immediately, more permanently felt,.. in your church establishment. MONTESINOS. This inconvenience is surely part of the price which must be paid for the blessing of a government so balanced and so guarded, that we can neither, on the one hand, be oppressed by the reckless obstinacy of an arbitrary will; nor on the other, hurried into disgraceful and iniquitous courses by the violence of popular counsels. SIR THOMAS MORE. It is so; but it is also the reason why the French government has always been served by abler agents than yours. And though a price must necessarily be paid for what you rightly deem a blessing, there is no necessity that the price should be so large. A minister, before he swells the peerage for any other cause than that of great and manifest desert, should bear in mind that by so doing he weakens the government in the worst way, and is adding to a burden which clogs it more than the national debt. 239 COLLOQUY XIII. THE RIVER GRETA.-TRADE.-POPULATION. COLONIES. St. OUR Cumberland river Greta has a shorter course than even its Yorkshire namesake. John's beck and the Glenderamaken take this name at their confluence, close by the bridge, three miles east of Keswick, on the Penrith road. The former issues from Leathes water, in a beautiful sylvan spot, and proceeds by a. not less beautiful course for some five miles through the vale from which it is called, to the place of junction. The latter, receiving the streams from Bowscale and Threlkeld tarns, brings with it the waters from the southern side of Blencathra. The Greta then flows toward Keswick; receives on its way the Glenderaterra first,.. which brings down the western waters of Blencathra, and those from Skiddaw forest,.. then the smaller stream from Nathdale; makes a wide sweep behind the town, and joins the Derwent, under Derwent Hill, about a quarter of a mile from the town, and perhaps half that distance from the place where that river flows out of the lake; but when swoln above its banks, it takes a shorter line, and enters Derwentwater. The Yorkshire stream was a favourite resort of Mason's, and has been celebrated by Sir Walter Scott. Nothing can be more picturesque, nothing more beautiful, than its course through the grounds at Rokeby, and its junction there with the Tees;.. and there is a satisfaction in knowing that the possessor of that beautiful place fully appreciates and feels its beauties, and is worthy to possess it. Our Greta is of a different character, and less known; no poet has brought it into notice, and the greater number of tourists seldom allow themselves time for seeing anything out of the beaten track. Yet the scenery upon this river, where it passes under the woody side of Latrigg, is of the finest and most rememberable kind: ambiguo lapsu refluitque fluitque, Occurrensque sibi venturas aspicit undas. There is no English stream to which this truly Ovidian description can more accurately be applied. From a jutting isthmus, round which the tortuous river twists, you look over its manifold windings, up the water, to Blencathra; down it, over a high and wooded middle-ground, to the distant mountains of Newlands, Cawsey Pike, and Grizedal. About a mile below that isthmus, and in a part of the bottom hardly less beautiful, is a large cotton-mill, with the dwelling-houses and other buildings appertaining to such an establishment. I was looking down upon them from the opposite hill-side where my spiritual companion had joined me in one of my walks. We want an appellation, said I, for an assemblage of habitations like that below, which may as little be called grange or hamlet as it may village or town. My friend, Henry Koster,.. who, greatly my junior as he was, is gone before me to his rest, and of whom many places, many things, and many thoughts mournfully remind me,.. used to call it the Engenho, borrowing a word from his Brazilian vocabulary. Destitute of beauty as the larger edifice necessarily is, there is nevertheless something in its height and magnitude, and in the number of its windows, which reminds one of a convent. The situation contributes to the likeness; for the spot is one which the founder of a monastery might well have chosen for its seclusion and beauty, and its advantages of wood and water. SIR THOMAS MORE. And which, Montesinos, would, in your eyes, be the more melancholy object of contemplation,.. the manufactory, or the convent? MONTESINOS. There are times and places in which each may be regarded with complacency, as contributing to the progress of the community, and to the welfare of the human race. There are times and places also in which they may each tend to retard that progress and counteract that welfare. The spirit of trade has raised this nation to its present point of power, and made it what it is, the riches which have thus been created being as it were the dung and dross with which the garden of civilization is manured, and without which the finest flowers and fruits of cultivated society could not be produced. Had it not been for the spirit of trade, and the impulse which the steam-engine had just then given to the manufacturing system, Great Britain could neither have found means nor men for the recent war, in which not only her vital interests, but those of the whole of Europe, were at stake. This good is paramount to all other considerations. Men act as they deem best for their own interest, with more or less selfishness, but always, upon the great scale, |