The great old House of mossy stone.
Dickens loved the old stage-coaches and travel by them. What he thought of the new railways and their effect upon landscape, you may read in Dombey and Son. He lived, moreover, to undergo the chastening experience of a railway collision. But his actual sense of the country you may translate for yourself from the account, in Bleak House, of the country life of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock. It is worse than stupid: it is vapid: or, rather, it is not there at all. Will you conceive Dickens, closing one of those Adelphi-Dedlock chapters and running his head suddenly into Mr. Wilfrid Blunt’s ballad of The Old Squire?
I like the hunting of the hare
Better than that of the fox;
The new world still is all less fair
Than the old world it mocks....
I leave my neighbours to their thought;
My choice it is, and pride,
On my own lands to find my sport,
In my own fields to ride....