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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2008 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/firstimpressionsOOmillrich 
 
FIRST IMPRESSIONS 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 
 
 BY HUGH MILLER, 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'the OLD RED SANDSTONE,' ETC. ETC. 
 
 ' Do you fiot think a man may be the -wiser (/ had almost said the better) 
 for going a hundred or two of miles .?'— Gray's Letters. 
 
 EI 
 
 
 EDINBURGH: 
 WILLIAM P. NIMMO. 
 
 1869. 
 

 TO THE READER. 
 
 Times have changed since our earlier British Novelists, when 
 they sought to make the incidents lie thick in their fictions, 
 gave them the form of a journey, and sent their heroes a tra- 
 velling over England. Tlie one-half of "Tom Jones," two-thirds 
 of " Joseph Andrews," not a few of the most amusing chapters 
 in "Roderick Random" and "Lauucelot Greaves," and the 
 whole of "Humphrey Clinker," are thrown into this form. 
 They are works of English travels ; and the adventures with 
 which they are enlivened arise by the wayside. 
 
 It would be rather a difficult matter in these later times to 
 make a novel out of an English tour. The countiy, measured 
 by day's journeys, has gro\vn nine-tenths smaller than it was in 
 the times of Fielding and Smollett The law has become too 
 strong for Captain Macheath the highwayman, and the public 
 too knowing for Mr. Jenkinson the swindler. The joumeyer 
 by moonlight, who accidentally loses his road, stumbles on no 
 " Hermit of the Hill," wrapped up in a grotesque dress of skins ; 
 but merely encounters, instead, some suspicious gamekeeper, 
 taking his niglit-rounds in behalf of the Squire's pheasants. 
 When mill-dams give way during the rains, honest Mat Brambles 
 
 k 
 
VI TO THE READER. 
 
 do not discover, in consequence, their affinity to devoted 
 Humphrey Clinkers : there is merely a half-hour's stoppage of 
 the train, barren of incident, save that the male passengers get 
 out to smoke, while the ladies sit still. And as for the fre- 
 quent tragedy of railway collision accidents, it has but little of 
 the classic about it, and is more appropriately recorded in news- 
 paper columns, struck off for the passing day, than in pages of 
 higher pretensions written for to-morrow. England has become 
 a greatly less fertile field of adventure than when, according to 
 the Anglioe Metropolis for 1690, the "weekly waggon of 
 Richard Hamersly the carrier " formed the sole conveyance, for 
 passengers who did not ride horses of their own, between 
 Brumegham and the capital. 
 
 But though the age of personal adventure has to a certainty 
 gone by, the age which has succeeded is scarcely less fertile in 
 incident on a larger scale, and of a greatly more remarkable 
 character. It would seem as if the same change which has 
 abridged the area of the country had given condensation to its 
 history. We are not only travelling, but also, as a people, 
 living fast ; and see revolutions, which were formerly the slow 
 work of ages, matured in a few brief seasons. Opinion during 
 the last twenty years has accomplished, though in a reverse 
 order, the cycle of the two previous centuries. From the Re- 
 formation to the Revolution, the ecclesiastical reigned paramount 
 in men's minds : from the Revolution to the breaking out of 
 the first American war — a quiet time in the main — Govern- 
 ments managed their business much through the medium of 
 individual influence, little personal interests carried the day, 
 and monarchs and mioisters bulked large in the forefront of 
 the passing events : from the first American war till the rise of 
 
TO THE READER. Vll 
 
 Napoleon, the hot political delirium raged wide among the 
 masses, and even statesmen of the old school learned to recog- 
 nise the people as a power. Now, such in effect has been the 
 cycle of the last twenty years. The reign of George the Fourth 
 was also that of personal and party influence. With the ao- 
 cession of William the political fever again broke out, and swept 
 the country in a greatly more alterative and irresistible form 
 than at first. And now, here, in the times of Victoria, are we 
 scarce less decidedly enveloped in the stili thickening ecclesi- , 
 astical element than our ancestors of the sixteenth century. If 
 there be less of personal adventure in the England of the pre- 
 sent day than in that of Queen Anne and the two first Georges, 
 there is, as if to make amends, greatly more of incident in the 
 history of the masses. It has been remarked by some students 
 of the Apocalypse, that the course of the predicted events at 
 first move slowly, as, one after one, six of the seven seals are 
 opened ; that on the opening of the seventh seal, the progress is 
 so considerably quickened that the seventh period proves as fertile 
 in events — represented by the sounding of the seven trumpets 
 — as the foregoing six taken together ; and that on the soimd- 
 ing of the seventh trumpet, so great is the further acceleration, 
 that there is an amount of incident condensed in tins seventh 
 part of the seventh period, equal, as in the former case, to that 
 of all the previous six parts in one. There are three cycles, it 
 has been said, in the scheme — cycle within cycle ; the second 
 comprised within a seventh portion of the first, and the third 
 within a seventh portion of the second. Be this as it may, we 
 may at least see something that exceedingly resembles it, in that 
 actual economy of change and revolution manifested in English 
 history for the last two centuries. It would seem as if events, 
 
Vlll TO THE EEADER. 
 
 in their downward course, had come under the influence of that 
 law of gravitation through which falling bodies increase in 
 speed as they descend, according to the squares of the distances. 
 Though there may be little to encounter in such a state of 
 society, there must of necessity be a good deal to observe : the 
 traveller may have few incidents to relate, and yet many ap- 
 pearances to describe. He finds himself in the circumstances 
 of the inariner who sits listlessly in the calm and sunshine of a 
 northern summer, and watches the ever-changing aspect of some 
 magnificent iceberg, as its sun-gilt pinnacles sharpen and at- 
 tenuate, and its deep fissures widen and extend, and the inces- 
 sant rush of the emancipated waters is heard to re-echo from 
 amid the green light of the dim twilight caverns within. So- 
 ciety in England, in the present day, exists, like the thawing 
 iceberg, in a transition state, and presents its consequent shifts 
 ings of aspect and changes of feature ; and such is the peculiar 
 degree of sensitiveness at which the Government of the country 
 has arrived — ^partly, it would seem, from the fluctuating nature 
 of the extended basis of representation on which it now rests — 
 that, like some nervous valetudinarian, open to every influence 
 of climate and the weather, there is scarce a change that can 
 come over opinion, or affect the people in even their purely 
 physical concerns, which does not more or less fully index it- 
 self in the statute-book. The autumn of 1845, in which I 
 travelled over England, was ungenial and lowering, and I saw 
 wheaten fields deeply tinged with brown — an effect of the soak- 
 ing rains — and large tracts of diseased potatoes. A season 
 equally bad, however, twenty years ago, would have failed to 
 influence the politics of the country. Its frequent storms might 
 have desolated the fruits of the earth, but they would have 
 
TO THE EEADEB. IX 
 
 made no impression on tlie statutes at large. But the etonns 
 of 1845 proved greatly more influential. They were included 
 in the cycle of rapid change, and anuihilated at once the Pro- 
 tectionist policy and party of the empire. And amid the fer- 
 menting components of English society there may be detected 
 elements of revolution in their first causes, destined, apparently, 
 to exercise an influence on public afiairs at least not less con- 
 siderable than the rains and tempests of the Autumn of Forty- 
 Five. The growing Tractarianism of the National Church 
 threatens to work greater changes than the bad potatoes, and 
 the semi-infidel liberalism of the country, fast passing into an 
 aggressive power, than the damaged corn* 
 
 The reader will find in the following pages, as from these 
 remarks he may be led to anticipate, scarce any personal anec- 
 dote or adventure : they here and there record a brief dialogue 
 by the wayside, or in some humble lodging-house, and here and 
 there a sohtary stroll through a wood, or a thoughtful lounge 
 in a quarry ; but there is considerably more of eye and ear in 
 tliem — of things seen and heard — than of aught else. Tliey 
 index, however, not much of what he might be led equally to 
 expect — those diagnostic symptoms impressed on the face of 
 society, that indicate the extensive changes, secular and ecclesi- 
 astical, which seem so peculiarly characteristic of the time. 
 The journey of which they form a record was undertaken purely 
 for purposes of relaxation, in that state of indifierent healtli, 
 and consequent languor, which an over-strain of the mental 
 facidties usually induces, and in which, like the sick animal thai 
 secludes itself from the herd, man prefers walking apart firom 
 his kmd, to seeking them out in the bustle and turmoil of active 
 life, there to note peculiarities of aspect or character, like an 
 
X TO THE READEE. 
 
 adventurous artist taking sketches amid the heat of a battla 
 They will, however, lead the reader who accompanies me in 
 my rambles considerably out of the usual route of the tourist, 
 into sequestered corners, associated with the rich literature of 
 England, or amid rocks and caverns, in which the geologist finds 
 curious trace of the history of the country as it existed during 
 the long cycles of the bygone creations. I trust I need scarce 
 apologize to the general reader for my frequent transitions from 
 the actual state of things, to those extinct states which obtained 
 in what is now England during the geologic periods. The art, 
 so peculiar to the present age, of deciphering the ancient hiero- 
 glyphics, sculptured on the rocks of our country, is gradually 
 extending from the few to the many : it will be comparatively 
 a common accomplishment half a generation hence; and when 
 the hard names of the science shall have become familiar enough 
 no longer to obscure its poetry, it will be foimd that what I 
 have attempted to do will be done, proportionally to their 
 measure of ability, by travellers generally. In hazarding the 
 prediction, I build on the fact, that it is according to the intel- 
 lectual nature of man to delight in the metaphor and the simile 
 — in pictures of the past and dreams of the future — in short, 
 in whatever introduces amid one set of figures palpable to the 
 senses, another visible but to the imagination, and thus blends 
 the ideal with the actual, like some fanciful allegorist, sculptor, 
 or painter, who mixes up with his groups of real personages, 
 qualities and dispositions embodied in human form — angelic 
 virtues with wings growing out of their shoulders, and brutal 
 vices furnished with tails and claws. And it is impossible, such 
 being the mental constitution of the species, to see the events 
 of other creations legibly engraved all around, as with an iron 
 
TO THE READER. XI 
 
 pen, on the face of nature, without letting the mind loose to 
 expatiate on those historic periods to which the record so gra- 
 phically refers. The geologist in our own country feels himself 
 in exactly the circumstances of the traveller who journeys amid 
 the deserts of Sinai, and sees the front of almost every precipice 
 roughened with antique inscriptions of which he had just dis- 
 covered the key — inscriptions that transport him from the 
 silence and solitude of the present, to a darkly remote past, 
 when the loneliness of the wilderness was cheered by the white 
 glitter of unnumbered tents, and the breeze, as it murmured by, 
 went laden with the cheerful hum of a great people. 
 
 It may be judged, I am afraid, that to some of the localities 
 I devoted too much, and to some too little time, in proportion 
 to the degree of interest which attached to them. The Lea- 
 sowes detained me considerably longer than Stratford-on-Avon ; 
 and I oftener refer to Shenstone than to Shakspere. It wiU, I 
 trust, be found, however, that I was influenced in such cases by 
 no suspicious sympathy with the little and the mediocre ; and that 
 if I preferred at times the less fertile to the richer and better 
 field, it has been simply, not because I failed to estimate their 
 comparative values, but because I found a positive though scanty 
 harvest awaiting me on the one, and on the other the originally 
 luxuriant swathe cut down and carried away, and but a vacant 
 breadth of stubble left to the belated gleaner. Besides, it is 
 not in his character as a merely tasteful versifier, but as a 
 master in the art of developing the beauties of landscape, that 
 I have had occasion to refer to Shenstone. He is introduced to 
 the reader as the authoi' of the Leasowes — a work which cost 
 him more thought and labour than all his other compositions 
 put together, and which the general reader, who has to prose- 
 
 ^ 
 
Xii TO THE EEADER. 
 
 cute his travels by the fireside, can study but at second hand — 
 as it now exists in sketches such as mine, or as it existed, at 
 the death of its author, in the more elaborate description of 
 Dodaley. It is thus not to a minor poet that I have devoted a 
 chapter or two, but to a fine rural poem, some two or three 
 hundred acres in extent, that cannot be printed, and that exists 
 nowhere in duplicate. 
 
 It does matter considerably in some things that a man's 
 cradle should have been rocked to the north of the Tweed ; and 
 as I have been at less pains to suppress in my writings the 
 peculiarities of the Scot and the Presbyterian than is perhaps 
 common with my country-folk and brother Churchmen, the 
 Englishman will detect much in these pages to remind him that 
 mine was rocked to the north of the Tweed very decidedly. I 
 tnist, however, that if he deem me in the main a not ill- 
 natured companion, he may feel inclined to make as large 
 allowances for the peculiar prejudices of my training, as he sees 
 me making on most occasions for the peculiar prejudices of his ; 
 that he may forgive me my partialities to my own poor coimtry, 
 if they do not greatly warp my judgment nor swallow up my 
 love for my kind ; that he may tolerate my Presbyterianism, if 
 he find it rendering a reason for its preferences, and not very 
 bigoted in its dislikes ; and, in short, that we may part friends, 
 not enemies, if he can conclude, without overstraining his charity, 
 that I have communicated fairly, and in no invidious spiiit, my 
 First Impressions of England and its People. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 T 
 
 Led to convert an intended voyage to Orkney into a journey to Eng- 
 land — Objects of the journey — Carter Fell — The Border Line — 
 Well for England it should have been so doggedly maintained by 
 the weaker country — Otterbum — The Mountain Limestone in 
 England, what it is not in Scotland, a true Mou'itain Limestone 
 — Scenery changes as we enter the Coal Meah ures — ^Wretched 
 weather — Newcastle— Methodists — Controversy on the Atone- 
 ment — The popular mind in Scotland mainly developed by its 
 theology — Newcastle Museum ; rich in its Geology and its Anti- 
 quities ; both branches of one subject — Geologic history of the 
 Roman Invasion — Durham Cathedral — The Monuments of Na- 
 ture greatly more enduring than those of man — Cyathophyllum 
 Fungites — The spotted tubers, and what they indicated — The 
 destiny of a nation involved in the growth of a minute fungus, 
 
 CHAPTEB n. 
 
 Weather still miserably bad ; suited to betray the frequent poverty of 
 English landscape — Gloomy prospects of the agriculturist — Corn- 
 Law League — York ; a true sacerdotal city — Cathedral ; noble 
 exterior ; interior not less impressive ; Congreve's sublime De- 
 scription — Unpardonable solecism — Procession — Dean Cockburn ; 
 crusade against the geologists — Cathedral service unworthy of 
 the Cathedral — Walk on the city ramparts — Flat fertility of the 
 surrounding country — The more interesting passages in the his- 
 tory of York supplied by the makers — R< binson Crusoe — Jeanie 
 Deans — Trial of Eugene Aram — Aram's real character widely 
 different from that drawn by the novelist, .... 
 
 17 
 
 lU 
 
CONTENTS, 
 
 CHAPTER IIL 
 
 Quit York for Manchester — A character — Quaker lady — Peculiar fea- 
 ture in the husbandry of the cloth district — Leeds — Simplicity 
 manifested in the geologic framework of English scenery — The 
 denuding agencies almost invariably the sole architects of the 
 landscape — Manchester ; characteristic peculiarities ; the Irwell ; 
 collegiate church ; light and elegant proportions of the building ; 
 its grotesque sculptures ; these indicative of the scepticism of 
 the age in which they were produced — St. Bartholomew's day — • 
 Sermon on Saints' day — Timothy's grandmother — The Puseyite 
 a High-churchman become earnest — Passengers of a Sunday- 
 evening train — Sabbath amusement not very conducive to happi- 
 ness — The economic value of the Sabbath ill understood by the 
 utilitarian — Testimony of history on the point, . . .29 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Quit Manchester for Wolverhampton — Scenery of the New Red Sand- 
 stone ; apparent repetition of pattern — The frequent marshes of 
 England ; curiously represented in the national literature ; in- 
 fluence on the national superstitions — Wolverhampton — Pecu- 
 liar aspect of the Dudley coal field ; striking passage in its his- 
 tory — The rise of Birmingham into a great manufacturing town, 
 an effect of the development of its mineral treasures — Upper 
 Ludlow deposit ; Aymestry limestone ; both deposits of peculiar 
 interest to the Scotch geologist — The LingulaLewisii and Tere- 
 hratula Wilsoni — General resemblance of the Silurian fossils to 
 those of the mountain limestone — First-born of the vertebrata 
 yet known — Order of creation — The Wren's Nest — Fossils of the 
 Wenlock limestone ; in a state of beautiful keeping — Anecdote 
 — Asaphus Caudatus; common, it would seem, to both the Silu- 
 rian and Carboniferous rocks — Limestone miners — Noble gallery 
 excavated in the hill, 48 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Dudley ; significant marks of the mining town — Kindly Scotch land- 
 lady — Temperance coffee-house — Little Samuel the teetotaller — 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Curious incident — Anecdote — The resuscitated spinet — ^Forbear- 
 ance of little Samuel— Dudley Museum ; singularly rich in ISilu- 
 rian fossils — Megalichthys Hibherti — Fossils from Mount Le- 
 banon ; very modern compared with those of the Hill of Dudley — 
 Geology peculiarly fitted to revolutionize one's ideas of modem 
 and ancient — Fossils of extreme antiquity furnished by a Can- 
 adian township that had no name twenty years ago — Fossils 
 from the old Egyptian desert found to be comparatively of yes- 
 terday — Dudley Castle and Castle-hill — Cromwell's mission — 
 ■ Castle finds a fiiithful chronicler in an old serving-maid — Her 
 narrative — Caves and fossils of the Castle-hill — Extensive excar 
 vations — Superiority of the natural to the artificial cavern — 
 Fossils of the Scottish Grauwacke — Analogy between the female 
 lobster and trilobite, .63 
 
 lb 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Stourbridge — ^Eifect of Plutonic convulsion on the surrounding scenery 
 — Hagley ; description in the " Seasons"— Geology the true 
 anatomy of landscape — Geologic sketch of Hagley — I'he road to 
 the Races — The old stone-cutter — Thomson's Hollow — His visits 
 to Hagley — Shenstone'sUrn — Peculiarities of taste founded oiten 
 on a substratum of personal character-— Illustration — Kousseau — 
 Pope's Haunt — Lyttelton's high admiration of the genius of Pope 
 — Description — Singularly extensive and beautiful landscape ; 
 drawn by Thomson — Reflection — Amazing multiplicity of the 
 prospect illustrative of a peculiarity in the descriptions of the 
 "Seasons" — Addison's canon on landscape; corroborated by 
 Shenstone, 
 
 CHAPTER Vn. 
 
 Hagley parish church — The sepulchral marbles of the Lytteltons— 
 Epitaph on the Lady Lucy — The phrenological doctrine of here- 
 ditary transmission ; unsupported by history, save in a way in 
 which history can be made to support anything — Thomas Lord 
 Lyttelton ; his moral character a strange contrast to that of his 
 father— I'he elder Lyttelton ; his deathbed— Aberrations of the 
 younger Lord — Strange ghost story ; curious modes of account- 
 ing for it—Return to Stourbridge— Late Drive— Hales Owen, 104 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VnL 
 
 PAoa 
 Abbotsford and tbe Leasowes — Tlie one place naturally suggestive of 
 tbe otber — Shenstone — ^The Leasowes his most elaborate compo- 
 sition — The English squire and his mill — Hales Owen Abbey ; 
 interesting, the subject of one of Shenstone's larger poems — 
 The old anti-Popish feeling of England well exemplified by the 
 fact — Its origin and history — Decline — Infidelity naturally favour- 
 able to the resuscitation and reproduction of Popery — The two 
 naileresses — Cecilia and Delia — Skeleton description of the 
 Leasowes — Poetic filling up — The spinster — The fountain, .121 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Detour — The Leasowes deteriorated wherever the poet had built, and 
 improved wherever he had planted — View from the hanging 
 wood — Stratagem of the island screen — Virgil's grave — Mound 
 of the Hales Owen and Birmingham Canal ; its sad interference 
 with Shenstone's poetic description of the infancy of the Stour — 
 Vanished cascade and root-house — Somraerville's urn — " To all 
 friends round the Wrekin " — Biver scenery of the Leasowes ; 
 their great variety — Peculiar arts of the poet ; his vistas, when 
 seen from the wrong end, realizations of Hogarth's caricature — 
 Shenstone the greatest of landscape-gardeners — Estimate of John- 
 son — Goldsmith's history of the Leasowes ; their after history, 1S8 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Shenstone's verses — The singular unhappiness of his paradise — ^Eng- 
 lish cider — Scotch and English dwellings contrasted — The 
 nailers of Hales Owen ; their politics a century ago — Competion 
 of the Scotch nailers ; unsuccessful, and why — Samuel Salt, the 
 Hales Owen poet — Village Church — Salt-works at Droitvrich ; 
 their great antiquity — Appearance of the village — Problem fur- 
 nished by the salt deposits of England ; various theories — Rock- 
 salt deemed by some a volcanic product ; by others the deposition 
 of an overcharged sea ; by yet others the produce of vast lagoons 
 — Leland— • The manufacture of salt from sea-water superseded, 
 even in Scotland, by the rock-salt of England, . . . .154 
 
■^alk to tlie C 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 talk to tlie Clent Hills—Incideiit in a fruit-shop—St, Kenelm's 
 Chapel — Legend of St. Kenelm — Ancient village of Clent; its 
 appearance and character — View from the Clent Hills — Mr- 
 Thomas Moss — Geologic peculiarities of the landscape ; illustra- 
 tion — The Scotch drift — Boulders; these transported by the 
 agency of ice floes — Evidence of the former existence of a broad 
 ocean channel — The geography of the geologist — Aspect of the 
 earth ever changing — Geography of the palaeozoic period ; of the 
 secondary; of the tertiary — Ocean the great agent of change and 
 dilapidation, 168 
 
 CHAPTER XIL 
 
 Geological colouring of the landscape — Close proximity in this neigh- 
 bourhood of the various geologic systems — The Oolite; its medi- 
 cinal springs ; how formed — Cheltenham — Strathpefter — The sali 
 ferous system ; its organic remains and footprints — Record of curi- 
 ous passages in the history of the earlier reptiles — Salt deposits — 
 Theory — The abstraction of salt from the sea on a large scale pro- 
 bably necessary to the continued existence of its denizens — Lower 
 New Red Sandstone — Great geologic revolution— Elevation of the 
 trap — Hills of Clent ; era of the elevation — Coal Measures ; their 
 three forests in the neighbourhood of Wolverhampton — Compara- 
 tively small area of the Birmingham coal-field — Vast coal-fields 
 of the United States— Berkeley's prophecy — Old Red Sandstone 
 — Silurian system — Blank, 186 
 
 CHAPTER XITT. 
 
 Birmingham: incessant clamour of the place — Toy-shop of Britain ; 
 serious character of the games in which its toys are chiefly em- 
 ployed — Museum — Liberality of the scientific English — Musical 
 genius of Birmingham — Theory — Controversy with the Yorkers 
 — Anecdote — The English language spoken very variously by 
 the English; in most cases spokitn very ill — English type of per- 
 son — Attend a Puseyite chapel — Pusevism a feeble imitation of 
 Popery — Popish cathedral — Popery the true resting-place of the 
 Puseyite — Sketch of the rise and progress of the Puseyite prin- 
 ciple; its pm-posed object not attained; hostility to science — 
 English Funerals, 206 
 
 ^ 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 Drive from Birmingliani to Stratford rather tarae — Ancient building 
 in a modern -looking street; of rude and humble appearance — 
 "The Immortal Shakspere born in this house" — Description of 
 the interior — The walls and ceiling covered with names — Albums 
 — Shakspere, Scott, Dickens; greatly different in their intellectual 
 otature, but yet all of one family — Principle by wi)ich to take 
 their measure — No dramatist ever draws an intellect taller than 
 his own — Imitative faculty — The Reports of Dickens — Learning 
 of Shakspere — New Place — The Piev. Francis Gastrall — Stratford 
 Church — The poet's grave ; his bust; far superior to the idealized 
 representations — The Avon — The jubilee ; and Cowper's descrip- 
 tion of it — The true hero-worship — Quit Stratford for Olney — 
 Get into bad company by the way — Gentlemen of the Fancy — 
 Adventure, . . 228 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 Cowper; his singular magnanimity of character; argument furnished 
 by his latter religious history against the selfish philosophy — 
 Valley of the Ouse — Approach to Olney — Appearance of the 
 town — Cowper's house; parlour; garden — Pippin tree planted 
 by the Poet — Sunmier-house written within and without — John 
 Tawell — Delightful old woman — Weston-Underwood — Thomas 
 Scott's house — The paik of the Throckmortons— Walk described 
 in "The Task" — Wilderness — Ancient Avenue — Alcove; pro- 
 spect which it commands, as drawn by Cowper — Colonnade — 
 Kustic Bridge — Scene of the " Needless Alarm" — The milk 
 thistle, 248 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 Yardley Oak; of immense size and imposing appearance — Cowper's 
 description singularly illustrative of his complete mastery over 
 language — Peasant's Nest — The poet's vocatirm peculiarly one of 
 revolution — The school of Pope; supplanted in its unproductive 
 old age by that of Cowper — Cowper's Coadjutors in the work — 
 Economy of literary revolution — The old English yeoman — Quit 
 Olney — Companions in the journey — Incident — Newport Pagnell 
 — Mr. Bull and the French Mystics — Lady of the Fancy — Cham- 
 pion of all England — Pugilism — Anecdote, . . . .264 
 
CONTENTS. XIX 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 PA6» 
 
 Cowper and the geologists — Geology in the poet's days in a state of 
 great immaturity — Case diflferent now — Folly of committing the 
 Bible to a false science — Galileo — Geologists at one in all their 
 more important deductions; vast antiquity of the earth one of 
 these — State of the question — Illustration — Presumed thickness 
 of the fossiliferous strata — Peculiar order of their organic con- 
 tents; of their fossil fish in particular, as ascertained by Agassiz 
 — The geologic races of animals entirely different from those 
 which sheltered with Noah in the ark — Alleged discrepancy be- 
 tween geologic fact and the Mosiac record not real — Inference 
 based on the opening verses of the book of Genesis — Parallel 
 , passage adduced to prove the inference unsound — The supposi- 
 tion that fossils may have been created such examined ; unworthy 
 of the divine wisdom; contrary to the principles which regu- 
 late human belief; subversive of the grand argument founded 
 on design — The profounder theologians of the day not anti-geo- 
 logists — Geologic fact in reality of a kind fitted to perform im- 
 portant work in the two theologies, natural and revealed; sub- 
 versive of the " infinite series" argument of the atheist; sub- 
 versive, too, of the objection drawn by infidelity from an astrono- 
 mical analogy — Counter-objection — Illustration, . . . 282 
 
 CHAPTER XVIIL 
 
 The Penny-a-mile Train and its Passengers — Aiint Jonathan — Lon- 
 don by Night — St. Paul's ; the City as seen from the Dome — 
 The Lord Mayor's coach — Westminster Abbey — The Gothic 
 architecture a less exquisite production of the human mind than 
 the Grecian — Poets' Comer — The Mission of the Poets — The 
 tombs of the kings — The monument of James Watt — A humble 
 coffee-house and its frequenters — The woes of gt'nius in London — 
 Old 110 Thames Street— The Tower— The Thames Tunnel- 
 Longings of the true Londoner for rural life and the country ; 
 their influence on literature — The British Museum; its splendid 
 collection of fossil remains — Human skeleton of Guadaloupe — The 
 
 Egyptian Room — Domesticities of the ancient Egyptians — Cycle 
 
 ^Hk of reproduction — ^Tbe Mummies, 310 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 PA.OB 
 
 HarroW'On-tlie-Hill — Descent through the formations from the Ter- 
 tiary to the Coal Measures — Journey of a hurdred-and-twenty 
 miles northwards, identical, geologically, with a journey of a 
 mile and a quarter dovmwardi — English very unlike Scottish 
 landscape in its geologic framework — Birmingham fair — Credu- 
 lity of the rural English; striking contrast which they furnish 
 in this respect to their countrymen of the knowing type — The 
 English grades of intellectual character of immense range; more 
 in extremes than those of the Scotch — Front rank of British in- 
 tellect in which there stands no Scotchman; probable cause — A 
 class of English, on the other hand, greatly lower than the Scotch; 
 naturally less cunous; acquire, in consequence, less of the de- 
 veloping pabulum — The main cause of the difference to be found, 
 however, in the very dissimilar religious character of the two 
 countries — the Scot naturally less independent than the English- 
 man; strengthened, however, where his character most needs 
 strength, l)y his religion — The independence of the Englishman 
 subjected at the present time to two distinct adverse influences, 
 the modern Poor Law and the Tenant-at-will system — Walsall — 
 Liverpool — Sort of lodging-houses in which one is sure to meet 
 many Dissenters, 331 
 
 CHAPTER XX, 
 
 Dissent a Mid-formation Organism in England— Cliurch-of-England- 
 ism strong among the upper and lower classes ; its peculiar 
 principle of strength among the lower; among the upper — The 
 Church of England one of the strongest institutions of the country 
 — Puseyism, however, a canker-worm at its root; partial success 
 of the principle — Tlie type of English Dissent essentially differ- 
 ent from that of Scotland; the causes of the difference deep in 
 the diverse character of the two peoples — Insulated character of 
 the Englishman productive of Independency — Adhesive cha- 
 racter of the Scotch productive of Presbyterianism — Attempts to 
 legislate for the Scotch in Church matters on an English prin- 
 ciple always unfortunate — Erastianism; essentially a different 
 thing to the English Churchman from what it is to the Scot — 
 Reason why — Independent Scotch congregation in a rural dis- 
 trict — Rarely well based ; and why — Conclusion, . . . 847 
 
Librar 
 
 FIRST IMPRESSIONS 
 
 OF 
 
 ENGLANDAND ITS PEOPLE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Led to convert an intended voyage to Orkney into a journey to England — Objects of the 
 journey — Carter Fell— The Border Line — Well for England it should have been so 
 doggedly maintained by the weaker country — Otterbum — The Mountain Limestone 
 in England, what it is not in Scotland, a true Mountain Limestone — Scenery changes 
 as we enter the Coal Measures — Wretched weather — Newcastle — Methodists — Con- 
 troversy on the Atonement — The popular mind in Scotland mainly developed by its 
 theology — Newcastle Museum ; rich in its Geology and its Antiquities ; both branches 
 of one subject — Geologic history of the Roman invasion — Durham Cathedral — The 
 monuments of Nature greatly more enduring than those of man — Cyathophyllum 
 Fufiffites —The spotted tubers, and what they indicated — The destiny of a nation in- 
 Tolved in the growth of a minute fungus. 
 
 I HAD purposed visiting the Orkneys, and spending my few 
 weeks of autumn leisure in exploring the Old Red Sandstone of 
 these islands along the noble coast sections opened up by the 
 sea. My vacations during the five previous seasons had been 
 devoted to an examination of the fossiliferous deposits of Scot- 
 land. I had already in some degree acquainted myself with 
 the Palaeozoic and Secondary formations of the northern half of 
 the kingdom and the Hebrides. One vacation more w^ould have 
 acquainted me with those of Orkney also, and completed my 
 survey of Scotland to the north of the Grampians ; and I would 
 have reckoned at least half my self-imposed task at an end. 
 When labouring professionally, however, during the previous 
 winter and spring, I had, I am afraid, sometimes failed to re- 
 
2 FIRST BIPRESSIONS OF 
 
 member what the old chivalric knights used never to forget, 
 that '^man is but of mould ;" and I had, in consequence, sub- 
 jected the " mould " to a heavier pressure than, from its yielding 
 nature, it is suited to bear. And now that play-time had once 
 more come round, I found I had scarce health and strength enough 
 left me to carry me in quest of more. I could no longer un- 
 dertake, as formerly, long journeys a-foot in a wild country ; 
 nor scramble, with sure step, and head that never failed, along 
 the faces of tall precipices washed by the sea. And so, for 
 the time at least, I had to give up all thoughts of visiting 
 Orkney. 
 
 " I will cross the Border," I said, " and get into England. 
 I know the humbler Scotch better than most men — I have at 
 least enjoyed better opportunities of knowing them ; but the 
 humbler English I know only from hearsay. I will go and 
 live among them for a few weeks, somewhere in the midland 
 districts. I shall lodge in humble cottages, wear a humble 
 dress, and see what is to be seen by humble men only — society 
 without its mask. I shall explore, too, for myself, the forma- 
 tions wanting in the geologic scale of Scotland — the Silurian, 
 the Chalk, and the Tertiary ; and so, should there be future 
 years in store for me, I shall be enabled to resume my survey 
 of our Scottish deposits with a more practised eye than at pre- 
 sent, and with more extended knowledge." August was drag- 
 ging on to its close, through a moist and cloudy atmosphere ; 
 eveiy day had its shower, and some days half a dozen ; but I 
 hoped for clearer skies and fairer weather in the south ; and so, 
 taking my seat at Edinburgh on the top of the Newcastle coach, 
 I crossed Carter Fell a little after mid-day, and found myself 
 for the first time in England. The sun on the Scottish side 
 looked down clear and kindly on laug-uid fields surcharged with 
 moisture, that exhibited greener and yet greener tints as we as- 
 cended from the lowland districts to the uplands ; while on the 
 southern side, though all was fair in the foreground, a thick 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 3 
 
 sullen cloud hung low over the distant prospect, resembling the 
 smoke of some vast city. 
 
 And this was the famous Border-line, made good by the 
 weaker against the stronger nation — at how vast an amount of 
 l.^lood and suffering ! — for more than a thousand years. It wore 
 to-day, in the quiet sunshine, a look of recluse tranquillity, that 
 seemed wholly unconscious of the past. A tumbling sea of dark 
 green hills, delicately chequered with light and shadow, swelled 
 upwards on either side towards the line of boundary, like the 
 billows of opposing tide-ways, that rise over the general level 
 where the currents meet ; and passing on and away from wave- 
 top to wave-top, Uke the cork baulk of a fisherman's net afloat 
 on the swell, ran the separating line. But all was still and 
 motionless, as in the upper reaches of the Baltic, when the 
 \N'inter frost has set in. We passed on the Scottish side a group 
 of stalwart shepherds — solid, grave-featured men, who certainly 
 did not look as if they loved fighting for its own sake ; and on 
 the English side, drove by a few stout, ruddy hinds, engaged in 
 driving carts, who seemed just as little quarrelsome as their 
 Scottish neighbours. War must be intrinsically mischievous. 
 It must be something very bad, let us personify it as proudly as 
 we may, that coidd have set on these useful, peaceable people — 
 cast in so nearly the same mould, speaking the same tongue, 
 possessed of the same common nature, loveable, doubtless, in 
 some points, from the development of the same genial afi'ections 
 to knock one another on the head, simply because the one-half 
 of them had first seen the light on the one side of the hill, and 
 the other half on the other side. And yet such was the state 
 of things which obtained in this wild district for many hundred 
 years. It seems, however, especially well for England, since the 
 quarrel began at all, that it should have been so doggedly main- 
 tained by the weaker people — so well maintained, that the border 
 haralot, round which they struggled, in the days of the first Ed- 
 ward, as a piece of doubtful property, is a piece of r'oubtfiil pro 
 
4 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 perty still, and has, in royal proclamation and act of Parliament, 
 its own separate clause assigned to it," as tlie "town called Ber- 
 wick-upon-Tweed." It is quite enough for the English, as shown 
 by the political history of modem times, that they conquered Ire- 
 land ; had they conquered Scotland also, they would have been 
 ruined utterly. " One such victory more, and they would have 
 been undone." Men have long suspected the trade of the her(i 
 to be a bad one ; but it is only now they are fairly beginning 
 to learn, that of all great losses and misfortunes, his master 
 achievement — the taking of a nation — is the greatest and most 
 incurably calamitous. 
 
 The line of boundary forms the water-shed in this part of the 
 island ; the streams on the Scottish side trot away northwards 
 toward the valley of the Tweed ; while on the English side they 
 pursue a southerly course, and are included in the drainage of 
 the Tyne. The stream which runs along the bare open vaUey 
 on which we had now entered, forms one of the larger tribu- 
 taries of the latter river. But every thing seemed as Scottish 
 as ever — the people, the dwelling-houses, the country. I could 
 scarce realize the fact, that the little grey parish church with 
 the square tower, which we had just passed, was a church in 
 which the curate read the Prayer-Book every Sunday, and that 
 I had left behind me the Scottish law, under which I had been 
 living all life long till now, on the top of the hill. I had proof, 
 however, at our first English stage, that such was actually the 
 case. "Is all right?" asked the coachman, of a tall lanky 
 Northumbrian who had busied himself in changing the horses. 
 " Yez, all roit," was the reply ; " roit as the Church of Eng- 
 land." I was, it was evident, on Presbyterian ground no longer. 
 
 We passed, as the country began to open, a spot marked by 
 two of the crossed swords of our more elaborate maps ; they lie 
 thick on both sides of the Border, to indicate where the old 
 battle-fields were stricken; and the crossed swords of this 
 especial locality are celebrated in chronicle and song. A rude, 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. D 
 
 straggling village runs for some one or two hundred yards 
 along both sides of the road. On the left there is a group of 
 tall trees, elevated on a ridge, which they conceal ; and a bare, 
 undulating, somewhat wild country spreads around. All is quiet 
 and solitary ; and no scathe on the landscape corresponds with 
 the cross swords on the map. There were a few children at 
 play, as we passed, in front of one of the cottages, and two old 
 men sauntering along the road. And such now is Otterbum — 
 a name I never associated before, save with the two noble 
 ditties of Chevy Chase, the magnificent narrative of Froissart, 
 and the common subject of both ballads and narrative, however 
 various their descriptions of it — that one stem night's slaughter, 
 four hundred years ago, 
 
 " When the dead Douglas won the field " 
 
 It was well for the poor victors they had a Froissart to celebrate 
 them. For though it was the Scotch who gained the battle, 
 it was the English who had the writing of the songs ; and had 
 not the victors found so impartial a chronicler in the generous 
 Frenchman, the two songs, each a model in its own department, 
 would have proved greatly an overmatch for them in the end. 
 
 The wilder tracts of Northumberland are composed of the 
 Millstone Grit and Mountain Limestone; and never before had 
 I seen this latter deposit developed in a style that so bears out 
 the appropriateness of its name. It is in Northumberland, what 
 it is rarely or never in Scotland, a true Mountain Limestone, 
 that rises into tall hills, and sinks into deep valleys, and spreads 
 laterally over a vast extent of area. The ocean of the Carboni- 
 ferous era in England must have been greatly more persistent 
 and extended than the ocean whose deposits form the base of 
 tlie Coal Measures in the sister country : it appears to have lain 
 further from the contemporary land, and to have been much 
 less the subject of alternate upheavals and depressions. We 
 were several hours in driving over the formation. As we 
 
6 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 entered upon the trae Coal Measures, tlie face of the country 
 at once altered : the wild, open, undulating surface sunk into 
 a plain, laid out, far as the eye could reach, into fields closely 
 reticulated with hedge-rows; the farm-houses and gentlemen's 
 seats thickened as we advanced; and England assumed its pro- 
 per character. With a change of scenery, however, we experi- 
 enced a change of weather. We had entered into the cloud that 
 seemed so threatening in the distance from the top of Carter 
 Fell ; and a thick, soaking rain, without wind, accompanied by 
 a lazy fog that lay scattered along the fields and woods in de- 
 tached wreaths of grey, saddened the landscape. As we drove 
 on, we could see the dense smoke of the pit-engines forming a 
 new feature in the prospect ; the tall chimneys of Newcastle, 
 that seemed so many soot-black obelisks half lost in the turbid 
 atmosphere, came next in view ; and then, just as the evening 
 was falling wet and cheerless, we entered the town, through 
 muddy streets, and along ranges of melancholy-looking houses, 
 dropping from all their eaves, and darkened by the continuous 
 rain of weeks. I was directed by the coachman to by far the 
 most splendid temperance coffee-house I had ever seen ; but it 
 seemed too fine a lodging-house for harbouring the more cha- 
 racteristic English, and I had not crossed the Border to see 
 cosmopolites ; and so, tiu'ning away from the door, I succeeded 
 in finding for myself a humbler, but still ver}^ respectable house, 
 in a different part of the town. 
 
 There were several guests in the public room : some two or 
 three smart commercial gentlemen from the midland trading 
 towns ; two young Sheffield mechanics, evidently of the respects 
 able class, who earn high wages and take care of them ; and a 
 farmer or two from the country. In the course of the evening 
 we had a good deal of conversation, and some controversy. 
 The mechanics were Methodists, who had availed themselves of 
 a few days' leisure to see the north country, but more especially, 
 as I after^vards learned, to be present at a discussion on contro- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 7 
 
 verted points of theology, which was to take place in Newcastle 
 on the following evening, between a prodigiously clever preacher 
 of the New Connexion^ very unsound in his creed, of whom I 
 had never heard before, and a more orthodox preacher of the 
 same body, profound in his theology, of whom I had heard just 
 as little. From the peculiar emphasis placed by the two lads 
 on the word orthodox, I inferred that neither of them deemed 
 orthodoxy so intellectual a thing as the want of it ; and I ulti- 
 mately discovered that they were partisans of the clever preacher. 
 One of the two seemed anxious to provoke a controversy on his 
 favourite points ; but the commercial men, who appeared rather 
 amused to hear so much about religion, avoided all definite 
 statement; and the men from the country said nothing. A 
 person in black entered the room — not a preacher apparently, 
 but, had I met him in Scotland, I would have set him down for 
 at least an elder : and the young mechanics were gratified. 
 
 The man in black was, I found, a Calvinist, not, however, of 
 the most profound type ; the Methodists were wild nondescripts 
 in their theology, more Socinian than aught else, and yet not 
 consistently Socinian either. A Scottish religious controversy 
 of the present time regards the nature and exteyit of tlie atone- 
 ment ; the two Wesleyans challenged, I found, the very existence 
 of the doctrine. There was really no suoh thing as an atone- 
 ment, they said : the atonement was a mere orthodox view 
 taken by the Old Connexion. The Calvinist referred to the 
 ordinary evidences to prove it something more ; and so the con- 
 troversy went on, with some share of perverted ingenuity on the 
 one side, and a considerable acquaintance with Scripture doc- 
 trine on the other. A tall, respectable-looking man, with the 
 freshness of a country life palpable about him, had come in 
 shortly after the commencement of the discussion, and took 
 evidently some interest in it. He turned from speaker to 
 si)eaker, and seemed employed in weighing the statements on 
 both sides. At length he struck in, taking part against the 
 
O FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 Calviiiist. " Can it really be held," he said, " that the all- 
 powerful God — the Being who has no limits to his powers- 
 could not forgive sin without an atonement? That would be 
 limiting his illimitable power with a vengeance ! " The remark 
 would scarcely have arrested a theologic controversy on the same 
 nice point in Scotland — certainly not among the class of peasant 
 controversialists so unwisely satirized by Burns, nor yet among 
 the class who, in our own times, have taken so deep an interest 
 in the Church question ; but the English Calvinist seemed un- 
 furnished with a reply. 
 
 I was curious to see how the metaphysics of our Scotch Cal- 
 vinism would tell on such an audience ; and took up the subject 
 much in the way it might be taken up in some country church- 
 yard," ere the congregation had fully gathered, by some of the 
 ^' grave-livers " of the parish, or as it might be discussed in the 
 more northern localities of the kingdom, at some evening meeting 
 of " the men." I attempted showing, step by step, that God did 
 not give to himself his own nature, nor any part of it ; that it 
 exists as it is, as independently of his will as our human liature 
 exists as it is independently of ours ; that his moral nature, 
 like his nature in general, is underived, unalterable, eternal ; 
 and that it is this underived moral nature of the Godhead 
 which forms the al^solute law of his conduct in all his dealings 
 with his moral agents. " You are, I daresay, right," said the 
 countryman ; " but how does all this bear on the doctrine of 
 the atonement ?" 
 
