forever conscious, for which he is ever | how, in the middle of so sweet and low grateful, however inaccurately observed a strain, such a stanza ás The qualities of style to which I propose to call attention in Keble are: (1) simplicity; (2) propriety; (3) gravity all three unpopular qualities enough nowadays, and, therefore, perhaps all the more worthy of study. (1) Simplicity, artistic simplicity, is a noble thing, and as rare as it is noble; it must be beyond and above ornateness; anciently, indeed, before literature had begun to knit her infinite combinations, it was more attainable; but now to be unstudied is to be thin. Art must now be "careless with artful care, affecting to be unaffected." Modern simplicity must show the spare ness of asceticism, not the leanness of anæmia. It must arise from the repression of luxuriance, not poverty of spirit; strict simplicity implies the rejection of all startling and glittering tricks of style, and consequently it implies a lordly patience in pursuit, with an indefatigable zeal for the selection of the precise, the majestic, the supreme. I do not say that Keble was always successful in the pursuit of simplicity. But it was his object all through. Outside the "Christian Year," indeed, in the "Lyra Innocentium," the studied avoidance of the ornamental and the attractive degenerated into vapid debility. But in the " Morning" and "Evening" poems : Only, O Lord, in thy dear love, If some poor wandering child of Thine There are in this loud stunning tide Of the everlasting chime, Through dusky lane and wrangling mart, and again for "Septuagesima : There is a book who runs may read, etc.; and what is perhaps the finest of all his lyrics, that for "Whitsunday: " When God of old came down from Heaven Half darkness and half flame. A dim and dreadful day. These have the authentic note of grandeur. They are lines that take the heart and imagination captive and linger in the memory unbidden. It may be, of course, that some of them are consecrated by familiar use, by being connected with moments of emotion and resolution. What an immense, what a sacred power, these writers of liturgical poems wield! but, on the other hand, such familiarity is apt to blind us also to excellence of style. No, the claim of genuine, severe simplicity may be sustained for Keble. (2) Propriety. —I am using the word, of course, in the extended sense of delicate appositeness, not as the reverse of have the true note of pure directness; impropriety. Keble has a wonderful Indeed, the spirit power, without tricks of rhetoric, of not the secret and refreshing twinkle Since all that is not Heaven must fade, Upon the home I love. With lulling spell let soft decay The crash of tower and grove. In such a mood it is so easy to be Again, in a frame of mind that so Why Autumn should be sad, I sit me down beside the hazel grove, ness were death. And what could be more supremely delicate, more touched with a loving humiliation, than the exquisite line (in the poem on Gunpowder Treason, of all places!), – may be held sickens to recall the pieces resolutely labelled humorous, which have been shamefully made public among his miscellaneous poems. If these were specimens of the wit in which his talk is said to have abounded, it is a matter for deep thankfulness that so few reminiscences of his conversation have survived. Life was far too serious and momentous to Keble for him to have enjoyed its pitiful contrasts. The only consolations indeed that can prevent a spirit, bounded by so petty a horizon, from becoming sullen or bitter, are perennial humor or intense seriousness. And Keble was as serious as Shelley or Wordsworth. It is not a quality that needs defining by quotation, for every single poem in the "Christian Year " is penetrated with it from the first line to the last. But in these days, when the issues of life and death, the intricacies of character, the logical truth of fatalism, are matters of after-dinner conversation, it is well to live a little with a mind to whom they were absorbing and fearful realities, too deep for laughter or tears. Keble's inmost instinct was not love, or the sense of beauty, but a resolute and puritanical sternness. He made the mistake, so common to religious spirits, of supposing that the religious instinct is universally implanted, and that whatever the varying quantities of intellect and capacity in an individual, the spiritual faculties are evenly distributed. Speak gently of our sister's fall. (3) Gravity. This Well, such an attitude, if unsympaperhaps to be almost a defect of qual-thetic and statuesque, is noble and adity; but in Keble it has a positive mirable. It is the temper in which value. He, a clerical Wordsworth, so great deeds are done and heroic resoluto speak, moved through the world, tions formed. It seals Keble one of not indeed without some simple merri- that honorable minority who clearly ment, but without a suspicion of the existence of that deeper and larger mood that we name humor. He never cared to note the odd, bewildering contradictions of humanity, its reckless absurdities, its profound and intimate mirth. Keble's smile, and he is said to have had one, was the grave, bright smile of the contented and joyous spirit, see the force of a moral ideal, maintain it in themselves, and demand it from others; and if it is difficult to sympathize with it, it is impossible not to admire it. It may be urged, then, that on these three grounds Keble may be reckoned among English poets. It will not be on these grounds that he will be most 106 The Disappearance of the Smaller Gentry (1660–1800). 