PRIVETT CHURCH 209 



side, but as it stands it measures nearly twenty-four 

 feet round a yard from the earth. This, with a small 

 farmhouse, in old times a manor house, and its out- 

 buildings and a cottage or two, make the village. So 

 quiet a spot is it that to see a human form or hear a 

 human voice comes almost as a surprise. The little 

 antique church, the few stones, the dark ancient tree 

 these are everything, and the effect on the mind is 

 strangely grateful a sense of enduring peace, with 

 something of that solitariness and desolation which we 

 find in unspoilt wildernesses. 



From these smallest churches, which appear like a 

 natural growth where they are seen, I turn to the large 

 and new, and the largest of all at this place that 

 of Privett. From its gorgeous yet vacant and cold 

 interior, and from the whole vast structure, including 

 that necessary ingredient in an elegant landscape, the 

 soaring spire visible for many miles around, I turn 

 away as from a jarring and discordant thing the 

 feeling one experiences at the sight of those brand- 

 new big houses built by over-rich stock jobbers on 

 many hills and open heaths in Surrey and, alas ! in 

 Hampshire. 



I do not, however, say that all new and large 

 churches raised in small rustic centres appear as dis- 

 cordant things. Even in the group of villages which I 

 have named there is a new and comparatively large one 

 which moves one to admiration the church of Black- 

 moor. Here the vegetation and surroundings are 



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