I arrived in good time at Sheffield, where, from the quantity of smoke, the sun appeared shorn of his beams. I looked at the astonishing productions in cutlery; as, for instance, a knife with a hundred and eighty blades; scissors which cut perfectly and can be used, though hardly visible with the naked eye, &c. &c. In defiance of superstition, I bought you needles and scissors enough for your whole life, with some other newly-invented trifles, which I am sure will please you. _Nottingham, Oct. 4th._ I rode the whole night, and saw only from a distance, and by moonlight, Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron's birth-place and family seat, now much neglected. Besides the Gothic church (of which nearly every English town possesses one, more or less beautiful,) there is not much to be seen in Nottingham; a remarkable manufactory of net excepted, where the steam-engines do all the work, and only a single man stands by the machinery to take care that nothing goes wrong. It is most strange to see the iron monsters begin to work, as if moved by invisible hands, and the most beautiful lace, stretched in a frame, comes slowly forth at the top, neat and finished; while the spindles, with the raw thread wound round them, keep on their perpetual motion below; the whole unaided, as I have said, by a single human hand. It was just the time of the Fair, which had drawn together a great number of curiosities; among others, a beautiful collection of wild beasts. Two Bengal tigers, of an enormous size, were so perfectly tame, that even ladies and children were allowed to enter their cage, or the animals were let out in the riding school where the collection was exhibited. No dog could be more gentle; but I doubt whether our police would have suffered such experiments. A remarkable animal was the horned horse, or Nyl Ghau, from the Himalaya mountains,--handsome and fleet, and in some respects very strangely formed. The beautiful wild ass of Persia, which they say is swifter and more untireable than a horse, and can live for weeks without food, was new to me. There were also here, as in the collection of animals on the Pfaueninsel near Berlin, a giant and a dwarf. _London, Oct. 6th._ Before I left Nottingham I visited the neighbouring seat of Lord Middleton, which is worth seeing. The park offered little remarkable. There was a curious old picture--a faithful portrait of the house and gardens as they existed two hundred years ago. It is very interesting; the more so, as you see the family in the strangest dresses, with a great company and numerous attendants, walking in the garden, and as the noble owner therein represented is the same who is so often mentioned in connexion with the celebrated ghost story. Every one ought to have pictures of this kind painted for his successors: the comparisons they suggest are always amusing, and sometimes instructive.