companions, the buildings, the libraries, the gardensinfluenced clearly the development of two of the most famous essayists of the last generation. Walter Pater and A. C. Benson shared certain qualities in addition to their own special characteristics. Their work was tranquil, leisurely, correct, well-informed, wise, tasteful. They bring peace and quiet with them; the fretful reader is soothed, his mind is informed, his vision extended. To obtain these effects are not the highest qualities of literature; yet they are at least high, and deserving of praise. Of the influence of college life upon writing, Benson was quite conscious. He takes his election to a Fellowship as a landmark in his literary life:

'I found myself at once at home in my small and beautiful college, rich with all kinds of grand and venerable traditions, in buildings of humble and subtle grace. The little darkroofed chapel, where I have a stall of my own; the galleried hall with its armorial glass; the low, book-lined library; the panelled combination-room, with its dim portraits of old worthies; how sweet a setting for a quiet life! Then, too, I have my own spacious rooms, with a peaceful outlook into a big close, half orchard, half garden, with bird-haunted thickets and immemorial trees bounded by a slow river' ('From a College Window').

Amid these surroundings essays of the 'urbane style can surely be naturally produced by those who have the talent for them. Walter Pater, perhaps, had the talent in a higher degree. As the interpreter of the ideal of beauty in art and letters Pater carried on the work of Arnold, romantic, yet classical, individualistic, yet orthodox. The Renaissance,' Marius the Epicurean,' 'Appreciations,' are the elaborate outcome of a mind steeped in the classical tradition, sweetened by the young life ever coming up to the university, broadened by conversation and travel. For such a man life at the university offers unique opportunities. Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which this queen of romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone? e?'

R. B. MoWAT.

Art. 10.-A SURVEY OF THE COUNTRYSIDE.

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'WHAT do they know of England who only England know?' And what do they know of England who only know its towns? The mentality of four-fifths of the people is urbanised and their environment is the mirk of industrialism. Many of them live and die ignorant of the country as God made it and knowing only those parts which are disfigured by the hand of man. It is, no doubt, true that, in these days, the segregation of the urban from the rural population has become less exclusive. The revival of road communication by the supersession of the horse and the extension of inexpensive means of transport have brought about some mingling of town and country. The charabanc, the small car, and the cheap excursion have broadened the visual horizon of the town-dweller beyond the limits of bricks and mortar. England's green and pleasant land is not a wholly unknown territory, and a superficial acquaintance with the appearance of the countryside is possessed by many whose fathers had never seen the unveiled face of the earth. The explorers penetrate the recesses where ancient peace lingers, and invade the quietude of slumbering villages. Some who are countrybred may have seeing eyes, but the greater number have eyes that see not and ears that hear not the sights and sounds through which they pass. Their view of the countryside is little more intimate than that of the airman flying above them.

To the casual visitor a village is a village and it is nothing more. One may differ from another, like the stars, in magnitude, or, more distinctively, in the convenience of its facilities for refreshment; but to the unseeing eye they are all essentially alike. Yet, in truth, they are of infinite variety, each with its separate individuality. The 'typical village' is a literary fiction true only in the sense that every small rural community possesses certain characteristic features of which the church and the manor house are usually the most prominent. This general resemblance derives from the original structure of the village community erected on a uniform plan over the greater part of England nearly a

thousand years ago. Countless descriptions of villages and village life have been written both from the inside and outside. Lord Ernle in 'The Land and its People describes the village in which he lives as follows:

'Towards the northern and north-western boundary of the parish, at no great distance from, but above, the stream, stands the village. In it are gathered practically all the population. Though the danger of isolation and the need of combined defence have passed away, detached farmhouses and cottages are still almost as rare are they were in Norman times. Surrounded by the wide expanse of meadow, arable pasture, and moorland, the occupiers clustered round the church and manor house for mutual help and protection in this world and the next. The village was laid out on no plan. It grew. Straight lines are rare. Nothing shows its natural growth more clearly than the labyrinth of winding lanes which saunter from one homestead to another.

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'Apparently engineered on the medieval principle, dear alike to politician and road-maker, that one good or bad turn deserves another, their direction is mostly governed by ancient enclosures of individual occupiers. One lane called Cat Street" commemorates St Catherine, on whose festival was held one of the two annual fairs, abandoned three centuries ago. Timber-framed, straw-thatched or tile-roofed, most of the houses belong to Tudor times. But they have displaced the mud-built, earth-floored, single-roomed, one-storied, chimney-less structures which sheltered the families and the live stock of the earlier settlers. Otherwise the changes have been slight.'

Few men saw more of rural England as it was a century ago than Cobbett, or visited more of its villages. His descriptions of the country and the crops are vivid and detailed; but the villages to him are mostly pegs for polemics, or focal points in the landscape. Thus:

"The houses of the village are in great part scattered about, and are amongst very lofty and fine trees; and from many points about, from the hilly fields, now covered with the young wheat, or with scarcely less beautiful sainfoin, the village is a sight worth going many miles to see. The lands too are pretty beyond description. These chains of hills make, below them, an endless number of lower hills, of varying shapes and sizes and aspects and of relative state as to each other, while the surface presents in the size and form of

which with equal bluntness of outward appearance records by its date that freedom of thought came long is before freedom of education.

Another village limned by memory lies in the snug shelter of those rolling Downs which were the home of the earliest inhabitants of these islands. The thin soil of the chalk abruptly ends at the foot of the slope, and on a tract of fertile land, traversed by a maze of streamlets, the village clusters round the church which is so literally the centre that, though roads converge upon it from all sides, each has its end at the churchyard, and to cross from one side of the village to the other on wheels means a long détour. A main road runs along one side of the rough parallelogram in which the village stands, and here are concentrated the two or three shops and some of the more pretentious houses. But within the parallelogram habitations are scattered promiscuously and reached by devious paths. Four epochs of architecture contributed to the building of the church, and a private chamber over the chancel memorialises a bygone period of ecclesiastical organisation. Vestiges of history abound in the cottages and lanes. The village is embowered in fruit trees which in the spring make it a vision of beauty as seen from the sheltering slopes of the embracing Downs.

A hill-top village, perched on a ridge five hundred feet above, and within distant view of, the sea, contains scarcely more than sufficient inhabitants to distinguish it from a hamlet. It is a widespread parish and a cluster of half a dozen cottages, with a curiously capacious inn and the old forge (now extinguished and converted into a 'garage'), lie on one side of the church and rectory. It is an umbrageous spot, and notwithstanding its elevated position one comes upon it unexpectedly on reaching the summit of the hill. Half a mile away, on the yonder side of a valley, the manor house stands in solitary grandeur.

As each village differs from another in its exterior, so descriptions of the same village given by different observers differ in their points of view. A great writer has given the world a view of a Scottish village through a window.' And every observant villager has a separate window' which limits his observation. The