A favourite theme of English writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that of escape from the bustle and back-stabbing of court or city life, and the more solid satisfaction of life in the countryside, on a small, self-sufficient country estate with only books and a few select friends for company.
This notion can be traced back to the sixth poem of the second book of Satires, or Sermones, of Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65 B.C. to 8 B.C.), known to the English as ...