ed.
Manchester and Norwich will be more remote from each other than Paris and
Marseilles. In place of a railway station there will be a swamp, and
instead of a turnpike gate, a wood. Mighty towns and spacious cities
will shrink into obscure villages; smiling and fertile districts relapse
into original barrenness; kinsfolk and acquaintance be put nearly out of
sight. There are no mails; there is no penny post; the last new novel
will not reach you. The Bishop of Exeter may become a cardinal, or
Colonel Sibthorpe commander of the forces, six weeks before you hear of
their promotion. The union between Scotland and England will be again as
good as divorced by distance and difficulty of transit. Your fish from
Billingsgate will be ancient, and your tailor will be sure to disappoint
you of your mourning or your marriage suit. Your commodious carpet-bag
must be exchanged for a trunk capacious enough to contain all your
"household stuff," except the kitchen range; your utmost speed will
amount to difficult stages of six miles an hour; you will journey in
terror; and you will arrive at your inn with the fixed determination of
never again quitting your home.

We will conclude our rambles over the old roads of four continents with
the words of one whose wisdom was not surpassed by his wit, although his
wit surpassed most of the wisdom of his contemporaries. "It is of some
importance," says Sydney Smith, (it is wrong to add 'the Reverend,' for
no one says _Mr._ William Shakspeare or _Mr._ John Milton,) "at what
period a man is born. A young man alive at this period hardly knows to
what improvement of human life he has been introduced; and I would bring
before his notice the changes which have taken place in England since I
began to breathe the breath of life--a period amounting to seventy years.
Gas was unknown. I groped about the streets of London in all but utter
darkness of a twinkling oil lamp, under the protection of watchmen in
their grand climacteric, and exposed to every species of degradation and
insult. I have been nine hours in sailing from Dover to Calais, before
the invention of steam. It took me nine hours to go from Taunton to Bath
before the invention of railroads, and I now go in six hours from Taunton
to London! In going from Taunton to Bath I suffered between ten thousand
and twelve thousand severe contusions, before stone-breaking Macadam was
born. I paid fifteen pounds in a single year for repairs