"No Englishman could be a more genuine lover of honest industry. He was cut to the heart by the horrible state of degradation into which the British labourer had sunk during, and for twenty years after, the great war... Week by week, and year by year, he went on thundering against the governing classes; but he always inserted saving clauses in his indictment for old descent and the trappings of royalty... Beneath the Radical peep forth infinite possibilities of Tory prejudice... English literature may be searched in vain for such another miniature of southern England as the Rural Rides... Those transcripts of scenery never grow obsolete."