'The Dean's parsonage is surrounded with fens, and you are teased beyond expression by the gnats. When we got here, the Dean's butler came to your father with a pair of leather stockings [the dress of that day was breeches and silk stockings] to draw on so as to protect his legs, which in hot weather [it was the month of June] is dreadful. Besides this, the beds have a machine covered with a silk net, which lets down after you are in bed, and covers you all over. Without this, there could be no sleeping; for, notwithstanding these precautions, we were most miserably stung.' Were anyone to light upon this passage in an isolated form nowadays, he would conclude without hesitation that it was an extract from some Indian diary--the use of the word 'natives' completing the resemblance. Here we have the Indian plague of mosquitoes existing in full severity in England, and also the use of mosquito-nets around the beds at night, exactly as in India. Nay, there is still another point of resemblance--namely, in the use which the Cambridgeshire 'natives' made of the cow-dung: drying and using it as fuel, as is the common practice of the natives of our Eastern Empire. In the letters which relate to the events of the Rebellion of 1745, and the march of the rebels into the heart of England, we have ample proof alike of the general ignorance of places now well known to every one, and of a want of the means of information in regard even to the great events taking place in other parts of the kingdom, which read strangely in these times when every morning we can know from the newspapers the very way the wind is blowing in every quarter of our island. The Highland army marches to and fro in its daring enterprise, although several separate armies (Wade's, Ligonier's, the Duke of Cumberland's, &c.) are on foot to meet or catch them: indeed, as we read in these letters, 'more troops are in England than ever was known before,' yet notwithstanding, the hardy light-moving Highlanders get through them all into the heart of England, and quite as easily back again. We cannot help thinking that the English generals had not much stomach for their work. They were astonished and something more by the sudden and total rout of Sir John Cope's army, and by the daring and marvellous rapidity of the rebels' march; and it must be allowed that even in their retreat, the Highlanders gave a good account of any force that tried to bar their passage. As the noble editor incidentally observes, General Wade (who was posted in the north of England to stop the southward march of the rebels) only became famous after the rebellion was over; and his marching and counter-marching to catch the rebels was of a very helpless character indeed.