8 COUNTRY LIFE 



of your equals for the improving company of virtuous 

 and unsophisticated peasants, as you might give up your 

 Bordeaux or Burgundy for a course of goat's milk. 

 Such books are idylls and pastorals in prose, and there 

 seems a dash of the artificial and theatrical in them. 

 But there is, and there is not. They are only artificial 

 and theatrical in so far as they are true to foreign facts, 

 and founded on an intimate though idealised knowledge 

 of the feelings and habits and social relations of our 

 good friends on the Continent. 



Nothing can more forcibly illustrate our meaning 

 than a comparison of the fascinating books we have 

 been referring to with the inexhaustible rural literature 

 of England. What a variety of volumes come crowd- 

 ing together on our memory, written by men who have 

 lived in the English country, and loved it, although 

 many of them had to quit it for more serious pursuits 

 for the best part of the year ! What an infinity of 

 friends they have made themselves among folks they 

 have never met in the flesh ; and what an endearing 

 popularity they have attained, because they have struck 

 the sympathetic chords in the bosoms of so many thou- 

 sands of their country-people ! If they have been read 

 and read again by successive generations, it is because 

 they have expressed with unstudied and instinctive 

 eloquence those feelings that are universally struggling 

 for utterance ; because by the force and minute fidelity 

 of their descriptions they have recalled to us some of 

 the brightest associations of our lives. Not only when 

 they have written with that definite purpose, but inci- 



