itics have fallen in Mr.
Hosken's case; and I mention it because the case is typical. They try
to get behind the ultimate facts and busy themselves with questions
they have no proper concern with. Some ask petulantly why Mr. Hosken
is not a "nature-poet." Some are gravely concerned that "local talent"
(_i.e._ the talent of a man who happens to dwell in some locality
other than the critic's) should not concern itself with local affairs;
and remind him--

"To thine orchard edge belong
All the brass and plume of song."

As if a man may not concern himself with the broader problems of life
and attack them with all the apparatus of recorded experience, unless
he happen to live on one bank or other of the Fleet Ditch! If a man
have the gift, he can find all the "brass and plume of song" in his
orchard edge. If he have not, he may (provided he be a _bona fide_
traveller) find it elsewhere. What, for instance, were the use of
telling Keats: "To thy surgery belong all the brass and plume of
song"? He couldn't find it there, so he betook himself to Chapman and
Lempriere. If you ask, "What right has a country postman to be
handling questions that vexed the brain of Plato?"--I ask in return,
"What right had John Keats, who knew no Greek, to busy himself with
Greek mythology?" And the answer is that each has a perfect right to
follow his own bent.

The assumption of many critics that only within the metropolitan cab
radius can a comprehensive system of philosophy be constructed, and
that only through the plate-glass windows of two or three clubs is it
possible to see life steadily, and see it whole, is one that I have
before now had occasion to dispute. It is joined in this case to
another yet more preposterous--that from a brief survey of an author's
circumstances we can dictate to him what he ought to write about, and
how he ought to write it. And I have observed particularly that if a
writer be a countryman, or at all well acquainted with country life,
all kinds of odd entertainment is expected of him in the way of notes
on the habits of birds, beasts, and fishes, on the growth of all kinds
of common plants, on the proper way to make hay, to milk a cow, and so
forth.

Richard Jefferies.

Now it is just the true countryman who would no more think of noting
these things down in a book than a Londoner would think of stating in
a novel that Bond Street joins Oxford Street and Piccadilly: simply
because they have be