The fact is, I have got an unfortunate habit of looking back. I am fond of the past, though only in a dreamy, unsystematic way. My history is a little out of order, and I am no authority upon dates; but I like to hover about places. I cannot tell the day, the hour, or even the year in which the battle of Sedgemoor occurred; but I have gloated over the old roadside mill from which the Duke of Monmouth watched his losing contest, and the old houses at Bridgewater, whose roofs were then probably crowded with women and children. I have even been through the straggling village of Weston Zoyland, and into the sanded tavern where the late Lord Macaulay resided for weeks while he wrote this portion of his history. I have heard the landlord’s proud account of his distinguished guest, and how “he worrited about the neighbourhood.” This interesting fact, so I am informed, is duly recorded, upon my authority, in the latest edition of _Men of the Time_. My only objection to the late Lord Macaulay is, that he was one of these men of the time—of my own time. If Gibbon had been the careful historian of Sedgemoor, the village pothouse would have had a finer old crusted flavour, to my taste. The sentiment that governs me scarcely blooms under a hundred years, neither more nor less. I cannot learn to love the Elizabethan times—they are too remote. I have no more real sympathy with fifteen hundred and fifty, than with eighteen hundred and fifty. I can tolerate the seventeenth century; but the eighteenth always “stirs my heart, like a trumpet.”