of the fine old British hospitality, when the farmer and his lads and lasses dined at one table, and a solid Englishman did not squeeze money out of his men's wages to surround himself with trumpery finery? To say the truth, Cobbett's fine flow of invective is a little too exuberant, and overlays too deeply the picturesque touches of scenery and the occasional bits of autobiography which recall his boyish experience of the old country life. It would be idle to inquire how far his vision of the old English country had any foundation in fact. Our hills and fields may be as lovely as ever; and there is still ample room for the lovers of 'nature' in Scotch moors and lochs, or even amongst the English fells, or among the storm-beaten cliffs of Devon and Cornwall. But nature, as I have said, is not the country. We are not in search of the scenery which appears now as it appeared in the remote days when painted savages managed to raise a granite block upon its supports for the amusement of future antiquaries. We want the country which bears the impress of some characteristic social growth; which has been moulded by its inhabitants as the inhabitants by it, till one is as much adapted to the other as the lichen to the rock on which it grows. How bleak and comfortless a really natural country may be is apparent to the readers of Thoreau. He had all the will to become a part of nature, and to shake himself free from the various trammels of civilised life, and he had no small share of the necessary qualifications; but one cannot read his account of his life by Walden pond without a shivering sense of discomfort. He is not really acclimatised; so far from being a true child of nature, he is a man of theories, a product of the social state against which he tries to revolt. He does not so much relish the wilderness as to go out into the wilderness in order to rebuke his contemporaries. There is something harsh about him and his surroundings, and he affords an unconscious proof that something more is necessary for the civilised man who would become a true man of the woods than simply to strip off his clothes. He has got tolerably free from tailors; but he still lives in the intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge debating-rooms.