Now, not a hundred paces from these seats there is a fine old church, with Norman door, and lancet east windows, and so on; and this, of course, has been duly patched, botched, plastered, and primmed up; and is kept as tidy as a new pin. For your English clergyman keeps his own stage properties, nowadays, as carefully as a poor actress her silk stockings. Well, all that, of course, is very fine; but, actually, the people go through the churchyard to the path on the hill-brow, making the new iron railing an excuse to pitch their dust-heaps, and whatever of worse they have to get rid of, crockery and the rest,—down over the fence among the primroses and violets to the river,—and the whole blessed shore underneath, rough sandstone rock throwing the deep water off into eddies among shingle, is one waste of filth, town-drainage, broken saucepans, tannin, and mill-refuse. The same morning I had to water my horses at the little village of Clapham, between Kirby and Settle. There is another exquisite rocky brook there; and an old bridge over it. I went down to the brook-side to see the bridge; and found myself instantly, of course, stopped by a dunghill,—and that of the vilest human sort; while, just on the other side of the road,—not twenty yards off,—were the new schools, with their orthodox Gothic belfry—all spick and span—and the children playing fashionably at hoop, round them, in a narrow paved yard—like debtor children in the Fleet, in imitation of the manners and customs of the West End. High over all, the Squire’s house, resplendent on the hillside, within sound alike of belfry, and brook. I got on here, to Bolton Bridge, the same day; and walked down to the Abbey in the evening, to look again at Turner’s subject of the Wharfe shore. If there is one spot in England, where human creatures pass or live, which one would expect to find, in spite of their foul existence, still clean—it is Bolton Park. But to my final and utter amazement, I had not taken two steps by the waterside at the loveliest bend of the river below the stepping-stones, before I found myself again among broken crockery, cinders, cockle-shells, and tinkers’ refuse;—a large old gridiron forming the principal point of effect and interest among the pebbles. The filth must be regularly carried past the Abbey, and across the Park, to the place. But doubtless, in Bolton Priory, amiable school teachers tell their little Agneses the story of the white doe;—and duly make them sing, in psalm tune, “As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks.”