Such expressions as these are typical. They indicate the general dislike for any life away from the city. And even those who loved the country, or thought they did, were far enough from caring for any but the tamest of its possible delights. Pope’s list of country pleasures, though half humorous, is nevertheless suggestive. In contrast to Mrs. M.’s devotion to “play-houses, parks, assemblies, London,” he depicts his own “rapture” in the presence of “gardens, rookeries, fishponds, arbours.”[24] When Bolingbroke “retired from the Court and glory to his country-seat and wife”[25] he bravely insisted that he liked the change. “Here,” he wrote from Dawley, “I shoot strong and tenacious roots. I have caught hold of the earth and neither my enemies nor my friends will find it an easy matter to transplant me again.”[26] But we must join Pope in the laugh against such a catching hold of the earth when we learn that Bolingbroke paid £200 to have his country halls painted with rakes, prongs, spades, and other insignia of husbandry in order to make it perfectly evident that he really did live on a farm.[27] The genuine lover of the country in the classical age expended his enthusiasm on the mild and easy pleasures of a well-kept country house easily accessible from the city. That a sane man could choose to live as Wordsworth did in the Lake District would have passed belief. In general, the country was thought of but as a good place to recruit one’s jaded energies, or as a refuge where disappointments might be hidden and disgrace forgotten. According to Gay, Whene’er a Courtier’s out of place, The country shelters his disgrace,[28] and his deserted, lovelorn Araminta felt that only the melancholy shades and croaking ravens of the country could suit her unhappy fate.[29] Watts thought that none but “useless souls” should “to woods retreat.”[30] On the whole, the words of the city mouse to his country cousin expressed the prevailing sentiment: Let savage beasts lodge in a country den; You should see towns, and manners know, and men.[31] The poet might sing the charms of the country if he chose, but he was, after all, as Denham said of Virgil and Cowley, only “gilding dirt.” [32] The attitude toward Nature in the literature of any age may be tested in two ways: by what is said, and by what is left unsaid, and of these the second is perhaps the more significant. Certainly in the poetry of the classical period the persistent ignoring of the grand and terrible in Nature comes home to the mind as a convincing proof of the prevailing distaste for wild scenery. And when we apply the other test and find that the conspiracy of silence is broken only by expressions indicative of positive dislike of such scenes, the case becomes a strong one. This point may be clearly illustrated by a somewhat detailed study of the poetical treatment of the mountains and the sea.