From London to York a few years ago, ten or twelve coaches gave life and animation to all the places they passed through. Their hotels and commercial rooms were filled at every blowing of the guard's horn; tradespeople looked out from behind their counters with a smile, as, with a dart and rattle, the four thoroughbred greys pulled the well-known fast coach up the street, loaded inside and out. They became proud of their Tally-ho, or Phenomenon; they got their newspapers and parcels "with accuracy and despatch," and enjoyed the natural advantages of their situation. Now the case is altered; a two-horse coach, or perhaps an omnibus, jumbles occasionally to the railway station, and the traveller complains that it takes him longer time to go the ten or twelve miles across the country than all the rest of the journey. Then he grumbles at the inconvenience of changing his mode of conveyance, and only revisits the out-of-the-way place when he cannot avoid it. A person settling in one of these towns twenty years ago, establishing trade, buying or building premises, in the belief that, however business may alter from other causes, his geographical position must, at all events, continue unchanged, must be as much astonished as was Macbeth at the migratory propensities of Birnam forest, when he perceives that towns a hundred miles down the road have actually walked between him and London; get their town parcels much earlier, and have digested and nearly forgotten their newspaper, while he is waiting in a fever of expectation to know whether rums is much riz or sugars is greatly fell. He calls for a branch railway to put him on equal terms; but a vast hill, perhaps, rises between him and the main line--it would cost forty thousands pounds a mile--he must bore an enormous tunnel, and fill up a prodigious valley, and the united wealth of all the shopkeepers in the town would fall far short of the required half million. He sinks down in sheer despair, or takes to drinking with the innkeeper, who has already had an attack of _delirium tremens_, gives up the _Times_ newspaper for the _Weekly Despatch_, and thinks Mr Frost a much injured character, and Rebecca a Welsh Hampden. The railway has touched his pocket, and the iron has entered into his soul. He feels as if he lived at the Land's-End, or had emigrated to the back woods of America. All the world goes at a gallop, and he creeps. Finally, he is removed to Hanwell, and endeavours to persuade Dr Conolly that he is one of Stephenson's engines, and goes hissing and spurting in fierce imitation of Rapid or Infernal. And all this is the natural consequence of having settled in an ancient city inaccessible to rails. A list could easily be made out that would astonish any one who had not reflected on the subject before, of cities and towns which must yield up their relative rank to more aspiring neighbourhoods on whom the gods of steam and iron have smiled. It will be sufficient to