Page:The English Peasant.djvu/244

 (Golden Hours, 1872.)

a circle with Warwick for its centre, let the line of its circumference begin at Leeds, and it will as nearly as possible pass round the body of England, leaving the two limbs to the north and south-west to balance each other. Just equidistant from this central point lie London and Manchester, so that we may truly say, from the heart of old England has come the impulse which bids fair to revolutionise the condition of our agricultural labourers.

I lately made a pilgrimage to the spring-head of this movement—to Barford, where dwells its leader, Joseph Arch; to Wellesbourne, beneath whose now historic chestnut the leaders of the movement have found a rural forum.

Leaving Warwick, which in its calm decay recalls the age when statesmen reckoned the prosperity of the country, not by the quarterly returns of the Exchequer or by the increase of population, but by the condition of its men—I take the road whose very name, suggests the genius of that noble era.

"To Stratford" tells me I am now in Shakspeare's England, wandering among scenes which formed for him the background of every rural picture, whether the scene was laid in England or France, Italy or Greece.

Nowhere, indeed, can we find more truly English landscapes. Roads lined with noble elms or beeches; parks clad in greensward, with glimpses of an ancient Tudor mansion seen among the trees; cottages of mediaeval build, laced and interlaced with huge beams, their high-peaked roofs neatly thatched, and often covered with 203