Ready-Money Jack will sleep with his
fathers: the good Squire, and all his peculiarities, will be buried in
the neighbouring church. The old Hall will be modernized into a
fashionable country-seat, or, peradventure, a manufactory. The park
will be cut up into petty farms and kitchen-gardens. A daily coach
will run through the village; it will become, like all other
commonplace villages, thronged with coachmen, post-boys, tipplers, and
politicians: and Christmas, May-day, and all the other hearty
merry-makings of the "good old times," will be forgotten.
THE AUTHOR'S FAREWELL.
And so without more circumstance at all,
I hold it fit that we shake hands and part.
--_Hamlet_.
Having taken leave of the Hall and its inmates, and brought the
history of my visit to something like a close, there seems to remain
nothing further than to make my bow, and exit. It is my foible,
however, to get on such companionable terms with my reader in the
course of a work, that it really costs me some pain to part with him;
and I am apt to keep him by the hand, and have a few farewell wards at
the end of my last volume.
When I cast an eye back upon the work I am just concluding, I cannot
but be sensible how full it must be of errors and imperfections:
indeed, how should it be otherwise, writing as I do about subjects and
scenes with which, as a stranger, I am but partially acquainted? Many
will doubtless find cause to smile at very obvious blunders which I
may have made; and many may, perhaps, be offended at what they may
conceive prejudiced representations.
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