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22. A prayer followed, as remarkable in its way as the singing.
Comprehensive, devout, simple, it was the pleading of man in the
felt presence of his Maker;—the key-note—“Nevertheless, I will talk
with Thee!” Next to Mr. Spurgeon’s earnestness his best gift is his
command of good, nervous English,—fluency which is never
verboseness. Knowing exactly what he means to say, he says it—
fully and roundly—and lets it alone thereafter. He is neither scholarly,
nor eloquent, in any other sense than in these. He read a chapter,
giving an exposition of each verse in terse, familiar phrase. There
was another hymn, and he announced his text:
“Rather rejoice because your names are written in Heaven!”
I should hardly name humility as a characteristic of prayer or
sermon; yet, for one whose boldness of speech often approximates
dogmatism, he is singularly free from self-assertion. His sermon was
more like a lecture-room talk than a discourse prepared for, and
delivered to a mixed multitude. His quotations from Holy Writ were
abundant and apt, evincing a retentive memory and ready wit. One-
third of the sermon was in the very words of Scripture. His habitual
employment of Bible phrases has lent to his own composition a
quaint savor. He makes lavish use of “thee” and “thou,” jumbling
these inelegantly with “you” in the same sentence.
For example:—He described a man who had been useful and
approved as a church-member: (always addressing his own people)
—“The Master has allowed you to work for many days in His
vineyard, and paid thee good wages, even given thee souls for thy
hire.”
In what shape reverses came to the prosperous laborer we were
not told, but that he did see others outstrip him in usefulness and
honors:
“You are bidden by the Master to take a lower—maybe the lowest
seat. Ah, then, my friend, thou hast the dumps!”
23. I heard him say in another sermon: “If my Lord were to offer a
prize for a joyful Christian I am afraid there are not many of you
who would dare try for it. And if you did, I fear me much you would
not draw even a third prize.”
Occasionally he is coarse in trope and expression. I hesitate to
record a sentence that shocked me to disgust as being not only in
atrocious taste and an unfortunate figure of speech, but, to my
apprehension, irreverent:
“If we are not filled, it is because we do not hang upon and suck
at those blessed breasts of God’s promises as we might and should
do.”
His illustrations are like his diction—homely. There was not a new
grand thought, nor a beautiful passage, rhetorically considered, in
any discourse we ever heard from him; not a trace of such fervid
imagination as draws men, sometimes against their will, to hear
Gospel truth in Talmage’s Tabernacle, or of Beecher’s magnificent
genius. We have, in America, scores of men who are little known
outside of their own town, or State, who preach the Word as simply
and devoutly; who are, impartially considered, in speech more
weighty, in learning incomparably superior to the renowned London
Nonconformist. Yet we sat—between six and seven thousand of us—
and listened to him for nearly an hour, without restlessness or
straying attention. Yes! and went again and again, to discover, if
possible, as the boys say of the juggler—“how he did it.”
In giving out the notices for the week, Mr. Spurgeon thanked the
regular attendants of the church for having complied with the
request he had made on the preceding Sabbath morning, and
“stopped away at night,” thus leaving more room for strangers. “I
hope still more of you will stop at home this evening,” he concluded
in a tone of jolly fellowship the people appeared to comprehend and
like. He was clearly thoroughly at one with his flock.
24. At night we also “stopped away,” but not at home. After much
misdirection and searching, we found the alley—it was nothing
better—leading to Dr. Cummings’s church in Crown Court, Long Acre.
It was small, very small in our sight while the remembered
roominess of the Tabernacle lingered with us,—plain as a Primitive
Methodist Chapel in the country; badly lighted, and the high, straight
pews were not half filled. The author of “Voices of the Dead” and
“Lectures upon the Apocalypse” is a gray-haired man a little above
medium height. His shoulders were bowed slightly—the bend of the
student, not of infirmity; his features were clear-cut and spirituelle.
He preached that night in faith and hope that were pathetic to us
who had read his prophecies—or his interpretation of Divine
prophecy—as long ago as 1850, and recalled the fact that the time
set for the fulfilment of some of these had passed.
His text was Rev. i. 3: “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that
hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things that are
written therein—for THE TIME IS AT HAND!”
He believed it. One read it in every word and gesture; in the rapt
look of the eyes so long strained with watching for the nearer
promise—the dayspring—of His coming; in the calm assurance of
mien and tone, the dignity of a seer, whom Heaven was joined with
earth to authenticate. He spoke without visible notes; his only
gesture a slight lifting of both hands, with a fluttering, outward
movement. We listened vainly for some token in his spoken
composition of the epigrammatic, often antithetical style, that gives
nerve and point to his published writings. The interesting, albeit
desultory talk was, he informed us, the first of a series of sermons
upon the Apocalypse he designed to deliver in that place from
Sabbath to Sabbath. He had been diligently engaged of late in
recasting the horoscope of the world. That was not the way he put
it. But he did say that he had reviewed the calculations upon which
his published “Lectures” were based, and would make known the
result of his labors in the projected series.
25. He preferred, it was said, the obscure corner in which he
preached to any other location, and had refused the offer of a lady
of rank to build him a better church, in a better neighborhood. I
suppose he thought it would outlast him—and into the millennial
age.
I read, but yesterday, in an English paper, that he had retired
from pulpit duties, in confirmed ill-health, and that after his long life
of toil he is very poor. Some of his wealthy friends propose to
pension him. And we remember so well when his “Voices of the
Night”—“The Day”—“The Dead” were read by more thousands and
tens of thousands than now flock to hear Spurgeon; when the
“Lectures upon the Apocalypse” were a bugle-call, turning the eyes
of the Christian world to the so long rayless East. We recall, too, the
title of another of his books, with the vision of the bent figure and
eyes grown dim with waiting for the glory to be revealed,—and
another text from his beloved Revelation:
“These are they that have come out of Great Tribulation, and
have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the
Lamb.”
27. CHAPTER IV.
The Two Elizabeths.
F the English autumn be sad, and the English spring be sour,
the smiling beauty of the English summer should expel the
memory of gloom and acerbity from the mind of the tourist
who is not afflicted with bronchitis. In England they make
the ch very hard, and pronounce the i in the second syllable as in
kite. They ought to know all about bronchitis, for it lurks in every
whiff of east wind, and most of the vanes have rusted upon their
pivots in their steadfast pointing to that quarter.
