efface their relics from its walls; the churchyard surrounding its base,
with undulating hillocks of mortality clad in long, rich grass, where
lie, half hidden, the old grey monumental stones that can no longer tell
the tale of bygone generations; the more modern sculpture, and the
homely grave-rail standing sentry over the last resting-place of the
poor, while some venerable tree overshadows the ground, where it has
probably stood since the first stone of that modest temple was laid by
our forefathers--all these are so endearingly English. The broad, rich
fields, the hedgerow boundaries and stately lines of vigorous trees
guarding their native soil; and above all, the manly bearing of a bold,
an independent, and a peaceful peasantry, the humblest of whom knows
that his cottage is a chartered sanctuary, protected alike from the
aggressions of civil and of ecclesiastical tyranny--these, too, are
English, sacredly English; and they leave upon the heart that has once
expanded among them, an impress never to be effaced. Among national
reformers, what a noble position would he occupy who should prevail upon
our monied countrymen to exchange their habits of periodical vagrancy
into popish lands, for a sojourn in the moral districts of their own
Protestant England, in the confidence that the climate which agreed with
their fathers from generation to generation--as the dates and ages
decipherable on our monuments will testify--would not annihilate them;
and that the sphere in which God had seen good to place them was that
wherein he purposed them to move, to exert their influence, and to
occupy for his glory, with the talents committed to their charge.

I have told you how books of imagination had supplanted the Bible in my
esteem; those books now, in a measure, yielded to the irresistible
attraction of outdoor amusement; but my mind was so abundantly stored
with the glittering tinsel of unsanctified genius, as it shone forth in
the pages of my beloved poets, that no room was left for a craving after