and paradox profane-the quiet assertion, namely, that a garden was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it. "Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, playhouses, satires, epigrams, puns"*-these all, he thankfully adds, came in on the town part, and the thither side of innocence. Precisians often avow themselves shocked at Charles Lamb's daring tours de force, in feats of whim and oddity. Let them not forget that so grave and orthodox an authority as Wordsworth -the very person to whom this epistolary extravaganza was addressed— bore deliberate witness of him, four years later, when his last home was taken up (not in London but) in Edmonton churchyard, O, he was good, if e'er a good man lived! By way of contrast to Charles Lamb-not in goodness, but in the town-and-country question,-take his old friend and correspondent, Robert Southey. He not merely prefers the country. He has a sheer hatred of the town. It is not a case of comparative dislike; but one of positive aversion. As early as 1796, when his plans were yet unsettled, and he was casting about for a profession, as well as a local habitation, wherein to make a name, we find him writing to Mr. Grosvenor Bedford: "London is not the only place for me: I have an unspeakable loathing for that huge city. 'God made the country, and man made the town.' Now, as God made me likewise, I love the country." In another letter: "I ardently wish for children; yet, if God should bless me with any, I shall be unhappy to see them poisoned by the air of London. Sir, I do thank God for it,-I do hate In So said John Donne; 'tis a favourite quotation of mine. My spirits always sink when I approach it. Green fields are my delight. I am not only better in health, but even in heart, in the country. A fine day exhilarates my heart; if it rains, I behold the grass assume a richer verdure as it drinks the moisture: everything that I behold is very good, except man; and in London I see nothing but man and his works." another, after the hateful metropolis had yet been fixed upon for his place of abode: "However, I expect to be as comfortable as it is possible to be in that cursed city, 'that huge and hateful sepulchre of men.' I detest cities, and had rather live in the fens of Lincolnshire or on Salisbury Plain than in the best situation London could furnish. . . It is not talking nonsense when I say that the London air is as bad for the mind as for the body, for the mind is a chameleon that receives its colours from surrounding objects,"-the differential character of which we have seen set down, by Southey's differential calculus, in the previous quotation. In another he says-what looks almost like some sentence of Lamb's read the wrong way-" a field thistle is to me worth all the flowers of Covent Garden." "I hate the journey," he writes, from Bath, in 1797; "and yet going to London I may say, with Quarles, My journey's better than my journey's end." In 1798 he writes to Mrs. Southey in blank verse instead of plain prose —and here is a fragment from the metrical epistle: * Lamb to Wordsworth, Jan. 22, 1830. To dwell in that foul city,-to endure Like some poor myrtle that in the town air In 1800 he tells Mr. Rickman that, should he, Southey, recover his health, London must be his place of residence; but that, much as he enjoys society, rather than purchase it by residing in "that huge denaturalised city," he would prefer dwelling on Poole Heath. In 1803 he writes Mr. Bedford that the prospect of a journey to London, and the unavoidable weariness of tramping over that overgrown metropolis, half terrifies him. In 1806 he describes his feelings when in London, ever the same, to Mr. Charles Wynn: "always weary, always in haste, always restless, and with a sense of discomfort produced by the detestable composition of fog, smoke, and pulverised horse-dung, which serves the Londoners for an atmosphere." He could truly say that the pleasantest minute he passed in the capital was when he seated himself in the stagecoach to depart from it. And once more, in 1817, we have him telling Mr. Chauncey H. Townshend, apropos of living amid Norfolk scenery, or the levels of Picardy, "Anywhere I could find food for the heart and the imagination, at those times when we are open to outward influences, except in great cities. If I were confined in them, I should wither away like a flower in a parlour window."