With my visit to Matlock Bath, I was much better satisfied. Here indeed is Derbyshire, in spite of spruce inns and fashionable boarding-houses. I scampered over the hills, (having first climbed them with more pleasure than fatigue,) and went from view to view with increasing transports. This region is all cliff and ravine, and precipice and chasm; yet in every direction the eye is refreshed and delighted, and the mind takes pleasure alike in thinking that it is scarcely English scenery, and that it is yet strikingly unlike anything but England after all! These sharp outlines, and bold walls of rock, for example, you say are somewhat Swiss; but as you look over them, towards the horizon, you see that their foliage and their verdure are English, absolutely; and then, looking down the chasm, at your feet, you see a trim and neat little village, and houses set in gardens, and peeping out from shrubbery, and especially a church, altogether such as no one ever sees save in England only! I entered the Speedwell mine, and went through the usual experiments with lights amid the spar, but, on the whole, the subterranean part of Matlock was what I liked least about it. I felt lonely, however, in enjoying my ramble about so beautiful a place, and the company of certain loved ones in America was longed for over and over again to make it all that I desired. From this delightful place I made my way to Shrewsbury. Beautiful is Shrewsbury, without and within! Its spires and its towers give you far-off promise of a place worthy of the traveller’s halt, and when you enter its old-fashioned streets, you are not disappointed. I found the market-place, with its hall and surrounding mansions, quite as unmodernized as those of towns in the north of France. The projecting gable of many an old timbered house confronts you as you go hither and thither through the borough, and very often the woodwork of such houses is fancifully arranged and ornamented, in a manner highly effective and picturesque. Their modern tenants paint the timbers with grave, but appropriate colours, and whitewash the plastered walls which intervene, thus bringing out the full design of the ancient architect in a neat and striking manner. I saw, in one of the streets, a chair carried by bearers, precisely as in Hogarth’s prints, and which seemed to have been in use ever since Hogarth’s day. Its occupant was a portly female, who might have graced the Court of Queen Anne, so far as her appearance was concerned, and what with such an apparition, in a place altogether so antique, I found myself for a moment quite in doubt whether the nineteenth century were actually in existence, with its many inventions.