THE DOCTOR. to the place where it fell into the Don, as he could have felt in knowing that the sources of the Nile had been explored, or the course and termination of the Niger. Hear, Reader, what a journalist says upon rivers in the newest and most approved style of critical and periodical eloquence! He says, and he regarded himself no doubt with no small complacency while so saying, "An acquaintance with" Rivers "well deserves to be erected into a distinct science. We hail Potamology with a cordial greeting, and welcome it to our studies, parlours, schools, reading-rooms, lecture-rooms, mechanics' institutes and universities. There is no end to the interest which Rivers excite. They may be considered physically, geographically, historically, politically, commercially, mathematically, poetically, pictorially, morally, and even religiously in the world's anatomy they are its veins, as the primitive mountains, those mighty structures of granite, are its bones; they minister to the fertility of the earth, the purity of the air, and the health of mankind. They mark out nature's kingdoms and provinces, and are the physical dividers and subdividers of continents. They welcome the bold discoverer into the heart of the country, to whose coast the sea has borne his adventurous bark. The richest freights have floated on their bosoms, and the bloodiest battles have been fought upon their banks. They move the wheels of cotton mills by their mechanical power, and madden the souls of poets and painters by their picturesque splendour. They make scenery and are scenery, and land yields no landscape without water. They are the best vehicle for the transit of the goods of the merchant, and for the illustration of the maxims of the moralist. The figure is so familiar, that we scarcely detect a metaphor when the stream of life and the course of time flow on into the ocean of Eternity." Hear, hear, oh hear! Yet the person who wrote this was neither We are advanced from the Age of Reason Topographical pursuits, my Doctor used to say, tend to preserve and promote the civilisation of which they are a consequence and a proof. They have always prospered in prosperous countries, and flourished most in flourishing times, when there have been persons enough of opulence to encourage such studies, and of leisure to engage in them. Italy and the Low Countries therefore took the lead in this branch of literature; the Spaniards and Portuguese cultivated it in their better days; and beginning among ourselves with Henry VIII. it has been continued with increasing zeal down to the present time. Whatever strengthens our local attachments is favourable both to individual and - our birth national character. Our home, place, our native land, think for awhile what the virtues are which arise out of the feelings connected with these words; and if thou hast any intellectual eyes thou wilt then perceive the connection between topography and patriotism. Show me a man who cares no more for one place than another, and I will show you in that same person one who loves nothing Beware of those who are but himself. homeless by choice! You have no hold on a human being whose affections are without a tap-root. The laws recognise this truth in the privileges which they confer upon freeholders; and public opinion acknowledges it also, in the confidence which it reposes upon those who have what is called a stake in the country. Vagabond and rogue are convertible terms; and with how much propriety any one may understand who knows what are the habits of the wandering classes, such as gypsies, tinkers, and potters. The feeling of local attachment was possessed by Daniel Dove in the highest degree. Spurzheim and the crazyologists would have found out a bump on his head for its local habitation; - letting that quackery pass, it is enough for me to know that he derived this feeling from his birth as a mountaineer, and that he had also a right to it by inheritance, as one whose ancestors had from time immemorial dwelt upon the same estate. Smile not contemptuously at that word, ye whose domains extend over more square miles than there were square roods upon his patrimony! To have held that little patrimony unimpaired, as well as unenlarged, through so many generations, implies more contentment, more happiness, and a more uniform course of steadiness and good conduct, than could be found in the proudest of your genealogies! The most sacred spot upon earth to him was his father's hearth-stead. Rhine, Rhone, Danube, Thames or Tyber, the mighty Ganges or the mightier Maranon, even Jordan itself, affected his imagination less than the Greta, or Wease as he was wont to call it, of his native fields; whose sounds in his boyhood were the first which he heard at morning and the last at night, and during so many peaceful and happy years made as it were an accompaniment to his solitary musings, as he walked between his father's house and his schoolmaster's, to and fro. | Don had beauties of its own, and utilities' which give to such beauties when combined with them an additional charm. There was not a more pleasing object in the landscape to his eyes than the broad sail of a barge slowly moving between the trees, and bearing into the interior of England the proauce of the Baltic, and of the East and West. The place in the world which he loved best was Ingleton, because in that little peaceful village, as in his childhood it was, he had once known every body and every body had known him; and all his recollections of it were pleasurable, till time cast over them a softening but a pensive hue. But next to Ingleton he loved Doncaster. And wherefore did he thus like Doncaster? For a better reason than the epigrammatist could give for not liking Dr. Fell, though perhaps many persons have no better than that epigrammatist had in this case, for most of their likings and dislikings. He liked it because he must have been a very unreasonable man if he had not been thankful that his lot had fallen there-because he was useful and respected there, contented, prosperous, happy; finally