The east wind is not necessarily raw. It was bracing, and the sky
blue as that of Italy, when we took a Fourth of July drive of nine
hours through the fairest portion of the Isle of Wight. The Tally-Ho
was a gorgeous pleasure-coach, all red and yellow. The coachman
and guard were in blue coats and brass buttons, red waistcoats, and
snowy leather breeches, fitting like the skin; high top-boots and
cockaded hats. We had four good horses, the best seats upon the
top of the coach, a hamper of luncheon, and as many rugs and
shawls as we would have taken on a winter voyage across the
Atlantic. There were opaline belts of light upon the sea, such as we
had seen from Naples and Sorrento, passing into pearl and faintest
blue where the sky met and mingled with the water. Hundreds of
sails skimmed the waves like so many white gulls. Here and there a
steamer left a dusky trail upon the air. Three were stationary about a
dark object near the shore. It looked like a projecting pile the rising
tide might cover. The Eurydice, a school-ship of the Royal Navy, had
foundered there in a gale six weeks and more agone, carrying
upwards of three hundred souls down with her. Day by day these
government transports were toiling to raise her and recover the
bodies of the boys. A week after we left the island they succeeded in
28. dragging up the water-logged hulk. Only eighteen corpses were
found. The sea had washed off and hidden the rest.
England is a garden in June, July, and August. The Isle of Wight is
a fairy parterre, set with such wealth of verdure and bloom as never
disappoints nor palls upon the sight. The roads are perfect in
stability and smoothness, and whether they lie along the edge of the
cliffs, or among fertile plains besprinkled with villages and farm-
buildings, with an occasional manor-house or venerable ruin, are
everywhere fringed by such hedges as flourish nowhere else so
bravely as in the British Isles. The hawthorn was out of flower, but
blackberries whose blossoms were pink instead of white, trailing
briony, sweet-brier, and, daintiest and most luxuriant of all, wild
convolvulus, hung with tiny cups of pale rose-color—healed our
regrets that we were too late to see and smell the “May” in its best-
loved home.
We lunched at Blackgang Chine, spreading our cloth upon the
heather a short distance from the brow of the cliff, the sea rolling so
far below us that the surf was a whisper and the strollers upon the
beach were pigmies. The breadth—the apparent boundlessness of
the view were enhanced by the crystalline purity of the atmosphere.
In standing upon the precipice, our backs to the shore, looking
seaward beyond the purple “Needles” marking the extremest point
of the sunken reef, we had an eerie sense of being suspended
between sky and ocean;—a lightness of body and freedom of spirit,
a contempt for the laws of gravitation, and for the Tally-Ho as a
means of locomotion, that were, we decided after comparing notes
among ourselves, the next best thing to being sea-fowl.
The principal objects of interest for the day were Carisbrooke
Castle and Arreton. Next to the Heidelberg Schloss, Carisbrooke
takes rank, in our recollection of ruins many and castles
uncountable, for beauty of situation and for careful preservation of
original character without injury to picturesqueness. The moat is
cushioned with daisied turf, but we crossed it by a stone bridge of a
single span. Over the gateway is carved the Woodville coat-of-arms,
29. supported on each side by the “White Rose” of York. The arch is
recessed between two fine, round towers. The massive doors, cross-
barred with iron, still hang upon their hinges. Passing these, we
were in a grassy court-yard of considerable extent. On our left was
the shell of the suite of rooms occupied by Charles I. during his
imprisonment here, from November 13, 1647, until the latter part of
the next year. Ivy clings and creeps through the empty window-
frames, and tapestries walls denuded of the “thick hangings and
wainscoting” ordered for the royal captive. The floors of the upper
story have fallen and the lower is carpeted with grass. Tufts of a
pretty pink flower were springing in all the crevices. Ferns grew rank
and tall along the inside of the enclosed space. High up in the wall is
the outline of a small window, “blocked up in after alterations,”
according to the record. Through this the king endeavored to escape
on the night of March 20, 1648. Horses were ready in the
neighborhood of the Castle, and a vessel awaited the king upon the
shore. A brave royalist came close beneath the window and gave the
signal.
“Then”—in the words of this man, the only eye-witness of the
scene—“His Majesty put himself forward, but, too late, found himself
mistaken.”
Charles had declared, when the size of the aperture was under
discussion, “Where my head can pass, my body can follow.”
“He, sticking fast between his breast and shoulders and not able
to get backward or forward. Whilst he stuck I heard him groan, but
could not come to help him, which, you may imagine, was no small
affliction to me. So soon as he was in again—to let me see (as I had
to my grief heard) the design was broken—he set a candle in the
window. If this unfortunate impediment had not happened, his
Majesty had certainly then made a good escape.”
The Stuarts were a burden to the land, as a family; but we
wished the window had been a few inches broader, and exile, not
the block, the end of fight ’twixt king and parliament, as we walked
30. up and down the tilt-yard converted into a promenade and bowling-
green for the prisoner while Colonel Hammond was governor of the
Castle. Here Charles paced two hours each day, the wide sea and
the free ships below him; in plain sight the cove where the little
shallop had lain, at anchor, the night of the attempted rescue.
“He was not at all dejected in his spirits,” we read; “but carried
himself with the same majesty he had used to do. His hair was all
gray, which, making all others very sad, made it thought that he had
sorrow in his countenance which appeared only by that shadow.”
In further evidence of his unbroken spirit in this earliest
imprisonment, we have the motto “Dum spiro, spero,” written by
himself in a book he was fond of reading. Without divining it, he was
getting his breath between two tempests. That in these months all
that was truly kingly and good within him was nourished into healthy
growth we gather, furthermore, in reading that “The Sacred
Scriptures he most delighted in; read often in Sand’s Paraphrase of
King David’s Psalms and Herbert’s Divine Poems.” Also, that
“Spenser’s Faerie Queen was the alleviation of his spirits after
serious studies.”
The Bowling Green is little changed in grade and verdure since
the semi-daily promenade of the captive monarch streaked it with
narrow paths, and since his orphaned son and daughter played
bowls together upon the turf two summers afterward. The sward is
velvet of thickest pile. There is an English saying that “it takes a
century to make a lawn.” This has had more than two in which to
grow and green.
We were glad that another party who were with us in the grounds
were anxious to see an ancient donkey tread the wheel which draws
up a bucket from the well, “144 feet deep, with 37 feet of water” in
a building at the side of the Castle. While they tarried to applaud
“Jacob’s” feat, we had a quiet quarter of an hour in the upper
chamber, where, as a roughly-painted board tells us, “The Princess
Elizabeth died.”
31. Who (in America) has not read the narrative, penned by the
thirteen-year-old child, “What the King said to me 29th of January
last, being the last time I had the happiness to see him”? The heart
breaks with the mere reading of the title and the fancy of the
trembling fingers that wrote it out.
