206 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



is a most entrancing sixteenth-century house, possessing 

 a gloomy park, a family curse, and a general atmosphere 

 altogether redolent of Mrs. Radcliffe at her darkest), 

 Miss Burney contented herself with observing that the 

 view of the South Downs from the King's Head or the 

 Talbot (where I suppose she was taking tea) was very 

 curious and singular. 



The utter lack of feeling displayed by the most 

 cultured people of the eighteenth century for the 

 domestic architecture of England positively appals. 

 I believe that Horace Walpole was the only man living 

 who had the faintest natural tendency to the taste — and 

 his taste naturally was affected by the vitiated atmosphere 

 which prevailed. Here is the second fine house that Miss 

 Burney (so far as human nature is concerned, the 

 observant of the observant) passes entirely without 

 observation. First it is Littlecote on the Bath Road, 

 which she fails to perceive, and now it is Cuckfield Park 

 on the Brighton Road. Two points only can be urged 

 in excuse of this deplorable exhibition of wall-eyedness 

 in one so young. Firstly, that Miss Burney was not by 

 nature a romanticist — indeed held them rather in 

 contempt — and so was probably watching from the 

 landing window a comedy in real life played by two 

 post-boys and a chambermaid in the gallcried inn's 

 backyard ; secondly, that the author of Evelina had not 

 enjoyed the advantage possessed by the present genera- 

 tion of revelling in the romances of Harrison Ainsworth. 

 No ; Miss Burney had no opportunity of reading Rook- 

 wood (not that she would have read it if she had had the 

 opportunity, I fear) ; and so Cuckfield Park was not 

 associated in her mind, as it is in ours, with Dick Turpin 

 and all the adventurous, dashing figures that throng the 

 pages of Ainsworth's first success. For Cuckfield Park 

 is the Rookwood of the romance ; and it is no unde- 

 served compliment to its intrepid writer, who with all his 

 faults, possessed the truly refreshing capacity for " cutting 

 analysis and getting to the story," that his novel has 



