clergyman and his wife are very decent people. Those are
almshouses, built by some of the family. To the right is the
steward's house; he is a very respectable man. Now we are coming to
the lodge gates; but we have nearly a mile through the park still.
It is not ugly, you see, at this end; there is some fine timber,
but the situation of the house is dreadful. We go down hill to it
for half a mile, and it is a pity, for it would not be an
ill-looking place if it had a better approach.'

The second is from the opening pages of Mrs. Humphry Ward's
_Marcella_:

'She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care
of centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees--some
Scotch firs, some beeches, a cedar or two--groups where the slow
selective hand of Time had been at work for generations, developing
here the delightful roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there
the bold caprice of bare fir trunks and ragged branches, standing
back against the sky. Beyond the lawn stretched a green descent
indefinitely long, carrying the eye indeed almost to the limit of
the view, and becoming from the lawn onwards a wide irregular
avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid maturity, ending at last
in a far distant gap where a gate--and a gate of some
importance--clearly should have been, yet was not. The size of the
trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the
avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring
steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast
lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried
with them a confused general impression of well-being and of
dignity. Marcella drew it in--this impression--with avidity. Yet at
the same moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the
end of the avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on
either side of the lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting
the broad gravel terrace beneath her window.'

In the former passage, which is brimful of humorous suggestion, the
writer is exclusively intent upon setting out points of human
character in an effective light. The latter is a highly-finished piece
of word-painting, taken direct, as an artist would take a picture,
from a landscape that lay before the writer, and as such it is
excell