The Modern Sunday
But what a revolution that English villages from "the quietest places under the sun" have become the noisiest! The traditional Sunday evening is shattered by "the roaring of the hungry stream," not of Virgil s greedy Acheron but of the motor-bikes of the young villagers, each bestriding his bellowing monster, with his girl ungainly crouched with outstretched legs behind him. It is the river of death only if you try to cross the road, but it is the death of Sunday eve as our fathers Tnew it. When the fairy queen presented George Gissing with a legacy of £300 a year and he retired to the Valley of the Exe from mortal poverty in London, he wrote in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft that he found "an inestimable boon" in "the calm and sanctity of the Day of Rest." He, an agnostic, celebrated Sunday by reading Milton, Virgil, Homer or Shakespeare. "No interruption befalls 'me. The page scarce rustles as it turns." Fifty years later, he would not have heard a folio Shakespeare if he had dropped it.
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