planted for shelter, orchards set for fruit, houses built for convenience.  Only in the church and the manor is there any care for seemliness and stateliness.  There are a dozen villages round about it which have sprung from the same needs, the same history; and yet these have missed the unconsidered charm of Haslingfield, which man did not devise, nor does nature inevitably bring, but which is instantly recognisable and strangely affecting.

Such charm seems to arise partly out of a subtle orderliness and a simple appropriateness, and partly from a blending of delicate and pathetic elements in a certain unascertained proportion.  It seems to touch unknown memories into life, and to give a hint of the working of some half-whimsical, half-tenderly concerned spirit, brooding over its work, adding a touch of form here and a dash of colour there, and pleased to see, when all is done, that it is good.

If one looks closely at life, one sees the same quality in humanity, in men and women, in books and pictures, and yet one cannot tell what goes to the making of it.  It seems to be a thing which no energy or design can capture, but which alights here and there, blowing like the wind at will.  It is not force or originality or inventiveness; very often it is strangely lacking in any masterful quality at all; but it has always just the same wistful appeal, which makes one desire to understand it, to take possession of it, to serve it, to win its favour.  It is as when the child in Francis Thompson’s poem seems to say, “I hire you for nothing.”  That is exactly it:  there is nothing offered or bestowed, but one is at once magically bound to serve it for love and delight.  There is nothing that one can expect to get from it, and yet it goes very far down into the soul; it is behind the maddening desire which certain faces, hands, voices, smiles excite—­the desire to possess, to claim, to know even that no one else can possess or claim them, which lies at the root of half the jealous tragedies of life.

Some personalities have charm in a marvellous degree, and if, as one looks into the old records of life, one discovers figures that seem to have laid an inexplicable hold on their circles, and to have passed through life in a tempest of applause and admiration, one may be sure that charm has been the secret.

Take the case of Arthur Hallam, the inspirer of “In Memoriam.”  I remember hearing Mr. Gladstone say, with kindled eye and emphatic gesture, that Arthur Hallam was the most perfect being physically, morally, and intellectually that he had ever seen or hoped to see.  He said, I remember, with a smile:  “The story of Milnes Gaskell’s friendship with Hallam was curious.  You must know that people fell in love very easily in those days; there was a Miss E—­ of whom Hallam was enamoured, and Milnes Gaskell abandoned his own addresses to her in favour of Hallam, in order to gain his friendship.”

Yet the portrait of Hallam which hangs in the provost’s house at Eton represents a rosy, solid, rather heavy-featured young man, with a flushed face,—­Mr. Gladstone said that this was caused by overwork,—­who looks more like a young country bumpkin on the opera-bouffe stage than an intellectual archangel.