The memory of Dawes’ farm taught me that if I was to live in the country some charm of outlook was indispensable to my content.  Mountains, a lake, a wood, a running river—­some delicate effect of scenery, some concourse of elements, either in themselves or in their combination beautiful—­these I must have if I would be happy.  They were as necessary to me as my daily bread.  But here I made a second disquieting discovery; there was not a part of England which could be justly described as beautiful that was not already occupied in the degree of its accessibility.  I thought of Surrey; I visited it and found myself in a superior Cockney Paradise.  Half a dozen men of genius had in an inadvertent moment advertised the pure air of the Surrey highlands, and by the time I came upon the scene trim villas had sprung up by hundreds, and wealth was already in possession.  The merest cottage in this favoured district provoked keen contest in the auction-room.  Indeed, in the true sense, there were no cottages; they had been transformed, added to, rebuilt, till only a remnant of their primitive rusticity remained.  It was the same everywhere.  I was too late by twenty years in this kind of quest.

I had been led to believe by various social writers that the villages of England were depopulated.  According to these fallacious chroniclers the country abounded in cottages and even small manor-houses from which the inhabitants had fled.  I can only say I never found it so.  A deserted roadside cottage I often found, but there were obvious reasons for its desolation.  Sometimes it was so far from other houses, or any centre of congregated life, that it must have been difficult, and almost impossible, for any one residing in it to obtain the common necessaries of life.  More commonly it was deserted because it was falling into ruin.  But no sooner did I reach a real village than I found every house in occupation.  The usual complaint was lack of accommodation.  Hence rents were by no means low, and the contest for houses was vehement.  If the village had real beauties of its own—­a cluster of thatched and dormer-windowed cottages, properties valuable to the artist—­one was sure to come upon immediate evidence of the cockney invasion.  What I thought a barn would as like as not prove a studio, and it was no farmer who lived at the pleasant, yellow-washed farmhouse amid the rose-garden, but ‘a gentleman from London.’  And we had but to go a little way down some shady lane to find a glaring board announcing building land for lease, and from some local agent one obtained particulars of the exact kind of house which the investor would be permitted to build upon the site.