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12 INTRODUCTION
This applies with even greater truth to Sussex. There is a wonderful continuity between the present and the past of this county. An inn where we find the landlord and the groom in the throes of the quite modern game of ping-pong, was but a hundred or so years ago the meeting place of Sussex smugglers, and still further back the same inn was the resort of religious pilgrims travelling to Chichester. We need not look beyond.
In this short study, the reader must be satisfied with antiquities of a humble and homely character ; and in bespeaking the interest of the reader, in favour of a few scrap ends of folk lore and relics of Sussex life, I shall promise to keep strictly within the historical limits laid down by Rudyard Kipling in his Sussex stories, with a reference here and there to the historical and literary associations of Sussex.
How widely read Rudyard Kipling's books may be I do not know, but there is no doubt that on those who do read them they exert a very powerful influence; and the secret of this influence lies, more than in anything else, in their style. Now style is something far above the possession of a rich vocabulary or a keen ear for rhythm and it is primarily an intellectual quality. The first requisites of good style are that the writer should |
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