6 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



as Mr. Selous, who could change his focus unconsciously 

 from the towering hawk to the toad's gold-rimmed eyes 

 glancing from his hole. 



Lord de Tabley, a supreme authority on one department 

 of botany, as well as a fine poet, takes his place along with 

 these. His inspiration was less but his knowledge more. 

 Inhabitants of Cheshire or Lancashire can taste the very 

 savour of their county in his verse ; and few writers have 

 taken more zest in the ' Royal aspects of the Earth/ as he 

 names one of his poems. To a Berkshire man it is as good 

 as a visit to Yattendon, that home of poets, to read Mr. 

 Bridges' lyrics, in which every month, almost every week 

 of the year, is compactly described with a lover's zest. 



It would be too long a theme to follow out the same 

 contrast in novelists, among whom it is yet more conspicuous. 

 Shelley took his descriptions of scenery in Alastor a debt 

 that few students seem to realise from a contemporary 

 novelist who had travelled in the Pyrenees. But the two 

 descriptions, both hers and his, are vast and unreal. No 

 better contrast perhaps could be made between the new and 

 the older view than the country scenes of Sir Walter Scott 

 and Mr. Hardy. Sir Walter's scenes are rhetorical append- 

 ages, splendid examples of scene painting in the stage sense. 

 In Mr. Hardy the people seem sometimes no more than 

 emanations from the country in which they work and have 

 their being. The two are inseparable, and each studied with 

 equal affection ; so that the attributes of moor or woodland 

 take the particular importance of hero or heroine. 



But when all is said, Hardy's woodlanders are no more 

 than the proper descendants of Chaucer's pilgrims. Spenser 

 loved the pageant of the year, and drew a pretty procession 

 of the months which modern writers on the circuit of the 

 year have unworthily neglected. Even though Milton, being 



