Read it through once

“Clean, airy, orderly and affluent; well paved, well lighted, well watched; abounding in wide and spacious streets, filled with excellent shops and handsome houses,” is Miss Mitford’s description of it, and she might have added that it was once again comporting itself in the grand manner as was proper to a town whose origin is lost in the mists of antiquity, but whose records, from the twelfth century at least, are records of great doings of both Church and State.