THE LOVE OF THE COUNTRY.

A PURE love of the country is as rare as a pure love of country, without the article. What love of the country is not will help us to the discovery of what it properly is. All who go to the country, or fly to the country, or even who prefer the country to the town, are not lovers of it, or in Horace's frame of mind, when he ejaculated,

"O rus quando te aspiciam,"

and sighed for the Sabine villa.

Many thousands repair to their country-houses, or those of their relatives and friends, solely because a certain time of the year has come, when by the canon-law of fashion it is absolutely forbidden to abide any longer in houses with numbers, and streets with names. How often is the law cursed while it is obeyed! How many "a longing, lingering look" is cast from the woods and fields during the weary months of August and September, back upon Piccadilly and the Strand! Hundreds would pass the livelong summer in the very heart's core of London-if they dared! With such the love of the country is simply the want of courage to live in town. But why give way to this false shame and make themselves martyrs to an affected taste? Is it scandalous to summer in a city? Where is the disgrace of being seen lounging in Pall-mall or Bond-street, when the sun is in Leo? If you prefer the Haymarket to the meadows whence the hay comes, why not avow it like an honest man, and boldly stick to the metropolis? It is no crime (though in the opinion of some it may be a blunder) to relish Spring-gardens or the Temple-gardens, or even Hatton-garden, better than all the gardens of all the country-seats in England. Much is to be said, too, with a little ingenuity, in behalf of your civic predilections. The roses of Hatton-garden have no thorns; there lurk no ambushed snakes under the grass of St. James's Park; no shipwrecks agonize your feelings as you pace the Strand; no bull rushes out to gore and toss you, if you saunter among the bowers of Lincoln's Inn Fields. Then the city has many, very many, of the objects which are so much admired and sought for in the country, and which the country is erroneously supposed to possess exclusively. Books have been written on the Natural History of London. You may botanize in every part of the town, and if you are an ornithologist, you have only to ascend any church-steeple, or climb your own chimneys, which is still permitted you by law. Do you want rookeries ?-repair to St. Giles's, or stroll into Old Jewry. If rookeries of brick are not so rural as those of trees, Irishmen are surely more romantic than crows, and Jews more picturesque than jackdaws. If the country should boast its crisped brooks and flowery streams, it may fairly be answered that the Thames is, by confession, the noblest stream in England, and that this glorious river is broader in London than any where else. Besides the country has no sewers! This is a point in which the town carries it hollow.

Some people are fond of hills; well, are there no hills in London?

Are hills incompatible wth cities? There is Rome, a large city, which has no fewer than seven. Paris has even its mountains, for example Montmartre. To be sure Paris is more celebrated for its champagne, but I mention Tower-hill, Holborn-hill, and the hills of Rome and Paris, only to show that all is not as flat in great cities as is sometimes supposed; you can have your ups and downs, your hill and valley, in the metropolis as well as in Wales or Cumberland. The chief drawback I see upon the pleasure of a tour in London, compared with an excursion through the Welch mountains is, that in the latter there is some chance, if not a very great probability, of an overset on the verge of a precipice, and a roll down a thousand feet of rocks, into some wizard brook below: enjoyments which you must make up your mind to dispense with in the former, there being no precipices to be met with, and no brook to be seen or heard, save only Brook-street.

However I do not mean to affirm that a complete rus in urbe is in the nature of things. As my friend Quinapulus finely observes," the country is the country, and the town is the town." There is a very marked difference between the flowers that drag out their wretched vegetable lives in the windows of a street in Bloomsbury, and those that flourish wild and free on the banks of the Wye, or the sides of Cader Idris. I am only saying that if a man detests a country life, he ought not to allow fashion to compel him to lead one. It is better to feign excuses for passing August in the Albany, than commit the practical and vexatious hypocrisy of sojourning at Llangollen and sighing for London.

Others there are who fly to cottages and woods for the sake of emancipation from the restraints and formalities imposed by towns. They rusticate for the pleasures of being rustic, a very different thing from being rural. To one, a retreat to Devonshire is an escape from trousers and Wellingtons to buckskins and tops. Another absconds to the Highlands to disencumber himself of gloves. A third ensconces himself in the mountains of Caernarvonshire for the prerogative of shaving but once a week, or cutting his razor altogether. Why not turn Mussulman and stay in London? The number of instances would astonish you in which love of the country is resolvable into mere natural antipathy to personal cleanliness. A vacation in the country is to very many, particularly students and gownsmen, only so many holidays from soap and water-a long reprieve from the brush and comb.

