Such, in real life, were the Tory squires upon whose memory Lord Macaulay has heaped the coarsest epithets of a not very refined vocabulary, the falsest coin of a not very sterling rhetoric; for I have no reason to believe that the owner of the letter-book was otherwise than an average specimen of the class to which he belonged, neither better nor worse than his neighbours who sat next him at the market ordinary, discussed the Dutch War with him over a quart of sack and a pipe of tobacco at the “Redd Lyon,” or rode over to a mid-day dinner and a game of bowls at Renishaw. The impression left upon the mind by such documents as the letter-book is not one of rudeness, but rather of comfort, education, and refinement. Of the ignorance and uncouthness, the drunkenness, the pig-handling, the low habits and gross phrases, the oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse, the vulgar taste which aimed at ornament, but could produce nothing but deformity, there is not a trace; and instead of meeting with “the deportment, the vocabulary, and the accent of a carter,” and the manners of “rustic millers or alehouse keepers,” we find a class of men useful in their generation, public-spirited and intellectual, courteous in their dealings with each other and compassionate towards the poor, and better judges of taste in architecture and gardening than at least one of their critics. [Illustration: A Gentleman and his Servant on the Road.] DERBYSHIRE FOLK-LORE By S. O. Addy, M.A. Every English county, one might almost say every English village, has preserved some fragments of a vast body of traditional lore which, before the age of printing, was common to the whole people. Such fragments may still, like coins on the sites of Roman towns, be picked up, some in better condition than others. Unfortunately, those who have written on this subject have preferred for the most part to limit their researches to old books. For instance, Brand, in his _Observations on Popular Antiquities_, first published in 1777, has given us a collection of scraps drawn from a thousand authors. It was very entertaining, no doubt, but the work would have been more valuable had its author collected from the lips of the people the ballads, legends, tales, and other portions of belief and custom which in the eighteenth century were far more abundant than they are to-day. It was a great opportunity neglected. But in the eighteenth century there was excuse for such neglect, because the value of such things was not then understood. Nor was their importance seen until the publication of such works as Scott’s _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_ in 1802, and an English translation of Grimm’s _Popular Stories_ in 1823. Even then English students did not begin to collect traditional remains systematically.