Picturesque English Cottages and Their Doorway Gardens 
wild hedgerows and an encircling wood, while 
near at hand the village church raises its 
spire heavenward and chants a Sursum corda. 
Of such a cottage a poet sings : 
“ Close in the dingle of a wood 
Obscured with boughs a cottage stood ; 
Sweet briar decked its lowly door. 
And vines spread all the summit o’er ; 
An old barn’s gable end was seen 
Sprinkled with Nature’s mossy green. 
Hard on the right, from whence the flail 
Of thresher sounded down the vale— 
A vale where many a flowret gay 
example of an old picturesque English 
cottage. 
But what is a cottage ? If we search the 
dry and musty tomes of English law-books 
we find that, according to a statute of 4 Ed¬ 
ward I., a cottage is a house without land 
attached to it; but by a later enactment 
(31. Elizabeth c. 7) rural dwellings were not 
shorn of their gardens. The object of this 
act was “ for avoiding of the great inconve¬ 
niences which are found by experience to grow 
by the erectinge and buyldinge of great 
BETWEEN YARMOUTH AND FRESHWATER IN THE ISLE OF WIGHT 
- * ' ; ’ f 
Sipt a clear streamlet on its way— 
A vale above whose leafy shade 
The village steeple shows its head.” 
Such is the framework of my picture of a 
rural home, the peculiarly beautiful and pic¬ 
turesque feature in English rural scenery 
where dwell 
“ Those calm delights that ask but little room.” 
The little house that nestles amidst the 
forest trees of the Isle of Wight be¬ 
tween Yarmouth and Freshwater is a good 
nombers and multitude of cotages which are 
dayly more and more increased in mayne 
parts of this realm.” It orders that no one 
is to build, or convert buildings into cot¬ 
tages, without setting apart at least four 
acres of ground to each. It excepts from the 
rule towns, mines, factories and cottages for 
sea-faring folk, underkeepers and such like 
folk. We gather from this that the work of 
cottage building was vastly increased during 
the reign of “ Good Queen Bess,” and also 
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