ABSTRACT
You live out of the world.’ Part of Hazlitt’s motivation for saying such things
was the pervasive sentimentality with which the urban world has treated the
countryside, since ancient times. The shepherds who sing to one another in
Virgil’s Eclogues, lovelorn in an Arcadia dripping with honey and bathed in
golden light, are as remote from everyday encounters with agricultural workers
as the shepherds in Brokeback Mountain – a story that was originally published
in the ultimate urbane environment of the New Yorker magazine, and which
was then further lyricized by Hollywood actors and cinematographic glamour.2
The countryside is repeatedly presented as the place to go for true feeling. At
