COUNTRY LIFE
1 OFTEN revisit places endeared to me by old associations, but none with the quickening (life, wrote Henry Vaugban, is "a quickness which rrty God bath kissed ") that agitates me when I set foot again in Chipping Campden, in whose neighbourhood I once lived. There this autumn I tried to analyse in what consists its evocative power, transcending familiarity and the passage of the years—Eheu fugaces, Postwne, Postume. . . . I think it lies in the emotional force of paradox. That curvilinear high street winding with the sinuous grace of a noble river, and yet the severely rectangular nature and sharp definition of the stone buildings ; the perfect compatibility—call it brotherhood—of the buildings to one another, and yet representing five centuries of entirely different styles subdued to one style, the Cotswold ; the structural sim- plicity of those buildings, and yet the extraordinary profusion of the secondary embellishments in wrought-iron work, finials, inn-signs, oriels, bow-windows, window-heads, cornices, chimneys, parapets, gar- goyles, porches, hood-moulds and the like, not to mention the little stone-gardens to the lovely almshouses full of asters, pentstemons, geraniums, dahlias and snapdragons. It is all like a piece of music in which the dominant theme is never sacrificed to the superabundance and diversity of he minor motives.
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