COUNTRY-HOUSE LIFE IN ENGLAND.


The love for country life is, if possible, stronger in England now
than at any previous period in her history. There is no other country
where this taste has prevailed to the same extent. It arose originally
from causes mainly political. In France a similar condition of things
existed down to the sixteenth century, and was mainly brought to an
end by the policy of ministers, who dreaded the increasing power of
petty princes in remote provinces becoming in combination formidable
to the central power. It was specially the object of Richelieu and
Mazarin to check this sort of baronial _imperium in imperio_, and
it became in the time of Louis XIV the keystone of that monarch's
domestic policy. This tended to encourage the "hanging on" of _grands
seigneurs_ about the court, where many of the chief of them, after
having exhausted their resources in gambling or riotous living, became
dependent for place or pension on the Crown, and were in fact the
creatures of the king and his minister. Of course this did not apply
to all. Here and there in the broad area of France were to be found
magnificent châteaux--a few of which, especially in Central France,
still survive--where the marquis or count reigned over his people an
almost absolute monarch.

There is a passage in one of Horace Walpole's letters in which that
virtuoso expresses his regret, after a visit to the ancestral "hôtels"
of Paris, whose contents had afforded him such intense gratification,
that the nobility of England, like that of France, had not