The whole country, he says, is traversed by these flying
cargoes; every by-road is explored by enterprising tourists from
Cheapside and the Poultry, and every gentleman's park and lawns
invaded by cockney sketchers of both sexes, with portable chairs and
portfolios for drawing.
He laments over this, as destroying the charm of privacy, and
interrupting the quiet of country life; but more especially as
affecting the simplicity of the peasantry, and filling their heads
with half-city notions. A great coach-inn, he says, is enough to ruin
the manners of a whole village. It creates a horde of sots and idlers,
makes gapers and gazers and newsmongers of the common people, and
knowing jockeys of the country bumpkins.
The Squire has something of the old feudal feeling. He looks back with
regret to the "good old times" when journeys were only made on
horseback, and the extraordinary difficulties of travelling, owing to
bad roads, bad accommodations, and highway robbers, seemed to separate
each village and hamlet from the rest of the world. The lord of the
manor was then a kind of monarch in the little realm around him. He
held his court in his paternal hall, and was looked up to with almost
as much loyalty and deference as the king himself.
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