"Then, Sir, for fear of a famine before they could get to the baiting-place, there were such baskets of plum-cake, Dutch gingerbread, Cheshire cheese, Naples biscuits, macaroons, neats' tongues, and cold boiled beef--and in case of sickness, such bottles of usquebagh, black cherry brandy, cinnamon-water, sack, tent, and strong beer, as made the old coach crack again; and for defence of this good cheer and my Lady's little pearl necklace, there was the family basket-hilt sword, the great Turkish scimitar, the old blunderbuss, a good bag of bullets, and a great horn of gunpowder." "Admirable." "Then for band-boxes, they were so bepiled up to Sir Francis's nose that he could only peep out at a chance hole with one eye, as if he were viewing the country through a perspective-glass." Sir John Vanbrugh, who wrote the above admirable account of a journey to London, was the grandson of a Protestant refugee from the Netherlands, and the son of a wealthy sugar-baker. Little is known of the history of his youth, or of that training which enabled him not only to become one of the most celebrated English architects, but also, in conjunction with Congreve, to produce some excellent comedies. As an architect, he designed Castle Howard and Blenheim; as a dramatist, his most successful plays were "The Relapse" and "The Provoked Wife," and the uncompleted "Journey to London," which was worked up by Colley Cibber into "The Provoked Husband." "The good of ancient times let others state; I think it lucky I was born so late." So wrote Sydney Smith, and it is a sentiment that all must concur in. The witty divine goes on to state:-- "A young man alive at this period hardly knows to what improvement of human life he has been introduced, and I would bring before his notice the following changes which have taken place in England since I first began to breathe in it the breath of life--a period amounting now to nearly seventy-three years. Gas was unknown. I groped about the streets of London in all but the utter darkness of a twinkling oil lamp, under the protection of watchmen in their grand climacteric, and exposed to every species of depredation and insult. I have been nine hours sailing from Dover to Calais before the invention of steam. It took me nine hours to go from Taunton to Bath before the invention of railroads, and I now go in six hours from London to Bath."