ength, and is called the South
Downs, properly speaking, only round Lewes. As you pass along you
command a noble view of the wild, or weald, on one hand, and the broad
downs and sea on the other. Mr. Ray used to visit a family just at the
foot of these hills, and was so ravished with the prospect from Plumpton
Plain, near Lewes, that he mentions those scapes in his "Wisdom of God in
the Works of the Creation" with the utmost satisfaction, and thinks them
equal to anything he had seen in the finest parts of Europe.

For my own part, I think there is somewhat peculiarly sweet and amusing
in the shapely-figured aspect of chalk-hills in preference to those of
stone, which are rugged, broken, abrupt, and shapeless.

Perhaps I may be singular in my opinion, and not so happy as to convey to
you the same idea; but I never contemplate these mountains without
thinking I perceive somewhat analogous to growth in their gentle
swellings and smooth fungus-like protuberances, their fluted sides, and
regular hollows and slopes, that carry at once the air of vegetative
dilation and expansion . . .

. . . Or was there ever a time when these immense masses of calcareous
matter were thrown into fermentation by some adventitious moisture: were
raised and leavened into such shapes by some plastic power: and so made
to swell and heave their broad backs into the sky so much above the less
animated clay of the wild below?

By what I can guess from the admeasurements of the hills that have been
taken round my house, I should suppose that these hills surmount the wild
at an average at about the rate of five hundred feet.

One thing is very remarkable as to the sheep: from the westward till you
get to the river Adur all the flocks have horns, and smooth white faces,
and white legs, and a hornless sheep is rarely to be seen; but as soon as
you pass that river eastward, and mount Beeding Hill, all the flocks at
once become hornless, or as they call them, poll-sheep; and have,
moreover, black faces with a white tuft of wool on their foreheads, and
speckled and spotted legs, so that you would think that the flocks of
Laban were pasturing on one side of the stream, and the variegated breed
of his son-in-law Jacob were cantoned along on the other. And this
diversity holds good respectively on each side from the valley of Bramber
and Beeding to the eastward, and westward all the whole length of the
downs. If you talk with the shepherds on this sub