sun is setting and the landscape fades away in purple twilight, the explorer becomes obsessed, against all reason, with the weird notion that the many centuries of civilisation are but a dream and the distant ages come back again.  To this bareness the pleasant little town of Stockbridge, situated delightfully in the valley of the Anton, is a gracious interlude.  In its old churchyard the curious may still see the whimsical epitaph to John Bucket, landlord of the “King’s Head” inn, who died, aged 67, in 1802:

And is, alas! poor Bucket gone?
Farewell, convivial honest John.
Oft at the well, by fatal stroke
Buckets like pitchers must be broke.
In this same motley shifting scene,
How various have thy fortunes been.
Now lifting high, now sinking low,
To-day the brim would overflow.
Thy bounty then would all supply
To fill, and drink, and leave thee dry.
To-morrow sunk as in a well,
Content unseen with Truth to dwell.
But high or low, or wet or dry,
No rotten stave could malice spy.
Then rise, immortal Bucket, rise
And claim thy station in the skies;
Twixt Amphora and Pisces shine,
Still guarding Stockbridge with thy sign.

In 1715, when the poet Gay rode horseback to Exeter and wrote a rhymed account of his journey for the Earl of Burlington, he described Stockbridge in doleful dumps.  Why?  Because for seven years there had been no election:

Sad melancholy ev’ry visage wears;
What! no election come in seven long years!
Of all our race of Mayors, shall Snow alone
Be by Sir Richard’s dedication known?
Our streets no more with tides of ale shall float!
Nor cobblers feast three years upon one vote.

Some of this seems cryptic, but it is explained by the fact of Sir Richard Steele having published, September 22nd, 1713, a quarto pamphlet entitled The Importance of Dunkirk considered . . . in a letter to the Bailiff of Stockbridge, whose name was John Snow.  The number of voters at Stockbridge was then about seventy, and its population chiefly cobblers.  To say it was a corrupt borough is merely to state what might be said of almost every one at that time; but it seems to have been especially notable, even above its corrupt fellows, for a contemporary chronicler is found writing: “It is a very wet town and the voters are wet too.”  He then continues, as one deploring the depreciation of securities, “The ordinary price of a vote is £60, but better times may come.”  But when elections only came septennially, the wet voters who subsisted three years upon one vote must have gone dry, poor fellows, an unconscionable while.