of the tenderness due to dumb creatures, in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practise towards a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost. When I have cast my perfidious line over the waves of a lake, or into the dips and hollows of a bubbling trout-stream, with all its romantic curvatures into creek and cove, a thousand images, born from poetic sentiment, and giving birth in turn to moralising thought, present themselves to my noonday reverie; images which would never have taken shape had I been pacing to and fro the gravel-walks of my garden. Above all, Nature herself, in that spiritual beauty which keeps opening out from the green deeps as our eye rests on the surface, just as out from some grand author meaning on meaning, secret on secret, will open as we continue to read and re-read the page-Nature herself fascinates and appeals to me when I stand on the grassy banks, and see earth and sky blending light and shadow in the glass of mysterious waters.

This miserable pastime of angling this base seduction of a credulous fellow-creature with a fraudulent bait-certainly it is not this which charms me hour after hour to solitary moss-grown banks. The pastime is but my excuse for listening so patiently

"From morn till noon, from noon till
dewy eve,"

to the vague whisperings of the Universal Mother. Why do I need that idle rod to draw me forth to the water-side-why, if no snare of mine near yon water-lily menaced the scaly flocks of Proteus-why could I not recline as long and as contentedly under this bowery elmtree, watching the reeds quiver where the pike stirs, or noting the

wistful eyes of the grasshopper as he halts on my lap, wondering whether I be friend or foe? I know not why. Ask the gunner whether he would walk thirty miles a-day over stubble and turnips, if he had a staff in his hand instead of his Manton.

Man is so formed for design by the Great Designer, that in his veriest amusement he still involuntarily seeks an object. He needs a something definite-a something that pretends to be practical-in order to rivet his attention long to external nature, however sensitive he may be to her charms. We must have our chase or our angling, our butterfly-net or our geological hammer, or we must be botanists or florists, naturalists, husbandmen, or artists. If we can make to ourselves no occupation out of the many that rural nature affords us, we must be contented, like the Spitalfields weaver, to visit her on rare holidays. Our week-day world is not in her calm retreats.

He who fondly prefers the country to the town, who feels that the best part of him can never develop into bloom and fruit in the atmosphere of capitals, is not, as I commenced by owning, wiser or better, more imaginative or more thoughtful, than he who by choice fixes his home in the busiest haunts of men. But he is probably better and possibly wiser than the average number of those who cannot live out of towns. He must possess, if Kant's theory of the Esthetic be as true as it is lovely, the inborn moral sentiment which allies itself to the immediate, unreasoning, unambitious sympathy with Nature.

66

He," says the grand philosopher, "who contemplates solitarily (without purpose or object of communicating to others what it pleases himself to observe) the beauty of a wild flower, a bird, an insect-to admire and to love it-who would regret not to find that thing in Nature, independently of all advantage he may draw from it-nay, even if it occasions to him some

loss or harm;-it is he who at taches to Nature an interest immediate and intellectual. . . . That advantage which Natural beauty has over Artistic beauty in alone thus exciting an immediate interest, accords with the purified and solid intelligence of all who have cultivated their moral sentiment. When a man, having sufficient taste to appreciate the productions of the Fine Arts with exactitude and delicate perception, quits without regret the chamber in which glitter those beauties that satisfy vanity and the craving for social distractions, and seeks the beauty of Nature, to find therein a delight which sustains his mind in that direction to which we can never attain the final goal in that man we suppose a certain beauteousness of soul which we do not attribute to a connoisseur, because the last finds an interest in the objects of Art.”

Leaving without comment these passages, which do but loosely and inadequately paraphrase the original (for it would almost require a Plato to translate, and, alas! at times, an Aristotle to comprehend, a Kant), I may suggest some less refining arguments in favour of the proposition that he who prefers the country is perhaps better than the average of those who prefer the town. It is clear that he must have a large share of that negative goodness which consists in the absence of evil. He cannot well be a profligate sensualist, nor an ambitious schemer, nor dependent for enjoyment on the gratification of petty vanities. His sources of pleasure will at least be generally pure. He will have that independence of spirit which can stand firm without leaning on other men's minds to use the fine expression of Locke," he will have raised himself above the alms-basket, and is not content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinion."* His conscience needs no turbulent excitements to chase away a haunting

remembrance. I speak of those who genuinely and truly love the country by natural temperament, not of those who take to it without love, as outlaws who fly into a temple, not to worship at its altar, but to lie hid within its sanctuary. Birds sing in vain to the ear, flowers bloom in vain to the eye, of mortified vanity and galled ambition. He who would know repose in retirement must carry into retirement his destiny, integral and serene, as the Cæsars transported the statue of Fortune into the chamber they chose for their sleep. The picture of the first Lord Holland gnawing out his fierce heart on the downs of Kingsgate, is very different from that of a gentler statesman, Pliny, hailing his reprieve from pomp and power, and exclaiming, in the scholar's true enthusiasm-"O mare, O littus, verum secretumque, Movotîov, quam multa dictatis, quam multa invenitis !"