because it is a very likeable place, being one of the most comfortable towns in England: for it is clean, spacious, in a salubrious situation, well-built, well-governed, has no manufactures, few poor, a greater proportion of inhabitants who are not engaged in any trade or calling, than perhaps any other town in the kingdom, and moreover it sends no members to parliament. Next to that wild river Wease whose visible course was as delightful to the eye and ear, as its subterranean one was to the imagination, he loved the Don. He was not one of those refined persons who like to lessen their admiration of one object by THE AUTHOR QUESTIONS THE PROPRIETY OF comparing it with another. It entered as little into his mind to depreciate the Don because it was not a mountain stream, as it did into Corporal Trim's or Uncle Toby's to think the worse of Bohemia because it has no sea coast. What if it had no falls, no rapids or resting-places, no basins whose pellucid water might tempt Diana and the Oreades to bathe in it; instead of these the INTERCHAPTER III. not large enough to hold, to the species specialissima, the little Thinking Public, which may find room in a nutshell. There is the fashionable Public, and the Religious Public, and the Play-going Public, and the Sporting Public, and the Commercial Public, and the Literary Public, and the Reading Public, and heaven knows how many Publics more. They call themselves Worlds sometimes, as if a certain number of worldlings made a World! He who pays his homage to any or all of these Publics, is a Publican and a Sinner. Nunquam valui populo placere; nam quæ ego scio non probat populus ; quæ probat populus, cgo nescio.” * "Bene et ille, quisquis fuit, (ambigitur enim de auctore.) cum quæreretur ab illo, quo tanta diligentia artis spectaret ad paucissimos perventuræ ? Satis sunt, inquit, mihi pauci; satis cst unus; satis est nullus."* But of all ideal Beings the most extraordinary is that which we call the Public. The Public and Transubstantiation I hold to be the two greatest mysteries in or out of nature. And there are certain points of resemblance between them. For as the Priest creates the one mystery, so the author, or other appellant to the said Public, creates the other, and both bow down in worship, real or simulated, before the Idol of their own creation. And as every fragment of the wafer, break it into as many as you may, contains in itself the whole entire mystery of transubstantiation, just in the same manner every fractional part of the Public assumes to itself the powers, privileges and prerogatives of the whole, as virtually, potentially DONCASTRIANA. POTTERIC CARR. SOMETHING and indefeasably its own. Nay, every individual who deems himself a constituent member of the said Public arrogates them also, and when he professes to be acting pro bono publico, the words mean with him all the good he can possibly get for himself. The old and famous illustration of Hermes may be in part applied to the Public; it is a circle of which the centre is every where: in part I say, for its circumference is defined. It is bounded by language, and has many intercircles. It is indeed a confused multiciplity of circles intersecting each other, perpetually in motion and in change. Every man is the centre of some circle, and yet involved in others; he who is not sometimes made giddy by their movements, has a strong head; and he who is not sometimes thrown off his balance by them, stands well upon his legs. Again, the Public is like a nest of patent coffins packed for exportation, one within another. There are Publics of all sizes, from the genus generalissimum, the great general universal Public, whom London is CHAPTER XXXV. P. I. CONCERNING THE MEANS OF EMPLOYING Why should I sowen draf out of my fist, CHAUCER. DONCASTER is built upon a peninsula, or ridge of land, about a mile across, having a gentle slope from east to west, and bounded on the west by the river; this ridge is composed of three strata, to wit,- of the alluvial soil deposited by the river in former ages, and of limestone on the north and west; and of sandstone to the south and east. To the south of this neck of land lies a tract called Potteric Carr, which is much below the level of the river, and was a morass, or range of fens, when our Doctor first took up his abode in Doncaster. This tract extends about four miles in length and nearly three in breadth, and the security which it afforded against an attack on that side, while the river protected the peninsula by its ** SENECA, 2, 79. semicircular bend on the other, was evidently one reason why the Romans fixed upon the site of Doncaster for a station. In Brockett's Glossary of North-Country words, Carr is interpreted to mean "flat marshy land; a pool or lake;" but the etymology of the word is yet to be discovered. These fens were drained and enclosed pursuant to an act of Parliament which was obtained for that purpose in the year 1766. Three principal drains were then cut, fourteen feet wide, and about four miles long, into which the water was conducted from every part of the Carr, southward, to the little river Torne, at Rossington Bridge, whence it flows into the Trent. Before these drainings the ground was liable to frequent inundations, and about the centre there was a decoy for wild ducks: there is still a deep water there of considerable extent, in which very large pike and eels are found. The soil, which was so boggy at first that horses were lost when attempting to drink at the drains, has been brought into good cultivation (as all such ground may be) to the great improvement of the district; for till this improvement was effected intermittent fevers and sore throats were prevalent there, and they have ceased from the time that the land was drained. The most unhealthy season now is the Spring, when cold winds from the North and North East usually prevail during some six weeks; at other times Doncaster is considered to be a healthy place. It has been observed that when endemic diseases arrive there, they uniformly come