"Not I," said the coachman, "I minds my horses, and they doesn't talk to me."

The only way in which we can improve upon the worthy coachman's description of his passengers will be by passing from the form of narrative to that of dialogue, which we shall beg leave to do whenever it may suit our purpose.

Allansley. How many miles did you say it was to Capel Cerig? Clanvoy. About fifty, I believe; and five more to the foot of Snowdon.

Larndon. Is all the road interesting?

Clanvoy. All except about five miles on this side of Cenniogge. Larndon. That then will be the time for yielding to the soporific influence of the coach. But I depend upon you, Clanvoy, to point out every thing worth notice, that I may not have the trouble of searching for it, but merely the pleasure of consenting to admire.

Clanvoy. There spoke the true spirit of the foreign tourist! The man certainly fancies himself in a travelling carriage; the sun broiling the sky to a cinder; the voiturier going at the rate of about four miles an hour; the road becoming more endless at every step, and the nauseous foreign diet producing all kind of anxieties. Pray what objects of interest would your indolency choose to have particularly pointed out?

Allansley. The spirit of enterprise and of discovery seems to be dying away in Larndon, now that we are approaching the object of our journey.

Clanvoy. O no, it is only the passing cloud, and the remote effect of his journey through the swamp of Martigny," where the unwholesome air chokes your admiration of the scenery.

Larndon. Very true: it is nothing more. What are those large distant woods that appear in two or three ranges over the hills?

Clanvoy. They are the grounds of Chirk castle, a fine old baronial place, and a good deal noticed in Welsh history. The lower part of the park is full of magnificent oaks: the upper part, though it has too flat an outline, is very high, and has an air of grandeur, from the extent of wood, which is chiefly Scotch fir. You ought some time or other to see that place, for it is much finer to look from than to look to. The whole style of Chirk castle, as to situation and every thing else, is so like Croft castle, in Herefordshire, that if you ever were there, you already have a good notion of Chirk. In the centre of those woods you may see the tops of some of the towers, which, if they were more lofty, would be very conspicuous in that situation.

NO. II.

* In the Valais, between Geneva and the Simplon road.

CC

Larndon. That castle, I think, belongs to the Myddelton Biddulph family.

Clanvoy. It does. Harrison, of Chester, has lately done some good Gothic vaulting there.

Allansley. What? the architect of that beautiful doric entrance in Chester castle?

Clanvoy. Yes, Allansley; the very man; who, I dare say, by this time, repents of what he did there; although, in material, design, and execution, a great part of it is first-rate. An ancient English fortress ought not to give way even to the Parthenon itself.

Larndon. Are we still in Shropshire?

Clanvoy. Yes; we enter Denbighshire on crossing the Ceiriog, a river between us and Chirk.

Larndon. What canal is this that we are crossing?

Clanvoy. The Ellesmere canal, of which you will see a good deal more presently. It is carried over the vale of Ceiriog by one very fine aqueduct, and over that of Llangollen by another still more magnificent. Between us and Chirk there is a deep valley, which has been, I think, rather awkwardly filled up with soil, in order to improve the road. That embankment is more like the contrivance of an earlier age than the present, but I suppose it was found the cheapest. You see a church-tower in the direction of the road. It belongs to the village of Chirk, about five miles from Oswestry.

Allansley. Whose place is that, a good way off on the right, a sort of old English house, among the trees?

Clanvoy. Brinkynalt, Lord Dungannon's: a beautiful house. and situation. I think this is the only glimpse of it that you catch along this new line of road.

Larndon. O really we are coming to something like fine scenery. What rich woods! and there is the aqueduct you spoke of! What a beautiful turn of the road this is that brings us at once into sight of this valley.

Allansley. Chirk aqueduct, I suppose. It is a very fine object, indeed; more like some Roman work than modern English. And there are sufficient weather-stains or water-stains upon the different parts, to give it an appearance of antiquity.

Clanvoy. A beautiful situation adds much to a fine work of art. Those meadows over which the arcade is built are seen between the piers, winding away into the woody bosom of the hills. The steep sides of the vale are also useful in preventing too large a space of solid wall. As it is, you see those ten arches are all equal, and the piers likewise. Allansley, did you ever see a drawing of Alcantara, the aqueduct that supplies Lisbon with water?

Coachman. Now, gentlemen, if you please.

Allansley. I don't think I ever did.-Are we to walk up this bill?

Clanvoy. As a matter of course. Now, if you'll get down, I'll follow you.

[They get down.]

Larndon. I like the style of this aqueduct exceedingly. There is in it a grand simplicity, which I think is a great merit. Is it large? How far are we from it? A quarter of a mile?

Clanvoy. I suppose so. It is about six hundred feet long, and sixty-five feet high. What the width is I have heard, but I forget. At one end is an immense tunnel. Of course there is a difference between an aqueduct for canal-boats, and one that is only to convey water for drinking, as is the case in the Lisbon Alcantara, which I understand is, in fact, a series of aqueducts, interrupted bere and there by hills. But the arcade of Alcantara is composed of plain lancet Gothic arches, upon lofty piers; and I confess I should have preferred that more solemn style to the round arch, however classical; or, if a round arch must be had, the Norman style would have been more appropriate.

