Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/221

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ARTHUR YOUNG
207

siasm. He would not have accepted Scott's love of the heather. He always speaks of 'heather and ling' with a kind of personal animosity. They are signs of the abomination of desolation. His criticism of French chateaux shows both sentiments. He is shocked, and with sufficient reason, at the game-preserving wastes which surround them; but he is also disgusted, in a minor degree, by the want of proper landscape-gardening. Their great houses are often built in the purlieus of a town; and what might be made into beautiful grounds abandoned to the baser purposes of stables or other utilitarian erections. Young naturally has the eye of the country gentleman, as his successor Cobbett had the eye of the practical farmer. Neither could take the simply sentimental view; and in each, therefore, a most genuine love of country scenery is combined with an almost fanatical horror of a waste. Young would have sympathised with Cobbett's denunciation of the 'accursed hill' of Hindhead, which some of us now find to possess certain charms; or have approved Defoe's remark, that Bagshot Heath had been placed by Providence so near to London in order to rebuke the pride of Englishmen by showing that the heart of their