to their punch, their gossip, and their oysters."* We must draw again on Mr. Luttrell as a ready draughtsman of this state of mind:

The spark whom Norfolk squires are courting

Has, ten to one, no turn for sporting.
Detests a gun, likes London better
Than woods or stubbles, bird or setter,
And would not, if he dared, be seen,

Beyond Kew-bridge or Turnham-green.†

-if

One of Sir Bulwer Lytton's early heroes owns his little faith in the permanence of any attachment professed for the country by the inhabitants of cities. If we can occupy our minds solely with the objects around us,-if the brook, he says, and the old tree, and the golden sunset, and the summer night, and the animal and homely life that we survey,these can fill our contemplation, and take from us the feverish schemes of the future, then, indeed, he can fully understand the reality of that tranquil and happy state" which our elder poets have described as incident to a country life. But if we carry with us to the shade all the restless and perturbed desires of the city: if we only employ present leisure in schemes for an agitated future-then it is in vain that we affect the hermit, and fly to the retreat. The moment the novelty of green fields is over, and our projects are formed, we wish to hurry to the city to execute them."‡ Could pageantry and dance, and feast and song,

says Cowper, in his exposé of sham sentiment and pseudo-pastoralism,
Be quelled in all our summer months' retreats,
How many self-deluded nymphs and swains,
Who dream they have a taste for fields and groves,
Would find them hideous nurseries of the spleen,
And crowd the roads, impatient for the town!§

Cowper's ruling is, that They love the country, and none else, who seek
For their own sake its silence and its shade.

A nymph and swain-the former, however, rather deluding than selfdeluded of this town-bred sort, Mr. Thackeray exhibits to us, shut up together in a country house, where their chief occupation is love-making and philandering, the live-long summer's day. Pendennis comes across Blanche Amory seated in the village school, instructing the children, and fancies to himself how patient she must be, how good natured, how ingenuous, how really simple in her tastes, and unspoiled by the world. "And do you really like the country ?" Pen asks her, as they walk together. "I should like never to see that odious city again," she protests. "O Arthur-that is, Mr.-well, Arthur, then-one's good thoughts grow up in these sweet woods and calm solitudes, like those flowers which won't bloom in London, you know. The gardener comes and changes our balconies once a week. I don't think I shall bear to look London in the face again-its odious, smoky, brazen face. Heigho!" Of course Pen asks for a translation of that sigh. Anon Mes Soupirs are laid

* Masson's Essays, Biographical and Critical.
Letters to Julia.
Godolphin, ch. xiv.
The Task, book iii.: "The Garden."

dside, and Mes Larmes begin. And then, "Ah! what answer is given to those in the eyes of a young woman? What is the method employed for drying them? O ringdoves and roses, O dews and wild flowers, O waving greenwoods and balmy airs of summer! Here were two battered London rakes, taking themselves in for a moment, and fancying that they were in love with each other, like Phillis and Corydon." In fine, when Mr. Thackeray thinks of country houses and country walks, his only wonder is that any man is left unmarried.

We must give another picture, to the life, from Cowper, of ill-at-ease rustication, trying to tutor itself into patience with its doom:

Anticipated rents and bills unpaid

Force many a shining youth into the shade,
Not to redeem his time, but his estate,
And play the fool, but at a cheaper rate.
There, hid in loathed obscurity, removed
From pleasures left, but never more beloved,
He just endures, and with a sickly spleen
Sighs o'er the beauties of the charming scene.
Nature indeed looks prettily in rhyme :
Streams tinkle sweetly in poetic chime;
The warblings of the blackbird, clear and strong,
Are musical enough in Thomson's song;

And Cobham's groves and Windsor's green retreats,

When Pope describes them, have a thousand sweets;
He likes the country, but in truth must own,
Most likes it when he studies it in town.†

