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 out the places where he composed his poems, many of them accessible from London, trying to find out on the spot why particular ideas suggested themselves to Milton's mind. Everything becomes so much clearer when looked at on the spot, when we consider the ideas of men in reference to the place where those ideas suggested themselves. The whole country of England is rich in historical suggestions. Everywhere we can see suggestions of the way in which luminous ideas came into the minds of those who have been before us. Their ideas become more luminous to us as we see how they were acquired, for ideas are valuable, not so much when we consider them as due to the spontaneous action of any individual, but when we see how they were borne in on him by the accumulated wealth of resources which his country contains.

There is still another aspect in which a country may be studied, and that is in relation to its social conditions both in the past and in the present day. Get, for instance, a large ordnance map and consider the boundaries of the parishes; draw them in and study social life from that basis. A friend of mine set himself to draw, for his own purposes, a rough parish map of the Weald of Kent. He took nothing but the divisions of the parishes, and he was suddenly struck by the fact that the parishes came in their present form from the most primitive times. He saw at a glance from the top of the Weald, looking down on both sides, the arrangement made by the original settlers. All the parishes are long narrow strips, the boundaries of which run down from the top of the