one is rust to another; what is stimulus to one is merely distraction to another. The action of London on a sluggish nature will ordinarily be beneficial; the action of the country on the same temperament may lead to the gradual rusting of all the faculties not actually needed in making money. But in the case of excitable natures the repose of the country may serve to check that frittering of time and energy which London, with its huge array of occupations, cherishes and exaggerates.

Perhaps the contrast between London and the country is best seen in the keen sense of social life which a man has in the former as compared with the keen sense of physical life which he has in the latter. Most of us know the feeling of going into the open air on a sunny morning in the country-the variety and play of existence of all kinds, and the strange way in which you seem to live more consciously because you are a part of that abounding animal energy which confronts you in all directions. In London the only being of which you take notice is man ; but a crowded street imparts a similar sense of the variety and play of existence, with the difference that this abounding energy is united to yours by a social rather than a physical tie-by an identity of interests and pursuits as well as of animal organs. If man is designed to live in combination with his fellows, his conception of his destiny will surely be more vivid in London than in the country. Yet this statement must be taken with a certain qualification. As has often been remarked, the very vastness of London generates a strong sense of individual insignificance. It is much easier to feel yourself necessary in the country, because there is almost sure to be some group of persons out of which you would be missed if you were to go away. You must occupy a very conspicuous position in London before you can flatter yourself that your absence would be noticed except by very intimate friends. An incidental consequence of this distinction is that a man is much more independent in London than in the country. He can call his soul his own with much less fear that his conscience will flatly give him the lie. A familiar instance of this is the regularity with which many people go to church in the country, who are by no means to be always found there when they are in London. Nothing is implied here as to the propriety or impropriety of not going to church, or as to the expediency of setting an example when what you do will certainly be noted. The fact that there is such a difference is the only thing which concerns us, and that is so far an important fact that people who mean to be very unlike their neighbours ought to remember that to be this in the country demands very much more resolution and persistence than it demands in London. The conces sions they may have to make in order to avoid being talked about may not be many or serious, but they will be happier probably if they make up their minds that some such concessions there will be, and that these had better be made with the best grace they can command.

There are some minds to which a home in the country is endeared by a keen love of nature in all the aspects under which the changing seasons

present her. This is the great counterbalancing charm to the opportunities of observing the hardly less various phases of social life which London supplies. There is no possibility of deciding which of these two tastes best deserves to be gratified. Dr. Johnson and Wordsworth will always remain types of different classes of minds. But it may be well to point out one serious drawback which detracts from the full enjoyment which the love of nature would otherwise secure to a man who makes his home in the country. It is not a drawback of nature's providing. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the country is only pleasant in summer or in fine weather. Chance aspects of scenery yield enjoyment at all times, and to escape from the yellow fog and black mud of a wet winter day in London to the white mists and natural coloured muds of the country is scarcely less delightful than to make the corresponding exchange on a blazing day in summer. In the worst weather there are some natural objects which do not lose their charm. The drawback meant is the inexorable progress of the builder, and the consequent deterioration of almost every habitable district within twenty miles of London. Unluckily the builder is like an unclean insect-he spoils far more than he eats. He can deprive a prospect miles in extent of all its characteristic beauty by setting down half-a-dozen houses in the wrong place. They will certainly, however, be set down there, and nowhere else, if there happen to be a plot of ground to be let on a building lease. This incursion of villas of inevitable and indescribable ugliness would be bad enough if it stood alone; but the villas are invariably followed by an army of campfollowers more hideous, if possible, than themselves. The gradual transformation of the old village street, and the mushroom growth of new streets in which red bricks and yellow bricks contend which shall look the worst, are sights which any one who lives near London must make up his mind to endure. Fortunately the farther you go the more chance there is that much that is charming will be left untouched for years to come; and perhaps, before complete destruction overtakes the whole district. round London, builders may learn that to kill the goose, in the shape of country scenery, is hardly the way to secure an unfailing succession of golden eggs, in the shape of tenants who are attracted from London by the love of country scenery.

Even the repose and leisure of the country need to be varied from time to time. It is no more good for man and wife to live alone than it was for man before a wife was given him. Some amount of intercourse with friends is a necessity-or next door to a necessity-of life. Some amount of hospitality is an instinct-or almost an instinct of human nature. To this point the advocate of living in London over living in the country usually addresses himself with the utmost confidence of victory. In his opinion to live in the country is to bury yourself alive; to live in London is to have the command of as pleasant society as any in the world. Before this antithesis can be accepted as a complete expression of the facts some qualifications must be introduced into it on both sides. One

VOL. XXIX.-No. 173.

29.

of these qualifications has just been indicated. The great overflow of London life has worked an extraordinary change in the surrounding districts. They have altogether ceased to be those social cemeteries which the country proper is said to be. It would be difficult now to find any village within twenty miles of London which has not its complement of new houses and its daily contingent of professional and business passengers. Indeed, if such a village could be discovered, the attractions of a bit of genuine country within easy access of London would ensure its being built over as soon as the land could be brought into the market. On the other hand the command of the best society which every Londoner is conventionally supposed to enjoy often means little more than a larger amount of the same kind of society which is usually to be had in the country. Still the contrast has a side of truth to it. In London every one can to a certain extent pick and choose their acquaintance, whereas in the country their acquaintance is pretty much chosen for them. If the place is large enough there may be two or even more sets in it; but it is probably a matter of chance into which a new-comer is introduced, and he can seldom pass from one to the other or be equal friends with all. At first sight it may seem that in this respect the advantage is altogether on the side of London. The liberty of choosing your associates is certainly very valuable; and in the matter of intellectual interest there is usually no comparison between society in the country and society in the town. Dinner parties in London are a series of social lotteries, in which the excitement is maintained by the constant chance of a prize turning up. Here, as everywhere, there are plenty of blanks, for there are no houses in which you can be secure against having a dull neighbour. But at all events you start with the chances in your favour. You do not go to dress with the melancholy foreboding that you may take down the same lady to whom you found nothing to say the week before last. You are spared the small local gossip, the domestic interrogatories and the domestic news vouchsafed in answer to them, which you meet in the country. You are not catechised as to the plan and probable cost of your new greenhouse, or expected to sympathise in your host's relations with a peccant coachman. The subjects which you have in common with your fellow-guests are at all events of some public interest. You do not find that the lady next to you only sees the Times when her husband brings it down from town, and that to-day she had gone up to dress before

he came in.