 ^' Very directly on your remark respecting it," I replied. " It 
 shows us that the will and power of God, in dealing with the 
 sins of his accountable creature man, cannot, if we may so 
 speak, be arbitrary, unregulated power and will, but must 
 spring, of necessity, out of his underived moral nature. If it 
 be according to this moral nature, which constitutes the go- 
 verning law of Deity — the law which controls Deity — that 
 without the ' shedding of blood there can be no remission,' then 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 9 
 
 blood must be slied, or remission cannot be obtained : atone- 
 ment for sin there must be. If, on the contrary, there can be 
 remission without the shedding of blood, we may be infallibly 
 certain the unnecessary blood will not be demanded, nor the 
 superfluous atonement required. To believe otherwise would be 
 to believe that God deals with his moral agent man, on prin- 
 ciples that do not spring out of his own moral nature, but are 
 mere arbitrary results of an unregulated will." " But are you 
 not leaving the question, after all,'just where you found iiV 
 asked the countryman. " Not quite," I replied : " of God's 
 moral nature, or the conduct which springs out of it, we can 
 but know what God has been pleased to tell us : the fact of 
 the atonement can be determined but by revelation ; and I be- 
 lieve, with the gentleman opposite, that revelation determines it 
 very conclusively. But if fact it be, then must we hold that it 
 is a fact which springs directly out of that underived moral 
 nature of God which constitutes the governing law of his power 
 and will ; and that, his nature being what it is, the antagonist 
 fact of remission without atonement is in reality an impos- 
 sibility. Your appeal in the question lay to the omnipotence of 
 God : it is something to know that in that direction there can 
 lie no appeal. Mark how strongly your own great poet brings 
 out this truth. In his statement of the doctrine of the atone- 
 ment — a simple digest of the scriptural statement — aU is made 
 to hinge on the important fact, that God having willed the sal- 
 vation of men, an atonement became as essentially necessary to 
 Him, in order that the moral nature which He did not give 
 himself might not be violated, as to the lapsed race, who might 
 recognise in it their sole hope of restoration and recovery. Man, 
 says the poet, 
 
 • To expiate his treason hftth nought left, 
 Btit to destruction, sacred and devote, 
 He, with his whole posterity, must die : 
 IH>' he, orjuttice must ,- unless for him 
 Pome other able, and as willing, pay 
 The rigid ^ati8fHCtion, death fur death.' " 
 
10 . FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 The countryman, was silent. "You Scotch are a strange 
 people," said one of the commercial gentlemen. " When I was 
 in Scotland two years ago, I could hear of scarce anything 
 among you but your Church question. What good does all 
 your theology do you 1" " Independently altogether of religious 
 considerations," I replied, " it has done for our people what all 
 your Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and all 
 your Penny and Saturday Magazines will never do for yours : 
 it has awakened their intellects, and taught them how to think. 
 The development of the popular mind in Scotland is a result 
 of its theologj^" 
 
 The morning rose quite as gloomily as the evening had fallen : 
 the mist-cloud still rested lazily over the town ; the rain dashed 
 incessantly from the eaves, and streamed along the pavement. 
 It was miserable weather for an invalid in quest of health ; but 
 I had just to make the best I could of the cu'cumstances, by 
 scraping acquaintance with the guests in the travellers' room, 
 and beating with them over all manner of topics until mid-day, 
 when I salUed out under cover of an umbrella, to see the to^Ti 
 museum. I found it well suited to repay the trouble of a 
 visit ; and such is the liberality of the Newcastle people, that 
 it cost me no more. It Ls superior, both in the extent and ar- 
 rangement of its geologic department, to any of our Scotch col- 
 lections with which I am acquainted ; and its Anglo-Roman 
 antiquities, from the proximity of the place to the wall of 
 Hadrian, are greatly more numerous than in any other museum 
 I ever saw — filling, of themselves, an entire gallery. As I 
 passed, in the geologic department, from the older Silurian to the 
 newer Tertiary, and then on from the newer Tertiary to the votive 
 tablets, sacrificial altars, and sepulchral memorials of the Anglo- 
 Eoman gallery, I could not help regarding them as all belonging 
 to one department. The antiquities piece on in natural sequence 
 to the geology ; and it seems but rational to indulge in the 
 same sort of reasonings regarding them. They are the fossils 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 1 1 
 
 of an extinct order of things, newer than the Tertiary — of an 
 extinct race — of an extinct religion — of a state of society and a 
 class of enterprises which the world saw once, but which it will 
 never see again. And with but little assistance from the direct 
 testimony of history, one has to grope one's way along this com- 
 paratively modem formation, guided chiefly, as in the more 
 ancient deposits, by the clue of circumstantial evidence. In at 
 least its leading features, however, the story embodied is re- 
 markably clear. First, we have evidence that, in those remote 
 times, when the northern half of the island had just become a 
 home of men, the land was forest-covered, like the woody 
 regions of North America, and that its inhabitants were rude 
 savages, unacquainted with the metals, but possessed of a few 
 curious arts which an after age forgot — not devoid of a religion 
 which, at least, indicated the immortality of the soul — and 
 much given to war. The extensive morass, in which huge 
 trunks lie thick and frequent — the stone battle-axe — the flint 
 arrow-head — the Druidic circle — the vitrified foi-t — the Picts' 
 house — the canoe hollowed out of a single log — are all fossils 
 of this early period. Then come the memorials of an after 
 formation. This wild country is invaded by a much more 
 civilized race than the one by which it is inhabited : we 
 find distinct marks of their lines of march — of the forests 
 which they cut down — of the encampments in which they en- 
 trenched themselves — of the battle-fields in which they were 
 met in fight by the natives. And they, too, had their religion. 
 More than half the remains which testify to their progress 
 consist of sacrificial altars and votive tablets dedicated to the 
 gods. The narrative goes on : another class of remains show 
 us that a portion of the countrj^ was conquered by the civilized 
 race. We find the remains of tesselated pavements, baths, 
 public roads, the foundations of houses and temples, accumu- 
 lations of broken pottery, and hoards of coin. Then comes 
 another important clause in the story : we ascertain that tlio 
 
12 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 civilized people failed to conquer the whole of the northern 
 country ; and that, in order to preserve what they had con- 
 quered, they were content to construct, at an immense expense 
 of labour, a long chain of forts, connected by a strong wall 
 flanked with towers. Had it been easier to conquer the rest of 
 the country than to build the wall, the wall would not have 
 been built. We learn further, however, that the laboriously- 
 built wall served its purpose but for a time : the wild people 
 beyond at length broke over it ; and the civilized invader, 
 wearied out by their persevering assaults, which though repelled 
 to-day, had again to be repelled to-morrow, at length left their 
 country to them entire, and, retreating beyond its furthest 
 limits, built for his protection a second wall. Such is the 
 history of this bygone series of occurrences, as written, if one may 
 so speak, in the various fossils of the formation. The antiquities 
 of a museum should always piece on to its geologic collection.^ 
 
 1 Some of the operations of the Romans in Scotland have, like the catastrophes of the 
 old geologic periods, left permanent marks on the face of the country. It is a curious 
 fact, that not a few of our southern Scottish mosses owe their origin to the Roman in- 
 vasion. Of their lower tiers of tree^ — those which constituted trie nucleus of the peaty 
 formation — many have been found still bearing the marks of the Roman hatchet — a 
 thin-edged tool, somewhat like that of the American woodsman, but still narrower. In 
 some instances the axe-head, sorely wasted, has been detected still sticking in the buried 
 stump, which is generally found to have been cut several feet over the soil, just where 
 the tool might be plied with most etfect ; and in many, Roman utensils and coins have 
 been disco. ered, where they have been hastily laid down by the soldiery among the 
 tangled brushwood, and forthwith covered up and lost. Rennie, in his " Essay on Peat 
 Moss," furnishes an interesting list of these curiosities, that tell so significant a story. " In 
 Ponsill Moss, near Glasgow," he says, " a leathern bag, containing about two hundred 
 silver coins of Rome, was found ; in Dundaff Moor, a number of similar coins were found 
 about forty years ago ; in Annan Moss, near the Roman Causeway, an ornament of pure 
 gold was discovered ; a Roman camp-kettle was found, eight feet deep, under a moss, on 
 the estate of Ochtertyre ; in Flanders Moss a similar utensil was found ; a Roman jug was 
 found in Locker Moss, Dumfries-shire ; a pot and decanter, of Roman copper, was found 
 in a moss in Kirkmichael parish in the same county ; and two vessels, of Roman bronze, 
 in the Moss of Glanderhill, inStrathaven." And thus the list runs on. It is not diflBcult 
 to conceive how, in the circumstances, mosses came to be formed The felled wood was 
 left to rot on the surface ; small streams were choked up in the levels ; pools formed in 
 the hollows ; the soil beneath, shut up from the light and the air, became unfitted to pro- 
 duce its former vegetation : but a new order of plants— the thick water-mosses — began to 
 spring up ; one generation budded and decayed over the ruins of another ; and what had 
 been an overturned forest became, in the course of years, a deep morass— an ULsightly 
 but permanent monument ot tLe formidable invader. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 13 
 
 The weather was still wretchedly bad ; but I got upon the 
 Great Southern Railway, and passed on to Durham, expecting 
 to see, in the city of a bishop, a quiet English town of the trae 
 ancient type. And so I would have done, as the close-piled 
 tenements of antique brick-work, with their secluded old-fashioned 
 courts and tall fantastic gables, testified in detail, had the cir- 
 cumstances been more favourable ; but the mist-cloud hung low, 
 and I could see little else than dropping eaves, darkened walls, 
 and streaming pavements. The river which sweeps past the 
 town was big in flood. I crossed along the bridge ; saw beyond, 
 a half-drowned country, rich in fields and woods, and varied by 
 the reaches of the stream ; and caught between me and the 
 sky, when the fog rose, the outline of the town on its bold 
 ridge, with its stately Cathedral elevated highest, as first in 
 place, and its grotesque piles of brick ranging adown the slope 
 in picturesque groups, continuous yet distinct. I next visited 
 the Cathedral The gloomy day was darkening into still 
 gloomier evening, and I found the huge pile standing up amid 
 the descending torrents in its ancient graveyard, like some 
 mass of fretted rock-work enveloped in the play of a fountain. 
 The great door lay open, but I could see little else within than 
 the ranges of antique columns, curiously moulded, and of girth 
 enormous, that separate the aisles from the nave ; and, half lost 
 in the blackness, they served to remind me this evening of the 
 shadowy, gigantic colonnades of Martin. Their Saxon strength 
 wore amid the vagueness of the gloom, an air of Babylonish 
 magnificence. 
 
 The rain was dashing amid the tombstones outside. One 
 antique slab of blue limestone beside the pathway had been 
 fretted many centuries ago into the rude semblance of a human 
 figure ; but the compact mass, unfaithful to its charge, had 
 resigned all save the general outline ; the face was worn smooth, 
 and only a few nearly obliterated ridges remained, to indicate 
 the foldings of the robe. It served to show, in a manner siif- 
 
14 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 ftciently striking, how miicli more indelibly nature inscribes 
 her monuments of the dead than art. The limestone slab had 
 existed as a churchyard monument for perhaps a thousand years ; 
 but the story which it had been sculptured to tell had been long 
 since told for the last time ; and whether it had marked out 
 the burial-place of priest or of layman, or what he had been or 
 done, no one could ^ now determine. But the story of an 
 immensely earlier sepulture — earlier, mayhap, by thrice as many 
 twelvemonths as the thousand years contained days — it con- 
 tinued to tell most distinctly. It told that, when it had existed 
 as a calcareous mud deep in the Carboniferous ocean, a species 
 of curious zoophyte, long afterw^ards termed Ci/athophi/llum 
 funr/ites, were living and dying by myriads ; and it now ex- 
 hibited on its surface several dozens of them, cut open at every 
 possible angle, and presenting every variety of section, as if to 
 show what sort of creatures they had been. The glossy wet 
 served as a varnish ; and I could see that not only had those 
 larger plates of the skeletons that radiate outwards from the 
 centre been preserved, but even the microscopic reticulations of 
 the cross partitioning. Never was there ancient inscription held 
 in such faithful keeping by the founder s bronze or the sculptor's 
 marble ; and never was there epitaph of human composition so 
 scrupulously just to the real character of the dead. 
 
 I found three guests in the coffee-house in which I lodged — 
 a farmer and his two sons ; the farmer still in vigorous middle 
 life ; the sons robust and tall ; all of them fine specimens of 
 the ruddy, well-built, square-shouldered Englishman. They had 
 been travelling by the railway, and were now on their return to 
 their farm, which lay little more than two hours' walk away ; 
 but so bad was the evening, that they had deemed it advisable 
 to take beds for the night in Durham. They had evidently a 
 stake in the state of the weather ; and as the rain ever and 
 anon pattered against the panes, as if on the eve of breaking 
 them, some one or other of the three would rise to the window, 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 15 
 
 and look moodily out into the storm. " God help us !" I heard 
 the old farmer ejaculate, as the rising wind shook the casement ; 
 '" we shall have no harvest at all." They had had rain, I learned, 
 in this locality, with but partial intermissions, for the greater 
 part of six weeks, and the crops lay rotting on the ground. In 
 the potatoes served at table I marked a peculiar appearance ; 
 they were freckled over by minute circular spots, that bore a 
 ferruginous tinge, somewhat resembling the specks on iron-shot 
 sandstone, and they ate as if but partially boiled. I asked the 
 farmer whether the affection was a common one in that part of 
 the countiy. " Not at all," was the reply": "we never saw it 
 before ; but it threatens this year to destroy our potatoes. The 
 half of mine it has spoiled already, and it spreads among them 
 every day." It does not seem natural to the species to asso- 
 ciate mighty consequences with phenomena that wear a very 
 humble aspect. The teachings of experience are essentially 
 necessary to show us that the seeds of great events may be 
 little things in themselves ; and so I could not see how im- 
 portant a part these minute iron-tinted specks — the work of a 
 microscopic fungus — were to enact in British history. The old 
 soothsayers professed to read the destinies of the future in very 
 unlikely pages — in the meteoric appearances of the heavens, 
 and in the stars — in the flight and chirping of birds — in the 
 entrails of animals — in many other strange characters besides ; 
 and in the remoter districts of my own country I have seen a 
 half-sportive superstition employed in deciphering characters 
 quite as unlikely as those of the old augurs — in the burning of 
 a brace of hazel nuts — in the pulling of a few oaten stalks — in 
 the grounds of a tea-cup — above all, in the Hallowe'en egg, in 
 which, in a different sense from that embodied in the allegory 
 of Cowley, 
 
 " The curious eye, 
 Jhrou:;h tlio firm shell and the thick white may spy 
 
 Ve.'irs to come n-f >rraing lie. 
 Close in their sacred secundine asleep." 
 
16 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 But who could have ever thought of divining over the spotted 
 tubers ? or who so shrewd as to have seen in the grouping of 
 their iron-shot specks, Lord John Russell's renunciation of the 
 fixed duty — the conversion to free-trade principles of Sir Robert 
 Peel and his Conservative Ministry — the breaking up into sec- 
 tions of the old Protectionist party — and, in the remote dis- 
 tance, the abolition in Scotland of the law of entail, and in 
 England the ultimate abandonment, mayhap, of the depressing 
 tenant-at-will system? If one could have read them aright, 
 never did the flight of bird, or the embowelment of beast, indi- 
 cate so wonderful a story as these siime iron-shot tubers. 
 
EXGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 17 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 Weather still miserably bad ; suited to betray the frequent poverty of English landscape 
 — Gloomy prospects of the agriculturist — Corn-Law League — York ; a true sacerdotal 
 city — Cathedral; noble exterior; interior not less impressive ; Congreve's sublime 
 Description — Unpardonable solecism — Procession — Dean Cockbum ; crusade against 
 tlie geologists — Cathedral service unworthy of the Cathedral — Walk on the city 
 ramparts — Flat fertility of the surrounding country— The more interesting passages 
 in the history of York supplied by the makers, — Robin?on Cmsoe— Jeanie Deans — 
 Trial of Eugdne Aram — Aram's real character widely different from that drawn by 
 the novelist 
 
 Rain, rain ! — another morning in England, and still no ini- 
 pTOvement in the weather. The air, if there was any change 
 at all, felt rather more chill and bleak than on the previous 
 e^^ening ; and the shower, in its paroxysms, seemed to beat still 
 h(}avier on the panes. I was in no mood to lay myself up in a 
 dull inn, like Washington living's stout gentleman, and so took 
 the train for York, in the hope of getting from under the cloud 
 somewhere on its southern side, ere I at least reached the Bri- 
 tish Channel. Never, surely, was the north of England seen 
 more thoroughly in dishabille. The dark woods and thick-set 
 hedge-rows looked blue and dim through the haze, like the 
 mimic woodlands of a half-finished drawing in grey chalk ; and, 
 instead of cheering, added but to the gloom of the landscape. 
 They seemed to act the part of mere sponges that first con- 
 densed and then retained the moisture — that became soaked in 
 the shower, and then, when it had passed, continued dispensing 
 their droppings on the rotting sward beneath, until another 
 shower came. The character of the weather was of a kind 
 suited to betray the frequent poverty of English landscape. 
 Wlien the sky is clear, and the sun bright, even the smallest 
 and tamest patches of country have their charms. There 
 
18 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 is beauty in even a hollow willow pollard fluttering its sil- 
 very leaves over its patch of meadow-sedges against the deep 
 blue of the heavens ; but in the dull haze and homogeneous 
 light, that was but light and shadow muddled into a neutral 
 tint of grey, one could not now and then help remarking that 
 the entire prospect consisted of but one field and two hedge-rows. 
 As we advanced, appearances did not improve. The wheaten 
 fields exhibited, for their usual golden tint slightly umbered, an 
 ominous tinge of earthy brown ; the sullen rivers had risen high 
 over the meadows ; and rotting hay-ricks stood up like islands 
 amid the water. At one place in the line the train had to drag 
 its weary length through foam and spray, up to the wheel- 
 axles, through the overflowings of a neighbouring canal. The 
 sudden shower came ever and anon beating against the car- 
 riage-windows, obscuring yet more the gloomy landscape with- 
 out ; and the passengers were fain to shut close every opening, 
 and to draw their greatcoats and wrappers tightly around them, 
 as if they had been journeying, not in the month of August, 
 scarcely a fortnight after the close of the dog-days, but at Christ- 
 mas. I heard among the passengers a few semi-political remarks, 
 suggested by the darkening prospects of the agTiculturist. The 
 Anti-Corn-Law League, with all its formidable equipments had 
 lain for years, as if becalmed in its voyage, a water-logged hulk, 
 that failed to press on towards its port of destination. One 
 good harvest after another had, as the sailors say, taken the 
 the wind out ,of its sails ; and now here evidently was there a 
 strong gale arising full in its poop. It was palpably on the eve 
 of making great way in its course ; and the few political re- 
 marks which I heard bore reference to the fact. But they 
 elicited no general sympathy. The scowling heavens, the 
 blackening earth, the swollen rivers, the ever-returning shower- 
 blast, with its sharp ringing patter, were things that had nought 
 of the gaiety of political triumph in them ; and the more solid 
 English, however favom-able to free trade, could not deem it a 
 
ENGLAND AND 1X3 PEOPLE. 19 
 
 cause of gratulation that for so many weeks " the sun, and the 
 light, and the stars had been darkened, and the clouds returned 
 after the rain." The general feeling seemed not inadequately 
 (Expressed by a staid elderly farmer, with whom I afterwards tra- 
 velled from York to Manchester. " I am sure," he said, looking 
 out into the rain, which was beating at the time with great vio- 
 lence — " I am sure I wish the League no harm ; but Heaven help 
 lis and the country if there is to be no harvest. The League 
 will have a dear triumph if God destroy the fruits of the earth." 
 Old sacerdotal York, with its august Cathedral, its twenty- 
 three churches, in which divine service is still performed, its 
 numerous ecclesiastical ruins besides — monasteries, abbeys, hos- 
 pitals, and chapels — at once struck me as different from any- 
 thing I had ever seen before. St. Andrews, one of the two 
 ancient archiepiscopal towns of Scotland, may have somewhat 
 resembled it on a small scale in the days of old Cardinal Bea- 
 ton ; but the peculiar character of the Scottish Reformation 
 rendered it impossible that the country should possess any such 
 ecclesiastical city ever after. Modern improvement has here 
 and there introduced more of its commonplace barbarisms into 
 the busier and the genteeler streets than the antiquary would 
 have bargained for ; it has been rubbing off the venerable rust, 
 somewhat in the style adopted by the serving-maid who scoured 
 the old Roman buckler with sand and water till it shone ; but 
 York is essentially an ancient city still. One may still walk 
 round it on the ramparts erected in the times of Edward the First, 
 and tell all their towers, bars, and barbicans ; and in threading 
 one's way along antique lanes, flanked by domiciles of mingled 
 oak and old brickwork, that belly over like the sides of ships, 
 and were tenanted in the days of the later Henrys, one stumbles 
 unexpectedly on rectories that have their names recorded in 
 Doomsday Book, and churches that were built before the Con- 
 quest. My first walk through the city terminated, as a matter 
 of course, at the Cathedral, so famous for its architectural mag- 
 
20 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 nificence and grandeur. It is a noble pile — one of the sublimest 
 things wrought by human hands which the island contains. As 
 it rose grey and tall before me in the thickening twilight — for 
 another day had passed, and another evening was falhng — I 
 was conscious of a more awe-struck and expansive feeling than 
 any mere work of art had ever awakened in me before. The 
 impression more resembled what I have sometimes experienced 
 on some solitary ocean shore, o'erhung by dizzy precipices, and 
 lashed high by the foaming surf ; or beneath the craggy brow 
 of some vast mountain, that overlooks, amidst the mute sub- 
 limities of nature, some far-spread uninhabited wilderness of 
 forest and moor. I realized, better than ever before, the justice 
 of the eulogium of Thomson on the art of the architect, and re- 
 cognised it as in reality 
 
 " The art where most magnificent appears 
 The little builder man." 
 
 It was too late to gain admission to the edifice, and far too late 
 to witness the daily service ; and I was desirous to see, not only 
 the stately temple itself, but the worship performed in it. I 
 spent, however, an hour in wandering round it — in marking the 
 effect on buttress and pinnacle, turret and arch, of the still 
 deepening shadows, and in catching the general outline between 
 me and the sky. The night had set fairly in long ere I reached 
 my lodging-house. York races had just begun ; and, bad as the 
 weather was, there was so considerable an influx of strangers into 
 the town, that there were few beds in the inns unoccupied, and 
 I had to content myself with the share of a bedroom in which 
 there were two. My copartner in the room came in late and 
 went away early ; and all I know of him, or shall perhaps ever 
 know, is, that after having first ascertained, not very correctly as 
 it proved, that I was asleep, he prayed long and earnestly ; that, 
 as I afterwards learned from the landlord, he was a Wesleyan 
 Methodist, who had come from the country, not to attend the 
 races, for he was not one of the race-frequenting sort of people. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 21 
 
 but on some business, and that he was much respected in his 
 neighbourhood for the excellence of his character. 
 
 Next morning I attended service in the cathedral'; and being, 
 I found, half an hour too early, spent the interval not unpleasantly 
 in pacing the aisles and nave, and studying the stories so doubts 
 fully recorded on the old painted glass. As I stood at the western 
 door, and saw the noble stone roof stretching away, more than 
 thirty yards overhead, in a long vista of five hundred feet, to 
 the great eastern window, I again experienced the feeling of the 
 previous evening. Never before had I seen so noble a cover. 
 The ornate complexities of the groined vaulting — ^the giant 
 colunms, with their foliage-bound capitals, sweeping away in mag- 
 nificent perspective — the coloured light that streamed through 
 more than a hundred huge windows, and but faintly illumined 
 the vast area after all — the deep withdrawing aisles, with their 
 streets of tombs — the great tower, under which a ship of the 
 line might hoist top and topgallant-mast, and find ample room 
 overhead for the play of her vane — ^the felt combination of great 
 age and massive durability, that made the passing hour in the 
 history of the edifice but a mere half-way point between the cen- 
 turies of the past and the centuries of the future — aU conspired to 
 render the interior of York Minster one of the most impressive 
 objects I had ever seen. Johnson singles out Congreve's descripn 
 tion of a similar pile as one of the finest in the whole range of 
 English poetry. It is at least description without exaggeration, 
 in reference to buildings such as this cathedral. 
 
 " Almeria.— It was a fancied noise : for all la hushed. 
 
 Leonora. — It bore the accent of a human voice. 
 
 Alvieria. —It was thy fear, or else some transient wind 
 Whistling through hollows of this vaulted aisle. 
 We'll Usten 
 
 Leonora. — Hark ! 
 
 Almeria. — No, all is hushed and still as death : 'tis dreadful 
 How reverend is the face of this tall pile. 
 Whose ancient pillars roar their marble heads. 
 To bear aloft its arched and ponderous roof. 
 By its own weight made steadfast and immoTablo— 
 Looking tranquillity ! It strikes an awe 
 
22 FIEST IMPEESSIONS OP 
 
 And terror on the aching sight : the tombs 
 And monumental caves of death look cold, 
 And shoot a chillness to the trembling heart. 
 Give me thy hand, and let me hear thy voice ; 
 Nay, quickly speak to me, and let me hear 
 Thy voice : my own aflFrights me with its echoes." 
 
 But though I felt the poetry of the edifice, so little had my 
 Presbyterian education led me to associate the not unelevated 
 impulses of the feeling with the devotional spirit, that, certainly 
 without intending any disrespect to either the national religion 
 or one of the noblest ecclesiastical buildings of England, I had 
 failed to uncover my head, and was quite unaware of the gross 
 solecism I was committing, until two of the officials, who had 
 just ranged themselves in front of the organ screen, to usher the 
 dean and choristers into the choir, started forward, one from 
 each side of the door, and, with no little gesticulatory empha- 
 sis, ordered me to take off my hat. " Off hat, sir ! off hat ! " 
 angrily exclaimed the one. '' Take off your hat, sir!" said the 
 other, in a steady, energetic, determined tone, still less resistible. 
 The peccant beaver at once sunk by my side, and I apologized 
 "Ah, a Scotchman!" ejaculated the keener official of the two, 
 his cheek meanwhile losing some of the hastily summoned red ; 
 " I thought as much." The officials had scarcely resumed their 
 places beside the screen, when dean and sub-dean, the canons re- 
 sidentiary and the archdeacon, the prebendaries and the vicars 
 choral, entered the building in their robes, and, with step slow 
 and stately, disappeared through the richly-fretted entrance of 
 the choir. A purple curtain fell over the opening behind them, 
 as the last figure in the procession passed in : while a few lay 
 saunterers, who had come to be edified by the great organ, found 
 access by another door, which opened into one of the aisles. 
 
 The presiding churchman on the occasion was Dean Cockbum 
 — a tall, portly old man, fresh-complexioned and silvery-haired, 
 and better fitted than most men to enact the part of an imposing 
 figure in a piece of impressive ceremony. I looked at the dean 
 with some little interest : he had been twice before the public 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 23 
 
 during the previous five years — once as a dealer in church offices, 
 for which grave offence he had been deprived by his ecclesiastical 
 superior the archbishop, but reponed by the Queen — and once 
 as a redoubtable assertor of what he deemed Bible cosmogony, 
 against the facts of the geologists. The old blood-boltered barons 
 who lived in the times of the Crusades used to make all square 
 with Heaven, when particularly aggrieved in their consciences, by 
 slaying a few scores of infidels a-piece ; — the dean had fallen, 
 it would seem, in these latter days, on a similar mode of doing 
 penance, and expiated the crime of making canons residentiary 
 for a consideration, by demolishing a whole conclave of geologists. 
 The cathedral service seemed rather a poor thing on the 
 \\'hole. The coldly-read or fantastically-chanted prayers, com- 
 mon-placed by the twice-a-day repetition of centuries — the 
 mechanical responses — the correct inanity of the choristers, who 
 had not even the life of music in them — the total want of lay 
 attendance, for the loungers who had come in by the side-door 
 went off en masse when the organ had performed its introduc- 
 tory part, and the prayers began — the ranges of empty seats, 
 which, huge as is the building which contains them, would 
 sc-arce accommodate an average-sized Free Church congregation 
 — all conspired to show that the cathedral service of the Eng- 
 lish Church does not represent a living devotion, but a devotion 
 that perished centuries ago. It is a petrifaction — a fossil — 
 existing, it is true, in a fine state of keeping, but still an 
 exanimate stone. Many ages must have elapsed since it was 
 the living devotion I had witnessed on the previous evening in 
 the double-bedded room — if, indeed, it was ever so living a 
 devotion, or aught, at best, save a mere painted image. Not 
 even as a piece of ceremonial is it in keeping with the august 
 edifice in which it is performed. The great organ does its part 
 admirably, and is indisputably a noble machine ; its thirty-two 
 feet double-wood diapason pipe, cut into lengths, would make 
 coffins for three Goliaths of Gath, brass armour and all : but 
 
24 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 the merely human part of the performance is redolent of none 
 of the poetry which plays around the ancient walls, or streams 
 through the old painted glass. It reminded me of the story 
 told by the eastern traveller, who, in exploring a magnificent 
 temple, passed through superb porticoes and noble halls, to find 
 a monkey enthroned in a little dark sanctum, as the god of the 
 whole. 
 
 I had a long and very agreeable walk along the city ram- 
 parts. White watery clouds stiU hung in the sky ; but the daj 
 was decidedly fine, and dank fields and glistening hedgerows 
 steamed merrily in the bright warm sunshine. York, like all 
 the greater towns of England, if we except the capital and 
 some two or three others, stands on the New Ked Sandstone ; 
 and the broad extent of level fertility which it commands is, 
 to a Scotch eye, vciy striking. There is no extensive prospect 
 in even tlie south of Scotland that does not include its wide 
 ranges of waste, and its deep mountain sides, never fuiTowed 
 by the plough ; while in our more northern districts, one sees 
 from eveiy hill-top which commands the coast, a landscape 
 coloured somewhat like a russet shawl with a flowered bor- 
 der ; — there is a mere selvedge of green cultivation on the edge 
 of the land, and all within is brown heath and shaggy forest. 
 In England, on the contrary, one often travels, stage after 
 stage, through an unvarying expanse of flat fields laid out 
 on the level formations, which, undisturbed by trappean or 
 metamorphic rocks, stretch away at low angles for hundreds of 
 miles together, forming blank tablets, on which man may write 
 his works in whatever characters he pleases. Doubtless such a 
 disposition of things adds greatly to the wealth and power of a 
 country; — the population of Yorkshire, at the last census, 
 equalled that of Scotland in 1801. But I soon began to weary 
 of an infinity of green enclosures, that lay spread out in undis- 
 tinguishable sameness, like a net, on the flat face of the land- 
 scape, and to long for the wild free moors and bold natural 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 25 
 
 features of my own poor couutiy. One likes to know the 
 place of one's birth by other than artificial marks — by some 
 hoary mountain, severe yet kindly in its aspect, that one has 
 learned to love as a friend — by some long withdrawing arm of 
 the sea, sublimely guarded, where it opens to the ocean, by its 
 magnificent portals of rock — ^by some wild range of precipitous 
 coast, that rears high its ivy-bound pinnacles, and where the 
 green wave ever rises and falls along dim resounding caverns — 
 by some lonely glen, with its old pine-forests hanging dark on 
 the slopes, and its deep brown river roaring over linn and 
 shallow in its headlong course to the sea. Who could fight for 
 a countiy without features — that one would scarce be sure of 
 finding out on one's return from the battle, without the assist- 
 ance of the mile-stones 1 
 
 As I looked on either hand from the ancient ramparts, now 
 down along the antique lanes and streets of the town, now 
 over the broad level fields beyond, I was amused to think how 
 entirely all my more vivid associations with York — town and 
 country — had been derived from works of fiction. True, it 
 was curious enough to remember, as a historical fact, that 
 Christianity had been preached here to the pagan Saxons in 
 the earlier years of the Heptarchy, by missionaries from lona. 
 And there are not a few other picturesque incidents, that, 
 frosted over with the romance of history, glimmer with a sort 
 of phosphoric radiance in the records of the place — from the 
 times when King Edwyn of the Northumbrians demolished the 
 heathen temple that stood where the Cathedral now stands, 
 and erected in its room the wooden oratory in which he was 
 baptized, down to the times when little crooked Leslie broke 
 over the city walls at the head of his Covenanters, and held 
 them against the monarch, in the name of the King. But the 
 historical facts have vastly less of the vividness of truth about 
 them than the facts of the makers. It was in this city of York 
 that the famous Robinson Crusoe was bom ; and here, in this 
 
26 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 city of York, did Jeanie Deans rest her for a day, on her Lon- 
 don journey, with her hospitable countrywoman, Mrs. Bickerton 
 of the Seven Stars ; and it was in the country beyond, down 
 in the West Eiding, that Gurth and Wamba held high colloquy 
 together, among the glades of the old oak forest; and that 
 Cedric the Saxon entertained, in his low-browed hall of Rother- 
 wood, the Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert and Prior Aymer of 
 Jorvaulx. 
 
 I visited the old castle, now a prison, and the town museum, 
 and found the geological department of the latter at once very 
 extensive and exquisitely arranged; but the fact, announced in 
 the catalogue, that it had been laid out under the eye of 
 Phillips, while it left me much to admire in the order exhibited, 
 removed at least all cause of wonder. I concluded the day — 
 the first very agreeable one I had spent in England — by a 
 stroll along the banks of the Ouse, through a colonnade of 
 magnificent beeches. The sun was hastening to its setting, 
 and the red light fell, with picturesque effect, on the white 
 sails of a handsome brig, that came speeding up the river, 
 through double rows of tall trees, before a light wind from the 
 east. On my return to my lodging-house, through one of the 
 obscure lanes of the city, I picked up, at a book-stall, what I 
 deemed, no small curiosity — the original *' Trial of Eugene 
 Aram," well known in English literature as the hero of one of 
 Bulwer's most popular novels, and one of Hood's most finished 
 poems, and for as wonderful a thing as either, his own remark- 
 able defence.. I had never before seen so full an account of 
 the evidence on which he was condemned, nor of the closing 
 scene in his singular history; nor was I aware there existed 
 such competent data for forming an adequate estimate of his 
 character, which, by the way, seems to have been not at all the 
 character drawn by Bulwer. Knaresborough, the scene of 
 Aram's crime, may be seen from the battlements of York 
 Minster. In York Castle he was imprisoned, and wrote his 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 27 
 
 Defence and his Autobiography ; at York Assizes he was tried 
 and convicted ; and on York gallows he was hung. The city , 
 is as intimately associated with the closing scenes in his history, 
 as with the passing visit of Jeanie Deans, or the birth of 
 Robinson Crusoe. But there is this important difference in the 
 cases, that the one story has found a place in literature from 
 the strangely romantic cast of its facts, and the others from the 
 intensely truthful air of their fictions. 
 
 Eugene Aram seems not to have been the high heroic cha- 
 racter conceived by the novelist — not a hero of tragedy at all, 
 nor a hero of any kind, but simply a poor egotistical litterateur, 
 with a fine intellect set in a very inferior nature. He represents 
 the extreme type of unfortunately a numerous class — the men 
 of vigorous talent, in some instances of fine genius, who, though 
 they can think much and highly of themselves, seem wholly 
 unable to appreciate their true place and work, or the real 
 dignity of their standing, and so are continually getting into 
 false, unworthy positions — in some instances falling into little 
 meannesses, in others into contemptible crimes. I am afraid 
 it is all too evident that even the sage Bacon belonged to tliis 
 class ; and there can be little doubt that, though greatly less a 
 criminal, the elegant and vigorous poet who described him as 
 
 " The greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind," 
 
 belonged to it also. The phosphoric light of genius that 
 throws so radiant a gloom athwart the obscurities of nature, 
 has in some cases been carried by a frivolous insect, in some by 
 a creeping worm : there are brilliant intellects of the fire-fly 
 and of the glow-worm class ; and poor Eugene Aram was one 
 of them. In his character, as embodied in the evidence on 
 which he was convicted and condemned, we see merely that 
 of a felon of the baser sort — a man who associated with low 
 companions, married a low wife, entered into low sharping 
 schemes with a poor dishonest creature whom, early in hia 
 
28 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 career, he used to accompany at nights in stealing flower-roots 
 — for they possessed in common a taste for gardening — and 
 whom he afterwards barbarously murdered, to possess himself 
 of a few miserable pounds, the proceeds of a piece of disreput- 
 able swindling, to which he had prompted him. Viewing him, 
 however, in another phase, we find that this low felon pos- 
 sessed one of those vigorous intellectual natures that, month 
 after month, and year after year, steadily progress in acquire- 
 ment — as the forest-tree swells in bulk of trunk and amplitude 
 of bough — till at length, with scarce any educational advantages, 
 there was no learned language which he had not mastered, and 
 scarce a classic author which he had not read. And, finally, 
 when the learned felon came to make his defence, all Britain 
 was astonished by a piece of pleading that, for the elegance of 
 the composition and the vigour of the thought, would have 
 done no discredit to the most accomplished writers of the day. 
 The defence of Eugene Aram, if given to the public among 
 the defences, and under the name of Thomas Lord Erskine, 
 so celebrated for this species of composition, would certainly 
 not be deemed unworthy of the collection of its author. There 
 can be no question that the Aram of Bulwer is a well-drawn 
 character, and rich in the picturesque of tragic effect ; but the 
 exhibition is neither so melancholy nor so instructive as that of 
 the Eugene Ai-am who was executed at York for murder in the 
 autumn of 1759, and his body afterwards hung in chains at 
 " the place called St. Robert's Cave, near Knaresborough." 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 29 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Quit York for Manchester — A character — Quaker lady— Peculiar feature in the htia- 
 bandry of the cloth district — Leeds — Simplicity manifested in the geologic framework 
 of English scenery — The denuding agencies almost invariably the sole architects of the 
 landscape — Manchester ; characteristic peculiarities ; the Irwell ; collegiate church 
 light and elegant proportions of the building ; its grotesque sculptures ; these indi- 
 cative of the scepticism of the age in which they were produced — St. Bartholomew's 
 day — Sermon on Saints' day — Timothy's grandmother — The Puseyite a High-church- 
 man become earnest — Passengers of a Sunday-evening train — Sabbath amusement 
 not very conducive to happiness — The economic value of the Sabbath ill understood 
 by the utilitarian — Testimony of history on the point. 
 
 On the following morning I quitted York for Manchester, 
 taking Leeds in my way. I had seen two of the ecclesiastical 
 cities of Old England, and I was now desirous to visit two of 
 the great trading towns of the modern country, so famous for 
 supplying with its manufactures half the economic wants of the 
 world. 
 
 At the first stage from York we were joined by a young 
 lady passenger, of forty or thereabouts, evidently a character. 
 She was very gaudily dressed, and very tightly laced, and had 
 a bloom of red in her cheeks that seemed to have been just a 
 little assisted by art, and a bloom of red in her nose that seemed 
 not to have been assisted by art at all. Alarmingly frank and 
 portentously talkative, she at once threw herself for protection 
 and guidance on " the gentlemen." She had to get down at 
 one of the intermediate stages, she said ; but were she to be so 
 unlucky as to pass it, she would not know what to do — she 
 would be at her wit's end ; but she trusted she would not be 
 permitted to pass it \ she threw herself upon the generosity of 
 
30 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 the gentlemen — she always did, indeed ; and she trusted the 
 generous gentlemen would inform her, when she came to her 
 stage, that it was time for her to get out. I had rarely seen, 
 except in old play-books, written when • our dramatists of the 
 French school were drawing ladies'-maids of the time of Charles 
 the Second, a character of the kind quite so stage-like in its 
 aspect ; and in a quiet way was enjoying the exhibition. And 
 the passenger who sat fronting me in the carriage — an elderly 
 lady of the Society of Friends — was, I found, enjoying it quite 
 as much and as quietly as myself. A countenance of much 
 transparency, that had been once very pretty, exhibited at 
 every droll turn in the dialogue the appropriate expression. 
 Remarking to a gentleman beside me that good names were 
 surely rather a scant commodity in England, seeing they had 
 not a few towns and rivers, which, like many of the American 
 ones, seemed to exist in duplicate and triplicate — they had 
 three Newcastles, and four Stratfords, and at least two river 
 Ouses — I asked him how I could travel most directly by rail- 
 way to Cowper's Ouse. He did not know, he said ; he had 
 never heard of a river Ouse except the Yorkshire one, which I 
 had just seen. The Quaker lady supplied me with the infor- 
 mation I wanted, by pointing out the best route to Olney ; and 
 the circumstance led to a conversation which only terminated 
 at our arrival at Leeds. I found her possessed, like many of 
 the Society of Friends, whom Howitt so well describes, of 
 literary taste, conversational ability, and extensive information ; 
 and we expatiated together over a wide range. We discussed 
 English poets and poetry ; compared notes regarding our cri- 
 tical formulas and canons, and found them wonderfully alike ; 
 beat over the Scottish Church question, and some dozen or so 
 other questions besides ; and at parting, she invited me to visit 
 her at her house in Bedfordshire, within half a day's journey of 
 Olney. She was at present residing with a friend, she said ; 
 but she would be at home in less than a fortnight ; and there 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 31 
 
 T7as much in her neighbourhood which, she was sure, it would 
 give me pleasure to see. I was unable ultimately to avail 
 myself of her kindness ; but in the hope that these chapters 
 may yet meet her eye, I must be permitted to reiterate my 
 sincere thanks for her frank and hospitable invitation. The 
 frankness struck me at the time as characteristically English ; 
 w^hile the hospitality associated well with all I had previously 
 known of the Society of Friends. 
 
 I marked, in passing on to Leeds, a new feature in the hus- 
 bandry of the district — whole fields of teazels, in flower at the 
 time, waving grey in the breeze. They indicated that I was 
 approaching the great centre of the cloth trade in England. 
 The larger heads of this plant, bristling over with their numer- 
 ous minute hooks, are employed as a kind of brushes or combs 
 for raising the nap of the finer broad-cloths ; and it seems a 
 curious enough circumstance, that in this mechanical age, so 
 famous for the ingenuity and niceuess of its machines, no effort 
 of the mechanician has as yet enabled him to supersede, or even 
 to rival, this delicate machine of nature's making. I failed to 
 acquaint myself very intimately with Leeds : the rain had again 
 returned, after a brief interval of somewhat less than two days ; 
 and I saw, under cover of my old friend the umbrella, but the 
 outsides of the two famous Cloth Halls of the place, where there 
 are more woollen stuffs bought and sold than in any other dozen 
 buildings in the world ; and its long up-hill street of shops, with 
 phlegmatic Queen Anne looking grimly adown the slope, from 
 her niche of dingy sandstone. On the following morning, which 
 was wet and stormy as ever, I took the railway train for Man- 
 chester, which I reached a little after mid-day. 
 
