to pieces at Conway, and borne on the shoulders of stout Welsh peasants to the Menai Strait. The markets were often inaccessible during several months.

It is said that the fruits of the earth were suffered to rot in one place, while in another, only a few miles distant, the supply fell far short of the demand.

On the best highways, heavy articles were, in the time of Charles II., generally conveyed from place to place by waggons. The expense of transmitting them was enormous. From London to Birmingham the charge was £7 a ton; from London to Exeter, £12;—that is, more by a third than was afterwards charged on turnpike roads, and fifteen times what is now demanded by railway companies. Coal was never seen except in the districts where it was produced, or to which it could be carried by sea; and was, indeed, always known in the south of England by the name of sea-coal. The rich commonly travelled in their iron carriages with at least four horses. A coach and six is in our time never seen, except as part of some procession. The frequent mention, therefore, of such equipages in old books is likely to mislead us. We attribute to magnificence what was really the effect of disagreeable necessity. People in the time of Charles II. travelled with six horses, because with a smaller number there was danger of sticking fast in the mire.

About the middle of the seventeenth century a public coach commenced to run between London and Oxford. It performed the journey in two days. At length, in 1669, it was announced that a vehicle, described as "The Flying Coach," would perform the journey between sunrise and sunset. This spirited undertaking was solemnly considered and sanctioned by the heads of the University, and seems to have excited the same sort of interest which is excited in our own time by the opening of a new railway. The success of the experiment was complete, and by the end of the reign of Charles II. flying coaches ran thrice a week from London to the chief towns. The ordinary day's journey was about fifty miles in summer; but in winter, when the roads were bad and the nights long, little more than thirty. The Chester coach, the York coach, and the Exeter coach,

generally reached London in four days during the fine season, but at Christmas not till the sixth day. These flying coaches were extolled as far superior to any similar vehicles ever known in the world. Their velocity is the subject of special commendation, and is triumphantly contrasted with the sluggish pace of the continental posts.

Whatever might be the way in which a journey was performed, the travellers, unless they were numerous and well armed, ran considerable risk of being stopped and plundered. The mounted highway-man, a marauder known to our generation only from books, was to be found on every main road. The waste tracts which lay round about London were especially haunted by this class. The public authorities seem to have been at a loss how to deal with the plunderers. At one time it was announced in the Gazette that several persons, who were strongly suspected of being highway-men, but against whom there was not sufficient evidence, would be paraded at Newgate in riding dresses. Their horses would also be shown. All gentlemen who had been robbed were invited to inspect this singular exhibition. other occasion, a pardon was publicly offered to a robber, if he would give up some rough diamonds of immense value which he had taken when he stopped the Harwich mail.

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All the various dangers by which the traveller was beset were greatly increased by darkness. He was, therefore, commonly desirous of having the shelter of a roof during the night; and such shelter it was not difficult to obtain. From a very early period the inns of England had been renowned. Our first great poet had described the excellent accommodation which they afforded to the pilgrims of the fourteenth century. Nine-andtwenty persons, with their horses, found room in the wide chambers and stables of the Tabard in Southwark. In the seventeenth century England abounded in excellent inns of every rank. The traveller sometimes in a small village lighted on a public-house such as Walton has described, where the brick floor was swept clean; where the walls were stuck round with ballads; where the sheets smelt of lavender; and where a blazing fire, a cup of

good ale, and a dish of trouts fresh from the neighbouring brook, were to be procured at a small charge. Indeed, it is certain that, on the whole, the improvement of our houses of public entertainment has not kept pace with the improvement of our roads and of our conveyances. Nor is this strange; for it is evident that, all other circumstances being equal, the inns will be best where the means of locomotion are worst. A hundred and sixty years ago, a person who came up to the capital from a remote county generally required by the way twelve or fifteen meals, and lodging for five or six nights. If he was a great man, he expected the meals and lodging to be comfortable, and even luxurious. At present we fly from York or Exeter to London by the light of a single winter's day. At present, therefore, a traveller seldom interrupts his journey merely for the sake of rest or refreshment. The consequence is, that hundreds of excellent inns have fallen into utter decay. In a short time, no good houses of this description will be found, except at places where strangers are likely to be detained by business or pleasure.—Abridged from Macaulay's History of England.

