Isabella in Dryden’s “The Wild Gallant” speaks the general sentiment: “He I marry must promise me to live at London. I cannot abide to be in the country, like a wild beast in the wilderness.”[14] So, too, Harriet, in “The Man of Mode,” counted all beyond Hyde Park a desert, and said that her love of the town was so intense as to make her hate the country even in pictures and hangings.[15] In “Epsom Wells” the apostle of “a pretty innocent country life” is the boor, Clodpate, but Lucia assures him that people really live nowhere but in London, for the “insipid dull being” of country folk cannot be called life.[16] It was in much the same spirit that Lady Mary Pierrepont responded to Lord Montagu’s proposition that they should live at Wharnecliffe. “Very few people,” she said, “that have settled entirely in the country but have grown at length weary of one another.”[17] Her preference for town life recurs in her poem, “The Bride in the Country.” By the side of a half rotten wood Melantha sat silently down, Convinced that her scheme was not good, And vexed to be absent from Town. How simple was I to believe Delusive, poetical dreams! Or the flattering landscapes they give Of meadows and murmuring streams. Bleak mountains, and cold starving rocks, Are the wretched result of my pains; The swains greater brutes than their flocks, The nymphs as polite as the swains.[18] When Shenstone’s young squire went forth to London in search of a wife the desired lady declared that she “could breathe nowhere else but in town.”[19] Lyttleton’s fair maiden finds country life “supinely calm, and dully innocent,” and affirms that The town, the Court, is Beauty’s proper sphere.[20] Young’s Fulvia had a similar passion for the town. Green fields, and shady groves, and crystal springs, And larks, and nightingales, are odious things; And smoke, and dust, and noise, and crowds, delight, And to be pressed to death, transports her quite.[21] In Aaron Hill’s poems we find a characteristic contest over the respective merits of city and country. Philemon exclaims, Let rustic sports engage the lab’ring hind, And cultivated acres plough his mind; Let him to unfrequented woods repair, And snuff, unenvy’d, his lean mountain air. Damon endeavors to defend Th’ unglorious preference of a country life by calling in evidence Cowley’s retirement to the shades, but Philemon triumphantly shows that Cowley’s dislike of the town was a clear case of sour grapes. In the end Damon recognizes that it is weak and unmanly to prefer the country.[22] Browne’s Celia explains to Chloe that country life may become endurable if one does not give herself up to “dull landscape,” but learns to think of the country as “the town in miniature.”[23]