is lowered in its tone, both of heart-wholeness, boldness, and affection, by the harsh times and harsh measures that have passed over every district, even the most favored; or why all these emigrations, and why all these parish-unions? What, then, is not the English peasant what he was? If I went among them where I used to go, should I not find the same merry groups seated among the sheaves, or under the hedgerows, full of laughter, and full of droll anecdotes of all the country round? Should I not hear of the farmer who never wrote but one letter in his life, and that was to a gentleman forty miles off; who, on opening it, and not being able to puzzle out more than the name and address of his correspondent, mounted his horse in his vexation, and rode all the way to ask the farmer to read the letter himself; and he could not do it--could not read his own writing? Should I not hear Jonathan Moore, the stout old mower, rallied on his address to the bull, when it pursued him till he escaped into a tree? How Jonathan, sitting across a branch, looked down with the utmost contempt on the bull, and endeavored to convince him that he was a bully and a coward? "My! what a vaporing coward art thou! Where's the fairness, where's the equalness of the match? I tell thee, my heart's good enough; but what's my strength to thine?" Should I not once more hear the hundred-times-told story of Jockey Dawes, and the man who sold him his horse? Should I not hear these, and scores of such anecdotes, that show the simple life of the district, and yet have more hearty merriment in them than much finer stories in much finer places? Hard times and hard measures may have, quenched some of the ancient hilarity of the English peasant, and struck a silence into lungs that were wont to "crow like chanticleer;" yet I will not believe but that, in many a sweet and picturesque district, on many a brown moor-land, in many a far-off glen and dale of our wilder and more primitive districts, where the peasantry are almost the sole inhabitants--whether shepherds, laborers, hewers of wood, or drawers of waters-- The ancient spirit is not dead, that homely and loving groups gather round evening fires, beneath low and smoky rafters, and feel that they have labor and care enough, as their fathers had, but that they have the pride of homes, hearts, and sympathies still. Let England take care that these are the portion of the English peasant, and he will never cease to show himself the noblest peasant on the face of the earth. Is he not that, in his patience with penury with him, and old age, and the union before him? Is he not that, when his landlord has given him his sympathy? When he has given him an ALLOTMENT--who so grateful, so industrious, so provident, so contented, and so respectable? The English peasant has in his nature all the elements of the English character. Give him ease, and who so readily pleased; wrong him, and who so desperate in his rage?