books studied were Leland's _Itinerary_, the _Paston Letters_, in five stately quarto volumes, and Arthur Young's _Six Weeks' Tour_. These studies were not quite in vain, for they will at least show a reader what to avoid. Young's _Six Weeks' Tour_ is most consumedly dull, reeking of turnips, sticky with marl, and the accounts of "the seats of the nobility and gentry, and other objects worthy of notice, by the author of the _Farmers' Letters_," are very rarely interesting. Some of them which are to our purpose--for of course the tour was not confined to East Anglia--shall be quoted in due season. To reading Leland, stimulated by many quaint quotations in later works, I had looked forward for years, but the second edition in nine volumes of "The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary, Oxford; Printed at the Theatre, for James Fletcher, Bookseller in the Turl, and Joseph Pott, Bookseller at Eton. 1745," was a grievous disappointment. The plums seem all to have been picked out by guide-book writers; few of them, if any, relate to East Anglia. The only things worthy of note were an account, perfectly straightforward, and to be quoted in its place, of the Dunmow Flitch, and some doggerel concerning the "properties of the counties of England." The material ones for us are:-- Essex, ful of good hoswyves, *....*....*....* Northfolk, ful of wyles, Southfolk, ful of styles, Huntingdoneshyre corne ful goode, *....*....*....* Cambridgeshire full of pykes. Leland, in fact, cannot be commended, but that is only because he planned his _magnum opus_, like many a good man before him and after, without regard to the allotted span of human life, not to speak of its uncertainty. In his "Newe Yeare's Gyft to King Henry the viii in the XXXVII Yeare of his Raygne," Leland talks of his studies, of his six years of travel, and then sketches his plan. It is "to write an History, to the which I entende to adscribe this Title, _De Antiquitate Britannica_ or els _Civilis Historia_. And this Worke I entende to divide yn to so many Bookes as there be Shires yn England and Sheres and greate Dominions in Wales. So that I esteme that this Volume will include a fiftie Bookes, wherof each one severally shaul conteyne the Beginninges Encreaces, and memorable Actes of the chief Tounes and Castelles of the Province allottid to hit." Leland died when he was forty-six, but if he had lived another century he could hardly have achieved his self-imposed task, even if he had been miraculously endowed with a Mercédès; and he cherished divers other projects. As it is, his so-called _Itinerary_ is, at best, but a collection of rough notes, having frequently no sort of coherence, often corrected or added to later in a distant geographical connection. In spite of a taste for antiquity it may be put down as stiff and heavy to read, and not sufficiently abounding in quaintness to repay the trouble of the reader.