68 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



at Christmas ; but is it not rather dearly retained, 

 when land is being cut up for Railroads all around 

 us, at two or three hundred pounds the acre and 

 scarcely a vestige or margin left to inclose for the 

 " more, more " cry of an increasing population ? 



It is, at the least, a consolation to think that these 

 huge banks have no prescriptive right : that when 

 Dr. Johnson told us " God made the Country,"* he 

 did not mean to deny that man made the hedge- 

 rows, or the conclusion that what he had raised 

 up, he might pull down ; especially when it is 

 discovered, as each may prove for himself, that 

 the Thorn grows much better, on the level. 



!N"o ! let the Park and the Pleasaunce have their 

 varied and picturesque alternation of bush, and 

 tree and green-sward of broken masses, and wind- 

 ing glades, and labyrinthine glens ; and let the 

 Forest have its leafy screen, its deep and devious 

 mysteries of light and shade; but let the field 

 of the husbandman have that beauty of its own 



Is not our author mistaken in ascribing this remark to 

 Doctor Johnson ? It is a part of a sentence of the poot 

 Cowper : "God made the country; man made the town," and 

 as the great lexicographer was a most inveterate as well as 

 "honest hater" of the country, ho was, in all probability, not 

 the inventor of the phrase now so often quoted. ED. 



