Would that it could be done! The wish is everywhere evident, but only Lethean waters could sweep away the useless lumber of mental baggage that destroys imagination and blunts the senses. The many efforts made to bring back the “properties”--to speak in the theatrical sense--of old time are pitiful or ridiculous, as your humour wills it. These are the days when things quaint and old-fashioned are revived for sake of their quaintness, sometimes in spite of their inconvenience and unsuitability; when ingle-nooks and open hearths with fire-dogs are built into modern houses for effect, although slow-combustion stoves are infinitely more comfortable and less wasteful of fuel. Our forbears, who did not know slow-combustion stoves, were not the creatures of sentiment that we are, and would soon have abolished open hearths for the close stoves had they been given the chance, just as they would have exchanged the tallow dip for electric lighting had the opportunity offered. We do not know the feelings with which the first gentlemen to use carpets abolished the old rush-strewn halls and the manners and customs contemporary with them; but if their sense of smell was as acute as our own, they must have noticed with great relief the absence of the dirt and festering bones that found a hiding-place beneath those rushes. All the marvellous changes in habits of living--the cheapening of food, the conversion of the luxuries of a former age into the ordinary requirements of this, and even the alterations in the face of the country and the houses of towns and villages--are due to those increased facilities of intercourse which, owing to the gradual improvement in roads, the coaches and waggons of yore were first able to give. When public vehicles began to ply into the country, this England of ours was not only a land of wide unenclosed heaths and commons, but the people of one county--nay, even the inhabitants of towns and villages--were markedly different in thought and prejudices, in speech and clothing, from those of others; while local style in building, and the various building materials obtained locally, gave each successive place that appearance of something new and strange which the traveller does not always meet with nowadays in far distant lands. As the drainage of lakes and fens, the filling up of the valleys and the reduction of the hills, have quite revolutionised the physical geography of wide areas, often changing the natural history of the districts affected, so has cheap, constant and quick travelling and conveyance of materials helped to reduce places and people to one dead level. Romance flies abashed from the level, monotonous road, where, years before, in some darkling hollow between the hills, ringed in by dense woodlands, it lurked in company with the highwayman. We do not desire the return of those gentry, but what would literature have done without them? Highway and turnpike improvements