 In passing through Northumberland, I had quitted the hilly 
 district when I quitted the Mountain Limestone and Millstone 
 Grit ; and now, in travelling on to Manchester, I had, I found, 
 again got into a mountainous, semi-pastoral country. There 
 were deep green valleys, traversed by lively tumbling streams, 
 
32 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 that opened on either hand among the hills ; and the course of 
 the railway train was, for a time, one of great vicissitude — now- 
 elevated high on an embankment — ^now burrowing deep in a 
 tunnel. It is, the traveller finds, the same Millstone Grit and 
 I\Iountain Limestone which form the hilly regions of Northum- 
 berland, that give here their hills and valleys to Lancashire and 
 the West Riding of Yorkshire ; and that, passing on to Derby, 
 in the general south-western range of the English formations, 
 compose the Peak, so famous for its many caves and chasms, 
 with all the picturesque groups of eminences that surround it 
 Tliere are few things which so strike the Scotch geologist who 
 visits England for the first time, as the simplicity with which 
 he finds he can resolve the varying landscape into its geologic 
 elements. The case is different in Scotland, where he has to 
 deal, in almost every locality, with both the denuding and the 
 Plutonic agents, and where, as in the neighbourhood of Edin- 
 burgh, many independent centres of internal action, grouped 
 closely together, connect the composition of single prospects with 
 numerous and very varied catastrophes. But in most English 
 landscapes one has to deal with the denuding agents alone. In 
 passing along an open sea-coast, in which strata of the Secondaiy 
 or Palaeozoic formations have been laid bare, one finds that the 
 degree of prominence exhibited by the bars and ridges of rock 
 exposed to the waves corresponds always with their degree of 
 tenacity and hardness. A bed of soft shale or clay we find 
 represented by a hollow trough ; the surf has worn it down 
 till it can no longer be seen, and a strip of smooth gravel rests 
 over it ; a stratum of sandstone, of the average solidity, rises 
 above the hollow like a mole, for the waves have failed to wear 
 the sandstone down ; while a band of limestone or chert we 
 find rising still higher, because still better suited, from its great 
 tenacity, to resist the attrition of the denuding agents. And 
 such on a great scale, is the principle of what one may term 
 the geologic framework of English landscape. The softer for- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 33 
 
 mations of the country we find represented, like the shale-beds 
 on the shore by wide flat valleys or extensive plains ; the 
 harder, by chains of hills of greater or lesser altitude, according 
 to the degree of solidity possessed by the composing materiaL 
 A few insulated districts of country, such as part of North 
 Wales, Westmoreland, and Cornwall, where the Plutonic agen- 
 cies have been active, we find coming under the more complex 
 law of Scottish landscape ; but in all the rest — save where 
 here and there a minute trappean patch imparts its inequalities 
 to the surface, as in the Dudley coal-field — soft or hard, solid 
 or incoherent, determines the question of high or low, bold or 
 tame. Here, for instance, is a common map of England, on 
 which the eminences are marked, but not the geologic forma- 
 tions. These, however, we may almost trace by the chains of 
 hills, or from the want of them. This hilly region, for instance, 
 which extends from the northern borders of Northumberland to 
 Derby, represents the Millstone Grit and Mountain Limestone 
 — solid deposits of indurated sandstone and crystalline lime, 
 that stand up amid the landscape like the harder strata on 
 the wave-worn sea-coast. On both sides of this mountainous 
 tract there are level plains of vast extent, that begin to form on 
 the one side near Newcastle, and at Lancaster on the other, 
 and which, uniting at Wirksworth, sweep on to the Bristol 
 Channel in the diagonal line of the English formations. These 
 level plains represent the yielding semi-coherent New Red Sand- 
 stone of England. The denuding agents have worn it down in 
 the way we find the soft shale-beds worn down on the sea-shore. 
 On the West we see it flanked by the Old Red Sandstone and 
 Silurian systems of Wales and western England — formations 
 solid enough to form a hilly country ; and on the east, by a 
 long hilly line, that, with little interniption, traverses the island 
 diagonally from Wliitby on the Yorkshire coast, to Lyme-Regis 
 on the English Channel. This elevated line traverses longitu- 
 dinally the Oolitic formation, and owes its existence to those 
 
 c 
 
34 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 coralline reefs and firm calcareous sandstones of the system that 
 are so extensively used by the architect. Another series of 
 hilly ridges, somewhat more complicated in their windings, re- 
 present the Upper and Lower Chalk ; while the softer Weald, 
 Gault, Greensand, and Tertiary deposits, we find existing as 
 level plains or wide shallow valleys. In most of our geologic 
 maps the hill-ranges are not indicated ; but in a country such 
 as England, where these are so palpably a joint result of the 
 geologic formations, and the denuding agencies, the omission is 
 surely a defect. 
 
 Manchester I found as true a representative of the great 
 manufacturing town of modern England, as York of the old 
 English ecclesiastical city. One receives one's first intimation 
 of its existence from the lurid gloom of the atmosphere that 
 overhangs it. There is a murky blot in one section of the sky, 
 however clear the weather, which broadens and heightens as we 
 approach, until at length it seems spread over half the firmament. 
 And now the innumerable chimneys come in view, tall and dim 
 in the dun haze, each bearing a-top its own troubled pennon of 
 darkness. And now we enter the suburbs, and pass through 
 mediocre streets of brick, that seem as if they had been built 
 wholesale by contract within the last half-dozen years. These 
 humble houses are the homes of the operative manufaetrirers. 
 The old wall of York, built in the reign of Edward the First, 
 still encloses the city ; — the antique suit of armour made for it 
 six hundred years ago, though the fit be somewhat of the tightest, 
 buckles round it still. Manchester, on the other hand, has been 
 doubling its population every half century for the last hundred 
 and fifty years ; and the cord of cotton twist that would have 
 girdled it at the beginning of the great revolutionary war, would 
 do little more than half girdle it now. The field of Peterloo, 
 on which the yeomanry slashed down the cotton-workers assem- 
 bled to hear Henry Hunt — poor, lank-jawed men, who would 
 doubtless have manifested less interest in the nonsense of the 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 35 
 
 orator, had they been less hungry at the time — has been covered 
 with brick for the last ten years. 
 
 As we advance, the town presents a new feature. We see 
 whole streets of warehouses — dead, dingy, gigantic buildings — 
 barred out from the light ; and, save where here and there a 
 huge waggon stands, lading or unlading under the mid-air cranes, 
 the thoroughfares, and especially the numerous cul-de-sacs, have 
 a solitary, half-deserted air. But the city clocks have just struck 
 one — the dinner hour of the labouring English ; and in one 
 brief minute two-thirds of the population of the place have 
 turned out into the streets. The rush of the human tide is 
 tremendous — headlong and arrowy as that of a Highland river 
 in flood, or as that of a water-spout just broken amid the hills, 
 and at once hurrying adown a hundred different ravines. But 
 the outburst is short as fierce. We have stepped aside into 
 some door-way, or out towards the centre of some public square, 
 to be beyond the wind of such commotion ; and in a few minutes 
 all is over, and the streets even more quiet and solitary than 
 before. There is an air of much magnificence about the public 
 buildings devoted to trade ; and the larger shops wear the solid 
 aspect of a long-established business. But nothing seems more 
 characteristic of the great manufacturing city, though disagree- 
 ably so, than the river Irwell, which runs through the place, 
 dividing it into a lesser and larger town, that, though they 
 bear different names, are essentially one. The hapless river — 
 a pretty enough stream a few miles higher up, with trees over- 
 hanging its banks, and fringes of green sedge set thick along its 
 edges — loses caste as it gets among the mills and the print- 
 works, There are myriads of dirty things given it to wash, 
 and whole waggon-loads of poisons from dye-houses and bleach- 
 yards thrown into it to carry away ; steam-boilers discharge 
 into it their seething contents, and drains and sewers their fetid 
 impurities ; till at length it rolls on — here between tall ding>' 
 walls, there under precipices of red sandstone — considerably less 
 
36 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 a river than a flood of liquid manure, in which all life dies, 
 whether animal or vegetable, and which resembles nothing in 
 nature, except, perhaps, the stream thrown out in eruption by 
 some mud-volcano. In passing along where the river sweeps by 
 the old Collegiate Church, I met a party of town-police dragging 
 a female culprit — delirious, dirty, and in drink — to the police- 
 office; and I bethought me of the well-known comparison of 
 Cowper, beginning, 
 
 " Sweet stream, that winds through yonder glade. 
 Apt emblem of a virtuous maid," — 
 
 of the maudlin woman not virtuous and of the Irwell. According 
 to one of the poets, contemporary with him of Olney, slightly 
 altered, 
 
 " In spite of fair Zelinda's charms. 
 And all her bards express, 
 Poor Lyce made as true a stream, 
 And I but flatter'd less." 
 
 I spent in Manchester my first English Sabbath ; and as I 
 had crossed the border, not to see countrymen nor to hear such 
 sermons as I might hear every Sunday at home, I went direct 
 to the Collegiate Church. This building, a fine specimen of the 
 florid Gothic, dates somewhere about the time when the Council 
 of Constance was deposing Pope John for his enormous crimes, 
 and burning John Huss and Jerome of Prague for their whole- 
 some opinions; and when, though Popery had become miser- 
 ably worn out as a code of belief, the revived religion of the 
 New Testament could find no rest for the sole of its foot, amid 
 a wide weltering flood of practical infidelity and epicurism in 
 the Church, and gross superstition and ignorance among the 
 laity. And the architecture, and numerous sculptures of the 
 pile, bear meet testimony to the character of the time. They 
 approve themselves the productions of an age in which the priest, 
 engaged in his round of rite and ceremony, could intimate know- 
 ingly to a brother priest, without over-much exciting lay sus- 
 picion, that he knew his profession to be but a joke. Some of 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 37 
 
 the old Cartularies curiously indicate this state of matters. " The 
 Cartulary of Moray," says an ingenious writer in the North British 
 Review, "contains the Constitutiones Lyncolnienses, inserted as 
 proper rules for the priests of that northern province, from which 
 we learn that they were to enter the place of worship, not with 
 insolent looks, but decently and in order ; and were to be guilty 
 of no laughing, or of attempting the perpetration of any base 
 jokes (turpi rim autjoco), and at the same time to conduct their 
 whisperings in an under tone. A full stomach, however, is not 
 the best provocative to lively attention ; and it is therefore far 
 from wonderful that the fathers dosed. Ingenuity provided a 
 remedy even for this ; and the curious visitor will find in the 
 niches of the ruined walls of the ecclesiastical edifices of other 
 days, oscillating seats, which turn upon a pivot, and require the 
 utmost care of the sitter to keep steady. The poor monk who 
 woald dare to indulge in one short nap would, by this most 
 cruel contrivance, be thrown forward upon the stone-floor of the 
 edifice, to the great danger of his neck, and be covered, at the 
 same time, with the < base laughter and joking' of his brethren." 
 Externally, the Collegiate Church is sorely wasted and much 
 blackened; and, save at some little distance, its light and ele- 
 gant proportions fail to tell. The sooty atmosphere of the place 
 has imparted to it its own dingy hue ; while the soft, new red 
 sandstone of which it is built has resigned all the nicer traceiy 
 intrusted to its keeping, to the slow wear of the four centuries 
 which have elapsed since the erection of the edifice. But, in 
 the interior, all is fresh and sharp as when the field of Bosworth 
 was stricken. What first impresses as unusual is the blaze of 
 light which fills the place. For the expected dim solemnity of 
 an old ecclesiastical edifice one finds the full glare of a modem 
 assembly-room ; the day-light streams in through numerous win- 
 dows, muUioned with slim shafts of stone, curiously intertwisted 
 a-lKjp, and plays amid tall slender columns, arches of graceful 
 sweep, and singularly elegant groinings, that shoot out their 
 
38 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 clusters of stony branches, light and graceful as the expanding 
 boughs of some lime or poplar grove. The air of the place is 
 gay, not solemn ; nor are the subjects of its numerous sculptures 
 of a kind suited to deepen the impression. Not a few of the 
 carvings which decorate every patch of wall are of the most 
 ludicrous character. Kows of grotesque heads look down into 
 the nave from the spandrels; some twist their features to the 
 one side of the face, some to the other ; some wink hard, as if 
 exceedingly in joke; some troll out their tongue; some give 
 expression to a lugubrious mirth, others to a ludicrous sorrow. 
 In the choir — of course a still holier part of the edifice than 
 the nave — the sculptor seems to have let his imagination alto- 
 gether run riot. In one compartment there sits, with a birch 
 over his shoulder, an old fox, stem of aspect as Goldsmith's 
 schoolmaster, engaged in teaching two cubs to read. In another, 
 a respectable-looking boar, elevated on his hind legs, is playing 
 on the bagpipe, while his hopeful family, four young pigs, are 
 dancing to his music behind their trough. In yet another there 
 is a hare, contemplating with evident satisfaction a boiling pot, 
 which contains a dog in a fair way of becoming tender. But 
 in yet another the priestly designer seems to have lost sight of 
 prudence and decorum altogether : the chief figure in the piece 
 is a monkey administering extreme unction to a dying man, 
 while a party of other monkeys are plundering the poor sufferer 
 of his effects, and gobbling up his provisions. A Scotch High- 
 lander's faith in the fairies is much less a reality now than it 
 has been ; but few Scotch Highlanders would venture to take 
 such liberties with their neighbours the *^ good people," as the 
 old ecclesiastics of Manchester took with the services of their 
 religion. 
 
 It is rather difficult for a stranger in such a place to follow 
 with strict attention the lesson of the day. To the sermon, 
 however, which was preached in a surplice, I found it com- 
 paratively easy to listen. The Sabbath — a red-letter one — was 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 39 
 
 the twice famous St. Bartholomew's day, associated in the his- 
 tory of Protestantism with the barbarous massacre of the French 
 Huguenots, and in the history of Puritanism with the ejection 
 of the English nonconforming ministers after the Kestoration ; 
 and the sermon was a laboured defence of saints' days in gene- 
 ral, and of the claims of St. Bartholomew's day in particular. 
 There was not a very great deal known of St. Bartholomew, said 
 the clergyman ; but this much at least we all know — he was a 
 good man — an exceedingly good man : it would be well for us 
 to be all like him ; and it was evidently our duty to be trying 
 to be as like him as we could. As for saints' days there could 
 be no doubt about them : they were very admirable things ; they 
 had large standing in tradition, as might be seen from ecclesi- 
 astical history and the writings of the later fathers ; and large 
 st.anding, too, in the Church of England — a fact which no one 
 acquainted with "our excellent Prayer-Book" could in the least 
 question ; nay, it would seem as if they had even some standing 
 in Scripture itself Did not St. Paul remind Timothy of the faith 
 that had dwelt in Lois and Eunice, his grandmother and mother? 
 and had we not therefore a good scriptural argument for keep- 
 ing saints' days, seeing that Timothy must have respected the 
 saint his grandmother? I looked round me to see how {he con- 
 gregation was taking all this, but the congregation bore the tran- 
 quil air of people quite used to such sermons. There were a good 
 many elderly gentlemen who had dropped asleep, and a good 
 many more who seemed speculating in cotton ; but the general 
 aspect was one of heavy inattentive decency : there was, in 
 short, no class of countenances within the building that bore 
 the appropriate expression, save the stone countenances on the 
 wall. 
 
 My fellow-guests in the coffee-house in which I lodged were, 
 an English Independent, a man of some intelligence, and a young 
 Scotchman, a member of the Relief body. They had been hear- 
 ing, they told me, an excellent discourse, in which the preacher 
 
40 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 had made impressive allusion to the historic associations of the 
 day; in especial, to the time 
 
 " When good Coligny's hoary hair was dabbled all in blood." 
 
 I greatly tickled them by giving them, in turn, a simple outline, 
 without note or comment, of the sermon I had been hearing. 
 The clergyman from whom it emanated, maugre his use of the 
 surplice in the pulpit, and his zeal for saints' days, was, I was 
 informed, not properly a Puseyite, but rather one of the class of 
 stiff High Churchmen that germinate into Puseyites when their 
 creed becomes vital within them. For the thorough High 
 Churchman bears, it would appear, the same sort of resemblance 
 to the energetic Puseyite, that a dried bulb in the florist's drawer 
 does to a bulb of the same species in his flower-garden, when 
 swollen with the vegetative juices, and rich in leaf and flower. It 
 is not always the most important matters that take the strongest 
 hold of the mind. The sermon and the ludicrous carvings, linked 
 as closely together by a trick of the associative faculty, as 
 Cruickshank's designs in Oliver Twist with the letter-press of 
 Dickens, continued to haunt me throughout the evening. 
 
 I lodged within a stone-cast of the terminus of the Great 
 Manchester and Birmingham Railway. I could hear the roaring 
 of the trains along the line, from morning till near mid-day, and 
 during the whole afternoon ; and, just as the evening was setting 
 in, I sauntered down to the gate by which a return train was 
 discharging its hundreds of passengers, fresh from the Sabbath 
 amusements of the country, that I might see how they looked. 
 There did not seem much of enjoyment about the wearied and 
 somewhat draggled groups; they wore, on the contrary, rather 
 an unhappy physiognomy, as if they had missed spending the 
 day quite to their minds, and were now returning, sad and dis- 
 appointed, to the round of toil, from which it ought to have 
 proved a sweet interval of relief A congregation just dismissed 
 from hearing a vigorous evening discourse w^ould have borne, to 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 41 
 
 a certainty, a more cheerful air. There was not much actual 
 drunkenness among the crowd — thanks to the preference which 
 the Englishman gives to his ale over ardent spirits — not a tithe 
 of what I would have witnessed, on a similar occasion, in my 
 own country. A few there were, however, evidently muddled; 
 and I saw one positive scene. A young man considerably in 
 liquor had quarrelled with his mistress, and, threatening to throw 
 himself into the Irwell, off he had bolted in the direction of the 
 river. There was a shriek of agony from the young woman, 
 and a cry of " Stop him, stop him," to which a tall bulky 
 Englishman, of the true John Bull type, had coolly responded, 
 by thrusting forth his foot as he passed, and tripping him at 
 full length on the pavement ; and for a few minutes all was 
 hubbub and confusion. With, however, this exception, the 
 aspect of the numerous passengers had a sort of animal decency 
 about it, which one might in vain look for among the Sunday 
 travellers on a Scotch railway. Sunday seems greatly less con- 
 nected with the fourth commandment in the humble English mind 
 than in that of Scotland, and so a less disreputable portion of the 
 people go abroad. There is a considerable difference, too, be- 
 tween masses of men simply ignorant of religion, and masses of 
 men broken loose from it ; and the Sabbath-contemning Scotch 
 belong to the latter category. With the humble Englishman 
 trained up to no regular habit of church-going, Sabbath is pud- 
 ding-day, and clean-shirt day, and a day for lolling on the grass 
 opposite the sun, and, if there be a river or canal hard by, for 
 trying how the gudgeons bite, or, if in the neighbourhood of a 
 railway, for taking a short trip to some country inn, famous for 
 its cakes and ale ; but to the humble Scot become English in 
 his Sabbath views, the day is, in most cases, a time of sheer 
 recklessness and dissipation. There is much truth in the shrewd 
 remark of Sir Walter Scott, that the Scotch, once metamor- 
 phosed into Englishmen, make very mischievous Englishmen 
 indeed. 
 
42 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 Among the existing varieties of the genus philanthropist — 
 benevolent men bent on bettering the condition of the masses 
 — there is a variety who would fain send out our working 
 people to the country on Sabbaths, to become happy and inno- 
 cent in smelling primroses, and stringing daisies on grass stalks. 
 An excellent scheme theirs, if they but knew it, for sinking a 
 people into ignorance and brutality — for filling a country with 
 gloomy workhouses, and the workhouses with unhappy paupers. 
 'Tis pity rather that the institution of the Sabbath, in its eco 
 nomic bearings, should not be better understood by the utili- 
 tarian. The problem which it furnishes is not particularly 
 difficult, if one could be but made to understand, as a first step 
 in the process, that it is really worth solving. The mere animal 
 that has to pass six days of the week in hard labour, benefits 
 greatly by a seventh day of mere animal rest and enjoyment : 
 the repose according to its nature proves of signal use to it, 
 just because it is repose according to its nature. But man is 
 not a mere animal : what is best for the ox and the ass is not 
 best for him ; and in order to degrade him into a poor unin- 
 tellectual slave, over whom tyranny, in its caprice, may trample 
 rough-shod, it is but necessary to tie him down, animal-like, 
 during his six working days to hard engrossing labour, and to 
 convert the seventh into a day of frivolous, unthinking relaxa 
 tion. History speaks with much emphasis on the point. The 
 old despotic Stuarts were tolerable adepts in the art of king- 
 craft, and knew well what they were doing when they backed 
 with their authority the Book of Sports. The merry unthink- 
 ing serfs, who, early in the reign of Charles the First, danced 
 on Sabbaths round the maypole, were afterwards the ready tools 
 of despotism, and fought that England might be enslaved. The 
 Ironsides, who, in the cause of civil and religious freedom, bore 
 them down, were stanch Sabbatarians. 
 
 In no history, however, is the value of the Sabbath more 
 strikingly illustrated than in that of the Scotch people during 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 43 
 
 the seventeenth and the larger portion of the eighteenth cen- 
 turies. Religion and the Sabbath were their sole instructors, 
 and this in times so little favourable to the cultivation of mind, 
 so darkened by persecution and stained with blood, that, in at 
 least the earlier of these centuries, we derive our knowledge of 
 the character and amount of the popular intelligence mainly 
 from the death-testimonies of our humbler martyrs, here and 
 there corroborated by the incidental evidence of writers such as 
 Burnet.^ In these noble addresses from prison and scaftbld — 
 the composition of men drafted by oppression almost at random 
 from out the general mass — we see how vigorously our Pres- 
 byterian people had learned to think, and how well to give 
 their thinking expression. In the quieter times which followed 
 the Revolution, the Scottish peasantry existed as at once the 
 most, provident and intellectual in Europe ; and a moral and 
 instmcted people pressed outwards beyond thje narrow bounds 
 of tlieir country, and rose inio offices of trust and importance 
 in all the nations of the world. There were no Societies for 
 the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in those days. But the 
 Sabbath was kept holy : it was a day from which every dissi- 
 pating frivolity was excluded by a stem sense of duty. The 
 popidar mind, with weight imparted to it by its religious ear- 
 nestness, and direction by the pulpit addresses of the day, ex- 
 patiated on matters of grave import, of which the tendency was 
 to concentrate and strengthen, not scatter and weaken, the 
 faculties ; and the secular cogitations of the week came to 
 bear, in consequence, a Sabbath-day stamp of depth and solidity. 
 The one day in the seven struck the tone for the other six. 
 
 ' Biimet, afterwards the celebrated Whig Bishop, was one of six divines sent out by 
 Archbishop Leighton in 1670 to argue the Scotoii people into Episcopacy. But the 
 mission was by no means successful. " The people of the country," says Burnet, "came 
 generally to hear us, though not in great crowds. We were indeed amazed to see a poor 
 commonalty so capable to argue upon points of government, and on the bounds to be 
 set to the power of princes in matters of religion. Upon all these topics they had texts 
 of Scripture at hand, and were ready with their answers to anything that was said to 
 them. This measure of knowledge was spread even among the meanest of them— their 
 cottagers and their senrants."— (Memoirs, voL L p. 431.) 
 
44 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 Our modem apostles of popular instruction rear up no such men 
 among the masses as were developed under the Sabbatarian 
 system in Scotland. Their aptest pupils prove but the lo- 
 quacious gabbers of their respective workshops — shallow super- 
 ficialists, that bear on the surface of their minds a thin diffusion 
 of ill-remembered facts and crude theories ; and rarely indeed 
 do we see them rising in the scale of society : they become 
 Socialists by hundreds, and Chartists by thousands, and get no 
 higher. The disseminator of mere useful knowledge takes aim 
 at the popular ignorance ; but his inept and unscientific gun- 
 nery does not include in its calculations the parabolic curve of 
 man's spiritual nature ; and so, aiming direct at the mark, he 
 aims toe low, and the charge falls short. 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 45 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Quit Manchester for Wolverhampton— Scenery of the New Red Sandstone ; apparent 
 repetition of pattern — The frequent marshes of England; curiously represented in the 
 national literature ; influence on the national superstitions — Wolverhampton — Pecu- 
 liar aspect of the Dudley coal-field ; striking passage in its history — The rise of Bir- 
 mingham into a great manufacturing town an eflfect of the development of its mineral 
 treasures — Upper Ludlow deposit ; Ayraestry Limestone ; both deposits of peculiar 
 interest to the Scotch geologist — The Lingula Lewisii. and Trebratula Wilsoni — 
 General resemblance of the Silurian fossils to those of the Mountain Limestone — 
 First-bom of the vertebrata yet known — Order of creation — The "Wren's Nest" — 
 Fossils of the Wenlock Limestone ; in a" state of beautiful keeping — Anecdote— 
 Asaphus Caudatus : common, it would seem, to both the Silurian and Carboniferous 
 rocks — Limestone miners— Noble gallery excavated in the hilL 
 
 I QUITTED Manchester by the morning train, and travelled 
 through a flat New Red Sandstone district, on the Birmingham 
 Railway, for about eighty miles. One finds quite the sort of 
 country here for travelling over by steam. If one misses seeing 
 a bit of landscape, as the carriages hurry through, and the ob- 
 jects in the foreground look dim and indistinct, and all in motion, 
 as if seen through water, it is sure to be repeated in the course of a 
 few miles, and again and again repeated. I was reminded, as we 
 hurried along, and the flat country opened and spread out on 
 either side, of webs of carpet-stuff nailed down to pieces of board- 
 ing, and presenting, at regular distances, returns of the same rich 
 pattern. Red detached houses stand up amid the green fields ; 
 little bits of brick villages lie grouped beside cross roads ; irregular 
 patches of wood occupy nooks and comers ; lines of poplars rise 
 tall and taper amid straggling cottages ; and then, having once 
 passed houses, villages, and woods, we seem as if we had to pass 
 them again and again ; the red detached houses return, the bits 
 of villages, the woody nooks and comers, the lines of taper 
 
46 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 poplars amid the cottages; and thus the repetitions of the pat- 
 tern run on and on. 
 
 In a country so level as England there must be many a swampy 
 hollow furnished with no outlet to its waters. The bogs and 
 marshes of the midland and southern counties formed of old the 
 natural strongholds, in which the people, in times of extremity, 
 sheltered from the invader. Alfred's main refuge, when all others 
 failed him, was a bog of Somersetshire. When passing this 
 morning along frequent fields of osiers and wide-spread marshes, 
 bristling with thickets of bulrushes and reeds, I was led to think 
 of what had never before occurred to me — the considerable amount 
 of imagery and description which the poets of England have trans- 
 ferred from scenery of this character into the national literature. 
 There is in English verse much whispering of osiers beside silent 
 streams, and much waving of sedges over quiet waters. Shak- 
 spere has his exquisite pictures of slow gliding currents — 
 
 " Making sweet music with the enamell'd stones. 
 And giving gentle kisses to each sedge 
 They overtake in their lone pilgrimage." 
 
 And Milton, too, of water-nymphs 
 
 " Sitting by rushy fringed bank 
 Where grows the veillow and the osier dank ;" 
 
 or 
 
 ** Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave. 
 In twisted braids of lilies knitting 
 The loose train of their amber dropping hair ;' 
 
 or of " sighing sent," by the " parting genius," 
 
 " From haunted spring and dale. 
 Edged with poplar pale." 
 
 We find occasional glimpses of the same dank scenery in Collins, 
 Cowper, and Crabbe ; and very frequent ones, in our own times, in 
 the graphic descriptions of Alfred Tennyson and Thomas Hood. 
 
 " One willow o'er the river wept, 
 And shook the wave as the wind did sigh ; 
 Above in the wind sported the swallow. 
 Chasing itself at its own wild will ; 
 And far through the marish green, and still, 
 
 The tangled water-courses slept. 
 Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.' 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 47 
 
 Not less striking is at least one of the pictures drawn by Hood: — 
 
 " The coot was ywimming in the reedy pool. 
 Beside the water-hen, so soon affrighted ; 
 And in the weedy moat, the heron, fond 
 Of solitude, alighted ; 
 The moping heron, motionless and stiff, 
 That on a stone as silently and stilly 
 Stood, an apparent sentinel, as if 
 To guard the water-lily." • 
 
 ' The watery flats of the country have had also their influence 
 on the popular superstitions. The delusive tapers that spring 
 up a-nights from stagnant bogs and fens must have been of fre- 
 quent appearance in the more marshy districts of England ; and 
 we accordingly find, that of all the national goblins, the goblin 
 of the wandering night-fire, whether recognised as Jack-of-the- 
 Lantem or Will-of-the-Wisp, was one of the best known. 
 
 " She was pinched and pulled, she said. 
 And he by friar's lantern led." 
 
 Or, as the exquisite poet who produced this couplet more ela 
 borately describes the apparition in his " Paradise Lost," — 
 
 " A wandering fire. 
 Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night 
 Kindles through agitation to a flame. 
 Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends, 
 Hovering and blazing with delusive light, 
 Leading the amazed night -wanderer from his way 
 Through bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool, 
 There swallowed up and lost, from succour far." 
 
 Scarce inferior to even the description of Milton is that of 
 Collins : — 
 
 " Ah, homely swains ! your homeward steps ne'er lose ; 
 
 Let not dank Will mislead you on the heath : 
 Dancing in mirky night, o'er fen and lake. 
 
 He glows, to draw you downward to your death. 
 In his bewitch'd, low, marshy willow-brak«. 
 
 What though, far off from some dark dell espied. 
 His glimmering mazes cheer th' excursive sight ? 
 
 Yet turn, ye wanderers, turn your steps aside. 
 Nor triist the guidance of that faithless light ; 
 
 For watchful, lurking 'mid the unrustUng reed. 
 At these mirk hours, the wily monster lies, 
 
 And listens oft to hear the passing steed, 
 And frequent round him rolls his sullen eyes, 
 If chance his sarage wrath may some weak wretch surpriiiat'* 
 
48 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 One soon wearies of the monotony of railway travelling — of 
 hurrying through a country, stage after stage, without incident 
 or advantage ; and so I felt quite glad enough, when the train 
 stopped at Wolverhampton, to find myself once more at freedom 
 and a-foot. There will be an end, surely, to all works of travels, 
 when the railway system of the world shall be completed. I 
 passed direct through Wolverhampton — a large but rather unin- 
 teresting assemblage of red-brick houses, copped with red-tile 
 roof, slippered with red-tile floors, and neither in its component 
 parts nor in its grouping differing in any perceptible degree from 
 several scores of the other assemblages of red-brick houses that 
 form the busier market-towns of England. The town has been 
 built in the neighbourhood of the Dudley coal-basin, on an in- 
 coherent lower deposit of New Red Sandstone, unfitted for the 
 purposes of the stone-mason, but peculiarly well suited, in some 
 of its superficial argillaceous beds, for those of the brick-maker. 
 Hence the prevailing colour and character of the place ; and 
 such, in kind, are the circumstances that impart to the great 
 majority of English towns so very different an aspect from that 
 borne by our Scottish ones. They are the towns of a brick and 
 tile manufacturing country, rich in coal and clay, but singularly 
 poor in sandstone quarries. 
 
 I took the Dudley road, and left the scattered suburbs of the 
 town but a few hundred yards behind me, when the altered ap- 
 pearance of the country gave evidence that I had quitted the 
 New Red Sandstone, and had entered on the Coal Measuresw 
 On the right, scarce a gunshot from the wayside, there stretched 
 away a rich though comparatively thinly-inhabited country — 
 green, undulated, lined thickly, lengthwise and athwart, with 
 luxuriant hedge-rows, sparsely sprinkled with farm-houses, and 
 over-canopied this morning by a clear blue sky ; while on the 
 left, far as the eye could penetrate through a mud-coloured at- 
 mosphere of smoke and culm, there spread out a barren uneven 
 wilderness of slag and shale, the debris of limekilns and smelting 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 49 
 
 works, and of coal aud ironstone pits ; and amid the dun haze 
 there stood up what seemed a continuous city of fire-belching 
 furnaces and smoke-vomiting chimneys, blent with numerous 
 groups of little dmgy buildings, the dwellings of iron-smelters and 
 miners. Wherever the New Red Sandstone extends, the countiy 
 wears a sleek unbroken skin of green ; wherever the Coal Mea- 
 sures spread away, lake like, from tlie lower edges of this fonna- 
 tion, all is verdureless, broken, and grey. The colouring of the 
 two formations could be scarcely better defined in a geological 
 map than here on the face of the landscape. There is no such 
 utter ruin of the surface in our mining districts in Scotland. The 
 rubbish of the subterranean workings is scarce at all suffered to 
 encroach, save in widely-scattered hillocks, on the arable super- 
 ficies ; and these hillocks the indefatigable agriculturist is ever 
 levelling and carrying away, to make way for the plough ; whereas, 
 so entirely has the farmer been beaten from off the field here, 
 and so thickly do the heaps cumber the surface, that one might 
 almost imagine the land had been seized in the remote past by 
 some mortal sickness, and, after vomiting out its bowels, had lain 
 stone-dead ever since. The labouring inhabitants of this desert 
 — a rude, improvident, Cyclopean race, indifterenfc to all save the 
 mineral treasures of the soil — are rather graphically designated 
 in the neighbouring districts, where I found them exceedingly 
 cheaply rated, as " the lie-wasters." Some six or eight centuries 
 ago, the Dudley coal-field existed as a wild forest, in which a 
 few semi-barbarous iron-smelters and charcoal-burners carried on 
 their solitary labours ; and which was remarkable chiefly for a 
 seam of coal thirty feet in thickness, which, like some of the 
 coal-seams of the United States, cropped out at the surface, and 
 was wrought among the trees in the open air. A small colony 
 of workers in iron of various kinds settled in the neighbourhood, 
 and their congregated forges and cottage-dwellings formed a little 
 noisy hamlet amid the woodlands. The miner explored, to 
 greater and still greater depths, the mineral treasures of the 
 
 D 
 
50 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 coal-field ; the ever-resounding, ever-smoking village added house 
 to house and forge to forge, as the fuel and the ironstone heaps 
 accumulated ; till at length the three thick bands of dark ore, 
 and the ten-yard coal-seam of the basin, though restricted to a 
 space greatly less in area than some of our Scottish lakes, pro- 
 duced, out of the few congregated huts, the busy town of Bir- 
 mingham, with its two hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants. 
 And as the rise of the place has been connected with the develop- 
 ment of the mineral treasures of its small but exceedingly rich 
 coal-field, their exhaustion, unless there open up to it new fields 
 of industry, must induce its decline. There is a day coming, 
 though a still distant one, when the miner shall have done with 
 this wilderness of debris and chimneys, just as the charcoal-burner 
 had done with it when the woodlands were exhausted, ages ago, 
 or as the farmer had done with it at a considerably later period ; 
 and when it shall exist as an uninhabited desert, full of gloomy 
 pitfalls, half-hidden by a stunted vegetation, and studded with 
 unseemly ruins of brick : and the neighbouring city, like a beg- 
 gared spendthrift, that, after having run through his patrimony, 
 continues to reside in the house of his ancestors, shall have, in 
 all probability, to shut up many an apartment, and leave many 
 a forsaken range of ofl&ces and out-houses to sink into decay. 
 
 The road began to ascend from the low platform of the coal- 
 field along the shoulder of a green hill that rises some six or 
 seven hundred feet over the level of the sea — no inconsiderable 
 elevation in this part of the kingdom. There were no longer 
 heaps of dark-coloured debris on either hand ; and I saw for the 
 first time in England, where there had been a cutting into the 
 acclivity, to lower the angle of the ascent, a section of rock much 
 resembling our Scotch grauwacke of the southern counties. 
 Unlike our Scotch grauwacke, however, I found that almost 
 every fragment of the mass contained its fossil — some ill-pre- 
 served terebratula or leptaena, or some sorely weathered coralline : 
 but all was doubtful and obscure; and I looked round me, 
 
 I 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 51 
 
 though in vain, for some band of lime compact enough to ex- 
 hibit in its sharp-edged casts the characteristic peculiarities of 
 the group. A spruce waggoner, in a blue frock much roughened 
 with needle-work, came whistling down the hill beside his team, 
 and I inquired of him whether there were limestone quarries in 
 the neighbourhood. " Yez, yez, lots of lime just afore thee," 
 said the waggoner, " can't miss the way, if thou lookest to the 
 hiU-side." I went on for a few hundred yards, and found an 
 extensive quarry existing as a somewhat dreary-looking dell, 
 deeply scooped out of the acclivity on the left, with heaps of 
 broken grass-grown debris on the one side of the excavation, and 
 on the other a precipitous front of grey lichened rock, against 
 which there leaned a line of open kilns and a ruinous hut. 
 
 The quarriers were engaged in plying mattock and lever on 
 an open front in the upper part of the dell, which, both from its 
 deserted appearance and the magnitude of its weather-stained 
 workings, appeared to be much less extensively wrought than at 
 some former period. I felt a peculiar interest in examining the 
 numerous fossils of the deposit — such an interest as that ex- 
 perienced by the over-curious Calender in the Arabian Nights, 
 when first introduced into the hall of the winged horse, from 
 which, though free to roam over all the rest of the palace, with 
 its hundred gates and its golden door, he had been long sedu- 
 lously excluded. I had now entered, for the first time, into a 
 chamber of the grand fossiliferous museum — the great stone- 
 record edifice of our island — of which I had not thought the 
 less frequently from the circumstance that I was better ac- 
 quainted with the chamber that lies directly overhead, if I may 
 so speak, with but a thin floor between, than with any other m 
 the erection. I had been labouring for years in the lower Old 
 Red Sandstone, and had acquainted myself with its winged and 
 plate-covered, its enamelled and tubercle-roughened ichthyolites ; 
 but there is no getting down in Scotland into the cellarage of 
 the edifice : it is as thoroughly a mystery to the mere Scotc|i 
 
52 FIUST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 geologist as the cellarage of Todgers' in Martin Chuzzlewit, of 
 which a stranger kept the key, was to the inmates of that re- 
 spectable tavern. Here, however, I had got fairly into the 
 cellar at last. The frontage of fossiliferous granwacke-looking 
 rock, by tlie wayside, which I had just examined, is known, 
 thanks to Sir Roderick Murchison, to belong to the upper Lud- 
 low deposit — the Silurian base on which the Old Red Sandstone 
 rests ; and I had now got a storey further down, and was among 
 the Aymestry Limestones. 
 
 The first fossil I picked up greatly resembled in size and form 
 a pistol-bullet. It proved to be one of the most characteristic 
 shells of the formation — the Terehratula Wilsoni. Nor was the 
 second I found — the Lingula Leivisii, a bivalve formed like the 
 blade of a wooden shovel — less characteristic. The Liugula still 
 exists in some two or three species in the distant Moluccas. 
 There was but one of these known in the times of Cuvier, the 
 Lingula anatina; and so unlike was it deemed by the naturalist 
 to any of its contemporary mollusca, that of the single species he 
 formed not only a distinct genus, but also an independent class. 
 The existing, like the fossil shell, resembles the blade of a 
 wooden shovel; but the shovel has also a handle, and in this 
 mainly consists its dissimilarity to any other bivalve : a cylin- 
 drical cartilaginous stem or foot-stalk elevates at some three or 
 four inches over the rocky base to which it is attached, just as 
 the handle of a shovel, stuck half a foot into the earth, at the 
 part where the hand grasps it, would elevate the blade over the 
 surface, or as the stem of a tulip eievates the flower over the soil. 
 A community of Lingulse must resemble, in their deep sea-haunts, 
 a group of Liliputian shovels, reversed by the labourers to in- 
 dicate their work completed, or a bed of half-folded tulips, raised 
 on stiff dingy stems, and exhibiting flattened petals of delicate 
 green. I am not aware that any trace of the cartilaginous foot- 
 stalk has been yet detected in fossil Lingulse ; — like those of this 
 quarry, tney are mere shovel-blades divested of the handles ; but 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 53 
 
 ill all tlmt survives of them, or could be expected to survive — 
 the calcareous portion — they are identical in type with the liv- 
 ing mollusc of the Moluccas. What most strikes in the globe- 
 si laped terebratula, their contemporary, is the singularly antique 
 character of the ventral margin : it seems moulded in the ex- 
 treme of an ancient fashion long since gone out. Instead of 
 nmning continuously round in one plane, like the margins of our 
 existing cockle, venus, or mactra, so as to form, when the valves 
 are shut, a rectilinear line of division, it presents in the centre 
 a huge dovetail, so that the lower valve exhibits in its middle 
 front a square gateway, which we see occupied, when the mouth 
 is closed by a portcullis-like projection, dependent from the 
 margin of the upper valve. Margins of this antique form cha- 
 ra(jterize some of the terebratulae of even the Chalk, and the 
 spirifers of the Carboniferous Limestone; but in none of the 
 comparatively modern shells is the square portcullis-shaped in- 
 dentation so strongly indicated as in the Terebratula Wilsoni. 
 I picked up several other fossils in the quarry: the Orthis 
 orbicularis and Orihis lunata; the Atiypa offinis; several 111- 
 presei-ved portions of orthoceratite, belonging chiefly, so far as 
 their state of keeping enabled me to decide, to the Orthoceras 
 hullatum; a small, imperfectly-conical coral, that more resembled 
 the Stromatopora concentrica of the Wenlock rocks, than any of 
 tlie other Silurian corals figured by Murchison ; and a few minute 
 sj)rigs of the Favosites polymorpha. The concretionary charac- 
 ter of the limestone of the deposit has militated against the 
 I)reservation of the larger organisms which it encloses. Of the 
 smaller shells, many are in a beautiful state of keeping : like 
 some of the comparatively modern shells of the Oolite, they still 
 retain unaltered the silvery lustre of the nacre, and present out- 
 lines as sharp and well defined, with every delicate angle un- 
 worn, and every minute stria undefaced, aa if inhabited but 
 yesterday by the living molluscs ; whereas most of the bulkier 
 fossils, from the broken and detached nature of the rock — a 
 
54 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 nodular limestone imbedded in strata of shale — exist as mere 
 fragments. What perhaps first strikes the eye is the deep-sea 
 character of the deposit, and its general resemblance to the 
 Mountain Limestone. Nature, though she dropped between the 
 times of the Silurian and Carboniferous oceans many of her 
 genera, and, with but a few marked exceptions, all her species,^ 
 seems to have scarce at all altered the general types after which 
 the productions of both oceans were moulded. 
 
 I could find in this quarry of the Aymestry Limestone no 
 trace of aught higher than the Cephalopoda — none of those 
 plates, scales, spines, or teeth, indicative of the vertebrate ani- 
 mals, which so abound in the Lower Old Red Sandstones of 
 Scotland. And yet the vertebrata seem to have existed at the 
 time. The famous bone-bed of the Upper Silurian system, with 
 its well-marked ichthyolitic remains, occurs in the Upper Ludlow 
 Rock — the deposit immediately overhead. We find it shelved 
 high, if I may so speak, in the first storey of the system, reckon- 
 ing from the roof downwards ; the calcareous deposit in which 
 this hill-side quarry has been hollowed forms a second storey ; 
 the Lower Ludlow Rock a third ; and in yet a fourth — the 
 Wenlock Limestone, — just one remove over the Lower Silurians 
 —for the Wenlock Shale ' constitutes the base storey of the 
 upper division, — there have been found the remains of a fish, 
 or rather minute portions of the remains of a fish, the most 
 ancient yet known to the geologist. *' Take the Lower Silu- 
 rians all over the globe," says Sir Roderick Murchison, in a 
 note to the writer of these chapters, which bears date no further 
 back than last July, " and they have never yet offered the trace 
 of a fish." It is to be regretted that the ichthyolite of the 
 Wenlock Limestone — the first-bom of the vertebrata whose 
 birth and death seem entered in the geologic register — has not 
 
 ' " Upwards of eight hundred extinct species of animals have been described as be- 
 longing to the earliest or Protozoic and Silurian period; and of these, only about one 
 hundred are found also in the overlying Devonian series ; while but fifteen are common 
 to the whole Palaeozoic period, and not one extends beyond it." — {Anstcd, 1844.) 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 55 
 
 been made the subject of a careful memoir, illustrated by a good 
 engraving. One is naturally desirous to know all that can be 
 known regarding the first entrance in the drama of existence 
 of a new class in creation, and to hav6 the place and date 
 which the entry bears in the record fairly established. The 
 evidence, however, though not yet made patent to the geolo- 
 gical brotherhood, seems to be solid. It has at least satisfied 
 a writer in the Edinburgh Review of last year, generally recog- 
 nised as one of the master-spirits of the age. " We have seen," 
 says Mr. Sedgwick, the understood author of the article, " cha- 
 racteristic portions of a fish derived from the shales alternating 
 with the Wenlock Limestone. This ichthyolite, to speak in the 
 technical language of Agassiz, undoubtedly belongs to the 
 Cestraciont family, of the Placoid order — proving to demon- 
 stration that the oldest known fossil fish belongs to the highest 
 type of that division of the vertebrata." 
 