from the south; and that the state of the weather may be foretold from a knowledge of what it has been at a given time in London, making an allowance of about three days, for the chance of winds. Here, as in all places which lie upon a great and frequented road, the transmission of diseases has been greatly facilitated by the increase of travelling. But before we leave Potteric Carr, let us try, reader, whether we cannot improve it in another way, that is, in the dissenting and so-called evangelical sense of the word, in which sense the battle of Trafalgar was im | proved, in a sermon by the Reverend John Evans. Gentle Reader, let you and I in like manner endeavour to improve this enclosure of the Carr. Four thousand acres of bog whereof that Carr consisted, and upon which common sand, coal ashes, and the scrapings of a limestone road were found the best manure, produce now good crops of grain, and excellent pasturage. There are said to be in England and Wales at this time 3,984,000 acres of uncultivated but cultivable ground; 5,950,000 in Scotland; 4,900,000 in Ireland; 166,000 in the smaller British Islands. Crags, woods, and barren land are not included in this statement. Here are 15,000,000 acres, the worst of which is as good as the morass which has been reclaimed near Doncaster, and the far greater part very materially better. I address myself now to any one of my readers who pays poor rates; but more especially to him who has any part in the disposal of those rates; and most especially to a clergyman, a magistrate, and a member of Parliament. The money which is annually raised for poor-rates in England and Wales has for some years amounted to from five to six millions. With all this expenditure cases are continually occurring of death from starvation, either of hunger or cold, or both together; wretches are carried before the magistrates for the offence of lying in the streets or in unfinished houses, when they have not where to hide their heads; others have been found dead by the side of limekilns, or brickkilns, whither they had crept to save themselves from perishing for cold; and untold numbers die of the diseases produced by scanty and unwholesome food. This money, moreover, is for the most part so applied, that they who have a rightful claim upon it, receive less than in justice, in humanity, and according to the intent of a law wisely and humanely enacted, ought to be their portion; while they who have only a legal claim upon it, that claim arising from an evil usage which has become pre scriptive, receive pay, where justice, policy, and considerate humanity, and these very laws themselves, if rightly administered, would award restraint or punishment. Thus it is in those parts of the United Kingdom, where a provision for the poor is directly raised by law. In Scotland the proportion of paupers is little less, and the evils attendant upon poverty are felt in an equal or nearly equal degree. In Ireland they exist to a far greater extent, and may truly be called terrible. Is it fitting that this should be while there are fifteen millions of cultivable acres lying waste? Is it possible to conceive grosser improvidence in a nation, grosser folly, grosser ignorance of its duty and interest, or grosser neglect of both, than are manifested in the continuance and growth and increase of this enormous evil, when the means of checking it are so obvious, and that too by a process in which every step must produce direct and tangible good? But while the Government is doing those things which it ought not to have done, and leaves undone those which it ought to do, let Parishes and Corporations do what is in their power for themselves. And bestir yourselves in this good work, ye who can! The supineness of the Government is no excuse for you. It is in the exertions of individuals that all national reformation must begin. Go to work cautiously, experimentally, patiently, charitably, and in faith! I am neither so enthusiastic as to suppose, nor so rash as to assert, that a cure may thus be found for the complicated evils arising from the condition of the labouring classes. But it is one of those remedial means by which much misery may be relieved, and much of that profligacy that arises from hopeless wretchedness be prevented. It is one of those means from which present relief may be obtained, and future good expected. It is the readiest way in which useful employment can be provided for the industrious poor. And if the land so appropriated should produce nothing more than is required for the support of those employed in cultivating it, and who must otherwise be partly or wholly supported by the poor-rates, such cultivation would, even then, be profitable to the public. Wherever there is heath, moor or fen,which there is in every part of the Island, there is work for the spade; employment and subsistence for man is to be found there, and room for him to encrease and multiply for generations. Reader, if you doubt that bog and bad land may be profitably cultivated, go and look at Potteric Carr, (the members of both Houses who attend Doncaster Races, may spare an hour for this at the next meeting). If you desire to know in what manner the poor who are now helpless may be settled upon such land, so as immediately to earn their own maintenance, and in a short time to repay the first cost of their establishment, read the account of the Pauper Colonies in Holland; for there the experiment has been tried, and we have the benefit of their experience. As for the whole race of Political Economists, our Malthusites, Benthamites, Utilitarians or Futilitarians, they are to the Government of this Country such counsellors as the magicians were to Pharaoh; whosoever listens to them has his heart hardened.But they are no conjurors. Do, pious marble, let thy readers know Protect his memory, and preserve his story; EPITAPH IN WESTMINSTER Abbey. THE Poet Crabbe has said that there subsists an utter repugnancy between the studies of topography and poetry. He must have intended by topography, when he said so, |