Old Country Life

by S. Baring-Gould

"About this point, where one road, skirting the great pond and edged by small houses, diverges from the great southern entrance, and where two streets, meeting or parting, lead by separate ways down the steep hill to the centre of the town, stands a handsome mansion, surrounded by orchards and pleasure-grounds, across which is perhaps to be seen the very best view of Belford, with its long ranges of modern buildings in the outskirts, mingled with picturesque old streets, the venerable towers of St. Stephen's and St. Nicholas', the light and tapering spire of St. John's, the huge monastic ruins of the abbey, the massive walls of the county gaol, the great river winding along like a thread of silver, trees and gardens mingling amongst all, and the whole landscape environed and lightened by the drooping elms of the foreground, adding an illusive beauty to the picture by breaking the too formal outline, and veiling just exactly those parts which most require concealment.

"Nobody can look at Belford from this point without feeling that it is a very English and very charming scene, and the impression does not diminish on farther acquaintance. We see at once the history of the place, that it is an antique borough town, which has recently been extended to nearly double its former size; so that it unites in no common degree the old romantic, irregular structures in which our ancestors delighted, with the handsome and uniform buildings which are the fashion now-a-days. I suppose that people are right in their taste, and that the modern houses are pleasantest to live in, but, beyond all question, those antique streets are the prettiest to look at. The occasional blending too is good. Witness the striking piece of street scenery which was once accidentally forced upon my attention as I took shelter from a shower of rain in a shop about ten doors up the right-hand side of Friar Street—the old vicarage-house of St. Nicholas embowered in greens, the lofty town-hall, and the handsome modern house of my friend Mr. Beauchamp, the fine church tower of St. Nicholas, the picturesque piazza underneath, the jutting corner of Friar Street, the old irregular shops in the market-place, and the trees of the Forbury just peeping between, with all their varieties of light and shadow. I went to the door to see if the shower was over, was caught by its beauty, and stood looking at it in the sunshine long after the rain had ceased."

I make no apology for this long extract. Miss Mitford is not much read now, and those who read her are always glad to re-read a passage from her fresh and graphic pen.

Street in Launceston.

That there may be more picturesqueness in an old German, Italian, and French town may be admitted, but it is of a more salient, obtrusive character than that which exists in our old county towns. The continental architects aimed at bold effects. I do not say that they were wrong. They achieved great success. Our architects built what was wanted, in a quiet, undemonstrative manner, and left effect to chance, and chance gave what they did not seek. The charms of an old English county town do not force themselves on our notice, are missed altogether by the hasty visitor; they have to be found out, they come by surprises, they depend on certain lights and plays of shadow, on the bursting into leaf of certain trees, on the setting up of certain hucksters' stalls. That a great deal of their picturesqueness is passing away is, alas! only too true. The tradesmen want huge window spaces for the display of their goods, so away is knocked the quaint old frontage of the house, and is replaced by something that can be sustained on iron supports between wide sheets of plate-glass. The suburbs are being made hideous with rows of model cottages, all precisely alike, roofed with blue slate. Nevertheless a great deal remains, and it is fortunately now something like a fashion to give us Queen Anne (so-called) gables in the streets, which at all events afford a pretty broken sky-line, and a play of light and shade on the frontage.

Then how different are the outskirts of a foreign town to an English country town. In Italy there are miles of lanes between high stone walls, over which indeed lemons show their glorious fruit and blaze in the sun; nevertheless, the sorry fact remains, that for as far as one cares to walk there is no prospect save by favour through a gate.

At Florence, for instance, it is wall, wall, on the right hand and on the left, all the way to Fiesole; and to the south, beyond S. Miniato, up and down the hills, wall, wall, on the right hand and on the left. At Genoa the city is engirded with hills, indeed the town lies in a crater, broken down to the west to the sea. Climb near two thousand feet to the encircling fortresses, and you go between wall, wall, all the way. Escape along the sea to Sampierdarema on one side, on the other to St. Fruttuoso, and it is a way between wall and house, house and wall. And a French town, or a German town, or a Belgian town, starts up suddenly out of bare fields, without trees, without hedges, with a suburb of tall, hideous, stuccoed, badly-built houses, all precisely alike and equally ugly. There are no cottages. Come back to England, and at once you discover that the cottage is that which gives charm to the approach of a town, it is the moss, the lichen that adheres to the wall, a softening, beautiful feature in itself. Then there are our hedges and hedgerow trees, and how different from the stiff avenues of poplar, and the boulevards of set planes, exactly ten paces apart.