The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature
and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878., by Various

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Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878.

Author: Various

Release Date: August 21, 2006 [EBook #19093]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.

OCTOBER, 1878.

VOLUME XXII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1878, by J.B. LIPPINCOTT
& CO., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

WARWICK AND COVENTRY.

[Illustration: OBLIQUE GABLES IN WARWICK.]

The history of England is written in living characters in the provincial
towns of the kingdom; and it is this which gives such interest to places
which have been surpassed commercially by great manufacturing centres and
overshadowed socially by the attractions of London. The local nobility
once held state little less than royal in houses whose beautiful
architecture now masks a hotel, a livery-stable, a girls' school, a
lawyer's office or a workingmen's club, and there are places where almost
every cottage, every wooden balcony or overhanging oriel, suggests
something romantic and antique. Even if no positive association is
connected with one of these humbler specimens of English domestic
architecture, you can fall back on the traditional home of love and
poetry, the recollections of idyls and pastorals daily acted out by
unconscious illustrators of the poets from one generation to another.
Modern life engrafted on these old towns and villages seems prosaic and
unattractive, though practically it is that which first strikes the eye.
New fronts mask old buildings, as new manners do old virtues; and if we
come to the frame and adjuncts of daily life, we must confess that
nineteenth-century trivialities are intrinsically no worse than mediaeval
trivialities.

There are in Warwick more modern houses and smart shops than ancient
gable