When Lucy Daylmer, to check Ellesmere's mocks and flouts at rural felicity, wishes, in her gentle way, that he would come and live for a little time in the country, "and then you might learn to understand us a little better," that sarcastic gentleman replies: "You had better at once wish all you can against me, Miss Daylmer; and say, as the witty Duke of Buckingham did to the dog that bit him, 'I wish you were married, and went to live in the country.' Is not that a good story, Milverton? One feels how Charles the Second must have liked the Duke's society."‡

y

Saint-Preux a raison when he assures Milord Edouard that "les gens de ville ne savent point aimer la campagne; ils ne savent point même être à peine quand ils y sont savent-ils ce qu'on y fait. Ils en dédaignent les travaux, les plaisirs; ils les ignorent: ils sont chez eux comme en pays étranger; je ne m'étonne pas qu'ils s'y déplaisent."§ You should turn villager, he argues, when you are in a village, or not go there at all. The inhabitants of Paris, who suppose themselves to be gone into the country, are never really there, on Rousseau's showing; they take Paris along with them: singers, wits, authors, parasites are the cortége by which they are accompanied. Gaming, music, private theatricals, are their only occupation there. They keep the same table as in Paris, and take their meals at the same hours, and do the same things as in town: why not remain in Paris, then, which they must needs lose something by leaving, while they have gained nothing in return? There are, indeed, those, says Theodore Hook, who affect to despise

* Pendennis, ch. lxiii.

† Cowper's Retirement.

Friends in Council, book ii. ch. iv.
§ La Nouvelle Héloïse, partie v. lettre vii.

everything like nature, and who pass their days in the country precisely as they pass their time in London; and who, like Lady Townly in the play, laugh at rurality, and shudder at the notion of an old tree. "But this is affectation-they know better, and their feelings and tastes are better; but, living in awe of ridicule, this scorn of everything divested of art is only a practical illustration of the whole scheme of artificiality."* That it is not always affectation, a standing proof occurs, however, in the very work whence this remark is taken-in the shamelessly candid Mr. Godfrey Moss, who, when a good-natured lady politely invites him to come some day and see her at Dulham, straightforwardly answers, "Whenever I have committed any crime which the law creturs shall think fit to punish very severely, ma'am, I will. No, no, none of your country houses for me. "I thought, Moss," interposes Maxwell, "you were a great admirer of the social parties at Lord Belford's, and the Christmas festivities at- "Pshaw, Mack!" the old fellow breaks in," so I am. I like a handful of London put down in a house full of luxury and comfort, with just as much rurality as you please, and no more; and that in a space sufficient to let every man do as he likes; or give me a tree on a grass-plot with a table under it, where one may smoke a cigar, and drink the ginnums and water, without offending any of your fine folks; either one thing or the other, but not such a place as that old body's." There is no affectation in this ginnums-and-water old gentleman (drawn from life, by-the-by), at any rate. Nor would Theodore have found it-whatever he may predicate of Lady Townly in the play -in such spirits as the bride in Shenstone's ballad, who, when

From Lincoln to London rode forth our young squire,
To bring down a wife whom the swains might admire,

refused point-blank to resign herself to vegetation on Lincolnshire plains -for,

In spite of whatever the mortal could say,
The goddess objected the length of the way.
To give up the opera, the park, and the ball,

For to view the stag's horns in an old country hall;

To have neither China nor India to see,

Nor a laceman to plague in a morning-not she!

To forsake the dear playhouse, Quin, Garrick, and Clive,
Who by dint of mere humour had kept her alive;

To forego the full box for his lonesome abode,

O Heavens! she should faint, she should die on the road!

Among the motley guests whom Matthew Bramble and his nephew dine with, at Smollett's table-for Smollett is, no doubt, the S of the novel, who "lives in the skirts of the town," and opens his house every Sunday to "all unfortunate brothers of the quill," whom he then and there regales on beef, pudding, potatoes, punch, and Calvert's entire butt beer-among these unfortunates, in their Sunday best, is one literary gentleman who "had contracted such an antipathy to the country, that he insisted upon sitting with his back towards the window that looked into the garden, and, when a dish of cauliflower was set upon the table, † Ibid., vol. i. ch. xi.

* Maxwell, vol. iii. ch. iv.

