The whole country that I have crossed is loam and flints, upon a bottom of chalk. At Alresford there are some watered meadows, which are the beginning of a chain of meadows that goes all the way down to Winchester, and hence to Southampton; but even these meadows have, at Alresford, chalk under them. The water that supplies them comes out of _a pond_, called Alresford Pond, which is fed from the high hills in the neighbourhood. These counties are purely agricultural; and they have suffered most cruelly from the accursed Pitt-system. Their hilliness, bleakness, roughness of roads, render them unpleasant to the luxurious, effeminate, tax-eating crew, who never come near them, and who have pared them down to the very bone. The villages are all in a state of _decay_. The farm-buildings dropping down, bit by bit. The produce is, by a few great farmers, dragged to a few spots, and all the rest is falling into decay. If this infernal system could go on for forty years longer, it would make all the labourers as much slaves as the negroes are, and subject to the same sort of discipline and management. _November 19 to 23._ At West End. Hambledon is a long, straggling village, lying in a little valley formed by some very pretty but not lofty hills. The environs are much prettier than the village itself, which is not far from the North side of Portsdown Hill. This must have once been a considerable place; for here is a church pretty nearly as large as that at Farnham in Surrey, which is quite sufficient for a large town. The means of living has been drawn away from these villages, and the people follow the means. Cheriton and Kilmston and Hambledon and the like have been beggared for the purpose of giving tax-eaters the means of making "_vast improvements, Ma'am_," on the villanous spewy gravel of Windsor Forest! The thing, however, must go _back_. Revolution here or revolution there: bawl, bellow, alarm, as long as the tax-eaters like, _back_ the thing must go. Back, indeed, _it is going_ in some quarters. Those scenes of glorious loyalty, the sea-port places, are beginning to be deserted. How many villages has that scene of all that is wicked and odious, Portsmouth, Gosport, and Portsea; how many villages has that hellish assemblage beggared! It is now being scattered _itself_! Houses which there let for forty or fifty pounds a-year each, now let for three or four shillings a-week each; and thousands, perhaps, cannot be let at all to any body capable of paying rent. There is an absolute tumbling down taking place, where, so lately, there were such "vast improvements, Ma'am!" Does Monsieur de Snip call those improvements, then? Does he insist, that those houses form "an addition to the national capital?" Is it any wonder that a country should be miserable when such notions prevail? And when they can, even in the Parliament, be received with cheering? _Nov. 24, Sunday._