Not all the counties by any means are true to type. All the Welsh divisions, for instance, are more or less artificial and late, with the exception of Anglesey. And as for the non-Roman parts, Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, it goes without saying that the county never was, and is not to this day, a true unit. The central and much of the west of England is the same. That is, the shires are cut as their name implies, somewhat arbitrarily, from the general mass of territory. When one says "arbitrarily" one does not mean that no local sentiment bound them, or that they had not some natural basis, for they had. They were the territory of central towns: Shrewsbury, Warwick, Derby, Chester, Oxford, Buckingham, Bedford, Nottingham. But their life was not and has not since been strongly individual. They have not continuous boundaries nor an early national root. But all round these, in a sort of ring, run the counties which have had true local life from the beginning. Cornwall is utterly different from Devon, and with a clear historic reason for the difference. Devon, again, is a perfectly separate unit, resulting from a definite political act of the early ninth century. Of Dorset and Hampshire one can say less, but with Sussex you get a unit which has been one kingdom and one diocese, set in true natural limits and lying within these same boundaries for much more than a thousand years. Kent, probably an original Roman division, has been one unit for longer still. Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex are equally old, though not upon their land boundaries equally denned; but perhaps the most sharply defined of all--after Sussex, at least--was Southern and Central Lancashire. Its topography was like one of those ideal examples which military instructors take for their models when they wish to simplify a lesson upon terrain. Upon one side ran the long, high, and difficult range which is the backbone of England; upon the other the sea, and the sea and the mountains leant one towards the other, making two sides of a triangle that met above Morecambe Bay. How formidable the natural barriers of this triangle were it is not easy for the student of our time to recognize. It needs a general survey of the past, and a knowledge of many unfamiliar conditions in the present, to appreciate it. The difficulty of those Eastern moors and hills, for instance, the resistance they offer to human passage, meets you continually throughout English history. The engineers of the modern railways could give one a whole romance of it; the story of every army that has had to cross them, and of which we have record, bears the same witness. The illusion which the modern traveller may be under that the barrier is negligible is very soon dispelled when for his recreation he crosses it by any other methods than the railway; and perhaps in such an experience of travel nothing more impresses one in the character of that barrier than the _loneliness_.