Life is strangely suspicious and impatient of youth and candour and innocence and _naïveté_. Hardly does it perceive these exquisite qualities to exist than it rubs away their bloom with a rough finger. How often one longs for an arrested progress--for a little girl to go on being a little girl a little longer; for the perpetual kitten of our dreams! But no; the Creator is not that kind of artist. I took upstairs with me a fine copy of _Paterson's Roads_, a book I had not seen since the sixties, when I used often to pore over my father's copy and set forth on imaginary journeys from London to Truro, London to Norwich, London to Dover, London to Everywhere, with Paterson's aid. I remember how proud I used to be to find our own ancestor in the margin--John Murray Falconer, Esq., of West Wolves House, Long Melton, five miles north of Cirencester, my father's grandfather; and Wilmington Oakes, Esq., of Masters Hall, just to the west of Evesham, grandfather of my mother. I had, indeed, an ambition at that time some day to be in Paterson myself, not knowing that the book was already outmoded, and that I was doomed to spend most of my life in a country where roads are chiefly tracks. Paterson's noble book, once in every country house and most town houses, is now rare, but it remains the best outline account of England in existence. Publishers may vie with each other in bringing out guide-books, and highway-and-byway books, and atlases and gazetteers; but _Paterson's Roads_ still conquers. Everything about the best edition of it is right: its arrangement, its type, its spaciousness, its interest in gentlemen's places, its little pictures of turnpike gates, its careful information; but most of all its period, before rails came in, when horses were still honoured, and postboys never died, and innkeepers flourished. Paterson may be said to pair off with Fielding. He is Fielding's courier, so to speak. Fielding has the romance; Paterson finds the roads and looks after the luggage and the horses. He is a companion to Pickwick, too: a serious, methodical Sam Weller. Spend an hour with Paterson, and you will have the England of Tom Jones and Samuel Pickwick before you; you will know it through and through. The period between these two books was Paterson's period. _Tom Jones_ was published in 1749, _Pickwick_ in 1837; Daniel Paterson was born in 1739 and died in 1825, living towards the end so quietly that Edward Mogg, who brought out a sixteenth edition in 1822 and dedicated it to George iv., referred to its true author as "the late."