"This is a charming retreat; what a sweet cottage! such beautiful wood! such enchanting water! What name do you give this little Paradise?"

"Les Delices."

"It is indeed a delicious spot."

"I enjoy it more than words can express; you see I wear no braces."

Akin to this is the love of sauntering and day-dreaming, to both of which the country is favourable, and the town unpropitious. You may lounge in Bond-street, but you cannot saunter. You can only saunter in fields and forests; and it is needless to expatiate upon the perils and dangers of day-dreaming (which is pretty much the same as sleepwalking), amidst the whirl of cabs, calashes, drays, dog-carts, coaches, caravans, trucks, tandems, Broughams, britzskas, chariots, curricles,

chairs, carts, vans, waggons, and omnibuses, constituting the moving mass of the mighty tide of life and population which daily and nightly sweeps through the passes and thoroughfares of London. The place to saunter is Blackheath, Salisbury-plain, Windsor Park, or the Trossachs. The country is the place for a ramble and a revery; in town if you stray you are lost; if you doze you are diddled. But the saunterer and dreamer does not seek the country because he loves it or prefers it; he chooses the fields because he can stroll about them with his hands in his pockets, as the poet Thomson ate his peaches from the garden-wall; or because he can somnambulize at noonday, as the albatross is said to sleep upon the wing; or because there are haycocks and banks of primroses and daisies, where he can occasionally stretch out his lubber length, and solicit slumbers which it might be fatal to enjoy in the equestrian Maelstroom of Charing-cross, or in the vehicular torrent of Cheapside.

The mere desire of change causes many a town-mouse to metamorphose himself for months into a country mouse. This class provincialize themselves for one half of the year merely because they have been metropolitans for the other. They are fully as happy in returning to town in February as in returning to the country in June. Their enjoyment of life, like the amusement of dancing, consists entirely in changing places. They have been so long in Harley-street, that they must go down to Hants; and then they remain so long in Hants that they must go back to Harley-street. Thus they swing between town and country, like a pendulum, or Mahomet's coffin, and if they ever settle, it is in the suburbs.

Observe your suburban people; they invariably tell you that they love the country, while the very choice they have made of an abode, demonstrates that they love the town just as well. Why does any family fix itself at Kensington or Hampstead, but because they cannot tear themselves away from Park-lane or Bloomsbury? They seek to please two masters; man, who made the town, and God, who made the country. Betwixt streets of red brick and lanes of green trees they know not which to choose, and therefore, like all temporizers, they endeavour to reconcile both by quartering themselves in ruddy villas peeping over clumps of verdure, resembling inverted bunches of carrots in Covent-garden.

Are places like these the country ?-no more than Covent-garden is the garden of the Hesperides. As imitations of the country, they are more to be detested for that very reason; just as the monkey is particularly hideous because it apes the man. But what makes the suburbs most ridiculous is that they mimic both the country and the town; here is a row of houses trying to look like Portlandstreet; there a group of cottages giving themselves the airs of a Tyrolese hamlet. Beside an ambitious copy of a house in Finsbury, you see a still more daring attempt at a villa on the lake of Como. When cockneys go to fancy-balls, it is remarked that they generally appear as shepherds or sportsmen. Snobbs is generally a Corydon; Priggins must be Hawthorn; and Miss Snooks, Amaryllis or nothing. In the same way, the most citizenlike of all imaginable dwellings of baked red clay, will surround itself with three laburnums, two lilacs,

and a poplar, and call itself "Sans Souci," or "The Hermitage." Fancy a hermitage with a brass knocker! Figure to yourselves the cell of a recluse with a brass plate upon the door bearing the inscription of "Mr. Stubbs !" An anchorite of the name of Stubbs! Or Wiggins an eremite !

Far in a wild, remote from public view,

From youth to age, the reverend Wiggins grew.

A great revolution has taken place since the jaded inhabitant of London could escape from his dungeon on a bright morning, in early summer, and convey himself, within the limits of a conscionable fasting walk, to a genuine rural spot beyond the "smoke and stir" of the metropolis, such as Milton had in his eye when he wrote his well-known simile,

As one who long in populous city pent, &c.

