Oh! friendly to the best pursuits of man,
Friendly to thought, to virtue and to peace,
Domestic life in rural pleasures past!
COWPER.
THE stranger who would form a correct opinion of the English character, must not e his observations to the metropolis.
He must go forth into the try; he must sojourn in villages and hamlets; he must visit castles, villas, farm-houses, cottages; he must wahrough parks and gardens; along hedges and green lanes; he must loiter about try churches; attend wakes and fairs, and other rural festivals; and cope with the people in all their ditions, and all their habits and humors.
In some tries, the large cities absorb the wealth and fashion of the nation; they are the only ?xed abodes of elegant and intelligent society, and the try is inhabited almost entirely by boorish peasantry. In England, on the trary, the metropolis is a mere gathering-place, eneral rendezvous, of the polite classes, where they devote a small portion of the year to a hurry of gayety and dissipation, and, having indulged this kind of ival, return again to the apparently more genial habits of rural life. The various orders of society are therefore diffused over the whole surface of the kingdom, and the more retired neighborhoods afford spes of the different ranks.
The English, in fact, are strongly gifted with the rural feeling.
They possess a quick sensibility to the beauties of nature, and a keen relish for the pleasures and employments of the try.
This passion seems i in them. Even the inhabitants of cities, born and brought up among brick walls and bustling streets, enter with facility into rural habits, and eviact for rural occupation. The mert has his snug retreat in the viity of the metropolis, where he often displays as much pride and zeal in the cultivation of his ?arden, and the maturing of his fruits, as he does in the duct of his business, and the success of a ercial enterprise. Even those less fortunate individuals, who are doomed to pass their lives in the midst of din and traf?c, trive to have something that shall remind them of the green aspect of nature. In the most dark and dingy quarters of the city, the drawing-room window resembles frequently a bank of ?owers; every spot capable of vegetation has its grass-plot and ?ower-bed; and every square its mimic park, laid out with picturesque taste, and gleaming with refreshing verdure.
Those who see the Englishman only in town, are apt to form an unfavorable opinion of his social character. He is either absorbed in business, or distracted by the thousand es that dissipate time, thought, and feeling, in this huge metropolis. He has, therefore, too only, a look of hurry and abstra. Wherever he happens to be, he is on the point of going somewhere else; at the moment he is talking on one subject, his mind is wandering to another; and while paying a friendly visit, he is calculating how he shall eize time so as to pay the other visits allotted to the m. An immeropolis, like London, is calculated to make men sel?sh and uing.
In their casual and tra meetings, they but deal brie?y in onplaces. They present but the cold super?ces of character--its rid genial qualities have no time to be warmed into a ?ow.
It is in the try that the Englishman gives scope to his natural feelings. He breaks loose gladly from the cold formalities aive civilities of town; throws off his habits of shy reserve, and bees joyous and fre