I confess I was not sorry to cut short with a question his glorifications of the age he lived in. Said I: “How about the smaller towns? I suppose you have swept those away entirely?”
“No, no,” said he, “it hasn’t gone that way. On the contrary, there has been but little clearance, though much rebuilding, in the smaller towns. Their suburbs, indeed, when they had any, have melted away into the general country, and space and elbow-room has been got in their centres: but there are the towns still with their streets and squares and market-places; so that it is by means of these smaller towns that we of to-day can get some kind of idea of what the towns of the older world were like;—I mean to say at their best.”
“Take Oxford, for instance,” said I.
“Yes,” said he, “I suppose Oxford was beaut