Allansley. Ah! I know how bigoted you now are to the monkish orders of architecture, or rather to the monkish disorders of architecture. Yet there was a time

Clanvoy. Well, my dear Allansley, what would you insinuate respecting the time that was?

Allansley. Merely that you held but one opinion respecting the various branches of Greek civilization.

Clanvoy. We are now in Wales; in the land of triads. I will give you a triad, which, you may take my word for it, was made in a bardic assembly, before the introduction of the alphabet: "There are three things in which the Greeks have excelled the moderns; 1st, in statuary; 2dly, in dress; 3dly, in versification."

Larndon. Well, for my part, I respect the Grecian as much as the Gothic architect. The two styles are both very good, and I hope they will flourish equally.

Clanvoy. That cannot be ; but perhaps for some time they both may flourish. The Grecian orders have reached their perfection; the styles of gothic have not. The perfection of an inferior system will sometimes take precedence of a better one, which is yet imperfect.

Larndon. What's that? Say that once again.

Clanvoy. An inferior system, if perfect in itself, may sometimes. take precedence of a better one, that has not yet reached perfec

tion.

Larndon. Very true.

Clanvoy. Turn round, and look at this embankment: it begins from that bridge over the Ceiriog, and gradually rises up here, having destroyed a great extent of land. But what upon earth brought the grand Irish road through Chirk? It ought certainly to have gone on the other side of that aqueduct. Now let us take to our conveyance again, having got over this hill, which, after all, s not much lowered by these late alterations.

[They resume their seats.]

Allansley. I see there are coal-pits in this neighbourhood.

Clanvoy. A stripe of coal runs all along this part of the Welsh border, and breaks off, or perhaps I had better say bends off, between Oswestry and Llanymynech, taking the direction of Church-Stretton and Ludlow. Limestone is frequently found without any coal near it, on the continent; but I believe coal is never found except in the neighbourhood of limestone. The coal of this neighbourhood is conveyed by the Ellesmere canal as far as Newtown, in Montgomeryshire, about thirty miles from Oswestry.

Larndon. How very flat those hills are! They put me in mind of some hills on the road between Lyons and Paris, that rise imperceptibly from the plain, and then suddenly dip down in an opposite direction.

Clanvoy. I remember those very hills that you are speaking of; and I dare say they are of limestone, like these; and, like these, too, they form the boundaries of a mountainous region, which is said to be an exception to the general dulness of the French landscape.

Larndon. But the mountains of central France are known to be volcanic, and I never understood that of North Wales.

Clanvoy. A geologist in the present age, or, you may say, in the present state of that interesting science, will always be careful to avoid the subject of North Wales. The strata of the Welsh border are well understood; but I dare say you remember how Buckland complains of the irregularities that abound in trap-rocks. Now this trap rock (worthily so called, for it is indeed a trap for the geologist,) is the very substance of which the first-rate Welsh mountains are composed. It seems to obey no fixed laws of stratification; it may appear almost any where, and in any form; sometimes it assumes a columnar basaltic appearance; in other places you will find it of a slaty character. Sometimes the question arises whether the peculiar position of a certain fragment is natural or druidical; and, because it is trap rock, the matter still remains undecided. Yet the two chief collections of trap rocks that I have seen are almost fac similes of each other. Mag❜llicud

dy's Reeks, at Killarney, which are considered the highest mountains in Ireland, are so like the summits of Snowdon, in their general appearance and arrangement, that I never shall forget my astonishment when the clouds rolled off Carràn Túal,* and I beheld an Irish portrait of the Wyddva. This eccentric and puzzling material is inferior to none in the grandeur of its formation. The highest alpine summits are sublime things, and the graceful curve which they all have is a miraculous beauty, considering the extreme hardness of granite. But, although the Alps are about five times as high as the British mountains, the grandeur of style in these last is really so impressive, that you can hardly wish for greater elevation.

Larndon. I shall ask Buckland, the next time I see him, to give me some account of the geology of North Wales.

Clanvoy. You will ask in vain. He will tell you candidly he cannot explain the phenomena that are met with here. The only approach to any thing like a theory that I ever heard from him respecting Snowdonia was, an idea that there might have been volcanoes here at the time of the deluge. But he supports the notion of tropical plants and animals having once flourished in this climate, or rather that this climate was once considerably warmer than at present.

Larndon. Buckland is a man of great research, great activity: he is one of the best, if not the very best, of all geological professors.

Clanvoy. His powers of illustration, and his talents for public lecturing, are very first-rate; but

Larndon. O you detractor! “but”?

What do you mean by you

Clanvoy. His theories, and not his only, but those of most other geological writers, have melted into air before the arguments of Granville Penn.

Larndon. Granville Penn? I never heard of him as a writer on geology.

Clanvoy. I am afraid that the opposite party have rather studiously concealed the name and the book of their antagonist. Yet frequently, when I least expect it, I meet with men that have considered the subject, who consider Granville Penn's work as more satisfactory than any other treatise upon geology.

Larndon. What is the title of his book?

Clanvoy. "A Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mo

*The chief summit of the Reeks.

The chief summit of Snowdon.