Since my stay at Sir Roger's in the country, I daily find more instance of this narrow party humour. Being upon a bowling green at a neighbouring market town the other day (for that is the place where the gentlemen of one side meet once a week), I observed a stranger among them of (164: 5) a better presence and genteeler behaviour than ordinary; but was much surprised that, notwithstanding he was a very fair better, nobody would take him up. But upon inquiry, I found that he was one who had given a disagreeable vote in a former parliament, for which reason (10) there was not a man upon that bowling green who would have so much correspondence with him as to win his money of him. Among other instances of this nature, I must not omit one which concerns myself. Will Wimble was the other (15) day relating several strange stories, that he had picked up, nobody knows where, of a certain great man; and upon my staring at him, as one that was surprised to hear such things in the country, which had never been so much as whispered in the town, Will stopped short in the thread (20) of his discourse, and after dinner asked my friend Sir Roger in his ear if he was sure that I was not a fanatic. It gives me a serious concern to see such a spirit of dissension in the country; not only as it destroys virtue (25) and common sense, and renders us in a manner barbarians towards one another, but as it perpetuates our animosities, widens our breaches, and transmits our present passions and prejudices to our posterity. For my own part, I am sometimes afraid that I discover the seeds of a civil war in these our divisions, and therefore cannot but bewail, as in their first principles, the miseries and calamities of our children. C. XXIII. SIR ROGER AND THE GIPSIES [No. 130. Monday, July 30, 1711. ADDISON.] Semperque recentes Convectare juvat praedas, et vivere rapto. VIRG.