A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. Ip 



coarser transitions, abrupt variations, separation of 

 extremes in rainfall and temperature ; in the lack of 

 what Gilbert White calls " delicate weather." 



People with ordinary Londoner's instincts cannot 

 even understand these distinctions ; to them, one of 

 our late summers of brazen drought is the ideal of 

 charming weather ; while to the real countryman 

 who knows and loves the face of the land, nothing 

 is so bitter as the lingering death of green things 

 morning after morning under the cloudless, pitiless 

 blue. And there are not many people now who 

 have not in some degree the Londoner's instincts. 

 The town has overpowered and swallowed up the 

 country we are cockney from sea to sea. The 

 change is to be traced in quite recent times ; relics 

 of the older state yet remain. Rural sentiment, the 

 bobus exercet suis feeling for the jolly farmer and the 

 fine peasantry, by all test of literature, came not so 

 long ago out of the fields and into the streets ; to-day 

 the wind sets the other way, the smell of the foot- 

 lights come across the hay ; London air blows into 

 the smallest village in Arcadia. Charles Lamb at 

 Enfield is far less a cockney than Mr. Hardy in 

 " Wessex," or Mr. Crockett in Ayrshire. We country 

 folk are taught, diverted, governed from Town ; the 

 little businesses proper to our conditions are directed 



