1650 and 1720, and a similar map of the period from 1720 to 1795. A comparison of the two would be an interesting commentary on the growth of knowledge and interest in British scenes. All that has been so far presented goes to show that in the antithesis between town and country the balance of favor swung round during the eighteenth century to the country. Usually the preference is implicit, and is to be inferred from the change of theme, but occasionally the antithesis is sharply stated, as, to take types, in Thomson, the Wartons, and Cowper. It is Thomson who first gives adequate statement of the transfer of sovereignty from the “fine lady muses of Richmond Hill” to “the muses of the simple country.” It is his hatred of the noisome town, his delight in fields and woods untouched by man, that established the new canon of taste. In the Wartons, twenty years later, the breach between the city and the country is almost an impassable gulf. Combined with the love of Nature in her external forms there is that spirit of romantic melancholy by virtue of which the poet regards Nature as a refuge from the tormenting complexities that beset the life of men in communities. There is usually a touch, sometimes more than a touch, of morbidness in the passionate eagerness to escape not only from the city into Nature, but from man and all traces of his dominion into a solitude free from all human suggestiveness. Forty years after the Wartons, Cowper’s famous epigram, “God made the country and man made the town,” summed the matter up according to the new view. Cowper is as emphatic in his preferences as his predecessors, and much more detailed and minute in his expression. With him there is no vague generalizing, no morbid or passionate over-statement. His love of the country is a fundamental fact not only in his physical, but also and even especially in his moral and spiritual, life. It is a fixed principle, quiet, rational, inevitable. The anti-classical side of the city and country antithesis receives in Cowper’s poetry its most decisive and most reasonable eighteenth-century statement. We hardly find anything so conclusive in fiction or in travels. There is an occasional expression of regret at going back to towns after a trip through the mountains and lakes, but as a rule the preference for the country is left to be inferred from the general tenor of the traveler’s writings. Mrs. Brooke protests much against London, and declares her preference for Nature unadorned. Mackenzie’s Julia rejoices over her country birth and education, and Mrs. Radcliffe reiterates the desirability of living far from towns and as close as possible to the influence of Nature. Cowper, however, remains as having given the final, emphatic statement.