212 JULY. 



vaulting on the part of the ladies ! and what an op- 

 portunity does it afford to beaux of exhibiting a 

 variety of gallant and delicate attentions ! I con- 

 sider a rude stile as any thing but an impediment 

 in the course of a rural courtship. 



Those good old turnstiles too can I ever forget 

 them ? the hours I have spun round upon them when 

 a boy! or those in which I have almost laughed 

 myself to death at the remembrance of my village 

 pedagogue's disaster ! Methinks I see him now ! 

 the time a sultry day, the domine a goodly person 

 of some eighteen or twenty stone, the scene a foot- 

 path sentinelled with turnstiles, one of which held him 

 fast as in amazement at his bulk. Never shall I forget 

 his efforts and agonies to extricate himself; nor his 

 lion-like roars which brought some labourers to his 

 assistance, who, when they had recovered from their 

 convulsions of laughter, knocked off the top of the 

 turnstile and let him go. It is long since I saw a 

 stile of this construction, and I suspect the Falstaffs 

 have cried them down. But without a jest, stiles 

 and foot-paths are vanishing every where. There 

 is nothing upon which the advance of wealth and 

 population has made so serious an inroad. As land 

 has increased in value, wastes and heaths have been 

 parcelled out and inclosed, but seldom have foot- 

 paths been left. The poet and the naturalist, who 

 before had, perhaps, the greatest real property in 

 them, have had no allotment. They have been 

 totally driven out of the promised land. Goldsmith 

 complained, in his day, that 