 A strange debiU this, and of deep interest to the student of 
 nature. The veil of mystery must for ever rest over the act of 
 creation ; but it is something to know of its order — to know 
 that, as exhibited in the great geologic register, graven, like the 
 decalogue of old, on tables of stone, there is an analogy main- 
 tained, that indicates identity of style with the order specified 
 in the Mosaic record as that observed by the Creator in pro- 
 ducing the scene of things to which we ourselves belong. In 
 both records — the sculptured and the written — periods of 
 creative energy are indicated as alternating with periods of rest 
 — days in which the Creator laboured, with nights in which He 
 ceased from his labours, again to resume them in the morning. 
 According to both records, higher and lower existences were 
 called into being successively, not simultaneously ; — according 
 to both, after each interval of repose, the succeeding period of 
 activity witnessed loftier and yet loftier efforts of production ; 
 according to both, though in the earlier stages there was incom- 
 pleteness in the scale of existence, there was yet no imperfection 
 
66 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 in the individual existences of which the scale was composed ; — 
 at the termination of the first, as of the last day of creation, all 
 in its kind was good. Ere any of the higher natures existed, 
 
 " God saw that all was a;ood, 
 When ev'n and morn recorded the third day." 
 
 I quitted the quarry in the hill-side, and walked on through 
 the village of Sedgley, towards a second and much more strik- 
 ing hill, well known to geologists and lovers of the picturesque 
 as the " Wren's Nest." A third hill, that of Dudley, beauti- 
 fully wooded and capped by its fine old castle, lies direct in the 
 same line ; so that the three hills taken together form a chain 
 of eminences, which run diagonally, for some four or five miles, 
 into the middle of the coal-basin ; and which, rising high from the 
 surrounding level, resemble steep-sided islets in an Alpine lake. 
 It is a somewhat curious circumstance, that while the enclosing 
 shores of the basin are formed of the Lower New Red Sandstone, 
 and the basin itself of the Upper and Lower Coal Measures, 
 these three islets are all Silurian ; the first, that of Sedgley, 
 which I had just quitted, presenting in succession the Upper 
 Ludlow Rock and Aymestry Limestone, with some of the inferior 
 deposits on which these rest ; and the second and third the 
 Wenlock Shale and Wenlock Limestone. The " Wren's Nest," 
 as I approached it this day along green lanes and over quiet 
 fields fringed with trees, presented the appearance of some bold 
 sea-promontory, crowned a-top with stunted wood, and flanked 
 by a tall, pale-grey precipice, continuous as a rampart for a full 
 half-mile. But, to borrow from one of Byron's descriptions, 
 
 " There is no sea to lave its base, 
 But a most living landscape, and the wave 
 Of woods and corn-fields, and the abodes of men 
 Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke 
 Rising from rustic roofs," 
 
 Such is the profile of the hill on both sides. Seen in front, it 
 presents the appearance of a truncated dome ; while a-top we 
 find it occupied by an elliptical, crater-like hollow, that has 
 
i 
 
 57 
 
 b(?en grooved deep by the hand of Nature along the flat sum- 
 mit, so as to form a huge nest, into which the gigantic roc 
 of Eastern story might drop a hundred such eggs as the one 
 familiar to the students of the great voyager Sinbad. And 
 hence the name of the eminence. John Bull, making merry, 
 in one of his humorous moods, with its imposing greatness, 
 has termed it the ^' Wren's Nest." I came up to its grey lines 
 of sloping precipice, and found them so thickly charged with 
 their sepulchral tablets and pictorial epitaphs, that, like the 
 walls of some Egyptian street of tombs, almost every square 
 yard bears its own lengthened inscription. These sloping pre- 
 cipices, situated as they now ai'e in central England, once 
 formed a deep sea bottom, far out of reach of land, whose green 
 recesses were whitened by innumerable corals and coral-lines, 
 amid which ancient shells, that loved the profounder depths, 
 tcrebratula, leptsena, and spirifer, lay anchored; while innu- 
 merable trilobites crept sluggishly above zoophyte and molhisc, 
 on the thickly inhabited platform; and the orthoceras and the 
 bellerophon floated along the surface high overhead. A strange 
 story, surely, but not more strange than true; in at least the 
 leading details there is no possibility of mistaking the purport 
 of the inscriptions. 
 
 The outer front of precipice we find composed of carbonate 
 of lime, alternating with thin layers of a fine-grained aluminous 
 shale, which yields to the weather, betraying, in every more 
 exposed portion of the rock, the organic character of the lime- 
 stone. Wherever the impalpable shale has been washed away, 
 we find the stone as shari)ly sculptured beneatli as a Chinese 
 snuff-box; with this diff"erence, however, that the figures are 
 more nicely relieved, and grouped much more thickly together. 
 We 'ascertain that every component particle of the roughened 
 ground on which they lie, even the most minute, is organic 
 It is composed of portions of the most diminutive zoopliytes — 
 retipora, or fcstinoUa, or the microscopic joints of thread-like 
 
58 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 crinoideal tentacula ; while the bolder figures that stand up in 
 high relief over it are delicately sculptured shells of antique 
 type and proportions, Crustacea of the trilobite family, corals 
 massive or branched, graceful gorgonia, and the stems and 
 pelvic bulbs of crinoidea. The impalpable shales of the hill 
 seem to have been deposited from above — the soil of aluminous 
 shores carried far by the sea, and thrown down in the calm on 
 beds of zoophytes and shells ; whereas the lime appears to have 
 been elaborated, not deposited : it gi'ew upon the spot slowly 
 and imperceptibly as age succeeded age — a secretion of animal 
 life. 
 
 After passing slowly around the hill, here striking off a shell, 
 there disinterring a trilobite — here admiring some huge mass 
 of chain-coral, that, even when in its recent state, I could not 
 have raised from the ground — there examining, with the assist- 
 ance of the lens, the minute meshes of some net-like festinella, 
 scarce half a nail's-breadth in area — I set me down in the sun- 
 shine in the opening of a deserted quarry, hollowed in the 
 dome-like front of the hill, amid shells and corallines that had 
 been separated from the shaley matrix by the disintegrating 
 influences of the weather. The organisms lay as thickly around 
 me as recent shells and corals on a tropical beach. The labours 
 of Murchison had brought me acquainted with their forms, and 
 with the uncouth names given them in this late age of the 
 world, so many long creations after they had been dead and 
 buried, and locked up in rock ; but they were new to me in 
 their actually existing state as fossils ; and the buoyant delight 
 with which I squatted among them, glass in hand, to examine 
 and select, made me smile a moment after, when I bethought 
 me that my little boy Bill could have shown scarce greater 
 eagerness, when set down for the first time, in his third sum- 
 mer, amid the shells and pebbles of the sea-shore. But I 
 daresay most of my readers, if transported for a time to the 
 ocean shores of Mars or of Venus, would manifest some such 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 59 
 
 eagerness in ascertaining the types in which, in these remote 
 planets, the Creator exhibits life. And here, strewed thickly 
 around me, were the shells ^nd corals of the Silurian ocean — 
 an ocean quite as dissimilar in its productions to that of the 
 present day, as the oceans either of Mars or Venus. It takes a 
 great deal to slacken the zeal of some pursuits. I have been 
 told by a relative, now deceased — a man strongly imbued with 
 a taste for natural history, who fought under Abercromby in 
 Egypt — that though the work was rather warm on the day he 
 first leaped ashore on that celebrated land, and the beach some- 
 what cumbered by the slain, he could not avoid casting a 
 glance at the white shells which mingled with the sand at his 
 feet, to see whether they greatly differed from those of his own 
 country; and that one curious shell, which now holds an 
 honoured place in my small collection, he found time to trans- 
 fer, amid the sharp whizzing of the bullets, to his waistcoat 
 pocket. 
 
 I filled a small box with minute shells and corals — terebra- 
 tulaj of some six or eight distinct species, a few leptsense and 
 orthes, a singularly beautiful astrea, figured by Murchison as 
 Astrea ananas, or the pine-apple astrea, several varieties of 
 cyathophyllum, and some two or three species of porites and 
 limaria. To some of the corals I foimd thin mat-like zoophytes 
 of the character of flustrse attached; to others, what seemed 
 small serpulse. Out of one mass of shale T disinterred the head 
 of a stone lily — the CyathocHnites pyrifoimiis — beautifully 
 preserved ; in a second mass I found the fully-expanded pelvis 
 and arms of a different genus — the Actinocrinites monilifoi'mis 
 — but it fell to pieces ere I could extricate it. I was more 
 successful in detaching entire a fine specimen of what I find 
 figured by Murchison, though with a doubtful note of interro- 
 gation attached, as a gorgonia or sea-fan. I found much 
 pleasure, too, in acquainting myself, though the specimens were 
 not particularly fine, with disjointed portions of trilobites — 
 
60 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 now a head turned up — now. the caudal portion of the shell, 
 exhibiting the inner side and abdominal rim — now a few de- 
 tached joints. In some of the specimens — invariably headless 
 ones — the body seems scarce larger than that of a common 
 house-fly. Here, as amid the upper deposits at Sedgley, I 
 was struck with the general resemblance of the formation to 
 the Carboniferous Limestone : not a few of the shells are at 
 least generically similar; there is tlie same abundance of cri- 
 noideae and festinellse ; and in some localities nearly the same 
 profusion of the large and the minuter corals. And though 
 trilobites are comparatively rare in the Mountain Limestone 
 of Britain, I have found in that of Dry den, in the neighbour- 
 hood of Edinburgh, the body of at least one trilobite, which I 
 could not distinguish from a species of frequent occurrence in 
 the Wenlock Limestone — the Asaphus Caudatus. I may re- 
 mind the reader, in corroboration of the fact, that Buckland, 
 in his " Bridgewater Treatise," figures two decapitated speci- 
 mens of this trilobite, one of which was furnished by the 
 Carboniferous Limestone of Northumberland, and the other by 
 the Transition Limestone near Leominster. There obtains, 
 however, one striking difference between the more ancient and 
 more modern deposits : I have rarely explored richly fossilifer- 
 ous beds of the Mountain Limestone, without now and then 
 finding the scales of a fish, and now and then the impression of 
 some land-plant washed from the shore ; but in the Silurian 
 hills of the Dudley coal-field, no trace of the vertebrata has yet 
 been found, and no vegetable product of the land. 
 
 The sun had got far down in the west ere I quitted the 
 deserted quarry, and took my way towards the distant town, 
 not over, but through the hill, by a long gloomy corridor. I 
 had been aware all day that, though apparently much alone, I 
 had yet near neighbours : there had been an irregular succession 
 of dull, half-smothered sounds, from the bowels of the earth ; 
 and at times, when in contact with the naked rock, I could 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 61 
 
 feel, as the subterranean thunder pealed through the abyss, the 
 solid mass trembling beneath me. The phenomena were those 
 described by Wordsworth, as eliciting, in a scene of deep solitude, 
 the mingled astonishment and terror of Peter Bell, — 
 
 " When, to confound his spiteful mirth, 
 A murmur pent within the earth, 
 In the dead earth, beneath the road. 
 Sudden arose ! It swept along, 
 A muffled noise, a rumbling sound : 
 'Twas by a troop of miners made, 
 Plying with gunpowder their trade. 
 Some twenty fathoms under ground " 
 
 I was scarce prepared, however, for excavations of such impos- 
 ing extent as the one into which I found the vaulted corridor 
 open. It forms a long gallery, extending for hundreds of yards 
 on either hand, with an overhanging precipice bare to the hill- 
 to]) leaning perilously over on the one side, and a range of sup- 
 porting buttresses cut out of the living rock, and perforated with 
 lofty archways, planting at measured distances their strong feet 
 on the other. Through the openings between the buttresses — 
 long since divested, by a shaggy vegetation, of eveiy stiff angu- 
 larity borrowed from the tool of the miner — the red light of 
 evening was streaming, in well-defined patches, on the grey rock 
 and broken floor. Each huge buttress threw its broad bar of 
 shadow in the same direction ; and thus the gallery, through 
 its entire extent, was baiTed, zebra-like, with alternate belts of 
 sun-light and gloom — the " ebon and ivory " of Sir Walter s 
 famed description. The rawness of artificial excavation has long 
 since disappeared under the slow incrustations of myriads of 
 lichens and mosses — for the quarrier seems to have had done 
 with the place for centuries ; and if I could have but got rid of 
 the recollection that it had been scooped out by handfuls for a 
 far different purpose than that of making a grotto, I should have 
 deemed it one of the finest caverns I ever saw. Imnuidiately 
 beside where the vaulted corridor enters the gallery, there is a 
 wide dark chasm in the floor, funiished with a rusty chaiu- 
 
62 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 ladder, that gives perilous access to the lower workings of the 
 hill. There was not light enough this evening to show half- 
 way down ; but far below, in the darkness, I could see the fiery 
 glimmer of a torch reflected on a sheet of pitch-black water; 
 and I afterwards learned that a branch of the Dudley and Bir- 
 mingham Canal, invisible for a full mile, has been carried thus 
 far into the bowels of the hill. I crossed over the nest-like 
 valley scooped in the summit of the eminence — a picturesque, 
 solitary spot, occupied by a corn-field, and feathered all around 
 on the edges with wood ; and then crossing a second deep exca- 
 vation, which, like the gallery described, is solely the work of 
 the miner, I struck over a range of green fields, pleasantly 
 grouped in the hollow between the Wren's-Nest-hiU and the 
 Castle-Hill of Dudley, and reached the town just as the sun 
 was setting. The valleys which interpose between the three 
 Silurian islets of the Dudley basin are also Silurian; and as 
 they have been hollowed by the denuding agencies out of use- 
 less beds of shale and mudstone, the miner has had no motive 
 to bore into their sides and bottom, or to cumber the surface, 
 as in the surrounding coal-field, with the ruins of the interior; 
 and so the valleys, with their three lovely hills, form an oasis 
 in the waste. 
 
p 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 63 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Dudley; significant marks of the mining town — Kindly Scotch landlady— Temperance 
 coflTee-house — Little Samuel the teetotaller — Curious incident — Anecdote — The re- 
 suscitated spinet — Forbearance of little Samuel — Dudley Museum ; singularly rich in 
 Silurian fossils — Megalichthys Hibberti — Fossils from Mount Lebanon ; very modem 
 compared with those of the Hill of Dudley— Geology peculiarly fitted to revolutionize 
 one's ideas of modem and ancient— Fossils of extreme antiquity furnished by a 
 Canadian township that had no name twenty years ago— Fossils from the old Egyptian 
 desert found to be comparatively of yesterday — Dudley Castle and Castle-hill — Crom- 
 well's mission — Castle finds a faithful chronicler in an old serving-maid — Her narra- 
 tive— Cayes and fossils of the Castle-hill — Extensive excavations— Superiority of the 
 natural to the artificial cavern- Fossils of the Scottish Grauwacke— Analogy between 
 the female lobster and the trilobite. 
 
 The town of Dudley has been built half on the Silurian de- 
 posit, half on the coal-field, and is flanked on the one side by 
 pleasant fields, traversed by quiet green lanes, and on the other 
 by ruinous coal-workings and heaps of rubbish. But as the 
 townspeople are not " lie-wasters," we find, in at least the neigh- 
 bourhood of the houses, the rubbish-heaps intersected with in- 
 numerable rude fences, and covered by a rank vegetation. The 
 mechanics of the place have cultivated without levelling them, 
 so that for acres together they present the phenomenon of a 
 cockling sea of gardens — a rural Bay of Biscay agitated by the 
 ground swell — with rows of cabbages and beds of carrots riding 
 on the tops of huge waves, and gooseberry and currant bushes 
 sheltering in deep troughs and hollows. I marked, as I passed 
 through the streets, several significant traits of the mining town : . 
 one of the signboards, bearing the figure of a brawny, half naked 
 man, armed with a short pick, and coiled up like an Andre 
 Ferrara broadsword in a peck basket, indicates the inn of the 
 " Jolly Miner ; " the hardware shops exhibit in their windows 
 
64 FIP.ST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 rows of Davy's safety -lamps, and vast piles of mining tools; 
 and the footways show their sprinkling of rugged-looking men, 
 attired in short jackets and trousers of undyed plaiding, sorely 
 besmutted by the soil of an underground occupation. In some 
 instances, the lamp still sticking in the cap, and the dazzled ex- 
 pression of countenance, as if the eye had not yet accommodated 
 itself to the light, indicate the close proximity of the subter- 
 ranean workings. I dropped into a respectable-looking tavern 
 to order a chop and a glass of ale, and mark, meanwhile, whether 
 it was such a place as I might convert into a home for a few 
 days with any reasonable prospect of comfort. But I found it 
 by much too favourite a resort of the miners, and that, whether 
 they agreed or disputed, they were a noisy generation over their 
 ale. The landlady, a kindly, portly dame, considerably turned 
 of fifty, was a Scotchwoman, a native of Airdrie, who had long 
 ago married an Englishman in her own country, and had now 
 been settled in Dudley for more than thirty years. My northern 
 accent seemed to bespeak her favour ; and taking it for granted 
 that I had come into England in quest of employment, but had 
 not yet been successful in procuring any, she began to speak 
 comfort to my dejection, by assuring me that our country-folk 
 in that part of the world were much respected, and rose always, 
 if they had but character, into places of trast. I had borne 
 with me, on my homely suit of russet, palpable marks of my 
 labours at Sedgley and the Wren's Nest, and looked, I daresay, 
 rather geological than genteel. Character and scholarship, said 
 the landlady, drawing her inference, were just everything in that 
 neighbourhood. Most of the Scotch people who came the way, 
 however poor, had both : and so, while the Irish always re- 
 mained drudges, and were regarded with great jealousy by the 
 labouring English, the Scotch became overseers and book-keepers, 
 sometimes even partners in lucrative works, and were usually 
 well liked and looked up to. I could fain have taken up my 
 abode at the friendly Scotchwoman's ; but the miners in a 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 65 
 
 neighbouring apartment were becoming every moment more 
 noisy ; and when they began to strike the table with their fists 
 till the glasses danced and rung, I got up, and, taking leave of 
 my countrywoman, sallied into the street. 
 
 After sauntering about the town for half an hour, I found 
 in one of the lanes a small temperance cofiee-house, with an air 
 of quiet sobriety about it that at once recommended it to my 
 favour. Finding that most of the customers of the place went 
 into the kitchen to luxuriate over their coffee in front of the 
 fire, I too went into the kitchen, and took my seat in a long 
 wooden settle, with tall upright back and arms, that stretched 
 along the side of the apartment, on the clean red tiles. The 
 English are by much a franker people than the Scotch — less 
 curious to know who the stranger may be who addresses them, . 
 and more ready to tell what they themselves are, and what they 
 are doing and thinking ; and I soon found I could get as much 
 conversation as I wished. The landlady's youngest son, a smart 
 little fellow in his ninth year, was, I discovered, a stem tee- 
 totaller. He had been shortly before at a temperance meeting, 
 and had been set up to make a speech, in which he had acquit- 
 ted himself to the admiration of all. He had been a teetotaller 
 for about nine years, he said, and his father was a teetotaller 
 too, and his mother, and brother and sisters, were all teetotal- 
 lers ; and he knew men, he added, who, before taking the 
 pledge, had worn ragged clothes, and shoes without soles, who, 
 on becoming teetotallers, had improved into gentlemen. He was 
 now engaged" in making a second speech, which was, however, 
 like a good many other second speeches produced in such cir- 
 cumstances, very much an echo of the first ; and every one who 
 dropped in this evening, whether to visit the landlady and her 
 daughters, or to drink coffee, was sure to question little Samuel 
 regarding the progress of his speech. To some of the querists 
 Samuel replied with great deference and respect ; to some with 
 no deference or respect at all. Condition or appearance seemed 
 
 £ 
 
66 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 to exert as little influence over the mind of the magnanimous 
 speech-maker as over that of the eccentric clergyman in Mr. 
 Fitzadam's World, who paid to robust health the honour so 
 usually paid to rank and title, and looked down as contemptu- 
 ously on a broken constitution as most other people do on dila- 
 pidated means. But Samuel had quite a different standard of 
 excellence from that of the eccentric clergyman. He had, I 
 found, no respect save for pledged teetotalism ; and no words 
 to bestow on drinkers of strong drink, however moderate in 
 their potations. All mankind consisted, with Samuel, of but 
 two classes — drunkards and teetotallers. Two young ladies — 
 daughters of the supervisor of the district — came in, and asked 
 him how he was getting on with his speech ; but Samuel 
 deigned them no reply. " You were rude to the young ladies, 
 Samuel," said his mother when they had quitted the room ; 
 "why did you not give them an answer to their question?" 
 " They drink," replied the laconic Samuel. " Drink ! " exclaimed 
 his mother — "Drink! — the young ladies!" "Yes, drink," 
 reiterated Samuel, " they have not taken the pledge." 
 
 I found a curious incident which had just occurred in the 
 neighbourhood, forming the main topic of conversation — ex- 
 actly such a story as Crabbe would have chosen for the basis of 
 a descriptive poem. A leaden pipe had been stolen a few 
 evenings before from one of the town churches : it was a long 
 ponderous piece of metal ; and the thieves, instead of carrying, 
 had dragged it along, leaving behind them, as they went, a sig- 
 nificant trail on grass and gravel, which had been traced on the 
 morrow by the sexton to the house of an elderly couple, in 
 what, for their condition, were deemed snug circumstances, and 
 who, for full thirty years, had borne a fair character in the place. 
 There lived with them two grown-up sons, and they also bore 
 fair characters. A brief search, however, revealed part of the 
 missing lead ; a still further search laid open a vast mine of 
 purloined moveables of every description. Every tile in the 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 57 
 
 back court, every square yard in the garden, every board in the 
 house-floor, covered its stolen article ; — kitchen utensils and 
 fire-irons, smiths' and miners' tools, sets of weights from the 
 market-place, pieces of hardware goods from the shops, garden 
 railings, sewerage grates, house-spouts — all sorts of things use- 
 ful and useless to the purloiners — some of them missed but yes- 
 terday, some of them abstracted years before — were found 
 heaped up together, in this strange jay's nest. Two-thirds of 
 the people of Dudley had gone out to mark the progress of dis- 
 covery ; and as the police furrowed the garden, or trenched up 
 the floor, there were few among the numerous spectators who 
 wexe not able to detect in the mass some piece of their own 
 property. I saw the seventh cart-load brought this evening to 
 the police-office ; and every fresh visitor to the coffee-house 
 caixied with him the intelligence of further discoveries. The 
 unhappy old man, who had become so sudden a bankrupt in 
 reputation when no one had doubted his solvency, and the two 
 sons, whom he had trained so ill, had been sent off to Glouces- 
 ter jail the evening before, to abide their trial at the ensuing 
 assizes. I was reminded by the incident of an occurrence which 
 took place some time in the last age, in a rural district in the 
 far north. A parish smith had lived and died with an unsus- 
 pected character, and the population of half the country-side 
 gathered to his funeral. There had been, however, a vast deal 
 of petty pilfering in his time. Plough and harrow irons were 
 continually disappearing from the fields and steadings of the 
 fanners, his nearer neighbours. Not a piece of hen-mounting 
 or trace-chain, not a cart-axle or wheel-rim, was secure. But 
 no one had ever thought of implicating the smith. Directly 
 opposite his door there stood a wall of loose uncemented stones, 
 against which a party of the farmers who had come to the 
 burial were leaning until the corpse should be brought out. 
 The coffin was already in the passage ; the farmers were raising 
 their shoulders from the wall to take their places beside it ; in 
 
68 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 ten minutes more the smith would have been put under the 
 ground with a fair character j when, lo ! the frail masonry be- 
 hind suddenly gave way ; the clank of metal was heard to mingle 
 with the dull rumble of the stones ; and there, amid the rub- 
 bish, palpable as the coffin on the opposite side of the road, lay, 
 in a scattered heap, the stolen implements so mysteriously ab- 
 stracted from the farmers. The awe-struck men must have 
 buried the poor smith with feelings which bore reference to 
 both worlds, and which a poet such as Wordsworth would per- j 
 haps know how to describe. 
 
 My landlady's eldest son, a lad of nineteen, indulged a strong 
 predilection for music, which, shortly prior to the date of my 
 visit, had received some encouragement in his appointment as 
 organist in one of the town churches. At a considerable ex- 
 pense of patient ingenuity he had fitted up an old spinet, until 
 it awoke into life, in these latter days of Collards and Broad- 
 woods, the identical instrument it had been a century before. 
 He had succeeded, too, in acquiring no imperfect mastery over 
 it ; and so, by a series of chances all very much out of the 
 reach of calculation, I, who till now had never seen but dead 
 spinets — rickety things of chopped wainscot, lying in waste 
 garrets from the days of the grandmothers and great-grand- 
 mothers of genteel families — was enabled to cultivate acquaint- 
 ance with the capabilities of a resuscitated spinet, vocal and all 
 alive. It gave me the idea, when at its best, of a box full of 
 Jew's harps, all twanging away at the full extent of their compass, 
 and to the best of their ability. The spirit of the musician, 
 however, made such amends for the defects of his instrument, 
 that his evening performances, carried on when his labours for 
 the day had closed, were exceedingly popular in the neighbour- 
 hood. The rude miner paused under, the windows to listen ; 
 and groups of visitors, mostly young girls, came dropping in 
 every night to enjoy the nice fresh melodies brought out of 
 the old musty spinet. Lovers of the fine arts draw naturally 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 69 
 
 together ; and one of the most frequent guests of the coffee- 
 liouse was an intelligent country artist, with whom I scraped 
 acquaintance, and had some amusing conversation. With little 
 Samuel, the speech-maker, I succeeded in forming a friendship 
 of the superlative type ; though, strange to relate, it must be 
 to this day a profound mystery to Samuel whether his fidm 
 Achates, the Scotchman, be a drinker of strong drink, or a tee- 
 totaller. Alas for even teetotalized human nature, when placed 
 in trying circumstances ! Samuel and I had a good many cups 
 of coffee together, and several glasses of Sampson, a palatable 
 Dudley beverage, compounded of eggs, milk, and spicery ; and, 
 as on these occasions a few well-directed coppers enabled him 
 to drive hard bargains with his mother for his share of the 
 tipple, he was content to convert in my behalf the all-important 
 question of the pledge into a mootpoint of no particular concern- 
 ment. I imfortunately left Dudley ere he had an opportunity 
 presented him of delivering his second speech. But he enter- 
 tained, he assured me, no fears for the result. It was well 
 known in the place, he said, that he was to speak at the first 
 temperance meeting ; there were large expectations formed, so 
 the audience could not be otherwise than very numerous and 
 attentive ; and he was quite satisfied he had something worth 
 while to give them. My friend Samuel bore a good deal of 
 healthy precocity about him. It would be, of course, consum- 
 mately absurd to found aught on a single instance ; but it has 
 been so often remarked that English children of the lively type 
 develop into cleverness earlier than the Scotch, that the obser- 
 vation has, in all likelihood, some foundation in reality. I find, 
 too, from the experiments of Professor Forbes of Edinburgh, 
 that the English lad in his sixteenth, seventeenth, and eigh- 
 teenth years possesses more bodily strength than the Scot of the 
 same years and standing, and that it is not until their nineteenth 
 year that the young men of both countries meet on a footing 
 of (jquality. And it seems not irrational to infer that the earlier 
 
70 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 development of body in the case of the embryo Englishman 
 should be accompanied by a corresponding development of mind 
 also — that his school exercises should be better than those of 
 the contemporary Scot, and his amateur verses rather more 
 charged with meaning, and more smoothly rounded. 
 
 Dudley has its geological museum — small, but very valuable 
 in some departments, and well arranged generally. Its Silu- 
 rian organisms are by far the finest I ever saw. No sum of 
 money would enable the fossil collector to complete such a set. 
 It contains original specimens of the trilobite family, of which, 
 in other museums, even the British, one finds but the casts. 
 Nor can anything be more beautiful than its groups of delicately 
 relieved crinoidea of all the different Silurian genera — some of 
 them in scarce less perfect keeping than when they spread out 
 their many-jointed arms in quest of prey amid the ancient seas ! 
 It contains, however, none of the vertebral remains furnished 
 by the celebrated bone-bed of the Upper Ludlow rocks, nor any 
 of the ichthyolitic fragments found still lower down ; though, 
 of course, one misses them all the more from the completeness 
 of the collection in contemporary organisms ; and its group of 
 Old Red Sandstone fossils serves but to contrast the organic 
 poverty of this system in its development in England, with the 
 vast fossil riches which it exhibits in our northern division of 
 the island. The neighbouring coal-field I found well repre- 
 sented by a series of plants and ichthyolites ; and I had much 
 pleasure in examining among the latter one of the best preserved 
 specimens of Megalichthys yet found-^a specimen disinterred 
 some years ago from out an ironstone bed near Walsall, knoTVTi 
 to the miners as the " gubbin iron." The head is in a remark- 
 ably fine state of keeping. The strong, enamelled plates, re- 
 sembling pieces of japanned mail, occupy their original places ; 
 they close round the snout, as if tightly riveted down, and lie 
 nicely inlaid in patterns of great regularity on the broad fore- 
 head ; the surface of each is finely punctulated, as if by an ex- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 71 
 
 ceedingly minute needle ; most of them bear, amid the smaller 
 markings, eyelet-like indentations of larger size, ranged in lines, 
 as if they had been half perforated for ornament by a tin- 
 worker's punch ; and the tout enserMe is that of the head of 
 some formidable reptile encased in armour of proof ; though, 
 from the brightly burnished surface of the plates, the armature 
 resembles rather that of some of the more brilliant insects, than 
 that common to fishes or reptiles. The occipital covering of the 
 crocodile is perhaps more than equally strong, but it lacks the 
 glossy japan, and the tilt-yard cast, if I may so speak, of the 
 many-jointed head-piece of the Megalichthys. The occipital 
 plates descend no lower than the nape, where they join on to 
 thickly-set ranges of glittering quadrangular scales of consider- 
 able size and great thickness, that gradually diminish, and 
 become more angular as they approach the tail. The fins are 
 unluckily not indicated in the specimen. In all fossil fish, of 
 at least the Secondary and Palaeozoic formations, the colouring 
 depends on the character of the deposits in which they have 
 lain entombed. I have seen scales and plates on the Megal- 
 ichthys, in some instances of a senna yellow, in some of a warm 
 chestnut brown ; but the finer specimens are invariably of a 
 glossy black. The Dudley Megalichthys, and a Megalichthys 
 in the possession of Dr. John Fleming — which, though greatly 
 less entire, is valuable, from exhibiting the vertebral column of 
 the animal — are both knights in black armour.^ 
 
 1 This ancient fish was at one time confounded with its contemporary the Holoptychius 
 Hihberti. A jaw of the latter animal, with its slim ichthyolite teeth bristling around its 
 huge reptile tusks, may be seen figured as that of Megalichthys, in the singularly interest- 
 ing Memoir of Dr. Ilibbert on the Limestone of Burdiehouse ; and we find sinirle teeth 
 similjirly mis-assigned in some other geological works of credit. But no two ichthyolitcs 
 in the geological scale in reality less resemble each other than these two fish of the Coal 
 Measure*. The Megalichthys, from head to tail, was splendid with polished enamel ; the 
 Holoptychius was, on the contrary, a dull-coated fish. The Megalichthys rarely exceeded 
 four feet in length, and commonly fell short of three ; the flolnptychius was one of the 
 most gigantic of*the trnnoids ; some individuals, judging from the fragments, must, like the 
 great basking shark of the northern ^eas, have exceeded thirty feet in length. The scjile.'^ 
 of the Megalichthys are smooth, quadrangular, and of great thickness, hut rarely exceed 
 an iach, or three quarters of an inch across; those of the Holoptychius are thin, nearly 
 
72 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 Among the donations to the Dudley Museum, illustrative of 
 the geology of foreign parts, I saw an interesting group of finely- 
 preserved fossil fish from Mount Lebanon — a very ancient 
 mountain, in its relation to human history, compared with the 
 Castle-hill of Dudley (which, however, begins to loom darkly 
 through the haze of the monkish annalists as early as the year 
 700, when Dud the Saxon built a stronghold on its summit), 
 but an exceedingly recent hill in its relation to the geologic eras. 
 The geologist, in estimating the respective ages of the two 
 eminences, places the hill with the modem history immensely 
 in advance of the hill with the ancient one. The fish dug out 
 of the sides of Lebanon, some five or six thousand feet over the 
 level of the sea, arc all fish of the modern type, with homy 
 scales and bony skeletons ; and they cannot belong to a remoter 
 period, Agassiz tells us, than the times of the Chalk. Fish 
 were an ancient well-established order in these comparatively 
 recent days of the Cretaceous system ; whereas their old Placoid 
 predecessors, contemporary with the Crustacea and brachiopoda 
 of the hill of Dudley, seem but to have just started into being 
 
 circular in form, thickly ridged on the upper surface, and vary from an inch to more 
 than five inches in diameter. The head of the Megalichthys was covered, as has been 
 shown, with brightly-japanned plates ; that of the Iloloptychius, with plates thickly 
 fretted on the surface, like pieces of shagreen, only the tubercles are more confluent, 
 and lie ranged in irregular ridges. It may be mentioned in the passing, that the 
 Holoptychius of the Coal Measures, if there be value in the distinguishing character- 
 istics of Owen — and great value there certainly is — was not even generically related 
 to the Holoptychius' of the Old Red Sandstone. The reptile teeth of the Old Red Holo- 
 ptychius are of hone, marked by the true dendrodic character of the genus, and so thickly 
 cancellated towards the base, as to resemble, in the cross section, pieces of open lace- 
 work. The reptile teeth of the Holoptychius Hibberti, on the contrary, are of ivory, 
 presenting towards the point, where the surface is smooth and unfurrowed, the common 
 tubular, radiating character of that substance, and exhibiting towards the base, where 
 the Gothic-like rodding is displayed, a strange intricacy of pattern, that becomes more 
 involved as we cut lower down, till what in the middle section resembles the plaiting of 
 a ruff seen in profile, is found to resemble, immediately over the line where the base rests 
 on the jaw, the labyrinthine complexity of a Runic knot. The scales of the creatures, 
 too, are very dissimilar in their microscopic structure, though both possess, in common, 
 rid'=;ed surfaces — the only point of resemblance from which their generic identity has been 
 inferred. Even the internal structure of their occipital plates is wholly different. So far 
 as is yet known, the Coal Measures contain no Holoptychius akin to the dendrodic genus 
 of that name so abundant in the Old Red Sandstone. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 73 
 
 at the earlier time, as the first-bom of their race, and must have 
 been regarded as mere upstart novelties among the old plebeian 
 crustaceans and molluscs they had come to govern. The trilobites 
 of Dudley are some four or five creations deeper in the bygone 
 eternity, if I may so speak, than the cycloids and ctenoids of 
 Lebanon. I was a good deal struck, shortly before leaving 
 home, by this curious transposition of idea which Greology in 
 such cases is suited to accomplish. I found waiting my in- . 
 spection one morning in the house-lobby, a box and basket, 
 both filled with fossils. Those in the basket, which had been 
 kindly sent me by Dr. John Wilson of Bombay, consisted of 
 i<jhthyolites and shells from the Holy Land, and fossil wood 
 f]'om the old Egyptian desert ; while those in the box, which 
 had been obligingly transmitted me by Dr. James Wilson of 
 IFpper Canada — a gentleman who, amid the wild backwoods, 
 wdth none to assist and few to sympathize, has cultivated a close 
 acquaintance with science for its own. sake — had been collected 
 in the modem township of Pakenham, not far from the banks 
 of the Ottawa. The fossil wood of the old desert — unequivo- 
 cally dicotyledonous, of the oak or mahogany stmcture — could 
 not, I found, be older than the Tertiary period ; the fish and 
 shells of Palestine, like those of the Dudley Museum, belong 
 apparently to the times of the Chalk ; but the organisms of the 
 modern towTiship, that had no name twenty years ago, boasted 
 an incomparably higher antiquity : they consisted of corals, 
 cmstacea, and cephalopoda, from the Lower Silurians. 
 
 No one who visits Dudley should omit seeing its Castle and 
 Castle-hill. The Castle, a fine old ruin of the tme English 
 type, with moat, court, and keep, dungeon and treble gateway, 
 chapel, guard-room, and hall, resembles in extent rather a 
 niinous village than a single building ; while the hill on which 
 it stands forms, we find, a picturesquely wooded eminence, 
 8(jamed with rough, bosky ravines, aud bored deep with gloomy 
 cliasms, that were excavated centuries a^o as limestone quarries. 
 
74 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 But their lime has been long since exhausted, and the miner 
 now plies his labours unseen, though not unheard, deep andd 
 the bowels of the mountain. The visitor may hear, in recesses 
 the most recluse and solitary, the frequent rumble of his sub- 
 terraneous thunder, and see the aspen trembling in the calm, 
 under the influence of the earthquake-like tremor communicated 
 to it from beneath. 
 
 The old keep, by much the strongest and most ancient por- 
 tion of the building, rises on the highest part of the eminence, 
 and commands the town below, part of which lies grouped 
 around the hill-foot, almost within pistol-shot of the walls. In 
 the olden time, this fortress occupied the centre of an extensive 
 woodland district, and was known as the "Castle of the Woods." 
 It had some rather high-handed masters in its day — among the 
 rest, the stern Leofric, husband of the Lady Godiva, so celebrated 
 in chronicle and song for her ride through Coventry. Even as 
 late as the close of the reign of Elizabeth, a lord of Dudley, at 
 feud with a neighbouring proprietor, ancestor of the well-known 
 Lord Lyttelton, issued from the triple gateway, "having," says 
 a local historian of the time, " one hundred and forty persons 
 with him, weaponed, some with bows and sheffes of arrows, 
 some with forest-bills and staves, and came to Mr. Lyttelton's 
 lands at Prestwood and Ashwood ; and out of Ashwood he 
 took three hundred and forty-one sheep, and caused some of his 
 company drive them towards Dudley ; and therewith not satis- 
 fied, he entered also into the enclosed grounds at Prestwood, 
 and there, with great violence, chased fourteen kyne, one bull, 
 and eight fat oxen, and brought them to Dudley Castle, and 
 kept them within the walls of the Castle ; and part of the said 
 cattle and sheep he did kill and eat, and part he sent to Co- 
 ventry, guarded by sixty men strongly armed with bows and 
 arrows, calyvers, and forest-bills, there to be sold." Somewhat 
 rough doings these, and rather of a Scotch than an English 
 type : they remind one of a Highland creach of the days of Rob 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 75 
 
 Roy. England, however, had a boy bom to it twenty years 
 after the event, who put an effectual stop to all such acts of 
 lordly aggression for the future ; and the keep of Dudley Castle 
 shows how. Two of its rock-like towers, with their connecting 
 curtain, remain scarce less entire than in the days of Dud or of 
 Leofric ; but the other two have disappeared, all save their 
 foundations, and there have been thirty-two-pound shot dug 
 out from among the ruins, that in some sort apologize for their 
 absence. The iron hand of Cromwell fell heavy on the Castle 
 of the Woods — a hand, of which it may be said, as Barbour 
 says of the gauntleted hand of the Bruce, that 
 
 " Where it strook with even stroke. 
 Nothing mocht against it stand ; " 
 
 and sheep and cattle have been tolerably safe in the neighbour- 
 hood ever since. It was a breezy, sunshiny day on which I 
 climbed the hill to the old keep, along a steep paved roadway 
 o'ershaded by wood. In the court behind — a level space some 
 two or three acres in extent, flanked on the one side by the 
 Castle buildings, and on the other by a grey battlemented wall 
 — I found a company of the embodied pensioners going through 
 their exercises, in their uniforms of red and blue. Most of them 
 — old, grey-headed veterans, with medals dangling at their 
 breasts, and considerably stiffened by years — seemed to perform 
 their work with the leisurely air of men quite aware that it was 
 not of the greatest possible importance. The broken ruins lay 
 around them rough with the scars of conflict and conflagration; 
 and the old time-worn fortress harmonized weU with the old 
 time-worn soldiery. 
 
 It must be a dull imagination that a scene so imposing as 
 that presented by the old Castle does not set in motion: its 
 gloomy vaults and vast halls — its huge kitchen and roomy 
 chapel — its deep fosse and tall rampart — its strong portjcuUised 
 gateway and battered keep — are all suggestive of the past,- — of 
 many a picturesque group of human creatures, impressed, like 
 
76 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 the building in which they fed and fought, worshipped and made 
 merry, with the character of a bygone age. The deserted apart- 
 ments, as one saunters through them, become crowded with life ; 
 the grey, cold, evanished centuries assume warmth and colour. 
 In Dudley, however, the imagination receives more help in its 
 restorations than in most other ruins in a state of equal dilapi- 
 dation. The building owes much to a garrulous serving-maid, 
 that followed her mistress about a hundred and twenty years 
 ago, to one of its high festivals — a vast deal more, at least, 
 than to all the great lords and ladies that ever shared in its 
 hospitality. The grandmother of that IVIrs. Sherwood of whom, 
 I daresay, most of my readers retain some recollection since 
 their good-boy or good-girl days, as a pleasing writer for the 
 young, was a lady's-maid, some time early in the last century, 
 in a family of distinction that used to visit at the Castle ; and the 
 authoress has embodied in her writings one of her grandmother's 
 descriptions of its vanished glories, as communicated to her 
 by the old woman many years after. I must give, by way of 
 specimen, a few characteristic snatches of her story — a story 
 which will scarce fail to recall to the learned in romance, the 
 picturesque narratives of Mrs. Kadcliffe's garrulous housekeepers, 
 or the lengthened anecdotes of the communicative Annette. 
 
