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VI behalf of the Squire's pheasants. When mill-dams give way during the rains, honest Mat Brambles do not discover, in consequence their affinity to devoted Humphrey Clinkers: there is merely a half-hour's stoppage of the train, barren of incident, save that the male passengers get out to smoke, while the ladies sit still. And as for the frequent tragedy of railway collision accidents, it has but little of the classic about it, and is more appropriately recorded in newspaper columns, struck off for the passing day, than in pages of higher pretensions, written for to-morrow. England has become a greatly less fertile field of adventure than when, according to the Angliæ Metropolis for 1690, the "weekly wagon of Richard Hamersly the carrier" formed the sole conveyance, for passengers who did not ride horses of their own, between Brumegham and the capital.

But though the age of personal adventure has to a certainty gone by, the age which has succeeded is scarcely less fertile in incident in a larger scale, and of a greatly more remarkable character. It would seem as if the same change which has abridged the area of the country had given condensation to its history. We are not only travelling, but also, as a people, living fast; and see revolutions which were formerly the slow work of ages matured in a few brief seasons. Opinion, during the last twenty years, has accomplished, though in a reverse order, the cycle of the two previous centuries. From the Reformation to the Revolution, the ecclesiastical reigned paramount in men's minds: from the Revolution to the breaking out of the first American war,—a quiet time in the main,—