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The stranger who would form a correct opinion
of the English character, must not confine
his observations to the metropolis. He must
go forth into the country; he must sojourn in
villages and hamlets; he must visit castles,
villas, farm houses, cottages; he must wander
through parks and gardens; along hedges
and green lanes; he must loiter about country
churches; attend wakes and fairs, and other
rural festivals; and cope with the people in all
their conditions, and all their habits and humours.

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In some countries, the large cities absorb the
wealth and fashion of the nation; they are the
only fixed abodes of elegant and intelligent society,
and the country is inhabited almost entirely
by boorish peasantry. In England, on
the contrary, the metropolis is a mere gathering
place, or general rendezvous, of the polite circles,
where they devote a small portion of the
year to a hurry of gayety and dissipation, and
having passed this kind of carnival, return
again to the apparently more congenial habits
of rural life. The various strata of society,
therefore, are diffused over the whole surface of
the kingdom, and the most retired neighbourhoods
afford specimens of the different ranks.

The English, in fact, are strongly gifted with
the rural feeling. They possess a keen sensibility
to the beauties of nature, and a relish for
the pleasures and employments of the country.
This passion seems inherent with them. Even
the inhabitants of cities, born and brought up
among brick walls and bustling streets, enter
with facility into rural habits, and evince a tact

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for rural occupation. The merchant has his
snug retreat in the vicinity of the metropolis,
where he often displays as much pride and zeal
in the cultivation of his flower garden, and the
maturing of his fruits, as he does in the conduct
of his business, and the success of a commercial
operation. Even those less fortunate individuals,
who are doomed to pass their lives in
the midst of din and traffick, contrive to have
something that shall remind them of the green
aspect of nature. In the dark and dingy lanes
of the metropolis, every drawing room window
is like a bank of flowers; wherever, also, there
is a spot capable of vegetation, the grass plot
and flower bed are cultivated, and every square
has its mimic park, laid out with picturesque
taste, and gleaming with refreshing verdure.

Those who see the Englishman only in
town, are apt to form an unfavourable opinion
of his social character. He is either absorbed
in business, or distracted by the thousand engagements
that dissipate time, thought, and
feeling, in this huge metropolis. He has,

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therefore, too commonly, a look of hurry and
abstraction. Wherever he happens to be, he is
on the point of going somewhere else; at the
moment he is talking on one subject, his mind
is wandering to another; and while paying a
friendly visit, is calculating how he shall economize
time so as to pay the other visits allotted
to the morning. A vast place, like London, is
calculated to make men selfish and uninteresting.
In their casual and transient meetings,
they can but deal briefly in commonplaces.
They present but the cold superficies of character—
its rich and genial qualities have no
time to be warmed into a flow.

But it is in the country that the Englishman
gives scope to his natural feelings. He breaks
loose gladly from the cold formalities and negative
civilities of town; throws off his habits
of shy reserve, and becomes joyous and freehearted.
He contrives to assemble around him
all the conveniences and elegancies of polite
life, and to banish its restraints. His country
seat abounds with every requisite, either for

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studious retirement, tasteful gratification, or rural
exercise. Books, paintings, music, horses,
dogs, and sporting implements of all kinds, are
at hand. He puts no constraint, either upon
his guests or himself, but in the true spirit of
hospitality, provides the means of enjoyment,
and leaves every one to partake according to
his inclination.

The taste of the English in the cultivation
of land, and in what is termed landscape gardening,
is unrivalled. They have studied nature
intently, and discover an exquisite sense of
her beautiful forms and harmonious combinations.
Those charms, which, in other countries,
she lavishes in wild solitudes, are here
assembled round the haunts of domestic life.
They seem to have caught her coy and furtive
graces, and spread them, like witchery, about
their rural abodes.

Nothing can be more imposing than the magnificence
of English park scenery. Vast lawns
that extend like sheets of vivid green, with here
and there clumps of gigantic trees, heaping up

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rich piles of foliage. The solemn pomp of
groves, and woodland glades, with the deer
trooping in silent herds across them; the hare,
bounding away to the covert; or the pheasant,
suddenly bursting upon the wing. The brook,
taught to wind in the most natural meanderings,
or expand into a glassy lake—the sequestered
pool, reflecting the quivering trees, with the
yellow leaf sleeping on its bosom, the trout
roaming fearlessly about its limpid waters;
while some rustic temple, or statue of nymph,
grown green and dank with age, gives an air
of classic sanctity to the seclusion.

These are but few of the features of park
scenery, which, indeed, is too well known to
need description. But what most delights me,
is the creative talent with which the English decorate
the unostentatious abodes of middle life.
The rudest habitation, the most unpromising
and scanty portion of land, in the hands of an
Englishman of taste, becomes a little paradise.
With a nicely discriminating eye, he seizes at
once upon its capabilities, and pictures in his

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mind the future landscape. The steril spot
grows into loveliness under his hand; and yet
the operations of art which produce the effect
are scarcely to be perceived. The cherishing
and training of some trees; the cautious pruning
of others; the delicate distribution of
flowers and plants of tender and graceful foliage;
the introduction of a green slope of velvet
turf; the partial opening to a peep of blue
distance, or silver gleam of water—all these
are managed with a nice tact, a pervading, yet
quiet assiduity, like the magic touchings with
which a painter finishes up a favourite picture.

The residence of people of fortune and refinement
in the country has diffused a degree
of taste and elegance in rural economy, that
descends to the lowest class. The very labourer,
with his thatched cottage and narrow
slip of ground, attends to their embellishment.
The trim hedge, the grass plot before the door,
the little flower bed bordered with snug box,
the woodbine trained up against the wall, and
hanging its blossoms about the lattice; the pot

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of flowers in the window; the holly providentially
planted about the house, to cheat winter
of its dreariness, and throw in a gleam of green
summer to cheer the fireside:—all these bespeak
the influence of taste, flowing down
from high sources, and pervading the lowest
levels of the public mind. If ever love, as
poets sing, delights to visit a cottage, it must
be the cottage of an English peasant.

