fog produced by the smoke, which never ceases day nor night, is the most disagreeable place you can imagine.

Rotherham:—Evening.

Continuing my journey, I made the first halt at Templenewsome, a house of Elizabeth’s time, belonging to the Dowager Marchioness of Hertford. This edifice has a great singularity; instead of battlements, a stone gallery surrounds the roof, consisting of letters which compose a sentence from the Bible. The park is melancholy, and the furniture of the house old-fashioned, without being interesting. I found nothing remarkable in the picture-gallery, but in the other rooms there were some interesting portraits: both the Guises, the uncles of Mary of Scotland; General Monk, who is strikingly like our old friend Thielemann; and Lord Darnley (Mary’s husband,) to whom this castle belonged; it hangs in the room in which he was born. I had a very bad headache; for which reason, perhaps, a second park, Stainbrook, appeared to me dreary and uncomfortable, nor could I admire the pictures. The road then led me through a series of manufacturing places, which looked like burning towns and villages. Rotherham itself, where I now am, is celebrated for its great iron-works, and I intend to see some of them to-morrow, if my illness goes off.

October 3rd.

After having walked half a German mile to the largest iron-work, I unluckily found the engine stopped, in consequence of the furnace having received some damage yesterday. I could therefore see but little, and went a mile further on to the steel-works. Here the steam-engine had just got out of order, and the operations were likewise suspended. So I wandered on again to the thread and linen manufactory; and my own astonishment, as well as that of my guide, was not small, when we perceived no signs of working here also, and heard that the great spindle had been broken in the morning. With this extraordinary ‘guignon’ ended my useless efforts to instruct myself for to-day; indeed there was no time to make any more.

Sheffield:—Evening.

I rode from Rotherham to Wentworth House, the seat of Lord Fitzwilliam, another truly regal domain, for extent, richness, and splendour; but (like many English parks) melancholy and monotonous; the immense tracts of grass, with a few scattered trees, and the tame sheep-like deer grazing upon them, in time become intolerable. Certainly, it is a most tasteless custom to have these green deserts extend on one side up to the very houses; it makes them look like enchanted palaces, inhabited by deer instead of men. It is easier to give oneself up to this notion since there is seldom a human being to be seen outside the house, which is usually shut up, so that you are often obliged to ring at the door for a quarter of an hour before you can get admittance, or the Lady ‘ChÁtelaine’ appears to play the cicerone, and receive her fee. Wentworth House is adorned with many valuable statues and pictures. Amongst others, a beautiful picture by Vandyk, representing the builder of the castle, Lord Strafford, just as sentence of death has been announced to him: he is holding the fatal scroll in his hand, and dictating to his secretary his last will. Another picture represents his son, a beautiful boy of sixteen, in a most becoming mourning dress,—black, with rich lace, fawn-coloured boots, a tight enamelled collar, a short cloak, a rich sword, and a scarf ‘en bandouliÈre.’

The picture of a race-horse as large as life, painted on gray linen, and placed in a niche without a frame, really deceived me; I thought it alive. This horse won so much, that the former lord built a quadrangle of magnificent stables, the most complete I have seen in this country, with the money. In these stables, which contain also a riding-school, stand sixty beautiful and picked horses.

An excellent portrait of the vain and ambitious Cardinal Wolsey, and one of the fickle Duke of Buckingham, are very interesting. The housekeeper, pointing to the portrait of Harvey, said: “This is the man who invented the circulation of the blood.” One would like to make that man’s acquaintance.

In the flower-gardens I found some beautiful parts; amongst others, an enclosure made of wire-fence, running along the gay parterres, peopled with foreign birds, a clear brook flowing through it, and planted with evergreens, on which the feathered inhabitants could sport at pleasure.

Several black swans, which have already reared four young ones, were swimming on a small pond near it. They seem to be completely accustomed to this climate. I was struck by a common beech on the banks of the water, which, by early polling, had completely changed its character. It was very low, but its branches stretched out on all sides, so as to cover an immense space, and form a regularly leafy tent of unequalled beauty. A fir, polled in the same manner, had attained a beauty far greater than that of its natural growth.

