COCKNEYISM IN THE COUNTRY. 225 



while to exhibit his powers. He wonders how people can live in 

 the country from choice, and asks a solemn question, now and then, 

 about passing the winter there, as he would about a passage 

 through Behring's Straits, or a pic-nic on the borders of the Dead 

 Sea. 



* But this is all very harmless. On their own ground, country 

 folks have the advantage of the cockneys. The scale is turned 

 then ; and knowing perfectly well how to mow, cradle, build stone 

 walls and drive oxen, undeniably useful and substantial kinds of 

 knowledge, they are scarcely less amused at the fine airs and 

 droll ignorances of the cockney in the country, who does not know 

 a bullrush from a butternut, than the citizens are in town at their 

 ignorance of an air of the new opera, or the step of the last 

 redowa. 



But if the cockney visitor is harmless, the cockney resident is 

 not. When the downright citizen retires to the country, not 

 because he has any taste for it, but because it is the fashion to have 

 a country house, he often becomes, perhaps for the first time in 

 his life, a dangerous member of society. There is always a certain 

 influence about the mere possessor of wealth, that dazzles us, and 

 makes us see things in a false light ; and the cockney has wealth. 

 As he builds a house which costs five times as much as that of any 

 of his country neighbors, some of them, who take it for granted 

 that wealth and taste go together, fancy the cockney house puts 

 their simple, modest cottages to the blush. Hence, they directly go 

 to imitating it in their moderate way ; and so, a quiet country 

 neighborhood is as certainly tainted with the malaria of cockneyism, 

 as it would be by a ship-fever, or the air of the Pontine marshes. 



The cockneyisms which are fatal to the peace of mind, and 

 more especially to the right feeling of persons of good sense and 

 propriety in the country, are those which have perhaps a real mean- 

 ing and value in town ; which are associated with excellent houses 

 and people there ; and which are only absurd and foolish when 

 transplanted, without the least reflection or adaptation^ into the 

 wholly different and distinct condition of things in country life. 



It would be too long and troublesome a task to give a catalogue 

 of these sins against good sense and good taste, which we every 

 15 



