and cottage-like houses, 'messuages or tenements,' as a friend of
mine calls such ignoble and nondescript dwellings, with inhabitants
whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a
little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an
ant-hill, or bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold, or nuns in a
convent, or sailors in a ship; where we know every one, are known to
every one, interested in every one, and authorised to hope that
every one feels an interest in us. How pleasant it is to slide into
these true-hearted feelings from the kindly and unconscious
influence of habit, and to learn to know and to love the people
about us, with all their peculiarities, just as we learn to know and
to love the nooks and turns of the shady lanes and sunny commons
that we pass every day. Even in books I like a confined locality,
and so do the critics when they talk of the unities. Nothing is so
tiresome as to be whirled half over Europe at the chariot-wheels of
a hero, to go to sleep at Vienna, and awaken at Madrid; it produces
a real fatigue, a weariness of spirit. On the other hand, nothing
is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss
Austen's delicious novels, quite sure before we leave it to become
intimate with every spot and every person it contains; or to ramble
with Mr. White* over his own parish of Selborne, and form a
friendship with the fields and coppices, as well as with the birds,
mice, and squirrels, who inhabit them; or to sail with Robinson
Crusoe to his island, and live there with him and his goats and his
man Friday;--how much we dread any new comers, any fresh importation
of savage or sailor! we never sympathise for a moment in our hero's
want of company, and are quite grieved when he gets away;--or to be
shipwrecked with Ferdinand on that other lovelier island--the island
of Prospero, and Miranda, and Caliban, and Ariel, and nobody else,
none of Dryden's exotic inventions:--that is best of all. And a