formed one of the
family of the Meadowses, of Witnesham, was for a time one of his
secretaries.

Young died, aged sixty-eight, in the year 1655, when Milton was fully
embarked in public life, when he could spare but little time; but we may
be sure that he would be the last at that time of life to forget all that
he owed to his tutor Young. Wife and son had predeceased the Vicar. It
seems as if there was no one left but the poet to record on the marble in
the middle aisle, in front of the present reading-desk, the virtues of a
character which had long exercised so beneficial an influence on his own,
and which he had loved so well. Milton's regret for the loss of such a
guide, philosopher, and friend must have been lasting and sincere.

CHAPTER XI.
IN CONSTABLE'S COUNTY.

East Bergholt--The Valley of the Stour--Painting from nature--East
Anglian girls.

Charles Kingsley was wont to glorify the teaching of the hills, and to
maintain that the man of the mountain is more imaginative and poetical
than the man of the plain. There are many Scotch people, mostly those
born in the Highlands, who tell us much the same. If the theory be
true--and I am not aware that it is--the exceptions are striking and
many. Lincolnshire is rather a flat country, but it gave us (I can never
bring myself to call him Lord) Alfred Tennyson. Many of our greatest
poets and artists were cockneys; and Constable, that sweet painter of
cornfields and shady lanes and quiet rivers, used to say that the scenes
of his boyhood made him a painter. I was one autumn in Constable's
county, and I do not wonder at it. It is a wonderful district. I trod
all the while, it seemed to me, on enchanted ground: in the gilded mist
of autumn, with its river and its marsh lands, where the cows lazily
fed--or got under the pollards to be out of the way of the flies--where
laughing children swarmed along the hedges in pursuit of the ripe
blackberry, where every cottage front was a thing of beauty, with its ivy
creeping up the roof or over the wall; while the little garden was a mass
of flowers. We expected to see the old gods and goddesses again to
participate in the joyousness of an ancient mirth.

Nor was it altogether a flat land, sacred to fat cattle and wheat and
turnips. All round me were the elements of romance. At one end of the
Vale of Dedham is a hill whence you may look all along the valley
(Constable has made it the subject of one of his p