death-like single streets. Each possesses two pumps, three hotels, ten
shops, fifteen beer-houses, a beadle, and a market-place.

Indeed, the town population of the county reckons for nothing when the
importance of the county is discussed, with the exception, as before
said, of the assize town, which is also a cathedral city. Herein a
clerical aristocracy, which is certainly not without its due weight. A
resident bishop, a resident dean, an archdeacon, three or four resident
prebendaries, and all their numerous chaplains, vicars, and
ecclesiastical satellites, do make up a society sufficiently powerful
to be counted as something by the county squirearchy. In other respects
the greatness of Barsetshire depends wholly on the landed powers.

Barsetshire, however, is not now so essentially one whole as it was
before the Reform Bill divided it. There is in these days an East
Barsetshire, and there is a West Barsetshire; and people conversant
with Barsetshire doings declare that they can already decipher some
difference of feeling, some division of interests. The eastern moiety
of the county is more purely Conservative than the western; there is,
or was, a taint of Peelism in the latter; and then, too, the residence
of two such great Whig magnates as the Duke of Omnium and the Earl De
Courcy in that locality in some degree overshadows and renders less
influential the gentlemen who live near them.

It is to East Barsetshire that we are called. When the division above
spoken of was first contemplated, in those stormy days in which gallant
men were still combatting reform ministers, if not with hope, still
with spirit, the battle was fought by none more bravely than by John
Newbold Gresham of Greshamsbury, the member for Barsetshire. Fate,
however, and the Duke of Wellington were adverse, and in the following