Her father had said to her, “But, sweetheart, thou wilt forget what
I tell thee!” “Then, shedding abundance of tears, I told him that I
would write down all he said to me.”
We knew, almost to a word, the naïve recital which was the
fulfilment of the pledge. We could not have forgotten at Carisbrooke
that her father had given her a Bible, saying: “It had been his great
comfort and constant companion through all his sorrows, and he
hoped it would be hers.” She had been a prisoner in the Castle less
than a week when she was caught in a sudden shower while playing
with her little brother, the Duke of Gloucester, on the Bowling Green.
The wetting “caused her to take cold, and the next day she
complained of headache and feverish distemper.” It was a poor bed-
chamber for a king’s daughter (with one window, a mere slit in the
wall, and one door), in the which she lay for a fortnight, “her disease
growing upon her,” until “after many rare ejaculatory expressions,
abundantly demonstrating her unparalleled piety, to the eternal
honor of her own memory and the astonishment of those who
waited upon her, she took leave of the world on Sunday, the 8th of
September, 1650.”
That was the way the chaplain and the physician told the story—
such a sorrowful little tale when one strips away the sounding
polysyllables and cuts short the windings of the sentences!
The warden’s wife was, we know, one of “those who waited upon
her.” Hireling hands ministered to her through her “distemper.” In the
scanty retinue that attended her to Carisbrooke was one “Judith
Briott, her gentlewoman.” We liked to think she must have loved her
gentle little mistress. It is possible her tending was as affectionate as
the care she might have had, had the mother, to whom the father
32. had sent his love by the daughter’s hand, been with her instead of in
France, toying (some say) with a new lover. Yet the child-heart must
have yearned for parents, brothers and sisters. On that Sunday
morning, an attendant entering with a bowl of bread-and-milk,
discovered that the princess had died alone, her cheek pillowed
upon the Bible—her father’s legacy.
That small chamber was a sacred spot where we could not but
speak low and step softly. It is utterly dismantled. When draped and
furnished it may not have been comfortless. It could never have
been luxurious. A branch of ivy had thrust itself in at the window
through which her dying eyes looked their last upon the sky. Caput
reached up silently and broke off a spray. As I write, it climbs up my
window-frame, a thrifty vine, that has taken kindly to voyaging and
transplanting. To me it is a more valuable memento than the
beautiful photograph of the monument erected to Princess
Elizabeth’s memory in the Church of St. Thomas, whither “her body
was brought (in a borrowed coach) attended with her few late
servants.”
Yet the monument is a noble tribute from royalty to the daughter
of a royal line. The young girl lies asleep, one hand fallen to her
side, the other laid lightly upon her breast, her check turned to rest
upon the open Bible. The face is sweet and womanly; the expression
peacefully happy. “A token of respect for her virtues, and sympathy
for her misfortunes. By Victoria R., 1856.” So reads the inscription.
Imagination leaped a wide chasm of time and station in passing
from the state prison-chamber of Carisbrooke to the thatched
cottage of The Dairyman’s Daughter; from the marble sculptured by
a queen’s command, to the head-stone reared by one charitable
admirer of the humble piety of Elizabeth Walbridge. To reach the
grave we had to pass through the parish church of Arreton. It is like
a hundred other parish churches scattered among the byways of
England. The draught from the interior met us when the door grated
upon the hinges, cold, damp, and ill-smelling, a smell that left an
earthy taste in the mouth. Beneath the stone flooring the noble dead
33. are packed economically as to room. The sexton, who may have
been a trifle younger than the building, spoke a dialect we could
hardly translate. The church was his pride, and he was sorely
grieved when we would have pushed right onward to the burying-
ground.
“Ye mun look at ’e brawsses!” he pleaded so tremulously that we
halted to note one, on which was the figure of a man in armor, his
feet upon a lion couchant.
“Here is ye buried under this Grave
Harry Haweis. His soul God save.
Long tyme steward of the Yle of Wyght.
Have m’cy on hym, God ful of myght.”
The date is 1430.
Another “brass” upon a stone pillar bears six verses setting forth
the worthy deeds of one William Serle:
“Thus did this man, a Batchelor,
Of years full fifty-nyne.
And doing good to many a one,
Soe did he spend his tyme.”
“An’ ye woant see ’e rest?” quavered the old sexton at our next
movement. “’E be foine brawsses! Quawlity all of um—’e be!”
Seeing our obduracy, he hobbled to the side-door and unlocked it,
amid many groans from himself and the rusty wards. The July light
and air were welcome after the damp twilight within. In death at
least, it would seem to be better with the poor than the “quality,” if
sun and breeze are boons. The churchyard is small and ridged
closely with graves. The old man led the way between and over
these to the last home of the Dairyman’s Daughter. We gathered
about it, looked reverently upon the low swell of turf. There is a
metrical epitaph, sixteen lines in length, presumably the composition
of the lady at whose expense the stone was raised. It begins:
34. “Stranger! if e’er by chance or feeling led,
Upon this hallowed turf thy footsteps tread,
Turn from the contemplation of the sod,
And think on her whose spirit rests with God.”
The rest is after the same order, a mechanical jingle in pious
measure. It offends one who has not been educated to appreciate
the value of post-mortem patronage bestowed by the lofty upon the
lowly. It was enough for us to know that the worn body of Legh
Richmond’s “Elizabeth” lay there peacefully sleeping away the ages.
We had picked up in a Ventnor bookshop a shabby little copy of
Richmond’s “Annals of the Poor,” printed in 1828. It contained a
sketch of Mr. Richmond’s life by his son-in-law, The Dairyman’s
Daughter, The Negro Servant, and The Young Cottager, the scene of
all these narratives being in the Isle of Wight. We reread them with
the pensive pleasure one feels in unbinding a pacquet of letters,
spotted and yellowed by time, but which hands beloved once
pressed, and yielding still the faint fragrance of the rose-leaves we
laid away with them when the pages were white and fresh. We, who
drew delight with instruction from Sunday-School libraries more than
thirty years back, knew Elizabeth, the “Betsey” of father and mother,
better than we did our next-door neighbors. Prima and Secunda,
allured by my enthusiasm to read the book, declared that her letters
to her spiritual adviser “were prosy and priggish,” but that the hold
of the story upon my heart was not all the effect of early association
was abundantly proved by their respectful mention of her humble
piety and triumphant death.
By her side lies the sister at whose funeral Legh Richmond first
met his modest heroine. In the same family group sleep the
Dairyman and his wife. “The mother died not long after the
daughter,” says Mr. Richmond, “and I have good reason to believe
that God was merciful to her and took her to Himself. The good old
Dairyman died in 1816, aged 84. His end was eminently Christian.”
