Glances at Inner England. I. OUTER ENGLAND. Or the crowds of Americans who land at Outer Liverpool, and overrun the little island they threaten some day to annex, few can claim to have seen what I am going to disclose to you of the England of to-day. They of course remark a good deal that is curious, a good deal that is odd, a good deal that is splendid, a good deal that is squalid; they will form no mean ideas of the strength, the wealth, the glory of Britain. Glancing from car or carriage window over a landscape which seems to eyes accustomed to the grand proportions of New World scenery to be exquisitely dwarfed, B bright with strangely-vivid green, ranged in mosaics of variously coloured earth and crops parcelled out in charming diversities of shape into what appear to be little garden fields—its trees and plantations studded over hill and dale with a natural skill or by a most artistic chance, the traveller regards the picturesque and romantic aspects of England. Here a ruin, that mayhap of Rievaulx Abbey, lying in some verdant vale, embosomed in richlywooded hills, with its unroofed aisles and nave and choir, its crumbling towers, the long ranges of its clustered columns and bended arches, the straggling remnants of its once elaborate cloisters, while over all, here and there, the solemn, slow-sprent ivy crowns with eternalising chaplets the worn-out glory of monasticism: there a castle, like that of Ludlow, the ancient stronghold of the Lords of the Marches, towering over delicious vales— typical together of manly strength and feminine beauty-recalling a tyranny and a chivalry together and for ever gone: the mind, as one stands there reviewing the long historic, literary, and political memories of those grey stones, fall ing into a sweet confusion of romantic visions, and revelling amid the combined influences of nature and of fancy. Or, there again, some noble Hall-like Castle Howard, or Chatsworth, or Trentham-homes for princes, the product of an intermediate era of classical taste, with broad grand wings and rich façade, its porches and colonnades flashing to view amid scenes of sylvan loveliness so fair, so Eden-like, as to transport the soul with an unwicked envy of those who can command and enjoy such beauties this side heaven, and with wonder at the wealth of a nation so many of whose nobles can dwell in royal palaces. Or here, once more, is a village, the first foundations of whose humble homes were laid a thousand years ago, dozing in some bowery hollow, with weather-tinted cottages, all thatched and gabled and dormered in quaint angles and slopes, its dilapidated windmill, its yew-decked churchyard, and the Gothic tower or spire that peeps above the ancient trees. In these and a thousand other such scenes may you look upon merry England and yet *B 2 |