278 THE NOBLE SCIENCE. 



railroads threatens to sweep off all that has hitherto 

 caused the life, the bustle, and traffic of provincial 

 towns, what have they to depend upon, but the sup- 

 port of the resident nobility and gentry belonging to 

 them? It is a melancholy fact, that times are not 

 what they w^ere in this respect. From a variety of 

 causes, irrelevant to our present subject, where, formerly, 

 there were ten, there is not now one, of all the coun- 

 try-seats between Islington and Edinburgh, and as far 

 south, east, or west, which is kept up in the style of 

 our ancestral hospitality. Silence too generally pre- 

 vails in the halls of our forefathers : — 



" Oh ! 'twas merry in the hall, 

 When beards wagged all ; 

 We shall ne'er see the like of it again." 



It is obvious, that the facilities of locomotion, the 

 consequent influx of all wealth to one focus of dissipa- 

 tion, that of the metropolis, are partly causes to which 

 such changes are attributable ; but we have nothing to 

 do with causes, we are looking at effects — at matters as 

 they now stand. How many famihes, after a season 

 in London, spend the remainder of their incomes on 

 foreign shores. The evil of absenteeism, so fatal to the 

 sister country, is already shedding its sickening hues 

 over the fading, but not yet departed glory of old Eng- 

 land. And is it not the duty of every man to put his 

 shoulder to the wheel, to do his utmost to render liis 



