422 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



great stress upon that urbanity which is acquired only by long associa- 

 tion of man with man. Greek pedagogy insists that education shall 

 above all things make the gentleman. Greek thinkers were far more 

 interested in their fellow men than in their irrational companions or in 

 the silent creation. It is true Theocritus, and the much later Dio, 

 praise country life, but they lived in an age that was preeminently 

 one of books. They commend the simple and unsophisticated manners 

 of those who keep aloof from the haunts of men more than they ex- 

 press delight in their rustic surroundings. They do not like nature 

 so much as they dislike man. Among the Eomans, Virgil and Horace 

 follow the same course. They either never leave the city or they stay 

 within easy reach of it. They do as did the usurer whom the latter 

 portrays in his much-read and often-translated second Epode. After 

 enumerating the delights of country life and the various vexations of 

 those who have much to do with men, he ends just where he began — 

 by staying in the city. This praise of rural life reads as if written by 

 one who knew but little about it. We find much the same thing in 

 Germany in Gessner's writings and in England in the age of Anne. 

 Pope declares : 



Happy the man whose wish and care 



A few paternal acres bound; 

 Content to breathe his native air 



On his own ground. 



Yet he never went farther from London than Virgil or Horace 

 from Borne. We get curious glimpses into the vagaries of taste when 

 we trace even in the barest outline the manifestations of what was 

 supposed to be a love of nature. Virgil's Pastoral poems seem to have 

 been the original inspiration. We can follow their influence in almost 

 every country of Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, 

 and, to some extent, in the eighteenth. Even the horticultural art 

 was made subservient to this fantastic taste of which Lenotre was the 

 chief apostle. Trees and shrubbery were clipped and trained into 

 artificial forms, and flowers were planted according to geometrical 

 figures. The aristocracy professed a love for nature, but it was nature 

 of a very unnatural sort. It is not until we come to Bloomfield and 

 Crabbe, but especially to Wordsworth, that we find nature and the un- 

 sophisticated man receiving a genuine poetical treatment by persons 

 who knew both at first hand and studied them with genuine sympathy. 

 Walter Scott was likewise an ardent lover of nature and of natural 

 scenery. Both his poetry and his prose are evidence. His novels con- 

 tain many elaborate descriptions of scenery that bear the stamp of 

 verisimilitude. They are the work of a constructive imagination of 

 the highest order. If Xenophon had had an eye for the beauties of 

 mountain and plain, of forest and stream, he would have left upon 

 record his impressions of them rather than the numerous and long 

 speeches he has handed down to posterity, made for the most part ' out 



