with their gladiatorial shows, quoted as good precedents? Forgetting that while the Romans were a growing and conquering people, they were a simple and domestic people. When they had their amphitheatres and their bloody shows of battling-men and beasts, they fell under imperial despotism, and thence into national destruction. If we will have a better spirit, we must take better means to produce it. We can never make our rural population too well informed. Ireland, with all manner of horrible outrages, England with its rick-burnings, and Scotland with its orderly peasantry, all point towards the evils of ignorance and oppression, and the national advantage and individual happiness that are to be reaped from the spread of sound knowledge through our rural districts.

THE nooks of the world which we visited in our last chapter lay in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire; we will now change the scene a little northward. Such secluded and original spots we might indeed readily undertake to discover in almost every county of England; but I can only give a few specimens from the great whole, and leave every one to look about him for the rest. Lancashire is famous for its immense manufactures, and consequent immense population. In ranging over its wild, bleak hills, we are presently made sensible of the vast difference between the character and habits of the working class, and the character and habits of the pastoral and agricultural districts. We have no longer those picturesque villages and cottages, half buried in their garden and orchard trees; no longer those home-crofts, with their old, tall hedges; no longer rows of beehives beneath their little thatched southern sheds; those rich fields and farm

houses, surrounded with wealth of corn-ricks, and herds and flocks. You have no longer that quiet and Arcadian-looking population; hedgers and ditchers, ploughmen and substantial farmers, who seem to keep through life the "peaceful tenor of their way," in old English fulness and content. There may be indeed, and there are, such people scattered here and there; but they and their abodes are not of the class which gives the predominant character to the scenery. On the contrary, everywhere extend wild naked hills, in many places totally unreclaimed; in others, enclosed, but exhibiting all the signs of a neglected and spiritless husbandry; with stunted fences or stone walls; and fields sodden with wet from want of drainage, and consequently overgrown with rushes. Over these naked and desolate hills are scattered to their very tops, in all directions, the habitations of a swarming population of weavers; the people and their houses equally unparticipant of those features which delight the poet and the painter. The houses are erections of stone or brick, covered with glaring red tiles, as free from any attempt at beauty or ornament as possible. Without, where they have gardens, those gardens are as miserable and neglected as the fields; within, they are squalid and comfortless.

In some of these swarming villages, ay, and in the cottages of the large manufacturing towns too, you can scarcely see a window with whole panes of glass. In one house in the outskirts of Blackburn, and that, too, an alehouse, we counted in a window of sixty panes, eight-and-forty broken ones; and this window was of a pretty uniform character with its fellows, both in that house, and the neighbouring ones. It is not possible to conceive a more violent and melancholy contrast than that which the filth, the poverty, and forlornness of these weavers' and spinners' dwellings form to the neatness, comfort, and loveliness of the cottages of the peasantry in many other parts of the kingdom. Any man who had once been through this district, might again recognise the locality if he were taken thither blindfold, by the very smell of oatcake which floats about the villages, and the sound of the shuttles, with their eternal "latitat! latitat!" I ranged wide over the bleak hills in the neighbourhood of Padiham, Belthorne, Guide, and such places, and the numbers and aspect of the population filled me

with astonishment. Through the long miserable streets of those villages, children and dogs were thick as motes in the sun. The boys and men with their hair shorn off, as with a pair of woolshears, close to their heads, till it stood up staring and bristly, and yet left hanging long over their eyes, till it gave them a most villanous and hangman look. What makes those rough heads more conspicuous, is their being so frequently red; the testimony of nature to the ancient prevalence of the Dane on these hills. The men are besides long and bony; the women often of stalwart and masculine figure, and of a hardness of feature which gives them no claims to be ranked amongst the most dangerous of the "Lancashire witches." Everywhere the rudeness of the rising generation is wonderful. Everywhere the stare of mingled ignorance and insolence meets you; everywhere a troop of lads is at your heels, with the clatter of their wooden clogs, crying—“ Fellee, gies a hawpenny!"

In one village, and that too the celebrated Roman station of Ribchester, our chaise was pursued by swarms of these woodenshod lads like swarms of flies, that were only beaten off for a moment to close in upon you again, and their sisters shewed equally the extravagance of rudeness in which they were suffered to grow up, by running out of the houses as we passed, and poking mops and brushes at the horses' heads. No one attempted to restrain or rebuke them; and yet, what was odd enough, not one of the adult population offered you the least insult, but if you asked the way, gave you the most ready directions, and if you went into their houses, treated you with perfect civility, and shewed an affection for these wild brats that was honourable to their hearts, and wanted only directing by a better intelligence. The uncouthness of these poor people is not that of evil disposition, but of pressing poverty and continued neglect. As is generally the case, in the poorest houses were the largest families. Ten and eleven children in one small dirty hovel was no uncommon sight, actually covering the very floor till there seemed scarce room to sit down; and amid this crowd, the mother was generally busy washing, or baking oatcakes; and the father making the place resound with the "latitat, latitat" of his shuttle. One did not wonder, seeing this, that the poor creatures are glad to

turn out the whole troop of children to play on the hills, the elder girls lugging the babies along with them.

The wildness into which some of these children in the more solitary parts of the country grow, is, I imagine, not to be surpassed in any of the back settlements of America. On the 5th of July, 1836, the day of that remarkable thunder-storm, which visited a great part of the kingdom with such fury, being driven into a cottage at the foot of Pendle by the coming on of this storm, and while standing at the door watching its progress, I observed the head of some human creature carefully protruded from the doorway of an adjoining shed, and as suddenly withdrawn on being observed. To ascertain what sort of person it belonged to, I went into the shed, but at first found it too dark to allow me to discover any thing. Presently, however, as objects became visible, I saw a little creature, apparently a girl of ten years old, reared very erectly against the opposite wall. On accosting her in a kind tone, and telling her to come forward, and not to be afraid, she advanced from the wall, and behold! there stood another little creature about the head shorter, whom she had been concealing. I asked the elder child whether this younger one was a girl. She answered-"Ne-a.” "Was it a boy?" "Ne-a." "What! neither boy nor girl! was she herself a girl?" "Ne-a." "What was it a boy that I was speaking to?" "Ne-a." "What in the name of wonder were they then?" "We are childer." "Childer! and was the woman in the house their mother?” “Ne-a.” "Who was she then ?" "Ar Mam." "O! your mam! and do you keep cows in this shed ?" "Ne-a." "What then?" "Bee-as." In short, common English was quite unintelligible to these little creatures, and their appearance was as wild as their speech. They were two fine young creatures, nevertheless, especially the elder, whose form and face were full of that symmetry and free grace that are sometimes the growth of unrestrained nature, and would have delighted the sculptor or the painter. Their only clothing was a sort of little bodice with skirts, made of a reddish stuff, and rendered more picturesque by sundry patches of scarlet cloth, no doubt from their mother's old cloak. Their heads, bosoms, and legs to the knees, were bare to all the influences of earth and heaven; and on giving them each a penny, they bounded away with the fleetness and