Pulborough; and further east the same would hold good to Lewes.

But when Mr Halsham in his bitterness cries out that "the town has
overflowed the country," meaning the whole country, and that "we are
cockney from sea to sea," he is being tragic at the cost of truth.
Would he drag Wiltshire and all the pastoral West into his turmoil?
You may go about any of the villages here, watch the daily doings of
the inhabitants, and feel confident that, practically, there has been
no substantial change since the Norman Conquest. The "feeling" of the
scene is the same as it always was, the outlook of the people,
their habit of mind, is the same. The one apparent difference is in
religion, and that is not a difference of substance but of accident.
We have forgotten the Madonna and the Saints, who were taken away
from us by violence. We still go to church, but they are not there any
more. They were expelled with a fork: one Cromwell but completed
what another began. And now it is late in the day: they can never be
brought back. "Vestigia nulla" is true of religion as of every other
human affair. But it was not them we worshipped. Rather it was what
they stood for--which endures.

All this leads me away from John Halsham and _Idlehurst_. A good
antidote to his extreme depression is to be found in another beautiful
book which, if not a classic, will become one. I mean _A Shepherd's
Life_, wherein Mr. Hudson reveals the very heart of pastoral Wilts.
I went right through it only the other day, journeying from Sarum to
Trowbridge on county business--Wishford, Wylye, Codford, Heytesbury,
and so on to Melksham and Westbury--names which to us are symphonies.
No change from the sempiternal round of country labour in those quiet
hollows, though it is true that you saw soldiers in buff unloading
railway trucks, and that the valley was lined with their wooden