HAMPSHIRE VILLAGE CHURCHES 



The honoured historian of the parish of Selborne 

 makes me shudder in this passage. But I am, perhaps, 

 giving too much importance to his words, since one 

 may judge from his mention of Norfolk hi this con- 

 nection as being even worse off than his own county, 

 that he was not well informed on the subject. Nor- 

 folk, like Somerset, abounds in grand old churches 

 of the Perpendicular period. That smallness, or 

 "meanness" as he expresses it, of the Hampshire 

 churches is, to my mind, one of their greatest merits. 

 The Hampshire village would not possess that charm 

 which we find in it its sweet rusticity and homeliness, 

 and its harmonious appearance in the midst of a nature 

 green and soft and beautiful but for that essential 

 feature and part of it, the church which does not tower 

 vast and conspicuous as a gigantic asylum or manu- 

 factory from among lowly cottages dwarfed by its 

 proximity to the appearance of pigmy-built huts in the 

 Aruwhimi forest. These immense churches which in 

 recent years have lifted their tall spires and towers 

 amidst lowly surroundings in many rural places, are, as 

 a rule, the work of some zealot who has seared his sense 

 of beauty with a hot iron, or else of a new over-rich lord 

 of the manor, who must have all things new, including 

 a big new church to worship a new God in his own 

 peculiar Stock Exchange God, who is a respecter of 

 wealthy persons. Here in Hampshire we have seen the 

 old but well preserved village church pulled down 

 doubtless with the consent of the ecclesiastical authori- 