Elizabeth died May 30, 1801, at the age of thirty-one.
35. “Pardon!” said a foreign gentleman, one of the party, who, seeing
Caput uncover his head at the grave, had done the same. “But will
you have the goodness to tell me what it is we have come here to
see?”
“The grave of a very good woman,” was the reply.
Legh Richmond tells us little more. Her love for her Saviour, like
the broken alabaster-box of ointment in the hand of another woman
of far different life, is the sweet savor that has floated down to us
through all these years.
I stooped to picked some bearded grasses from the mound. The
sexton bent creakingly to aid me, chattering and grinning. He wore a
blue frock over his corduroy trousers: his hands and clothes were
stained with clay; his sunken cheeks looked like old parchment.
“’A wisht ’a ’ad flowers to gi’ ’e, leddy!” he said. “’A dit troy for
one wheele to keep um ’ere. But ’a moight plant um ivery day, and
’ee ud be all goane ’afore tummorrer. He! he! he! ’A—manny leddies
cooms ’ere for summat fro’ e’ grave. ’A burried ’er brother over
yander!” chucking a pebble to show where—“’a dit! ’E larst of ’e
fomily. ’Ees all goane! And ’a’m still aloive and loike to burry a
manny more! He! he!”
Our homeward route lay by the Dairyman’s cottage, a long mile
from the church. When the coffin of Elizabeth, borne by neighbors’
hands, was followed by the mourners, also on foot, funeral hymns
were sung, “at occasional intervals of about five minutes.” As we
bowled along the smooth road, Prima, sitting behind me, read aloud
from the shabby little volume a description of the surrounding scene,
that might, for accuracy of detail, have been written that day:
“A rich and fruitful valley lay immediately beneath. It was adorned
with corn-fields and pastures, through which a small river winded in
a variety of directions, and many herds grazed upon its banks. A fine
range of opposite hills, covered with grazing flocks, terminated with
a bold sweep into the ocean, whose blue waves appeared at a
36. distance beyond. Several villages, churches and hamlets were
scattered in the valley. The noble mansions of the rich and the lowly
cottages of the poor added their respective features to the
landscape. The air was mild, and the declining sun occasioned a
beautiful interchange of light and shade upon the sides of the hills.”
The annalist adds,—“In the midst of this scene the chief sound
that arrested attention was the bell tolling for the funeral of the
‘Dairyman’s Daughter.’”
“A picture by Claude!” commented Caput as the reader paused.
“A draught of old wine that has made the voyage to India and
back!” said Dux, our blue-eyed college-boy.
These were the hills that had echoed the funeral psalm; these the
cottages in whose doors stood those “whose countenances
proclaimed their regard for the departed young woman.” Red brick
“cottages,” the little gardens between them and the road crowded
with larkspurs, pinks, roses, lavender, and southernwood. They were
generally built in solid rows under one roof, the yards separated by
palings. There were no basements, the paved floors being laid
directly upon the ground. Two rooms upon this floor, and one above
in a steep-roofed attic, was the prevailing plan of the tenements.
The doors were open, and we could observe, at a passing glance,
that some were clean and bright, others squalid, within. All, mean
and neat, had flowers in the windows. The Dairyman’s cottage
stands detached from other houses with what the neighbors would
term “a goodish bit of ground” about it. To the original dwelling that
Legh Richmond saw has been joined a two-story wing, also of brick.
Beside it the cottage with its thatched roof is a very humble affair.
The lane, “quite overshaded with trees and high hedges,” and “the
suitable gloom of such an approach to the house of mourning,” are
gone, with “the great elm-trees which stood near the house.” The
rustling of these,—as he rode by them to see Elizabeth die,—the
imagination of the unconscious poet and true child of Nature
“indulged itself in thinking were plaintive sighs of sorrow.”
37. But we saw the upper room with its sloping ceiling, and the
window-seat in which “her sister-in-law sat weeping with a child in
her lap,” while Elizabeth lay dying upon the bed drawn into the
middle of the floor to give her air.
The glory of the sunsetting was over sea and land, painting the
sails rose-pink; purpling the lofty downs and mellowing into delicious
vagueness the skyey distances—the pathways into the world beyond
this island-gem—when we drove into Ventnor. The grounds of the
Royal Hotel are high and spacious, with turfy banks rolling from the
cliff-brow down to the road, divided by walks laid in snowy shells
gathered from the shore. From a tall flag-staff set on the crown of
the hill streamed out, proud and straight in the strong sea-breeze—
the Stars and Stripes!
We did not cheer it, except in spirit, but the gentlemen waved
their hats and the ladies kissed their hands to the grand old
standard, and all responded “Amen!” to the deep voice that said,
“God bless it, forever!” And with the quick heart-bound that sent
smiles to the lips and moisture to the eyes, with longings for the
Land always and everywhere dearest to us, came kindlier thoughts
than we were wont to indulge of the “Old Home,” which, in the
clearer light of a broadening Christian civilization, can, with us,
rejoice in the anniversary of a Nation’s Birthday.
39. CHAPTER V.
Prince Guy.
EAMINGTON is in, and of itself, the pleasantest and
stupidest town in England. It is a good place in which to
sleep and eat and leave the children when the older
members of the party desire to make all-day excursions. It is pretty,
quiet, healthy, with clean, broad “parades” and shaded parks
wherein perambulators are safe from runaway horses and reckless
driving. There are countless shops for the sale of expensive fancy
articles, notably china and embroidery; more lodging-houses than
private dwellings and shops put together. There is a chabybeate
spring—fabled to have tasted properly, i. e., chemically, “nasty,” once
upon a time—enclosed in a pump-room. Hence “Leamington Spa,”
one of the names of the town. And through the Jephson Gardens
(supposed to be the Enchanted Ground whereupon Tennyson
dreamed out his “Lotos-eaters”) flows the “high-complectioned
Leam,” the sleepiest river that ever pretended to go through the
motions of running at all. Hawthorne defines the “complexion” to be
a “greenish, goose-puddly hue,” but, “disagreeable neither to taste
nor smell.” We used to saunter in the gardens after dinner on fine
evenings, to promote quiet digestion and drowsiness, and can
recommend the prescription. There are churches in Leamington,
“high” and “low,” or, as the two factions prefer to call themselves,
“Anglican” and “Evangelical;” Nonconformist meeting-houses—
Congregational, Wesleyan and Baptist; there are two good
circulating libraries, and there is a tradition to the effect that living in
hotels and lodgings here was formerly cheap. One fares tolerably
there now—and pays for it.
