"When the late Mr. Pitt was determined to keep out Buonaparte and prevent his gaining a settlement in the county of Kent, among other ingenious devices adopted for that purpose he caused to be constructed what was then, and has ever since been conventionally termed, a 'Military Canal.' This is a not very practicable ditch, some thirty feet wide and nearly nine feet deep in the middle, extending from the town and port of Hythe to within a mile of the town and port of Rye, a distance of about twenty miles, and forming, as it were, the end of a bow, the arc of which constitutes that remote fifth quarter of the globe, Romney Marsh, spoken of by travellers. Trivial objections to the plan were made at the time by cavillers; an old gentleman of the neighbourhood, who proposed, as a cheap substitute, to put down his own cocked-hat upon a pole, was deservedly pooh-pooh'd down; in fact, the job, though rather an expensive one, was found to answer remarkably well. The French managed, indeed, to scramble over the Rhine and the Rhone, and other insignificant currents; but they never did, or could, pass Mr. Pitt's 'Military Canal.'" [Illustration: THE ROYAL MILITARY CANAL, AT WAREHORNE.] Satire is writ large, in a fine bold Roman hand, over that description of the Military Canal, is it not? and really, the difficulty of outflanking, or even of overpassing, this insignificant waterway would have been small had Napoleon ever set forth from Boulogne. But he never did, and so its defensible properties remain only x. One thing it does do most thoroughly: being dug at the foot of the ground falling to the levels, it sets visible limits and bounds to the marshland, and in a striking manner makes you understand that here you are come into another and strange region. From Hythe, under those earthy clifflets it goes by way of Lympne, Hurst, Bonnington, Bilsington, Ruckinge, Warehorne, and Appledore, and thence to within hail of Rye, and is nowadays a most picturesque object. The word "canal" does by no means accord it justice. You picture a straight-cut stretch of water, yellow and malodorous, with barges slowly voyaging along, the bargees smoking rank shag and indulging in ranker language; but that is quite unlike this defence of Old England. It is not straight, its waters are clean, there are not any barges; but there are overhanging trees, clusters of bulrushes, strange water-plants, and an abundance of wild life along its solitary way. Before railways were, and when even the few roads of the marsh were almost impassable, the canal was very useful to the inhabitants of the district, when goods came and went along it by packet-boats; but they have long since ceased to ply. So long since as 1867 it was proposed to sell this obsolete defence to a projected railway company, but it escaped that fate.