First impressions of England and its people / By Hugh Miller.

  • Hugh Miller
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: First impressions of England and its people / By Hugh Miller. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/440
    me considerably longer than Stratford-on-Avon; and I oftener refer to Shenstone than to Shakspeare. It will, I trust, be found, how¬ ever, that I was influenced in such cases by no suspicious sympathy wdth the little and the mediocre ; and that if I preferred at times the less fertile to the richer and better field, it has been simply, not because I failed to estimate their comparative values, but because I found a positive though scanty harvest awaiting me on the one, and on the other the originally luxuriant swathe cut down and car¬ ried away, and but a vacant breadth of stubble left to the belated gleaner. Besides, it is not in his character as a merely tasteful versifier, but as a master in the art of developing the beauties of landscape, that I have had occasion to refer to Shenstone. He is introduced to the reader as the author of the Leasowes,—a work which cost him more thought and labour than all his other compo¬ sitions put together, and which the general reader, who has to pro¬ secute his travels by the fire-side, can study but at second hand,— as it now exists in sketches such as mine, or as it existed, at the death of its author, in the more elaborate description of Dodsley. It is thus not to a minor poet that I have devoted a chapter or two, but to a fine rural poem, some two or three hundred acres in extent, that cannot be printed, and that exists nowhere in duplicate. It does matter considerably in some things that a man’s cradle should have been rocked to the north of the Tweed ; and as I have been at less pains to suppress in my writings the peculiarities of the Scot and the Presbyterian than is perhaps common with my country¬ folk and brother Churchmen, the Englishman will detect much in these pages to remind him that mine was rocked to the north of the Tweed very decidedly. I trust, however, that if he deem me in the main a not ill-natured companion, he may feel inclined to make as large allowances for the peculiar prejudices of my training, as he sees me making on most occasions for the peculiar prejudices of his ;
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