and even with its beggars crowding and quarreling for
their daily dole at its gate. The face of the country seemed to have been
unchanged since the first invasion of the Visigoths:--immense commons,
grown barren from the absence of all cultivation; vast, dreary
sheep-walks; villages, few, rude, and thinly peopled; the absence of all
enclosures, and a general look of loneliness, which, however, I could have
scarcely imagined in England at any period since the Heptarchy. Yet, those
wild wastes were often interspersed with delicious spots; where, after
toiling half the day over a desert wild as Arabia, the traveller suddenly
stood on the brink of some sweet and secluded valley, where the eye rested
on almost tropical luxuriance--all the shrubs and blossoms which require
so much shelter in our rougher climate, flourishing in the open air;
hedges of myrtle and jessamine; huge olives, and primeval vines,
spreading, in all the prodigality of nature, over the rocks; parasite
plants clothing the oaks and elms with drapery of all colours, floating in
every breath of wind; and, most delicious of all, in the fiery centre of
Spain, streams, cool as ice and clear as crystal, gushing and glancing
away through the depths of the valley; sometimes glittering in the sun,
then plunging into shade, then winding along, seen by starts, like silver
snakes, until they were lost under sheets of copse and foliage, unpruned
by the hand of man, and which seemed penetrable only by the bird or the
hare.

WATERTON'S SECOND SERIES OF ESSAYS.[8]

At the conclusion of the autobiography prefixed to his former series of
Essays, published some years since, Mr Waterton announced that he then
"put away the pen not to be used again except in self-defence." That this
resolution has been departed from, from whatever motive, will be matter
for congratulation to most, if not all, of the readers of the "Wanderings"
and "Essays;" and the volume before us derives an additional interest from
its being an unsolicited donation to the widow of his deceased friend, Mr
Loudon, the well-known naturalist. Methinks the author would not have done
amiss in continuing, both to this and the former series of essays, the
peculiarly appropriate title under which his first lucubrations were given
to the world: since veritable _Wanderings_ they are over every imaginable
variety of subject and climate, from caymans in the Essequibo to the blood
of St Januarius at Naples; scheme