the solid English fare, the brass candlesticks at bedtime, and the
lavendered sheets, still preserve the atmosphere of a novel by Fielding
or an essay by Addison.

There still, as in Shakespeare's day, one can take one's ease at one's
inn, as perhaps in the hostelries of no other land. It is the frequency
and excellence of these English inns that make it charmingly possible to
see England, as it is best seen, on foot or on a bicycle. It is not a
country of isolated wonders, with long stretches of mere road between.
Every mile counts for something. But, if the luxury of walking it with
stick and knapsack is denied us, and we must needs see it by motor-car,
we cannot fail to make one observation, that of the surprising variety
of natural scenery packed in so small a space. Between Land's End and
the Tweed the eye and the imagination have encountered every form of the
picturesque. In an area some three hundred and fifty miles long by three
hundred broad are contained the ruggedness of Cornwall, the idyllic
softness of Devon, the dreamy solitudes of the South Downs, with their
billowy, chalky contours, the agricultural fertility of Kent and
Middlesex, the romantic woodlands and hilly pastures of Surrey, the
melancholy fens of Lincolnshire, the broad, bosky levels of the
midlands, the sudden wildness of Wales, with her mountains and glens,
Yorkshire, with its grim, heather-clad moors, Westmoreland, with its
fells and Wordsworthian "Lakes"; every note in the gamut of natural
beauty has been struck, from honeysuckle prettiness to savage grandeur.

Yet, although all these contrasts are included in the English scene, it
is not of solitude or grandeur that we think when we speak of the
English countryside. They are the exceptions to the rule of a gentler,
more humanized natural beauty, in which the village church and the
ivy-clad ruin play their part. Perhaps some such formula as this would