We made Leamington our headquarters for six weeks,
Warwickshire being a very mine of historic show-places, and the
40. sleepy Spa easy of access from London, Oxford, Birmingham, and
dozens of other cities we must see, while at varying distances of
one, five, and ten miles lie Warwick Castle, Kenilworth, Stratford-on-
Avon, Charlecote, the home of Sir Thomas Lucy (Justice Shallow),
Stoneleigh Abbey—one of the finest country-seats in Great Britain—
and Coventry.
The age of Warwick Castle is a mooted point. “Cæsar’s Tower,”
ruder in construction than the remainder of the stupendous pile, is
said to be eight hundred years old. It looks likely to last eight
hundred more. The outer gate is less imposing than the entrance to
some barn-yards I have seen, A double-leaved door, neither clean
nor massive, was unbolted at our ring by a young girl, who told us
that the “H’Earl was sick,” therefore, visitors were not admitted
“h’arfter ’arf parst ten.” Once in the grounds, “they might stay so
long h’as they were dispoged.”
It is impossible to caricature the dialect of the lower classes of the
Mother Country. Even substantial tradesmen, retired merchants and
their families who are living—and traveling—upon their money are,
by turns, prodigal and niggardly in the use of the unfortunate
aspirate that falls naturally into place with us; while servants who
have lived for years in the “best families” appear to pride themselves
upon the liberties they take with their h’s, mouthing the mutilated
words with pomp that is irresistibly comic. We delighted to lay traps
for our guides and coachmen, and the yeomen we encountered in
walks and drives, by asking information on the subject of Abbeys,
Inns, Earls, Horses, Halls, and Ages. In every instance they came
gallantly up to our expectations, often transcended our most daring
hopes. But we seldom met with a more satisfactory specimen in this
line than the antique servitor that kept the lodge of Warwick Castle.
She wore a black gown, short-waisted and short-skirted, a large
cape of the same stuff, and what Dickens had taught us to call a
“mortified” black bonnet of an exaggerated type. The cap-frill within
flapped about a face that reminded us of Miss Cushman’s Meg
Merrilies. Entering the lodge hastily, after the young woman who had
41. admitted us had begun cataloguing the curiosities collected there,
she put her aside with a sweep of her bony arm and an angry,
guttural “Ach!” and began the solemnly circumstantial relation she
must have rehearsed thousands of times. We beheld “H’earl Guy’s”
breast-plate, his sword and battle-axe, the “’orn” of a dun cow slain
by him, and divers other bits of old iron, scraps of pottery, etc. But
the chef d’œuvre of the custodian was the oration above Sir Guy’s
porridge-pot, a monstrous iron vessel set in the centre of the square
chamber. Standing over it, a long poker poised in her hand, she
enumerated with glowing gusto the ingredients of the punch brewed
in the big kettle “when the present H’earl came h’of h’age,” glaring
at us from the double pent-house of frill and bonnet. I forget the
exact proportions, but they were somewhat in this order:
“H’eighteen gallons o’ rum. Fifteen gallons o’ brandy”—
tremendous stress upon each liquor—“One ’undred pounds o’ loaf
sugar. H’eleven ’undred lemmings, h’and fifty gallons h’of ’ot water!
This h’identikle pot was filled h’and h’emptied, three times that day!
H’I myself saw h’it!”
Her greedy gloating upon the minutest elements of the potent
compound was elfish and almost terrible. It was like—
“Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,”—
the harsh gutturals and suspended iron bar heightening the haggish
resemblance. The pot, she proceeded to relate, was “six ’undred
years h’old,” and bringing down the poker upon and around the
edge, evolving slow gratings and rumblings that crucified our least
sensitive nerves, “h’is this h’our without ’ole h’or crack h’as H’I can
h’answer for h’and testify!”
The entire exhibition was essentially dramatic and effectively
ridiculous. She accepted our gratuity with the same high tragedy air
and posed herself above the chaldron for an entering party of
visitors.
42. We sauntered up to the castle along a curving drive between a
steep bank overrun with lush ivy and a wall covered with creepers,
and overhung by fine old trees. Birds sang in the branches and
hopped across the road, the green shade bathed our eyes
refreshingly after the glare of the flint-strewn highway outside of the
gates. It was a forest dingle, rather than the short avenue to the
grandest ancient castle in Three Kingdoms. A broad expanse of turf
stretching before the front of the mansion is lost as far as the eye
can reach in avenues and plantations of trees. Among these are
cedars of Lebanon, brought by crusading Earls from the Holy Land,
still vigorously supplying by new growth the waste of centuries.
Masses of brilliant flowers relieved the verdure of the level sward,
fountains leaped and tinkled in sunny glades, and cut the shadow of
leafy vistas with the flash of silver blades. In the principal
conservatory stands the celebrated Warwick Vase, brought hither
from Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. Ladders were reared against the
barbican wall of great height and thickness, close by Guy’s Tower
(erected in 1394). Workmen mounted upon these were scraping
mosses and dirt from the interstices of the stones and filling them
with new cement. No pains nor expense is spared to preserve the
magnificent fortress from the ravages of time and climate. From the
foundation of the Castle until now, the family of Warwick, in some of
its ramifications—or usurpations—has been in occupation of the
demesne and is still represented in the direct line of succession by
the present owner. The noble race has battled more successfully
with revolution and decay in behalf of house and ancestral home
than have most members of the British Peerage whose lineage is of
equal antiquity and note.
Opposite the door by which we entered the Great Hall, was a
figure of a man on horseback, rider and steed as large as life. The
complete suit of armor of the one and the caparisons of the other,
were presented by Queen Elizabeth to Robert Dudley, Earl of
Leicester, her handsome master-of-horse. From this moment until we
quitted the house, we were scarcely, for a moment, out of sight of
relics of the parvenu favorite.
43. It is difficult to appreciate that real people, made of flesh, blood,
and sensibilities akin to those of the mass of humankind, live out
their daily lives, act out their true characters, indulge in “tiffs” and
“makings up,” and have “a good time generally,” in these great
houses to which the public are so freely admitted. Neither lives nor
homes seem to be their individual and distinctive property. They
must be tempted, at times, to doubts of the proprietorship of their
own thoughts and enjoy the right of private opinion by stealth.