 " I was delighted," says the old serving-maid, " when it was 
 told me that I was to accompany my lady and a friend of hers 
 to the Castle, in order that I might be at hand to wait on them 
 next morning ; for they were to stay at the Castle all night. So 
 we set out on the coach, the two ladies being seated in front, 
 and myself with my back to the horses ; and it was quite dark 
 by the time we arrived at the foot of the Castle-hill, for it was 
 the dead of winter, and the snow lay on the ground. However, 
 there were lamps fixed upon the trees, all along the private 
 road up to the Castle ; and there were lights upon the towers, 
 which shone as beacons far and near ; for it was a great day at 
 the Castle. The horses, though we had four, had hard work to 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 77 
 
 drag us up the snowy path. However, we got up in time ; and, 
 passing under the gateway, we found ourselves in the court-yard. 
 But oh ! how different did it then show to what it does now, 
 being littered with splendid equipages, and sounding with the 
 rattling of wheels and the voices of coachmen and grooms calling 
 to each other, and blazing with lights from almost every win- 
 dow; and the sound of merry voices, and of harps and viols, 
 issued from every door-way! At length, having drawn up to 
 the steps of the portico, my ladies were handed out by a young 
 gentleman wearing an embroidered waistcoat with deep pockets, 
 and a bag-wig and sword; and I was driven to another door, 
 \/here I was helped out by a footboy, who showed me the way 
 tD the housekeeper's room." The serving-maid then goes on to 
 describe the interior. She saw on the dark wainscoting, hard, 
 stiff paintings, in faded colours, of antiquely-dressed dames, and 
 knights in armour; but the housemaid, she said, could tell her 
 nothing of their history. Some of the rooms were hung with 
 tapestry, some with tarnished paper that looked like cut velvet. 
 The housekeeper was an old, bustling dame, " with a huge bunch 
 of keys hanging to her girdle by a strong chain of steel." 
 " There was not a window which was sashed, but all were case- 
 mented in stone frames, many of the panes being of coloured 
 glass ; and there was scarce one chamber on the same level with 
 another, but there was a step to go up or a step to go down to 
 each : the chimney-pieces of carved wood or stone were so high, 
 that I could hardly reach to the mantel shelves when standing 
 on tiptoe ; and instead of grates, such as we have now, there 
 were mostly dogs upon the hearths. The chairs were of such a 
 size, that two of the present sort would stand in the room of 
 ' Mc; and the doors, though very thick and substantial, were 
 tch an inch or two from the floor, so that the wind whistled 
 all along the passages, rattling and shaking the casements, and 
 often making a sort of wild and mournful melody." 
 
 The great hall which constituted the grand centre of the 
 
78 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 festivities of this evening, now forms one of the most dilapi- 
 dated portions of the ruins. The front walls have fallen so low 
 that we can barely trace their foundations, and a rank vegetar 
 tion waves over the floor. I think it is Macculloch who says, 
 that full one-half the ancient strongholds of our Scotch High- 
 lands thrown together into a heap would be found scarce equal 
 in the aggregate to a single English castle of the more magni- 
 ficent type ; and certainly enough remains of the great hall here, 
 broken as it is, to illustrate, and in some degree corroborate the 
 remark, disparaging to the Highlands as it may seem. We can 
 still ascertain that this single room measured seventy-five feet 
 in length by fifty-six feet in breadth — a space considerably 
 more than equal in area to most of our north-country fortalices. 
 It was remarkable at one time for containing, says Dr. Plott, 
 an oak table, composed of a single plank, three feet in breadth, 
 that extended from end to end of the apartment. The great 
 hall must have presented a gay scene when seen by the grand- 
 mother of Mrs. Sherwood. " Three doors opened into it from 
 the gallery above. At one of these," says the garrulous old 
 woman, " all the servant-maids were standing, and I took my 
 place among them. I can hardly tell how to describe this hall 
 to you, unless by saying that the roof was arched or groined, 
 not unlike that of some ancient church which you may have 
 seen ; and it had large and lofty windows, painted and carved 
 in the fashion called Gothic. It was illuminated with many 
 candles, in sconces of brass hanging from the ceiling ; and every 
 comer of it, wide as it was, was bright as the day. There was 
 a gaUery at the further end of it, filled with musicians ; and the 
 first and foremost among them was an old harper from Wales, 
 who used, in those days, to travel the country with his harp on 
 his back, ever presenting himself at the doors of the houses 
 where feasts and merry-makings might be expected. The 
 dresses of the time were very splendid ; the ladies shone with 
 glossy silks and jewels, and the gentlemen with embroidery and 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 79 
 
 gold and silver lace ; and I have still before me the figures of 
 that gay and distinguished company, for it consisted of the noble 
 of the land, with their families. It may be fancy ; but I do not 
 think I ever in these days see faces so fair as some of those 
 which shone that night in the old Castle-hall." Such were 
 some of the reminiscences of the ancient serving-maid. A few 
 years after the merry-making which she records, the Castle was 
 deserted by the inmates for a more modem building ; and in 
 1750 it was reduced by fire to a blackened group of skeleton 
 walls. A gang of coiners were suspected at the time of har- 
 bouring among its concealments; and the conflagration is said 
 to have been the work of an incendiary connected with the gang. 
 An unfinished stanza, spelt amiss, and carved rudely on one of 
 the soft sandstone lintels, used to be pointed out as the work of 
 the felon ; but, though distinctly legible till within the last few 
 years, it can now be pointed out no longer : — 
 
 ** Water went round it, to garde it from the Fooe : 
 The fire shall bum it " 
 
 Can the reader complete the couplet 1 If not, he may be per- 
 haps apt to suspect the man who first filled up the gap with 
 sense and rhyme as the original author, and, of course, the in- 
 cendiary. But though every boy and girl in Dudley has learned 
 to add the missing portion, no one seems to know who the indi- 
 vidual was who supplied it first. 
 
 " Water went round it, to garde It from the Fooe : 
 The fire shall burn it, atid lay its towers low." 
 
 Some of the dells and caverns of the Castle-hill I found ex- 
 ceedingly picturesque. Its limestone is extensively employed in 
 the smelting furnaces as a flux. Every ton of clay ironstone 
 must be mixed up with half a ton of lime, to facilitate the se- 
 paration of the metal from the argillaceous dross ; and so, from 
 the earliest beginnings of the iron-trade, the work of excavation 
 has been going on in the hill of Dudley. The first smelter who 
 dug up a barrowful of ironstone to make a sword, must have 
 
80 FIKST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 come to the hill for half a barrowful of lime to mix up with the 
 brown mass ere he committed it to the fire. And so some of 
 the caverns are very vast, and, for caverns of man's making, 
 very old; and some of the open dells, deserted by the quarrier 
 for centuries, bear amid their precipices trees of large size, and 
 have long since lost every mark of the tool. The recesses of the 
 hill, like those of the Wren's Nest, are threaded by a subter- 
 ranean canal, which, in passing under the excavation of an 
 ancient quarry, opens to the light ; and so in a thickly wooded 
 walk, profoundly solitary, when one is least thinking of the possi- 
 bility of such a thing, one comes full upon a.wide and very deep 
 chasm, overhung by trees, the bottom of which is occupied by a 
 dark basin, crowded with boats. We may mark the boatmen 
 emerging from out the darkness by one cavern, and re-entering 
 it by another. They see the sun, and the sky, and the green 
 trees far above, but nothing within reach save rough rocks and 
 muddy water; and if they do not think, as they* pass, of human 
 life, bounded by the darkness of the two eternities, with no lack 
 of the gloomy and the turbid in closest contact, but with what 
 the heart most desires hung too high for the hand to grasp, it; 
 is not because there are no such analogies furnished by the brief 
 passage through, but merely because they have failed to dis- 
 cover them. 
 
 A little further on there may be found a grand though some- 
 what sombre cavern, which, had it come direct from the hand of 
 Nature, I should perhaps have deemed one of the most remark- 
 able I ever explored. We enter a long narrow dell, wooded 
 a-top, like all the others, with an overhanging precipice rising 
 tall on the one side, and the strata sloping off on the other in 
 a continuous plane, like the face of a rampart. Nor is this 
 sloping wall devoid of its characteristic sculpturings. We find 
 it fretted with shells and corals, and well-marked heads and 
 joints of the Calymev^e Blumenhachii, so abundant an organism 
 in these rocks as to be familiarly known as the Dudley trilobite. 
 

 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 
 
 T scarcely know on what principle it should have occurred ; but 
 certainly never before, even when considerably less familiar with 
 the wonders of Geology, was I so impressed by the appe^ance 
 of marine fossils in an inland district, as among these wooded 
 solitudes. Perhaps the peculiarity of their setting, if I may so 
 speak, by heightening the contrast between their present circum- 
 stances and their original habitat, gave increased effect to their 
 appeals to the imagination. The green ocean depths in which 
 they must have lived and died associate strangely in the mind 
 with the forest retreats, a full hundred miles from the sea-shore, 
 in which their remains now lie deposited. Taken with their 
 accompaniments, they serve to remind one of that style of arti- 
 ficial grotto- work in which corals and shells are made to mingle 
 with flowers and mosses. The massy cyathophyllum sticks out 
 of the sides of grey lichened rocks, enclasped by sprigs of ivy, or 
 overhung by twigs of thorn and hazel; deep-sea terebratulae 
 project in bold relief from amid patches of the delicate wood 
 sorrel; here a macerated oak leaf, with all its skeleton fibres 
 open as a net, lies glued by the damps beside some still more 
 delicately reticulated festinella ; there a tuft of graceful harebells 
 projects over some prostrate orthoceratite ; yonder there peeps 
 out from amid a drapery of green liver-wort, like a heraldic hel- 
 met from the mantling, the armed head of some mailed trilo- 
 bite : the deep-sea productions of the most ancient of creations 
 lie grouped, as with an eye to artistic effect, amid the floral 
 productions of our own times. At the further end of this re- 
 tired dell, so full of interest to the geologist, we see, where the 
 rock closes, two dark openings separated by a rude limestone 
 column. One of these fonns a sort of window to the cavern 
 within, so exceedingly lofty in the sill as to be inaccessible to 
 the explorer: through the other we descend along a damp, 
 mouldy path, and reach the twilight bank of a canal, which 
 stretches away into the darkness between two gloomy walls of 
 rock of vast height, connected half-way up — as flooring beams 
 
 F 
 
82 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 connect the walls of a skeleton building — by a range of what 
 seems rafters of rock. The cavern had once an upper storey — 
 a wofliing separated from the working below by a thin sloping 
 floor; and these stone rafters are remains of the floor, left as a 
 sort of reclining buttresses, to support the walls. They form one 
 of the most picturesque features of the cavern, straddling over- 
 head from side to side, and receding in the more than twilight 
 gloom of the place, each succeeding rafter dimmer and more 
 dim, in proportion to its distance from the two openings, till 
 the last becomes so indistinctly visible, that if but a cloud pass 
 over the sun, it disappears. A rustic bridge leads across the 
 canal ; but we can see only the one end of it — the other is lost in 
 the blackness ; the walls and floor are green with mould ; the 
 dark water seems a sullen river of pitch ; we may occasionally 
 mark the surface dimpled by the track of a newt, or a toad 
 puffing itself up, as if it fed on vapour, on the damp earthy 
 edge ; but other inhabitants the cavern has none. I bethought 
 me of the wild description of Kirke White : — 
 
 " And as she enter'd the cavern wide, 
 The moonbeam gleamed pale. 
 And she saw a snake on the craggy rock, — 
 
 It clung by its slimy tail. 
 Her foot it slipped, and she stood aghast. 
 For she trod on a bloated toad." 
 
 Solitary as the place usually is, it presented a singularly ani- 
 mated appearance six years ago, when it was visited by the 
 members of the British Association, and converted by Sir 
 Roderick Murchison into a geological lecture-room. He dis- 
 coursed of rocks and fossils in the bowels of the hill, with the 
 ponderous strata piled high on every side, like courses of Cy- 
 clopean masonry, and the stony forms of the dead existing by 
 millions around him. 
 
 But, after all, there are no caverns like those of nature's 
 making : they speak to the imagination in a bolder and freer 
 style than any mere excavation of the quarrier, however huge ; 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 83 
 
 and we find, in consequence, that they have almost always en- 
 gaged tradition in their behalf. There hangs about them some 
 old legend of spectral shapes seen flitting across the twilight 
 vestibule : or of ancient, bearded men, not of this world, stand- 
 ing, porter-like, beside the door ; or of somnolent giants re- 
 posing moodily in the interior ; or of over-bold explorers, who 
 wandered so deep into their recesses that they never again re- 
 turned to the light of day. I bethought me, when in Sir 
 Roderick's lecture-room, of one of the favourite haunts of my 
 boyhood — a solitary cave, ever resounding to the dash of the 
 bniows — and felt its superiority. Hollowed of old by the 
 waves on an unfrequented shore, just above the reach of the ex- 
 istmg tide-line — its grey roof bristling with stalactites, its grey 
 floor knobbed with stalagmite — ^full of all manner of fantastic 
 dependencies from the top and sides — with here little dark 
 openings branching off into the living rock, and there unfinished 
 columns standing out from it, roughened with fretted irregulari- 
 ties, and beaded with dew — with a dim twilight resting even 
 at noonday within its further recesses, and steeped in an atmos- 
 phere of unbreathing silence, rarely broken save by the dash of 
 the wave or the shriek of the sea-fowl — it is at all times a place 
 where the poetry of deep seclusion may be felt — the true her- 
 mit-feeling, in which self is absorbed and forgotten amid the 
 silent sublimities of nature. The unfrequent visitor scares the 
 seal from the mid-tide rock in the opening, or encounters the 
 startled otter in its headlong retreat to the sea. But it seemed 
 redolent, when I last saw it, of a still higher poetry. Night 
 had well-nigh fallen, though the nearly vanquished daylight still 
 struggled with the darkness. The moon at full rose slowly 
 over the sea, 
 
 " All pale and dim, &<* if from rest 
 The ghost of the lato buried sun 
 Had crept into the skies." 
 
 Tlie level beam fell along a lonely coast, on brown precipice and 
 grey pebbly shore — here throwing into darker shade some 
 
84 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 wooded recess, there soliciting into prominence some tall cliflf 
 whitened by the cormorant. The dark-browed precipice, in 
 which the cavern is hollowed, stood out in doubtful relief ; 
 while the cavern itself — bristling grey with icicles, that showed 
 like the tags of a dead dress — seemed tenanted, in the exag- 
 gerative gloom, with all manner of suggestive shapes. Here a 
 sheeted uncertainty sat beside the wall, or looked out from one 
 of the darker openings upon the sea ; there a broken skeleton 
 seemed grovelling upon the floor. There was a wild luxury 
 in calling to mind, as one gazed from the melancholy interior 
 on the pale wake of the moon, that for miles on either hand 
 there was not a human dwelling, save the deserted hut of a 
 fisherman who perished in a storm. The reader may perhaps 
 remember, that in exactly such a scene does the poet Collins 
 find a home for his sublime personification of Fear. 
 
 " Say, wilt thou shroud in haunted cell. 
 Or in some hoUow'd seat, 
 'Gainst which the big waves beat, 
 With shuddering, meek, submitted thought, 
 Hear drowning seamen's cries in tempests brought ?" 
 
 I spent the greater part of a week among the fossiliferous 
 deposits of Dudley, and succeeded in procuring a tolerably fair 
 set of fossils, and in cultivating a tolerably competent acquain- 
 tance with the appearances which they exhibit in their various 
 states of keeping. It is an important matter to educate the 
 eye. Should there be days of health, and the exploration of 
 the Scottish Grauwacke in store for me, I may find my brief 
 sojourn among the English Silurians of some little advantage. 
 Fossils in our ancient southern deposits are exceedingly rare ; 
 and there is, in consequence, a lack of data by which to ascer- 
 tain the age of the formations in which they occur, and which 
 they fail sufficiently to mark. The tablets are devoid of inscrip- 
 tions, save that we here and there find a half-effaced character, 
 or the outline of some sorely-worn hieroglyphic. And yet, had 
 the few fossils hitherto discovered been preserved and brought 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 85 
 
 together, their joint testimony might be found to amount to 
 something. The Graptolites of Peebles-shire and Galloway are 
 tolerably well known as identical with the English species — tlie 
 Qraptolithus Ludensis and Grraptolithm foliaceus — which pos- 
 sess, however, a wide range in the more ancient rocks, passing 
 downwards from the beds of the Upper Silurian, to deposits 
 that lie deep in what was once tenned the Cambrian series. In 
 Peebles-shire, at Wraehill, says Mr. Nicol, shells have been de- 
 tected in a Grauwacke limestone, now unluckily no longer acces- 
 sible. It is stated by Mr. Maclaren, in his elaborate and 
 singularly satisfactory Treatise on the Geology of Fife and the 
 Lothians, that he succeeded in disinterring two organisms — a 
 small orthoceratite, and what seemed to be a confused accumu- 
 lation of the shattered fragments of minute trilobites — from out 
 of one of the Grauwacke patches which occur among the Pent- 
 lands. I have been informed by the late Mr. William Laidlaw, 
 the trusted friend of Sir Walter Scott, that he once disinterred 
 a large bivalve from amid the Grauwackes of Selkirkshire. The 
 apparent remains of broken terebratulae have been found in 
 various locahties in the Grauwacke of Galloway, and atrypae 
 and tentaculites in a rather equivocal deposit at Girvan deemed 
 Silurian. Were the various scattered fragments of the fossili- 
 ferous record to be brought carefully together, they might be 
 found sufficiently complete to give one at least a few definite 
 ideas regarding the times which preceded in Scotland the age of 
 the Coccosteus and Pterichthys. 
 
 There wons a barber in Dudley, who holds a sort of fossil 
 agency between the quarrier and the public, of whom I purchased 
 several fine trilobites — one of them, at least, in the most perfect 
 state of keeping I have yet seen. The living creature could not 
 have been more complete in every plate and joint of the head 
 and back ; but, as in all the other specimens of trilobite known 
 to the geologist, it presents no trace of the abdominal portion. 
 I procured another specimen rolled up in the peculiar ball-form 
 
86 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 SO often figured, with the tail in contact with the head. It seems 
 not unworthy of remark, that the female lobster, when her spawn 
 is ripening in an external patch on her abdomen, affects for its 
 protection the same rolled form. Her dorsal plates curve, round 
 from the joint at the carpace till the tail-flap rests on her breast ; 
 and the multitudinous dark-coloured eggs, which, having no 
 hard shell of their own to protect them, would be otherwise ex- 
 posed to every hungry maurauder of the deep, are thus covered 
 up by the strong mail with which the animal is herself protected. 
 When we take the fact into account, that in no specimen of 
 trilobite, however well preserved, do we find abdominal plates, 
 and that the ball-like form is so exceedingly common, may we not 
 infer that this ancient crustacean was shelled on but the back 
 and head, and that it coiled itself round to protect a defenceless 
 spawn 1 . In yet another specimen which I purchased from the 
 barber, there is an eye of the Asaphm Caudatus, which presents, 
 in a state of tolerable keeping, its numerous rows of facets. So 
 far as is yet known, the eye which first saw the light on this 
 ancient earth of ours, gave access to it through four hundred and 
 fifty distinct spherical lenses. The barber had been in the way 
 of selling Dudley fossils, he told me, for a good many years, and 
 his father h^d been in the way of selling them for a good many 
 more ; but neither he nor his father had ever seen among them 
 any portion of an ichthyolite. The crustaceans, with their many- 
 jointed plates, and many-windowed eyes, are, so far as is yet 
 known, the highest organisms of the deposit. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 87 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Stourbridge — Eflfect of Plutonic convulsion on the surrounding scenery — Hagley; de- 
 scription in the " Seasons" — Geology the true anatomy of landscape— Geologic sketch 
 of Hagley — The road to the races — The old stone-cutter — Thomson's Hollow — His 
 visits to Hagley — Shenstone's Urn— Peculiarities of taste founded often on a substra- 
 tum of personal character — Illustration — Rousseau — Pope's Haunt — Lyttelton's high 
 admiration of the genius of Pope — Description — Singularly extensive and beautiful 
 landscape ; drawn by Thomson — Reflection — Amazing multiplicity of the prospect 
 illustrative of a peculiarity in the descriptions of the " Seasons " — Addison's canon 
 on landscape ; corroborated by Shenstone. 
 
 I LEFT Dudley by the morning coach for Stourbridge, and ar- 
 rived, all unwittingly, during the bustle of its season of periodic 
 license — the yearly races. Stourbridge is merely a smaller 
 Wolverhampton, built on the same lower deposit of the New Red 
 Sandstone, of the same sort of red brick, and roofed and floored 
 with the same sort of red tiles. The surrounding country is, 
 however, more pleasingly varied by hill and valley. Plutonic 
 convulsion from beneath has given to the flat incoherent forma- 
 tion a diversity of surface not its own ; and we see it tempested 
 into waves over the unseen, trappean masses, like ocean over the 
 back of some huge sea-monster. In passing on to the south and 
 west, one finds bolder and still bolder inequalities of surface. The 
 hills rise higher, and are more richly wooded, until, at length, 
 little more than three miles from Stourbridge, in a locality where 
 the disturbing rock has broken through, and. forms a chain of 
 picturesque trap eminences, there may be seen some of at once 
 the finest and most celebrated scenery in England. Certainly for 
 no scenery, either at home or abroad, has the muse done more. 
 Who, acquainted with the poetry of the last century, has not 
 heard of Hagley, the " British Tempe," so pleasingly sung by 
 
88 FIKST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 Thomson in his " Seasons," and so intimately associated, in the 
 verse of Pope, Shenstone, and Hammond, with the Lord Lyttelton 
 of English literature ? It was to walk over Hagley that I had 
 now turned aside half-a-day's journey out of my purposed route. 
 Rather more from accident than choice, there were no poets with 
 whom I had formed so early an acquaintance as with the English 
 poets who flourished in the time of Queen Anne and the first 
 two Georges. I had come to be scarce less familiar with Hagley 
 and the Leasowes, in consequence, than Reuben Butler, when 
 engaged in mismanaging his grandmother's farm, with the agri- 
 culture of the " Georgics ; " and here was my first opportunity, 
 after the years of half a lifetime had come and gone, of com- 
 paring the realities as they now exist with the early conceptions 
 I had formed of them. My ideas of Hagley had been derived 
 chiefly from Thomson, with whose descriptions, though now con- 
 siderably less before the reading public than they have been, most 
 of my readers must be in some degree acquainted. 
 
 '• The love of Nature works, 
 And wanns the bosom ; till at last sublimed 
 To rapture and enthusiastic heat, 
 We feel the present Deity, and taste 
 The joy of God to see a happy world ! 
 These are the sacred feelings of thy heart, 
 Lyttelton, the friend ! Thy passions thus 
 And meditations vary, as at large. 
 Courting the muse, through Hagley Park thou strayest. 
 The British Tempe ! There along the dale. 
 With woods o'erhung, and shagged with mossy rocks, 
 Where on each hand the* gushing waters play. 
 And down the rough cascade white dashing fall. 
 Or gleam in lengthen'd vista through the trees. 
 You silent steal, or rit beneath the shade 
 Of solemn oaks, that tuft the swelling mounts. 
 Thrown graceful round by Nature's careless hand. 
 And pensive listen to the various voice 
 Of rural peace ; — the herds, the flocks, the birds. 
 The hollow whispering breeze, the plaint of rills. 
 That, purling down amid the twisted roots 
 Which creep around, their dewy murmurs shake 
 On the soothed ear." 
 
 In all the various descriptions of Hagley and the Leasowes 
 which I have yet seen, however elaborate and well written, I 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 89 
 
 have found such a want of leading outlines, that I could never 
 form a distinct conception of either place as a whole. The 
 writer — whether a Thomson or a Dodsley — introduced me to 
 shaded walks and open lawns, swelling eminences and sequestered 
 hollows, wooded recesses with their monumental urns, and green 
 hill-tops with their crowning obelisks ; but, though the details 
 were picturesquely given, I have always missed distinct lines of 
 circumvallation to separate and characterize from the surround- 
 ing country the definite locality in which they were included. 
 A minute anatomical acquaintance with the bones and muscles 
 is deemed essential to the painter who grapples with the diffi- 
 culties of the human figure. Perhaps, when the geological vo- 
 cabulary shall have become better incorporated than at present 
 with the language of our common literature, a similar acquaint- 
 ance with the stony science will be found scarce less necessary 
 to the writer who describes natural scenery. Geology forms 
 the true anatomy — the genuine osteology — of landscape; and 
 a correct representation of the geological skeleton of a locality 
 will be yet regarded, I doubt not, as the true mode of impart- 
 ing adequate ideas of its characteristic outlines. The osteology of 
 Hagley, if I may so speak, is easily definable. On the southern 
 shore of the Dudley coal-basin, and about two miles from its 
 edge, there ris^ in the New Red Sandstone a range of trap 
 hills about seven miles in length, known as the Clent Hills, 
 which vary in height from six to eight hundred feet over the 
 level of the sea. They lie parallel, in their general direction, to 
 the Silurian range, already described as rising, like a chain of 
 islands, amid the coal ; but, though parallel, they are, like the 
 sides of the parallel ruler of the geometrician when fully 
 stretched, not opposite; the southernmost hill of the Silurian 
 range lying scarce so far to the south as the northernmost hill 
 of the trap range. The New Red Sandstone, out of which the 
 latter arises, forms a rich, slightly undulating country, reticulated 
 by many a green lane and luxuriant hedge-row ; the hills them- 
 
 ^ 
 
90 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 selves are deeply scooped by hollow dells, furrowed by shaggy 
 ravines, and roughened by confluent eminences ; and on the 
 south-western slopes of one of the finest and most variegated of 
 the range, half on the comparatively level red sandstone, half 
 on the steep-sided billowy trap, lie the grounds of Hagley. Let 
 the Edinburgh reader imagine such a trap hill as that which 
 rises on the north-east between Arthur's Seat and the sea, 
 tripled or quadrupled in its extent of base, hollowed by dells 
 and ravines of considerable depth, covered by a soil capable of 
 sustaining the noblest trees, mottled over with votive urns, 
 temples, and obelisks, and traversed by many a winding walk, 
 skilfully designed to lay open every beauty of the place, and he 
 will have no very inadequate idea of the British Tempe sung 
 by Thomson. We find its loveliness compounded of two simple 
 geologic ^ elements — that abrupt and variegated picturesqueness 
 for which the trap rocks are so famous, and which may be seen 
 so strikingly illustrated in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh; 
 and that soft-lined and level beauty — an exquisite component 
 in landscape when it does not stand too much alone — so cha- 
 racteristic, in many localities, of the Lower New Red Sandstone 
 formation. 
 
 I was fortunate in a clear, pleasant day, in which a dappled 
 sky overhead threw an agreeable mottling of light and shadow 
 on the green earth below. The road to Hagley was also that 
 to the races, and so there were many passengers. There were 
 carts and waggons rumbling forward, crowded with eager ruddy 
 faces of the round Saxon type ; and gigs and carriages, in which 
 the faces seemed somewhat less eager, and were certainly less 
 ruddy and round. There were numerous parties, too, hurrying 
 afoot : mechanics from the nearer towns, with pale, unsunned 
 complexions, that reminded one of the colourless vegetation 
 which springs up in vaults and cellars; stout jovial ploughmen, 
 redolent, in look and form, of the open sky and the fresh air ; ' 
 bevies of young girls in gipsy bonnets, full of an exuberant merri- 
 

 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 
 
 rnent, that flowed out in laughter as they went ; and bands of 
 brown Irish reapers, thrown out of their calculations by the back- 
 ward harvest, with their idle hooks slung on their shoulders, and 
 fluttering in rags in a country in which one saw no rags but 
 their own. And then there came, in long procession, the boys 
 of a free-school, headed by their masters ; and then the girls of 
 another free-school, with their mistresses by their side; but the 
 boys and girls were bound, I was told, not for the races, but 
 for a pleasant recess among the Clent Hills, famous for its great 
 abundance of nuts and blackberries, in which they were per- 
 mitted to spend once a year, during the season of general license, 
 a compensatory holiday. To the right of the road, for mile 
 b(3yond mile, field succeeds field, each sheltered by its own rows 
 of trees, stuck into broad wasteful hedges, and which, as they' 
 seem crowded together in the distance, gave to the remote land- 
 scape the character of a forest. On the left the ground rises 
 picturesque and high, and richly wooded, forming the first 
 beginnings of the Clent Hills; and I could already see before 
 me, where the sky and the hill met, the tufted vegetation and 
 pointed obelisks of Hagley. 
 
 I baited at Hagley village to take a glass of cider, which the 
 warmth of the day and the dustiness of the road rendered ex- 
 ceedingly grateful ; and entered into conversation with an old 
 grey-headed man, of massive frame and venerable countenance, 
 who was engaged by the wayside in sawing into slabs a large 
 block of New Red Sandstone. The process, though I had hewn, 
 as I told him, a great many stones in Scotland, was new to me, 
 and so I had not a few questions to ask regarding it, which he 
 answered with patient civility. The block on which he was 
 operating measured about six feet in length by four in breadth, 
 and was from eighteen to twenty inches in thickness ; and he 
 was cutting it by three draughts, parallel to its largest plane, 
 into four slabs. Each draught, he said, would employ him 
 about four days, and the formation of the slabs, each containing 
 
92 FIRST rMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 a superficies of about twenty-four feet, at least a fortnight. He 
 purposed fashioning them into four tombstones. Nearly half 
 his time was occupied, he reckoned, in sawing — rather hard 
 work for an old man; and his general employment consisted 
 chiefly in fashioning the soft red sandstone into door-pieces, and 
 window-soles, and lintels, which, in the better brick-houses in 
 this locality, are usually of stone, tastefully carved. His saw 
 was the common toothless saw of the marble-cutter, fixed in a 
 heavy wooden frame, and suspended by a rope from a project- 
 ing beam ; and the process of working consisted simply in 
 swinging it in the line of the draught. I should have no diffi- 
 culty, he informed me, in getting admission to the Lyttelton 
 grounds : I had but to walk up to the gardener's lodge, and 
 secure the services of one of the under gardeners ; and, under 
 his surveillance, I might wander over the place as long as I 
 pleased. At one time, he said, people might enter the park 
 when they willed, without guide or guard ; but the public, left 
 to its own discretion, had behaved remarkably ill : it had thrown 
 down the urns, and chipped the obelisks, and scrabbled worse 
 than nonsense on the columns and the trees; and so it had to 
 be set under a keeper, to insure better behaviour. 
 
 I succeeded in securing the guidance of one of the gardeners ; 
 and, passing with him through part of the garden, and a small 
 but well-kept greenhouse, we emerged into the park, and began 
 to ascend the hill by a narrow inartificial path, that winds, in 
 alternate sunshine and shadow, as the trees approach or recede, 
 through the rich moss of the lawn. Halfway up the ascent, 
 where the hill-side is indented by a deep irregularly semicircular 
 depression, open and grassy in the bottom and sides, but 
 thickly garnished along the rim with noble trees, there is a 
 semi-octagonal temple, dedicated to the genius of Thomson — 
 " a sublime poet," says the inscription, " and a good man," 
 who greatly loved, when living, this hollow retreat. I looked 
 with no little interest on the scenery that had satisfied so great 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 93 
 
 a master of landscape ; and thought, though it might be but 
 fancy, that I succeeded in detecting the secret of his admira- 
 tion ; and that the specialties of his taste in the case rested, as 
 they not mifrequently do in such cases, on a substratum of 
 personal character. The green hill spreads out it» mossy arms 
 around, like the arms of a well-padded easy-chair of enormous 
 proportions, imparting, from the complete seclusion and shelter 
 wldch it affords, luxurious ideas of personal security and ease ; 
 while the open front permits the eye to expatiate on an expan- 
 sive and lovely landscape. We see the ground immediately in 
 front occupied by an uneven sea of tree-tops, chiefly oaks of 
 noble size, that rise, at various levels, on the lower slopes of 
 the park. The clear sunshine imparted to them this day 
 exquisite variegations of fleecy light and shadow. They formed 
 a billowy ocean of green, that seemed as if wrought in floss 
 silk. Far beyond — for the nearer fields of the level country 
 are hidden by the oaks — lies a blue labyrinth of hedge-rows, 
 stuck over with trees, and so crowded together in the distance, 
 that they present, as has been already said, a forest-like appear- 
 ance; while, still farther beyond, there stretches along the 
 horizon a continuous purple screen, composed of the distant 
 highlands of Cambria. 
 
 Such is the landscape which Thomson loved. And here he 
 
 used to saunter, the laziest and best-natured of mortal men, 
 
 with an imagination full of many-coloured conceptions, by far 
 
 the larger part of them never to be realized, and a quiet eye, 
 
 that took in without eff'ort, and stamped on the memory, every 
 
 meteoric effect of a changeful climate, which tlirew its tints of 
 
 gloom or of gladness over the diversified prospect. The images 
 
 I sunk into the quiescent mind as the silent shower sinks into 
 
 j the crannies and fissures of the soil, to come gushing out, at 
 
 some future day, in those springs of poetry which so sparkle in 
 
 the '< Seasons," or that glide in such quiet yet lustrous beauty 
 
 fj through that most finished of English poems, the " Caatle of 
 
94 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 Indolence." Never before or since was there a man of genius 
 wrought out of such mild and sluggish elements as the bard of 
 the " Seasons." A listless man was James Thomson ; kindly 
 hearted ; much loved by all his friends ; little given to think 
 of himself; who " loathed much to write, ne cared to repeat." ^ 
 And to Hagley he used to come, as Shenstone tells us, in " a 
 hired chaise, drawn by two horses ranged lengthwise," to lie 
 abed till long past mid-day, because he had " nae motive" to 
 rise; and to browse in the gardens on the sunny side of the 
 peaches, with his hands stuck in his pockets. He was hourly 
 expected at Hagley on one of his many visits, when the intel- 
 ligence came, instead, of his death. With all his amazing 
 inertness, he must have been a loveable man — an essentially 
 different sort of person from either of his two poetical Scotch 
 acquaintances. Mallet or Armstrong. Quin wept for him no 
 feigned tears on the boards of the theatre ; poor Collins, a per- 
 son of warm and genial affections, had gone to live beside him 
 at Richmond, but on his death quitted the place for ever ; even 
 Shenstone, whose nature it was to think much and often of 
 himself, felt life grow darker at his departure, and, true to his 
 hobby, commemorated him in an urn, on the principle on which 
 the late Lord Buchan was so solicitous to bury Sir Walter 
 Scott. " He was to have been at Hagley this week," we find 
 Shenstone saying, in a letter dated from the Leasowes, in which 
 
 1 The stanza in tbe " Castle of Indolence," " by another hand," which portrays so 
 happily the character of Thomson, was written by Lyttelton; and there are perhaps 
 more of those felicities of phrase which sink into the memory of a people, in the nine 
 lines of which it consists, than in any single poem of ten times the length his Lordship 
 ever produced. 
 
 " A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems. 
 
 Who, void of envy, guile, and lust of gain. 
 
 On virtue still, and nature's pleasing themes, 
 
 Pour'd forth his unpremeditated strain ; 
 The world forsaking with a calm disdain, 
 
 Here laughed he careless in his easy seat ; 
 Here quaflfed, encircled with the joyous train, — 
 Oft moralizing sage : his ditty sweet 
 He loathed much to write, ne cared to repeat." 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 95 
 
 he records his death, " and then I should probably have seen 
 him here. As it is, I will erect an urn in Virgil's Grove to 
 his memory. I was really as much shocked to hear of his 
 death as if I had known and loved him for a number of years. 
 God knows, I lean on a very few friends, and if they drop me, 
 I become a wretched misanthrope." 
 
 Passing upwards from Thomson's hollow, we reach a second 
 and more secluded depression in the hill-side, associated with 
 the memory of Shenstone; and see at the head of a solitary 
 ravine a white pedestal, bearing an urn. The trees droop their 
 branches so thickly around it, that, when the eye first detects 
 it in the shade, it seems a retreating figure, wrapped up in a 
 winding-sheet. The inscription is eulogistic of the poet's char- 
 acter and genius. " In his verses," it tells us, with a quiet 
 elegance, in which we at once recognise the hand of Lyttleton, 
 " were all the natural graces, and in his manners all the amiable 
 simplicity, of pastoral poetry, with the sweet tenderness of the 
 elegiac." This secluded ravine seems scarce less characteristic 
 of the author of the " Ode to Rural Elegance," and the " Pas- 
 toral Ballad," than the opener hollow below, of the poet of the 
 " Seasons." There is no great expansion of view, of which, 
 indeed, Shenstone was no admirer. " Prospects," he says, in 
 his " Canons on Landscape," " should never take in the blue 
 hills so remotely that they be not distinguishable from clouds; 
 yet this mere extent is what the vulgar value." Thomson, 
 however, though not quite one of the vulgar, valued it too. 
 As seen from his chosen recess, the blue of the distant hills 
 seems melting into the blue of the sky ; or, as he himself better 
 describes the dim outline — 
 
 ** The Cambrian mountains, like far clouds, 
 That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise." 
 
 It is curious enough to find two men, both remarkable for their 
 nice sense of the beautiful in natural scenery, at issue on so 
 important a point; but the diversity of their tastes indicates, 
 
96 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 one may venture to surmise, not only the opposite character oi 
 their genius, but of their dispositions also. Shenstone was 
 naturally an egotist, and, like Rousseau, scarce ever contem- 
 plated a landscape without some tacit reference to the space 
 occupied in it by himself. " An air of greatness," remarks the 
 infirm philosopher of Geneva, " has always something melan- 
 choly in it : it leads us to consider the wretchedness of those 
 who affect it. In the midst of extended grass-plats and fine 
 walks the little individual does not grow greater; a tree of 
 twenty feet high will shelter him as well as one of sixty; he 
 never occupies a space of more than three feet ; and in the 
 midst of his immense possessions is lost like a poor worm." 
 Alas! it was but a poor worm, ever brooding over its own 
 mean dimensions — ever thinking of the little entity self, and 
 jealous in its egotism of even the greatness of nature — that 
 could have moralized in a strain so unwholesome. Thomson, 
 the least egotistic of all poets, had no such jealousy in his com- 
 position. Instead of feeling himself lost in any save vignette 
 landscapes, it was his delight, wholly forgetful of self and its 
 minute measurements, to make landscapes even larger than the 
 life — to become all eye — and, by adding one long reach of the 
 vision to another, to 'take in a kingdom at a glance. There 
 are few things finer in English poetry than the description in 
 which, on this principle, he lays all Scotland at once upon the 
 canvas : — 
 
 " Here a while the muse, 
 High hovering o'er the broad cerulean scene. 
 Sees Caledonia in romantic view ; 
 Her airy mountains, from tho waving main 
 Invested with a keen, diffusive sky, 
 Breathing the soul acute : her forests huge, 
 Incult, robust, and tall, by Nature's band 
 Planted of old ; her azure lakes between. 
 Poured out extensive, and her watery wealth 
 Full ; winding deep and green her fertile vales ; 
 Wi'uh many a cool, translucent, brimming flood 
 Washed lovely, from the Tweed (pure parent stream. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 97 
 
 Whose pastoral banks first hoard my Doric reed, 
 With sylvan Jed, thy tributary brook), 
 To where the north's inflated tempest foams 
 O'er Orca's or Betubium's highest peak," 
 
 Shenstone's recess, true to his character, excludes, as I have 
 said, the distant landscape. It is, however, an exceedingly 
 pleasing, though somewhat gloomy spot, shut up on every side 
 by the encircling hills — here feathered with wood, there pro- 
 jecting its soft undulating line of green against the blue sky ; 
 while, occupying the bottom of the hollow, there is a small 
 sheltered lake, with a row of delicate limes, that dip their 
 pendent branches in the water. 
 
 Yet a little further on we descend into an opener and more 
 varied inflection in the hilly region of Hagley, which is said to 
 have been as favourite a haunt of Pope as the two others of 
 Thomson and Shenstone, and in which an elaborately-carved 
 um and pedestal records Lyttelton's estimate of his powers as a 
 writer, and his aims as a moralist : " the sweetest and most 
 elegant," says the inscription, " of English poets, the severest 
 chastiser of vice, and the most persuasive teacher of wisdom." 
 Lyttelton and Pope seem to have formed mutually high estimates 
 of each other's powers and character. In the "Satires" we 
 find three several compliments paid to the " young Lyttelton," 
 
 " Still true to virtue, and as warm as true." 
 
 And when, in the House of Commons, one of Sir Robert Wal- 
 I pole's supporters accused the rising statesman of being the facile 
 associate of an "unjust and licentious lampooner" — for, as Sir 
 Robert's administration was corrupt, and the satirist severe, 
 such was Pope's character in the estimate of the ministerial 
 majority — he rose indignantly to say, " that he deemed it an 
 honour to be received into the familiarity of so great a poet." 
 But the titled paid a still higher, though perhaps undesigned, 
 compliment to the untitled author, by making his own poetry 
 the very echo of his. Among the English literati of the last 
 
 G 
 
98 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 century there is no other writer of equal general ability so de- 
 cidedly, I had almost said so servilely, of the school of Pope as 
 Lyttelton. The " little crooked man, during the last thirteen 
 years of his life, was a frequent visitor at Hagley ; and it is 
 still a tradition in the neighbourhood that in the hollow in 
 which his urn has been erected he particularly delighted. He 
 forgot Gibber, Sporm, and Lord Fanny ; flung up with much 
 glee his poor shapeless legs, thickened by three pairs of stock- 
 ings apiece, and far from thick after all, and called the place his 
 " own ground." It certainly does no discredit to the taste that 
 originated the gorgeous though somewhat indistinct descriptions 
 of "Windsor Forest." There are noble oaks on every side — some 
 in their vigorous middle-age, invested with that "rough grandeur 
 of bark, and wide protection of bough," which Shenstone so ad- 
 mired — some far gone in years, mossy and time-shattered, with 
 white skeleton branches a-top, and fantastic scraggy roots pro- 
 jecting, snake-like, from the broken ground below. An irregular 
 open space in front permits the eye to range over a prospect 
 beautiful though not extensive ; a small clump of trees rises so 
 near the urn, that when the breeze blows, the slim branch-tips 
 lash it as if in sport, while a clear and copious spring comes 
 bubbling out at its base. 
 
 I passed somewhat hurriedly through glens and glades — 
 over rising knolls and wooded slopes — saw statues and obelisks, 
 temples and hermitages — and lingered a while ere I again de- 
 scended to the lawn, on the top of an eminence which com- 
 mands one of the richest prospects I had yet seen. The land- 
 scape from this point — by far too fine to have escaped the eye 
 of Thomson — is described in the " Seasons ; " and the hill which 
 overlooks it, represented as terminating one of the walks of 
 Lyttelton and his lady — that Lucy Lady Lyttelton, whose 
 early death formed, but a few years after, the subject of the 
 monody so well known and so much admired in the days of our 
 great-grandmothers : — 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 99 
 
 " The beauteous bride 
 To whose fair memory flowed the tenderest tear 
 That ever trembled o'er the female bier." 
 
 It is not in every nobleman's park one can have the opportunity 
 of comparing such a picture as that in the " Seasons " with such 
 an original. I quote, with the description, the preliminary lines 
 so vividly suggestive of the short-lived happiness of Lyttelton : 
 
 « Perhaps thy loved Lucinda shares thy walk. 
 With soul to thine attuned. Then Nature all 
 Wears to the lover's eye a look of love ; 
 And all the tumult of a guilty world, 
 Toss'd by the generous passions, sinks away : 
 The tender heart is animated peace : 
 And as it pours its copious treasures forth 
 In various converse, softening every theme, 
 You, frequent pausing, turn, and from her eyes— 
 Where meekened sense, and amiable grace, 
 And lively sweetness dwell — enraptured drink 
 That nameless spirit of ethereal joy — 
 Unutterable happiness '.—which love 
 Alone bestows, and on a favoured few. 
 Meantime you gain the height from whose fair brow 
 The bursting prospect spreads immense around, 
 And snatched o'er hill and dale, and wood and lawn, 
 And verdant field, and darkening heath between, 
 And villages embosomed soft in trees, 
 And spiry towns by surging columns marked 
 Of household smoke, Vour eye excursive roams. 
 Wide, stretching from the Hall, in whose kind haunt 
 The Hospitable Genius lingers still. 
 To where the broken landscape, by degrees 
 Ascending, roughen^ into rigid hills, 
 O er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds 
 That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise." 
 
 As I called up the passage on the spot where, as a yet un- 
 formed conception, it had first arisen in the mind of the writer, 
 I felt the full force of the contrast presented by the two pic- 
 tures which it exhibits — the picture of a high but evanescent 
 human happiness, whose sun had set in the grave nearly a 
 century ago ; and the picture of the enduring landscape, unal- 
 tered in a single feature since Lyttelton and his lady had last 
 gazed on it from the hill-top. " Alas !" exclaimed the contem- 
 plative Mirza, " man is but a shadow, and life a dream." A 
 
100 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 natural enough reflection, surely — greatly more so, I am afraid, 
 than the solace sought by the poet Beattie under its depressing 
 influence, in a resembling evanescence and instability in ail 
 ^ nature and in all history. 
 
