Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/36

30 THE CORNWALL COAST pensation that such places preserve for us the best picture of what Old England truly was in days before she became " a nation of shopkeepers." It is no use to go to the flourishing commercial cities to find traces of earlier England ; these cities have usually swept away the traces of antiquity they once possessed — tortuous streets are straightened and widened, quaint old houses are thrown down, the picturesque makes way for the useful ; even the old churches are looked at askance, as occupy- ing ground that might be devoted to warehouses and offices. In these quiet corners of the West such temptations have not presented themselves ; population is thin, and there is little call for the destructiveness of expansion ; medisevalism may still be found here, in the streets and byways, in the houses, and sometimes in the people. The chief peril is in the intrusion of the summer holiday and the " week-end." Irreparable damage is sometimes prompted by the desire to attract visitors. But those who come to the West Country are not usually such as seek for the noise and glare of the conventional watering- place. They come for natural beauty, pure air, and quietude. The recreative pleasure that they crave must be of a different kind from that with which they can daily become familiar if they please. There are theatres and music-halls in town ; it does not add to the wittiness of the Pierrot or the humour of the comic singer to find them exercising their functions on a hot dusty beach, densely packed with humanity, strewn with torn newspapers, burnt matches, orange skins, and banana peelings. Yet those who feel in this manner are a minority, otherwise certain popular resorts would be less flourishing.