and clean, empty and a little grass-grown, and bordered with spacious,
soberly-ornamental brick houses, which look as if there had been more going
on in them in the first decade of the century than there is in the present,
but which can still, nevertheless, hold up their heads and keep their
window-panes clear, their knockers brilliant and their doorsteps whitened.
The place looks as if seventy years ago it had been the centre of a large
provincial society, and as if that society had been very "good of its
kind." It must have transported itself to Ludlow for the season--in
rumbling coaches and heavyish curricles--and there entertained itself in
decent emulation of that metropolis which a choice of railway-lines had not
as yet placed within its immediate reach. It had balls at the
assembly-rooms; it had Mrs. Siddons to play; it had Catalani to sing. Miss
Austin's and Miss Edgeworth's heroines might perfectly well have had their
first love-affair there: a journey to Ludlow would certainly have been a
great event to Fanny Price or Anne Eliot, to Helen or Belinda. It is a
place on which a provincial "gentry" has left a sensible stamp. I have
seldom seen so good a collection of houses of the period between the elder
picturesqueness and the modern baldness. Such places, such houses, such
relics and intimations, always carry me back to the near antiquity of that
pre-Victorian England which it is still easy for a stranger to picture with
a certain vividness, thanks to the partial survival of many of its
characteristics. It is still easy for a stranger who has stayed a while in
England to form an idea of the tone, the habits, the aspect of English
social life before its classic insularity had begun to wane, as all
observers agree that it did, about thirty years ago. It is true that the
mental operation in this matter reduces itself to fancying some of the
things which form what Mr. Matthew Arnold would call the peculiar "notes"
of England infinitely exaggerated--the rigidly aristocratic constitution of
society, for instance; the unæsthetic temper of the people; the private
character of most kinds of comfort and entertainment. Let an old gentleman