LETTER LXXXVII. 

 To THE Honourable Daines Barrington. 



" — — — Mugire videbis 

 Sub pedibus terram, et descendere montibus ornos." 



(ViRG. j^n. iv, 490, 491.) 



'* Earth bellows, 

 Trees leave their mountains at her potent call ; 

 Beneath her footsteps groans the trem])ling ball." 



(Pitt.) 



When I was a boy I used to read, with as- 

 tonishment and implicit assent, accounts in Baker's 

 " Chronicle " of walking hills and travelling moun- 

 tains. John Philips, in his " Cyder," alludes to the 

 credit given to.such stories with a delicate but quaint 

 vein of humour peculiar to the author of the *' Splen- 

 did Shilling : " 



*' I nor advise, nor reprehend the choice 

 Of Marcley Hill ; the apple no where finds 

 A kinder mould ; yet 'tis unsafe to trust 

 Deceitful ground : who knows but that once more 

 This mount may journey, and his present site 

 Forsaken, to thy neighbour's bounds transfer 

 Thy goodly plants, affording matter strange 

 For law debates I" 



But, when I came to consider better, I began to 

 suspect that though our hills may never have jour- 

 neyed far, yet that the ends of many of them have 

 slipped and fallen away at distant periods, leaving 



the cliffs bare and abrupt. This seems to have been 



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