bly on the eve of making great way in its course; and the few political remarks which I heard bore reference to the fact. But they elicited no general sympathy. The scowling heavens, the blackening earth, the swollen rivers, the ever-returning shower-blast, with its sharp-ringing patter, were things that had nought of the gayety of political triumph in them; and the more solid English, however favorable to free trade, could not deem it a cause of gratulation that for so many weeks "the sun, and the light, and the stars, had been darkened, and the clouds returned after the rain." The general feeling seemed not inadequately expressed by a staid elderly farmer, with whom I afterwards travelled from York to Manchester. "I am sure," he said, looking out into the rain, which was beating at the time with great violence,—"I am sure I wish the League no harm; but Heaven help us and the country, if there is to be no harvest! The League will have a dear triumph, if God destroy the fruits of the earth."
Old sacerdotal York, with its august cathedral, its twenty-three churches in which Divine service is still performed, its numerous ecclesiastical ruins besides,—monasteries, abbeys, hospitals and chapels,—at once struck me as different from anything I had ever seen before. St. Andrews, one of the two ancient archiepiscopal towns of Scotland, may have somewhat resembled it on a small scale in the days of old Cardinal Beaton; but the peculiar character of the Scottish Reformation rendered it impossible that the country should possess any such ecclesiastical city ever after. Modern improvement has here and there introduced more of its commonplace barbarisms into the busier and the genteeler streets than the antiquary would have bargained for; it has been rubbing off the venerable rust, somewhat in the style adopted by the serving-maid, who scoured the old Roman buckler with sand and water till it