 "Art, empire, earth itself, to change are doomed: 
 Earthquakes have raised to heaven the humble vale, 
 And gulfs the mountain's mighty mass entombed, 
 And where the Atlantic rolls, wide continents have bloomed." 
 
 All very true — ^none the less so, certainly, from the circum- 
 stance of its being truth in advance of the age in which the 
 poet wrote ; but it is equally and still more emphatically true, 
 that the instability of a mountain or continent is a thing to be 
 contrasted, not compared, with the instability of the light clouds, 
 that, when the winds are up, float over it, and fling athwart 
 the landscape their breadth of fitful shadow. And, alas ! what 
 is human life 1 " even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, 
 and then vanisheth away." There need be no lack of memen- 
 toes to remind one, as I was this day reminded by the passage 
 in Thomson, what a transitory shadow man is, compared with 
 the old earth which he inhabits, and how fleeting his pleasures, 
 contrasted with the stable features of the scenes amid which 
 for a few brief seasons he enjoys them. fli 
 
 The landscape from the hill-top could not have been seen to '* 
 greater advantage, had I waited for months to pick out their 
 best day. The far Welsh mountains, though lessened in the 
 distance to a mere azure ripple, that but barely roughened the 
 line of the horizon, were as distinctly defined in the clear atmos- 
 phere as the green luxuriant leafage in the foreground which 
 harmonized so exquisitely with their blue. The line extended 
 from far beyond the Shropshire Wrekin on the right, to far 
 beyond the Worcestershire Malverns on the left. Immediately 
 at the foot of the eminence stands the mansion-house of Hagley 
 — the " Hall,'" where the " Hospitable Genius lingers still ;" 
 — a large, solid-looking, but somewhat sombre edifice, built of 
 the New Red Sandstone on which it rests, and which too much 
 
 ■i 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 101 
 
 reminds one, from its peculiar tint, of the prevailing red brick 
 of the district. There was a gay party of cricket-players on 
 the lawn. In front. Lord Lyttelton, a fine-looking young man, 
 stripped of coat and waistcoat, with his bright white shirt puffed 
 out at his waistband, was sending the ball far beyond bound, 
 amid an eager party, consisting chiefly, as the gardener informed 
 me, of tenants and tenants' sons j and the cheering sounds of 
 shout and laughter came merrily up the hilL Beyond the house 
 rises a noble screen of wood, composed of some of the tallest 
 and finest trees in England. Here and there the picturesque 
 cottages of the neighbouring village peep through ; and then, 
 on and away to the far horizon, there spreads out a close- wrought 
 net-work of fenced fields, that, as it recedes from the eye, seems 
 to close its meshes, as if drawn awry by the hand, till at length 
 the openings can be no longer seen, and the hedge-rows lie 
 piled on each other in one bosky mass. The geologic frame- 
 work of the scene is various, and each distinct portion bears its 
 own marked characteristics. In the foreground we have the 
 undulating trap, so suited to remind one, by the picturesque 
 abruptness of its outlines, of those somewhat fantastic back- 
 grounds one sees in the old prints which illustrate, in our early 
 English translations, the pastorals of Virgil and Theocritus. 
 Next succeeds an extended plane of the richly-cultivated New 
 Red Sandstone, which, occupying fully two-thirds of the entire 
 landscape, forms the whole of what a painter would term its 
 middle ground, and a little more. There rises over this plane, 
 in the distance a ridgy acclivity, much fretted by inequalities, 
 composed of an Old Red Sandstone formation, coherent enough 
 l|to have resisted those denuding agencies by which the softer 
 deposits have been worn down ; while the distant sea of blue 
 hills, that seems as if toppling over it, has been scooped out qf 
 I the Silurian formations. Upper and Lower, and demonstrates, 
 = in its commanding altitude and bold wavy outline, the still 
 greater solidity of the materials which compose it 
 
102 • FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 The entire prospect — one of the finest in England, and 
 eminently characteristic of what is best in English scenery — 
 enabled me to understand what I had used to deem a peculiarity 
 — in some measure a defect — in the landscapes of the poet 
 Thomson. It must have often struck the Scotch reader, that 
 in dealing with very extended prospects, he rather enumerates 
 than describes. His pictures are often mere catalogues, in which 
 single words stands for classes of objects, and in which the 
 entire poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of vast 
 extent, occupied by amazing multiplicity. I cannot better illus- 
 trate my meaning than by his introductory description to the 
 *' Panegyric on Great Britain :" — 
 
 " Heavens ! what a goodly prospect spreads around. 
 Of hills, and dales, and woods, and lawns, and spires. 
 And glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all 
 The stretching landscape into smoke decays !" 
 
 Now, the prospect from the hill at Hagley furnished me with 
 the true explanation of this enumerative style. Measured along 
 the horizon, it must, on the lowest estimate, be at least fifty 
 miles in longitudinal extent ; measured laterally, from the 
 spectator forwards, at least twenty. Some of the Welsh moun- 
 tains which it includes are nearly thrice that distance; but 
 then they are mere remote peaks, and the area at their bases 
 not included in the prospect. The real area, however, must 
 rather exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles ; the 
 fields into which it is laid out are small, scarcely averaging a 
 square furlong in superficies ; so that each square mile must 
 contain about forty, and the entire landscape — for all is fertility, 
 about forty thousand. With these are commixed innumerable 
 cottages, manor-houses, villages, towns. Here the surface is 
 dimpled by unreckoned hollows ; there fretted by uncounted 
 mounds; all is amazing, overpowering multiplicity— a multi- 
 plicity which neither the pen nor the pencil can adequately 
 express ; and so description, in even the hands of a master, 
 sinks into mere enumeration. The pictures become a cata- 
 

 ■ 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 103 
 
 logue ; and all that genius can accomplish in the circumstances 
 is just to do with its catalogue what Homer did with his— dip 
 it in poetry. I found, however, that the innumerable details of 
 the prospect, and its want of strong leading features, served to 
 dissipate and distract the mind, and to associate with the vast 
 whole an idea of littleness, somewhat in the way that the 
 minute hieroglyphics on an Egyptian obelisk serve to divert 
 attention from the greatness of the general mass, or the nice 
 integrity of its proportions ; and I would have perhaps attri- 
 buted the feeling to my Scotch training, had I not remembered 
 that Addison, whose early prejudices must have been of an 
 opposite cast, represents it as thoroughly natural. Our ideas 
 of the great in nature he describes as derived from vastly- 
 extended, not richly-occupied prospects. " Such," he says, " are 
 the prospects of an open champaign country, a vast uncultivated 
 desert of huge heaps of mountains, high rocks, and precipices, 
 or a wide expanse of water Such extensive and unde- 
 termined prospects," he adds, " are as pleasing to the fancy as 
 the speculations of eternity or infinitude are to the understand- 
 ing." Shenstone, too, is almost equally decided on the point ; 
 and certainly no writer has better claims to be heard on ques- 
 tions of this kind than the author of the Leasowes. " Grandeur 
 and beauty," he remarks, " are so very opposite, that you often 
 diminish the one as you increase the other. Large, unvariegated, 
 simple objects have always the best pretensions to sublimity : 
 a large mountain, whose sides are unvaried by art, is grander 
 than one with infinite variety. Suppose it chequered with 
 diJBferent-coloured clumps of wood, scars of rock, chalk-quarries, 
 villages, and farm-houses — ^you will perhaps have a more beau- 
 tiful scene, but much less grand, than it was before. The 
 hedge-row apple-trees in Herefordshire afford a lovely scenery 
 at the time they are in blossom ; but the prospect would be 
 really grander did it consist of simple foliage. For the same 
 reason, a large oak or beech in autumn is grander than the 
 Bame in spring. The sprightly green is then obfuscated." 
 
104 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Hagley parish church — ^The sepulchral marbles of the Lytteltons — Epitaph on the Lady 
 Lucy — The phrenological doctrine of hereditary transmission ; unsupported by his- 
 tory, save in a way in which history can be made to support anything — Thomas Lord 
 Lyttelton ; his moral character a strange contrast to that of his father — The elder 
 Lyttelton ; his deathbed — Abberrations of the younger Lord— Strange ghost story ; 
 curious modes of accounting for it — Return to Stourbridge — Late Drive — Hales Owen. 
 
 The parish church of Hagley, an antique Gothic building of 
 small size, much hidden in wood, lies at the foot of the hill, 
 within a few hundred yards of the mansion-house. It was 
 erected in the remote past, long ere the surrounding pleasure- 
 grounds had any existence ; but it has now come to be as 
 thoroughly enclosed in them as the urns and obelisks of the rising 
 ground above, and forms as picturesque an object as any urn or 
 obelisk among them all. There is, however, a vast difference 
 between jest and earnest ; and the 6072a fide tomb-stones of the 
 building inscribed with names of the dead, and its dark walls 
 and pointed roof reared with direct reference to a life to which 
 the present is but the brief vestibule, do not quite harmonize 
 with temples of Theseus and the Muses, or political columns 
 erected in honour of forgotten Princes of Wales, who quarrelled 
 with their fathers, and were cherished, in consequence, by the 
 Opposition. As I came upon it unawares, and saw it emerge 
 from its dense thicket of trees, I felt as if, at an Egyptian feast, 
 I had unwittingly brushed off the veil from the admonitory skele- 
 ton. The door lay open — a few workmen were engaged in 
 paving a portion of the floor, and repairing some breaches in the 
 vault ; and as I entered, one of their number was employed in 
 shovelling, some five or six feet under the pavement, among the 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 105 
 
 dust of the Lytteltons. The trees outside render the place ex- 
 ceedingly gloomy. " At Hagley," the too celebrated Thomas 
 Lord Lyttelton is made to say, in the posthumous volume of 
 Letters which bears his name, " there is a temple of Theseus, 
 commonly called by the gardener the temple of Perseus, which 
 stares you in the face wherever you go ; while the temple of 
 God, commonly called by the gardener the parish church, is so 
 industriously hid by trees from without, that the pious matron 
 can hardly read her prayer-book within." ^ A brown twilight 
 still lingers in the place : the lettered marbles along the walls 
 glisten cold and sad in the gloom, as if invested by the dun Cim- 
 merian atmosphere described by the old poet as brooding over 
 the land of the dead — 
 
 " The dusky coasts 
 Peopled by shoals of visionary ghosts." 
 
 One straggling ray of sunshine, coloured by the stained glass of 
 a narrow window, and dimmed yet more by the motty dust-reek 
 raised by the workmen, fell on a small oblong tablet, the plainest 
 and least considerable in the building, and, by lighting up its in- 
 scription of five short lines, gave to it, by one of those fortuitous 
 happinesses in which so much of the poetry of common life con- 
 sists, the prominence which it deserves. It briefly intimates that 
 it was placed there, in its naked unadomedness, " at the parti- 
 cular desire of the Right Honourable George Lord Lyttelton, 
 who died August 22, 1773, aged sixty-four." The poet had 
 willed, like another titled poet of less unclouded reputation, that 
 his " epitaph should be his name alone." Beside the plain slab 
 — so near that they almost touch — there is a marble of great 
 elegance — the monument of the Lady Lucy. It shows that she 
 
 » Tills volume, though it contains a good many authentic anecdotes of the younger 
 liyttelton, is not genuine. It was written, shortly after his Lordship's death, when the 
 public curiosity regarding him was much excited, by a person of resembling character — 
 Duhe Combe, a man who, after dis8ipating in early life a large fortime, lived precariously 
 for many years as a clever but rather un»cruy)ulou^ author of all work, and succeeded in 
 producing, when turned of seventy, a well-known volume — "Dr. Syntax's Tour in Seaxch 
 *>f the Picturesque." 
 
106 rmsT impressions of 
 
 pre-deceased her husband — dying at the early age of twenty-nine 
 — nearly thirty years. Her epitaph, like the Monody, must be 
 familiar to most of my readers ; but for the especial benefit of 
 the class whose reading may have lain rather among the poets of 
 the present than of the past century, I give it as transcribed from 
 the marble. 
 
 " Made to engage all hearts and charm all eyes. 
 Though meek, magnanimous — though witty, wise ; 
 Polite as she in courts had ever been. 
 Yet good as she the world had never seen ; 
 The noble fire of an exalted mind, 
 With gentle female tenderness combined ; 
 Her speech was the melodious voice of love. 
 Her song the warbling of the vernal grove ; 
 Her eloquence was sweeter than her song. 
 Soft as her heart, and as her reason strong : 
 Her form each beauty of the mind expressed ; 
 Her mind was virtue by the graces dressed." 
 
 England, in the eighteenth century, saw few better men or 
 better women than Lord Lyttelton and his lady ; and it does 
 seem a curious enough fact, that their only son, a boy of many 
 hopes and many advantages, and who possessed quick parts and 
 a vigorous intellect, should have proved, notwithstanding, one 
 of the most flagitious personages of his age. The first Lord 
 Lyttelton was not more conspicuous for his genius and his virtues 
 than the second Lord Lyttelton for his talents and his vices. 
 
 There are many who, though they do not subscribe to the 
 creed of the phrenologist, are yet unconsciously influenced by 
 its doctrines; and never, perhaps, was the phrenological belief 
 more general than now, that the human race, like some of the 
 inferior races, is greatly dependent for the development of what 
 is best in it, on what I shall venture to term purity of breed. 
 It has become a sort of axiom, that well-dispositioned intellectual 
 parents produce a well-dispositioned intellectual offspring; and 
 of course, as human history is various enough, when partially 
 culled, to furnish evidence in support of anything, there have 
 been instances adduced in proof of the position, which it would 
 take a long time to enumerate. But were exactly the opposite 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 107 
 
 belief held, the same various history would be found to furnish 
 at least as many evidences in support of it as of the other. The 
 human race, so far at least as the mental and the moral are con- 
 cerned, comes very doubtfully, if at all, under the law of the 
 inferior natures. David Hume, better acquainted with history 
 than most men, gives what seems to be the true state of the 
 case. " The races of animals," he says, " never degenerate when 
 carefully attended to ; and horses in particular always show their 
 blood in their shape, spirit, and swiftness; but a coxcomb may 
 beget a philosopher, as a man of virtue may leave a worthless 
 progeny." It is not uninstructive to observe how strongly the 
 philosophy of the remark is borne out by the facts of Hume's 
 own History. The mean, pusillanimous, foolish John was the 
 son of the wise, dauntless Henry the Second, aud the brother of 
 the magnanimous Richard Coeur de Lion. His immediate de- 
 scendant and successor, nearly as weak, though somewhat more 
 honest than himself, was the father of the fearless, politic, un- 
 scrupulous Edward the First ; and he of the imbecile Edward the 
 Second; and he in turn, of the brave, sagacious Edward the 
 Third ; and then comes one of those cases which the phrenologist 
 picks out from the general mass, and threads together, as with 
 a string : the heroic Edward the Third was the father of the 
 heroic Black Prince. And thus the record runs on, bearing from 
 beginning to end the same character ; save that as common men 
 are vastly less rare, as the words imply, than uncommon ones, 
 it is inevitable that instances of the ordinary producing should 
 greatly predominate over instances of an opposite cast. We see, 
 however, a brutal Henry the Eighth succeeded by his son, a just 
 and gentle Edward the Sixth; and him by his bigoted, weak- 
 minded sister, tlie bloody Mary ; and her by his other sister, the 
 shrewd, politic Elizabeth. But in no history is this indepen- 
 dence of man's mental and moral nature of the animal laws of 
 transmissions better shown than in the most ancient and au- 
 thentic of all. The two first brothers the world ever saw — 
 
108 FIUST IMPEESSIONS OF 
 
 children of the same father and mother — were persons of diar 
 metrically opposite characters ; a similar diversity obtained in 
 the families of Noah and of Jacob : the devout Eli was the 
 father of profligate children ; and Solomon, the wise son of a 
 great monarch, a great warrior, and a great author — he who, 
 according to Cowley, " from best of poets best of kings did 
 grow" — had much unscrupulous coxcombry and mediocre com- 
 monplace among his brethren, and an ill-advised simpleton for 
 his son. 
 
 The story of the young Lyttelton — better known half a 
 century ago than it is now — has not a few curious points about 
 it He was one of three children, two of them girls, apostro- 
 phized by the bereaved poet in the Monody : 
 
 " Sweet babes, who, like the little playful fawns. 
 Were wont to trip along these verdant lawns 
 
 By your delightful mother's side, 
 
 Who now your infant steps shall guide ? 
 Ah ! where is now the hand whose tender care 
 To every virtue would have formed your youth. 
 And strewed with flowers the thorny ways of truth! 
 
 loss beyond repair ! 
 
 wretched father, left alone 
 To weep their dire misfortune and thy own ! 
 How shall thy weakened mind oppressed with woe. 
 
 And droo[)ing o'er thy Lucy's grave. 
 Perform the duties that you doubly owe. 
 
 Now she, alas ! is gone. 
 From folly and from vice their helpless age to save ! " 
 
 One of the two female children died in infancy ; the other lived 
 to contract an advantageous and happy marriage with a very 
 amiable nobleman, and to soothe the dying bed of her father. 
 The boy gave early promise of fine parts and an energetic dispo- 
 sition. He learned almost in childhood to appreciate Milton, 
 mastered his tasks with scarce an effort, spoke and wrote with 
 fluent elegance, and was singularly happy in repartee. It was 
 early seen, however, that his nature was based on a substratum 
 of profound selfishness, and that an uneasy vanity rendered 
 him intensely jealous of all in immediate contact with him, 
 whose claims to admiration or respect he regarded as overtop- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 109 
 
 ping his own. All of whom he was jealous it was his disposition 
 to dislike and oppose : his insane envy made war upon them in 
 behalf of self; and, unfortunately, it was his excellent father^ — 
 a man possessed of one of the highest and most unsullied repu- 
 tations of the day — whom he regarded as most his rival. Had 
 the first Lord Lyttleton been a worse man, the second Lord 
 would possibly have been a better one ; for in the moral and 
 the religious — in all that related to the conduct of life and the 
 government of the passions — he seemed to regard his father as 
 a sort of reverse standard by which to regulate himself on a 
 principle of contrariety. The elder Lord had produced a treatise 
 on the " Conversion of St. Paul," which continues to hold a pro- 
 minent place among our works of evidence, and to which, says 
 Johnson, " infidelity has never been able to fabricate a specious 
 answer." It was answered, however, after a sort, by a sceptical 
 foreigner, Claude Annet, whose work the younger Lyttelton 
 made it his business diligently to study, and which, as a piece of 
 composition and argument, he professed greatly to prefer to his 
 father's. The elder Lyttelton had written verses which gave 
 him a place among the British poets, and which contain, as he 
 himself has characterized those of Thomson — 
 
 " Not one immoral, one corrupted thought — 
 One line which, dying, he could wish to blot" 
 
 The younger Lyttelton wrote verses also ; but his, though not 
 quite without merit, had to be banished society, like a leper 
 freckled with infection, and they have since perished apart. 
 The elder Lyttelton wrote Dialogues of the Dead; so did the 
 younger; but his dialogues were too blasphemously profane to 
 be given, in a not very zealous age, to the public ; and we can 
 but predict their character from their names. The speakers in 
 one were, "King David and Caesar Borgia;" and in another, 
 *' Socrates and Jesus Christ," He gave a loose to his passions, 
 till not a woman of reputation would dare be seen in his com- 
 pany, or permit him, when he waited on her — heir-apparent as 
 
110 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 he was to a fine estate and a fair title— to do more than leave 
 his card. His father, in the hope of awakening him to higher 
 pursuits and a nobler ambition, exerted his influence in getting 
 him returned to Parliament ; and he made his debut in a brilliant 
 speech which greatly excited the hopes of the veteran senator 
 and his friends, and was complimented in the House by the 
 Opposition, as fraught with the " hereditary ability of the 
 Lytteltons." He subsequently lost his seat, however, in con- 
 sequence of some irregularities connected with his election, and 
 returned full swing to the gratification of the grosser propensities 
 of his nature. At length, when shunned by high and low, even 
 in the neighbourhood of Hagley, he was sent to hide his dis- 
 grace in an obscure retreat on the Continent. 
 
 Meanwhile, the elder Lyttelton was fast breaking up. There 
 was nothing in the nature of his illness, says his physician, in 
 an interesting account of his last moments, to alarm the fears 
 of his friends ; but there is a malady of the afioctions darkly 
 hinted at in the narrative, which had broken his rest and pros- 
 trated his strength, and which medicine could not reach. It is 
 sad enough to reflect that he himself had been one of the best 
 of sons. The letter is still extant which his aged father ad- 
 dressed to him on the publication of his treatise on the " Con- 
 version of St. Paul." After some judicious commendation of 
 the cogency of the arguments and the excellence of the style, 
 the old man goes on to say, " May the King of kings, whose 
 glorious cause you have so well defended, reward your pious 
 labours, and grant that I may be found worthy, through the 
 merits of Jesus Christ, to be an eye-witness of that happiness 
 which I doubt not He will bountifully bestow upon you. In 
 the meantime, I shall never cease glorifying God for having en- 
 dowed you with such useful talents, and giving me so good a 
 son." And here was the son, in whose behalf this afiocting 
 prayer had been breathed, dying broken-hearted, a victim to 
 paternal solicitude and sorrow ! But did the history of the 
 

 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. Ill 
 
 ^ecies furnish us with no such instances, we should possess one 
 argument fewer than in the existing state of things, for a 
 scheme of final retribution, through which every unredressed 
 wrong shall be righted, and every unsettled accoimt receive its 
 appropriate adjustment. Junius, a writer who never praised 
 willingly, had just decided, with reference to his Lordship's 
 long political career, that "the integrity and judgment of Lord 
 Lyttelton were unquestionable j" but the subject of the eulogy 
 -svas passing to the tribunal of a higher Judge. His hopes of 
 immortality rested solely on the revealed basis ; and yet it did 
 yield him cause of gratitude on his deathbed, that he had been 
 enabled throughout the probationary course, now at its close, to 
 maintain the character of an honest man. " In politics and 
 ill public life," he said to his physician, shortly ere his depar- 
 ture, " I have made public good the rule of my conduct. I 
 never gave counsels which I did not at the time think the best 
 I have seen that I was sometimes in the wrong ; but I did 
 not err designedly. I have endeavoured in private life to do all 
 the good in my power ; and never for a moment could indulge 
 malicious or unjust designs against any person whatsoever." 
 And so the first Lord Lyttelton slept with his fathers ; and 
 Thomas, the second Lord, succeeded him. 
 
 He soon attained, in his hereditary seat in the Upper House, 
 to no small consequence as a Parliamentary speaker ; and the 
 Ministry of the day — the same that lost the colonies to Britain 
 — found it of importance he should be conciliated. His father 
 had long desired, but never could obtain, the Government ap- 
 pointment of Chief Justice in Eyre. It was known there was 
 nothing to be gained by conferring a favour of the kind on the 
 first Lord Lyttelton : he would have voted and spoken after 
 exactly the same manner, whether he got the appointment or 
 no. But the second Lord was deemed a man of a different 
 stamp ; and the place which the father, after his honest ser- 
 vices of forty years, had longed for in vain, the son, in the in- 
 
112 FIPvST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 fancy of his peerage, ere he had performed a single service of 
 any kind, received unsolicited. The gift had its effect ; and 
 many of his after votes were recorded on the side of Ministers, 
 against Chatham and the Americans. No party, however, 
 could calculate very surely on his support : he was frequently 
 drawn aside by some eccentric impulse ; and frequently hit 
 right and left in mere wantonness, without caring whether the 
 stroke fell on friend or foe. There were, meanwhile, sad doings 
 at Hagley. In " his father's decent hall," to employ the lan- 
 guage of Childe Harold, 
 
 ** condemned to uses vile, 
 Now Paphian girls w ere known to sing and smile." 
 
 He had been manied to a lady, of whom nothing worse has 
 ever been said than that she accepted his hand. Her, however, 
 he had early deserted. But the road he had taken, with all its 
 downward ease and breadth, is not the road which leads to hap- 
 piness ; and enough survives of his private history to show that 
 he was a very miserable man. 
 
 " And none did love him : though to hall and bower 
 He gathered revellers from far and near, 
 He knew them flatterers of the festal hour. 
 The heartless parasires of present cheer ; 
 Yea, none did love him — not his lemans dear," 
 
 He seems to have been strongly marked by the peculiar 
 heartlessness so generally found to co-exist with the gratuitous 
 and flashy generosity of men of grossly licentious lives ; that 
 petrifaction of feeling to which Burns and Byron — both of 
 them unfortunately but too well qualified to decide on the sub- 
 ject — so pointedly refer. But he could feel remorse, however 
 incapable of pity, and remorse heightened — notwithstanding an 
 ostentatious scepticism — by the direst terrors of superstition. 
 Among the females who had been the objects of his temporary 
 attachment, and had fallen victims to it, there was a Mrs. 
 Dawson, whose fortune, with her honour and reputation, had 
 been sacrificed to her passion, and who, on being deserted by 
 
 i 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 113 
 
 his Lordship for another, did not long survive ; she died broken- 
 hearted, bankrupt both in means and character. But though 
 she perished without friend, she was yet fully avenged on the 
 seducer. Ever after, he believed himself haunted by her spectre. 
 It would start up before him in the solitudes of Hagley at noon- 
 day — at night it flitted round his pillow — it followed him inces- 
 santly during his rustication on the Continent — and is said to 
 have given him especial disturbance when passing a few days at 
 Lyons. In England, when residing for a short time with a 
 brother nobleman, he burst at midnight into the room in which 
 his host slept, and begged in great horror of mind, to be per- 
 mitted to pass the night beside him ; in his own apartment, he said 
 he had been strangely annoyed by an unaccountable creaking of 
 the floor. He ultimately deserted Hagley, which he found by 
 much too solitary, and in too close proximity with the parish 
 burying-ground ; and removed to a country-house near Epsom, 
 called Pit Place, from its situation in an old chalk-pit. And 
 here, six years after the death of his father, the vital powers 
 suddenly failed him, and he broke down and died in his thirty- 
 sixth year. There were circumstances connected with his death 
 that form the strangest part of his story — circumstances which 
 powerfully attracted public attention at the time, and which, as 
 they tasked too severely the belief of an incredulous age, have 
 been very variously accounted for. We find Dr. Johnson, whose 
 bias, however, did not incline him to the incredulous side, thus 
 referring to them in one of the conversations recorded by Bos- 
 well. " I mentioned," says the chronicler, " Thomas Lord 
 Lyttelton's vision — the prediction of the time of his death, and 
 its exact fulfilment.'* Johnson — " It is the most extraordi- 
 nary thing that has happened in my day : I heard it with my 
 own ears from his uncle. Lord Westcote. I am so glad to have 
 evidence of the spiritual world that I am willing to believe it." 
 Dr. Adams — " You have evidence enough ; good evidence, which 
 netids not such support." Johnson — *< I like to have more." 
 
 u 
 
114 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 This celebrated vision, long so familiar to the British public, 
 that almost all the writers who touch on it, from Boswell to 
 Sir Walter Scott inclusive, deal by the details as too well known 
 to be repeated, is now getting pretty much out of sight. I 
 shall present the particulars^ therefore, as I have been able to 
 collect them from the somewhat varying authorities of the 
 time.^ His Lordship, on Thursday, November 5th, 1779, had 
 made the usual opening address to the Sovereign the occasion 
 of a violent attack on the Administration ; " but this," says 
 Walpole, " was, notwithstanding his Government appointment, 
 nothing new to him ; he was apt to go point blank into all 
 extremes, without any parenthesis or decency, nor even boggled 
 at contradicting his own words." In the evening he set out for 
 his house at Epsom, carrying with him, says the same gossiping 
 authority, " a caravan of nymphs." He sat up rather late after 
 his arrival ; and, on retiring to bed, was suddenly awakened 
 from brief slumber a little before midnight, by what appeared 
 to be a dove, which, after fluttering for an instant near the bed 
 curtains, glided towards a casement-window in the apartment, 
 where it seemed to flutter for an instant longer, and then 
 vanished. At the same moment his eye fell upon a female 
 figure in white standing at the bed-foot, in which he at once 
 recognised, says Warner, " the spectre of the unfortunate lady 
 that had haunted him so long." It solemnly warned him to 
 prepare for death, for that within three days he should be called 
 to his final account ; and, having delivered its message, immedi- 
 ately disappeared. In the morning his Lordship seemed greatly 
 discomposed, and complained of a violent headache. " He had 
 
 I Walpole, Wraxall, Warner, and the Scots Magazine. Malone, in one of the notes to 
 Boswells "Johnson," refers the reader for a correct account of " Lyttelton's supposed 
 vi>ion," to Nash's " History of Worcestershire; " and his reference has been reprinted 
 without alteration, in the elaborate edition of Croker. But the earlier commentator 
 must have been misled in the case by a deceptive memory, and the latter by taking his 
 predecessor's labours too much on trust. Nash's entire notice consists of but a meagre 
 allusion to his Lordship's death, wound up by the remark that there were circum- 
 gtances connected with it well suited to " engage the attention of believers in the second 
 sight." 
 
^" "U^.l «^ «^+^, 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 115 
 
 had an extraordinary dream," he said, "suited, did he possess 
 even a particle of superstition, to make a deep impression on 
 his mind ; " and in afterwards communicating the particulars of 
 the vision, he remarked, rather however in joke than earnest, 
 that the warning was somewhat of the shortest, and that really 
 after a course of life so disorderly as his, three days formed but 
 a brief period for preparation. On Saturday he began to re- 
 cover his spirits, and told a lady of his acquaintance at Epsom 
 that as it was now the third and last day, he would, if he 
 escaped for but a few hours longer, fairly "jockey the ghost." 
 He became greatly depressed, however, as the evening wore on ; 
 and one of his companions, as the critical hour of midnight ap- 
 proached, set forward the house-clock, in the hope of dissipating 
 his fears, by misleading him into the belief that he had entered 
 on the fourth day, and was of course safe. The hour of twelve 
 accordingly struck ; the company, who had sat with him till 
 now, broke up immediately after, laughing at the prediction ; 
 and his Lordship retired to his bedroom apparently much re- 
 lieved. His valet, w^ho had mixed up at his desire a dose of 
 rhubarb, followed him a few minutes after, and he sat up in 
 bed, in apparent health, to take the medicine ; but being in 
 want of a tea-spoon, he despatched the servant, with an ex- 
 pression of impatience, to bring him one. The man was scarce 
 a minute absent. When he returned, however, his master was 
 a corpse. He had fallen backwards on the pillow, and his out- 
 stretched hand still grasped his watch, which exactly indicated 
 the fatal hour of twelve. It has been conjectured that his dis- 
 solution might have been an effect of the shock he received, on 
 ascertaining that the dreaded hour had not yet gone by : at all 
 events, explain the fact as we may, ere the fourth day had 
 aiTived, Lyttelton was dead. It has been further related, as a 
 curious coincidence, that on the night of his decease, one of his 
 intimate acquaintance at Dartford, in Kent, dreamed that his 
 Lordship appeared to him, and drawing back the curtain, said 
 
116 FIRST mPEESSIONS OF 
 
 with an air of deep melancholy, " My dear friend, it is all over ; 
 you see me for the last time." ^ 
 
 The story has been variously accounted for. Some have 
 held, as we learn from Sir Walter Scott in his " Demonology," 
 that his Lordship, weary of life, and fond of notoriety, first in- 
 vented the prediction, with its accompanying circumstances, and 
 then destroyed himself to fulfil it. And it is added, in a note 
 furnished by a friend of Sir Walter s, that the whole incident 
 has been much exaggerated. " I heard Lord Fortescue once 
 say," says the writer of the note, " that he was in the house 
 with Lord Lyttelton at the time of the supposed visitation, and 
 he mentioned the following circumstances as the only founda- 
 tion for the extraordinary superstructure at which the world 
 has wondered : — ' A woman of the party had one day lost a 
 favourite bird, and all the men tried to recover it for her. Soon 
 after, on assembling at breakfast. Lord Lyttelton complained of 
 having passed a very bad night, and having been worried in his 
 dreams by a repetition of the chase of the lady's bird. His 
 death followed, as stated in the story.' " Certainly, had this 
 
 ^ The reader may be curious to pec the paragraph in which, Pixty- seven years ago, the 
 details of this singular incident were first communicated to the British public through 
 the various periodicals of the day. I quote from the Scots Magazine for December 1779 : 
 *' On Thursday night, November 25th, Lord Lyttelton sat up late, after his vote on the 
 Address in the House of Lords. He complained of a violent headache next morning, 
 seemed much discomposed, and recited a very striking dream, which, he said, would 
 have made a deep impression on his mind had he been possessed of even the least particle 
 of superstition. He had started up from midnight sleep, on perceiving a bird fluttering 
 near the bed-curtains, which vanished suddenly, when a female spectre in white raiment 
 presented itself, and charged him to depend on his dissolution within three days. He 
 lamented jocosely the shortness of the warning ; and observed, it was a short time for 
 preparation after so disorderly a life. On the Saturday morning, he found himself in 
 
 spirits ; and when at Epsom, told Mrs. F (wife of the Hon. Mr. F ) that he should 
 
 jockey the ghost if he escaped a few hours, for it was the third and last day. He wjis 
 seized with convulsions in the evening, and expired putting off his clothes to go into bed. 
 These circumstance? are not only verified by Charles Wal — y, Esq., a captain in the ro;>'al 
 navy, and many other respectable characters, witnesses of his Lordship's conversation and 
 exit, but are remarkably impressed by the additional circumstance of a very intimate 
 iriend of Lord Lyttelton, at Dartford, in Kent, dreaming on theaight of this evening (Sa- 
 turday, November 27) that his Lordship had appeared to him towards daybreak, and, 
 drawing back the curtain, said, ' My dear friend, it is all over; you see me for the last 
 time,' or words to that effect." 
 
m 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. ' 117 
 
 been all, it would be scarce necessary to infer that his Lordship 
 destroyed himself. But the testimony of Lord Fortescue does 
 not amount to more than simply that, at first, Lord Lyttelton 
 told but a part of his dream ; while the other evidence goes to 
 show that he subsequently added the rest. Nor does the theory 
 of the premeditated suicide seem particularly happy. If we 
 must indeed hold that the agency of the unseen world never 
 sensibly mingles with that of the seen and the tangible, 
 
 " To shame the doctrine of the Sadducee/' 
 
 we may at least deem it not very improbable that such a vision 
 should have been conjured up by the dreaming fancy of an im- 
 happy libertine, ill at ease in his conscience, sensible of sinking 
 health, much addicted to superstitious fears, and who, shortly 
 before, had been led, through a sudden and alarming indispo- 
 sition, to think of death. Nor does it seem a thing beyond 
 the bounds of credibility or coincidence, that in the course of 
 the three following days, when prostrated by his ill-concealed 
 terrors, he should have experienced a second and severer attack 
 of the illness from which, only a few weeks previous, he had 
 with difficulty recovered.^ 
 
 1 Certaiu it is— and the circumstance is a curious one — there were no firmer believers 
 in the truth of the story than Lyttelton's own nearer relatives. It was his uncle, a man 
 of strong sense, to whom Johnson referred as his authority, and on whose direct evidence 
 he built so much ; and we are told by Sir ^'athaiiiel Wraxall, that the Do^sager Lady 
 Lyttelton— the younger Lord's stepmother, whom, however, the knight represents as " a 
 woman of a very lively imagination " — was equally a believer. " I have frequently seen 
 at her house in Portugal Street, Grosvenor Square," Fays Sir Nathaniel, *' a painting 
 which she herself executed in 1780, expres:<ly to commemorate the event. It hung in a 
 conspicuous part of her drawing-room. There the dove appears at the window : while a 
 female figure, habited in white, stands at the bed-foot, announcing to Lord Lyttelton 
 bis dissolution Every part of the picmre was faithfully designed after the description 
 given her by his Lordship's valet, to whom his master related all the circumstances." 
 •' About four years after, in the year 1783," adds the knight, " when dining at Pit Place, I 
 bad the curiosity to visit Lord Lyttelton's bed-chamber, where the casement-window at 
 which, aa his Lordship asserted, the dove appeared to flutter, was pointed out to me." 
 The reader will perhaps remember that Byron refers to the apparition of the bird as a 
 precedent for the passage in the " Bride of Abydos," in which he introduces the spirit of 
 Selim as pouring out its sorrows, in the form of a nightingale, over the tomb of Zuleika. 
 " For a belief that the souls of the dead inhabit bird>»," s*ays the poet, " we need no* 
 truvel to the east : Lord Lyttelton's ghost story, and many other instances, bring this 
 
118 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF • 
 
 I returned to Stourbridge, where I halted to get some refresh- 
 ment, and wait the coach for Hales Owen, in an old-fashioned 
 inn, with its overhanging gable of mingled beam and brick 
 fronting the street, and its some six or seven rooms on the 
 ground-floor, opening in succession into each other like the 
 rattles of a snake's tail. Three solid-looking Englishmen, two 
 of them farmers evidently, the third a commercial traveller, had 
 just sat down to a late dinner ] and on the recommendation of 
 the hostess, I drew in a chair and formed one of the party. A 
 fourth Englishman, much a coxcomb apparently, greatly excited, 
 and armed with a whip, was pacing the floor of the room in which 
 we sat : while in an outer room of somewhat inferior preten- 
 sions, there was another Englishman, also armed with a whip, 
 and also pacing the floor ; and the two, each from his own 
 apartment, were prosecuting an angry and noisy dispute to- 
 gether. The outer-room Englishman was a groom — the inner- 
 room Englishman deemed himself a gentleman. They had both 
 got at the races into the same gig, the property of the inn- 
 keeper, and quarrelled about who should drive. The groom had 
 argued his claim on the plea that he was the better driver of the 
 two, and that driving along a crowded race-ground was difficult 
 and dangerous : the coxcomb had insisted on driving because 
 he liked to drive, and because, he said, he didn't choose to be 
 driven in such a public place by a groom. The groom retorted, 
 that though a groom, he was as good a man as he was, for all 
 his fine coat — perhaps a better man ; and so the controversy 
 went on, till the three solid Englishmen, worried at their meal 
 by the incessant noise, interfered in behalf of the groom. " Thou 
 bee'st a foolish man," said one of the farmers to the coxcomb ; 
 *' better to be driven by a groom than to wrangle with a groom." 
 " Foolish man!" iterated the other farmer, ^' thou's would have 
 
 superstition nearer home." The Lord Westcote, Lord Lytteltcm's uncle, who related the 
 Btory to Johnson, succeeded to the title and estate, and the present Lord Lyttelton is. I 
 believe. Lord Westcote' s grandson. 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 1 1 9 
 
 )roken the groom's neck and thee's own." " Ashamed," ex- 
 claimed the commercial gentleman, " to be driven by a groom 
 at such a time as this — the groom a good driver too, and, for 
 all that appears, an honest man ! I don't think any one should 
 be ashamed to be driven by a groom ; I know I wouldn't." 
 " The first un-English thing I have seen in England," said I : 
 " I thought you English people were above littlenesses of that 
 kind." " Thank you, gentlemen, thank you," exclaimed the 
 voice from the other room ; " I was sure I was right. He's a 
 low fellow ; I would box him for sixpence." The coxcomb 
 muttered something between his teeth, and stalked into the 
 apartment beyond that in which we sat ; the commercial gentle- 
 man thrust his tongue into his cheek as he disappeared ; and 
 we were left to enjoy our pudding in peace. It was late and 
 long this evening ere the six o'clock coach started for Hales 
 Owen. At length, a little after eight, when the night had 
 fairly set in, and crowds on crowds had come pouring into the 
 town from the distant race-ground, away it rumbled, stuck over 
 with a double fare of passengers, jammed on before and behind, 
 and occupying to the full every square foot a-top. 
 
 Though sorely be-elbowed and be-kneed, we had a jovial ride. 
 England was merry England this evening in the neighbourhood 
 of Stourbridge. We passed cart, and waggon, and gig, parties 
 afoot and parties on horseback ; and there was a free inter- 
 change of jibe and joke, hail and halloo. There seemed to be 
 more hearty mirth and less intemperance afloat than I have 
 seen in Scotland on such occasions ; but the whole appeared 
 just foolish enough notwithstanding ; and a knot of low black- 
 guard gamblers, who were stuck together on the coach front, 
 and conversing with desperate profanity on who they did and 
 by whom they were done, showed me that to the foolish there 
 was added not a little of the bad. The Hales Owen road 
 runs for the greater part of the way within the southern edge 
 of the Dudley coal-field, and, lying high, commands a down- 
 
120 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 ward view of its multitudinous workings for many miles. It 
 presented from the coach-top this evening a greatly more 
 magnificent prospect than by day. The dark space — a nether 
 firmament, for its grey wasteful desolation had disappeared 
 with the vanished daylight — was spangled bright by innumer- 
 able furnaces, twinkling and star-like in the distance, but flaring 
 like comets in the foreground. We could hear the roaring of 
 the nearer fires ; here a tall chimney or massy engine peered 
 doubtfully out, in dusky umber, from amid the blackness ; 
 while the heavens above glowed in the reflected light, a blood- 
 red. It was near ten o'clock ere I reached the inn at Hales 
 Owen ; and the room into which I was shown received, for 
 more than an hour after, continual relays of guests from the 
 races, who turned in for a few minutes to drink gin and water, 
 and then took the road again. Tliey were full of their backings 
 and their bets, and animated by a life-and-death eagerness to 
 demonstrate how Sir John's gelding had distanced my Lord's 
 mare. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 121 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Abbotsford and the Leasowes — The one place naturally suggestive of the other — Shen- 
 stone — The Leasowes his most elaborate composition — The English squire and his mill 
 — Hales Owen Abbey; interesting, the subject of one of Shenstone's larger poems — 
 The old anti-Popish feeling of England well exemplified by the fact — Its origin and 
 history — Decline — Infidelity naturally favourable to the resuscitation and reproduc- 
 tion of Popery — The two naileresses — Cecilia and Delia— Skeleton description of the 
 Leasowes — Poetic filling up — The spinster — The fountain. 
 
 I HAD come to Hales Owen to visit the Leasowes, the patri- 
 mony which poor Shenstone converted into an exquisite poem, 
 written on the green face of nature, with groves and thickets, 
 cascades and lakes, urns, temples, and hermitages, for the cha- 
 racters. In passing southwards, I had seen from the coach-top 
 the woods of Abbotsford, with the turrets of the mansion-house 
 peeping over ; and the idea of the trim-kept desolation of the 
 place suggested to me that of the paradise which the poet of 
 Hales Owen had, like Sir Walter, ruined himself to produce, 
 that it, too, might become a melancholy desert. Nor was the 
 association which linked Abbotsford to the Leasowes by any 
 means arbitrary : the one place may be regarded as having in 
 some degree arisen out of the other. *' It had been," says Sir 
 Walter, in one of his prefaces, " an early wish of mine to con- 
 nect myself with my mother earth, and prosecute those experi- 
 ments by which a species of creative power is exercised over the 
 face of nature. I can trace, even to childhood, a pleasure derived 
 from Dodsley's account of Shenstone's Leasowes ; and I envied 
 the poet much more for the pleasure of accomplishing the objects 
 detailed in his friend's sketch of his grounds, than for the pos- 
 session of pipe, crook, flock, and Phillis to boot." Alas ! 
 
 " Prudence sings to tbotightle!>s bards in vain."* 
 
122 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 In contemplating the course of Shenstone, Sir Walter could see 
 but the pleasures of the voyage, without taking note of the ship- 
 wreck in which it terminated ; and so, in pursuing identically 
 the same track, he struck on identically the same shoal. 
 
