line of trunks fades away in the semi-diaphanous mist in rather an awesome fashion. The wood seems full of mystery. The swaying of the limbs overhead, and the little sigh of the wind as it plays about the bare "hightops," sound mournful and eerie. The darkness is now complete, and as you cross the stile and leave behind these glades and coppices, so still and dark, yet soon to be full of the life of night, the familiar high road, though it be dark and silent too, seems friendly and companionable.

Even in weather too bad to permit of walking, the country is (to the proper temper of mind) infinitely more endurable than the town. You may sit to read or write without the infinite disturbance of the streets-without the brown and darksome fog which is now becoming common, not in London alone, but in all great towns. It is only in the country that the fogs are still white and harmless. Moated granges and Edwardian manorhouses are not for all of us, of course; and, mayhap, those who could most keenly enjoy such delights come in for them never. Nor is the country life entirely suitable for all of those to whom it is possible. But a life made up of half country and half town should be delicious to all save the desperately wicked, or those persons, so numerous now, and so sadly to be pitied, to whom existence without daily change and excitement is unendurable. It is not always easy to understand why people who may live where they list deliberately choose the town in preference to the country. They fancy, no doubt, that they could not be happy away from the streets; but the fault is in them, not in the way of life which they despise. And, looked at even from the money point of view, there is commonly a balance of economy on the side of the rural life. Land is now so cheap in most English counties, that a sum which would

not buy very much in the shape of a London leasehold will command a sufficient freehold in the country. During the last ten or a dozen years the rents of fine old country houses of small or moderate size, no more expensive to keep up than a rectory or a vicarage, have been largely reduced-first, because of the poverty of the land, and second, for that most melancholy of reasons, that the gentleman of moderate means has, like the labourer, taken to deserting the country. But such depression cannot last for ever; and meanwhile all the delights of country life are " going" at something like half-price.

J. PENDEREL-Brodhurst.

CHAPTER VI.

THE PLEASURES OF THE COUNTRY.

BY COMPTON READE,

Author of "Take care whom you Trust," etc.

Av universal fallacy accredits the English mind with being nothing better than pragmatical. That for the most part we are men of action is our proudest boast, and Dr. Pusey rightly complimented the elder university on producing not books but men, being fully alive to the all-importance of what old William of Wykeham styled "man-makyng." But we are not all muscles and motion. There remains, even in an age of railroads and liners, that splendid force, the English brain. True, neither to-day nor to-morrow can reproduce a Shakespeare. Intellect, as the medieval people put it, resembles Deitas diffusa, whereas in the greatest of poets it might have been termed Deitas concentrata; nevertheless, if weakened by diffusion, the divine quality which crystallised itself in a Shakespeare, remains a common heritage of the race, and for all our ceaseless locomotion we do think. The Victorian era almost rivals that of Elizabeth in mental brilliance, and there are still myriads among us who have not bowed the knee to the Baal of business so superstitiously as to have lost all sense of the worship of the beautiful.

At the same time the general gravitation towards urban life, and particularly towards the Metropolis, tends

to dwarf the range of English sympathy. We shall get to be a very one-sided people if altogether we lose touch with Nature; for by one of those paradoxes which meet us at every turn the ideal is evolved less from the quick intelligence of the city than from the supreme silence of the country. Titania and Puck emanated from the lawns and glades of Charlcote. The stage borrowed the fairy and the imp. It could not create them, still less invest such fancies with the credulous belief even now accorded them by the peasantry of the Welsh border. And not only shall we miss the charm of pure ideality, but our very realism also will inevitably become stereotyped and conventional. Kensington Gardens and the Bois de Boulogne stand in the same relation to Nature that a Japanese tea-tray does to art. Depend upon it, the eye needs the education of association as truly as the ear, and if the eye and ear be indeed the avenues of the soul, upon their culture must largely depend the texture of man's higher self. To argue thus is perhaps but to take up the well-worn parable of Mr. Ruskin; nevertheless, where can be found a more capable or honest guide? No one in his senses desires to foster a morbid æstheticism, the cant of art, or rather the art of cant; but to be in tune with such environment as this planet affords cannot be otherwise than healthy, and the sepulture of existence within the narrow area of the very largest and most overgrown of cities amounts to a heresy against human liberty.

To one class the word country means nothing more than the hunting and shooting season; to another agriculture only, or the business of food production. Both these notions are essentially vulgar, because limited and inadequate, yet they have prevailed all through. Nimrod loved field and forest, like many another of our gentle

barbarians, simply as media for big game. Horace himself-Horace, the polished cynic, the Anacreon and the Rochester of the Augustan age, appears to have prized his Sabine valley solely because of its superlative vines. Not as a sculptor, not as a painter, did this poet of the golden lyre regard his rural retreat, but rather in the spirit of a Herefordshire rustic, whose orchard teems with the old fox-whelp apple, that yields a cyder in value equal to the vintages of Epernay. To keep the elements of butchery and business in the background is essential, if the great face of Nature is to be admired for its own. sake; and with the spread of education, with a class rapidly forming in our midst of minds trained to contemplation, with the revival of the old Elizabethan accomplishments, it must surely be possible to view our native land apart from the delectation of destruction or the allurements of agriculture. The typical Englishman of the twentieth century will neither be Tony Lumpkin nor Farmer George; the typical English woman something more spirituelle than Di Vernon or Mrs. Poyser. We have developed a fresh type, we of this later age, a type, moreover, capable of a yet further evolution. Unlike their grandparents, fine gentlemen have ceased to be fine, and a cottage, if only it be true to art, satisfies our nature far more thoroughly than a shoddy palace. The grandiose has got to be our pet abomination. We ask for quality, and reject quantity if devoid of positive excellence. Nevertheless, while thus exhibiting the grace of humility, our standard diverges widely from that of simple Wordsworth, and even more so from his predecessors of the quasi-pastoral sort, such as Thomson and Collins. Experience teaches the real worth of that invaluable aphorism: Soyez de votre Siècle. This is not the epoch of what Sydney Smith termed a vegetable

E