One thing helped me to picture a social company of friends
grouped comfortably, even cozily, in this mighty chamber, the
pointed rafters of which met so far above us that the armorial
bearings carved between them upon the ceiling were indistinct to
near-sighted eyes; where the walls were covered with suits of armor,
paintings by renowned masters, and treasures of virtu in furniture
and ornament thronged even such spaciousness as that in which the
bewildered visitor feels for a moment lost. A great fireplace, with
carved oaken mantel, mellow-brown with years, and genuine fire-
dogs of corresponding size, yawned in the wall near Leicester’s
effigy. Beside this was a stout rack, almost as large as a four-post
bedstead, full of substantial logs, each at least five feet long. There
must have been a cord of seasoned wood heaped irregularly within
bars and cross-pieces. Some was laid ready for lighting in the
chimney, kindlings under it. A match was all that was needed to
furnish a roaring fire. That would be a feature in the old feudal hall.
An antique settle, covered with crimson, stood invitingly near the
hearth. One sitting upon it had a view of the lawn sloping down to
the river, and the umbrageous depths of the woods beyond; of the
jutting end and one remaining pier of the old bridge on the hither
bank, the trailing ivy pendants drooping to touch the Avon that
mirrored castle-towers, trees, the broken masonry of one bridge and
the solid, gray length of the other. In fancying who might have sat
here on cool autumn days, looking dreamily from the red recesses of
the fireplace to the tranquil picture framed by the window; who
walked at twilight upon the polished floor over the sheen of the
leaping blaze upon the dark wood; who talked, face to face, heart
44. with heart, about the hearth on stormy winter nights—I had let the
others move onward in the lead of the maid-servant who was
appointed to show us around. One gets so tired of the sing-song
iteration of names and dates that she is well-pleased to let acres of
painted canvas, the dry inventory of beds and stools, tables and
candlesticks, the list of lords, artists and grandees gabbled over in
hashed English, seasoned with pert affectations, slip unheeded by
her ears. We accounted it great gain when we were suffered to
enjoy in our own way a single picture or a relic that unlocked for us
a treasure-closet of memory and fancy.
Drifting dreamily then in the wake of the crowd, I halted between
an original portrait of Charles I. and one of his namesake and
successor, trying, for the twentieth time, to reconcile the fact of the
strong family likeness with the pensive beauty of the father and the
coarse ugliness of the son, when strident tones projected well
through the nose apprised me that the Traveling American had
arrived and was on duty. The maid had waited in the Great Hall to
collect a party of ten before beginning the tour. Workmen were
hammering somewhere upon or about the vaulted roof, and the
woman’s explanations were sometimes drowned by the
reverberation. We were not chagrined by the loss. We had guide-
books and catalogues, and each had some specific object of interest
in view or quest. The Traveling American, benevolent to a nuisance,
tall, black-eyed and bearded, with an oily ripple of syllables betraying
the training of camp-meeting or political campaign, took up the
burden of the girl’s parrot-talk and rolled it over to us, not omitting
to inter-lard it with observations deprecatory, appreciative, and
critical.
“Original portrait of Henry VIII., by a cotemporary artist—name
not known. Holbein—most likely! He was always painting the old
tyrant. Considered a very excellent likeness. Although nobody living
is authority upon that point. Over the door, two portraits. Small
heads, you see, hardly larger than cabinet pictures,—of Mary and
Anne Boleyn. Which is which—did you say, my dear? Oh! the one to
45. the left is Anne, Henry’s second wife. Supplanted poor old Kate of
Arragon, you remember. What a run of Kates the ugly Blue-beard
had! Anne is a pretty, modest-looking girl. The wonder is how she
could have married that fat beer-guzzler over yonder, king or no
king. Let me see! Didn’t he want to marry Mary, too? ‘Seems to me
there is some such story. And she said ‘No, thank you!’ Hers is a nice
face, but she isn’t such a beauty as her sister.”
Ad infinitum—and from the outset, ad nauseam, to all except the
four ladies of his party. They tittered and nudged one another at
each witticism, and looked at us for answering tokens of sympathy.
We pressed the maid onward since we were not allowed to precede
her; tarried in the rear of the procession as nearly out of ear-shot as
might be. But the armory is a succession of narrow rooms, and a
pause at the head of the train in the last of the series brought about
a “block” of the two parties. Upon a table was a lump of faded velvet
and tarnished gold lace, frayed and almost shapeless.
T. A. (beamingly). “The saddle upon which Queen Elizabeth rode,
on the occasion of her memorable visit to Kenilworth. She had just
given Kenilworth to Leicester, you remember, as a love-token. He
was a Warwick (!); so the saddle has naturally remained in the
family. An interesting and perfectly authenticated relic. Elizabeth
invented side-saddles, as you are all aware. This was manufactured
to order. It is something to see the saddle on which Queen Elizabeth
rode. And on such an occasion! It makes an individual, as it were—
thrill! Clara! where are you, my dear.” A pretty little girl came
forward, blushingly. “Put your hand upon it, my child! Now—you can
tell them all at home you have had your hand upon the place where
Queen Elizabeth sat on!”
“Is there no pound in Warwick for vagrant donkeys?” muttered
Lex, a youth in our section of the company.
He had been abroad but three weeks, and the species, if not the
genus, was a novelty to him. Nor had we, when as strange to the
sight and habits of the creature as was he, any adequate prevision
46. of the annoyance he would become—what a spot, in his ubiquity and
irrepressibleness, upon our feasts of sight-seeing. Caput had, as
usual, a crumb of consolation for himself and for us when we had
shaken ourselves free from our country-people at the castle-door by
taking a different route from theirs through the grounds.
“At any rate, he knew who Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn and
Elizabeth were, and was not altogether ignorant of Leicester and
Kenilworth. We need not be utterly ashamed of him. Only—we will
wait until he has been to look at the Warwick Vase before we go in. I
can live without hearing its history from his lips.”
A notable race have been the Warwicks in English legends and
history, for scores of generations. Princely in magnificence; doughty
in war; in love, ardent; in ambition, measureless. Under Plantagenet,
Tudor, Stuart, and Guelph, they have never lacked a man to stand
near the throne and maintain worthily their dignity. But, in the long
avenue of stateliness there are heads loftier than their fellows. Once
in an age, one has stood grandly apart, absorbent of such active
interest and living sympathy as we cannot bestow upon family or
clan.
As at Carisbrooke, Charles Stuart and his hapless daughter are
continually present to our imagination; and the grandmother, whose
head, like his, rolled in the sawdust of an English scaffold, glides a
pale, lovely shade with us through the passages of Holyrood; as at
Kenilworth, we think of Elizabeth, the guest, more than of Leicester,
the host, and in Trinity Church at Coventry, pass carelessly by
painted windows exquisite in modern workmanship, to seek in an
obscure aisle the patched fragment of glass that commemorates the
chaste Godiva’s sacrifice for her people,—so there was for us one
Lord of Warwick Castle, one Hero of Warwickshire. I shall confess to
so many sentimental weaknesses, so many historical heresies in the
course of this volume, that I may as well divulge this pampered
conceit frankly and without apology.
