another yet more preposterous--that from a brief survey of an author's
circumstances we can dictate to him what he ought to write about, and
how he ought to write it. And I have observed particularly that if a
writer be a countryman, or at all well acquainted with country life,
all kinds of odd entertainment is expected of him in the way of notes
on the habits of birds, beasts, and fishes, on the growth of all kinds
of common plants, on the proper way to make hay, to milk a cow, and so
forth.


Richard Jefferies.

Now it is just the true countryman who would no more think of noting
these things down in a book than a Londoner would think of stating in
a novel that Bond Street joins Oxford Street and Piccadilly: simply
because they have been familiar to him from boyhood. And to my mind it
is a small but significant sign of a rather lamentable movement--of
none other, indeed, than the "Rural Exodus," as Political Economists
call it--that each and every novelist of my acquaintance, while
assuming as a matter of course that his readers are tolerably familiar
with the London Directory, should, equally as a matter of course,
assume them to be ignorant of the commonest features of open-air life.
I protest there are few things more pitiable than the transports of
your Cockney critic over Richard Jefferies. Listen, for instance, to
this kind of thing:--

"Here and there upon the bank wild gooseberry and currant bushes
may be found, planted by birds carrying off ripe fruit from the
garden. A wild gooseberry may sometimes be seen growing out of
the decayed 'touchwood' on the top of a hollow withy-pollard.