The "bloom of an orchard, the festivity of a hay field, and the carols of harvest home," could not have met with a more cheerful and benevolent pen than Mr. Whateley's; a love of country pervades many of his pages; nor could any one have traced the placid scenery, or rich magnificence of nature, with a happier pen than when he records the walk to the cottage at Claremont, the grandeur and majesty of the scene at _Blenheim_, or _Stowe_, _Persfield_, _Wotton_ in the vale of Aylesbury--the rugged, savage, and craggy points of _Middleton Dale_, "a chasm rent in the mountain by some convulsion of nature, beyond the memory of man, or perhaps before the island was peopled," with its many rills, springs, rivulets, and water-falls--the vast cliffs of rocks at _Matlock_, _Bath_, that "scene of romantic magnificence; from such scenes, probably, was conceived the wild imagination, in ancient mythology, of the giants piling _Pelion_ upon _Ossa_; the loftiness of the rocks, and the character of the _Derwent_, a torrent in which force and fury prevail; the cascades in it are innumerable; before the water is recovered from one fall, it is hurried down another; and its agitation being thus increased by repeated shocks, it pushes on with restless violence to the next, where it dashes against fragments of rocks, or foams among heaps of stones which the stream has driven together"--the dusky gloom at the iron forge, "close to the cascade of the Weir, (between _Ross_ and _Monmouth_) where the agitation of the current is increased by large fragments of rocks, which have been swept down by floods from the banks, or shivered by tempests from the brow; and the sullen sound, at stated intervals, from the strokes of the great hammers in the forge, deadens the roar of the water-fall"--the solitude, the loveliness, and the stillness of _Dovedale_, "the whole of which has the air of enchantment; grotesque as chance can cast, wild as nature can produce"--the monkish tomb-stones, and the monuments of benefactors long since forgotten, which appear above the green sward, at _Tintern Abbey_, with its maimed effigies, and sculpture worn with age and weather--his view to the approach to Lord _Cadogan's_, near _Reading_--his feeling and enchanting description of the _Leasowes_--"the wonderful efforts which art has made at _Painshill_ to rival nature;" where the massy richness of its hanging wood "gives an air of grandeur to the whole"--the _Tinian_, and other lawns, and noble and magnificent views in that vast sylvan scene _Hagley_, where, in a spot which once delighted Mr. Pope, is inscribed an urn to his memory, "which, when shewn by a gleam of moonlight through the trees, fixes that thoughtfulness and composure to which the mind is insensibly led by the rest of this elegant scene."