road, through Shire along to Dorking, runs up the valley between the chalk-hills and the sand-hills; the chalk to our left and the sand to our right. This is called the Home Dale. It begins at Reigate and terminates at Shalford Common, down below Chilworth. _Reigate, December 1._ I set off this morning with an intention to go across the Weald to Worth; but the red rising of the sun and the other appearances of the morning admonished me to keep upon _high ground_; so I crossed the Mole, went along under Boxhill, through Betchworth and Buckland, and got to this place just at the beginning of a day of as heavy rain, and as boisterous wind, as, I think, I have ever known in England. _In_ one rotten borough, one of the most rotten too, and with another still more rotten _up upon the hill_, in Reigate, and close by Gatton, how can I help reflecting, how can my mind be otherwise than filled with reflections on the marvellous deeds of the Collective Wisdom of the nation! At present, however (for I want to get to bed) I will notice only one of those deeds, and that one yet "_incohete_," a word which Mr. Canning seems to have coined for the _nonce_ (which is not a coined word), when Lord Castlereagh (who cut his throat the other day) was accused of making a _swap_, as the horse-jockeys call it, of a _writer-ship_ against a _seat_. It is _barter_, _truck_, _change_, _dicker_, as the Yankees call it, but as our horse-jockeys call it _swap_, or _chop_. The case was this: the chop had been _begun_; it had been entered on; but had not been completed; just as two jockeys may have _agreed_ on a chop and yet not actually _delivered_ the horses to one another. Therefore, Mr. Canning said that the act was _incohete_, which means, without cohesion, without consequence. Whereupon the House entered on its Journals a solemn resolution, that it was its duty to _watch over its purity with the greatest care_; but that the said act being "_incohete_" the House did not think it necessary to proceed any further in the matter! It unfortunately happened, however, that in a very few days afterwards--that is to say, on the memorable eleventh of June, 1809--Mr. Maddocks accused the very same Castlereagh of having actually sold and delivered a seat to Quintin Dick for three thousand pounds. The accuser said he was ready to bring to the bar proof of the fact; and he moved that he might be permitted so to do. Now, then, what did Mr. Canning say? Why, he said that the reformers were a low degraded crew, and he called upon the House to make a stand against democratical encroachment? And the House did not listen to him, surely? Yes, but it did! And it voted by a thundering majority, that it would not hear the evidence. And this vote was, by the leader of the Whigs, justified upon the ground that the deed complained of by Mr. Maddocks was according to a practice which was as notorious as _the sun at noon day_. So much for