40 ENGLISH SAGA

Came the * Ave atque Vale9 of the Poet's hopeless woe,
Tenderest of the Roman poets, nineteen hundred years

ago,

' Prater Ave atque Vak *—as we wandered to and fro
Gazing at the Lydian laughter of the Garda Lake below
Sweet Catullus' all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio!"1

The great country houses with the classical colonnades and
porticos and their parks recalling some gentle Sicilian or
Thracian scene were a natural setting for these gentlemen
scholars. Here the law of primogeniture afforded a nursery for
the higher branches of the national culture. Their library walls
were lined with the golden volumes of two centuries of English
and more of classical thought and learning: the child who grew
up in those stately rooms knew, subconsciously, that he was heir
to the ages. Even when, as often happened, the eldest son abjured
books for the superior charms of horse, rod and dog, it was
almost certain that one or other of 'his numerous younger
brothers would acquire in the freedom of his father's library the
scholarly tastes that he would carry with him into a wider
world.

• •••••••

Here in the country-house was the accumulated tradition not
only of culture but of order. The life of a great country-house
afforded a microcosm of the state: no fitter training ground
could have been devised for those called upon by birth and wealth
to rule. An English landed estate in the first half of the nineteenth
century was a masterpiece of smooth and intricate organisation
with its carefully-graded hierarchy of servants, indoor and out-
door, and its machinery for satisfying most of the normal wants-
of communal life—farms, gardens, dairies, brewhouses, gran-
aries, stables, laundries and workshops; carpenters, ironmongers,
painters, masons, smiths and glaziers; its kitchens, larders, and
sculleries, beer and wine cellars, gunrooms apd stores. At Wo-
burn the Duke of Bedford directly employed nearly 600 persons,
300 artificers being regularly paid every Saturday night, and his
bill for domestic pensions alone amounted to over £2000 a year.
Here, Greville reported, "is order, economy, grandeur, comfort
and general content . . . with inexhaustible resources for every
taste—a capital library, all the most curious and costly books;

1 Tcnryson, Catullus Ode.