Southsea was not drains. We are at present
unextortionate, cleanly, and of good savour,
and we have done our best "to meet the
polished requirements of that aristocracy
which patronises us, summer after summer,
more and more." (See the new advertisement
of our bazaar, where a wheel of fortune
has been recently erected regardless of
expense.) We take in at each hotel a second-
day's newspaper; we have added to a library,
which was before considered but little inferior
to that of the British Museum, several
modern publications; and I do not desire to
exalt this journal with a sense of its own
merits unduly, when I say that there is an
intention—an expressed intention—on the
part of the committee of management to order
it monthly upon trial. We are anxious to
please everybody and to offend no one. The
Honourable Rapid (by which name, in an
ignorance of the terms, although in full
consciousness of the blessings, of hereditary
title, we were accustomed to call him), one of
a party of collegians studying here, informed
us that there was nothing in literature worth
reading now except the Mysteries of the
City, an illustrated serial not binding itself
to be finished in any particular amount of
numbers, and Lady Clearstarch swept out of
the reading-room, and nearly out of Barnley
Combe as well, because it was offered to her
as an improving volume. We have built
four bathing-machines—two for ladies, and
two for gentlemen—and there is a little gritty
coffin in the possession of the postmistress,
wherein such as desire it can obtain a warm
salt-water bath. Paths have been cut in our
hills, and saddled donkeys placed conveniently
at the feet of them. Seats are set
advantageously fronting the best views—and
alpenstocks, which the guide-book says are
absolutely indispensable, "the sharp gradients of
the Barnley Combe foot-roads being inexpressibly
trying to the pedestrian"—are exposed
for sale at the barber's, to the wonder of the
aboriginal inhabitants. We retained a literary
gentleman (of great provincial reputation)
for the purpose of compiling that volume and
of eulogising Barnley Combe therein—and he
has done it with a vengeance; when I read
about our stupendous heights, gigantic fir
forests, and spooming cataract, I feel—if I
may be allowed the expression—positively
Alpine. Like the man who had talked prose
all his life without knowing it, I begin to be
aware of what a romantic region I have
been hitherto a denizen. The surgeon tells
me he has hopes of one of the parish children
having a regular goitre when she grows up,
in which case her fortune and ours will
indeed be made. How we shall dilate upon
"the population (alas!) paying the usual
penalty for the enormous altitude at which
they live, and for the gigantic character of
their magnificent scenes!" There is "A
picturesque recluse," the guide-book says,
"who having made his solitary abode for
years in a cleft of Barnley cliff, now earns a
scanty subsistence, in addition to the roots
and the spring with which he has been so
long contented, by awakening the slumberous
echoes with a Switzer horn." This is, in
reality, the boy who should be minding my
pigs in the beech-wood, but who prefers to
sit upon a very dangerous ledge amongst the
rocks, practising upon his swine-call, and
who consumes more beer and bacon when he
comes home at night, after doing nothing,
than any grown man in the village, after doing
a great deal. My gardener tells me that he
could get a shilling a head many a day if I
would let him show people over my half acre
of lawn and shrubbery during the season.
"Here," this is the guide-book again, "Art
seems to have been the chief operator in laying
out with taste the walks, the flowers, the
plantations"—there are altogether five-and-forty
trees, including gooseberry trees. "There,"
it continues, referring to my neighbour's (the
coast-guardsman's grounds), for which he does
not care an anchor button, and which he suffers
to run to rack and ruin, "Nature has had the
principal management—the dark, ivy-mantled
rock, the overhanging wood, the spooming
cataract, are the prevailing characteristics."

There is nothing in Barnley Combe which
loses in description, I think; nothing either in
illustration, to judge by the violent engravings,
prints, and water-colour sketches of it
exhibited in all the neighbouring towns, stuck
against the sides of public conveyances,
obtruded upon the heads of note-paper, and
stamped on mugs, and jugs, and work-boxes,
and fans for presents. We do what we can
to become famous and popular every way.
When homœopathy was the rage, our chemist
—who is likewise the grocer, and the baker,
and the wine and beer merchant, all in an
infinitesimal way—became a convert to the
next-to-nothing remedies at once, still issuing
to the benighted, castor-oil, if they liked it,
by the gallon. When the water-cure got to
be fashionable, our doctor had pipes laid on
to his own house from everywhere
immediately, and would put you, if you preferred
it, in a couple of wet sheets, just as soon as
recommend a warming-pan and antimonial
wine. Our rector, Mr. England, who "expects
every man to do his duty," and dislikes
much personal clerical exertion, has done his
very best to procure pleasing curates, and
has persevered, in spite of many disappointments
—the high, the broad, the low, the slow,
the no-church have all been tried at Barnley
Combe, and all for different offences have
been found guilty and condemned. Ladies
of high degree have sailed out of our
very pews before the winds of distasteful
doctrine. Officers of state have gone to
sleep, as though they were not taking a
holiday from their respective duties; and the
rector himself has once to listen to a
denunciatory harangue, of which he, the
incumbent, was the unmistakable object, and