16 THE BRIGHTON ROAD 



Mr. Chute, " whom," says he, " I have created 

 Strawberry King- at- Arms.'" One wonders what that 

 mute, inglorious Chute thought of it all ; if he was as 

 disgusted with Sussex sloughs and moist unpleasant 

 " mountains " as his garrulous companion. Chute 

 suffered in silence, for the sight of pen, ink, and paper 

 did not induce in him a fury of composition ; and so 

 we shall never know what he endured. 



Then the pedantic Doctor John Burton, who 

 journeyed into Sussex in 1751, had no less unfortunate 

 acquaintance with these miry ways than our dilettante 

 of Strawberry Hill. To those who have small Latin 

 and less Greek, this traveller's tale must ever remain 

 a sealed book ; for it is in those languages that he 

 records his views upon ways and means, and men and 

 manners, in Sussex. As thus, for example : 



" I fell immediately upon all that was most bad, 

 upon a land desolate and muddy, whether inhabited 

 by men or beasts a stranger could not easily distinguish, 

 and upon roads which were, to explain concisely what 

 is most abominable, Sussexian. No one would 

 imagine them to be intended for the people and the 

 public, but rather the byways of individuals, or, more 

 truly, the tracks of cattle-drivers ; for everywhere the 

 usual footmarks of oxen appeared, and we too, who 

 were on horseback, going along zigzag, almost like 

 oxen at plough, advanced as if we were turning back, 

 while we followed out all the twists of the roads. 

 . . . My friend, I will set before you a kind of problem 

 in the maimer of Aristotle : — Why comes it that the 

 oxen, the swine, the women, and all other animals (!) 

 are so long-legged in Sussex ? Can it be from the 

 difficulty of pulling the feet out of so much mud 

 by the strength of the ankle, so that the muscles 

 become stretched, as it were, and the bones 

 lengthened ? " 



A doleful tale. Presently he arrives at the conclusion 

 that the peasantry " do not concern themselves with 

 literature or philosophy, for they consider the pursuit 

 of such things to be only idling," which is not so very 



