6 IDLEHURST : 



vignettes of the garden and the fields, sketches of 

 the old people and the new, perspectives of our work 

 and our play ; my favourites presented, I hope, 

 without excessive touches of rose -madder; my 

 aversions etched without overmuch acid. You will 

 not account impertinent a few private judgments 

 here and there upon matters beyond our village 

 horizon ; dicta which are the product of the genuine 

 Arcadian mind. Some one (Eduard Kohler, I think, 

 in " Fantasiereisen >J ) has an apologue of a Scythian 

 tribe accustomed to turn out an anchorite into the 

 desert for a term of years, and to receive on his 

 return his strictures upon their manners and the 

 constitution of their state with the consideration due 

 to abstracted and unprejudiced criticism. Now I 

 have been, for longer than I care to think, a rigid 

 hermit in the wilderness ; I am pure of the taint of 

 Pall Mall ; I am untouched by propagandist romances 

 and the weightiest of reviews. You will allow these 

 impressions of mine as the outcome of a seclusion 

 at once fortunate and wilful ; my fact and fancy both 

 come out of that world you have barred yourself 

 from, the aprica rura which I think still sometimes 

 touch your heart, through the smoke cloud or the 

 tropic sky, with the half-reproachful sweetness of 

 first-love remembered after forty years. 



