In 1634, when the great and awful conflict in which many of the dearest interests of England were involved seemed as yet far distant, Sir William Brereton made a lengthened tour in Holland and the United Provinces, and in the following year he travelled over a great part of England, Scotland, and Ireland. On his return he wrote an account of his journeyings from the brief notes made on the way, and this journal, the original MS. of which is in the possession of Sir Philip de Malpas Grey Egerton, of Oulton, has been published by the Chetham Society. Singular to say, there is nothing in it to lead us to suppose that at that time the writer felt any interest in military affairs; nor is there any reference to the great political and religious questions which were then agitating the public mind in his own country, and in which it might naturally be supposed he would feel much concern. The narrative is, as Mr. Hawkins, the editor, expresses it, "a plain, unimpassioned statement of what he saw and observed. The beauties of nature never warm him into admiration; nor do the feelings, habits, or phenomena of the people, or the countries which he visited, seduce him into any philosophical investigation." He was not a deep thinker, and evidently looked at things from a purely matter of fact point of view; his observations are confined in a great measure to a description of what he saw and heard, and not unfrequently comparison is drawn between the places he visited and those of a kindred character in his own country, generally to the advantage of the latter. He describes pleasantly the "stately city of Rotterdam" and the "fair maiden town of Dort;" Schiedam he describes as a "dainty, sweet, pleasant town, larger than Namptwich," with "a delicate, spacious, market-place, a fine church, and a great channel walled on both sides with free-stone, running along the middle of the street, whereunto their ships come." He descants upon land tillage, tells the prices of dairy and farm produce, and generally expresses his opinion on the system of agriculture pursued; but that which seems most to have attracted his attention was the method adopted in different places of taking wild fowl by decoys, a hobby he appears to have indulged in at his Cheshire home, where he says he also had a decoy, probably in the low-lying grounds, watered by the Deane in the valley below Handforth Hall. At Amsterdam he "dined with Mr. Pageatt," where he had "a neat dinner and strawberries." It is pleasant to find him thus making acquaintance with a noted Cheshire worthy, John Paget, the author of "The Defence of Presbyterian Church Government," who had been minister of Nantwich in 1598, but who, in 1605, the year following that in which Brereton was born, had been compelled to retire on account of his nonconformity, when he settled at Amsterdam, where, in 1607, he had a call to the pastorate of the English church, in which he continued to minister for the long period of thirty years.[33]