Cotton’s—“cheerful hearty Mr. Cotton”—description of a post-horse may be less familiarly known to the reader than either of the preceding descriptions of the inconveniences of riding post: it describes a journey from the neighbourhood of Bakewell to Holyhead, about the year 1678. “A guide I had got, who demanded great vails, For conducting me over the mountains of Wales: Twenty good shillings, which sure very large is; Yet that would not serve, but I must bear his charges: And yet for all that, rode astride on a beast, The worst that e’er went on three legs, I protest. It certainly was the most ugly of jades: His hips and his rump made a right ace of spades; His sides were two ladders, well spur-galled withal; His neck was a helve, and his head was a mall; For his colour, my pains and your trouble I’ll spare, For the creature was wholly denuded of hair, And, except for two things, as bare as my nail,— A tuft of a mane and a sprig of a tail. Now such as the beast was, even such was the rider, With head like a nutmeg, and legs like a spider; A voice like a cricket, a look like a rat, The brains of a goose, and the heart of a cat: But now with our horses, what sound and what rotten, Down to the shore, you must know, we were gotten; And there we were told, it concerned us to ride, Unless we did mean to encounter the tide. And then my guide lab’ring with heels and with hands, With two up and one down, hopped over the sands; Till his horse, finding the labour for three legs too sore, Foled out a new leg, and then he had four. And now, by plain dint of hard spurring and whipping, Dry-shod we came where folks sometimes take shipping. And now hur in Wales is, Saint Taph be hur speed, Gott splutter hur taste, some Welsh ale hur had need: Yet surely the Welsh are not wise of their fuddle, For this had the taste and complexion of puddle. From thence then we marched, full as dry as we came, My guide before prancing, his steed no more lame, O’er hills and o’er valleys uncouth and uneven, Until, ’twixt the hours of twelve and eleven, More hungry and thirsty than tongue can well tell, We happily came to St. Winifred’s well.” Cotton’s ride to Holyhead was not however nearly so diversified in its adventures as a journey from Hardwick to Bakewell about the same period, described by Edward, son of Sir Thomas Browne, the worthy knight and physician of Norwich. A tour in Derbyshire, in the year 1622, was indeed no light matter. Our ancestors were much in the right to make their wills before encountering the perils of a ride across the moors. We are constrained to abridge the author’s narrative, but the main incidents of it are preserved in our transcript.