Where, oh where, has this gentle shepherd gone?  Have spinning-jennies swallowed him up?  Alas! as was observed of Mrs. Harris, “there’s no such a person.”  Did he ever exist?  We have a strong suspicion that he never did, save in the imaginations of poets.

Before the age of railroads and sanitary reformers, the pastoral life of the Arcadians was a beautiful myth, The Blue Book men have exploded it for ever.  The agricultural labourers have not decent houses,—­only miserable huts, to live in.  They have but few provisions for cleanliness or decency.  Two rooms for sleeping and living in, are all that the largest family can afford.  Sometimes they have only one.  The day-room, in addition to the family, contains the cooking utensils, the washing apparatus, agricultural implements, and dirty clothes.  In the sleeping apartment, the parents and their children, boys and girls, are indiscriminately mixed, and frequently a lodger sleeps in the same and only room, which has generally no window,—­the openings in the half-thatched roof admitting light, and exposing the family to every vicissitude of the weather.  The husband, having no comfort at home, seeks it in the beershop.  The children grow up without decency or self-restraint.  As for the half-hearted wives and daughters, their lot is very miserable.

It is not often that village affairs are made the subject of discussion in newspapers, for the power of the press has not yet reached remote country places.  But we do hear occasionally of whole villages being pulled down and razed, in order to prevent them “becoming nests of beggars’ brats.”  A member of Parliament did not hesitate to confess before a Parliamentary Committee, that he “had pulled down between twenty-six and thirty cottages, which, had they been left standing, would have been inhabited by young married couples.”  And what becomes of the dispossessed?  They crowd together in the cottages which are left standing, if their owners will allow it; or they crowd into the workhouses; or, more generally, they crowd into the towns, where there is at least some hope of employment for themselves and their children.

Our manufacturing towns are not at all what they ought to be; not sufficiently pure, wholesome, or well-regulated.  But the rural labourers regard even the misery of towns as preferable to the worse misery of the rural districts; and year by year they crowd into the seats of manufacturing industry in search of homes and employment.  This speaks volumes as to the actual state of our “boasted peasantry, their country’s pride.”

The intellectual condition of the country labourers seems to be on a par with their physical state.  Those in the western counties are as little civilized as the poor people in the east of London.  A report of the Diocesan Board of the county of Hereford states that “a great deal of the superstition of past ages lingers in our parishes.  The observation of lucky and unlucky days and seasons is by no means