 I had been intimate from a very immature period with the 
 writings of Shenstone. There are poets that require to be known 
 early in life, if one would know them at all to advantage. They 
 give real pleasure, but it is a pleasure which the mind outgrows ; 
 they belong to the "comfit and confectionary-plum" class; and 
 Shenstone is decidedly one of the number. No mind ever out- 
 grew the " Task," or the " Paradise Lost," or the dramas of 
 Shakspere, or the poems of Burns ; they please in early youth ; 
 like the nature which they embody and portray, they continue 
 to please in age. But the Langhoms, Wartons, Kirke Whites, 
 Shelleys, Keatses — shall I venture to say it 1 — Byrons, are 
 flowers of the spring, and bear to the sobered eye, if one misses 
 acquainting one's-self with them at the proper season, very much 
 the aspect of those herbarium specimens of the botanist, which 
 we may examine as matters of curiosity, but scarce contemplate 
 — as we do the fresh uncropped flowers, with all their exquisite 
 tints and delicious odours vital within them — as the objects of 
 an affectionate regard. Shenstone was one of the ten or twelve 
 English poets whose works I had the happiness of possessing 
 when a boy, and which, during some eight or ten years of my 
 life — for books at the time formed luxuries of difficult procure- 
 ment, and I had to make the most of those I had — I used to 
 read over and over at the rate of about twice in the twelvemonth. 
 And every time I read the poems, I was sure also to read 
 Dodsley's appended description of the Leasowes. I could never 
 form from it any idea of the place as a whole : the imagery 
 seemed broken up into detached slips, like the imagery of a 
 magic lantern ; but then nothing could be finer than the insu- 
 lated slips ; and my mind was filled with gorgeous pictures, all 
 fresh and bright, of *' sloping groves," " tufted knolls," " wooded 
 

 valleys," " sequestered lakes," and " noisy rivulets" — of rich 
 grassy lawns, and cascades that come bursting in foam from 
 bosky hill-sides — of monumental ums, tablets, and temples — of 
 hermitages and priories ; and I had now come to see in what 
 degree my conceptions, drawn from the description, corresponded 
 with the original, if, indeed, the original still maintained the im- 
 press given it by the genius of Shenstone. His writings, like 
 almost all poetic writings that do not please equally at sixteen 
 and sixty, had stood their testing century but indifferently well. 
 No one at least would now venture to speak of him as the "cele- 
 brated poet, whose divine elegies do honour to our nation, our 
 language, and our species;" though such, sixty years ago, was 
 the estimate of Bums, when engaged in writing his preface to 
 an uncouth volume of poems first published at Kilmarnock, that 
 promise to get over their century with much greater ease. On 
 the " Leasowes " — ^by far the most elaborate of all the composi- 
 tions of its author — the ingenious thinking of full twenty years 
 had been condensed ; and I was eager to ascertain whether it 
 had not stood its testing century better under the skyey influences, 
 than " Ophelia's Urn," or " the Song of Colin, a discerning 
 Shepherd," under those corresponding influences of the literary 
 heavens which freshen and preserve whatever has life in it, and 
 wear down and dilapidate whatever is dead. 
 
 A little after ten o'clock, a gentleman, who travelled in his 
 own carriage, entered the inn — a frank, genial Englishman, who 
 seemed to have a kind word for every one, and whom the inn- 
 people addressed as the Squire. My Scotch tongue revealed my 
 country ; and a few questions on the part of the Squire, about 
 Scotland and Scotch matters, fairly launched us into conversation. 
 I had come to Hales Owen to see the Leasowes, I said : when a 
 very young man, I used to dream about them full five hundred 
 miles away, among the rocks and hills of the wild north ; and I 
 had now availed myself of my first opportunity of paying them 
 a visit. The Squire, as he in turn informed me, had taken the 
 
124 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 inn in his way to rusticate for a few days at a small property of 
 his in the immediate neighbourhood of the Leasowes; and if I 
 but called on him on the morrow at his temporary dwelling — 
 Squire Eyland's Mill — all the better if I came to breakfast — he 
 would, he said, fairly enter me on the grounds, and introduce me, 
 as we went, to the old ecclesiastical building which forms the 
 subject of one of Shenstone's larger poems, "The Ruined Abbey.'' 
 He knew all the localities— which one acquainted with but the 
 old classic descriptions would now find it difficult to realize, for 
 the place had fallen into a state of sad dilapidation — and often 
 acted the part of cicerone to his friends. I had never met with 
 anything half so frank in Scotland from the class who travel 
 in their own carriages; and, waiving but the breakfast, I was 
 next morning at the Mill — a quiet, rustic dwelling, at the side 
 of a green lane — a little before ten. It lies at the bottom of a 
 flat valley, with a small stream, lined by many a rich meadow, 
 stealing between its fringes of willows and alders ; and with the 
 Leasowes on the one hand, and the Clent Hills, little more than 
 an hour's walk away, on the other, it must form, in the season 
 of green fields and clear skies, a delightful retreat. 
 
 The Squire led me through the valley adown the course of 
 the stream for nearly a mile, and then holding to the right for 
 nearly a quarter of a mile more, we came full upon the ruins 
 of Hales Owen Abbey. The mace of the bluff Harry had 
 fallen heavy upon the pile : it had proved, in after times, a 
 convenient quarry for the neighbouring farm-houses, and the 
 repair of roads and fences for miles around; and so it now 
 consists of but a few picturesque fragments cut apart by wide 
 gaps, in which we fail to trace even the foundations — fragments 
 that rise insulated and tall — here wrapt up in ivy — there 
 bristling with wallflower — over hay ricks, and antique farm 
 offices, and moss-grown fruit trees, and all those nameless 
 appurtenances which a Dutchman would delight to paint, of a 
 long established barn-yard, farm-house, and orchard. I saw. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 125 
 
 resting against one of the walls, the rudely-carved lid of a stone 
 coffin, which exhibits in a lower comer a squat figure in the 
 attitude of adoration; and along the opposite side and upper 
 comer, an uncouth representation of the cmcifixion, in which 
 the figure on the cross seems that of a gaunt ill-proportioned 
 skeleton. Covered over, however, with the lichens of ages, 
 and gamished with a light border of ground ivy — a plant 
 which greatly abounds amid the ruins — its antique mispropor- 
 tions seem quite truthful enough, and impress more than 
 elegance. One tall gable, that of the chancel, which forms 
 the loftiest part of the pile, still remains nearly entire ; and its 
 great window, once emblazoned with the arms of old Judge 
 Lyttelton, but now stripped of stained glass and carved mul- 
 lion, is richly festooned with ivy. A wooden pigeon-house has 
 been stuck up in the opening, and half-a-dozen white pigeons 
 were fluttering in the sunshine this morning, round the ivied 
 gable-top. The dust of the old learned lawyer lies under the 
 hay-ricks below, with that of nameless warriors and forgotten 
 churchmen ; and when the spade turns up the soil„ fragments 
 of human bones are found, thickly mingled with bits of painted 
 tiles and stained glass. 
 
 It may be thought I am but wasting words in describing so 
 broken a min, seeing I must have passed many finer ones 
 undescribed ; but it will, I trast, be taken into account that I 
 had pemsed the " Ruined Abbey" at least twice every twelve- 
 month, from my twelfth to my twentieth year, and that I had 
 now before me the original of the picture. The poem is not a 
 particularly fine one. Shenstone's thinking required rhyme, 
 just as Pope's weakly person needed stays, to keep it tolerably 
 erect; and the " Ruined Abbey" is in blank verse. There is 
 poetry, however, in some of the conceptions, such as that of 
 the peasant, in the days of John, retuming listless from his 
 fields after the Pope had pronounced his dire anathema, and 
 seeing in every dark overbellying cloud 
 
126 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 " A vengeful angel, in whose waving scroll 
 He read damnation." 
 
 Nor is the following passage — descriptive of the same gloomy 
 season of terror and deprivation — though perhaps inferior in 
 elegance and effect to the parallel passage in the prose of Hume, 
 without merit : — 
 
 " The wretch — whose hope, by stern oppression chased 
 From every earthly bliss, still as it saw 
 Triumphant wrong, took wing and flew to heaven, 
 And rested there — now mourned his refuge lost. 
 And wonted peace. The sacred fane was barred ; 
 And the lone altar, where the mourners thronged 
 To supplicate remission, smoked no more; 
 While the green weed luxuriant rose around. 
 Some from their deathbed, in delirious woe, 
 Beheld the ghastly king approach, begirt 
 In tenfold terrors, or, expiring, heard 
 The last loud clarion sound, and heaven's decree 
 With unremitting vengeance bar the skies. 
 Nor light the grief— by Superstition weighed — 
 That their dishonoured corse, shut from the verge 
 Of hallowed earth or tutelary fane. 
 Must sleep with brutes, their vassals, in the field. 
 Beneath some path in marie unexercised." 
 
 The chief interest of the poem, however, does not lie in its 
 poetry. It forms one of the most curious illustrations I know 
 of the strong anti-Popish zeal, apart from religious feeling, 
 which was so general in England during the last century, and 
 which, in the Lord-George-Gordon mobs, showed itself so very 
 formidable a principle when fairly aroused. Dickens's picture 
 in ^' Bamaby Rudge," of the riots of 1780, has the merit of 
 being faithful ; — his religious mobs are chiefly remarkable for 
 being mobs in which there is no religion ; but his picture would 
 be more faithful still had he made them in a slight degree 
 Protestant. Shenstone, like the Lord-George-Gordon mob, was 
 palpably devoid of religion — " an elegant heathen, rather than 
 a Christian," whose poetry contains verses in praise of almost 
 every god except the true one ; and who, when peopling his 
 Elysium with half the deities of Olympus, saw nymphs and 
 

 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 127 
 
 satyrs in his very dreams. But though only an indifferent 
 Christian, he was an excellent Protestant. There are passages 
 in the " Ruined Abbey" that breathe the very spirit of the 
 English soldiery, whose anti-Popish huzzas, on the eve of the 
 Revolution, deafened their infatuated monarch in his tent. 
 Take, for instance, the following : — 
 
 " Hard was our fate while Rome's director taught 
 Of subjects born to be their monarch's prey; 
 To toil for monks — for gluttony to toil — 
 For vacant gluttony, extortion, fraud. 
 For avarice, envy, pride, revenge, and shame ! 
 Oh, doctrine breathed from Stygian caves ! exhaled 
 From inmost Erebus ! " 
 
 Not less decided is the passage in which he triumphs over the 
 suppression of the Monasteries, " by Tudor s wild caprice." 
 
 " Then from its towering height, with horrid sound. 
 Bushed the proud Abbey. Then the vaulted roofs, 
 Tom from their walls, disclosed the wanton scene 
 Of monkish chastity ! Each angry friar 
 Crawled from liis bedded strumpet, muttering low 
 An ineffectual curse. The pervious nooks. 
 That ages past conveyed the guileful priest 
 To play some image on the gaping crowd. 
 Imbibe the novel daylight, and expose 
 Obvious the fraudful engin'ry of Rome." 
 
 Even with all his fine taste, and high appreciation, for the 
 purposes of the landscape gardener, of bona fide pieces of 
 antiquity, rich in association, it is questionable, from the fol- 
 lowing passage, whether his anti-Popish antipathies would not 
 have led him to join our Scotch iconoclasts in their stern work 
 of dilapidation. 
 
 " Henceforth was plied the lonij-continiied task 
 Of righteous kavock, covering distant fields 
 With the wrought remnants of the shattered pile; 
 Till recent, through the land, the pilgrim sees 
 Rich tracts of brighter green, and in the midst 
 Grey mouldering walls, with nodding ivy crowned. 
 Or Gothic turret, pride of ancient days, 
 Now but of use to grace a rural scene, 
 To bound our vistas, and to glad the sons 
 Of George's reign, reeerved for fairer times." 
 
128 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 In " Tlie Schoolmistress," the most finished and pleasing of 
 Shenstone's longer poems, we find one of the sources of the 
 feeling somewhat unwittingly exhibited. " Shenstone learned 
 to read," says Johnson, in his biography, " of an old dame, 
 whom his poem of * The Schoolmistress' has delivered to pos- 
 terity." " The house of my old school-dame, Sarah Lloyd," 
 we find the poet himself saying, in one of his earlier letters 
 (1741), " is to be seen as thou travellest towards the native 
 home of thy faithful servant. But she sleeps with her fathers, 
 and is buried with her fathers ; and Thomas her son reigneth 
 in her stead." Of the good Sarah Lloyd we learn from the 
 poem — a piece of information suited to show how shrewd a 
 part Puseyism is acting in possessing itself of the humbler 
 schools of the country — that 
 
 " She was just, and friend to virtuous lore. 
 And passed much time in truly virtuous deed. 
 And in her elfins' ears would oft deplore 
 The times when truth by Popish rage did bleed, 
 And tort'rous death was true devotion's meed, 
 And simple Faith in iron chains did mourn. 
 That nould on wooden image place her creed, 
 And lawny saints in smouldering flames did burn : 
 Ob, dearest Lord, forfend thilk days should ere return !" 
 
 Tlie anti-Popish feeling of England which existed, as in Shen- 
 stone, almost wholly apart from doctrinal considerations, seems 
 to have experienced no diminution till after the suppression of 
 the rebellion of 1745. A long series of historic events had 
 served first to originate, and then to fill with it to saturation 
 every recess of the popular mind. The horrors of the Marian 
 persecution, rendered patent to all by the popular narratives df 
 Fox — the Invincible Armada and its thumb-screws — the diabol- 
 ical plot of the time of James — ^the Irish Massacre of the fol- 
 lowing reign — the fierce atrocities of Jeffreys in the Monmouth 
 rising, intimately associated in the Protestant mind of the 
 country with the Popery of his master — the imprisonment of 
 the bishops — and the influence of the anti-Romish teaching of 
 the English Church after the Revolution, with the dread, for 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 129 
 
 many years, of a Popish Pretender — had all united to originate 
 and develop the sentiment which, in its abstract character, we 
 find so adequately represented in Shenstone. Much about the 
 time of the poet's death, however, a decided reaction began to 
 take place. The Pretender died; the Whigs originated their 
 scheme of Roman Catholic Emancipation ; atheistic violence had 
 been let loose on the clergy of France, not in their character as 
 Popish, but in their character as Christian ; and both the genius 
 of Burke and the piety of Hall had appealed to the Protestant 
 sympathies of England in their behalf. The singularly anoma- 
 lous position and palpable inefficiency of the Irish Establishment 
 had created a very general diversion in favour of the Popish 
 majority of Ireland ; the Voluntary controversy united Evan- 
 gelistic Dissent and Roman Catholicism by the bonds of a com- 
 mon cause — at least Evangelistic Dissent was fond enough to 
 believe the cause a common one, and learned to speak with 
 respect and regard of " Roman Catholic brethren ;" the spread 
 of Puseyism in the English Establishment united, by sympathies 
 of a different but not weaker kind, the Papist and the High 
 Churchman ; the old anti-Popish feeling has been gradually 
 sinking under the influence of so many reactive causes, and 
 not since the times of the Reformation was at so low an ebb as 
 in England at the present day. It would seem as if every old 
 score was to be blotted off, and Popery to be taken a second 
 time on trial. But it will ultimately be found wanting, and 
 will, as in France and Germany, have just to be condemned 
 again. The stiff rigidity of its unalterable codes of practice and 
 belief — inadequately compensated by the flexibility of its wilier 
 votaries — has incapacitated it from keeping up with tlie human 
 mind in its onward march. If it be the sure destiny of man to 
 rise, it must be the as inevitable fate of Popery to sink. The 
 excesses of fifteen hundred years liave vitiated and undermined 
 its constitution, intellectual and moral ; its absurder beliefs liave 
 become incompatible witli advanced knowledge — its more de- 
 
 I 
 
130 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 spotic assumptions with rational freedom ; and were it not for 
 the craving vacuum in the public mind which infidelity is con- 
 tinually creating for superstition to fill, and into which Popery 
 is fitfully rushing, like steam into the condenser of an engine, 
 again and again to be annihilated, and again and again to flow 
 in, its day, in at least the more enlightened portions of the 
 empire, would not be long. 
 
 There seems to be a considerable resemblance at bottom be- 
 tween the old English feeling exemplified in Shenstone, and that 
 which at present animates the Ronge movement in Germany. 
 We find the English poet exclaiming, 
 
 " Hail, honoured WycliflFe, enterprising sage ! 
 An Epicurtu in the cause of truth !! " 
 
 And the continental priest — occupying at best but a half-way 
 position between Luther and Voltaire, and who can remark in 
 his preachings that " if Roman Catholics have a Pope at Rome, 
 the Protestants have made their Pope of a book, and that that 
 book is but a 4ead letter*' — apostrophizes in a similar spirit the 
 old German Reformers. I can, however, see nothing inconsis- 
 tent in the zeal of such men. It does not greatly require the aid 
 of religion to enable one to decide that exhibitions such as that 
 of the holy coat of Treves are dishonest and absurd, or to warm 
 with indignation at the intolerance that would make one's 
 liberty or life pay the penalty of one's freedom of opinion. 
 Shenstone, notwithstanding his indifference to the theological, 
 was quite religious enough to have been sabred or shot had he 
 been at Paris on the eve of St. Bartholomew, or knocked on 
 the head if in Ulster at the time of the Irish massacre. What, 
 apart from religious considerations, is chiefly to be censured and 
 regretted in the zeal of the Ronges and Shenstones, Michelets, 
 and Eugkie Sues, is, not that it is inconsistent, but that it con- 
 stitutes at best but a vacuum-creating power. It forms a void 
 where, in the nature of things, no void can permanently exist, 
 and which superstition is ever rushing in to fill ; and so the 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 131 
 
 progress of the race, wherever it is influentially operative, instead 
 of being conducted onwards in its proper line of march, becomes 
 a weary cycle, that ever returns upon itself. The human intel- 
 lect, under its influence, seems as if drawn mthin the cease- 
 lessly-revolving eddies of a giddy maelstrom, or as if it had 
 become obnoxious to the remarkable curse pronounced of old by 
 the Psalmist — I quote from the version of Milton — 
 
 " My God ! oh, make them as a wheel ; 
 No quiet let them find ; 
 Giddy and restless let thein reel 
 Like stubble from the wind." 
 
 History is emphatic on the point. Nearly three centuries have 
 elapsed since the revived Christianity of the Keformation sup- 
 planted Roman Catholicism in Scotland. But there was no 
 vacuum created ; the space previously taken up in the popular 
 mind by the abrogated superstition was amply occupied by the 
 resuscitated faith ; and, as a direct consequence, whatever 
 reaction in favour of Popery may have taken place among the 
 people is of a purely political, not religious character. With 
 Popery as a religion, the Presbyterian Scotch are as far from 
 closing now as they ever were. But how entirely different has 
 been the state of matters in France ! There are men still living 
 who remember the death of Voltaire. In the course of a single 
 lifetime. Popery has been twice popular and influential in that 
 country, and twice has the vacuum-creating power, more than 
 equally popular and influential for the time, closed chill and 
 cold around it, to induce its annihilation. The literature of 
 France for the last half-century is curiously illustrative of this 
 process of action and reaction — of condensation and expansion. 
 It exhibits during that period three distinct groups of authors. 
 There is a first group of vacuiun-creators — a surviving remnant 
 of the Encyclopedists of the previous half-contniy — adequately 
 rej)resented by Condorcet and the Abb^ Raynal : next appeals 
 a group of the reactionists, represented ecjually well by Chateau- 
 1 riand and Lamartine ; and then — for Popery has again become 
 
13"2 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 monstrous — we see a second group of vacuum-creators in the 
 Eugene Sues and Michelets, the most popular French writers 
 of the present day. And thus must the cycle revolve, " unquiet 
 and giddy as a wheel," until France shall find rest in the Chris- 
 tianity of the New Testament. 
 
 I spent so much time among the ruins, that my courteous 
 conductor, the Squire, who had business elsewhere to attend to, 
 had to leave me, after first, however, setting me on my way to 
 the Leasowes, and kindly requesting me to make use of his name, 
 if the person who farmed the grounds demurred, as sometimes 
 happened with strangers, to give me admission to them, I 
 struck up the hill, crossed a canal that runs along its side, got 
 into a cross road between sheltered belts of planting, and then, 
 with the Leasowes full in front, stopped at a small nailery, to 
 ask at what point I might most easily gain access to them. 
 The sole workers in the nailery were two fresh-coloured, good- 
 looking young girls, whose agile, well-turned arms were plying 
 the hammer with a rapidity that almost eluded the eye, and 
 sent the quick glancing sparks around them in showers. Both 
 stopped short in their work, and came to the door to point out 
 what they deemed the most accessible track. There was no 
 gate, they said, in this direction, but I would find many gaps 
 in the fence : they were in doubt, however, whether the people 
 at the " white house" would give me leave to walk over the 
 grounds : certainly the nailer lads were frequently refused ; and 
 they were sorry they couldn't do anything for me : I would be 
 sure of permission if they could give it me. At all events, said 
 I, I shall take the longest possible road to the white house, 
 and see a good deal of the grounds ere I meet with the refusal. 
 Both the naileresses laughed ; and one of them said she had 
 always heard the Scotch were " long-headed." Hales Owen 
 and its precincts are included in the great iron district of Bir- 
 mingham ; and the special branch of the iron trade which falls 
 to the share of the people is the manufacture of nails. The 
 
r 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 133 
 
 suburbs of the town are formed chiefly of rows of little brick 
 houses, with a nail-shop in each ; and the quick, smart patter 
 of hammers sounds incessantly, in one encircling girdle of din, 
 from early morning till late night. As I passed through, on 
 my way to the Squire's Mill, I saw whole families at work 
 together — father, mother, sons, and daughters ; and met in the 
 street young girls, not at all untidily dressed, considering the 
 character of their vocation, trundling barrowfuls of coal to their 
 forges, or carrying on their shoulders bundles of rod-iron. Of all 
 our poets of the last century, there was scarce one so addicted 
 to the use of those classic nicknames which impart so unreal 
 an air to English poetry, when bestowed on English men and 
 women, as poor Shenstone. We find his verses dusted over 
 with Delias, and Cecilias, and Ophelias, Flavias, and Fulvias, 
 Chloes, Daphnes, and Phillises ; and, as if to give them the 
 necessary prominence, the printer, in all the older editions, 
 has relieved them from the surrounding text by the employ- 
 ment of staring capitals. I had read Shenstone early enough 
 to wonder what sort of looking people his Delias and Cecilias 
 were ; and now, ere plunging into the richly-wooded Leasowes, 
 I had got hold of the right idea. The two young naileresses 
 were really very pretty. Cecilia, a ruddy blonde, was fabri- 
 cating tackets ; and Delia, a bright-eyed brunette, engaged in 
 heading a double-double. 
 
 Ere entering on the grounds, however, I must attempt doing 
 what Dodsley has failed to do — I must try whether I cannot 
 give the reader some idea of the Leasowes as a whole, in their 
 relation to the surrounding country. Let us, then, once more 
 return to the three Silurian eminences that rise island-like from 
 the basin of the Dudley coal-field, and the parallel line of trap 
 hills that stretches away amid the New Red Sandstone. I 
 have described the lines as parallel, but, like the outstretched 
 sides of a parallel-ruler, not opposite. There joins on, however, 
 to the Silurian line — like a prolongation of one of the right lines 
 
134 FIKST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 *>£ the mathematician indicated by dots — an extension of the 
 chain, not Silurian, which consists of eminences of a flatter and 
 humbler character than either the Wren's Nest or the Castle- 
 hill, and which runs opposite to the trap chain for several 
 miles. One of these supplementary eminences — ^the one adjoin- 
 ing the Castle-hill — is composed of the trap to which the entire 
 line owes its elevation ; and a tall, cairn-like group of apparent 
 boulders, that seem as if they had been piled up by giants, but 
 are mere components of a partially disintegrated projection from 
 the rock below, occupies its summit. In the flat hill directly 
 beyond it, though the trap does not appear, it has tilted up the 
 Lower Coal Measures, amid the surrounding New Red Sand- 
 stone, saddlewise on its back ; the strata shelve downwards on 
 both sides from the anticlinal line a-top, like the opposite sides 
 of a roof from the ridge ; and the entire hill, to use a still 
 humbler illustration, resembles a huge bUster in new plaster 
 formed by the expansion of some fragment of unslaked lime in 
 the ground-coating beneath. Now, it is with this hill of the 
 Lower Coal Measures — this huge blister of millstone grit — that 
 we have chiefly to do. 
 
 Let the reader imagine it of soft swelling outline, and ample 
 base, with the singularly picturesque trap range full in front, 
 some four miles away, and a fair rural valley lying between. 
 Let him further imagine the side of the hill furrowed by a 
 transverse valley, opening at right angles into the great front 
 valley, and separating a-top into two forks, or branches, -that 
 run up, shallowing as they go, to near the hill-top. Let him, 
 in short, imagine this great valley a broad right line, and the 
 transverse forked valley a gigantic letter Y resting on it. And 
 this forked valley on the hill-side — this gigantic letter Y — is 
 the Leasowes. The picturesqueness of such a position can be 
 easily appreciated. The forked valley, from head to gorge, is 
 a reclining valley, partaking along its bottom of the slope of 
 the eminence on which it lies, and thus possessing, what is by 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE, 135 
 
 no means common among the valleys of England, true down- 
 hill water-courses, along which the gathered waters may leap 
 in a chain of cascades ; and commanding, in its upper recesses, 
 though embraced and sheltered on every side by the surrounding 
 hill, extending prospects of the country below. It thus com- 
 bines the scenic advantages of both hollow and rising ground, 
 — ^the quiet seclusion of the one, and the expansive landscapes 
 of the other. The broad valley into which it opens is rich and 
 well wooded. Just in front of the opening we see a fine sheet 
 of water, about twenty acres in extent, the work of the monks ; 
 immediately to the right stand the ruins of the Abbey ; imme- 
 diately to the left, the pretty compact town of Hales Owen lies 
 grouped around its fine old church and spire ; a range of green 
 swelling eminences rises beyond ; beyond these, fainter in the 
 distance, and considerably bolder in the outline, ascends the 
 loftier range of the trap hills — one of the number roughened 
 by the tufted woods, and crowned by the obelisk at Hagley ; 
 and, over all, blue and shadowy on the far horizon, sweeps the 
 undulating line of the mountains of Cambria. Such is the 
 character of the grounds which poor Shenstone set himself to 
 convert into an earthly paradise, and such the outline of the 
 surrounding landscape. But to my hard anatomy of the scene 
 I must add the poet's own elegant filling up : — 
 
 , " Romantic scenes of pendent hillR, 
 And verdant vales and falling rills. 
 And mossy banks the fields adorn. 
 Where Damon, simple swain, was bom. 
 The Dryads reared a shady grove. 
 Where such as think, and such as love. 
 Might safely sigh their summer's day. 
 Or muse their silent hours away. 
 The Oreads liked the climate well, 
 And taught the level plains to swell 
 In verdant mounds, from whence the eye 
 Might all their larger works descry. 
 The Naiads poured their urns around 
 From nodding rocks, o'er vales profound : 
 They formed their streams to please the view, 
 And bade them wind aa serpents do ; 
 
136 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 And having shown them where to stray. 
 Threw little pebbles in their way." 
 
 I got ready permission at the house of the Leasowes — a 
 modem building erected on the site of that in which Shenstone 
 resided — to walk over the grounds ; and striking upwards 
 directly along the centre of the angular tongue of land which 
 divides the two forks of the valley, I gained the top of the hill, 
 purposing to descend to where the gorge opens below along the 
 one fork, and to re-ascend along the other. On the hill-top, a 
 single field's breadth beyond the precincts of the Leasowes, I 
 met a tall middle-aged female, whose complexion, much em- 
 browned by the sun, betrayed the frequent worker in fields, and 
 her stiff angularity of figure, the state of single blessedness, and 
 "maiden meditation, fancy free," which Shakspere compli- 
 mented in Elizabeth. I greeted her with fair good day, and 
 asked her whether the very fine grounds below were not the 
 Leasowes 1 or, as I now learned to pronounce the word, Lisos 
 — for when I gave it its long Scotch sound, no one in the 
 neighbourhood seemed to know what place I meant. "Ah, 
 yes," said she, "the Lisos/ — they were much thought of long 
 ago, in Squire Shenstone's days ; but they are all ruinated now ; 
 and, except on Sundays, when the nailer lads get into them, 
 when they can, few people come their way. Squire Shenstone 
 w^as a poet," she added, " and died for love." This was not 
 quite the case : the Squire, who might have married his Phillis 
 had he not been afraid to incur the expense of a wife, died of a 
 putrid fever at the sober age of forty-nine; but there would 
 have been little wit in substituting a worse for a better story, 
 and so I received without challenge the information of the spin- 
 ster. In descending, I took the right-hand branch of the valley, 
 which is considerably more extended than that to the left. A 
 low cliff", composed of the yellow gritty sandstone of the Lower 
 Coal Measures, and much overhung by stunted alder and hazel 
 bushes, stands near the head of the ravine, just where the 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 137 
 
 Leasowes begin; and directly out of the middle of the cliif, 
 some three or four feet from its base, there comes leaping to 
 the light, as out of the smitten rock in the wilderness, a clear 
 and copious spring — one of the " health-bestowing" fountains, 
 
 " All bordered with moss. 
 Where the harebells and violets grew." 
 
 Alas ! moss and harebells and violets were gone, with the path 
 which had once led to the spot, and the seat which had once 
 fronted it ; the waters fell dead and dull into a quagmire, like 
 young human life leaping out of unconscious darkness into 
 misery, and then stole away through a boggy strip of rank 
 grass and rushes, along a line of scraggy alders. All was changed, 
 save the full-volumed spring, and it, — 
 
 " A thousand and a thousand years. 
 Twill flow as now it flows." 
 
138 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 1 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Detour — The Leasowes deteriorated wherever the poet had built, and improved wherever 
 he had planted — View from the hanging wood — Stratagem of the island screen — 
 Virgil's grave — Mound of the Hales Owen and Birmingham Canal; its sad interference 
 with Shenstone's poetic description of the infancy of the Stour — Vanished cascade 
 and root-house — Somerville'K urn — "To all friends round the Wrekin" — River 
 scenery of the Leasowes; their great variety — Peculiar arts of the poet; his vistas, 
 when seen from the wrong end, realizations of Hogarth's caricature — Shenstone the 
 greatest of landscape-gardeners — Estimate of Johnson — Goldsmith's history of the 
 Leasowes ; their after history. 
 
 The water creeps downwards from where it leaps from the 
 rock, to form a chain of artificial lakes, with which the bottom 
 of the dell is occupied, and which are threaded by the water- 
 course, like a necklace of birds' eggs strung upon a cord. Ere 
 I struck down on the upper lake, however, I had to make a 
 detour of a few hundred yards to the right, to see what Dodsley 
 describes as one of the finest scenes furnished by the Leasowes 
 — a steep terrace, commanding a noble prospect — a hanging 
 wood — an undulating pathway over uneven ground, that rises 
 and falls like a snake in motion — a monumental tablet — three 
 rustic seats — and a temple dedicated to Pan. The happy comer 
 which the poet had thus stuck over with so much bravery is 
 naturally a very pretty one. The hill-side, so gentle in most of 
 its slopes, descends for about eighty feet — nearly at right angles 
 with the forked valley, and nearly parallel to the great valley 
 in front — as if it were a giant wave on the eve of breaking ; 
 and it is on this steep rampart-like declivity — this giant wave 
 — that the hanging wood was planted, the undulating path 
 formed, and the seats and temple erected. But all save the 
 wood has either wholly vanished, or left behind but the faintest 
 traces — traces so faint that, save for the plan of the grounds 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 139 
 
 appended to the second edition of Dodsley's description, they 
 -v^'ould have told me no distinct story. 
 
 Ere descending the rampart-like acclivity, but just as the 
 ground begins gradually to rise, and when I should be passing, 
 according to Dodsley, through the "Lover's Walk," a seques- 
 tered arboraceous lane, saddened by the urn of "poor Miss 
 Dolman" — "by the side of which" there had flowed " a small 
 bubbling rill, forming little peninsulas, rolling over pebbles, or 
 falling down small cascades, all under cover, and taught to 
 murmur very agreeably" — I found myself in a wild tangled 
 jungle, with no path under foot, with the " bubbling rill" con- 
 verted into a black lazy swamp, with thickets of bramble all 
 around, through which I had to press my way, as I best could, 
 breast-high — " poor Miss Dolman's" urn as fairly departed and 
 invisible as "poor Miss Dolman;" in short, everything that 
 had been done imdone, and all in readiness for some second 
 Shenstone to begin de novo. As the way steepened, and the 
 rank aquatic vegetation of the swamp, once a runnel, gave place 
 to plants that affect a drier habitat, I could detect in the hol- 
 low of the hill some traces of the old path ; but the place forms 
 a receptacle into which the gusty winds sweep the shorn leaf- 
 age of the hanging wood above, and so I had to stalk along 
 the once trimly-kept walk, through a stratum of decayed leaves, 
 half-leg deep. In tlie middle of the hanging wood I found 
 what had been once the temple of Pan. There is a levelled 
 space on the declivity, about half the size of an ordinary sitting 
 parlour : the winds had swept it bare ; and there, distinctly visible 
 on three sides of the area, are the foundation of a thin brick 
 wall, that, where least broken, rises some six or eight mches 
 above the level. A little further on, where the wood opens on 
 one of the loveliest prospects I ever beheld, I found a decayed 
 oak-post remaining, to indicate the locale of a seat that had once 
 eulogized the landscape which it fronted in a classic Latin in-^ 
 scription. But both seat and inscription are gone. And yet 
 
140 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 maugre this desolation, not in the days of Shenstone did the 
 Leasowes look so nobly from this elevation as they did this 
 day. I was forcibly reminded of one of the poet's own remarks, 
 and the completeness of its realization : — " The works of a per- 
 son that builds," he says, '' begin immediately to decay; while 
 those of him who plants begin directly to improve. In this, 
 planting promises a more lasting pleasure than building." The 
 trees of the Leasowes, when the Leasowes formed the home and 
 furnished the employment of the poet, seem to have been mere 
 saplings. We find him thus writing to a friend in the summer 
 of 1743 : — " A malignant caterpillar has demolished the beauty 
 of all our large oaks. Mine are secured by their littleness. 
 But I guess Hagley Park suffers — a large wood near me being 
 a winter-piece for nakedness." More than a hundred years 
 have since elapsed, and the saplings of a century ago have ex- 
 panded into the dignity of full-grown treehood. The hanging 
 wood, composed chiefly of very noble beeches, with a sprinkling 
 of graceful birches on its nether skirt, raises its crest so high as 
 fully to double the height of the eminence which it crowns ; 
 while the oaks on the finely varied ground below, of imposing size, 
 and exhibiting in their grouping the hand of the master, com- 
 pose such a scene as the finest of the landscapes designed by 
 Martin in illustration of Milton's " Paradise Lost." The day 
 was warm, calm, cloudless ; the lights and shadows lay clear 
 and transparent on lake and stream, dell and dingle, green swell- 
 ing lawn and tall forest-tree ; and the hanging wood, and the 
 mossy escarpment over which it hangs, were as musical in the 
 bright sunshine, with the murmur of bees, as when, exactly a 
 hundred and two years before, Shenstone was penning his pas- 
 toral ballad. 
 
 Quitting the hanging wood, I struck athwart the declivity, 
 direct on the uppermost lake in the chain which I have de- 
 scribed as lying, like a string of birds' eggs, along the bottom 
 of the valley. I found it of small extent — a pond or lochan, 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 141 
 
 rather than a lake — darkly coloured — its still black surface 
 partially embroidered by floats of aquatic plants, among which 
 I could detect the broad leaves of the water lily, though the 
 flowers were gone — and overhung on all sides by careless 
 groups of trees, that here and there dip their branches in the 
 water. In one striking feature of the place we may still detect 
 the skill of the artist. There is a little island in the upper 
 part of the lake, by much too small and too near the shore to 
 have any particular interest as such ; or, indeed, viewed from 
 below, to seem an island at all. It is covered by a thick clump 
 of alders of low growth, just tall enough and thick enough to 
 conceal, screen-like, the steep bank of the lake behind. The 
 top of the bank is occupied by several lofty oaks ; and as the 
 screen of alders hides the elevation on which they stand, they 
 seem to rise direct from the level of the water to the giant sta- 
 ture of a hundred feet. The giants of the theatre are made by 
 setting one man on the shoulders of another, and then throwing 
 over both a large cloak ; — the giant trees here are made by 
 setting them upon the shoulders of a hill, and making the 
 thick island-screen serve the purpose of the concealing mantle. 
 
 The second lake in the chain — a gloomier and smaller piece 
 of water than the first, and much hidden in wood — has in its 
 present state no beauty to recommend it; it is just such an 
 inky pool, with rotten snags projecting from its sluggish surface, 
 as a murderer would select for concealing the body of his vic- 
 tim. A forlorn brick ruin, overflooded by the neighbouring 
 streamlet, and capped with sickly ivy, stands at the upper end 
 — at the lower, the waters escape by a noisy cascade into a se- 
 cluded swampy hollow, overshadowed by stately oaks and ashes, 
 much intermixed with trees of a lower growth — yew, holly, 
 and hazel — and much festooned with ivy. We find traces of an 
 untrodden pathway on both sides the stream, with the remains 
 of a small mouldering one-arched bridge, now never crossed 
 over, and divested of both its parapets ; and in the centre of 
 
142 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 a circular area, surrounded by trees of loftiest stature, we may 
 see about twice as many bricks as an Irish labourer would trundle 
 in a wheelbarrow, arranged in the form of a small square. This 
 swampy hollow is the " Virgil's Grove," so elaborately described 
 by Dodsley, and which so often in the last age employed the 
 pencil and the burine ; and the two barrowfuls of brick are all 
 that remain of the obelisk of Virgil. I had run not a few nar- 
 row chances of the kind before ; but I now fairly sunk half to 
 the knees in the miry bottom, and then pressing onwards, as I 
 best could, 
 
 " Quenched in a boggy Syrtis, neither sea 
 Nor good dry land, nigh foundered, on I fared. 
 Treading the crude consistence half on foot, 
 Half flying," 
 
 till I reached a drier soil beside yet another lake in the chain, 
 scarce less gloomy, and even more sequestered, than the last. 
 There stick out along its edges a few blackened stumps, on which 
 several bushy clusters of fern have taken root, and which, over- 
 shadowed by the pendent fronds, seem so many small tree-ferns. 
 I marked here, for the first time, the glance of scales and the 
 splash of fins in the water ; but they belonged not to the " fishes 
 of gold" sung by the poet, but to some half-dozen pike that I 
 suppose have long since dealt by the fishes of gold as the bulkier 
 contemporaries of the famous Jack the Giant-killer used to deal 
 by their guests. A further walk of a few hundred yards through 
 the wooded hollow brought me to the angle where the forks of 
 the dell unite and form one valley. A considerable piece of 
 water — by much the largest on the grounds — occupies the bottom 
 of the broad hollow which they form, by their union — the squat 
 stem, to use a former illustration, of the letter Y ; and a long 
 narrow bay runs from the main body of the lake up each of the 
 two forks, losing itself equally in both, as it contracts and nar- 
 rows, amid the over-arching trees. 
 
 There is a harmony of form as certainly as of sound — a music 
 to the eye in the one, as surely as to the ear in the other. I 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 143 
 
 had hitherto witnessed much dilapidation and decay, but it was 
 dilapidation and decay on a small scale ; I had seen merely the 
 wrecks of a few artificial toys, scattered amid the sublime of 
 nature ; and there were no sensible jarrings in the silent concert 
 of the graceful and the lovely, which the entire scene served to 
 compose. Here, however, all of a sudden, I was struck by a harsh 
 discord. Where the valley should have opened its noble gate- 
 way into the champaign — a gateway placed half-way between 
 the extended magnificence of the expanse below, and the more 
 closely concentrated beauties of the dells above — there stretches, 
 from bank to bank, a stiff, lumpish, rectilinear mound, some 
 seventy or eighty feet in height, by some two or three hundred 
 yiirds in length, that bars out the landscape — deals, in short, by 
 the wanderer along the lake or through the lower reaches of the 
 dell, as some refractory land-steward deals by some hapless railway 
 surveyor, when, squatting down full before him, he spreads out 
 a broad extent of coat-tail, and eclipses the distant sight. Poor 
 Shenstone ! — it would have broken his heart That unsightly 
 mound conveys along its flat level line, straight as that of a 
 ruler, the Birmingham and Hales Owen Canal. Poor Shenstone 
 once more ! With the peculiar art in which he excelled all men, 
 he had so laid out his lakes, that the last in the series seemed 
 to piece on to the great twenty-acre lake dug by the monks, and 
 so to lose itself in the general landscape. And in one of his 
 letters we find him poetical on the course of the vagrant streams 
 — those of his own grounds — that feed it. " Their first ap- 
 peiirance," he says, " well resembles the playfulness of infancy : 
 they skip from side to side with a thousand antic motions, that 
 answer no other purpose than the mere amusement of the pro- 
 prietor. They proceed for a few hundred yards, and then their 
 severer labours begin, resembling the graver toils of manliood. 
 They set mills in motion, turn wheels, and ply hammers for 
 manufactures of all kinds ; and in this manner roll on under the 
 name of the Stour, supplying works for casting, forging, and 
 
lii FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 shaping iron for every civil and military purpose. Perhaps you 
 may not know that my rills are the principal sources of this 
 river ; or that it furnishes the propelling power to more iron- 
 works than almost any other single river in the kingdom." The 
 dull mound now cuts off the sportive infancy of the Stour from 
 its sorely-tasked term of useful riverhood. There is so cruel a 
 barrier raised between the two stages, that we fail to identify the 
 hard-working stream below with the playful little runnels above. 
 The water comes bounding all obscurely out of the nether side 
 of the mound, just as it begins its life of toil — a poor thing 
 without a pedigree, like some hapless child of quality stolen by 
 the gipsies, and sold to hard labour. 
 
 Passing upwards along the opposite branch of the valley, I 
 found a succession of the same sort of minute desolations as I 
 had met in the branch already explored. Shenstone's finest cas- 
 cades lay in this direction ; and very fine, judging from the de- 
 scription of Dodsley, they must have been. " The eye is here 
 presented," says the poetic bibliopole, " with a fairy vision, con- 
 sisting of an irregular and romantic fall of water, one hundred 
 and fifty yards in continuity ; and a very striking and unusual 
 scene it affords. Other cascades may have the advantage of a 
 greater descent and a larger stream ; but a more wild and ro- 
 mantic appearance of water, and at the same time strictly natural, 
 is difficult to be met with anywhere. The scene, though small, 
 is yet aggrandized with so much art, that we forget the quantity 
 of water which flows through this close and overshadowed 
 valley, and are so much pleased with the intricacy of the scene, 
 and the concealed height from whence it flows, that we, with- 
 out reflection, add the idea of magnificence to that of beauty. 
 In short, it is only upon reflection that we find the stream is not 
 a Niagara, but rather a waterfall in miniature ; and that by the 
 same artifice upon a larger scale, were there large trees in place 
 of small ones, and a river instead of a rill, a scene so formed 
 would exceed the utmost of our ideas." Alas for the beautiful 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 
 
 cascade ! Here still was the bosky valley, dark and solitary, 
 with its long withdrawing bay from the lake speckled by the 
 broad leaves of the water-lily ; old gnarled stems of ivy wind, 
 snake-like, round the same massy trunks along which they had 
 been taught to climb in the days of the poet ; but for the water- 
 fall, the main feature of the scene, I saw only a long dark trench 
 — much crusted by mosses and liverworts, and much overhung 
 by wood — that furrows the side of the hill ; and for the taste- 
 ful root-house, erected to catch all the beauties of the place, I 
 found only a few scattered masses of brick, bound fast together 
 by the integrity of the cementing lime, and half-buried in a brown 
 stratum of decayed leaves. A little further on, there lay across 
 the runnel a huge monumental urn of red sandstone, with the 
 base elevated and the neck depressed. It dammed up enough 
 of the little stream to form a reservoir at which an animal might 
 drink, and the clayey soil around it was dibbled thick at the 
 time by the tiny hoofs of sheep. The fallen urn had been in- 
 scribed to the memory of Somerville the poet. 
 