66 read, but for his pure and sober re- was a familiar figure in English counligious spirit, about which indeed much try life. Within a hundred years he might be said that would be foreign to was practically extinct, a character the purpose of this essay. But it may now quite worn out and gone," says a be granted that he had a strong per- writer in 1792. To-day, with the modception of beauty, moral and physical, ern squire and his surroundings before in spite of a certain rigidity of tone; one's eyes, the broad estates swollen and that he had style, the gift of ex-with the wreckage of the agrarian pression, an artistic ideal, without revolution, the trim lawns and rebuilt which no purity of outlook, no exultant sense of beauty, can make a poet. But even if his claim cannot be sustained, even if his writings were not poetry, we may be thankful that for more than half a century there have been spirits so high, so refined, so devoted, as to have been misled by his spiritual ardor, the lofty sublimity of his ideal, as to mistake his refined and enthusiastic utterance for the voice of the genuine bard. ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON. From Macmillan's Magazine. THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SMALLER GENTRY (1660-1800). a country-seats and town-houses, it is difficult to recall even in outline the figure of one of the smaller gentry of the seventeenth century. He stood apart from the yeoman in all the obstinate pride of the owner of a coat-ofarms, the representative of an honorable line, a member, albeit often threadbare member, of the governing class. In social standing, in habits, in ideas, there was no barrier between him and his wealthier neighbors. He dined with them, rode to market with them, and cursed the Whigs with them on a footing of perfect equality. Poor as he might be, he was of gentle blood, and they could be no more. His house with its one keeping-room, and possibly "THE old Hall is now converted into a withdrawing-room for the womenfolk, a farmhouse " "The Grange has its sleeping accommodation of the now been unoccupied for many years" roughest, and the farm-midden hard "In dry summers the foundations upon the kitchen door, was certainly of the Manor-house can be clearly no better than, often by no means so traced upon the turf" "The estate good as a second-rate modern farmin 1795 passed with other neighboring house, and its comfort was infinitely properties into the hands of Alderman less. His furniture and belongings, Indigo, the celebrated East India mer- the settle-forms and stools of his parchaut " "By a series of judicious lor, his chests and clothes-presses and purchases, his lordship has now be- his half-dozen chairs, the pewter flagcome the owner of almost the whole ons and dishes, and the row of old parish." And so on, chapter after books, were such as a decent estatechapter, runs the guide-book. In them- bailiff of our own day might legitiselves there is nothing very striking in mately aspire to own. He himself was such phrases. Yet we wonder how untravelled, ignorant, bigoted, coarse, many who read them realize that in with less knowledge of the world than these commonplaces lies the record of the drover to whom he sold his bulone of the most serious revolutions in locks, and no ideas of pleasure or English social history, of the silent recreation beyond a drinking-bout or a destruction and disappearance from coursing-match. Yet such as he was, English society of a whole class, ale filled an important place in rural class, moreover, which for at least two society. centuries had played no small part in the making of England. One does not, indeed, readily realize without figures the tremendous gaps At the close of the seventeenth cen- which have been made in the ranks of tury the "little squire" with his patri- the country gentry during the last two mony of two or three hundred a year centuries by the disappearance of the small squires. Speaking roughly (and | gentle blood entered on the visitation all estimates upon the subject must of 1620, one hundred and thirteen are necessarily be rough, owing to absence extinct in the male line; a few are of precise statistics), two hundred years represented through a daughter's deago there were at least four times as scendants. One hundred and ninetymany gentry residing in the country as five families were entered in Ashmole's there are to-day. Allowing for the in- visitation of Berkshire in 1664; " but crease of population there ought to few survive," writes Mr. Cooper King, have been four times as many resident the latest historian of that county. Of gentry to-day as there were two hun- the list of knights, gentlemen, and dred years ago. Villages which now freeholders in the county of Chester have their one or two country-houses, drawn up in 1579, eight alone of the could then count their dozen or score eighty-one from East Cheshire are still of "bonnet lairds." The very monu- represented on their old estates.1 In ments of the village church, above all 1601, there were ninety gentlemen on its registers, are eloquent witnesses to the Commission of the Peace for Berkthe extent of the disaster, for a disaster shire; by 1824 eighty-seven out of the it assuredly is. "In the sixteenth ninety houses were extinct or had century," writes Mr. Baring Gould, in parted with their lands. Of fortyhis "Old Country Life," of the parish three estates in the valley of the Ribble of Ugborough in South Devon, "we in Lancashire and Yorkshire, six and find in them [the parish registers] the no more are still owned by the families names of the following families all of who held them under Elizabeth. Fifty gentle blood, occupying good houses: years ago, in his "Rural Rides," CobThe Spealts, the Prideaux, the Stures, bett noted the same phenomena in the Fowels, the Drakes, the Glass fam- southern England. On the road from ily, the Wolcombes, the Fountaynes, Warminster to Devizes within a hunthe Heles, the Crokers, the Percivals. dred years of the time he wrote there In the seventeenth century occur the were twenty-two mansion-houses of Edgcumbes, the Spoores, the