I arrived in good time at Sheffield, where, from the quantity of smoke, the sun appeared shorn of his beams. I looked at the astonishing productions in cutlery; as, for instance, a knife with a hundred and eighty blades; scissors which cut perfectly and can be used, though hardly visible with the naked eye, &c. &c. In defiance of superstition, I bought you needles and scissors enough for your whole life, with some other newly-invented trifles, which I am sure will please you.

Nottingham, Oct. 4th.

I rode the whole night, and saw only from a distance, and by moonlight, Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron’s birth-place and family seat, now much neglected.

Besides the Gothic church (of which nearly every English town possesses one, more or less beautiful,) there is not much to be seen in Nottingham; a remarkable manufactory of net excepted, where the steam-engines do all the work, and only a single man stands by the machinery to take care that nothing goes wrong.

It is most strange to see the iron monsters begin to work, as if moved by invisible hands, and the most beautiful lace, stretched in a frame, comes slowly forth at the top, neat and finished; while the spindles, with the raw thread wound round them, keep on their perpetual motion below; the whole unaided, as I have said, by a single human hand.

It was just the time of the Fair, which had drawn together a great number of curiosities; among others, a beautiful collection of wild beasts. Two Bengal tigers, of an enormous size, were so perfectly tame, that even ladies and children were allowed to enter their cage, or the animals were let out in the riding school where the collection was exhibited. No dog could be more gentle; but I doubt whether our police would have suffered such experiments. A remarkable animal was the horned horse, or Nyl Ghau, from the Himalaya mountains,—handsome and fleet, and in some respects very strangely formed. The beautiful wild ass of Persia, which they say is swifter and more untireable than a horse, and can live for weeks without food, was new to me. There were also here, as in the collection of animals on the Pfaueninsel near Berlin, a giant and a dwarf.

London, Oct. 6th.

Before I left Nottingham I visited the neighbouring seat of Lord Middleton, which is worth seeing. The park offered little remarkable. There was a curious old picture—a faithful portrait of the house and gardens as they existed two hundred years ago. It is very interesting; the more so, as you see the family in the strangest dresses, with a great company and numerous attendants, walking in the garden, and as the noble owner therein represented is the same who is so often mentioned in connexion with the celebrated ghost story. Every one ought to have pictures of this kind painted for his successors: the comparisons they suggest are always amusing, and sometimes instructive.

I reached St. Albans in the night, and saw the celebrated Abbey by the light of the moon, and of lanterns. The clerk was quickly awakened, and conducted me thither. I first admired the exterior of the building, built by the Saxons, in the eighth century, of indestructible Roman bricks, and then entered the imposing interior. The nave of the church is doubtless one of the largest in the world; it is more than six hundred feet long. There are many beautiful stone carvings; and although little could be distinctly seen by so feeble a light, the general effect by this strange and uncertain illumination, with our dark figures in the middle, and the sounds of the midnight bell from the tower, was most romantic and awful.

This was still more the case when we descended into the vault where, in an open leaden coffin, lies the skeleton of the Duke of Gloucester who was poisoned six hundred years ago by Cardinal Beaufort. Time has rendered it as brown and smooth as polished mahogany; and curious antiquarians have already robbed it of several bones. The clerk, who was an Irishman, seized one of the leg-bones without ceremony, and brandishing it in the air like a cudgel, he remarked that this bone had become so beautiful and hard with time, that it would make an excellent shillelah. What would the haughty Duke have said, if he could have known how his remains would be treated by such ignoble hands? The magnificent oak ceiling, more than 1000 years old, is a glorious proof of the solid architecture of those times. It is still as beautiful and perfect as if there were no cyphers after the unit. The painted windows, with the golden tomb of St. Alban, were unhappily almost entirely destroyed in Cromwell’s time.

I reached London early enough to repose half the night; and my first business in the morning was to finish this letter, already swollen to a packet. In a few hours I hope it will be on its way.

Do not be impatient therefore; and receive this letter with the same affectionate indulgence as its numerous predecessors.

Your faithful L——.