place, and therefore I omit any discourse of it here.

Shaftesbury is also on the edge of this county, adjoining to
Wiltshire and Dorsetshire, being fourteen miles from Salisbury,
over that fine down or carpet ground which they call particularly
or properly Salisbury Plain. It has neither house nor town in view
all the way; and the road, which often lies very broad and branches
off insensibly, might easily cause a traveller to lose his way.
But there is a certain never-failing assistance upon all these
downs for telling a stranger his way, and that is the number of
shepherds feeding or keeping their vast flocks of sheep which are
everywhere in the way, and who with a very little pains a traveller
may always speak with. Nothing can be like it. The Arcadians'
plains, of which we read so much pastoral trumpery in the poets,
could be nothing to them.

This Shaftesbury is now a sorry town upon the top of a high hill,
which closes the plain or downs, and whence Nature presents you a
new scene or prospect--viz., of Somerset and Wiltshire--where it is
all enclosed, and grown with woods, forests, and planted hedge-
rows; the country rich, fertile, and populous; the towns and houses
standing thick and being large and full of inhabitants, and those
inhabitants fully employed in the richest and most valuable
manufacture in the world--viz., the English clothing, as well the
medley or mixed clothing as whites, as well for the home trade as
the foreign trade, of which I shall take leave to be very
particular in my return through the west and north part of
Wiltshire in the latter part of this work.

In my return to my western progress, I passed some little part of