Still there is something to be said on the other side. If London is the best place for making acquaintances, or for enjoying the company people who are not even acquaintances, the country is the best place for making friends, and for really seeing the friends you have already. Society in London is like a complicated dance figure, in which you touch hands with everybody and have scarcely time for a word with your partner. Even in the pleasantest parties it may be only just before the time comes for leaving that you find out that one of the guests is the person whom

of all others you want to talk to on some subject in which you are mutually interested; and as to those whom you knew beforehand, it is so long since you have met them that you feel it is safest not to assume any recollection of what you then discussed with them. In the country you cannot choose your associates as you can in London; but, if you are pleased with the associates which chance has given you, the intercourse with them is much more intimate. You meet the same people so often that if there is anything in them there is full time for it to come out. You find by degrees that you have common pursuits; you enquire what each has lately been doing in them; you agree to come down by the same train the next afternoon, and to take your friend's house on your way home. All this is theoretically possible in London as well as in the country, but it can only be done by a special effort. It does not spring naturally out of the society which you frequent; you have to consider how you are to see So-and-so, and what vacant day can be found to ask him to dinner. A man who trusted to seeing his friends in the ordinary course of a season's parties would be much in the position of a man who trusted to meeting them in the street. There is another feature of country as contrasted with London life which tends in the same direction. In London you ask your friends to dinner, and, as regards men at all events, this is your only chance of seeing them. Such of your friends as happen to live in the country you hardly see at all; for what with the difficulty of making room for them in a London house, and the restraint which their presence imposes in the midst of the engagements of London society, they rarely pay you a visit. In the country, on the contrary, you ask your neighbours to dinner, and you ask your London friends to come and stay with you. There is more opportunity for growing intimate with people who are with you from a Saturday afternoon till a Monday morning, and during that time become a part of your household, are seen at all hours and under all circumstances, and have time to throw off a little of the gloss of society, and to show the real character underneath, than there is in a whole series of dinner parties. In the course of a single summer you may turn more than one set of acquaintances, who in London would have remained acquaintances to the end of the chapter, into genuine friends. Even as regards neighbours the question comes back very much to the contrast between repose and stimulus which underlies so much of the difference between the two ways of life. The very description just given of a typical country dinner party, which to one man will seem dull beyond words, to another will seem just what an evening's relaxation should be. "When I am tired with a hard day's work," the latter will say, "I do not care to be too much roused up in the evening. The exciting and brilliant talk which you promise me in London is not at all what I want. I had much rather hear a little news about the neighbourhood, and compare notes with my friends as to the progress of our fruit-trees or our respective successes in salad growing." Whether he or the Londoner is most

in the right is a point that everyone must decide for themselves. Something may depend on the nature of a man's work during the day, and the demands it makes on the intellect; something on the light in which he regards conversation to take part in which needs a quick and sustained attention; something on the degree in which his wife is pleased or bored by one or the other types of society.

Among the points of contrast between town and country none perhaps will have more weight than the opportunities for recreation which they severally offer. Work is much the same everywhere, and under all circumstances. The husband goes out in the morning to his office or his chambers; the wife takes up her household concerns, her letter writing, her visiting among the poor, or whatever else she classes among duties that must be done. When the business day is over they have a certain fraction of time at their own disposal. On Sundays probably they have the whole day, and besides their summer holiday they have days at other times which they can spend in whatever manner pleases them. As regards the employment of these hours and days, living in London and living in the country have each their advantages. In the country there is a standing source of pleasure in the garden. Whether the space at a man's disposal be small or large, there is always something to be done or planned in it. Assuming of course that it is something better than the mere patch before or behind a suburban villa, there is room for alterations if it be an old garden, for laying out if it be a new one, for judicious thinning if the trees are too crowded, for judicious planting if the ground is bare. In every season of the year there is some part of the garden that will give occupation either out-door or in-door. You have newly come to your house in the autumn, and you find that the fall of the leaf has left a side of the house exposed which you wish to keep sheltered at all times. You have let the season for autumn planting slip by you; but there is employment for mild days in considering how your evergreens shall be grouped, and for winter evenings in comparing authorities to see which plants will suit your purpose best, and catalogues to ascertain the sizes which you can get them at starting and the prices you will have to pay. Or you notice that evergreens are too predominant in your shrubbery, and that they need to be interspersed with trees which shall give a thicker shade in summer and more varied tints in spring and autumn. You have now to calculate different rates of growth, lest you should be planting for posterity instead of for yourself, to consider whether you care more for trees which put out their leaves early or for trees which keep them late, whether you prefer mass or symmetry, whether you wish the variations of colour to be most conspicuous when the foliage is young or when it is fading. If former tenants have already pretty well covered the ground, you have still to consider whether the general plan of the garden may not be improved, whether the flower beds shall be brought nearer the house or moved further away from it, whether space now wasted in useless paths shall be thrown into lawn, whether the paths that are kept shall be made