And again, among English forms of country life, it is life in _bona fide_ rural districts which we must take for our type. All round London there now exists a sort of intellectual cordon, extending from twenty to thirty miles into Kent and Surrey, and about ten miles into Herts and Essex. Professor Nichols might have mapped it as he did our starry cluster, by jotting down every house on the boundary inhabited by politicians, literary men, and artists, and then running a line all round from one to another. Within this circumference (of course, extending year by year), the ideas, habits, and conversation of the inhabitants are purely Londonesque. The _habitué_ of London dinner-parties finds himself perfectly at home at every table where he sits down, and may take it for granted that his hosts and their guests will all know the same familiar characters, the same anecdotes of the season, the books, the operas, the exhibitions; and, much more than all this, will possess the indescribable easy London manner of lightly tripping over commonplace subjects, and seriously discussing only really interesting ones, which is the art of conversational perspective. Beyond the invisible mental London Wall which we have described, the wanderer seems suddenly to behold another intellectual realm. As the author of the “Night Thoughts” describes a rather more startling experience, he stands on the last battlement, which “Looks o’er the vale of non-existence,”— at the end of all things wherewith he is familiar. He has, in short, penetrated into the Rural Districts of the Mind, where men’s ideas have hedges and ditches no less than their fields. And once again we must take English country life in its most elevated and perfect form,—that of the hereditary landed gentry,—to contrast it most advantageously with the life of towns. To understand and enjoy country life as it may be enjoyed, a man should not only live in one of those “Stately Homes of England,” of which Mrs. Hemans was so enamoured, but be born and have spent his youth in such a house, built by his fathers in long past generations. A wealthy merchant or a great lawyer who buys in his declining years the country seat of some fallen family, to enjoy therein the honorable fruits of his labors may probably be a much more intelligent person than the neighboring squire, whose acres have descended to him _depuis que le monde est monde_. But he can no more make himself into a country gentleman, and acquire the tastes and ideas of one, or learn to understand _from the inside_ the loves and hates, pleasures and prejudices of squiredom, than he can acquire the _dolce favella Toscana_ by buying himself a Florentine barony.