deference to the Poet Laureate’s argument, and with more to that of his fair and talented supporter, I do maintain that no objects can give such a gratifying air of life and cheerfulness to a valley surrounded, or not, by high mountains, or so strikingly enhance the bright green of herbage and foliage, or the more sombre, but warmer, tints of near or distant hills, as a liberal sprinkling over the landscape of pure white [Sidenote: OUT-DOORS AND IN-DOORS CONTRASTED.]cottages, embosomed, as these are, each in its own nest of sheltering trees; and I do wish that the farmers of Langdale, and all our other fell-dales, would expend a shilling or two annually on lime, and bestow upon their romantically situated homesteads, “the cleanly, pleasant appearance derivable from a plentiful periodical application of white-wash.” Their present grim, dingy, almost squalid exteriors, are strongly suggestive to the mind of a stranger of internal poverty, desolation and dirt, than which nothing can be more distant from their real in-door condition; for, in all these scattered houses, miserable as they look externally, there is abundance for the wants of the inmates and for the requirements of hospitality, and their cleanliness is such that, as I have partaken of many meals spread upon their unclothed tables, so, in the absence of a table, would I not scruple to eat my dinner if laid upon any of their blue flagged floors,[A] for those are cleaner than many table-cloths I have seen in the course of my peregrinations through other countries. [A] It is said that “great wits jump together,” and it would appear that, under certain circumstances, the same saltatory exploit may be performed by a great and a small wit; for instance, Miss Martineau in her capital essay on the Lake District, treating of the inside cleanliness of the houses, makes nearly the same remark as I have made above. I am sorry that I cannot conscientiously adopt the complaint of the very modern literary gentleman who accused Shakspeare of forestalling all his best ideas, because the above passage, or at least the same idea, if it be one, occurred in the first edition of these papers, and was printed above three years before the appearance of Miss Martineau’s work. [Sidenote: WORT AND WELCOME.]