INTRODUCTION delighted (p. 24). It really is Dunstanborough, a castle certainly in ruins, yet stronger than the winds, though six centuries have passed since this descendant of a Saxon fortress was rebuilt by Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, known as "The Hog." If the presence of Old Age in our English landscapes were to be wiped out by industrialism, what would remain of that romantic England which we carry with us in thought to all parts of the world, and by which we are drawn back to her radiant country scenes? Further, to live always in London, or in any vast city, is to be estranged from rural England, almost as much so as the English are in the Colonies; and this is why the love of English rusticity has begun once more to show itself in a multitude of picture-books, continuing those traditions that formed a nursing-school for Hearne, Girtin, Turner, De Wint, and many other masters of English water-colour. In illustrated works the great difficulty is to find a scheme by which the pictures and the text will be bound together into a whole. The present book has eighty plates, all of historic country scenes, and the plan which I have tried to carry out is one suggested by the drawings. The chapters are necessarily in the nature of roundabout papers, but they give in the right sequence, I hope, the purpose of the plan, namely, to show what historic landscapes represent in England's progress from the coming of Cæsar to the present day. The pictures by Mr. Orrock mark the halting |