try-people should be rude, and townspeople gentle. Whereas I
believe that the result of each mode of life may, in some stages of
the world's progress, be the exact reverse; and that another use of
words may be forced upon us by a new aspect of facts, so that we may
find ourselves saying: "Such and such a person is very gentle and
kind--he is quite rustic; and such and such another person is very
rude and ill-taught--he is quite urbane."

At all events, cities have hitherto gained the better part of their
good report through our evil ways of going on in the world generally;
chiefly and eminently through our bad habit of fighting with each
other. No field, in the Middle Ages, being safe from devastation, and
every country lane yielding easier passage to the marauders,
peacefully-minded men necessarily congregated in cities, and walled
themselves in, making as few cross-country roads as possible: while
the men who sowed and reaped the harvests of Europe were only the
servants or slaves of the barons. The disdain of all agricultural
pursuits by the nobility, and of all plain facts by the monks, kept
educated Europe in a state of mind over which natural phenomena could
have no power; body and intellect being lost in the practice of war
without purpose, and the meditation of words without meaning. Men
learned the dexterity with sword and syllogism, which they mistook for
education, within cloister and tilt-yard; and looked on all the broad
space of the world of God mainly as a place for exercise of horses, or
for growth of food.

There is a beautiful type of this neglect of the perfectness of the
Earth's beauty, by reason of the passions of men, in that picture of
Paul Uccello's of the battle of Sant' Egidio,[23] in which the armies
meet on a country road beside a hedge of wild roses; the tender red
flowers tossing above the helmets, and glowing beneath the lowered
lances. For in like manner the whole of Nature only shone hitherto for
man between the tossing of helmet-crests; and sometimes I cannot but
think of the trees of the earth as capable of a kind of sorrow, in
that imperfect life of theirs, as they opened their innocent leaves in
the warm springtime, in vain for men; and all along the dells of
England her beeches cast their dappled shade only where the outlaw
drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase; and by the sweet
French rivers their long ranks of poplar waved in the twilight, only
to show the flames of