Whatever the varying predilections of grown-up men for town or country, one fact needs no proving; all children prefer the country. Ask any schoolboy up to the age of fifteen, where he would spend his holidays. Not one in five hundred will say, In the streets of London," if you give him the option of green fields and running waters. It is, then, a fair presumption that there must be something of the child still in the character of the men or the women whom the country charms in maturer as in dawning life.

Among women especially, I own I think better of those who prefer fields to streets. They have not in capitals the grand occupations of laborious men-they have no bar and no senate. At the best, if more than usually cultured and intelligent, they can but interchange such small coins of thought and learning as are spent in talk. But if there be one thing in which intellect can appear to the intellectual

either flippant or commonplace, it is the talk of wits in the drawingrooms of capitals. The worst part of an eminent man's conversation is, nine times out of ten, to be found in that part which he means to be clever. Even in the talk of Dr Johnson, as recorded by Boswell, the finest things are those which he said to Boswell when nobody was by, and which he could just as well have said in the Hebrides.

The most delicate beauty in the mind of women is, and ever must be, an independence of artificial stimulants for content. It is not so with men. The links that bind men to capitals belong to the golden chain of civilisation-the chain which fastens all our destinies to the throne of Jove. And hence the larger proportion of men in whom genius is pre-eminent have preferred to live in cities, though some of them have bequeathed to us the loveliest pictures of the rural scenes in which they declined to dwell. Certainly nothing in Milton or in Shakespeare more haunts our memory than the passages in which they seem to luxuriate in rural life, as Arcadians in the Golden Age. What voluptuous revelry amongst green leaves in that half-pastoral comedy which has its scene in the Forest of Ardennes! In the Midsummer Night's Dream how Fancy seems to bury herself, as it were, in the lap of Nature, as the fairies bury themselves in the bells of flowers! Think of Milton, the Lycidas, the Comus, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, the garden-land of Paradise Lost! Yet Milton seems to have willingly enough spent nearly all his life in "troublous cities pent." Even in his brief holiday abroad it is amongst capitals that he loves to linger. We do not find him, like the poet who has had the widest and loudest fame of our own age, rejoice

"To sit alone, to muse o'er flood and fell, To slowly trace the forest's fading green, Where things that own not man's dominion

dwell,

And mortal foot has ne'er or rarely been."

Shakespeare, so far as we know of his life, was from early youth a denizen of London till rich enough to retire; and then he retired, not into the solitudes of the country, but into a social dwelling in the midst of a town, in which, no doubt, he found, and was pleased to find, associates of younger days, with whom he could talk frankly, as great men rarely talk save to those with whom they have played in boyhood.

Most of the more famous modern writers on the Continent have by choice lived in cities, especially the German and the French. And in this they are distinguished from the ancient authors, at least the Latin. Horace had his Sabine farm in the Vale of Ustica; the love of scenery yet more attractive made him take also his cottage amidst the orchards and "mobile rivulets" of Tivoli. He sighed yet for a third country home-a winter retreat in the mild climate of Sorrento. Tibullus, the amorous and the beautiful, passed the larger part of his short life on his estate in the lovely country between Tivoli and Præneste. Ovid, specially the man of gaiety and fashion, lived, it is true, chiefly at Rome (before his mysterious exile), but he had a garden of his own apart from his house, between the Flaminian and Clodian Ways, to which he constantly resorted, as well as his country-seat, the Pelignan farm.

Virgil's house at Rome, like that of Propertius, was ruralised, as it were, by its neighbourhood to the vast gardens of Mæcenas. His favourite residence, however, was at Naples, not actually in the town, if Neapolitan traditions be worthy of credit, but on the outskirts, near his legendary tomb on Posilippo, and facing the bay which sunset colours with such glorious hues.

