moments, upon her childish paradise, and a few shillings would have made her happy. I, on the contrary, had exhausted years in searching for my paradise, but without a prospect of success.
The fact is, I have got an unfortunate habit of looking back. I am fond of the past, though only in a dreamy, unsystematic way. My history is a little out of order, and I am no authority upon dates; but I like to hover about places. I cannot tell the day, the hour, or even the year in which the battle of Sedgemoor occurred; but I have gloated over the old roadside mill from which the Duke of Monmouth watched his losing contest, and the old houses at Bridgewater, whose roofs were then probably crowded with women and children. I have even been through the straggling village of Weston Zoyland, and into the sanded tavern where the late Lord Macaulay resided for weeks while he wrote this portion of his history. I have heard the landlord's proud account of his distinguished guest, and how "he worrited about the neighbourhood." This interesting fact, so I am informed, is duly recorded, upon my authority, in the latest edition of Men of the Time. My only objection to the late Lord Macaulay is, that he was one of these men of the time—of my own time. If Gibbon had been the careful historian of Sedgemoor, the village pothouse would have had a finer old crusted flavour, to my taste. The sentiment that governs me scarcely blooms under a hundred years, neither more nor less. I cannot learn to love the Elizabethan times—they are too remote. I have no more real sympathy with fifteen hundred and fifty, than with eighteen hundred and fifty. I can tolerate the seventeenth century; but the eighteenth always "stirs my heart, like a trumpet."
Notwithstanding all this, I am not an obstructive man; I am not a "fogey." I take the good the gods provide me. I have no prejudices against gas; though I wish it could be supplied without so much parochial quarrelling. It may generate poison, as certain chemists assert; but it certainly generates too many pamphlets and public meetings. I use the electric telegraph; I travel by the railway; and I am thankful to their inventors and originators. The moment, however, I leave the railway, I plunge rapidly into the past. I never linger, for a moment, at the bright, new, damp, lofty railway hotel (I hate the name of hotel, although I know it springs from hostelry); nor amongst the mushroom houses that rally round the station. My course is always through the distant trees, beyond the dwarfish, crumbling church, whose broad low windows seem to have taken root amongst the flat, uneven tombstones, into the old town or village, into its very heart—its market-place—and up to the brown old door of its oldest inn. I know everything that can be said against such places. They are very yellow; they have too strong a flavour of stale tobacco-smoke; their roofs are low, and their floors have a leaning either to one side or the other. Their passages are dark, and often built on various levels; so that you may tumble down into your bed-chamber, or tumble up into your sitting-room, shaking every tooth in your head, or possibly biting your tongue. These may be serious drawbacks to some
