The honoured historian of the parish of Selborne makes me shudder in this passage. But I am, perhaps, giving too much importance to his words, since one may judge, from his mention of Norfolk in this connection as being even worse off than his own county, that he was not well informed on the subject. Norfolk, like Somerset, abounds in grand old churches of the Perpendicular period. That smallness, or "meanness" as he expresses it, of the Hampshire churches, is, to my mind, one of their greatest merits. The Hampshire village would not possess that charm which we find in it--its sweet rusticity and homeliness, and its harmonious appearance in the midst of a nature green and soft and beautiful--but for that essential feature and part of it, the church which does not tower vast and conspicuous as a gigantic asylum or manufactory from among lowly cottages dwarfed by its proximity to the appearance of pigmy-built huts in the Aruwhimi forest. These immense churches which in recent years have lifted their tall spires and towers amidst lowly surroundings in many {186} rural places, are, as a rule, the work of some zealot who has seared his sense of beauty with a hot iron, or else of a new over-rich lord of the manor, who must have all things new, including a big new church to worship a new God in--his own peculiar Stock Exchange God, who is a respecter of wealthy persons. Here in Hampshire we have seen the old but well preserved village church pulled down--doubtless with the consent of the ecclesiastical authorities--its ancient monuments broken up and carted away, its brasses made into fire ornaments by cottagers or sold as old metal, and the very gravestones used in paving the scullery and offices of the grand new parsonage built to match the grand new church. [Sidenote: Peasants' religious feeling]