Our eye through Honiton’s fair valley roves. Behind us soon the busy town we leave, Where finest lace industrious lasses weave. Now swelling clouds roll’d on; the rainy load Stream’d down our hats, and smoked along the road; When (O blest sight!) a friendly sign we spy’d, Our spurs are slacken’d from the horse’s side; For sure a civil host the house commands, Upon whose sign this courteous motto stands-- “This is the ancient hand, and eke the pen; Here is for horses hay, and meat for men.” How rhyme would flourish, did each son of fame Know his own genius, and direct his flame! Then he that could not Epic flights rehearse Might sweetly mourn in Elegiac verse. But were his Muse for Elegy unfit, Perhaps a Distich might not strain his wit; If Epigram offend, his harmless lines Might in gold letters swing on alehouse signs. Then Hobbinol might propagate his bays, And Tuttle-fields record his simple lays; Where rhymes like these might lure the nurses’ eyes, While gaping infants squall for farthing pies. “Treat here, ye shepherds blithe, your damsels sweet, For pies and cheesecakes are for damsels meet.” Then Maurus in his proper sphere might shine, And these proud numbers grace great William’s sign;-- “This is the man, this the Nassovian, whom I named the brave deliverer to come.” But now the driving gales suspend the rain, We mount our steeds, and Devon’s city gain. Hail, happy native land!--but I forbear What other counties must with envy hear. Dean Swift, too, was a frequent traveller on horseback, particularly on the Chester and Holyhead road. He seems once to have tried the Chester stage, and ever after to have taken to the saddle. Riding thus in 1710 from Chester to London in five days, he describes himself as “weary the first, almost dead the second, tolerable the third, and well enough the rest,” but “glad enough of the fatigue, which has served for exercise.” After making the journey from London to Holyhead and Dublin in 1726, he wrote to Pope, describing “the quick change” he had made in seven days from London to Dublin, “through many nations and languages unknown to the civilised world.” He had expected the enterprise, “with moderate fortune,” to take ten or eleven days. “I have often reflected,” he adds, “in how few hours, with a swift horse or a strong gale, a man may come among a people as unknown to him as the Antipodes.” Swift was by no means indulging in playful banter when he wrote this. He felt a genuine cause for wonder in such expedition; and certainly if the rustic speech of rural England was like a strange and uncivilised tongue, how much more strange and uncivilised the languages of Wales and Ireland must have sounded!