Shenstone's Songs and Ballads.

he snuffed up volatile salts to keep him from fainting, yet this delicate person was the son of a cottager, and had many years run wild among asses on a common." Here is affectation, if you will, and rather broadly caricatured, too. But it is not often that people affect a dislike so common -a false delight in country scenes is affected often enough. All the better is it to meet with a frank avowal, such as the Charles Lambs and Sydney Smiths were ever prompt to make, of anti-rural propensities. They no more mince the matter for themselves than the poet does for his goldenlegged heroine, when he tells us that, although she loved Eastern Tales about inexhaustible purses, yet all

Pastoral scenes on her heart fell cold,
For Nature with her had lost its hold,
No field but the Field of the Cloth of Gold

Would ever have caught her foot in it.*

Of this same auriferous demoiselle, when she becomes a bride, and has to spend the honeymoon in the country, the poet her biographer has the same story to tell:

And what were joys of the pastoral kind

To a Bride-town-made-with a heart and a mind
With simplicity ever at battle?

A bride of an ostentatious race,

Who, thrown in the Golden Farmer's place,

Would have trimmed her shepherds with golden lace,
And gilt the horns of her cattle.

She could not please the pigs with her whim,
And the sheep wouldn't cast their eyes at a limb
For which she had been such a martyr;

The deer in the park, and the colts at grass,
And the cows unheeded let it pass;
And the ass on the common was such an ass
That he wouldn't have swapp'd
The thistle he cropp'd

For her Leg, including the Garter!

She hated lanes, and she hated fields-
She hated all that the country yields—
And barely knew turnips from clover;
She hated walking in any shape,

And a country stile was an awkward scrape,
Without the bribe of a mob to gape

At the Leg in clambering over!

And then the rascally adventurer, her husband-not Peter Bell cared less for primroses, and all that sort of thing, than Monsieur the Count did.

To tell, indeed, the true extent

Of his rural bias, so far it went

As to covet estates in ring fences

And for rural lore he had learnt in town

That the country was green, turn'd up with brown,
And garnished with trees which a man might cut down
Instead of his own expenses.

* Hood, Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg.

VOL. L.

F

CROOKED USAGE;

OR,

THE ADVENTURES OF LORN LORIOT.

BY DUDLEY COSTELLO.

CHAPTER XVII.

SIR WILLIAM.

WHEN Mrs. Drakeford-or, as her admirer the Doctor, in his most admiring mood, poetically called her, "The Juno of Clerkenwell"-went forth on her secret expeditions, the attractions of her toilette, which she never neglected, were, if possible, more than usually heightened. There are many uses to which a devoted friend may be turned, and amongst others to which the Doctor was made subservient was the monopoly of the brougham, which, in the flush of successful practice, he had recently set up. In fact, the carriage was more at the service of Mrs. Drakeford than of its owner, and every morning at the same hour, the Doctor's page-a youth in buttons who circulated a vast quantity of the elixir-came for Juno's orders. Sometimes Esther was her companion, though generally she went out alone, but where she went to on these last occasions was even more than the coachman could altogether pretend to say; for though Smudge, in a laudable spirit of inquiry, made the most of her opportunity in pumping that functionary, throwing questions at him while the brougham stood at the door, she never got more out of him than the fact that "he druv her Missis down to the West-end, where she got out in a premiskerous way, and he waited about till she come back again."

"But Lord!" says Smudge, in an under tone from the door-step, as if she was talking to herself, but still contriving to make the coachman hear, "you must see which way she goes."

"I'm not a bad hand at turning a corner," replies Jehu; "it's my perfession so to do; but of all the turners of corners as ever I come across, the quickest is your Missis. That there 'andle is turned afore the broom's well up to the kerb, and tho' she's not a light-weight, she's on the pavement in a second. John,' says she, there's a trifle for somethin' to drink, be here in an hour-or two, as the case may be-and while I puts the money in my pocket blest if she ain't round the corner."

The only comment Smudge can make on this intelligence-and she always makes it-is, "Well! She's no good!" Whereupon Jehu raises his whip elbow, depresses the opposite corner of his mouth, and winks with his off-eye, as much as to say, "You're not far out there, young 'un;" and having telegraphed this opinion in a dumb-show which Smudge rightly interprets, the countenance of Jehu resumes its customary expression of stolid gravity.

But that which the Doctor's coachman, with all his knowledge of the ins and outs of London, failed to discover, it shall be our purpose partially to disclose.