The hedges, which take up a considerable fraction of English arable soil, help to the park-like appearance of the country. They are inexpressibly beautiful when spring wakes them up to pipe their roulades in tender green. In summer they are splendid in blazon of leaf and flower. In autumn they flaunt banners of gold and red and brown. In winter, too, they are still beautiful, especially in the early winter when there still survive a few scarlet berries to glow and crackle and almost burn in the frost. If England, in a mood of thrift, swept away her hedges and put in their places fences (or that nice sense of keeping boundaries which enables the French cultivator to do without either), the saving of land would be enormous. But much of the park-like beauty of the country-side would depart; and with it the predominant note of the English landscape, which is that of the estate of a rich, careful, orderly nobleman. The change will be slow in coming, if it comes at all; for though he would be the last man, probably, to suspect it, the Englishman is at heart æsthetic. Yes, in spite of horse-hair furniture, gilt-framed oleographs, wax-flower decorations, and Early Victorian wall-papers, and other sins of which many of him have been, and still are, guilty, the Englishman has planted in him an instinct for art. It shows in his love of nature, of the green of his England. Almost every one aspires to come into touch with a bit of plant life. In the East End of London the aspiration takes the form of a window garden. You may see workingmen's "flats" let at six shillings a week with their window gardens. In the West End, land which must be worth many thousands of pounds per acre is devoted to garden use. For want of better, a terrace of houses will have a little strip of plantation, at back or front, common to all of them. House and "flat" agents tell that tenants almost always demand that there shall be at least sight of a green tree from some window. In the small suburban villas a very considerable tax of money and labour is cheerfully paid in the effort to keep in good order a little pocket-handkerchief of lawn and a few shrubs. This love of the garden is holy and wholesome, and it proves, I think, that the Englishman is at heart a lover of the beautiful, an "æsthetic," though he is supposed to be such a dull, prosaic, practical person. Comparing the English with the French on this point, in my opinion it is in the practical application of æsthetic principles to life rather than in æsthetic sensibility that the French are superior to the English. What difference there is in æstheticism favours the English; there are deeper springs of art and poetry in the English people than in the French. But art has been far more carefully cherished and organised in France than in England. There is more general artistic education, if less true artistic feeling.