CHAPTER XXXIV. P. I.

MORAL INTEREST OF TOPOGRAPHICAL WORKS. LOCAL ATTACHMENT.

Let none our Author rudely blame
    Who from the story has thus long digrest;
But for his righteous pains may his fair fame
    For ever travel, whilst his ashes rest.
                                           SIR WILLILAM DAVENANT.

Reader, if thou carest little or nothing for the Yorkshire river Don and for the town of Doncaster, and for the circumstances connected with it, I am sorry for thee. My venerable friend the Doctor was of a different disposition. He was one who loved, like Southey

        ———uncontrolled, as in a dream
To muse upon the course of human things;
Exploring sometimes the remotest springs,
Far as tradition lends one guiding gleam;
Or following upon Thought's audacious wings
Into Futurity the endless stream.

He could not only find

    ———tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing,—1

but endeavoured to find all he could in them, and for that reason delighted to enquire into the history of places and of things, and to understand their past as well as their present state. The revolutions of a mansion house within his circuit were as interesting to him as those of the Mogul Empire; and he had as much satisfaction in being acquainted with the windings of a brook from its springs to the place where it fell into the Don, as he could have felt in knowing that the Sources of the Nile had been explored, or the course and termination of the Niger.

1 SHAKESPEAR.

Hear, Reader, what a journalist says upon rivers in the newest and most approved style of critical and periodical eloquence! He says, and he regarded himself no doubt with no small complacency while so saying,

“An acquaintance with” Rivers “well deserves to be erected into a distinct science. We hail Potamology with a cordial greeting, and welcome it to our studies, parlours, schools, reading-rooms, lecture-rooms, mechanics' institutes and universities. There is no end to the interest which Rivers excite. They may be considered physically, geographically, historically, politically, commercially, mathematically, poetically, pictorially, morally, and even religiously—In the world's anatomy they are its veins, as the primitive mountains, those mighty structures of granite, are its bones; they minister to the fertility of the earth, the purity of the air, and the health of mankind. They mark out nature's kingdoms and provinces, and are the physical dividers and subdividers of continents. They welcome the bold discoverer into the heart of the country, to whose coast the sea has borne his adventurous bark. The richest freights have floated on their bosoms, and the bloodiest battles have been fought upon their banks. They move the wheels of cotton mills by their mechanical power, and madden the souls of poets and painters by their picturesque splendor. They make scenery and are scenery, and land yields no landscape without water. They are the best vehicle for the transit of the goods of the merchant, and for the illustration of the maxims of the moralist. The figure is so familiar, that we scarcely detect a metaphor when the stream of life and the course of time flow on into the ocean of Eternity.”

Hear, hear, oh hear!

Udite—
Fiumi correnti, e rive,—
E voi—fontane vive! 2

Yet the person who wrote this was neither deficient in feeling, nor in power; it is the epidemic vice prevailing in an age of journals that has infected him. They who frame their style ad captandum fall into this vein, and as immediate effect is their object they are wise in their generation. The public to which they address themselves are attracted by it, as flies swarm about treacle.

2 GIUSTO DE' CONTE.

We are advanced from the Age of Reason to the Age of Intellect, and this is the current eloquence of that age!—let us get into an atmosphere of common sense.

Topographical pursuits, my Doctor used to say, tend to preserve and promote the civilization of which they are a consequence and a proof. They have always prospered in prosperous countries, and flourished most in flourishing times when there have been persons enough of opulence to encourage such studies, and of leisure to engage in them. Italy and the Low Countries therefore took the lead in this branch of literature; the Spaniards and Portugueze cultivated it in their better days; and beginning among ourselves with Henry 8th, it has been continued with encreasing zeal down to the present time.

Whatever strengthens our local attachments is favorable both to individual and national character. Our home,—our birth place,—our native land,—think for a while what the virtues are which arise out of the feelings connected with these words; and if thou hast any intellectual eyes thou wilt then perceive the connection between topography and patriotism.

Shew me a man who cares no more for one place than another, and I will shew you in that same person one who loves nothing but himself. Beware of those who are homeless by choice! You have no hold on a human being whose affections are without a tap-root. The laws recognize this truth in the privileges which they confer upon freeholders; and public opinion acknowledges it also, in the confidence which it reposes upon those who have what is called a stake in the country. Vagabond and rogue are convertible terms; and with how much propriety any one may understand who knows what are the habits of the wandering classes, such as gypsies, tinkers and potters.

The feeling of local attachment was possessed by Daniel Dove in the highest degree. Spurzheim and the crazyologists would have found out a bump on his head for its local habitation;—letting that quackery pass, it is enough for me to know that he derived this feeling from his birth as a mountaineer, and that he had also a right to it by inheritance, as one whose ancestors had from time immemorial dwelt upon the same estate. Smile not contemptuously at that word, ye, whose domains extend over more square miles than there were square roods upon his patrimony! To have held that little patrimony unimpaired, as well as unenlarged, through so many generations implies more contentment, more happiness, and a more uniform course of steadiness and good conduct, than could be found in the proudest of your genealogies!

The most sacred spot upon earth to him was his father's hearth-stead. Rhine, Rhone, Danube, Thames or Tyber, the mighty Ganges or the mightier Maranon, even Jordan itself, affected his imagination less than the Greta, or Wease as he was wont to call it, of his native fields; whose sounds in his boyhood were the first which he heard at morning and the last at night, and during so many peaceful and happy years made as it were an accompaniment to his solitary musings, as he walked between his father's house and his schoolmaster's, to and fro.

Next to that wild river Wease whose visible course was as delightful to the eye and ear, as its subterranean one was to the imagination, he loved the Don. He was not one of those refined persons who like to lessen their admiration of one object by comparing it with another. It entered as little into his mind to depreciate the Don because it was not a mountain stream, as it did into Corporal Trim's or Uncle Toby's to think the worse of Bohemia because it has no sea coast. What if it had no falls, no rapids or resting-places, no basins whose pellucid water might tempt Diana and the Oreades to bathe in it; instead of these the Don had beauties of its own, and utilities which give to such beauties when combined with them an additional charm. There was not a more pleasing object in the landscape to his eyes than the broad sail of a barge slowly moving between the trees, and bearing into the interior of England the produce of the Baltic, and of the East and West.

The place in the world which he loved best was Ingleton, because in that little peaceful village, as in his childhood it was, he had once known every body and every body had known him; and all his recollections of it were pleasurable, till time cast over them a softening but a pensive hue. But next to Ingleton he loved Doncaster.

And wherefore did he thus like Doncaster? For a better reason than the epigrammatist could give for not liking Dr. Fell, though perhaps many persons have no better than that epigrammatist had in this case, for most of their likings and dislikings. He liked it because he must have been a very unreasonable man if he had not been thankful that his lot had fallen there—because he was useful and respected there, contented, prosperous, happy; finally because it is a very likeable place, being one of the most comfortable towns in England: for it is clean, spacious, in a salubrious situation, well-built, well-governed, has no manufactures, few poor, a greater proportion of inhabitants who are not engaged in any trade or calling, than perhaps any other town in the kingdom, and moreover it sends no members to parliament.