whose tops the summer sun seems to linger so long has not filled the shepherd’s heart with a wistful yearning that must be expressed in verse or music.  Neither he nor the ploughman in the vale have heard or seen aught that stirs them in Nature.  The shepherd has never surprised an Immortal reclining on the thyme under the shade of a hawthorn bush at sunny noontide; nor has the ploughman seen the shadowy outline of a divine huntress through the mist that clings to the wood across the field.

These people have no myths; no heroes.  They look back on no Heroic Age, no Achilles, no Agamemnon, and no Homer.  The past is vacant.  The have not even a ‘Wacht am Rhein’ or ‘Marseillaise’ to chaunt in chorus with quickened step and flashing eye.  No; nor even a ballad of the hearth, handed down from father to son, to be sung at home festivals, as a treasured silver tankard is brought out to drink the health of a honoured guest.  Ballads there are in old books—­ballads of days when the yew bow was in every man’s hands, and war and the chase gave life a colour; but they are dead.  A cart comes slowly down the road, and the labourer with it sings as he jogs along; but, if you listen, it tells you nothing of wheat, or hay, or flocks and herds, nothing of the old gods and heroes.  It is a street ditty such as you may hear the gutter arabs yelling in London, and coming from a music hall.

So, too, in material things—­in the affairs of life, in politics, and social hopes—­the labourer has no well-defined creed of race.  He has no genuine programme of the future; that which is put forward in his name is not from him.  Some years ago, talking with an aged labourer in a district where at that time no ‘agitation’ had taken place, I endeavoured to get from him something like a definition of the wants of his class.  He had lived many years, and worked all the while in the field; what was his experience of their secret wishes? what was the Cottage Charter?  It took some time to get him to understand what was required; he had been ready enough previously to grumble about this or that detail, but when it came to principles he was vague.  The grumbles, the complaints, and so forth, had never been codified.  However, by degrees I got at it, and very simple it was:—­Point 1, Better wages; (2) more cottages; (3) good-sized gardens; (4) ‘larning’ for the children.  That was the sum of the cottager’s creed—­his own genuine aspirations.

Since then every one of these points has been obtained, or substantial progress made towards it.  Though wages are perhaps slightly lower or rather stationary at the present moment, yet they are much higher than used to be the case.  At the same time vast importations of foreign food keep the necessaries of life at a lower figure.  The number of cottages available has been greatly increased—­hardly a landlord but could produce accounts of sums of money spent in this direction.  To almost all of these large gardens are now attached.  Learning for the children is provided by the schools erected in every single parish, for the most part by the exertions of the owners and occupiers of land.