to-day under the grey laden sky.  Here a chalk-pit showed its miniature precipices; here a leafless covert detached its wiry sprays against the light.  The villages were pretty enough, with their quaint, irregular white cottages, comfortably thatched, among the little orchards and gardens; and in every village the ancient, beautiful church, each with a character of its own and a special feature of interest or beauty, lay nestled in trees, or held up its grey tower over ricks and barns.  We are apt to forget what beautiful things these churches are, because they are so common, so familiar; if there were but a few of them, we should make careful pilgrimages to see them, but now we hardly turn off the road to visit them.

I often wonder what exactly the feeling and the spirit were that produced them, what the demand precisely was that created the supply.  I suppose they were almost always the gift of some wealthy person; of course labour and perhaps materials were cheaper, but there must have been a much larger proportion of people employed in the trade of building than is the case nowadays; probably these churches were slowly and leisurely built, in the absence of modern mechanical facilities.  It is difficult to conceive how the thing was carried out at all in places with so few resources—­how the stone was conveyed thither over the infamous miry roads, how the carving was done, how the builders were lodged and fed.  One would like, too, to know exactly what part the churches played in the social life of the place.  Some people would have us believe that the country people of that date had a simple enjoyment of beauty and artistic instincts which caused them to take a pleasure, which they do not now feel, in these beautiful little sanctuaries.  I do not know what the evidence is for that.  I find it very hard to believe that our agricultural labourers have gone backwards in this respect; I should imagine it was rather the other way.  My impression is that education has probably increased the power of perception and appreciation rather than diminished it.  It is possible that the absence of excitement, of diffuse reading, of communication in those days may have tended to concentrate the affections and interests of agricultural people more on their immediate surroundings, but I rather doubt it; the problem is, considering the much greater roughness and coarseness of village life in the Middle Ages, how there could have existed a poetical and artistic instinct among villagers, which they have now forfeited.

These churches certainly indicate that a very different view of religion prevailed; they testify to a simpler and stronger sense of religion than now exists, but not, I think, to a truer sense of it.  They stand, I do not doubt, for a much more superstitious and barbarous view of the relation of God to men; the people who built them had, I imagine, the idea of conciliating God by the gift of a seemly sanctuary, a hope of improving