An endeavour has been made in the preceding paragraphs to picture the unspoiled English village as it appears to the ordinary intelligent observer of to-day. No attempt has been made to glorify village life, past or present. There are some people who see nothing but cause for regret in the invasion of the villages by what we call “progress,” but for the most part those people are not sons of the soil: they are either “week-enders” or people of comfortable incomes who have retired to a cottage _orné_ amid congenial surroundings. They see and know little of the monotony that drives the young people into the towns, or of the hardships of lambing and winter work on the farms. There are other critics who say that architecture is so much a reflection of social conditions that a beautiful village could only have been produced by a happy and contented people. It is a question whether such a village is, or ever has been, specially attractive to the eyes of its inhabitants, if indeed they have the ability to consider such things at all. Admiration for the beauty of the countryside seems to be a very modern cult, if we are to take our great writers as typical of their time, though in fact they were usually ahead of their time. Scott, Wordsworth, and other poets of that period certainly saw something in it, but prior to their day there is little evidence that even cultured men noticed anything worthy of comment in the English landscape or the English village. There are exceptions of course, and we find evidence of love of the English countryside even in the work of so classical a writer as Milton, and later in the poems and letters of Cowper. But probably Dr. Johnson is typical of eighteenth-century men of letters. He declined a country living on one occasion, and in several passages of Boswell’s _Life_ we find Johnson making fun of country manners, country conversation, and country life generally, while of landscape and of the beauty of the English village he has little to say. William Cobbett, writing a century ago, is so obsessed with indignation about agricultural poverty and the iniquities of the governing class, that he seldom comments in his _Rural Rides_ on the charm of a village. Sandwich is “as villainous a hole as one could wish to see,” Cirencester “a pretty nice town,” and so is Tonbridge. But he waxes furious about some of the tumbledown cottages that modern well-fed tourists would call “picturesque,” and he regards the barrenness of the New Forest as a blot on our civilisation. Cobbett provides a very good antidote to an over-sentimental view of country life. III KING COAL (1810-1910)