We pass it to visit Woburn Abbey, the residence of the Russell family, with its extensive and magnificent gardens, its model farms, its picture gallery, and other accessories of a great nobleman’s country seat.

It was at Woburn that Francis, Duke of Bedford, held his sheep-shearing feasts, and by patronising, in conjunction with Coke of Norfolk and Mr. Western, improvements and improvers in agriculture and stock-breeding, did so much to promote agricultural improvement in this county, and to create that large class of wealthy educated agriculturists, which confers such great benefits on this country.

Now that every country gentleman has at least one neighbour who is, or professes to be, an agricultural improver, it is difficult to give an adequate idea of the benefit we have derived from the agricultural enthusiasm of the noblemen and gentlemen who first made the science of cultivating breeding fashionable, we must be excused the word, among a class which had previously been exclusively devoted to field sports or to town life.  They founded that finest of all modern characters—­the English country gentleman, educated, yet hearty, a scholar and a sportsman, a good farmer, and an intelligent, considerate landlord; happy to teach, and ready to learn, anything connected with a pursuit which he follows with the enthusiasm of a student and the skill of a practical man.

The other stations have nothing about them to induce a curious traveller to pause.  Not so can we say of Bedford.

Bedford has been pauperised by the number and wealth of its charities.  A mechanic, or small tradesman, can send his child if it be sick to a free hospital; when older to a free school, where even books are provided; when the boy is apprenticed a fee may be obtained from a charity; at half the time of apprenticeship, a second fee; on the expiration of the term, a third; on going to service, a fourth; if he marries he expects to obtain from a charity fund “a portion” with his wife, also educated at a charity; and if he has not sufficient industry or prudence to lay by for old age, and those are virtues which he is not likely to practise, he looks forward with confidence to being boarded and lodged at one of Bedford’s fifty-nine almshouses.

The chief source of the charities of Bedford is derived from an estate of thirteen acres of land in the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn, London, bequeathed by Sir William Harpur, an alderman of that city, in the reign of Edward VI., for founding a free school for instructing the children of the town in grammar, and good manners.  This land, now covered with valuable houses, produces some 16,000 pounds per annum.

On this fund there are supported, 1st. a Grammar School, with eighty boys on the foundation, and as many private boarders; a Commercial School, containing 100 to 150 boys; a National School, of 350 boys, where on the half holidays 170 girls are received, a regular Girls’ School and an Infant School.