conjecture; and from being so to others, begin to be objects
of curiosity and wonder even to ourselves. We are no more those
hackneyed commonplaces that we appear in the world: an inn restores us
to the level of nature, and quits scores with society! I have certainly
spent some enviable hours at inns--sometimes when I have been left
entirely to myself, and have tried to solve some metaphysical problem,
as once at Witham-common, where I found out the proof that likeness is
not a case of the association of ideas--at other times, when there have
been pictures in the room, as at St. Neot's (I think it was) where I
first met with Gribelin's engravings of the Cartoons, into which I
entered at once, and at a little inn on the borders of Wales, where
there happened to be hanging some of Westall's drawings, which I
compared triumphantly (for a theory that I had, not for the admired
artist) with the figure of a girl who had ferried me over the Severn,
standing up in the boat between me and the twilight--at other times I
might mention luxuriating in books, with a peculiar interest in this
way, as I remember sitting up half the night to read Paul and Virginia,
which I picked up at an inn at Bridgewater, after being drenched in the
rain all day; and at the same place I got through two volumes of Madame
D'Arblay's Camilla. It was on the tenth of April, 1798, that I sat down
to a volume of the New Eloise, at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle
of sherry and a cold chicken. The letter I chose was that in which St.
Preux describes his feelings as he first caught a glimpse from the
heights of the Jura of the Pays de Vaud, which I had brought with me as
a _bon bouche_[32], to crown the evening with. It was my birthday, and I
had for the first time come from a place in the neighbourhood to visit
this delightful spot. The road to Llangollen turns off between Chirk
and Wrexham; and on passing a certain point, you come all at once upon
the valley, which opens like an amphitheatre, broad, barren hills rising
in majestic state on either side, with "green upland swells that echo to
the bleat of flocks" below, and the river Dee babbling over its stony
bed in the midst of them. The valley at this time "glittered green with
sunny showers," and a budding ash-tree dipped its tender branches in the
chiding stream. How proud, how glad I was to walk along the high road
that overlooks the delicious prospect, repeating the lines which I have
just quoted fr