ssary to me as my daily bread. But here I made a second
disquieting discovery; there was not a part of England which could be
justly described as beautiful that was not already occupied in the
degree of its accessibility. I thought of Surrey; I visited it and
found myself in a superior Cockney Paradise. Half a dozen men of
genius had in an inadvertent moment advertised the pure air of the
Surrey highlands, and by the time I came upon the scene trim villas had
sprung up by hundreds, and wealth was already in possession. The
merest cottage in this favoured district provoked keen contest in the
auction-room. Indeed, in the true sense, there were no cottages; they
had been transformed, added to, rebuilt, till only a remnant of their
primitive rusticity remained. It was the same everywhere. I was too
late by twenty years in this kind of quest.

I had been led to believe by various social writers that the villages
of England were depopulated. According to these fallacious chroniclers
the country abounded in cottages and even small manor-houses from which
the inhabitants had fled. I can only say I never found it so. A
deserted roadside cottage I often found, but there were obvious reasons
for its desolation. Sometimes it was so far from other houses, or any
centre of congregated life, that it must have been difficult, and
almost impossible, for any one residing in it to obtain the common
necessaries of life. More commonly it was deserted because it was
falling into ruin. But no sooner did I reach a real village than I
found every house in occupation. The usual complaint was lack of
accommodation. Hence rents were by no means low, and the contest for
houses was vehement. If the village had real beauties of its own--a
cluster of thatched and dormer-windowed cottages, properties valuable
to the artist--one was sure to come upon immediate evidence of the
cockney invasion. What I thought a barn would as like as not prove a
studio, and it was no farmer who lived at the pleasant, yellow-washed
farmhouse amid the rose-garden, but 'a gentleman from London.' And we
had but to go a little way down some shady lane to find a glaring board
announcing building land for lease, and from some local agent one
obtained particulars of the exact kind of house which the investor
would be permitted to build upon the site.

It will be said that this was not the country proper, nor was it, for
London has annexed every place within fi