The proneness to rural life among the higher
classes of the English, has had a great and salutary
effect upon the national character, I do
not know a finer race of men than the English
gentlemen. Instead of the softness and effeminacy
which characterize the men of rank in
some countries, they exhibit a union of elegance
and strength, a robustness of frame and
freshness of complexion, which I am inclined to
attribute to their living so much in the open air,
and pursuing so eagerly the invigorating recreations
of the country. These hardy exercises
also produce a healthful tone of mind and spirits,
and a manliness and simplicity of manners,
which not even the follies and

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dissipations of the town can easily pervert. In the
country, too, the different orders of society
seem to approach more freely, to be more disposed
to blend and operate favourably upon
each other. The distinctions between them do
not appear to be so strong and impassable as
in the cities. The manner in which property
has been distributed into small estates and
farms, has established a regular gradation from
the nobleman, through the classes of gentry,
small landed proprietors, substantial farmers,
down to the labouring peasantry; and while it
has thus banded the extremes of society together,
has implanted in each intermediate link
a spirit of independence. This, it must be
confessed, is not so universally the case at
present as it was formerly; the larger estates
having, in late years of distress, absorbed the
smaller, and, in some parts of the country,
almost annihilated the sturdy race of small
farmers. These, however, I believe, are but
casual breaks in the general system I have
mentioned.

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In rural occupation there is nothing mean
and debasing. It leads a man forth among
scenes of natural grandeur and beauty; it
leaves him to the workings of his own mind,
operated upon by the purest and most elevating
of external influences. Such a man may be
simple and rough, but he cannot be vulgar.
The man of refinement, therefore, finds nothing
revolting in an intercourse with the lower orders
in rural life, as he does in the lower orders
of cities. He lays aside his distance and reserve,
and is glad to doff the attributes of rank,
and enter into the honest heartfelt enjoyments
of common life. Indeed, the very amusements
of the country bring men more and more together;
and the sound of hound and horn blend
all feelings into harmony. I believe this is one
great reason why the nobility and gentry are
more popular among the inferior orders in England
than in any other country; and why the
latter have endured so many excessive pressures
and extremities, without repining more

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generally at the unequal distribution of fortune and
privilege.

To this mingling of cultivated and rustic
society, also, may be attributed the rural feeling
that runs through British literature; the frequent
use of illustrations from rural life; those
incomparable descriptions of nature, that abound
in the British poets—that have continued down
from “the flower and the leaf” of Chaucer,
and have brought into our closets all the freshness
and fragrance of the dewy landscape.
The pastoral writers of other countries appear
as if they had paid nature an occasional
visit, and become acquainted with her general
charms; but the British poets have lived and
revelled with her—they have wooed her in her
most secret haunts—they have watched her
minutest characteristics. A spray could not
tremble in the breeze—a leaf could not rustle to
the ground—a diamond drop could not patter in
the stream—a fragrance could not exhale from
the humble violet, nor a daisy unfold its crimson
tints to the morning, but it has been noticed

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by these impassioned and delicate observers, and
wrought up into some beautiful morality.

The effect of this devotion of elegant minds
to rural occupations has been wonderful on the
face of the country. A great part of the island
is level, and would be monotonous, were it not
for the charms of culture; but it is studded and
gemmed, as it were, with castles and palaces,
and embroidered with parks and gardens. It
does not abound in grand and sublime prospects,
but rather in little home scenes of rural repose
and sheltered quiet. Every antique farm house
and moss-grown cottage is a picture; and as
the roads are continually winding, and the view
shut in by groves and hedges, the eye is delighted
by a continual succession of small landscapes
of captivating loveliness.

The great charm, however, of English scenery
is the moral feeling that seems to pervade it.
It is associated in the mind with ideas of order,
of quiet, of calm and settled principles, of hoary
usage and reverend custom. Every thing seems
to be the growth of ages of regular and

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peaceful existence. The old church of remote architecture,
with its low massive portal; its gothic
tower; its windows rich with tracery and
painted glass in scrupulous preservation; its
stately monuments of warriors and worthies of
the olden time, ancestors of the present lords
of the soil; its tombstones, recording successive
generations of sturdy yeomanry, whose
progeny still plough the same fields, and kneel
at the same altar. The parsonage, a quaint
irregular pile, partly antiquated, but repaired
and altered in the tastes of various ages and
occupants. The stile and footpath leading
from the churchyard, across pleasant fields,
and along shady hedge-rows, according to an
immemorial right of way. The neighbouring
village, with its venerable cottages, its public
green, sheltered by trees, under which the forefathers
of the present race have sported. The
antique family mansion, standing apart in some
little rural domain, but looking down with a protecting
air on the surrounding scene.—All these
common features of English landscape, evince

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a calm and settled security, an hereditary transmission
of home-bred virtues, and local attachments,
that speak deeply and touchingly for the
moral character of the nation.

It is a pleasing sight of a Sunday morning,
when the bell is sending its sober melody across
the quiet fields, to behold the peasantry in their
best finery, with ruddy faces, and modest cheerfulness,
thronging tranquilly along the green
lanes to church; but it is still more pleasing to
see them in the evenings, gathering about their
cottage doors, and appearing to exult in the
humble comforts and embellishments which
their own hands have spread around them.

It is this sweet home feeling, this settled repose
of affection in the domestic scene, that is,
after all, the parent of the steadiest virtues and
purest enjoyments; and I cannot close these desultory
remarks better, than by quoting the
words of a modern English poet, who has depicted
it with remarkable felicity:

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