this work his _family_, for there are six full-grown octavo volumes,
which would occupy a respectable portion of any library table.

* * * * *

Dunwich is a market town in the hundred of Blything, Suffolk, three and
a half miles from Southwold, and one hundred from London. It was once an
important, opulent, and commercial city, but is now a mean village. It
was also an episcopal see, but William I. transferred the see to
Thetford, and thence to Norwich. Dunwich stands on a cliff of
considerable height commanding an extensive view of the German Ocean,
and we learn that its ruin is owing chiefly to the encroachments of the
sea. It is a poor, desolate place, as the cut implies. Mr. Shoberl, in
the _Beauties of England and Wales_, tells us "seated upon a hill
composed of loam and sand of a loose texture, on a coast destitute of
rocks, it is not surprising that its building shall have successively
yielded to the impetuosity of the billows, breaking against, and easily
undermining the foot of the precipice." Certainly not, say we; and it is
equally un-surprising that seven out of its eight parishes having been
long ago destroyed, their political consequence should not exist beyond
their extermination. Mr. Oldfield, whom we remember to have often met,
was a man of jocose turn, and he has not spared Dunwich his whip of
humour, for, speaking of its gradual decay by the sea, he says--"the
encroachment that is still making, (1816) will probably, in a few years,
oblige the constituent body to betake themselves to a boat, whenever the
king's writ shall summon them to the exercise of their elective
functions; as the necessity of adhering to _forms_, in the farcical
solemnity of borough elections, is not to be dispensed with."

We must be brief with its representative and political history. "Out