margins of lakes, fallen trunks in the forest overgrown with
wild flowers, make scenes unattainable in our civilised England. Even
our roughest scenery is comparatively man-made: our heaths are game
preserves; our woodlands are thinned of superfluous underbrush; our
moors are relieved by deliberate plantations. But England in her own way
is unique and unrivalled. Such parks, such greensward, such grassy
lawns, such wooded tilth, are wholly unknown elsewhere. Compare the
blank fields and long poplar-fringed high roads of central France with
our Devon or our Warwickshire, and you get at once a just measure of the
vast, the unspeakable difference.

And man has done it all. Alone he did it. Often as I take my walks
abroad--and when I say abroad I mean in England--I see men at work
dotting about exotics of variegated foliage on some barren hillside, and
I say to myself, "There, before my eyes, goes on the beautifying of
England." Thirty years ago, the North Downs near Dorking were one bare
stretch of white chalky sheep-walk; half of them still remain so; the
other half has been planted irregularly with copses and spinneys, which
serve to throw up and enhance the beauty of the unaltered intervals.
Beech and larch in autumn tints set off smooth patches of grass and
juniper. Within the last few years, the downs about Leatherhead have
been similarly diversified. Much of the loveliness of rural England is
due, one must frankly confess, to the big landlords. Though the great
houses love us not, we must allow at least that the great houses have
cared for the trees in the hedge-rows, and for the timber in the
meadows, as well as for the covert that sheltered their pheasants, their
foxes, and their gamekeepers. But almost as much of England's charm is
due to individual small owners or occupiers. 'Tis they who have planted
the grounds about villa or cottage; they who have stocked the sweet old
gardens of yew and box, of hollyhock and peony; they who have given us
the careless rustic grace of the English village. Still, one way or
another, man has done it all, whether in grange or in manor-house, in
palatial estate or in labourer's holding. Look at the French or Belgian
hamlet by the side of the English one; look at the French or Belgian
farm by the side of our English wealth in wooded glen or sheltered
homestead. Bricks and mortar are _not_ covering the whole of England.
That is only true of the squalid purlieus and outliers of London