BIO AND LITTLE. 181 



far smaller tKan it used once to be, bv reduciiif; 

 the time needed to get over it from sen to s(»a. 

 As we justly say, tliey liave brought London 

 several hours nearer to York or to Exeter. But, 

 on the other liand, it can hardly be denied tliat 

 they have given us all a far less true idea of the 

 relative bigness of the whole country, compared 

 to the part of it we know personally, by dimin- 

 ishing the nund)er of interme<liate j)oints, and 

 especially by getting rid of those hilltt)p views 

 which in coaching times enabled one to measure 

 with com[)arative accuracy the actual extent of 

 the distance traversed. 



Now let us turn for a moment from the area of 

 England to the greater area of the rest of Europe. 

 England and Wales themselves make up less than 

 one-half the surface of the British Isles, which we 

 may take, for convenience sake, as a unit of mea- 

 surement ; though nobody can pretend that he 

 knows them all so well, from Cape Clear to the 

 North Foreland, from John o' Groat's to the 

 Lizard Point, as to be able to frame a definite 

 picture of their actual bigness. Keally, when we 

 compare Britain with other countries, we do not 

 even pretend to ourselves to compare the genuine 

 areas ; we think only of the relative space occu- 

 pied by the representation of each of them on a 

 tiny map. Any man who has once traversed 

 England by rail, from Berwick to Dover, and 



