which the English used to be famous.  Among the Lincolnshire farmers rural life is to be seen in its most agreeable aspect.  The labourers are as superior to the southern peasantry as their employers to the southern tenantry.  Books, newspapers, and music may be found in the farm-houses, as well as old ale and sound port wine.  At Aylsby, six miles from Great Grimsby, Mr. William Torr has a fine herd of short horns and a flock of pure Leicester sheep, well worth a visit.  The celebrated Wold farmers are about ten miles distant.  Any one of them is worth six Baden barons.

After crossing from Hull, if a visit to these Wold Farms be intended, Grimsby is the best resting-place, a miserable town of great antiquity, which, after slumbering, or rather mouldering, for centuries on the profits of Parliamentary privileges and a small coasting trade, has been touched by the steam-enchanter’s wand, and presented with docks, warehouses, railways, and the tools of commerce.  These, aided by its happy situation, will soon render it a great steam-port, and obliterate, it is to be hoped, the remains of the squalid borough, which traces back its foundation to the times of Saxon sea-kings.  We must record, for the credit of Great Grimsby, that it evinced its improved vitality by subscribing a larger sum to the Exhibition of Industry than many towns of ten times its population and more than ten times its wealth.

The execution of the railway and dock works, which will render Great Grimsby even more important than Birkenhead, has been mainly due to the exertions of the greatest landowner in the county, the Earl of Yarborough, who has wisely comprehended the value of a close connexion between a purely agricultural and manufacturing district.

His patriotic views have been ably seconded by Mr. John Fowler, the engineer of the Manchester and Lincolnshire Railways, and Mr. James J. M. Rendel, the engineer of these docks as well as of those at Birkenhead.

The Grimsby docks occupy thirty-seven acres, cut off from the sea.  The work was courageously undertaken, in the midst of the depression which followed the railway panic, by Messrs. Thomas, Hutchins, & Co., contractors, and has been carried through in an admirable manner, in the face of every kind of difficulty, without an hour’s delay.  They will open in March next.  The first stone was laid by Prince Albert in May 1849, when he electrified the audience at dinner by one of those bursts of eloquence with which the events of the Great Exhibition have made us familiar.  It was on the occasion of his ride to Brocklesby that Lord Yarborough’s tenantry rode out to meet the Prince, and exhibited the finest farmers’ cavalcade for men and horses in England.