t grievances.

In fact, he rails against stage-coaches, post-chaises, and
turnpike-roads, as serious causes of the corruption of English rural
manners. They have given facilities, he says, to every humdrum citizen
to trundle his family about the kingdom, and have sent the follies and
fashions of town, whirling, in coachloads, to the remotest parts of
the island. The whole country, he says, is traversed by these flying
cargoes; every by-road is explored by enterprising tourists from
Cheapside and the Poultry, and every gentleman's park and lawns
invaded by cockney sketchers of both sexes, with portable chairs and
portfolios for drawing.

He laments over this, as destroying the charm of privacy, and
interrupting the quiet of country life; but more especially as
affecting the simplicity of the peasantry, and filling their heads
with half-city notions. A great coach-inn, he says, is enough to ruin
the manners of a whole village. It creates a horde of sots and idlers,
makes gapers and gazers and newsmongers of the common people, and
knowing jockeys of the country bumpkins.

The Squire has something of the old feudal feeling. He looks back with
regret to the "good old times" when journeys were only made on
horseback, and the extraordinary difficulties of travelling, owing to
bad roads, bad accommodations, and highway robbers, seemed to separate
each village and hamlet from the rest of the world. The lord of the
manor was then a kind of monarch in the little realm around him. He
held his court in his paternal hall, and was looked up to with almost
as much loyalty and deference as the king himself. Every neighbourhood
was a little world within itself, having its local manners and
customs, its local history and local opinions. The inhabitants were
fonder of their homes, and thought less of wandering. It was looked
upon as an expedition to travel out of sight of the parish steeple;
and a man that had been to London was a village oracle for the rest of
his life.

What a difference between the mode of travelling in those days and at
present! At that time, when a gentleman went on a distant visit, he
sallied forth like a knight-errant on an enterprise, and every family
excursion was a pageant. How splendid and fanciful must one of those
domestic cavalcades have been, where the beautiful dames were mounted
on palfreys magnificently caparisoned, with embroidered harness, all
tinkling with silver bells, attended by cavaliers richl