47. For us—foremost and pre-eminent among the mighty men of the
house of Warwick who have “found their hands” for battle and for
statecraft since the foundations of Cæsar’s Tower were laid, stands
Earl Guy, Goliath and Paladin of the line. Of his deeds of valor,
authentic and mythical, the witch at the Lodge has much to tell—the
traditionary lore of the district, more.
“I am not Samson, nor Sir Guy, nor Colbrand,”
Shakspeare makes a man of the people say. Sir Guy overthrew and
slew the giant Colbrand in the year 926, according to Dugdale. Is
not the story of this and a hundred other feats of arms recorded in
the “Booke of the most victoryous Prince Guy of Warwick”? When he
fell in love with the Lady Lettice—(or Phillis—traditions disagree
about the name), the fairest maiden in the kingdom, she set him on
to perform other prodigies of valor in the hope of winning her hand.
In joust and in battle-field, at home and afar, he wore her colors in
his helmet and her image in his heart.
“She appoynted unto Earl Guy many and grievous tasks, all of
which he did. And soe in tyme it came to pass that he married her.”
They lived in Warwick Castle, a fortress then, in reality, and of
necessity, for a few peaceful years. How many we do not know, only
that children were born unto them, and that Lettice, laying aside the
naughtiness of early coquetry, grew gentler, more lovable and more
fond each day, while Earl Guy waxed silent and morose under the
pressure of a mysterious burden, never shared with the wife he
adored and had periled his soul to win. Suddenly and secretly he
withdrew to the cell of a holy hermit who lived but three miles away,
and was lost to the world he had filled with rumors of “derring-
doing.” The Countess Lettice, distracted by grief at the
disappearance of her lord, and the failure of her efforts to trace the
direction of his flight, without a misgiving that while her detectives—
who must have been of the dullest—scoured land and sea in search
of the missing giant, he was hidden within sight of the turret-
windows of Guy’s Tower—withdrew into the seclusion of her castle
48. and gave herself up to works of piety and benevolence. Guy’s
children had her tenderest care; next to them her poor tenantry.
Upon stated days of the week a crowd of these pensioners
presented themselves at her gates and were fed by her servants.
Among them came for—some say, twenty, others, forty years, a
beggar, bent in figure, with muffled features, in rags, and
unaccompanied by so much as a dog, who silently received his dole
of the Countess’s charity and went his way challenged by none. We
hope, in hearing it, that the Lady Lettice, her fair face the lovelier for
the chastening of her great grief, sometimes showed herself to the
waiting petitioners. If she did, weeping had surely dulled her vision
that she did not recognize Earl Guy under his labored disguise, for
he was a Saul even among brawny Saxons and the semi-barbarous
islanders. If the eremite had such chance glimpses of his love, they
were the only earthly consolation vouchsafed him in the tedious life
of mortification and prayer. While Lettice, in her bower among her
maidens, prayed for his return, refusing all intercourse with the gay
world, her husband divided his time between the cave where he
dwelt alone and the oratory of the hermit-monk where he spent
whole days in supplication, prone upon the earth.
Poor, tortured, ignorant soul! grand in remorse and in penance as
in war and in love! He confessed often to the monk, seldom
speaking to him at other times. The priest kept faithfully the dread
secrets confided to him. His absolution, if he granted it, did not ease
the burdened soul. The end came when the long exile had dried up
life and spirit. From his death-bed Earl Guy sent to his wife, by the
hand of one of her hinds, a ring she had given him in the days of
their wedded joy, “praying her, for Jesu’s sake to visit the wretch
from whom it came.” He died in her faithful arms. They were buried,
side by side, near his cave.
This is still pointed out to visitors,—a darksome recess, partly
natural, enlarged by burrowing hands,—perhaps by those of the
“victoryous Prince Guy.”
49. I drew from the Leamington Library, one Saturday afternoon, a
queer little book, prepared under the auspices of a local
archæological society, and treating at some length of recent
discoveries in Guy’s Cave by an eminent professor of the
comparatively new science of classic archæology. Far up in one
corner he had uncovered rude cuttings in the rock, and with infinite
patience and ingenuity, obtained an impression of them. The surface
of the stone is friable; the letters are such clumsy Runic characters
as a warrior of the feudal age would have made had he turned his
thoughts to penmanship. The language is a barbarous Anglo-Saxon.
But they have made out Lettice’s name, twice repeated, and in
another place, Guy’s. This last is appended to a line of prayer for
“relief from this heavy”—or “grievous”—“load.”
I read the treatise aloud that evening, excited and triumphant.
“Now, who dare ridicule us for believing in Prince Guy?”
“It all fits in too well,” said candid Prima, sorrowfully.
But the local savans do not discredit the discovery on that
account. We drove out to Guy’s Cliff the next afternoon to attend
service in the family chapel of the Percys, whose handsome mansion
is built hard by. The stables are hewn out of the same rocky ridge in
which Guy dug his cell. The chapel occupies the site of the old
oratory. The bell was tinkling for the hour of worship as we entered
the porch. It is a pretty little building, of gray stone, as are the
surrounding offices, and on this occasion was tolerably well filled
with servants and tenants of “the Family.” In a front slip sat the
worshippers from the Great House—an old lady in widow’s
mourning, who was, we were told, Lady Percy, and three portly
British matrons, simple in attire and devout in demeanor. A much
more august personage, pursy and puffing behind a vast red
waistcoat, whom we supposed to be Chief Butler on week days and
verger on Sabbath, assigned to us a seat directly back of the ladies,
and, what was of more consequence in our eyes, in a line with a
niche in which stands a gigantic statue of Earl Guy. This was set up
50. on the site of the oratory, two hundred years after his death, by the
first of the Plantagenets, Henry II.
“Our lord, the King, has each day a school for right well-lettered
men,” says a chronicler of his reign. “Hence, his conversation that he
hath with them is busy discussing of questions. None is more honest
than our king in speaking, ne in alms largess. Therefore, as Holy
Writ saith, we may say of him—‘His name is a precious ointment,
and the alms of him all the church shall take.’”
