CHAPTER II.
Weather still miserably bad; suited to betray the frequent Poverty of English Landscape.—Gloomy Prospects of the Agriculturist.—Corn-Law League.— York; a true Sacerdotal City.—Cathedral; noble Exterior; Interior not less impressive; Congreve's sublime Description.—Unpardonable Solecism.—Procession.—Dean Cockburn; Crusade against the Geologists.—Cathedral Service unworthy of the Cathedral.—Walk on the City Ramparts.—Flat Fertility of the surrounding Country.—The more interesting Passages in the History of York supplied by the Makers.—Robinson Crusoe.—Jeanie Deans.—Trial of Eugene Aram.—Aram's real Character widely different from that drawn by the Novelist.
Rain, rain!—another morning in England, and still no improvement in the weather. The air, if there was any change at all, felt rather more chill and bleak than on the previous evening; and the shower, in its paroxysms, seemed to beat still heavier on the panes. I was in no mood to lay myself up in a dull inn, like Washington Irving's stout gentleman, and so took the train for York, in the hope of getting from under the cloud somewhere on its southern side, ere I at least reached the British Channel. Never surely was the north of England seen more thoroughly in dishabille. The dark woods and thick-set hedgerows looked blue and dim through the haze, like the mimic woodlands of a half-finished drawing in gray chalk and, instead of cheering, added but to the gloom of the landscape. They seemed to act the part of mere sponges, that first condensed and then retained the moisture,—that became soaked in the shower, and then, when it had passed, continued dispensing their droppings on the rotting sward beneath, until
