Whether it is best to live rapidly or slowly; whether the “twenty years of Europe” be preferable to the “cycle of Cathay”; and what is to be said on behalf of each of the two modes of existence,—supposing that we have the choice between them,—seem to be questions not unworthy of a little consideration. It is quite possible that the common impulse to be “in among the throngs of men,” and to cram a month’s ideas and sensations into a day, may be the truest guide to happiness; indeed, it is rather sorrowful to doubt that it should be so, considering how every successive census shows the growth of the urban over the rural populations, and how strongly the magnets of the great cities seem destined in future years to draw into them all the loose attractable human matter in each country. Nevertheless, it must be admitted to be also possible that, like the taste for tobacco or alcohol or opium, the taste for town life may be an appetite the indulgence of which is deleterious, and that our gains of enjoyment thereby obtained may be practically outbalanced by the loss of pleasures which slip away meanwhile unperceived. It would be satisfactory, once for all, to feel assured that in choosing either town or country life (when we have the choice), we not only follow immediate inclination, but make deliberate selection of that which must necessarily be the higher and happier kind of life, on which, when the time comes for saying good-night, we shall look back without the miserable regret that we have permitted the nobler duties and the sweeter joys to escape us, while we have spent our years in grasping at shadows and vanities. The dog with the bone in his mouth, who drops it to catch the bone in the water, is a terrible warning to all mankind. But which is the real bone, and which is only the reflection? The question is not easily answered. Let us premise that it is of English country life and town life alone I mean to speak. Foreigners—Frenchmen, for example—who live in the country seem always to do so under protest, and to wish to convey to the traveller that, like the patriarch, they are only strangers and sojourners in the rural districts, seeking a better country, even a Parisian. Molière’s Comtesse d’Escarbagnas, who has been six weeks in the capital once in her life, and who indignantly asks her visitor, “_Me prenez-vous pour une provinciale, Madame?_” is the type of them all. Of course, country life taken thus as a temporary and rather disgraceful banishment can never display its true features or produce its proper quantum of enjoyment.