Stures, sufficient note to be marked on the the Glass family again, the Hillerdens, county map; in 1826 there were only Crokers, Coolings, Heles, Collings, seven. Upon his map of thirty miles Kempthornes, the Fowells, Williams, of the valley of the Avon above SalisStrodes, Fords, Prideaux, Stures, Furlongs, Reynolds, Hurrells, Fownes, Copplestones, and Saverys. In the eighteenth century there are only the Saverys and Prideaux; by the middle of the nineteenth these are gone. The grand old mansion of the Fowells, that passed to the Savery family, is in Chancery, deserted save by a caretaker, falling to ruins. What other mansions there were in the place are now farmhouses." At the present day indeed the vicar writes that there is not a single family of resident gentlefolk in the parish; and Ugborough is, in the opinion of Mr. Baring Gould, only an example, though perhaps a striking example, of a universal change. The records of the herald's visitations, according to the same authority, tell the same tale. Of one hundred and twenty-four Devonshire families of bury he marks the sites of fifty mansion-houses; forty-two of them were, when he wrote, mansion-houses no longer. A host of similar instances confront one in any county history. The evidence indeed is overwhelming, not only as to the strange way in which the number of the country gentry has crumbled and mouldered away, but that it was at the latter end of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth centuries that the change took place. The causes are no doubt complex. In part they were economical. The Civil War was responsible for much. Apart from its direct losses, the "slighted" houses, the destroyed woods, the bare farms, hundreds of squires had to face the fact, when the shouting was over for the return of his most Sacred 1 Earwaker's East Cheshire, i. 17. 2 Clarke's Hundred of Wanting, p. 14. 108 The Disappearance of the Smaller Gentry (1660-1800). Majesty, that their estates were sad- the prospect, almost the certainty, that dled with legacies of the struggle in his family acres or their proceeds the shape of debts, the payment of would yield him a far better return in which was hopeless, or which at best trade than he could ever expect from would cripple the family fortunes for a farming. To trade indeed the smaller generation. What with the free gifts gentry had nothing of the modern and loans to the king, and the exac- aversion. The courtly mind of Chamtions of the Parliament, many an berlayne was shocked to see "" the sous honest gentleman, who had fought of baronets, knights, and gentlemen hard for the one and been correspond- sitting in shops and sometimes of pedingly fined by the other, found himself ling trades; 99 2 no such scruples in the position of Colonel Kirkby of troubled the poorer squires. They Kirkby Ireleth, who "so encumbered married traders' daughters; it was his estate that neither he nor his de- nothing strange for their younger sous scendants ever succeeded in clearing it to become clothiers or merchants. of debt; 991 or like Sir John Danvers Many a one, even of those who had of Danby found himself forced to sell no need to turn trader, was like Squire his estate to his own tenants. And it Blundell of Crosby not above " going must be remembered that with a land- £40" with his sister and cousin "in an tax of four shillings in the pound on adventure to the Barbadoes." 8 And the gross value, and mortgage-interest the profits were enormous. Squire at seven or eight per cent., he who Blundell in his adventure cleared a went borrowing in Restoration days hundred per cent.; something better had a fair chance of fulfilling the old this than trying to find a purchaser for adage. Redress from the king was a granary of unsalable wheat. hopeless. The low prices of corn from If the squire did desire to sell, there 1666 to 1671 must have been the last were a host of purchasers ready to straw to many an ancient house, hand. The same influences which inalready tottering on the verge of dis- duce men now to invest in broad acres aster. 66 They did talk much," noted the fortunes made in the city or at the Pepys on New Year's Day, 1667, bar were at work, but with tenfold "of the present cheapness of coru, force. The political value of land was even to a miracle; so as their farmers far higher than it is to-day. To purcan pay no rent but do fling up their chase land was not only to obtain a lands." Many estates went staggering safe investment in days when trustees' on under the load of debt until the end stocks, government securities, and railof the century. The list of private way debentures were still in the far acts for the sale of lands, one hun- future, nor only, thanks to Orlando dred and twenty-four in the thirty-one Bridgman, the surest method of securyears of Charles the Second, two hun- ing the stability of a family against the dred and ten in the twelve years of caprices of fortune or the wastefuluess William and Mary, two hundred and of one's descendants; it was the sole fifty-one in the short reign of Anne method by which in politics the weight is an instructive commentary. Well of one's money could be felt. might Evelyn remark in 1795 that there were 66 never so many private bills passed for the sale of estates, showing the wonderful prodigality and decay of families." There was always, too, before the eyes of the needy squire, who was naturally reluctant to part with his battered house and starved patrimony, 1 Annals of Cartmel, p. 77. And as the eighteenth century wore on and the profits to be derived from the new agriculture became apparent, the habit of buying up the smaller estates became a settled policy. Wealthier squires who had saved money, noble houses that had repaired their fortunes by a marriage into the city," East India nabobs, soldiers, chancellors, • Present State of England, 1695, p. 261. |