and enclosure—the majestic seats, comfortable houses, cheerful villages, enviable cots, and wellstocked farms, sometimes animating the most retired parts of the country, and sometimes rising in the neighbourhood of well-populated towns, and magnificent cities, decorating the most vivid colours of nature, with the most ingenious and useful aids of art-all these afford a proud delight to the native, and must impress every man of every other country, with a conviction of its being, indeed, the Queen of isles.

Of its climate, we shall have much to say as we pass on meantime, we may boldly assert, with the sensible Delineator above quoted, that, although England is situated in the northern part of the temperate zone, no country is cloathed with so beautiful and lasting a verdure, and that the rigours of winter and the heats of summer are felt in a much less degree than in parallel climates on the Continent-while the sea-ports of Holland, and of your country, my loved friend, are every winter locked up with ice, ours are never known to suffer this inconvenience. I am aware, however, you have

heard so much of our heavy atmosphere, and its melancholy consequences, that it will require far more eloquence than is in the possession of your present correspondent, to prove, that even this humour of our air is attended with various benefits. And though you will find all this set down, right patriotically, in our written books, and maintained in our conversations, ocular demonstration alone can satisfy you, that the diversity of our weather secures the island from those extremes of heat and cold to which other nations, within the same degree of latitude, are annually exposed, and that it is to this moderation of the air and variegation of the weather, that we live to as great an age as in any part of Europe. But the prejudice of our fogs, and the vaporous evils they are presumed to engender,even to the mixing with our blood, till they convert us into self-murderers-is, I know, so strong, that I prepare you for my determined, yet warrantable, vindication of my country on this matter, so often as an opportunity of defence presents itself. In the mean while, the remark of one of our British monarchs, as recorded by

Sir William Temple, deserves a place in your memory, and I take it from that writer, that it may be ready for your use when you are our guest. It was, we are told, an observation of our Second Charles, in reply to some persons who were reviling our climate. "That," said the king, "is the best climate where a man can be abroad in the air with the most pleasure, or at least, without trouble or inconvenience the most days in the year, and the most hours in a day, and that I can be in England."

It would be repetition of a common schoolboy fact to tell you, that civil policy has distributed the kingdom into fifty-two counties or shires; of which, according to the delineator's perspicuous arrangement, their are six northern, four bordering on Wales, twelve midland, eight eastern, three south-eastern, four southern, three south-western, six of North Wales, and six of South Wales: nor should I have mentioned this division, had our correspondence been limited to your own eye; but, as I design it to endeavour at a more general service to foreigners, after it has, in the first instance, paid

its homage to you, the little time which has been consumed in this,-to you, superfluous communication,-will be forgiven!

You will now suffer me to be your reporter and precursor as the affections may lead ; but at present, you will be glad of a short pause, in the interval of which, I am proud to subscribe myself very faithfully yours.

LETTER III.

My

Bromley, Kent, May 30, 1798.

y intention was to have set out, in`

my accustomed way, by gentle stages.

"Sedate to think, and watching each event," even with the first fair day, as I before mentioned, that should succeed the period of closing my introductory Letter. My purpose was, to direct my course from the metropolis of the British empire, to one of its celebrated universities; making a pause at Cambridge-which as a seminary of British education, and for the literary and sacred awe that a sight of its classic edifices inspires, is one of the places every stranger should visit; and from thence to have taken a circuitous tour into different parts of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Huntingdonshire; not, because those divisions of England afford the best opportunity of giving you a first favourable