following to the garrison. Lancashire witches they would have done for capitally-but then witches don't tell fortunes by palmistry; their vocation is by spell and cauldron; and as for gipsies, why it is just as difficult to mistake the particular expression and cultivated voice of an English lady, as it is the features and voice of the real gipsy-woman. Black eyes and black hair these ladies had; but they had neither the olive skin, nor the bold, easy degagée air of the gipsy belle; and what do gipsies with such beautifully slender and delicate hands? They were importunate; but nothing but a life and an education in the gipsy-camp, and perhaps the blood and descent of the gipsy, can give the peculiar style of palaver-the suaviter in modo-the unique flattery-the "you are born fortunate, sir"-with which the gipsy accosts you. And the costume! The gipsy wears nothing short. She has a long gown, -a long red cloak-a handkerchief tied over her head, it is true, but upon it a large flapping bonnet with lace trimming, or black beaver hat ;-instead of that fairy form, she is generally strapping, tall, and strong-and instead of those taper ankles and small feet, which could evidently dance down the four-and-twenty hours, she has her lower limbs arrayed in black stockings and stout shoes that would do for a wagoner. Young gipsy women walk with sticks! how rarely do you see an old one with one? Knowing now who these ladies were, I should, beforehand, have expected a closer personation of the gipsy; but the result only proves the difficulty of the attempt. It must, however be confessed, that this was as pretty a little rural adventure as one could desire to meet with.

196

CHAPTER II.

NOOKS OF THE WORLD;

OR, A PEEP INTO THE BACK SETTLEMENTS OF ENGLAND.

THERE are thousands of places in this beautiful kingdom, which if you could change their situation-if you could take some plain, monotonous, and uninteresting tracts from the neighbourhood of large cities, from positions barren and of daily observance, and place these in their stead-would acquire an incalculable value; while the common spots would serve the present inhabitants of those sweet places just as well, and often far better, for the ordinary purposes of their lives-for walking over in the day, sleeping in during the night, and raising grass, cattle, and corn upon. The dwellers of cities-the men who have made fortunes, or are making them, and yet long for the quietness and beauty of the country-but especially the literary, the nature-loving, the poetical—would, to use a common expression, jump at them; and, if it were in their power to secure them, would make heavens-uponearth of them. Yes! they are such spots as thousands are longing for; as the day-dreaming young, and the world-weary old, are yearning after, and painting to their mind's eye, daily in great cities; and the dull, the common-place, the unpercipient of their beauty and their glory, are dwelling in them;-paradisiacal fields and magnificent mountains; or cloudy hollows in their mottled sides; or little cleuchs and glens, hidden and green-overhung

with wild wood-rocky, and resounding with dashing and splashing streams;-places, where the eye sees the distant flocks and their slowly-stalking shepherds-the climbing goat, the soaring eagle: and the ear catches their far-off cries; whence a thousand splendours and pageants, changing aspects, and kindling and dying glories, in earth and sky, are witnessed; the cheerful arising of morning-the still, crimson, violet, purple, azure, dim grey, and then dark fading away of day into night, are watched; where the high and clear grandeur and solitude of night, with its moon and stars, and wandering breezes, and soul-enwrapping freshness, are seen and felt. Such places as these, and the brown or summerempurpled heath, with its patch of ancient forest; its blasted, shattered, yet living old trees, greeting you with feelings and fancies of long-past centuries; the clear, rushing brook; the bubbling and most crystalline spring; and the turf that springs under your feet with a delicious elasticity, and sends up to your senses a fresh and forest-born odour; or cottages perched in the sides of glades, or on eminences by the sea-the soul-inspiring sea -with its wide views of coming and going ships, its fresh gales, and its everlasting change of light and life, on its waters, and on its shores; its sailors, and its fishermen, with all their doings, families, and dependencies-every one of them thoroughly covered and saturated with the spirit of picturesque and homely beauty; or inland hollows and fields, and old hamlets, lying amid great woods and slopes of wondrous loveliness;-if we could but turn things round, and bring these near us, and unite, at once, city advantages, city society, and them! But it never can be! And there are living in them, from generation to generation, numbers of people who are not to be envied, because they know nothing at all of the enviableness of their situation.

