character. To test its power we need only turn to our literature. Shakespeare would not have written "A Midsummer Night's Dream," with all the riot of fairies, flowers, and rural imaginings, unless his youthful fancy had been fed on the familiar and lovely scenes surrounding every farmstead and lowly cottage near Stratford-onAvon. Milton's familiarity with English country life saturates his poems. Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, reflect the stored up rural sights, sounds, and odours accumulated in his meditative walks about his father's house at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. Where ever they lived, and whatever the environment of their boyhood, Shakespeare and Milton would no doubt have been inspired poets, only they would have worn their laurels "with a difference." The "violets sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes or Cytherea's breath" might not have blossomed eternally in the verse of the one, nor the song of the lark, the smell of the eglantine, the swish of the scythe, haunted the lighter poems of the other. Since then, to be a "poet of Nature" has become a profession; but the strange haunting faculty dwelling in so many of the references to the simplest incidents of rural life exists only when the association of the idea with its maturer expression has affected the poet at first hand and in early boyhood. The dullest of us can recall the face of rural England in Shakespeare's day. Many of the fields and lanes remain unchanged about his birthplace. But even Mr. Besant hardly enables us to imagine Fleet Street when Elizabeth was Queen.

So it is that nearly all our love for the past is borne along by means of the magic chain of rural things by which we are connected with it. This influence has grown into our national life with far greater distinctness than we find in the case of the French, the Italians, or

the Germans. For until the exigencies of trade and manufacture drove, in an evil hour, our population into the towns, we were a country-bred people. The change has made us wealthy, has multiplied our numbers by ten, but has it made us better, wiser, kindlier, or happier? Certainly it has not made us merrier. "Merry" is the last epithet our foreign critics apply to us. But when we all lived in the country, and could boast of a magnificent peasantry whose descendants now are ruling India, peopling North America, trying to become millionaires on the Stock Exchange or in company promoting, we "did not take our pleasures sadly." The only reason the epithet can now be applied to us is because of the smiling and pastoral beauty of the country which welcomes the stranger by all manner of home-like allurements. All the happiest homes should, indeed, be in the country. There alone the child can blossom untrammelled, and absorb the influences enabling him to apprehend the meaning of the phrase "I am an Englishman." Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in his very fine poem, "The Flag of England," speaks of a section of us as "a street-bred people." The reproach is deserved, if not exactly in the application he intended. We have acquired a "street-bred" manner of looking at things. Our newspaper criticism is most of it "street-bred," and so is more than half our politics. When the close of the turmoil and confusion the French revolution had brought on Europe gave us an opportunity of becoming the great manufactory and workshop of the world in a still greater degree than we had been before, we began to be ashamed of our country breeding. The restless activity then first set in violent commotion altered the social perspective. Country life was dethroned from the place it had always occupied in the public mind and those forced

to dwell there looked towards the great towns, particularly London, with longing eyes. At the beginning of the century country breeding was a favourite butt for the clumsy banter of the time. But steam, that has conquered distance so far as our island is concerned, has brought town and country into the closest possible relation, and it has become necessary for a nervous and much worried generation to revert intermittently and with hesitation to the manners of their grandfathers. The "change of

we are all so fond of talking about, usually means getting out of London or its provincial equivalent. I don't think the Elizabethans wanted much "change of air," or that the medical experts of the day thought of ordering it to patients suffering from dyspepsia or nervous debility. But a town-bred people crave it, and children need it as much as they need good food. The lad entirely brought up in London grows up with half his natural faculties undeveloped. He cannot distinguish

between an elm tree and a beech, or recognise the difference between a linnet and a sparrow. It is not for him to hear the nightingale sing when his fancy is freshest, or thrill with inexplicable excitement at the first glimpse of a speckled-backed trout. He will know the country only by hearsay or through the medium of books. Our Peter Bells should surely all be "street-bred." But under all conditions Nature will assert herself and we are reverting to our old methods. Those who can live in the country, and those who cannot, turn to it with a longing all the smoke of London cannot stifle. Falstaff is not the only man who "babbles of green fields," only the wiser man babbles of them before it is too late.

PERCY WHITE.

CHAPTER V.

THE COUNTRY MOUSE: AN APPRECIATION.

BY JAMES PENDEREL-BRODHURST,

Author of "The Enfranchisement of Leaseholds"-(Estates Gazette Office); Part Author of "The Royal River," and "Abbeys and Churches of England and Wales."

We need not go back so far as Virgil, nor even Sir Roger de Coverley, to find abundance of literature in praise of rural life, its delight and its gentle charm. English literature indeed, and especially that which accumulated before the present century, is very largely what it is now the fashion to call the "appreciation" of the life which most poets, from Virgil to Crabbe, have sought to praise. But when the age of great towns set in, a change, at first gradual, but at last rapid, began to operate, and there was developed a school of poets and prosateurs who took as keen a delight in singing the praises of the pavement as their forerunners (and usually their betters) had felt in extolling the country life.

There is a touch of clever, if flippant, cynicism in these eulogies of the flagstones which gives us pause sometimes, and bids us enquire if all this chanting of the supreme delights of Piccadilly is quite sincere and quite convinced. But, indeed, this battle of the town-mouse and the country-mouse of literature is, in a way, as old as the Restoration. The little poets sang then, as the little poets sing to-day of the variety of the street, of the glare of the play-house, the swirl and scramble of the life

which makes itself obvious and felt. But a good many of us, who have, perhaps, too much of the town and its emotions, may well ask ourselves sometimes if the townmouse be not hopelessly in the wrong. We may "live the life" of which the earnest young man and the still more earnest damsel for ever prate, without being quite so morbidly conscious of it. It is of the essence of happiness that we do not know we are enjoying it, and it is, perhaps, in some measure due to forgetfulness of this truism that a notion has arisen among people who are more or less compelled by stress of circumstance to spend their lives in towns, that beyond the clatter which reminded Lowell, in a phrase which will live as long as language, of "the roaring loom of time," there is no enjoyment and no salvation. Town life has become so full of interests, so crowded with excitements, and with temptations of the nerves that the notion, mistaken and mischievous though it be, has perhaps some reason even if it have no justification. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has asked in one of his fierce and stormy, if unbalanced, ballads "what the little street-bred people" know of England; and I may use his phrase to ask what all the hereditary, and most of the accidental “street-bred people" know of that rurality which is the one enormous and subtle charm of England?

This modern revolt against the country, did we not know the reason for it, would be the more surprising and disquieting, in that there has never been a land in which rural life has been more passionately beloved or more widely enjoyed. The rich Roman endured his villa, but he loved his Rome. To him a spell of country life was but an interlude, dictated at least as much by fashion as by desire, and to this day Latin peoples, in the bulk, have not acquired that instinctive calenture for the romantic