There was a shelf of books, and a row of them on the
mantel-piece; works of political economy, they appeared to be, statistics
and things of that sort; very dry reading, with which, however,
Middleton's experience as a politician had made him acquainted. Besides
there were a few works on local antiquities, a county-history borrowed
from the Master's library, in which Hammond appeared to have been lately
reading.
"They are delightful reading," observed Middleton, "these old
county-histories, with their great folio volumes and their minute account
of the affairs of families and the genealogies, and descents of estates,
bestowing as much blessed space on a few hundred acres as other
historians give to a principality. I fear that in my own country we
shall never have anything of this kind. Our space is so vast that we
shall never come to know and love it, inch by inch, as the English
antiquarians do the tracts of country with which they deal; and besides,
our land is always likely to lack the interest that belongs to English
estates; for where land changes its ownership every few years, it does
not become imbued with the personalities of the people who live on it.
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