We are continually labouring to improve society-to diffuse education-to confer higher and ampler religious knowledge; but these people know little of all this-experience little of its effect; for their abodes, and natural paradises, lie far from the great tracks of travel and commerce; far from our great roads; in the most out-of-the-world places-the very nooks of the world.

If you come by chance upon them, you are struck with their admirable beauty, their solemn repose, their fresh and basking

solitude. You cannot help exclaiming, What happy people must these be! But, when you come to look closer into them, the delusion vanishes. They do not, in fact, see any beauty that you see. Their minds have never been stirred from the sluggish routine of their daily life; their mental eye has never been unsealed, and directed to survey the advantages of their situation. They have been occupied with other things. Like the farmer's lad mentioned by Wordsworth, their souls have become encrusted in their own torpor.

A sample should I give

Of what this stock produces, to enrich

The tender age of life, ye would exclaim,

"Is this the whistling plough-boy whose shrill notes
Impart new gladness to the morning air?"
Forgive me, if I venture to suspect

That many, sweet to hear of in soft verse,
Are of no finer frame ;-his joints are stiff;
Beneath a cumbrous frock that to the knees

Invests the thriving churl, his legs appear,
Fellows to those that lustily upheld

The wooden-stools, for everlasting use,

Whereon our fathers sate. And mark his brow!

Under whose shaggy canopy are set

Two eyes, not dim, but of a healthy stare;

Wide, sluggish, blank, and ignorant and strange;
Proclaiming boldly that they never drew

A look or motion of intelligence,

From infant conning of the Christ-cross-row,
Or puzzling through a Primer, line by line,

Till perfect mastery crown the pains at last.

The Excursion, B. 8.

This, however, is one of the worst specimens of the most stupified class-farm-servants. Wordsworth himself makes his good and wise Wanderer, a shepherd in his youth, and describes him, when a lad, as impressed with the deepest sense of nature's majesty. He represents him, in one of the noblest passages of the language, as witnessing the sun rise from some bold headland, and

Rapt into still communion that transcends

The imperfect offices of prayer and praise.

And, indeed, the mountaineer must be generally excepted from

that torpor of mind I have alluded to. The forms of nature that perpetually surround him, are so bold and sublime, that they almost irresistibly impress, excite, and colour his spirit within him; and those legends and stirring histories which generally abound in them, co-operate with these natural influences. This unawakened intellect dwells more generally amid the humbler and quieter forms of natural beauty; in the "sleepy hollows" of more champaign regions.

It might be supposed that these nooks of the world would, in their seclusion, possess very much one moral character; but nothing can be more untrue. Universally, they may seem old-fashioned, and full of a sweet tranquillity; but their inhabitants differ widely in character in different parts of the country-widely often in a short space, and in a manner that can only be accounted for by their less or greater communion with towns, less or greater degree of education extended to them-and the kind extended. Where they are far from towns, and hold little intercourse with them, and have no manufactory in them, they may be dull, but they are seldom very vicious. If they have had little education, they lead a very mechanical sort of life; are often very boorish, and have very confined notions and contracted wishes; are rude in manner, but not bad in heart. I have been in places-ay, in this newspaper-reading age, where a newspaper never comes; where they have no public-house, no school, no church, and no doctor; and yet the district has been populous. But, in similarly situated places, where yet they had a simple, pious pastor-some primitive patriarch, like the venerable Robert Walker, of whom so admirable an account is given by Wordsworth; where they have been blest with such a man amongst them, and where they have had a school; where they knew little of what was going on in the world, and where yet you were sure to find, in some crypt-like hole in the wall, or in a little fireside window, about half a dozen books-the Bible, "Hervey's Meditations among the Tombs," "Baxter's Saint's Everlasting Rest," "Romaine's Life of Faith," or his "Drop of Honey from the Rock Christ," "Macgowan's Life of Christ," or "Drelincourt on Death," and such like volumes; or "Robinson Crusoe," "Philip Quarle," "The History of Henry the Earl of Moreland," "Pilgrim's Progress," or "Pamela;”—