Even Terence, whose vocation of comic writer might be supposed to fix him amidst the most populous haunts of men, may be fairly presumed, when not in the villas of his patrons, to have spent his time

chiefly on his own small estate by the Appian Road, till he vanished into Greece, whence he never returned; dying, according to one report-for there are many reports as to the mode and place of his death -amidst the mountain seclusions of Arcady. Every scholar, almost every schoolboy, has got by heart the song in which Catullus vents his rapture on regaining his home on the Sirmian Peninsula. And many a man who has never read Catullus has uttered the same cry of joy in greeting his rural threshold after strange wanderings or lengthened absence. For what more blessed than to ungird us of our cares-when the mind lays down its fardel, and we come from the toil afar to our own hearth, and repose on the longed-for bed? Who does not then call on the dear roof to welcome him as if it were a living thing of life, and echo the sense of that wondrous line

"Laugh, every dimple in the cheek of

home!"*

Cicero's love of the country needs no proof. With his busy life we still associate his quiet Tusculum. Pliny the younger gives us a description, chiefly known to architectural critics, whom it has sadly puzzled, of a rich public man's retreat from the smoke of Rome, only seventeen miles from the city, "so that (writes Pliny to his friend) after we have finished the business of the day, we can go thither from town at sunset ;" a journey which he calls extremely short when performed on horseback (more tedious in a carriage, because the roads were sandy). Certainly a man must have loved the country well to ride seventeen miles to a house in it after the business of the day. Few English statesmen or lawyers, I suspect, would be equally alert in their sacrifice to the rural deities. But how lovingly Pliny

describes the house, with apartments so built as to command the finest prospects: the terrace before the gallery all perfumed with violets; the gallery itself so placed that the shadow of the building is thrown on the terrace in the forenoon; and at the end of the gallery "the little garden apartment," which he calls his own-his sweetheart-looking on one side to the terrace, on the other to the sea; and then his own bedchamber carefully constructed for the exclusion of noise. No voice of babbling servants, no murmurs from booming seas, reach the room in which, as he tells us elsewhere, he not only sleeps but muses.

"There," he exclaims, in that charming letter + wherein he compares that petty gossip of the town, which seems, while you are in town, to be so sensible and rational, but of which you say when you get into the country," How many days have I wasted on trifles !"-" there," he exclaims, "there, at my Laurentium, I hear nothing that I repent to have heard, say nothing that I repent to have said; no hopes delude, and no fears molest me. Welcome, thou life of integrity and virtue! O dulce otium, honestumque, ac pœne omni negotio pulchrius!"

We have no absolute warrant for fixing the voluntary choice of the great poets of Athens either in town or country. But we know, from ample authority, that the possession of a rural home was the passionate craving of an Athenian. Up to the date of the Peloponnesian War most of the Athenian citizens resided habitually with their families in the country. And when compelled, at the outbreak of that war, to come within the blind walls of the city, each man grieved, as if in leaving his rural home he was leaving his own civil polity, yea, his own proper city, behind him.‡

The burly Demos itself is represented by Aristophanes much as our old-fashioned caricatures represented John Bull-a shrewd and grumbling farmer thinking how votes might affect his crops. It may not, therefore, be presumptuous to suppose that Sophocles had a favourite retreat on the chalky soil of his native Colonus, and listened, many a returning spring, to "the nightingales that tenanted the dark ivy, and greeted the narcissus, ancient coronal of mighty goddesses, as it burst into bloom under the dews of heaven."* Or that the wronged and melancholy Euripides might have gathered his consoling books (Athenæus tells us that he was an ardent book-collector) into some suburban dwelling-place by the banks of that Cephisus, of which, in the headlong rush of his darkest tragedy, he pauses to chant the tempering breeze and the fragrant rose.t

The town temperament is in general anxious, aspiring, combative; the rural temperament quiet, unambitious, peaceful.

But the town temperament has this advantage over the rural—a man may by choice fix his home in cities, yet have the most lively enjoyment of the country when he visits it for recreation; while the

* Edip. Col., from line 668.

man who, by choice, settles habitually in the country, there deposits his household gods, and there moulds his habits of thought to suit the life he has selected, usually feels an actual distress, an embarrassment, a pain, when, from time to time, he drops, a forlorn stranger, on the London pavement. He cannot readily brace his mind to the quick exertions for small objects that compose the activity of the Londoner. He has no interest in the gossip about persons he does not know; the very weather does not affect him as it does the man who has no crops to care for. When the Londoner says, "What a fine day!" he shakes his head dolefully, and mutters, "Sadly in want of rain."

The London sparrows, no doubt, if you took them into the forest glens of Hampshire, would enjoy the change very much; but drop the thrush and linnet of Hampshire into St James's Square, and they would feel very uneasy at the prospect before them. You might fill all the balconies round with prettier plants than thrush and linnet ever saw in the New Forest, but they would not be thrush and linnet if they built their nest in such coverts.

(To be continued.)

+ Medea, 842.