[These were the days before railroads had run everything and everybody up to London.  There were still to be found then, in various parts of England, life that was peculiar and provincial, and manners that had in them a character of their own and a stamp of originality that had often quite as much to attract as to repel.  Men and women are, of course, still the same that sat to that enchanting painter, Jane Austen, but the whole form and color and outward framing and various countenance of their lives have merged its distinctiveness in a commonplace conformity to universal custom; and in regard to the more superficial subjects of her fine and gentle satire, if she were to return among us she would find half her occupation gone.]

Monday, August 1st.—­I got some books while waiting for the coach, and we started at half-past eight.  The heat was intolerable and the dust suffocating, but the country through which we passed was lovely.  For a long time we drove along the brow of a steep hill.  The valley was all glorious with the harvest:  corn-fields with the red-gold billows yet untouched by the sickle; others full of sunburnt reapers sweeping down the ripe ears; others, again, silent and deserted, with the tawny sheaves standing, bound and dry, upon the bristling stubble, on the ground over which they rippled and nodded yesterday, a great rolling sea of burnished grain.  All over the sunny landscape peace and prosperity smiled, and gray-steepled churches and red-roofed villages, embowered in thick protecting shade, seemed to beckon the eye to rest as it wandered over the charming prospect.  The white-walled mansions of the lords of the land glittered from the verdant shelter of their surrounding plantations, and the thirsty cattle, beautiful in color and in grouping, stood in pools in the deeper parts of the brooks, where some giant tree threw its shadow over the water and the smooth sheltered sward round its feet.  In spite of this charming prospect I was very sad, and the purple heather bordering the road, with its thick tufts, kept suggesting Weybridge and the hours I had lately spent there so happily....  To shake myself I took up “Adam Blair;” and, good gracious! what a shaking it did give me!  What a horrible book!  And how could D——­ have recommended me to read it?  It is a very fine and powerful piece of work, no doubt; but I turned from it with infinite relief to “Quentin Durward.”  Walter Scott is quite exciting enough for wholesome pleasure; there is no poison in anything that he has ever written:  for how many hours of harmless happiness the world may bless him!

At Totnes we got out of the coach to shake ourselves, for we were absolute dust-heaps, and then resumed our powdery way, and reached Plymouth at about four o’clock.  As we walked up toward our lodgings, we were met by Mr. Brunton, with the pleasing intelligence that those we had bespoken had been let, by some mistake, to another family.