First published October 1917 Revised and reprinted 1922

FOREWORDS

917 R479

1922

THIS book of the Old Country was first designed and issued during the war, as a reminder for those who, being abroad, were bound to be visited by home-thoughts. As then completed, it contained many items that were of occasional and passing interest, bearing upon the brave services rendered to Our men in France and elsewhere by the Red Triangle. These fugitive pages have now given way to more permanent ones, bearing upon the memories, treasured scenes, and old associations, that make England dear to her sons and daughters. For although it is true, as John of Gaunt says in the history-play,1

All places that the eye of heaven visits

Are to a wise man ports and happy havens;

yet is England's ground "sweet soil," mother and nurse in one, to English men and women, which holds them with a powerful charm, never more than when they are far away.

1 Richard II.

V

M311775

There is in English Literature an immemorial cult of the praise and honour of the Old Country, and attached to it there is a special dialect too. Many of its allusions and its famous passages are gathered in this anthology; but to give them all would require not one volume, but many. For every shire, every countryside, every village, has its store of fragrant recollections and familiar instances of local colour and humour.. Sometimes it is a simple old song that is the remembrancer, like the Lass of Richmond Hill :

On Richmond Hill there lives a lass
More bright than May-day morn,
Whose charms all other maids

A rose without a thorn.

surpass,

This lass so neat, with smiles so sweet,
Has won my right good-will;
I'd crowns resign to call her mine,
Sweet lass of Richmond Hill.

Or the Suffolk Yeoman's song:

Good neighbours, since you've knock'd me down,
I'll sing you a song of songs the crown,
For it shall be to the fair renown

Of a race that yields to no man.

When order first on earth began,

Each king was then a husbandman;
He honour'd the plough

And the marley-mow,

Maintain'd his court from off his farm,

And kept all round him tight and warm,
Like a right-down Suffolk yeoman.

Or "Me and my Comàrade":

When I was bound apprentice
In famous Lincolnshire,

Full well I served my master
For more than seven year;
Till I took up to poaching,
As you shall quickly hear,
Oh! it's my delight on a shiny night.
In the season of the year.

As me and my comȧrade

Were setting of a snare,

'Twas then we spied the gamekeeper,-
For him we did not care;

For we can wrestle and fight, my boys,
And jump o'er any where,—

For it's my delight on a shiny night,
In the season of the year.

An old tune and words freighted with early native associations are of curious value as homecarriers to those abroad. One may add here a terzet of other passages, which were written out of their wisdom and tenderness, by the great hearts, the master spirits, of our literature; too slight to fill whole pages, but too memorable to be forgotten. One is Ben Jonson's word on Amor Patriæ, in his Discoveries:

"There is a necessity all men should love their country he that professeth the contrary, may be delighted with his words, but his heart is there."

Another is Wordsworth's, from his prose-tract on the Convention of Cintra, in which he speaks of his sorrow for England if she should betray her trust as

the keeper of the liberty of the nations. It rings like a prose-lyric, to be set by his noble sonnets inspired by the same passionate affection for England:

"O sorrow! O misery for England, the land of liberty and courage and peace; the land trustworthy and long approved; the home of lofty example and benign precept; the central orb to which, as to a fountain, the nations of the earth' ought to repair, and in their golden urns draw light';-O sorrow and shame for our country; for the grass which is upon her fields, and the dust which is in her graves ;-for her good men who now look upon the day;-and her long train of deliverers and defenders, her Alfred, her Sidneys, and her Milton; whose voice yet speaketh for our reproach; and whose actions survive in memory to confound us, or to redeem !”

The third is Shakespeare's :

"O England, model to thy inward greatness,
Like little body with a mighty heart,

What might'st thou do, that honour would thee do,
Were all thy children kind and natural!" 1

More to the same effect could be added, which lent a moving accent to that famous concerted lay of England, written by her poets and her prosewriters, from Chaucer down to our own time of troubled peace after war.

It is to England that the book has been mainly confined for want of room. A much larger anthology than this would be required for the book of Great Britain and Ireland.

Grateful acknowledgments are due by the editor,

1 Prologue to Henry V.