Past some outlying waste lands and over railway bridges, the coach rattles down the sharp descent into Guildford town; down the narrow High Street--the steepest, they say, in England, and certainly the stoniest--to draw up before the "Angel," punctually at two o'clock.
Guildford is no more than thirty miles from London, and yet it remains to this day as provincial in appearance as ever it could have been in the olden times of road-travel. Provinciality was the pet bugbear of Matthew Arnold, but he applied it as a scornful term only to literary and critical shortcomings. To him the vapourings of modern poetasters would have been provincialisms, and the narrow-minded criticisms of Mr. George Howells, who can see nothing in Shakespeare, but perceives a wealth of genius in his fellow-novelists of the United States, would have been provincialisms of the worst order.
But the provinciality of places, as distinguished from minds, can be no reproach in these latter days, when all the great towns, with London at their head, have grown so large and congested that a sight of God's pure country and a breath of healthy air are only to be obtained by most townsfolk with infinite pains and great expenditure of time. It was an evil day when the great cities of England grew so large that one who ascended a church steeple in their midst could discover nothing on the horizon but chimney-pots and bricks-and-mortar; and the best of times were those when weary citizens took their pleasure after the day's work in the fields and groves that bordered upon the habitations of men. What are Progress and Civilization but will-o'-wisps conjured up by the malignity of the devil to hide the degeneration of the race and the starvation of the soul, when the outcome of the centuries is the shutting out from the face of nature of three-fourths of the population? What else than a sorry jest is the boast of London's five millions of people, when by far the greater proportion of those five millions never know what country life means, nor even what is the mitigated rusticity of a provincial town in whose centre you can open your casement of a morning and welcome the sun rising in a clear sky, listen to the morning chorus of the birds, and see, though you be in the very midst of the provincial microcosm, the fields and hedge-rows, the streams and rural lanes of the country-side?