Page:The golden book of King Edward VII.djvu/43

THE GOLDEN BOOK OF

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I understand your qualification for membership consists in your being working men in literature and art, and good fellows. Of these qualifications the first I can hardly aspire to, but perhaps you will allow me to be the second.

 

In everything "he struck the human note,"and nowhere more so than at Sandringham, his beautiful Norfolk estate where, as an Old-English country gentleman, he led what was for a King the "simple life," and where he was known "a model landlord, a successful farmer, a sanitary reformer, a generous philanthropist, an esteemed employer, and the most practical of all temperance reformers." Of all his private predilections, stock-breeding was his favourite: and he "loved his sheep and oxen," it has been said, "as William the Conqueror loved the tall red deer,—as if he had been their father." He brought the barren and almost hopeless fallows of Sandringham to a state of magnificent fertility. King Edward, in fact, was one of the first to go "back to the land."

 

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