it comes from bad historical novels and the disquieting statuary
that garnishes some facades.

On the way, to-day, I passed through my dear Cumberland country.
Nowhere to as great a degree can one find the combination of
lowland and highland beauties; the outline of the blue hills is
broken by the outline of many tumultuous tree-clumps; and the broad
spaces of moorland are balanced by a network of deep hedgerows that
might rival Suffolk, in the foreground. - How a railway journey
shakes and discomposes one, mind and body! I grow blacker and
blacker in humour as the day goes on; and when at last I am let
out, and have the fresh air about me, it is as though I were born
again, and the sick fancies flee away from my mind like swans in
spring.

I want to come back on what I have said about eighteenth century
and middle-age houses: I do not know if I have yet explained to
you the sort of loyalty, of urbanity, that there is about the one
to my mind; the spirit of a country orderly and prosperous, a
flavour of the presence of magistrates and well-to-do merchants in
bag-wigs, the clink of glasses at night in fire-lit parlours,
something certain and civic and domestic, is all about these quiet,
staid, shapely houses, with no character but their exceeding
shapeliness, and the comely external utterance that they make of
their internal comfort. Now the others are, as I have said, both
furtive and bedevilled; they are sly and grotesque; they combine
their sort of feverish grandeur with their sort of secretive
baseness, after the manner of a Charles the Ninth. They are
peopled for me with persons of the same fashion. Dwarfs and
sinister people in cloaks are about them; and I seem to divine