Our host regaled us after dinner with a volunteer dessert of some very delicious pears, which grew in very great profusion in his garden. From this place to Soestdyke, one of the two country palaces of the king allowed by the constitution, the roads are very sandy, and we were obliged to take four horses. In the neighbourhood of Naarden the country is covered with buckwheat; which, after we had advanced about four English miles, began to undulated, and present a very beautiful appearance. The many spires and chimnies of villages peeping above the trees in all directions, the small divisions of land, the neat and numerous little farm houses which abounded on all sides of us, presented a picture of industry and prosperity seldom seen in any other country. The sound wisdom displayed by the Dutch in preventing the overgrowth and consolidation of farms, cannot fail to strike the observation of the traveller, and particularly an English one. By this admirable policy, Holland is enabled to maintain its comparatively immense population, under the great disadvantage of a soil far from being genial; hence it is but little burthened with paupers, and hence the abundance of its provision. In England, on the contrary, the farmers, grown opulent by availing themselves of the calamities of unproductive seasons, and consequent scarcity, have for many years past omitted no opportunity, by grasping at every purchase, to enlarge their estates, and hence a portion of land which, if separated into small allotments, would give food and a moderate profit, to _many_ families, is now monopolized by _one_; and those who ought to be farmers on a small scale, are now obliged to toil as labourers in the fields of their employer, at wages that are not sufficient, if their families are numerous, to prevent the necessity of their applying for parochial aid. If some legislative provision could be effected to restrain this monstrous and growing evil, by that ardent and cordial lover of his country, and particularly of the lower classes of society, Mr. Whitbread, who has laudably in parliament applied his enlightened mind to ameliorate the condition of the poor, it would be one of the most beneficial measures that ever received the fiat of the British senate. I do not repine to see the farmers, or any other respectable class of men, receive and enjoy the honest fruits of their own enterprize and industry: I could see with less regret all those decent and frugal habits of the farm which once characterized the yeomanry of England superseded by the folly and fashion of the gay and dissipated; the farmer drinking his bottle of port instead of some cheap salubrious ale; his daughter, no longer brought up in the dairy, returning from a boarding-school, to mingle the sounds of her harp with the lowing of cows, or reluctantly going to the market of the adjoining town, tricked out in awkward, misplaced finery, with a goose in one hand