the county. Dorchester is indeed a pleasant agreeable
town to live in, and where I thought the people seemed less divided into
factions and parties than in other places; for though here are divisions,
and the people are not all of one mind, either as to religion or
politics, yet they did not seem to separate with so much animosity as in
other places. Here I saw the Church of England clergyman, and the
Dissenting minister or preacher drinking tea together, and conversing
with civility and good neighbourhood, like Catholic Christians and men of
a Catholic and extensive charity. The town is populous, though not
large; the streets broad, but the buildings old and low. However, there
is good company, and a good deal of it; and a man that coveted a retreat
in this world might as agreeably spend his time and as well in Dorchester
as in any town I know in England.

The downs round this town are exceeding pleasant, and come up on, every
side, even to the very streets' end; and here it was that they told me
that there were six hundred thousand sheep fed on the downs within six
miles of the town--that is, six miles every way, which is twelve miles in
diameter, and thirty-six miles in circumference. This, I say, I was
told--I do not affirm it to be true; but when I viewed the country round,
I confess I could not but incline to believe it.

It is observable of these sheep that they are exceeding fruitful, the
ewes generally bringing two lambs, and they are for that reason bought by
all the farmers through the east part of England, who come to Burford
Fair in this country to buy them, and carry them into Kent and Surrey
eastward, and into Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire
north; even our Banstead Downs in Surrey, so famed for good mutton, is
supplied from this place. The grass or herbage of these downs is full of
the sweetest and the most aromatic plants, such as nourish the sheep to a
strange degree; and the sheep's dung, again, nourishes that herbage to a
strange degree; so that the valleys are rendered extremely fruitful by
the washing of the water in hasty showers from off these hills.

An eminent instance of this is seen at Amesbury, in Wiltshire, the next
county to this; for it is the same thing in proportion over this whole
county. I was told that at this town there was a meadow on the bank of
the River Avon, which runs thence to Salisbury, which was let for 12
pounds a year per acre for the grass only.