Nor were good reasons wanting for eschewing London. Only two centuries ago a Sussex squire, Mr. Palmer, was fined in the sum of £1000 for residing in London rather than on his own estate in the country, and that even in face of the fact that his country mansion had been burned within the two years when his trial took place! We are told that this sentence struck terror into the London sojourners; and it was followed by a proclamation for them to leave the city with their “wives and families, and also widows.” And now we have no difficulty in understanding why there are so many large mansions in small country towns. The habit of making the best of a hard lot influenced the gentry even long after it would have been safe to have followed Mr. Palmer’s example; and so we find up to the Hanoverian period large old-fashioned houses in some small country towns, that look, as Dickens says, as if they had lost their way in infancy, and grown to their present proportions.
Sir Richard Fanshaw wrote a curious poem on the subject of the proclamation for gentlemen to reside on their own estates, of which four verses may suffice as a sample:--
“Nor let the gentry grudge to go Into those places whence they grew, But think them blest they may do so. Who would pursue
The smoky glories of the town That may go till his native earth, And by the shining fire sit down On his own hearth.
Believe me, ladies, you will find In that sweet life more solid joys, More true contentment to the mind Than all town toys.
Nor Cupid there less blood doth spill, But heads his shafts with chaster love; Not feathered with a sparrow’s quill, But with a dove.”
There are even of Queen Anne’s reign many excellent specimens of town architecture in remote villages of Cheshire and Shropshire. Mr. Norman Shaw has brought this late classic architecture again into deserved repute, and quite a new work might be published of the details of them,--the well-considered mouldings, the wreaths, and chimney-pieces. Many of these houses were inhabited even in the present century by courtly--perhaps somewhat formal--gentlemen, and now they are turned into boarding-schools or village tenements. Railways, of course, have rapidly and completely changed the scene. The old moralist in Thackeray laments the change of times, when a man of quality used to enter London, or return to his country house, in a coach and pair, with outriders, and now his son “slinks” from the station in a brougham. In speaking of the change that came over the architecture of England in the Elizabethan age, when Italian forms superseded the indigenous ones, it is not for a moment meant that the change was for the better. There was an incessant craving for foreign importation, which was a subject of satire among the writers of those days.