If called upon to propose any summer’s journey for a young English traveller, (and it is a call often made with reference to continental tours,) we might reasonably suggest the coasts of Great Britain, as affording every kind of various interest, which can by possibility be desired.  Such a scheme would include the ports and vast commercial establishments of Liverpool, Bristol, Greenock, Leith, Newcastle, and Hull; the great naval stations of Plymouth, Portsmouth, Chatham, and Milford; the magnificent estuaries of the Clyde and Forth, and of the Bristol Channel, not surpassed by any in Europe; the wild and romantic coasts of the Hebrides and Western Highlands; the bold shore of North Wales; the Menai, Conway, and Sunderland bridges; the gigantic works of the Caledonian Canal and Plymouth Breakwater; and numerous other objects, which it is beyond our purpose and power to enumerate.  It cannot be surely too much to advise, that Englishmen, who have only slightly and partially seen these things, should subtract something from the length or frequency of their continental journeys, and give the time so gained to a survey of their own country’s wonders of nature and art.

To the agriculturist, and to the lover of rural scenery, England offers much that is remarkable.  The rich alluvial plains of continents may throw out a more profuse exuberance and succession of crops; but we doubt whether agriculture, as an art, has anywhere (except in Flanders and Tuscany alone) reached the same perfection as in the less fertile soils of the Lothians, Northumberland, and Norfolk.  Still more peculiar is the rural scenery of England, in the various and beautiful landscape it affords—­in the undulating surface—­the greenness of the enclosures—­the hamlets and country churches—­and the farm houses and cottages dispersed over the face of the country, instead of being congregated into villages, as in France and Italy.  We might select Devonshire, Somersetshire, Herefordshire, and others of the midland counties, as pre-eminent in this character of beauty, which, however, is too familiar to our daily observation to make it needful to expatiate upon it.

Nor will our limits allow us to dwell upon that bolder form of natural scenery which we possess in the Highlands of Scotland, in Wales, Cumberland, and Derbyshire, and which entitles us to speak of this island as rich in landscape of the higher class.  In the scale of objects, it is true that no comparison can exist between the mountain scenery of Britain, and that of many parts of the continent of Europe.  But it must be remembered, that magnitude is not essential to beauty; and that even sublimity is not always to be measured by yards and feet.  A mountain may be loftier, or a lake longer and wider, without any gain to that picturesque effect, which mainly depends on form, combination, and colouring.  Still we do not mean to claim in these points any sort of equality with the Alps, Apennines, or Pyrenees; or to do more than assert that, with the exception of these, the more magnificent memorials of nature’s workings on the globe, our own country possesses as large a proportion of fine scenery as any part of the continent of Europe.—­Q.  Rev.