As I emerged from the great, busy town on the north, I passed by the estates and residences of its manufacturing aristocracy.  The homes they have built and embellished should satisfy the tastes and ambitions of any hereditary nobility.  They need only a little more age to make them rival many baronial establishments.  It is interesting to see how the different classes of society are stepping into each other’s shoes in going up into higher grades of social life.  The merchant and manufacturing princes of England have not only reached but surpassed the conditions of wealth, taste and elegance which the hereditary peers of the realm occupied a century ago; while the latter have gone up to the rich and luxurious surroundings of kings and queens of that period.  The upward movement has reached the very lowest strata of society.  Not only have the small tradesmen and farmers ascended to the comfortable conditions of large merchants and landowners of one hundred years ago, but common day laborers are lifted upward by the general uprising.  I should not wonder if all the damp, low cellarless cottages they now frequently inhabit should be swept away in less than fifty years and replaced by as comfortable buildings as the great middle class occupied in the childhood of the present generation.

I found comfortable quarters for the night in the little village of Bramhope, about five miles from Leeds.  The next day I walked to Harrogate, passing through Otley and across the celebrated Wharf Vale.  The scenery of this valley, as it opens upon you suddenly on descending from the south into Otley, is exceedingly beautiful; not so extensive as that of Belvoir Vale, but with all the features of the latter landscape compressed in a smaller space; like a portrait taken on a smaller scale.  As you look off from the southern ridge or wall of the valley, you seem to stand on the cord of a segment of a circle, the radius of which touches the horizon at about five miles to the north.  This crescent is filled with the most delicate lineaments of Nature’s beauty.  The opposite walls of the gallery slope upward from the meandering Wharf so gently and yet reach the blue ceiling of the sky so near, that all the paintings that panel them are vividly distinct to your eye, and you can group all their lights and shades in the compass of a single glance.

On the opposite side, half hidden and half revealed among the trees of an ample park, stands Farnley Hall, a historical residence of an old historical family.  I had a letter of introduction to the present proprietor, Mr. Fawkes, who, I hope, will not deem it a disparagement to be called one of the Knights of the Shorthorns—­a more extensive, useful, and cosmopolitan order than were the Knights of Rhodes or of Malta.  Unfortunately for me, he was not at home; but his steward, a very intelligent, gentlemanly and genial man, took me over the establishment, and showed me all the stock that was stabled, mostly bulls of different ages.