Meantime the question arises, Did he mean his Squire Western for a
_representative_ portrait? Possibly not. He might design it expressly
as a sketch of an individual, and by no means of a class. And
the fault may be, after all, not in _him_, the writer, but in
_us_, the falsely interpreting readers. But, be that as it may,
and figure to ourselves as we may the rustic squire of a hundred to a
hundred and fifty years back (though manifestly at utter war, in the
portraitures of our novelists, with the realities handed down to us by
our Parliamentary annals), on that _arena_ we are dealing with
objects of pure speculative curiosity. Far different is the same
question, when practically treated for purposes of present legislation
or philosophic inference. One hundred years ago, such was the
difficulty of social intercourse, simply from the difficulty of
locomotion (though even then this difficulty was much lowered to the
English, as beyond comparison the most equestrian of nations), that it
is possible to imagine a shade of difference as still distinguishing
the town-bred man from the rustic; though, considering the multiplied
distribution of our assize towns, our cathedral towns, our sea-ports,
and our universities, all so many recurring centres of civility, it is
not very easy to imagine such a thing in an island no larger than ours.
But can any human indulgence be extended to the credulity which assumes
the same possibility as existing for us in the very middle of the
nineteenth century? At a time when every week sees the town banker
drawn from our rural gentry; railway directors in every quarter
transferring themselves indifferently from town to country, from
country to town; lawyers, clergymen, medical men, magistrates, local
judges, &c., all shifting in and out between town and country; rural
families all intermarrying on terms of the widest freedom with town
families; all again, in the persons of their children, meeting for
study at the same schools, colleges, military academies, &c.; by what