The country ventured in those days to come to the very gates of the capital. I will not say that the Fauns danced at Brompton, or that Sylvanus was ever seen in the shades of Vauxhall, or that the trees of Kensington were tenanted by the Dryads, or that Dian ever hunted with her nymphs over Harrow-hill; for Milton would have recorded those events had they taken place in his times; but it is certain that "pleasant villages and farms" then "adjoined" London; that "each rural sight" was to be seen, " each rural sound" heard; a man might then have led a pastoral or even a hermit's life almost within the bills of mortality, provided his name was neither Tubbs or Tomkins, and provided he abstained from brass-plates and knockers; but now the very idea of a Colin, or a Tuck, within fifty miles of St. Paul's, is enough to make even Heraclitus laugh: the town has put the country to flight; nay, the country may be said to have been turned out of the country. Rus in urbe must indeed be chimerical, where to find even rus in rure is no easy matter. Steam has a great deal to answer for. We have never heard the rail in the meadows, since we began to travel on railroads. A day's journey will hardly bring us within the note of the cuckoo, and the song of the nightingale will soon be as the music of the spheres. Probably, before many years the only sounds heard in England will be the hissing of the boiler, and the mechanical clatter of the steam-coach. Agreeable exchange for the song of the milkmaid and the warbling of Philomel!

A querulous friend remarked:

"I have no motives to take me to the country now."
"No motives! have you not the loco-motives?"
"But seriously, there is no longer an object."

"Object! is there not always the terminus ?"

“Ay, the terminus, that everlasting terminus; of all pedantries save me from the pedantry of engineering; time was when I could go to Torquay, or Clifton, or Norwood, or Beaumaris-now I must go to a terminus; I cannot stir a step beyond a terminus; pray tell me, if you have so much geography, where is Terminas? Or who is Terminus?"

"There was a Roman deity so called."

"Not Roman-English! he is the god of those pagan engineers, and the idol of the railway companies at this moment. I shall worship Juggernaut sooner than Terminus."

"Well determined," I replied.

In the course of another conversation lately, a person alluded to the subject of Rural Deans, and a clergyman present remarked that their office was a very ancient one.

"Yet I do not recollect," somebody answered, "that it is mentioned in the 'De Rusticâ," or by either Theocritus or Virgil."

"Did any body ever see a Rural Dean?" asked a third.

It happened that I had seen that spiritual phenomenon, and I said so.

"You saw a Rural Dean!" exclaimed several voices.

"Where?" demanded the most incredulous of the company.

"In Fleet-street!"

Oddly enough, out of a party of seven or eight, including a clergyman, I was the only one who had ever seen a Rural Dean, and I had seen him in the heart of London.

"The only decided case I ever met with of rus in urbe," said Quinapulus.

Little boys and girls think they love the country very sincerely, when in fact they love only gooseberries and cherries. The country is a fruitful theme of panegyric as long as there is fruit upon the trees. Well, it is as legitimate to worship Pomona for her apples and pears, as the true divinity for the sake of the loaves and fishes.

"But nobody is so wicked?" says Simplex.

"Nobody!—suppose the fish a turbot!—what think you?" "Oh, a turbot! that alters the case."

This, however, is rambling. To return then to our subject; we proceed from the views of little girls to consider those of young women, over whom "the sentimental" exercises a potent influence, and enters largely into their inclinations towards the country. To them the country is Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia realized; every lass is a Galatea, every lad a Tityrus, the commonest hind a Colin Clout. They think there is a pair of turtle doves for every tree in the island, and their notion of a lamb is that of a little capering quadruped, covered with the finest wool, and bedizened with pink ribbons. The thought of a pig never enters their dear heads, and the ploughboys of their fancies have the countenances of cherubs, dress like the Queen's pages, and whistle only Italian airs. They cannot conceive what people want with such coarse things as bread and bacon, when they can breakfast on honey, and dine on conserve of roses. As to killing a lamb for food, they would just as soon cherish the thought of parricide. They revolt from a pigeon-pie as they would from the banquet of Thyestes. However, these fair enthusiasts will eat boiled chicken and roast ducks, neither chickens nor ducks being fortunate enough to share the protection with which poetry and sentiment shield the dove and the red breast. Potatoes they consider a barbarous innovation upon the dietary of pastoral romance. The ground would be much better occupied with peaches and nectarines.