How long does it take to know a place? Well, if you are lucky enough to go there with really good introductions, I should think six months; if you know no one, and are dependent on chance, or the vicar of the parish, you may never know it at all; but, in ordinary cases, and where people have had their edges clipped by really good society, you ought to know quite as many people as you wish to in about three years.
Therefore, if you have begun your residence in the suburbs, and have a nice church, a nice doctor, and nice friends, stay there; you don’t know how deeply your roots are planted until you begin to drag them up. If you are a Londoner, on no account be persuaded by artistic accounts of country delights to leave your beloved pavements and the exquisite freedom of a town life and surroundings: and if you are born and have lived among cabbages and roses--if you love the country, and can interest yourself mildly in the continual changes that are going on around you in your neighbours’ houses and the cottages round about--remain there; and be thankful for tastes which are innocent if they are circumscribed, and often result in a far nobler life than that made up mostly from excitement and dissipation; because anyone who can and will live cheerfully in the country, making work for the labourer, and employing folk in pure air, and in decent habitations, does much more for the human race than he wots of, and should be encouraged to do so in any manner that one possibly can.
I am often being told that the country is a far cheaper place to live in than London; but I have tried both, and I know better. In the first place, in London you can do precisely what you like, and, provided your likes are not openly eccentric, no one will interfere with you. You can have ten friends or ten thousand acquaintances. You may wear one dress as long as it will hold together, and no one will doubt your capabilities of being respectable because of your shabby attire. You may get up when you like, go to bed when you like, need not give to any charity if you are not charitably disposed, need not keep a carriage, because you can at any moment hail any vehicle, and go anywhere you like; and, above all, can be so easily amused, and at so cheap a rate, that one need hardly put down ‘amusements’ in our schedule at all.