Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/684

 mind's eye. The stranger who wanders over its ruffled surface recognizes at every turn the elements of George Eliot's novels—especially when he carries himself back in imagination to the Warwickshire of forty years ago. He says to himself that it would be impossible to conceive anything more conservatively bucolic, more respectably pastoral. It was in one of the old nestling farmhouses, beyond a hundred hedgerows, that Hetty Sorrel smiled into her milk pans, as if she were looking for a reflection of her pretty face; it was at the end of one of the leafy pillared avenues that poor Mrs. Casaubon paced up and down in fervid disappointment. The county suggests, in especial, both the social and the natural scenery of "Middlemarch." There must be many a genially perverse old Mr. Brooke there yet, and whether there are many Dorotheas or not, there must be many a well-featured and well-acred young country gentleman, of the pattern of Sir James Chettam, who, as he rides along the leafy lanes, softly cudgels his brain to know why a clever girl shouldn't wish to marry him. But I doubt whether there are many Dorotheas, and I suspect that the Sir James Chettams of the county are not often pushed to that intensity of meditation. You feel, however, that George Eliot could not have placed her heroine in a local medium better fitted to throw her fine impatience into relief—a community more likely to be startled and perplexed by a questioning attitude in a well-housed and well-fed young gentlewoman.

Among the very agreeable days that I spent in these neighborhoods, there is one in especial of which I should like to give a detailed account. But I find on consulting my memory that the details have melted away into the single deep impression of a picturesqueness which no poor words of mine can hope to reproduce. It was a long excursion, by rail and by carriage, for the purpose of seeing three extremely interesting old country houses. Our errand led us, in the first place, into Oxfordshire, through the ancient market town of Banbury, where of course we made a point of looking out for the Cross referred to in the famous nursery rhyme. It stood there in the most natural manner—though I am afraid it has been "restored"—with various antique gables around it, from one of whose exiguous windows the young person appealed to in the rhyme may have witnessed the interesting spectacle which the latter commemorates. The houses we went to see have not a national reputation; and to quote that modest person to whom it was remarked that he was really the best man in the world, I have no doubt that there are a hundred more just as good. They have, indeed, a local reputation, but they are not thought to be very exceptionally curious or beautiful, and I imagine that to indulge regarding them in too demonstrative an admiration would be to seem almost as puzzling and startling as Dorothea Brooke. Such places, to a Warwickshire mind of good habits, must appear to be the pillars and props of a heaven-appointed order of things; and accordingly, in a land on which heaven smiles, their grassy foundations must often be encountered. But nothing could well give a stranger a stronger impression of the wealth of England in such matters—of the interminable list of her ancient territorial homes—than this fact that the enchanting old mansions I speak of should have but a limited renown—should not be lions of the first magnitude. Of one of them, the finest of the group, one of my companions, who lived but twenty miles away, had never even heard. Such a place was not thought a matter to boast about. Its peers and its mates are scattered all over the country; half of them are not even mentioned in the county guide-books. You stumble upon them in a drive or a walk. You catch a glimpse of an ivied façade at the midmost point of a great estate, and taking your way,