* He had neither outlived the feelings, nor forgotten the simile, of his metrical letter to Mrs. Southey, nineteen years before. His poetical Epistle to Allan Cunningham includes the assurance (1828), Needless it were to say how willingly I bade the huge metropolis farewell, Its din, and dust, and dirt, and smoke, and smut, Donne did not hate More perfectly, that city. Not for all Its social, all its intellectual joys, Would I renounce the genial influences And thoughts and feelings to be found where'er Earth's liberal bosom.† Southey, then, it will be owned, was a good hater of the city which had so good a lover in Charles Lamb. Both these men, too, were constant in their likes and dislikes city-wards. Their preference, respectively, was not a varying, but a constant quantity. Many people fluctuate notoriously in this respect. They fancy the country till they get there, and pine for the city as soon as they are away from it. Or vice versa; like Robert Greene's Shepherd, who -left the fields and took him to the town, Fold sheep who list, the hook he cast away; * Life and Letters of Robert Southey, vol. i. pp. 277, 293, 295, 299, 323, 336; vol. ii. pp. 45, 207; vol. iii. pp. 4, 239; vol. iv. p. 283. Also, Selections (Mr. Wood Warter's) from Southey's Letters, vol. i. pp. 71, 153, 372; vol. ii. p. 80, &c. † Poetical Works of Robert Southey, vol. iii. (edit. 1837). Epistle to Allan Cunningham. Menalcas would not be a country clown, Nor shepherd's weeds, but garments far more gay, but whose resolve, after a half-dozen intermediate stanzas, of civic experience and disappointment, is, To flocks again; away the wanton town, Fond pride avaunt; give me the shepherd's hook, A coat of gray, I'll be a country clown,* &c. Tremaine's morning in the alcove terminates with this bit of self-questioning: "Whence is it that in London, surrounded by a vexatious crowd, I sighed for such a retreat as this, where I might suspect no man's sincerity, and study nature in her most pleasing attire; and here, where I have her, and can compare the delightful original with the copy, that the banquet should fail?" Mr. Hawthorne's Blithedale Romancer acknowledges, as the romance gets more than half way over, that whatever had been his taste for solitude and natural scenery, yet the "thick, foggy, stifled elements of cities, the entangled life of many men together, sordid as it was, and empty of the beautiful, took quite as strenuous a hold" upon his mind.‡ "How often, my dear Bob," sighs one of Mrs. Gore's fashionable Londoners, to his brother-in-law, at Eden Castle, "did we sigh in London, last year, for the quiet of the country!" -whereas now the cry is, "away with buttercups and daisies! Who would not rather hear Sheridan speak than the brooks bubble? Who would not rather dine at Carlton House, than watch yonder oxen grazing-like beasts as they are ?" But Pope had pointed the same moral ages ago: Papilia, wedded to her amorous spark, Sighs for the shades-" How charming is a Park!" All bathed in tears-" Oh odious, odious Trees !"]}] Even those who will not confess to any such violent reaction as this, hum and haw equivocally about country pleasures when they get into them. They acquiesce with a qualification, and assent with a demur. They modify, and fence, and tergiversate, much in the style of Shak"And how like you this shepspeare's jester in the Forest of Arden. herd's life, Master Touchstone ?" Corin asks that most delectable of motley fools. "Truly, shepherd," is Touchstone's answer (or no answer), "in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a very vile life. Now in respect it is in the field, it pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the court, it is tedious." And so, like Mr. Burke in St. Stephen's, he goes on refining, to an extent that should have made a preliminary of what he makes the sequel of his dissertation-the query, namely, "Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?" Unconsciously, Corin had; but not of a kind to follow the subtle windings of Touchstone's degrees of comparison, or * Poems of Robert Greene: The Song of a Country Swain. The Blithedale Romance, § xvii. § Self; or, The Narrow, Narrow World, ch. xv. Pope's Moral Essays, ep. ii. As You Like It, Act III. Sc. 2. suspect anything but mystification prepense in all that labyrinth of clauses. It is the vacillating preference, now of country, now of town-the fluctuating desire, now of rural associations, and now of city scenes—that makes residence in suburban districts so agreeable to many. Not having, on the other hand, the pronounced and unchangeable affection of Charles Lamb for metropolitan characteristics, including even (for he would not have excluded) The cabman's cry to get out of the way, The fight in the street which is backed for gold- nor having, on the other hand, Southey's uncompromising and indefeasible loyalty to rural quiet-they