THE MEN OF KENT

Sometimes I am rewarded for fretting myself so much about present
matters by a quite unasked-for pleasant dream. I mean when I am
asleep. This dream is as it were a present of an architectural
peep-show. I see some beautiful and noble building new made, as
it were for the occasion, as clearly as if I were awake; not
vaguely or absurdly, as often happens in dreams, but with all the
detail clear and reasonable. Some Elizabethan house with its
scrap of earlier fourteenth-century building, and its later
degradations of Queen Anne and Silly Billy and Victoria,
marring but not destroying it, in an old village once a clearing
amid the sandy woodlands of Sussex. Or an old and unusually
curious church, much churchwardened, and beside it a fragment of
fifteenth-century domestic architecture amongst the not
unpicturesque lath and plaster of an Essex farm, and looking
natural enough among the sleepy elms and the meditative hens
scratching about in the litter of the farmyard, whose trodden
yellow straw comes up to the very jambs of the richly carved
Norman doorway of the church. Or sometimes 'tis a splendid
collegiate church, untouched by restoring parson and architect,
standing amid an island of shapely trees and flower-beset
cottages of thatched grey stone and cob, amidst the narrow
stretch of bright green water-meadows that wind between the
sweeping Wiltshire downs, so well beloved of William Cobbett. Or some
new-seen and yet familiar cluster of houses in a grey village of the
upper Thames overtopped by the delicate tracery of a
fourteenth-century church; or even sometimes the very buildings of the
past untouched by the degradation of the sordid utilitarianism that