THE GROWTH AND SIZE OF CITIES.

THE line of the gentle Cowper, "God made the country and man made the town," has passed into a proverb. When it is intended to mean, as the poet himself explains it, that the contemplation of Nature's charms-the groves and fields, the song of the thrush and the nightingale—are more fitted to exercise a beneficial influence on the mind than the artificial amusements of the town, this adage expresses an unquestionable truth. But the additional ideas of the poet,-that the town, as compared with the country, is unfavourable to the progress of virtue, and that the congregating of men in large cities is something like a thwarting of the designs of Providence in regard to them, however fine they may be as poetical fancies, are not in accordance with what experience teaches. A very slight glance at the page of history, whether sacred or secular, will show how important is the part

that towns have played in advancing the best interests of man. Look at the earliest propagators of Christianity. What places did the divinely inspired apostles select as the summits on which to light the first beacon-fires of divine truth? The names of Jerusalem, Antioch, Athens, Corinth, and Rome, rise up before us in answer. During the middle ages, commercial activity and individual freedom were preserved in a few cities, when they had disappeared from all other parts of the continent of Europe. In the great struggle for civil and religious liberty in our country in the seventeenth century, the towns, for the most part, ranged themselves on the side of freedom. In our own times they have become more than ever the centres of activity, intelligence, and combined action for religious and philanthropic ends; so that, more than even in the past, the history of the world will become identified with that of its large towns.

It is only in recent times that we have become familiarized with the sudden rising of large towns. In earlier periods they grew much more slowly, and the causes of their formation were, for the most part, two-fold. The establishment of a church was very commonly the commencement. This will at once explain the

reason why so many places in England begin or end with the word church, and in Scotland with kirk. In a similar manner we get a glimpse of our country's history from such terminations as minster, so common in English towns, and derived from monasterium, a religious house; and from such prefixes as kil, in Kilmarnock, Kilpatrick, &c., kil signifying a cell or chapel. In this way the origin of more than eighty towns and villages in Britain has been ascertained.

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But the warlike habits of our ancestors had fully as much to do with the establishment of towns as the spread of religion. castle or stronghold was often the centre around which a town was formed. The dread of robbers and marauders drove the baron's retainers and dependants to seek security in the immediate vicinity of the castle. The terminations castle, caster, or chester, (a fortified place,) and in several cases burgh, (one of the earliest meanings of which is a stronghold,) indicate an origin of this kind.

But it is when we come to the time of our manufacturing and

commercial greatness, and to the extension of our colonies, that we witness the spectacle of great cities rising with a rapidity truly marvellous. As the cotton trade in Manchester and Glasgow has increased, so has the population of these cities, with a regularity that is somewhat striking. We find almost the same results if we compare the increase in Leeds with the progress of the woollen trad?, in Dundee with that in linen, and in Birmingham with that in iron. From the beginning of the seventeenth century Manchester has been engaged in the cotton manufacture. Its supplies of material were at first drawn, strange to say, from Cyprus and Smyrna. Its annual supply of raw cotton at the end of the seventeenth century would now scarcely meet the demand of twenty-four hours. It had then a population of 6,000, and contained neither a printing-press nor a coach. It possesses now more than one hundred printing presses, and supports twenty coach-makers.-The first house in Leeds was built in the seventeenth century. The population in the time of Charles II. was below 7,000; it is now nearly 200,000.-In 1685 the manufacturers of Birmingham boasted that their trade was so extensive that their goods were sent over to Ireland! The population was then 4,000; it is now more than fifty times that amount. In the beginning of the eighteenth century Birmingham did not contain a single bookseller's shop. On market day a bookseller -Michael Johnson, the father of the lexicographer—came over from Lichfield and opened a book-stall for a few hours!

At the time of the Reformation, Glasgow had a population of about 2,000. By 1660, a century after, it had increased to 14,000. In another century it had doubled, and by the beginning of the present century it had reached 83,000. Thus in about one hundred and fifty years it had increased more than 80,000. But when the cotton trade began, it advanced by the same amount in twenty-five years. During the first thirty years of the present century the population increased two and a half times, and the number of cotton spindles in use three times; during the second thirty years the population has nearly doubled, and the number of spindles has been almost trebled.—In Dundee the correspondence between the increase in population and in the staple manufacture is still more striking.