villas, no
sooner does a man fix on a nice situation--a rising knoll beside a
river--a gentle slope--or beautiful level green--no sooner does he
rear a modest, or perhaps an ornamental, mansion on the site, than his
next care is to plant as thick round it as the trees will stand. Elms,
poplars, oaks, and larches, in a few years block up the view; and
arbutus, rododendrons, and enormous Portugal laurels, stand as an
impenetrable screen before every window; so that a house, which by its
architecture ought to be an ornament to the neighbourhood, and should
command noble hills and rich valleys, might as well be a wigwam in an
Indian forest. There seems a greater tendency to rheumatism than
romance among the inhabitants; and, by the by, we observed on all the
walls Welsh placards of Parr's pills. But in spite of the large
letters, and the populousness of the towns and villages where they
were posted up, we did not see a single individual reading the
announcements. Query, can the Welsh peasantry read Welsh? or is their
book-learning limited to English, and their native tongue left to its
oral freedom, untrammeled with A, B, C? In addition to the usual fence
of impenetrable trees and shrubs, we noticed one pretty little
dwelling, newly built, a mile or two from the village of Ragland,
tastefully ornamented with an immense heap of compost, which nearly
barricaded the drawing-room window. The inhabitant must have been a
prodigious agriculturist; and probably preferred the useful, but
unromantic heap, to any other object in the view. We gave it the name
of Guano Hall.

But where, all this while, is Ragland Castle, and when will the old
mare jiggle joggle to the end of our course? All eyes were kept in
constant motion to catch a glimpse of the towers and pinnacles, of
which we felt sure we were now within a mile. Trees, trees, and
nothing but trees, with sometimes a glimpse of blue hills far off, and
wreaths of smoke from cottages or farms rising above the wilderness of
leaves. At last, on a little elevation on the left hand, rising
solemnly, into the silent air, we caught sight of the old ruin, with
great ponderous walls, covered with ivy, and the sky seen through the
open arches of its immense windows. A beautiful mass of building, with
such rents and fissures in it, that you wondered whether it was ever
entire; and the walls so thick and massive that you wondered again how
it ever fell into decay. We hobbled into the village,