Old Country Life

There are notices about on all the walls that amateur theatricals will be given in the new Town Hall in behalf of the local Hunt; and the neighbours are bringing in their fox's brushes and masks wherewith to decorate the proscenium and the walls of the hall. The poor old Assembly Room, something like a Grecian temple, but copied – and badly copied – in stucco, is now given up to a dealer in antiquities, second-hand furniture, and old china. That Assembly Room in which our grandmothers danced is now piled up with beds, large oil-paintings, chiffoniers, fire-irons and fenders, staircase clocks, and an endless amount of rubbish for which no one, one would suppose, could be found to be purchaser. The assembly balls, the hunt balls, the bachelors' balls, the concerts, and, as we have seen, the dramatical entertainments, now take place in the new Town Hall.

The old county town is thriving. It is a place to which all the neighbourhood gravitates. There is now a setting of the tide into towns, and ebb in the country places. Servants will not go to the country. Meat, dairy produce, fowls, are as dear in the country as in the towns. In the towns it is not necessary to keep a pony carriage; in the towns there is escape from those village parasites who fall on and eat up those who settle in the country; and in the towns there is more going on. In the towns educational advantages are to be had which are lacking in the country. So, not only do old ladies go to towns, but also families fairly well off; and the country is becoming deserted. Small, pretty houses do not let well there; great houses not at all. So the country towns are eating up the country.

"Clean, airy, and affluent; well paved, well lighted, well watched; abounding in wide and spacious streets, filled with excellent shops and handsome houses; – such is the outward appearance, the bodily form, of our market town," says Miss Mitford concerning Belford; and the description applies to every other county town in England. As for the vital-spark, the life-blood that glows and circulates through the dead mass of mortar and masonry, that I have neither space to describe, nor would one description apply to every other.

notes

Footnote_1_1

Foster, Baronetage, 1880. See Chaos, p. 653.

Footnote_2_2

Examples of Carved Oak Woodwork, by W. Bliss Sanders. London: 1883.

Footnote_3_3

Mr. Bliss Saunders gives details of one of these in the work above referred to.

Footnote_4_4

Hare, Walks in Rome.

Footnote_5_5

Having got rid of the wall, and finding that flowers now suffer from the wind, gardeners are fond of sinking beds, and not a few gardens are thus furnished.

Footnote_6_6

A Reflective Tour through Part of France. London: 1789.

Footnote_7_7

From Songs of the West: Traditional Songs and Ballads of the West of England. Collected by S. Baring Gould and H. Fleetwood Sheppard. London: Methuen & Co. 1889.

Footnote_8_8

The Flying Horse is a peculiarly dangerous throw over the head, and usually breaks or severely injures the spine of the wrestler thus thrown.