The Exeter Road

h longer route than any of those already named. They went, in fact, by the Bath Road and thence through Somerset. The Exeter Road beyond Basingstoke was at that period a mi

despite the strenuous opposition encountered from the peasantry and others on th

would suffice very well from Salisbury to Exeter; nor would the improvement of the way over the Downs demand much labour, for the bottom was solid, and one general expense for pickaxe and spade work, for levellin

ut we will not suppose this is in a well-governed happy state like ours. Lex non supponet odiosa. If such terrors were to take

FOR GOO

from their enchanted castles. Whereas, a family, as things now stand, or a party of gentlemen and ladies, would sooner travel to the South of France and back again than down to Falmouth or the Land’s End. And ’tis easier and pleasanter—so that all beyond Sarum or Dorchester is to us terra incognita, and the mapmakers might, if they pleased, fill the vacuities of Devon and Cornwall with forests, sands, elephants, savages, or what they please. Travellers of every denomination—the wealthy, the man of taste, the idle, the valetudinary—would all, if the roads were good, visit once at least the western parts of this island. Whereas, every man and woman that has an hundred superfluous guineas must now turn bird of passage, flit away across the ocean, and expose themselves to the ridicule of the French. Now, what but the goodness of the roads can tempt people to make such expensive and foolish e

lifetime he hears of their welfare by the post, and once, perhaps, receives a token when the Western curate posts up to town to be initiated into a benefice—and that is all. H

ERVA

s a Marlborough stage-coachman did when turnpikes were first erected between London and Bath. A new road was planned out, but still my honest man would go round by a miserable waggon-track called “Ramsbury narrow way.” One by one, from little to less, he dawdled away all his passengers, and when asked why he was such an obstinate idiot, his answer was (in a grumbling tone) that he was now an aged man; that he relished not new fantasies; that his grandfather and father had driven the aforesaid way before him, and that he would continue in the old track to his death, though his four horses only drew a passenger-fly. But the proprietor saw no wit in this: the old Automedon “resigned” (in the Court p