is a nomad, and wherever he goes “Beauty pitches her tents before him.”  He is smitten by a passionate love for Nature, and is privileged to follow her into her solitary haunts and recesses.  Nature is his mistress, and he is continually making declarations of his love.  When one thinks of ordinary occupations, how one envies him, flecking his oak-tree boll with sunlight, tinging with rose the cloud of the morning in which the lark is hid, making the sea’s swift fringe of foaming lace outspread itself on the level sands, in which the pebbles gleam forever wet.  The landscape painter’s memory is inhabited by the fairest visions,—­dawn burning on the splintered peaks that the eagles know, while the valleys beneath are yet filled with uncertain light; the bright blue morn stretching over miles of moor and mountain; the slow up-gathering of the bellied thunder-cloud; summer lakes, and cattle knee-deep in them; rustic bridges forever crossed by old women in scarlet cloaks; old-fashioned waggons resting on the scrubby common, the waggoner lazy and wayworn, the dog couched on the ground, its tongue hanging out in the heat; boats drawn up on the shore at sunset; the fisher’s children looking seawards, the red light full on their dresses and faces; farther back, a clump of cottages, with bait-baskets about the door, and the smoke of the evening meal coiling up into the coloured air.  These things are forever with him.  Beauty, which is a luxury to other men, is his daily food.  Happy vagabond, who lives the whole summer through in the light of his mistress’s face, and who does nothing the whole winter except recall the splendour of her smiles!

The vagabond, as I have explained and sketched him, is not a man to tremble at, or avoid as if he wore contagion in his touch.  He is upright, generous, innocent, is conscientious in the performance of his duties; and if a little eccentric and fond of the open air, he is full of good nature and mirthful charity.  He may not make money so rapidly as you do, but I cannot help thinking that he enjoys life a great deal more.  The quick feeling of life, the exuberance or animal spirits which break out in the traveller, the sportsman, the poet, the painter, should be more generally diffused.  We should be all the better and all the happier for it.  Life ought to be freer, heartier, more enjoyable than it is at present.  If the professional fetter must be worn, let it be worn as lightly as possible.  It should never be permitted to canker the limbs.  We are a free people,—­we have an unshackled press,—­we have an open platform, and can say our say upon it, no king or despot making us afraid.  We send representatives to Parliament; the franchise is always going to be extended.  All this is very fine, and we do well to glory in our privileges as Britons.  But, although we enjoy greater political freedom than any other people, we are the victims of a petty social tyranny.  We are our own despots,—­we