fish, particularly oysters, bring vast sums annually to this county; there are great numbers of wild-fowl near the Thames which are sold in London to the dealers."

As to the inhabitants :

"In the more interior parts, those who follow husbandry, like the fishermen who reside near the Thames, are plain, blunt and honest, whilst the artists in the manufacturing towns are industrious and sober."

It's all very well people making out that artists often overdo the Bohemian atmosphere. Here we have evidence that in Essex at least we are most staid and respectable people.

Several items should be noted by the traveller in Essex for future reference. Epping is famous for sausages of unusual magnificence. Harwich men "boast that their town is walled and their streets paved with clay; and yet, that one is as strong, and others as clean, as those that are built or paved with stone. The fact indeed is true, for there is a kind of clay in the cliff, between the town and the Beacon Hill adjoining, which, when it falls down into the sea, where it is beaten with the waves and the weather, turns gradually into stone; but the chief reason assigned is, from the water of a certain spring or well, which, rising in the cliff, runs down into the sea among those pieces of clay, and petrifies them as it runs, and the force of the sea often stirring, and perhaps turning, the lumps of clay, when storms of wind may give force

enough to the water, causing them to harden everywhere alike; otherwise those which are not quite sunk in the water of the spring would be petrified in part.

These stones are gathered up to pave the streets and build the houses, and are, indeed, very hard. It is remarkable that some of them, taken up before they are thoroughly petrified, will, upon breaking, appear to be hard as stone without, and soft as clay in the middle; whereas others that have lain a due time will be thoroughly stone to the centre, and full as hard without."

The view from Great Burstead, or rather from Thorndon Hill, arouses such enthusiasm in the writer that he quite lets himself go, for the prospect he records "exceeds imagination.”

The hills in Kent, the sea, the River Thames, with vessels sailing to and from London, together with many well-cultivated fields and pleasant villages, which every way present themselves, astonish the spectator. When a classical scholar takes a view of all the objects which present themselves to his eyes from this eminence, it brings to his remembrance the speech of Hannibal in Livy, when from the Alps he showed his soldiers the beauties of Italy, and encouraged them, from the hopes of possessing that garden of the world, to march against the Romans with alacrity."

After this I shall not dare to describe the view overlooking Tilbury and the Thames. Perhaps it is less like Italy than it was in those days, when the manufacture of cement was