“The villages to north of Trent are but indifferent, and the churches very thin sown; and, indeed, for a long time one would think the country of no religion at all, there being hardly either Christian church or heathen temple to be seen. The fields on both hands were mostly grass; and the greatest variety and plenty of fine cattle, all of various colours. I admired the cattle much more than the people; for they seem to have the least of what we call smartness of any folks I ever saw, and totally void of all sort of curiosity--which, perhaps, some may think a good quality.... As for the inclosing in England, it is of all the different methods, both good and bad, that can be imagined; and that such insufficient inclosures, as some are, keep in the cattle (which is so hard with us in Scotland) is entirely owing to the levelness of the grounds; so that an English cow does not see another spot than where she feeds, and has as little intelligence as the people.” Surely the cows are to be pitied, born incapable of taking comprehensive views of things in this flat and unprofitable land. If ever there arose a chance of wider views for the fair traveller, England rose not in her esteem on that account. “Sometimes,” she owns, “we had an extensive prospect, but not the least variety, so that we could say there was too much of it. No water, no distinction between a gentleman’s seat and his tenant’s house, but that he was a little more smothered up with trees.” The lady, when she reached London, found the same reason for contempt of Hyde Park as a place of resort; it was naught, because it was quite smothered with trees. She also surprised the crowded Londoners that she thought England on the whole less populous than Scotland, and there is a good deal of right observation in the sketch she gives of England extra-metropolitan a hundred years ago.