the operation, that
they would renew my age, and then I will heartily forgive them all the
rest. In the mean time, whatever uneasiness I have suffered from the
little malice of these men, and my retirement in the country, the
pleasures I have received from the same occasion, will fairly balance the
account. On the one hand, I have been highly delighted to see my name and
character assumed by the scribblers of the age, in order to recommend
themselves to it; and on the other, to observe the good taste of the
town, in distinguishing and exploding them through every disguise, and
sacrificing their trifles to the supposed _manes_ of Isaac Bickerstaff
Esquire. But the greatest merit of my journey into Staffordshire, is,
that it has opened to me a new fund of unreproved follies and errors that
have hitherto lain out of my view, and, by their situation, escaped my
censure. For, as I have lived generally in town, the images I had of the
country were such only as my senses received very early, and my memory
has since preserved with all the advantages they first appeared in.

Hence it was that I thought our parish church the noblest structure in
England, and the Squire's Place-House, as we called it, a most
magnificent palace. I had the same opinion of the alms-house in the
churchyard, and of a bridge over the brook that parts our parish from the
next. It was the common vogue of our school, that the master was the best
scholar in Europe, and the usher the second. Not happening to correct
these notions, by comparing them with what I saw when I came into the
world, upon returning back, I began to resume my former imaginations, and
expected all things should appear in the same view as I left them when
I was a boy: but to my utter disappointment I found them wonderfully
shrunk, and lessened almost out of my knowledge. I looked with contempt
on the tribes painted on the church walls, which I once so much admired,
and on the carved chimneypiece in the Squire's Hall. I found my old
master to be a poor ignorant pedant; and, in short, the whole scene to be
extremely changed for the worse. This I could not help mentioning,
because though it be of no consequence in itself, yet it is certain, that
most prejudices are contracted and retained by this narrow way of
thinking, which, in matters of the greatest moment are hardly shook off:
and which we only think true, because we were made to believe so, before
we were capable to distinguish betwe