BOOK XI. CONTAINING ABOUT THREE DAYS.
9. Chapter ix. The morning introduced in some pretty writing.
(continued)
We will therefore take our leave of these good people, and attend his
lordship and his fair companions, who made such good expedition that
they performed a journey of ninety miles in two days, and on the
second evening arrived in London, without having encountered any one
adventure on the road worthy the dignity of this history to relate.
Our pen, therefore, shall imitate the expedition which it describes,
and our history shall keep pace with the travellers who are its
subject. Good writers will, indeed, do well to imitate the ingenious
traveller in this instance, who always proportions his stay at any
place to the beauties, elegancies, and curiosities which it affords.
At Eshur, at Stowe, at Wilton, at Eastbury, and at Prior's Park, days
are too short for the ravished imagination; while we admire the
wondrous power of art in improving nature. In some of these, art
chiefly engages our admiration; in others, nature and art contend for
our applause; but, in the last, the former seems to triumph. Here
Nature appears in her richest attire, and Art, dressed with the
modestest simplicity, attends her benignant mistress. Here Nature
indeed pours forth the choicest treasures which she hath lavished on
this world; and here human nature presents you with an object which
can be exceeded only in the other.
The same taste, the same imagination, which luxuriously riots in these
elegant scenes, can be amused with objects of far inferior note. The
woods, the rivers, the lawns of Devon and of Dorset, attract the eye
of the ingenious traveller, and retard his pace, which delay he
afterwards compensates by swiftly scouring over the gloomy heath of
Bagshot, or that pleasant plain which extends itself westward from
Stockbridge, where no other object than one single tree only in
sixteen miles presents itself to the view, unless the clouds, in
compassion to our tired spirits, kindly open their variegated mansions
to our prospect.
Not so travels the money-meditating tradesman, the sagacious justice,
the dignified doctor, the warm-clad grazier, with all the numerous
offspring of wealth and dulness. On they jog, with equal pace, through
the verdant meadows or over the barren heath, their horses measuring
four miles and a half per hour with the utmost exactness; the eyes of
the beast and of his master being alike directed forwards, and
employed in contemplating the same objects in the same manner. With
equal rapture the good rider surveys the proudest boasts of the
architect, and those fair buildings with which some unknown name hath
adorned the rich cloathing town; where heaps of bricks are piled up as
a kind of monument to show that heaps of money have been piled there
before.
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