gladly pitch their tent within reach both of city squares and of hedgerow lanes, and congratulate themselves on securing ready access to either, according as the taste for either may prevail. Christopher North professes to love "suburban retirement" even more than the remotest rural solitude. In old age, one needs, he says, to have the neighbourhood of human beings to lean upon -"and in the stillness of awakening morn or hushing eve, my spirit yearns towards the hum of the city, and finds a relief from all o'ermastering thoughts, in its fellowship with the busy multitudes sailing along the many streams of life, too near to be wholly forgotten, and yet far enough off not to harass or disturb. In my most world-sick dreams, I never longed to be a hermit in his cave. Mine eyes have still loved the smoke of human dwellings-and when my infirmities keep me from church, sitting here in this arbour, with Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, perhaps, on the table before me, how solemn, how sublime, the sound of Sabbath-bells-whether the towers and spires are shining in the sunlight, or heard each in its own region of the consecrated city, through a softening weight of mist or clouds from the windy sea!"t John Wilson was in the prime of life when he described these, an old man's feelings. A quarter of a century later, he was an old man himself; and it was then his lot to be tended and cherished in a suburban home, such as he had idealised in his Buchanan Lodge-there to eke out the infirm remainder of his once exuberant strength, and there to close his eyes at last, almost within sound of the Tron Church and St. Giles's chimes, and within sight, in grey, grand outline, of Arthur's Seat. * Mrs. Browning's Poems, vol. ii.: “The Soul's Travelling." BEATRICE BOVILLE; OR, PRIDE VERSUS PRIDE. BY OUIDA. I. OF EARLSCOURT'S FIANCÉE. To compass her with sweet observances, That, according to Mr. Tennyson's lately-published opinion, is the devoir of that deeply-to-be-pitied individual, l'homme marié. Possibly in the times of which the Idylls treat, Launcelot and Guenevere might have been the sole, exceptional mauvais sujets in the land, and woad, being the chief ingredient in the toilette-dress, mightn't come quite so expensive. But now-a-days "sweet observances," rendered, I presume, by gifts from Hunt and Roskell's and boxes in the grand tier, tell on a chequebook so severely; "keeping her true" is such an exceedingly problematical performance, to judge by Sir C. C.'s breathless work, and "dressing her beautifully" comes so awfully expensive, with crinoline and cashmeres, pink pearls, and Mechlin, and the beau sexe's scornful repudiation, not alone of a faded silk, like poor Enid's, but of the handsomest dress going, if it's damned by being "seen twice," that I have ever vowed that, plaise à Dieu, I will never marry, and with Heaven's help will keep the vow better than I might most probably keep the matrimonial ones if I took them. Yet if ever I saw a woman for whom I could have fancied a man's committing that semi-suicidal act, that woman was Beatrice Boville. Not for her beauty, for, except one of the loveliest figures and a pair of the most glorious eyes, she did not claim much; not for her money, for she had none; not for her birth, for on one side that was somewhat obscure; but for herself: and had I ever tried the herculean task of dressing anybody beautifully and keeping anybody true, it should have been she, but for the fact that when I knew her first she was engaged to my cousin Earlscourt. We had none of us ever dreamt he would marry, for he had been sworn to political life so long, given over so utterly to the battle-ground of St. Stephen's and the intrigues of Downingstreet that the ladies of our house were sorely wrathful when they heard that he had at last fallen in love and proposed to Beatrice Boville, who, though she was Lady Mechlin's niece, was the daughter of a West Indian who had married her mother, broken her heart, spent her money, deserted her, and never been heard of since; the more wrathful as they had no help for themselves, and were obliged to be contented with distinguishing her with refreshing appellations of a "very clever schemer," evidently a "perfect intrigante," and similar epithets with which their sex is driven for consolation under such trying circumstances. It's a certain amount of relief to us to call a man who has cut us down in a race "a stupid owl; very little in him!" but it is mild gratification to that enjoyed by ladies when they retaliate for injury done them by that delightful bonbon of a sentence, "No doubt a most artful person!" You |