n away with their daughters, which
the meetings called assemblies in some other parts of England are
recommended for. Here is no Bury Fair, where the women are scandalously
said to carry themselves to market, and where every night they meet at
the play or at the assembly for intrigue; and yet I observed that the
women do not seem to stick on hand so much in this country as in those
countries where those assemblies are so lately set up--the reason of
which, I cannot help saying, if my opinion may bear any weight, is that
the Dorsetshire ladies are equal in beauty, and may be superior in
reputation. In a word, their reputation seems here to be better kept,
guarded by better conduct, and managed with more prudence; and yet the
Dorsetshire ladies, I assure you, are not nuns; they do not go veiled
about streets, or hide themselves when visited; but a general freedom of
conversation--agreeable, mannerly, kind, and good--runs through the whole
body of the gentry of both sexes, mixed with the best of behaviour, and
yet governed by prudence and modesty such as I nowhere see better in all
my observation through the whole isle of Britain. In this little
interval also I visited some of the biggest towns in the north-west part
of this county, as Blandford--a town on the River Stour in the road
between Salisbury and Dorchester--a handsome well-built town, but chiefly
famous for making the finest bone-lace in England, and where they showed
me some so exquisitely fine as I think I never saw better in Flanders,
France, or Italy, and which they said they rated at above 30 pounds
sterling a yard; but I suppose there was not much of this to be had. But
it is most certain that they make exceeding rich lace in that county,
such as no part of England can equal.

From thence I went west to Stourbridge, vulgarly called Strabridge. The
town and the country around is employed in the manufacture of stockings,
and which was once famous for making the finest, best, and highest-prize
knit stocking in England; but that trade now is much decayed by the
increase of the knitting-stocking engine or frame, which has destroyed
the hand-knitting trade for fine stockings through the whole kingdom, of
which I shall speak more in its place.

From hence I came to Sherborne, a large and populous town, with one
collegiate or conventual church, and may properly claim to have more
inhabitants in it than any town in Dorsetshire, though it is neither the
county-