saw
the infancy, if not the birth, of that teeming trade; for it is not to every
man that it is given to behold the commencement of such a future as seems
promised to gloomy, swampy Great Grimsby.

At Great Grimsby we are in a position to take a large choice of routes. We
may go back to London by Louth, famous for its church, spire, and comical
coat of arms; {209} by Boston and Peterborough; or take our way through the
ancient city of Lincoln to Nottingham and the Midland Counties, where the
famous forest of Robin Hood and the Dukeries invite us to study woodland
scenery and light-land farming; but on this occasion we shall make our way to
Sheffield, over a line which calls for no especial remark--the most noticeable
station being East Retford, for the franchise of which Birmingham long and
vainly strove. What delay might have taken place in our political changes if
the M.P.'s of East Retford had been transferred to Birmingham in 1826, it is
curious to consider.

SHEFFIELD.

The approach to Sheffield from Lincolnshire is through a defile, and over a
long lofty viaduct, which affords a full view of the beautiful amphitheatre
of hills by which it is surrounded.

The town is situated in a valley, on five small streams--one the "Sheaf,"
giving the name of Sheffield, in the southern part of the West Riding of
Yorkshire, only six miles from Derbyshire.

The town is very ugly and gloomy; it is scarcely possible to say that there
is a single good street, or an imposing or interesting public
building,--shops, warehouses and factories, and mean houses run zigzagging up
and down the slopes of the tongues of land, or peninsulas, that extend into
the rivers, or rather streamlets, of the Porter, the Riveling, the Loxley,
the Sheaf, and the Don. Almost all the merchants and manufacturers reside in
the suburbs, in villas built of white stone on terraces commanding a lovely
prospect.

The picturesqueness, the wild solitude of the immediate neighbourhood of
Sheffield, amply compensates for the grimy gloom in which the useful and
disagreeable hardware trade is carried on. All around, except where the Don
opens a road to Doncaster, great hills girdle it in, some of which at their
summit spread out into heath-covered moorlands, where the blackcock used
lately to crow. Almost in sight of the columns of factory smoke, others of
the surrounding ridge are wood-crowned, and others saddlebacked and turfed;
so that a short walk