SOURCE: "Rural Rides," in Votive Tablets: Studies Chiefly Appreciative of English Authors and Books, Cobden-Sanderson, 1931, pp. 268-80.

Blunden was associated with the Georgians, an early twentieth-century group of English poets who reacted against the prevalent contemporary mood of disillusionment and the rise of artistic modernism by seeking to return to the pastoral, nineteenth-century poetic traditions associated with William Wordsworth. As a literary critic and essayist, he often wrote of the lesser-known figures of the Romantic era as well as of the pleasures of English country life. In the following essay, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1930, Blunden examines Rural Rides.

No title could sound simpler than that which was applied many years ago to William Cobbett—"the Last of the Saxons"—unless it were the title of Cobbett's book, Rural Rides; and yet the man and his book alike are complexities from which a modern mind...