town, nor does it send members to Parliament. The church is still
a reverend pile, and shows the face of great antiquity. Here begins the
Wiltshire medley clothing (though this town be in Dorsetshire), of which
I shall speak at large in its place, and therefore I omit any discourse
of it here.

Shaftesbury is also on the edge of this county, adjoining to Wiltshire
and Dorsetshire, being fourteen miles from Salisbury, over that fine down
or carpet ground which they call particularly or properly Salisbury
Plain. It has neither house nor town in view all the way; and the road,
which often lies very broad and branches off insensibly, might easily
cause a traveller to lose his way. But there is a certain never-failing
assistance upon all these downs for telling a stranger his way, and that
is the number of shepherds feeding or keeping their vast flocks of sheep
which are everywhere in the way, and who with a very little pains a
traveller may always speak with. Nothing can be like it. The Arcadians'
plains, of which we read so much pastoral trumpery in the poets, could be
nothing to them.

This Shaftesbury is now a sorry town upon the top of a high hill, which
closes the plain or downs, and whence Nature presents you a new scene or
prospect--viz., of Somerset and Wiltshire--where it is all enclosed, and
grown with woods, forests, and planted hedge-rows; the country rich,
fertile, and populous; the towns and houses standing thick and being
large and full of inhabitants, and those inhabitants fully employed in
the richest and most valuable manufacture in the world--viz., the English
clothing, as well the medley or mixed clothing as whites, as well for the
home trade as the foreign trade, of which I shall take leave to be very
particular in my return through the west and north part of Wiltshire in
the latter part of this work.

In my return to my western progress, I passed some little part of
Somersetshire, as through Evil or Yeovil, upon the River Ivil, in going
to which we go down a long steep hill, which they call Babylon Hill, but
from what original I could find none of the country people to inform me.

This Yeovil is a market-town of good resort; and some clothing is carried
on in and near it, but not much. Its main manufacture at this time is
making of gloves.

It cannot pass my observation here that when we are come this length from
London the dialect of the English tongue, or the country way of
expressing the