This picture of rural England at the end of the eighteenth century is no more than a descriptive inventory of the contents of the average English village at that time. Yet everyone who knows such a village, unaltered by the march of civilisation since 1810 or so, can be relied on to say that it has an undoubted charm of its own. There is certainly no charm in an inventory, so we must now seek for the ingredients that are lacking in our list. The first is, without doubt, the perfect harmony of Nature and art. The colours and texture of the old buildings harmonise admirably with the colours of the surrounding landscape. In some places that is due to an actual identity of material. Thus the old stone farm-houses that one sees in the Yorkshire dales are built of the same sandstone rocks that jut out from the hillside all round them. But, on the whole, that is unusual. There is no similarity between the rich red brickwork of East Anglia and anything in the surrounding earth or vegetation, nor between the Cotswold stone cottages and the green slopes on which they stand. After making all allowances for the mellowing that time produces, all we can say about this matter of colour is that old building materials seem to harmonise with their natural surroundings, whatever colours are involved and whatever may be the surroundings. That is not quite accurate. In Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales, where the prevailing colour of the landscape is in dull tones, buildings of local stone with roofs of sturdy thick local slates do undoubtedly merge into the general colour-scheme more successfully than buildings with red-tiled roofs; whereas the warmer colouring and more generous sunshine of the southern half of England allows of a greater range of tone in buildings, even assimilating the “magpie” half-timber houses of the West Midlands.