Country Life
THE LAUREATE'S COUNTY.
There have been greater poets than Dr. Bridges, the dead laureate, to whom a successor has yet to be found ; but some countrymen will be inclined to give him a higher place than perhaps his poetry as such altogether justifies. He was the poet of Berkshire and Oxfordshire, as Shakespeare of Warwickshire, or Wordsworth of Westmorland, or as Gilbert White was the annalist of Hampshire. If anyone wishes to
see a characteristic English village set in the deep, deep country, let him go to Yattendon in Berkshire, where Bridges
lived with other poets and an artist or two for a great many years. There is, or was, an old tree there with a wooden seat around the trunk that deserves the fame of an Arthur's scat, so eloquent is it of rural calm. Berkshire is one of the most lovely of all our counties, and as various as England itself ; and you will find scattered about the late Laureate's lyrics charming records of its several beauties, though perhaps it needs some special knowledge to recognize them all.
Previous page
