And now the road brings us to the borders of Hants. It is no mere pose to assert that every English county has its own especial characteristics, an unmistakable and easily recognizable individuality: the fact has been so often noted and commented upon that it is fast becoming a truism. But of a county of the size of Hampshire, which ranks eighth in point of size among the forty English divisions, it would be rash to generalize too widely. One is apt to sum up this county as merely a slightly more gracious, and generous variant of the forbidding downs and uplands of Wiltshire, but, although quite three-quarters of the area of Hants is poor, waterless, and inhospitable, yet there are fertile corners, nooks, and valleys, covered with ancient alluvial soil, that yield nothing to any other part of England. Still, Fuller is a little more than just to Hampshire when he calls it "a happy countrey in the foure elements, if culinary _fire_ in courtesie may pass for one, with plenty of the best wood for the fuel thereof; most pure and piercing the _aire_ of this shyre; and none in England hath more plenty of clear and fresh rivulets of troutful _water_, not to speak of the friendly sea, conveniently distanced from London. As for the _earth_," he continues, "it is both fair and fruitful, and may pass for an expedient betwixt pleasure and profit, where by mutual consent they are moderately accommodated." [Sidenote: _HANTS_] If old Fuller could revisit the scenes to which this description belongs, he would indeed find profit but moderately accommodated, if at all; for as the greater proportion of the soil of Hampshire has always been notoriously poor, so now the farming of it has decayed from the moderately profitable stage to a condition in which the tenant farmer sits down in despair, and the landlord has to meet the changed conditions of the times with heavier reductions of rents than his contemporaries of more fertile counties are called upon to make. And even so, and despite the fifteen and twenty-five per cent. deductions that are constantly being made, innumerable farms have gone, or are going, out of cultivation in Hampshire, whose bare chalk downs and unkindly levels of sand are growing lonelier and more desolate year by year. But a grateful and profitable feature of Hampshire are the water-meadows that border the fishful streams of the Itchen, the Test, and the Avon. They merit all the commendation that Fuller gives them, and more; but, so far as the Portsmouth Road is concerned, Hampshire exhibits its most barren, ill-watered, and flinty aspects; from the point where it enters the county, near Liphook, past the chalky excrescence of Butser Hill, through the bare and barren downs of Chalton, to Portsmouth itself.