Whether as an erudite antiquarian, or as a pious son of the
church he caused this statue to be placed here, History, nor its elder
sister, Tradition informs us. We may surmise shrewdly, and less
charitably, that repentant visitings of conscience touching his marital
infidelities, or the scandal of Fair Rosamond, or peradventure, the
desire to appease the manes of the murdered Becket had something
to do with the offering. The effigy was thrown down in the ruin of
the oratory in the Civil Wars, and for many years, lay forgotten in the
rubbish. The Percys have raised it with reverent hands, and set it—
sadly broken and defaced—in the place of honor in their chapel.
There was charming incongruity in the aspect of the towering
gray figure, with one uplifted arm from which sword or battle-axe
has fallen, and the appointments and occupants of the temple. The
head is much disfigured, worn away, more than shattered. But there
is majesty in the outlines and attitude. Our eyes strayed to it oftener,
dwelt upon it longer, than on the fresh-colored face of the spruce
Anglican who intoned the service and read a neat little homily upon
the 51st Psalm, prefaced by a modest mention of David’s sin in the
matter of Uriah the Hittite. From what depth of blood-guiltiness had
our noble recluse entreated deliverance in a day when blood
weighed lightly upon the souls of brave men?
The Sabbath light flowed through the stained windows of the
chancel and bathed in blessing, the feet of the graven figure; the
lifted arm menaced no more, but signified supplication as we
prayed:
51. “Spare Thou those who confess their sins!”
—was tossed aloft in thanksgiving in the last hymn:—
“O Paradise, O Paradise!
Who doth not crave for rest?
Who would not seek the happy land
Where they that love are blest?
Where loyal hearts and true
Stand ever in the light,
All rapture through and through,
In God’s most holy sight.”
53. CHAPTER VI.
Shakspeare and Irving.
E had “Queen’s weather” for most of our excursions in
England, and no fairer day than that on which we went to
Stratford-on-Avon.
The denizens of the region give the first sound of a to the name
of the quiet river—as in fate. I do not undertake to decide whether
they, or we are correct. Their derelictions upon the H question are so
flagrant as to breed distrust of all their inventions and practice in
pronunciation. (Although we did learn to say “Tems”—very short—for
“T’ames.”)
I wish, for the benefit of future tourists who may read these
pages, that I had retained the address of the driver—and I believe
the owner—of the waggonette we secured for our drives in
Warwickshire. It held our party of six comfortably, leaving abundant
space in the bottom and under the seats for hamper and wraps, and
was a stylish, easy-running vehicle. The coachman was a fine young
fellow of, perhaps, six-and-twenty, civil, obliging, and, in our
experience, an exceptionally intelligent member of his class. In this
conveyance, and with such pilotage, we set out on July 27th, upon
one of our red-letter pilgrimages—fore-ordained within our, for once,
prophetic souls ever since, as ten-year old children, we used to read
Shakspeare secretly in the garret on rainy Saturdays.
It was an old copy relegated to the lumber-chest as too shabby
for the family library. One side of the calf-skin cover was gone, and
luckily for the morals of the juvenile student, “Venus and Adonis”
and most of the sonnets had followed suite. But an engraved head
of William Shakspeare was protected by the remaining cover and
had left a shadow-picture, in white-and-yellow, upon the tissue-
54. paper next it. After the title-page followed a dozen or so of
biography, which we devoured as eagerly as we did “The Tempest,”
“Julius Cæsar,” and “Macbeth.” We had read Mrs. Whitney’s always-
and-everywhere charming “Sights and Insights,” before and since
leaving America, and worn Emory Ann’s “realizing our geography” to
shreds by much quoting. To-day, we were realizing our Shakspeare
and “Merry” England.
The drive was surpassingly lovely. The smoothness of the road
was, in itself, a luxury. It is as evenly-graded and free from stones
and ruts as a bowling-alley. One prolific topic of conversation is
denied the morning-callers and bashful swains of Warwickshire. They
cannot discuss the “state of the roads,” their uniform condition being
above criticism. The grass grew quite up to the edge of the highway,
but was shaven and weedless as a lawn. There were hedge-rows
instead of fences, and at intervals, we had enchanting glimpses up
intersecting ways of what we had heard and read of all our lives, yet
in which we scarcely believed until we saw, in their beauty and
picturesqueness, real lanes. The banks, sloping downward from the
hedges into these, were clothed with vines, ferns and field-flowers.
One appreciates the exquisite fidelity of such sketches from Nature
as,—
“I know a bank on which the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine—”
after seeing the lanes between Leamington and Stratford-on-Avon.
Double rows of noble trees screened us from the sun for a mile at a
time, and the hedges, so skillfully clipped that the sides and rounded
tops were never marred by redundant growth, yet bearing no sign of
the shears in stubby or naked stems, were walls of richest verdure
throughout the route. The freshness and trimness of the English
landscape is a joy and wonder forever to those unused to the
perfection of agriculture which is the growth of centuries. There is
the finish and luxuriance of a pleasure-garden in every prospect in
55. these midland counties, and, forgetting that the soil has
acknowledged a master in the husbandman for more than a
thousand years, and that, for more than half that time, the highest
civilization known to man has held reign in this tiny island, we are
tempted to think discontentedly of the contrast offered by our own
magnificent, and, by contrast, crude spaces. It was not because of
affectation or lack of patriotism that, upon our return home, the
straggling fences, clogged with alder and brambles, the ragged
pastures and gullied hillsides were a positive pain to sight and heart.
Any one who has seen a good photograph of Shakspeare’s house
knows exactly how it looks. The black timbers of the frame-work are
visible from the outside. The spaces between the beams are filled
with cement or plaster. There are three gables in front, the third, at
the upper corner, broader and higher than the others. The chimney
is in the end-gable, joining this last at right angles, and is covered
with ivy. A pent-house protects the main entrance. Wide latticed
windows light the ground-floor; a latticed oriel projects from the
second story of the taller division of the building. Smaller casements
in line with this are set in each of the principal upper rooms. The
house is flush with the street, and is probably smarter in its
“restoration,” than when Master John Shakspeare, wool-dealer, lived
here. We entered, without intervening vestibule or passage, a square
room, the ceiling of which was not eight feet high. A peasant’s
kitchen, that was also best-room, with a broken stone floor and
plastered walls checquered by hewn beams.
Two sisters, who dressed, looked, moved and spoke absurdly
alike, are the custodians of the cottage. One met us with a
professional droop of a not-elastic figure, a mechanical smile and an
immediate plunge into business:
“After the removal of the Shakspeare family from this humble
tenement, it was leased to a prosperous butcher, who occupied this
room as a shop. That was, indeed, a sad desecration, and one that
accounts for the dilapidation of the floor, it having been shattered by
chopping meat upon it.”
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