D.'s,
Though sweet is the physic and simple the fees;
This, at least, you'll admit, as we dart from your view
That our vignette presents you with a sweet adieu!
A VISIT TO GLOUCESTER AND BERKELEY.
Sketches on the Mood--Singular Introduction to an old
Friend--A Tithe Cause tried--A strange Assemblage of
Witnesses--Traits of Character--Effects of the Farmers'
Success--An odd Cavalcade--Rejoicings at Berkeley.
~284~~The road from Cheltenham to Gloucester affords a good view of the
Cotswold and Stroudwater Hills, diversified by the vales of Evesham,
Gloucester, and Berkeley, bounded on the east by the Severn, and
presenting in many situations a very rich picturesque appearance. We
are not of the dull race who dwell on musty records and ancient
inscriptions, or travel through a county to collect the precise date
when the first stone of some now moss-crowned ruin was embedded in
the antique clay beneath. Let the dead sleep in peace; we are not
_anti-queer-ones_ enough to wish the mouldering reliques of our
ancestors arrayed in chronological order before our eyes, nor do we mean
to risk our merry lives in exploring the monastic piles and subterranean
vaults and passages of other times. No; our office is with the living,
with the enriched Gothic of modern courts, and the finished Corinthian
capitals of society, illustrating, as we proceed, with choice specimens
of the rustic and the grotesque; now laughing over our wine with the
Tuscan bacchanal, or singing a soft tale of love in the ear of some
chaste daughter of the composite order; ~285~~trifling perhaps a little
harmless badinage with a simple Ionic, or cracking a college joke with a
learned Doric; never troubling our heads, or those of our readers, about
the origin or derivation of these orders, whether they came from early
Greece or more accomplished Home; or be their progenitors of Saxon,
Norman, Danish, or of Anglo-Saxon character, we care not; 'tis ours
to depict them as they at present appear, leaving to the profound
topographers and compilers of county histories all that relates to the
black letter lore of long forgotten days.
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