SALISBURY-ABURY-WILTON.

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though nearly as extraordinary. Brittany in France possesses druidical monuments on the same plan. The arts and powers of nations in the first stages of civilization are mostly applied to the erection of great masses, of which Egypt affords the most remarkable examples. Refinements of taste aim at another sort of luxury, far less durable.

The soil is a bed of clay, slightly covered with a bed of vegetable mould, as in Norfolk, and equally capable of cultivation; an acre would then furnish as much subsistence as twenty do now. The plough encroaches every day upon this desert, but there is still a great space in resource for future genera

tions.

July 6-Salisbury is a little old city, very ugly, and of which there is nothing to say, except that the steeple of its cathedral, which is immensely high, and built of stone to its very summit, is twenty inches out of the perpendicular, which is really enough to take off the attention of the most devout congregation. We went to the morning service, and did not find a single person in the church except those officiating. It is not the first time we have observed this desertion of the metropolitan churches, even where the steeples were quite perpendicular. This church seems to lose in zeal and fervour what the sectaries have gained; and the regular clergy are accused of giving themselves too little trouble in the cause.

Three miles beyond Salisbury we visited Wilton, Lord Pembroke's. It is an old house, built in part by Inigo Jones. A whole wing was dismantled and thrown open ten years ago, to make a gallery of antiques. The floors, exposed to the injuries of the weather, are half rotten, and the poor antiques, thrown about higgledy piggledy, sans nose, sans

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WILTON ANTIQUES-TREES.

fingers, sans every other prominent member, form a marble field of battle, half melancholy, half ridiculous, the sight of which would distress me beyond measure, were I their master, and could not afford to finish the work so unfortunately begun. Sancho might well have said here, " qui trop embrasse mal étreint." Had the antiques been simply arranged along the walls of the apartments as they happened to be, without tearing down doors and windows, it would have been an interesting and respectable sight, which the possessor and the public would have enjoyed all this time. The site is low and flat; a velvet lawn, level as a piece of water unites to a real piece of water, artificial, and by no means bright, but of a good effect notwithstanding, and prodigious fine trees everywhere. They are such as are met with nowhere in the world except in an English park. Nature always plants in a crowd. Here a young and vigorous subject, picked out of the nursery-bed, is placed alone in a good soil, properly prepared; it is merely pro-. tected for some years by a fence, in other respects left to itself; it soon forms a pyramid, round, regu lar, and formal, yet pretty from the plumpness of youth. In the progress of years this roundness is angularized; the strongest boughs kill the others -the lowest, as they extend further in search of air and light, yielding to their own weight, incline towards the ground, which they sometimes touch, forty or fifty feet from their trunk ;-above, other boughs, each according to their several positions, project at right angles, towards the open space;-higher and higher, the boughs incline more to the vertical, till at last, towards the sum mit, some remains of the conical form is observed, -exuberant masses of foliage, spread in inclined