Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/249

 stone—they had a few years before been hovels of clay and turf—placed close together, end to end, in rows forming the village street, resembling the rows of negro cabins on a planter's estate, where nothing is left to the individual will of the tenant, but he must squat in the one case as the slave owner, in the other as the laird bids him. Whereas everything that gives beauty to an English Village springs from the circumstance of the individual will having been as free to select a spot for a dwelling as the oak on the village green to shoot out its boughs as nature prompted it.

I have in the preceding section quoted a few words from Sir Walter Scott's description of the village of Tully-Veolan. I will now quote a few words more. Sir Walter Scott, in describing the village of Tully-Veolan, says: "The village was more than half a mile long, the cottages being divided from each other by gardens, or yards, as the inhabitants called them, of different sizes." I can truly say, however, that such was not the case in this village of which I write—for the cottages were placed close together, without gardens or greensward between them and the road or village street, though many of them, perhaps all, may have