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RURAL HOURS. 
lesser collateral causes working together, aiding and strengthening 
each other meanwhile, ere decided results are produced. This is 
perceptible in small matters, well as in matters of importance. 
Something more than a mere partiality for landscape painting has 
been at work ; people had grown tired of mere vapid, conventional 
repetitions, they felt the want of something more positive, more 
real ; the head called for more of truth, the heart for more of life. 
And so, writers began to look out of the window more frequently ; 
when writing a pastoral they tmned away from the little porcelain 
shepherds and shepherdesses, standing in high-heeled shoes and 
powdered wigs upon every mantel-piece, and they fixed their eyes 
upon the real living Roger and Dolly in the hay-field. Then they 
came to see that it would do just as well, nay, far better, to seat 
Roger and Dolly under a hawthorn, or an oak of merry England, 
than to paint them beneath a laurel, or an ilex of Greece or Rome ; 
in short, they learned at length to look at nature by the light of the 
sun, and not by the glimmerings of the poet’s lamp. And a great 
step this was, not only in art, but in moral and intellectual prog- 
ress.* One of the first among the later English poets, who led 
* Note. — This onward course in truthful description should not stop short 
at inanimate nature. There is a still further progress whicli remains to be effect- 
ed ; the same care, the same attention, the same scruples should, most assuredly, 
be shown by the conscientious mind, in writing of our fellow-creatures. If we 
seek to give a correct picture of a landscape, a tree, a building, how much more 
anxious should we be never willingly to give a distorted or perverted view of any 
fellow-man, or class of men ; of any fact bearing upon the welfaae of our fcllow- 
crcaturcs, or of any class of facts with the same bearing ! We claim, in this age, 
to be more especially in quest of truths — how, then, shall we ever find them, if we 
are all busy in throwing obstacles in each other’s way 1 Even in fiction, nay, in 
satire, in caricature, there are just proportions which it is criminal wholly to 
pervert. In such cases, political writers arc often avowedly without shame ; and, 
alas ! how often do Christian writers conform, in this way, to the world about 
them ! Perhaps there is no other commandment of Holy Scripture more boldly 
