Page:The English Peasant.djvu/236

 And all this, we are told, belongs to one man!

How natural to gaze on such a scene, so peaceful, so beautiful, so suggestive of all kinds of poetical ideas of rural happiness, and instinctively to believe it must be the best possible condition of existence for all who are privileged to live within its borders. How natural to exclaim with the American Republican, entranced by the potent spell of English aristocratic society, "I never realized so forcibly the splendid results of wealth and primogeniture."

So will it appear to those who dwell within the magic walls of the enchanter's castle. Pass beyond the white lodges and get into the sunburnt highway. Stop the first labouring man you meet, enter his cottage, listen to the housewife's tale, and then say what you think of the splendid results of wealth and primogeniture.

Such were my cogitations after paying a visit to the district which has Blenheim Park for its centre, and the Marlborough estates for its circumference. A park fourteen miles round, enclosing an area of 3000 acres, worthy, from its antiquity and beauty, to be compared with Windsor. A regal palace, rather than an old grey hall, standing in a fairyland of gardens and streams and fountains and islands, with picture galleries, whose wealth of Rubens and Titians moved a great German art critic to declare Blenheim alone worthy a journey to England. The possession of such an estate is enough to elevate its owner to the very top of the social column, even if he owed it to modern commerce or to ancient rapine. But Blenheim, as everyone knows, is held by the better title of service done in the cause of European liberty. Still more, its present owner, as a Christian man, and as one who has been a minister of the Queen, must be supposed to take a higher view of his duties than that which ordinarily obtains in rural districts. At Blenheim, therefore, if anywhere, we ought to find the rural system of England producing good fruits.

In passing rapidly through the villages which lie under the Blenheim aegis, one's sense of the orderly and the beautiful is certainly gratified. The white cottages and pretty porches overgrown with jasmine and honeysuckle, the small gardens just now