_Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle_ (concerning William the Conqueror) Ed: Hearne, vol. ii. p. 375. THE NEW FOREST. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. [Illustration: View in Bushey Bratley.] No person, I suppose, would now give any attention to, much less approve of, Lord Burleigh’s advice to his son—“Not to pass the Alps.” We have, on the contrary, in these days gone into an opposite extreme. We race off to explore the Rhine before we know the Thames. We have Alpine clubs, and Norway fishing, and Iceland exploring societies, but most of us are beyond measure ignorant of our own hills and valleys. Every inch of Mont Blanc has been traversed by Englishmen, but who dreams of exploring the Cotswolds; or how many can tell in what county are the Seven Springs, and their purple anemones? We rush to and fro, looking at everything, and remembering nothing. We see places only that we may be seen there, or else be known to have seen them. Yet to Englishmen, surely the scenes of their own land should possess a greater interest than any other. Go where we will throughout England, there is no spot which is not bound up with our history. Nameless barrows, ruined castles, battlefields now reaped by the sickle instead of the sword, all proclaim the changes our country has undergone. Each invasion which we have suffered, each revolution through which we have passed, are written down for us in unmistakeable characters. The phases of our Religion, the rise or fall of our Art, are alike told us by the grey mouldings and arches of the humblest parish Church as by our Abbeys and Cathedrals. The faces, too, and gait, and dialect, and accent, of our peasantry declare to us our common ancestry from Kelt, and Old-English, and Norseman. A whole history lies hid in the name of some obscure village. I am not, for one moment, decrying travelling elsewhere. All I say is, that those who do not know their own country, can know nothing rightly of any other. To understand the scenery of our neighbours, we must first see something of the beauties of our own; so that when we are abroad, we may be able to make some comparisons,—to carry with us, when we look upon the valleys of the Seine and the Rhine, some impression of our own landscapes and our own rivers—some recollection of our own cathedrals, when we stand by those of Milan and Rouen.