And below, in the Hemicycle, the colours are to grow cool again, with Heliotrope between the Lilies, the Lavenders, and the Monthly Roses, and Fortune’s Yellow and Rêve d’Or running up the supporting wall.
The beauty of the ancient woods in that Lancashire home from which we have just returned lingers in our memory. Outside the park walls, the flat fields lie that would have a charm of their own if the encroachment of the peculiarly unlovely brick and mortar prosperity of the district did not catch the eye on almost every side; but within there is a sense of wonderful peace and mystery, in the old, old woods with their Rhododendron glades. The astonishing height of the trees seems to keep modernity at bay, and tells stories still of the simple, proud, God-fearing race which has become so associated with the very spot of earth that has borne and nurtured them for many centuries, that, like one or two other families in England, their name in absolute legality is not complete without the territorial appendage.
THE DISAPPEARING SQUIRE
We hear every day that “the Squire” is a being of the past. We know that every effort of present-day legislation is to abolish what was once the strength of England; what might still be its strength, if the restless and destructive spirit of the age would permit it.
The young owner of those old lands ‹who has just been our host› is one who will, we hope, keep up the traditions—so fast dying out, or being stamped out—a little longer. He is, as his grandfather was, the centre of his own people, the shepherd of his flock. Not quite to the same extent, perhaps: we do not suppose, for instance, that he is both maker and depository of their wills, or that he is summoned to every tenant’s deathbed as was that kindly, sturdy old Lancastrian his grandsire.
“Hurry, Jimmy, hurry!” the afflicted wife and mother would say. “Run oop to the Hall and tell Squoire to coom along quick, for feyther’s at his last!”
Neither would he undertake to mend the broken leg; or patch up the conjugal quarrel. But the young Squire will still hear such a phrase as this at election time: “What we wants to know is which way Squoire’s voting? Squoire’s man is the man for we!”
He will let his cottages at eighteen pence a week; and the larger the family is the smaller will be the rent. And the claims of the tenant will be attended to before his own. He seems as much part of them as they are part of him. Has anyone ever heard of a labourer on a large estate being in destitution? We never have. Our great landowners do more to provide for their own dependents and keep down pauperism than any frantic legislator or wholesale philanthropist. But the system is to go; we have the best authority for it, the authority of those in power. God help England and England’s poor peasants, say we, when they have their way!