 This southern fork of the valley is considerably shorter than 
 the northern one ; and soon rising on the hill-side, I reached a 
 circular clump of firs, from which the eye takes in the larger 
 part of the grounds at a glance, with much of the surrounding 
 country. We may see the Wrekin full in front, at the distance of 
 about thirty miles ; and here, in the centre of the circular clump, 
 there stood, says Dodsley, an octagonal seat, with a pedestal- 
 like elevation in the middle, that served for a back, and on the 
 t^^]) of which there was fixed a great punch-bowl, bearing as its 
 ai)propriate inscription the old country toast, " To all friends 
 round the Wrekin." Seat and bowl have long since vanished, 
 ;iih1 we see but the circular clump. At the foot of the hill there 
 is a beautiful piece of water, narrow and long, and skirted by 
 willows, with both its ends so hidden in wood, and made to wind 
 ' naturally, that instead of seeming what it is — merely a small 
 pond — it seems one of the reaches of a fine river. We detect, too, 
 
146 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 the skill of the poet in the appearance presented from this point 
 by the chain of lakes in the opposite fork of the valley. As seen 
 through the carefully-disposed trees, they are no longer detached 
 pieces of water, but the reaches of a great stream — a sweeping 
 inflection, we may suppose, of the same placid river that we see 
 winding through the willows, immediately at the hill-foot. The 
 Leasowes, whose collected waters would scarce turn a mill, ex- 
 hibit, from this circular clump, their fine river scenery. The 
 background beyond rises into a magnificent pyramid of foliage, 
 the apex of which is formed by the tall hanging wood on the 
 steep acclivity, and which sweeps downwards on each side in 
 graceful undulations, now rising, now falling, according to the 
 various heights of the trees or the inequalities of the ground. 
 The angular space between the two forks of the valley occupies 
 the foreground. It sinks in its descent towards the apex — for the 
 pyramid is of course an inverted one — from a scene of swelling 
 acclivities, fringed with a winding belt of squat, broad-stemmed 
 beeches, into a soft sloping lawn, in the centre of which, 
 deeply embosomed in wood, rise the white walls of the mansion- 
 house. And such, as they at present exist, are the Leasowes — 
 the singularly ingenious composition inscribed on an English hill- 
 side, which employed for twenty long years the taste and genius 
 of Shenstone. An eye accustomed to contemplate nature merely 
 in the gross, and impressed but by vast magnitudes or by great 
 multiplicity, might not find much to admire in at least the more 
 secluded scenes — in landscapes a furlong or two in extent, and 
 composed of merely a few trees, a few slopes, and a pond, or in 
 gloomy little hollows, with interlacing branches high over-head, 
 and mossy runnels below. But to one not less accustomed to 
 study the forms than to feel the magnitudes — who can see spirit 
 and genius in even a vignette, beauty in the grouping of a clump, 
 in the sweep of a knoll, in the convexity of a mossy bank, in 
 the glitter of a half-hidden stream, or the blue gleam of a solitary 
 lochan — one who can appreciate all in nature that the true land- 
 
i 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 147 
 
 Bcape-painter admires and develops — will still find much to 
 engage him amid the mingled woods and waters, sloping acclivi- 
 ties and hollow valleys, of the Leasowes. I have not yet seen 
 a piece of ground of equal extent that exhibits a tithe of its 
 variety, or in which a few steps so completely alter a scene. In 
 a walk of half a mile, one might fill a whole portfolio with 
 sketches, all fine and all various. 
 
 It was chiefly in the minuter landscapes of the place that I 
 missed the perished erections of the poet. The want of some 
 central point on which the attention might first concentrate, 
 and then, as it were, let itself gradually out on the surrounding 
 objects, served frequently to remind me of one of the poet's 
 own remarks. " A rural scene to me is never perfect," he 
 says, " without the addition of some kind of building. I have, 
 ho\^'ever, known a scar of rock in great measure supplying the 
 deficiency." Has the reader observed how unwittingly Bewick 
 seems to have stumbled on this canon, and how very frequently 
 the scar of rock — somewhat a piece of mannerism, to be sure, 
 but always fine, and always picturesquely overhung with 
 foliage — is introduced as the great central object into his 
 vignettes 1 In nature's, too, the eff'ect, when chance-embodied 
 in some recluse scene, must have been often remarked. I have 
 seen a huge rock-like boulder, roughened by lichens, giving 
 animation and cheerfulness to the wild solitude of a deep forest- 
 clearing ; and a grey undressed obelisk, reared many centuries 
 ago over the* savage dead, imparting picturesqueness and interest 
 to a brown sterile moor. 
 
 With the poet's erections, every trace of his lesser ingenui- 
 ties has disappeared from the landscape — his peculiar art, for 
 instance, of distancing an object to aggrandize his space, or in 
 contriving that the visitor should catch a picturesque glimpse 
 of it just at the point where it looked best; and that then, 
 losing sight of it, he should draw near by some hidden path, 
 over which the eye had not previously travelled. The artist, 
 
148 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 with his many-hued pigments at command, makes one object 
 seem near and another distant, by giving to the one a deeper 
 and to the other a fainter tinge of colour. Shenstone, with a 
 palette much less liberally furnished, was skilful enough to 
 produce similar effects with his variously-tinted shrubs and 
 trees. He made the central object in his vista some temple or 
 root-house, of a faint retiring colour; planted around it trees of 
 a diminutive size and a " blanched fady hue," such as the 
 " almond willow" and " silver osier;" then, after a blank space, 
 he planted another group of a deeper tinge — trees of the 
 average hue of the forest, such as the ash and the elm ; and 
 then, last of all, in the foreground, after another blank space, 
 he laid down trees of deep-tinted foliage, such as the dark 
 glossy holly, and the still darker yew. To the aerial, too, he 
 added the linear perspective. He broadened his avenues in 
 the foreground, and narrowed them as they receded ; and the 
 deception produced he describes — and we may well credit him, 
 for he was not one of the easily satisfied — as very remarkable. 
 The distance seemed greatly to increase, and the grounds to 
 broaden and extend. We may judge from the nature of the 
 device, of the good reason he had to be mortally wroth with 
 members of the Lyttelton family, when, as Johnson tells us, 
 they used to make a diversion in favour of Hagley, somewhat 
 in danger of being eclipsed at the time, by bringing their 
 visitors to look up his vistas from the wrong end. The picture 
 must have been set in a wofully false light, and turned head 
 downwards to boot, when the distant willows waved in the 
 foreground beside the dimly-tinted obelisk or portico, and the 
 nearer yews and hollies rose stiff, dark, and diminutive, in an 
 avenue that broadened as it receded, a half-dozen bowshots 
 behind them. Hogarth's famous caricature on the false per- 
 spective of his contemporary brethren of the easel, would in 
 such a case be no caricature at all, but a truthful representation 
 of one of Shenstone's vistas viewed from th^ wrong end 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 149 
 
 Some of the other arts of the poet are, however, as I have 
 already had occasion to remark, still very obvious. It was one 
 of his canons, that " when an object had been once viewed 
 from its proper point, the foot should never travel to it by the 
 same path which the eye had travelled over before." The 
 visitor suddenly lost it, and then drew near obliquely. We 
 can still see that all his pathways, in order to accommodate 
 themselves to this canon, were covered ways, which winded 
 through thickets and hDllows. Ever and anon, whenever there 
 was aught of interest to be seen, they emerged into the open 
 day, like moles rising for a moment to the light, and then 
 straightway again buried themselves from view. It was another 
 of his canons, that " the eye should always look down upon 
 water." " Customary nature," he remarks, " made the thing 
 a necessary requisite." " Nothing," it is added, " could be 
 more sensibly displeasing than the breadth of flat ground," 
 which an acquaintance, engaged, like the poet, though less 
 successfully, in making a picture-gallery of his property, had 
 placed " between his terrace and his lake." Now, in the 
 Leasowes, wherever water is made to enter into the composition 
 of the landscape, the eye looks down upon it from a command- 
 ing elevation — the visitor never feels, as he contemplates it, 
 that he is in danger of being carried away by a flood, should 
 an embankment give way. It was yet further one of Shen- 
 stone's canons, that " no mere slope from the one side to the 
 other can be agreeable ground: the eye requires a balance," 
 not, however, of the kind satirized by Pope, in which 
 
 " each alloy has its brother. 
 And half the platform just reflects the other ;" 
 
 but the kind of balance which the higher order of landscape 
 painters rarely fail to introduce into their works. " A building, 
 for instance, on one side, may be made to contrast with a group 
 of trees, a large oak, or a rising hill, on the other." And in 
 meet illustration of this principle, we find that all the scenes of 
 
150 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 the Leasowes are at least well balanced, though most of their 
 central points are unluckily away : the eye never slides off the 
 landscape, but cushions itself upon it with a sense of security 
 and repose : and the feeling, even when one fails to trace it to 
 its origin, is agreeable. "Whence," says the poet, "does this 
 taste proceed, but from the love we bear to regularity in per- 
 fection ? But, after all, in regard to gardens, the shape of the 
 ground, the disposition of the trees, and the figure of the water, 
 must be sacred to nature, and no forms must be allowed that 
 make a discovery of art." 
 
 England has produced many greater poets than Shenstone, 
 but she never produced a greater landscape-gardener. In at 
 least this department he stands at the head of his class, unap- 
 proachable and apart, whether pitted against the men of his 
 own generation, or those of the three succeeding ones. And in 
 any province in which mind must be exerted, it is at least some- 
 thing to be first. The estimate of Johnson cannot fail to be 
 familiar to almost every one. It is, however, so true in itself, 
 and so exquisitely characteristic of stately old Samuel, that I 
 must indulge in the quotation. " Now was excited his [Shen- 
 stone's] delight in rural pleasures, and his ambition of rural 
 elegance. He began to point his prospects, to diversify his 
 surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters ; which 
 he did with such judgment and such fancy as made his little 
 domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful 
 —a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers. 
 Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves, and to place a 
 bench at every turn where there is an object to catch the view 
 — to make water run where it will be heard, and to stagnate 
 where it will be seen — to leave intervals where the eye will be 
 pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there is something 
 to be hidden — demand any great powers of mind, I will not 
 inquire : perhaps a surly and sullen spectator may think such 
 performances rather the sport than the business of human, 
 
 I 
 
r 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 151 
 
 reason. But it must be at least confessed, that to embellish 
 the form of nature is an innocent amusement; and some praise 
 must be allowed by the most supercilious observer to him who 
 does best what such multitudes are contending to do well." 
 
 But though England had no such landscape-gardener as Shen- 
 stone, it possessed denizens not a few, who thought more highly 
 of their own taste than of his ; and so the history of the Lea- 
 sowes, for the ten years that immediately succeeded his death, 
 is a history of laborious attempts to improve what he had 
 rendered perfect. This history we find recorded by Goldsmith, 
 in one of his less known essays. Considerable allowance must 
 be made for the peculiar humour of the writer, and its exagge- 
 rative tendency ; for no story, real or imaginary, ever lost in the 
 hands of Goldsmith ; but there is at least an air of truth about 
 its general details. " The garden," he says, " was completely 
 grown and finished : the marks of every art were covered up by 
 the luxuriance of nature — the winding walks were grown dark 
 — the brooks assimied a natural selvedge — and the rocks were 
 covered with moss. Nothing now remained but to enjoy the 
 beauties of the place, when the poor poet died, and his garden 
 was obliged to be sold for the benefit of those who had contri- 
 buted to its embellishment. 
 
 " The beauties of the place had now for some time been cele- 
 brated as well in prose as in verse ; and all men of taste wished 
 for so envied a spot, where every turn was marked with the 
 poet's pencil, and every walk awakened genius and meditation. 
 The first purchaser was one Mr. Truepenny, a button-maker, 
 who was possessed of three thousand pounds, and was willing 
 also to be possessed of taste and genius. 
 
 "As the poet's ideas were for the natural wildness of the 
 landscape, the button-maker's were for the more regular pro- 
 ductions of art. He conceived, perhaps, that as it is a beauty 
 in a button to be of a regular pattern, so the same regularity 
 ought to obtain in a landscape. Be that as it will, he employed 
 
152 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 the shears to some purpose : he clipped up the hedges, cut 
 down the gloomy walks, made vistas on the stables and hog- 
 sties, and showed his friends what a man of true taste should 
 always be doing. 
 
 " The next candidate for taste and genius was a captain of a 
 ship, who bought the garden because the former possessor could 
 find nothing more to mend : but unfortunately he had taste too. 
 His great passion lay in building — in making Chinese temples 
 and cage-work summer-houses. As the place before had the 
 appearance of retirement, and inspired meditation, he gave it a 
 more peopled air ; every turning presented a cottage or icehouse, 
 or a temple ; the garden was converted into a little city, and it 
 only wanted inhabitants to give it the air of a village in the 
 East Indies. 
 
 " In this manner, in less than ten years the improvement has 
 gone through the hands of as many proprietors, who were all 
 willing to have taste, and to show their taste too. As the 
 place had received its best finishing from the hands of the first 
 possessor, so every innovator only lent a hand to do mischief. 
 Those parts which were obscure, have been enlightened ; those 
 walks which led naturally, have been twisted into serpentine 
 windings. The colour of the flowers of the field is not more 
 various than the variety of tastes that have been employed here, 
 and all in direct contradiction to the original aim of its first 
 improver. Could the original possessor but revive, with what a 
 sorrowful heart would he look upon his favourite spot again ! 
 He would scarcely recollect a dryad or a wood-nymph of his 
 former acquaintance ; and might perhaps find himself as much 
 a stranger in his own plantation as in the deserts of Siberia." 
 
 The after history of the Leasowes is more simple. Time, as 
 certainly as taste, though much less offensively, had been busy 
 with seat and temple, obelisk and root>-house ; and it was soon 
 found that, though the poet had planted, he had not built, for 
 posterity. Tlie ingenious antiquary of Wheatfield discovered in 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 153 
 
 the parsonage-house garden of his village, some time about the 
 middle of the last century, a temple of lath and plaster, which 
 had been erected, he held, by the old Romans, and dedicated to 
 Claudius Caesar; but the lath and plaster of these degenerate 
 days do not last quite so long. The progress of dilapidation 
 was farther accelerated by the active habits of occasional visitors. 
 Young men tried their strength by setting their shoxilders to 
 the obelisks; and old women demonstrated their wisdom by 
 carrying home pieces of the seats to their l&res : a robust young 
 fellow sent poor Mr. Somerville's urn a-spinning down the hill ; 
 a vigorous iconoclast beheaded the piping fawn at a blow. 
 There were at first large additions made to the inscriptions, of 
 a kind which Shenstone could scarce have anticipated ; but anon 
 inscriptions and additions too began to disappear; the tablet 
 in the dingle suddenly failed to compliment Mr. Spence; and 
 Virgil's grove no longer exhibited the name of Virgil. " The 
 niinated Priory wall" became too thoroughly a ruin; the punch- 
 bowl was shivered on its stand; the iron ladle wrenched from 
 beside the ferruginous spring; in short, much about the time 
 when young Walter Scott was gloating over Dodsley, and wish- 
 ing he too had a property of which to make a plaything, what 
 Shenstone had built and inscribed on the Leasowes could be 
 known but from Dodsley alone. His artificialities had perished, 
 like the artificialities of another kind of the poets his contempo 
 rjiries; and nothing survived in his more material works, as in 
 their writings, save those delightful portions in which he had 
 but given body and expression to the harmonies of nature. 
 
154 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 CHAPTER X, 
 
 Shenstone's verses — The singular unhappiness of his paradise— English cider— Scotch 
 and English dwellings contrasted— The nailers of Hales Owen ; their politics a cen- 
 tury ago— Competition of the Scotch nailers ; unsuccessful, and why— Samuel Salt, 
 the Hales Owen poet — Village Church— Salt-works at Droitwich ; their great an- 
 tiquity—Appearance of the village— Problem furnished by the salt deposits of Eng- 
 land ; various theories — Rock-salt deemed by some a volcanic product ; by others the 
 deposition of an overcharged sea ; by yet others the produce of vast lagoons — Leland 
 —The manufacture of salt from sea- water superseded, even in Scotland, by the rock- 
 salt of England. 
 
 It was now near sunset, and high time that I should be 
 leaving the Leasowes, to " take mine ease in mine inn." By 
 the way, one of the most finished among Shenstone's lesser 
 pieces is a paraphrase on the apophthegm of old Sir John. We 
 find Dr. Samuel Johnson, as exhibited in the chronicle of Bos- 
 well, conning it over with meikle glee in an inn at Chapelhouse ; 
 and it was certainly no easy matter to write verse that satisfied 
 the Doctor. 
 
 " To thee, fair Freedom ! I retire. 
 
 From flatt'ry, cards, and dice, and din: 
 Nor art thou found in mansions higher 
 Than the low cot or humble inn. 
 
 Tis here with boundless power I reign ; 
 
 And every health which I begin 
 Converts dull port to bright champaigne ; 
 
 Such freedom crowns it at an inn. 
 
 I fly from pomp, I fly from plate, 
 
 I fly from falsehood's specious grin; 
 Freedom I love, and form I hate, 
 And choose my lodgings at an inn. 
 
 Here, waiter, take my sordid ore. 
 Which lacqueys else might hope to win ; 
 
 It buys what courts have not in store — 
 It buys me freedom at an inn. 
 
F 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 155 
 
 Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round. 
 Where'er his stages may have been. 
 
 May sigh to think he still has found 
 The warmest welcome at an inn." 
 
 Ere, however, quitting the grounds to buy freedom at the 
 " Plume of Feathers," I could not avoid indulging in a natural 
 enough reflection on the unhappiness of poor Shenstone. Never, 
 as we may see from his letters, was there a man who enjoyed 
 life less. He was not vicious ; he had no overpowering pas- 
 sion to contend with ; he could have had his Phillis had he 
 chosen to take her ; his fortune, nearly three hundred a year, 
 should have been quite ample enough, in the reign of George 
 the Second, to enable a single man to live, and even, with 
 economy, to furnish a considerable surplus for making gimcracks 
 in the Leasowes ; he had many amusements — he drew taste- 
 fully, had a turn, he tells us, for natural history, wrote elegant 
 verse and very respectable prose ; the noble and the gifted of 
 the land honoured him with their notice ; above all, he lived 
 in a paradise, the beauties of which no man could better appre- 
 ciate ; and his most serious employment, like that of our com- 
 mon ancestor in his unfallen state, was " to dress and to keep 
 it." And yet even before he had involved his affairs, and the 
 dun came to the door, he was an unhappy man. " I have lost 
 my road to happiness," we find him saying, ere he had com- 
 pleted his thirty-fourth year. Nay, we even find him quite 
 aware of the turning at which he had gone wrong. "Instead," 
 he adds, "of pursuing the way to the fine lawns and venerable 
 oaks which distinguish the region of happiness, I am got into 
 the pitiful parterre-garden of amusement, and view the nobler 
 scenes at a distance. I think I can see the road, too, that leads 
 the better way, and can show it to others ; but I have got 
 many miles to measure back before I can get into it myself, and 
 no kind of resolution to take a single step. My chief amuse- 
 ments at present are the same they have long been, and lie 
 scattered about my farm. The French have what they call a 
 
156 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 parque ornee — I suppose, approaching about as near to a gar- 
 den as the park at Hagley. I give my place the title ofsiferme 
 ornee.'' Still more significant is the frightful confession em- 
 bodied in the following passage, written at a still earlier period : 
 — " Every little uneasiness is sujficient to introduce a whole 
 train of melancholy considerations, and to make me utterly dis- 
 satisfied with the life I now lead, and the life which I foresee I 
 shall lead. I am angry, and envious, and dejected, and fran- 
 tic, and disregard all present things, just as becomes a madman 
 to do. I am infinitely pleased, though it is a gloomy joy, with 
 the application of Dr. Swift's complaint, / that he is forced to 
 die in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.'" Amusement 
 becomes, I am afraid, not very amusing when rendered the 
 exclusive business of one's life. All that seems necessary in 
 order to render fallen Adams thoroughly miserable, is just to 
 place them in paradises, and, debarring them serious occupation, 
 to give them full permission to make themselves as happy as 
 they can. It was more in mercy than in wrath that the first 
 father of the race, after his nature had become contaminated by 
 the fall, was driven out of Eden. Well would it have been for 
 poor Shenstone had the angel of stem necessity driven him also, 
 early in the day, out of his paradise, and sent him into the 
 work-day world beyond, to eat bread in the sweat of his brow. 
 I quitted the Leasowes in no degree saddened by the consi- 
 deration that I had been a hard-working man all my life, from 
 boyhood till now ; and that the future, in this respect, 
 held out to me no brighter prospect than I had realized in 
 the past. 
 
 When passing through York, I had picked up at a stall a 
 good old copy of the poems of Philips — John, not Ambrose ; 
 and in railway carriages and on coach-tops I had revived my 
 acquaintance, broken off for twenty years, with " Cider, a Poem," 
 " Blenheim," and the " Splendid Shilling ; " and now, in due 
 improvement of the lessons of so judicious a master, I resolved. 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 157 
 
 when taking my ease in the " Plume of Feathers," that, for one 
 evening at least, I should drink only cider. 
 
 t" Fallacious drink ! ye honest men, beware, 
 1^ Nor trust in smoothness ; the third circling glass 
 
 Suffices virtue." 
 
 The cider of the " Plume" was, however, scarce so potent as 
 that sung by Philips. I took the third permitted glass, after a 
 dinner transposed far into the evening by the explorations of 
 the day, without experiencing a very great deal of the exhila- 
 rating feeling described — 
 
 " Or lightened heart. 
 Dilate with fervent joy, or eager soul. 
 Keen to pursue the sparkling glass amain." 
 
 Nor was the temptation urgent to make up in quantity what 
 was wanting in strength : " the third circling glass sufficed 
 virtue." Here, as at the inns in which I had baited, both at 
 Durham and York, I was struck by the contrast which many 
 of the older English dwelling-houses furnish to our Scotch ones 
 of the same age. In Scotland the walls are of solid stone-work, 
 thick and massy, with broad-headed, champer-edged rybats, and 
 ponderous soles and lintels, selvedging the opening ; whereas the 
 wood-work of the interior is almost always slight and fragile, 
 formed of spongy deal or moth-hollowed fir rafters. After the 
 lapse of little more than a century, there are few of our Scotch 
 fk>ors on which it is particularly safe to tread. In the older 
 English dwellings we generally find a reverse condition of 
 things : the outsides, constructed of slim brick-work, have a 
 toy-like fragility about them ; whereas inside we find strong 
 oaken beams, and long-enduring floors and stairs of glossy wain- 
 scot. We of course at once recognise the great scarcity of good 
 building-stone in the one country, and of well-grown forest-wood 
 in the other, as the original and adequate cause of the peculiarity. 
 Their dwelling-houses seem to have had different starting-points ; 
 
158 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 those of the one being true lineal descendants of the old Plot's 
 house, complete from foundation to summit without wood — 
 those of the other, lineal descendants of the old forest-dwellings 
 of the Saxon, formed ship-like in their unwieldy oaken strength, 
 without stone. Wood to the one class was a mere subordinate 
 accident, of late introduction — stone to the other ; and were I 
 sent to seek out the half-way representatives of each, I would 
 find those of England in its ancient beam-formed houses of the 
 days of Elizabeth, in which only angular interstices in the walls 
 are occupied by brick, and those of Scotland in its time-shattered 
 fortalices of the type of the old Castle of Craig-house, in Ross- 
 shire, where floor rises above floor in solid masonry, or of the 
 type of Borthwick Castle, near Edinburgh, stone from founda- 
 tion to ridge. 
 
 I spent some time next morning in sauntering among the cross 
 lanes of Hales Owen — now and then casting vague guesses, from 
 the appearance of the humbler houses — for what else lies within 
 reach of the passing traveller? — regarding the character and 
 condition of the inmates ; and now and then looking in through 
 open windows and doors at the nailers, male and female, en- 
 gaged amid their intermittent hammerings and fitftd showers 
 of sparks. As might be anticipated of a profession fixed very 
 much down to the comer of a country, and so domestic in its 
 nature, nail-making is hereditary in the families that pursue it. 
 The nailers of Hales Owen at the present day are the descendants 
 of the nailers who, as Shenstone tells us, were so iutelligent in 
 the cause of Hanover during the outburst of 1745. " The 
 rebellion," he says, in writing a friend just two months after 
 the battle of Prestonpans, " is, as you may guess, the subject 
 of all conversation. Every individual nailer here takes in a 
 newspaper, and talks as familiarly of kings and princes as ever 
 Master Shallow did of John of Gaunt." Scarcely a century 
 had gone by, and I now found, from snatches of conversation 
 caught in the passing, that the nailers of Hales Owen were 
 
I 
 
 ' ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLB. 159 
 
 interested in the five points of the Charter and the success of 
 the League, and thought much more of whajj they deemed their 
 own rights, than of the rights of either monarchs de facto or 
 monarchs de jure. There was a nail manufactory established 
 about seventy years ago at Cromarty, in the north of Scotland, 
 which reared not a few Scotch nailers ; but they seemed to 
 compete on unequal terms with those in England ; and after 
 a protracted struggle of rather more than half a century, the 
 weaker went to the wall, and the Cromarty nail- works ceased. 
 There is now only a single nail-forge in the town ; and this 
 last of the forges is used for other purposes than the originally 
 intended one. I foimd in Hales Owen the true key to the 
 failure of the Cromarty manufactory, and saw how it had come 
 to be undersold in its own northern field by the nail-merchants 
 of Birmingham. The Cromarty nailer wrought alone, or, if a 
 family man, assisted but by his sons ; whereas the Hales Owen 
 nailer had, with the assistance of his sons, that of his wife, 
 daughters, and maiden sisters to boot ; and so he bore down 
 the Scotchman in the contest, through the aid lent him by his 
 female auxiliaries, in the way his blue painted ancestors, backed 
 by not only all the fighting men, but also all the fightmg women 
 of the district, used to bear down the enemy. 
 
 In passing a small bookseller's shop, in which I had marked 
 on the counter an array of second-hand books, I dropped in to 
 see whether I might not procure a cheap edition of Shenstone, 
 with Dodsley's description, and found a tidy little woman 
 behind the counter, who would fain, if she could, have suited 
 me to my mind. But she had no copy of Shenstone, nor had 
 she ever heard of Shenstone. She well knew Samuel Salt the 
 Hales Owen teetotal poet, and could sell me a copy of Am 
 works ; but of the elder poet of Hales Owen she knew nothing. 
 I bought from her two of Samuel's broadsheets — the one a 
 wrathful satire on the community of Odd-Fellows ; the other, 
 " A Poem on Drunkenness." 
 
160 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 " how silly is the drinker ! 
 
 Swallowing what he does not need ! 
 In the eyes of every thinker 
 
 He must be a fool indeed. 
 How he hurts his constitution ! 
 All for want of resolution 
 
 Not to yield to drink at first !" 
 
 Such is the verse known within a mile of the Leasowes, while 
 that of their poet is forgotten. Alas for fame ! Poor Shen- 
 stone could scarce have anticipated that the thin Castalia of tee- 
 totalism was to break upon his writings, like a mill-dam during 
 a thunderstorm, to cover up all their elegancies from the sight 
 where they should be best known, and present instead but a 
 turbid expanse of water. 
 
 I got access to the parish church, a fine old pile of red sand- 
 stone, with dates, in some of its more ancient portions, beyond 
 the Norman conquest. One gorgeous marble, sentinelled by 
 figures of Benevolence, Fidelity, and Major Halliday, all very 
 classic and fine, and which cost, as my guide informed me, a 
 thousand pounds, failed greatly to excite my interest : I at least 
 found that a simple pedestal in front of it, surmounted by a 
 plain urn, impressed me more. The pedestal bears a rather 
 lengthy inscription, in the earlier half of which there is a good 
 deal of verbiage ; but in the concluding half the writer seems 
 to have said nearly what he intended to say. 
 * * * 
 
 •' Reader, if genius, taste refined, 
 A native elegance of mind — 
 If virtue, science, manly sense. 
 If wit that never gave offence. 
 The clearest head, the tenderest heart. 
 In thy esteem ere claimed a part — 
 Oh ! smite thy breast, and drop a tear. 
 For know thy Shenstone's dust lies here." 
 
 The Leasowes engaged me for the remainder of the day ; and 
 I again walked over them a few weeks later in the season, when 
 the leaf hung yellow on the tree, and the films of grey silky 
 gossamer went sailing along the opener glades in the clear frosty 
 air. But I have already recorded my impressions of the place. 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 161 
 
 inlepeiidently of date, as if all formed at one visit. I must 
 now take a similar liberty with the chronology of my wendings 
 in another direction ; and, instead of passing direct to the Clent 
 Hills in my narrative, as I did in my tour, describe, first, a 
 posterior visit paid to the brine-springs at Droitwich. I shall 
 by and by attempt imparting to the reader, from some com- 
 manding summit of the Clent range, a few general views regard- 
 ing the geology of the landscape ; and by first bearing me 
 company on my visit to Droitwich, he will be the better able 
 to keep pace with me in my after survey. 
 
 The prevailing geological system in this part of England is 
 the New Red Sandstone, Upper and Lower. It stretches for 
 many miles around the Dudley coal-basin, much in the way 
 that the shires of Stirling and Dumbarton stretch around the 
 waters of Loch Lomond, or the moors of Sutherland or the hills 
 of Inverness-shire encircle the waters of Loch Shin or Loch 
 Ness. In the immediate neighbourhood of the basin we find 
 only the formations of the lower division of the system, and 
 these are of comparatively little economic value : they contain, 
 however, a calcareous conglomerate, which represents the mag- 
 nesian limestone of the northern counties, and which in a very 
 few localities is pure enough to be wrouglit for its lime : they 
 contain, too, several quarries of the kind of soft building sand- 
 stone which I found the old stone-mason engaged in sawing at 
 Hagley. But while the lower division of the New Red is thus 
 unimportant, its upper division is, we find, not greatly inferior 
 in economic value to the Coal Measures themselves. It forms 
 the inexhaustible storehouse of our household salt — all that we 
 employ in our fisheries, in our meat-curing establishments for 
 the army and navy, in our agriculture, in our soda manufac- 
 tories — all that fuses our glass and fertilizes our fields, imparts 
 the detergent quality to our soap, and gives us salt heiTings and 
 salt pork, and everything else salt that is tlie better for being so, 
 down to our dinner celery and our breakfast eggs ; it forms, in 
 
 L 
 
162 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 short, to use a Scoticism, the great salt-bachet of the empire ; 
 and the hand, however frequently thrust into it, never finds an 
 empty comer. By pursuing southwards, for seven or eight 
 miles, the road which, passing through Hales Owen, forms the 
 principal street of the village, we rise from the lower incoherent 
 marls, soft sandstones, and calcareous conglomerates of the 
 system, to the equally incoherent marls, and nearly equally soft 
 sandstones, of its upper division; and, some five or six miles 
 farther on, reach the town of Droitwich, long famous for its salt 
 springs. There were salt-works at Droitwich in the times of the 
 Romans, and ever since the times of the Romans. In the age 
 of the Heptarchy, Kenulph king of Mercia, after cutting off the 
 hands and putting out the eyes of his brother-king, Egbert of 
 Kent, squared his accounts with Heaven by giving ten salt- 
 furnaces in Droitwich to the church of Worcester. Poor Edwy 
 of England, nearly two centuries after, strove, though less suc- 
 cessfully, to purchase the Church's sanction to his union with 
 his second cousin, the beautiful Elgiva, by giving it five salt- 
 furnaces more. In all probability, the salt that seasoned King 
 Alfred's porridge, when he lived with the neat-herd, was supplied 
 by the works at Droitwich. And still the brine comes welling 
 up, copious as ever. I saw one powerful spring boiling amid 
 the twilight gloom of its deep pot, like a witch's caldron in a 
 cavern, that employs a steam-engine night and day to pump it 
 to the surface, and furnishes a thousand tons of salt weekly. In 
 1779, says Nash, in his history of Worcestershire, the net salt-' 
 duties of the empire amounted to about two hundred and forty 
 thousand pounds, and of that sum not less than seventy-five 
 thousand pounds were derived from the salt-works at Droitwich. 
 The town lies low. There had been much rain for several 
 days previous to that of my visit — the surrounding fields had 
 the dank blackened look so unlovely in autumn to the eye of 
 the farmer, and the roads and streets were dark with mud. 
 Most of the houses wore the dingy tints of a remote and some- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 163 
 
 ;it neglected antiquity. Droitwich was altogether, as I saw 
 , a sombre-looking place, with its grey old church looking 
 down upon it from a scraggy wood-covered hill ; and what 
 struck me as peculiarly picturesque was, that from this dark 
 centre there should be passing continually outwards, by road or 
 canal, waggons, carts, track-boats, barges, all laden with pure 
 white salt, that looked in the piled-up heaps like wreaths of 
 drifted snow. There could not be two things more unlike than 
 the great staple of the town and the town itself. There hung, 
 too, over the blackened roofs, a white volume of vapour — the 
 steam of the numerous salt-pans, driven off in the course of 
 evai)oration by the heat — which also strikingly contrasted with 
 the general blackness. The place has its two extensive salt- 
 works — the old and the new. To the new I was denied access ; 
 but it mattered little, as I got ready admittance to the old. 
 The man who superintended the pumping engine, though he knew 
 me merely as a curious traveller somewhat mud-bespattered, 
 stopped the machine for a few seconds, that I might see undis- 
 turbed the brine boiling up from its secret depths ; and I was 
 freely permitted to take the round of the premises, and to 
 examine the numerous vats in their various stages of evapora- 
 tion. It is pleasant to throw one s-self, unknown and unre- 
 commended, on the humanity of one's fellows, and to receive 
 kindness simply as a man ! 
 
 As I saw the vats seething over the furnaces, some of them 
 already more than half-filled with the precipitated salt, and 
 bearing a-top a stratum of yellowish-coloured fluid, the grand 
 problem furnished by the saline deposits of this formation rose 
 before me in all its difficulty. Geology propounds many a hard 
 question to its students — questions quite hard and difficult 
 enough to keep down their conceit, unless, indeed, very largely 
 developed ; and few of these seem more inexplicable than the 
 problem furnished by the salt deposits. Here, now, are these 
 brin}' springs welling out of this Upper New Red Sandstone of 
 
164 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 central England — springs whose waters were employed in making 
 salt two thousand years ago, and which still throw up that 
 mineral at the rate of a thousand tons apiece weekly, without 
 sign of diminution in either their volume or their degree of 
 saturation ! At Stoke Prior, about three miles to the east of 
 Droit wich, a shaft of four hundred and sixty feet has been sunk 
 in the Upper New Red, and four beds of rock-salt passed through, 
 the united thickness of which amount to eighty-five feet. Nor 
 does this comprise the entire thickness, as the lower bed, though 
 penetrated to the depth of thirty feet, has not been perforated. 
 In the salt-mines of Cheshire, the beds are of still greater thick- 
 ness — an upper bed measuring in depth seventy-eight feet, and 
 an under bed, to which no bottom has yet been found, a hun- 
 dred and twenty feet. And in Poland and Spain there occur 
 salt deposits on a larger scale still. The saliferous district of 
 Cordova, for instance, has its solid hills of rock-salt, which nearly 
 equal in height and bulk Arthur's Seat taken from the level of 
 Holyrood House. How, I inquired, beside the flat steaming 
 caldrons, as I marked the white crystals arranging their facets 
 at the bottom — how were these mighty deposits formed in the 
 grand laboratory of nature 1 Formed they must have been, in 
 this part of the world, in an era long posterior to that of the 
 Coal ; and in Spain, where they belong to the cretaceous group, 
 in an era long posterior to that of the Oolite. They are more 
 immediately underlaid in England by a sandstone, constituting 
 the base of the Upper New Red, which is largely charged with 
 vegetable remains of a peculiar and well-marked character ; and 
 the equally well-marked flora of the carboniferous period lies 
 entombed many hundred feet below. AH the rock-salt in the 
 kingdom must have been formed since the more recent vegeta- 
 tion of the Red Sandstone lived and died, and was entombed 
 amid the smooth sands of some deep-sea bottom. 
 
 But how formed 1 Several antagonist theories have been 
 promulgated in attempted resolution of the puzzle. By some 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE.- 165 
 
 tne salt has been regarded as a volcanic product ejected from 
 beneath ; by some, as the precipitate of a deep ocean over- 
 charged with saline matter ; by some, as a deposit of salt water 
 lakes cut off from the main sea, like the salt lagoons of the 
 tropics, by surf-raised spits or bars, and then dried up by the 
 heat of the sun. It seems fatal to the first theoiy that the 
 eras of Plutonic disturbance in this part of the kingdom are of 
 a date anterior to the era of the Saliferous Sandstone. The 
 Cl(;nt Hills belong to the latest period of trappean eruption 
 traceable in the midland counties ; and they were unquestion- 
 ably thrown up, says Murchison, shortly after the close of the 
 Carboniferous era — many ages ere the Saliferous era began. 
 Besides, what evidence have we derived from volcanoes, either 
 recent or extinct, that rock-salt, in deposits so enormously huge, 
 is a volcanic product ? Volcanoes in the neighbourhood of the 
 sea — and there are but few very active ones that have not the 
 sea for their neighbour — deposit not unfrequently a crust of 
 salt on the rocks and lavas that surround their craters ; but we 
 never hear of their throwing down vast saliferous beds, con- 
 tinuous for great distances, like those of the New Red Sandstone 
 of England. And further, even were salt in such huge quan- 
 tity an unequivocally volcanic production, how account for its 
 position and arrangement here 1 How account for the occur- 
 rence of a volcanic product, spreading away in level beds and 
 layers for nearly two hundred miles, in one of the least dis- 
 turbed of the English formations, and forming no inconsiderable 
 portion of its strata 1 As for the second theory, it seems ex- 
 ceedingly difficult to conceive how, in an open sea, subject, of 
 course, like all open seas, to such equalizing influences as the 
 ruffling of the winds and the deeper stirrings of the tides, any 
 one tract of water should become so largely saturated as to 
 throw down portions of its salt when the surrounding tracts, 
 less strongly impregnated, retained theirs. I have seen a fish- 
 curcir's vat throwing down its salt when surcharged with the 
 mineral, but never any one stronger patch of the brine doing so 
 
166 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 ere the general mixture around it had attained to the necessary 
 degree of saturation. And the lagoon theory, though appar- 
 ently more tenable than any of the others, seems scarce less en- 
 veloped in difficulty. The few inches, at most few feet, of salt 
 which line the bottoms and sides of the lagoons of the tropics, 
 are but poor representatives of deposits of salt like those of the 
 Upper Old Red of Cheshire ; and Geology, as has been already 
 indicated, has its deposits huger still. Were one of the vast 
 craters of the moon — Tycho or Copernicus — to be filled with 
 sea water to the brim, and the fires of twenty ^tnas to be 
 lighted up under it, we could scarce expect as the result a 
 greater salt-making than that of Cordova or Cracow. A bed 
 of salt a hundred feet in thickness would demand for its salt- 
 pan a lagoon many hundred feet in depth ; and lagoons many 
 hundred feet in depth, in at least the present state of things, 
 are never evaporated.^ 
 
 The salt-works at Droitwich were visited, in the reign of 
 Henry the Eighth, by Leland the antiquary. He "asked a 
 Salter," he tells us, " how many furnaces they had in all ; and 
 
 1 Dr. Friedrich Parrot, the Russian traveller, gives a brief account in his " Journey to 
 Ararat" (1836) of the salt lakes that now mark the site of the inland sea which seems to 
 have once occupied a large portion of the central basin of Asia. Their salt, however, 
 though abundant and valuable, regarded as an article of traffic and a source of revenue, 
 would form, we find, but an inconsiderable geologic deposit — a stratum scarce equal to 
 the thinnest of the unworkable seams at Stoke Prior or Northwich. "At the western 
 extremity of the expansion of the river Manech, on its northern shore," says the tra- 
 veller, " are a number of salt lakes, the largest of which, there called Grusnoe Azore, is 
 probably the same that is distinguished in our maps by the name of the new salt lake, 
 and is five miles long and two-thirds of a mile wide. These lakes have the property, in 
 common with others ot the same kind, that during the hottest season of the year, which 
 in these parts is from May to the end of August, the surface of the water becomes covered 
 with a crust of salt nearly an inch thick, which is collected with shovels into boats, and 
 piled away. This is managed by private individuals, who rent the privilege from the 
 government of the Don, on condition of paying a tenth of the produce. On this occasion 
 I was much interested in being able to prove to my own satisfaction, that in such lakes 
 it is nothing more than the rapid evaporation from the heat of the sun, and the conse- 
 quent supersaturation of the water with salt, that effects the crystallization of the latter; 
 for these lakes are so shallow, that the little boats in which the salt is gathered are gene- 
 rally trailing on the bottom, and leave a long furrow behind them on it ; so that the lake 
 is consequently to be regarded as a wide pan of enormous superficial extent, in which 
 the brine can easily reach the degree of concentration required ; while, on the other 
 hand, if the summer prove cold or rainy, the superfluous water must necessarily militate 
 against the crystallization of the salt, or even prevent it altogether." 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 167 
 
 the Salter numbered them to an eighteen score, saying, that 
 every one paid yearly to the king six shillings and eightpence." 
 " Making salt," the antiquary adds, " is a notable destruction 
 of wood — six thousand loads of the young polewood, easily 
 cloven, being used twelvemonthly ; and the lack of wood is 
 now perceivable in all places near the Wyche, on as far as 
 Worcester." The Dudley coal-field seems to have been broached 
 just in time to preserve to the midland districts their iron and 
 salt trade. The complaint that the old forests were well-nigh 
 gone was becoming general, when in 1662 a Dudley miner took 
 out a patent for smelting his iron-stone with coke instead of 
 charcoal ; and the iron trade of England has been on the in- 
 crease ever since. And only a few years later, the salters of 
 Droitwich became equally independent of the nearly exhausted 
 forests, by lighting up their " eighteen score furnaces " with 
 coal. The railways and canals of the country have since spread 
 the rock-salt of the New Red Sandstone over the empire ; and 
 it is a curious fact, that some of our old established Scotch salt- 
 works — works so old that they were in existence for centuries 
 before the Scotch Salter had ceased to be a slave — are now 
 engaged in crystallizing, not sea-water as formerly, but rock- 
 salt, from the midland coimties of England. I picked up, about 
 a twelvemonth ago, on a cart-road in the neighbourhood of 
 Prestonpans, a fragment of rock-salt, and then, a few yards 
 nearer the town, 9, second fragment ; and, curious to know where 
 the mineral could have come from, in a district that has none 
 of its own; I went direct to one of the more ancient salt-works 
 of the place to inquire. But the large reservoir of salt-water 
 attached to the works for supplying the boilers, and which 
 communicates by a pipe with the profounder depths of the sea 
 beyond, of itself revealed the secret. There, against one of the 
 comers, lay a red, half-molten pile of the rock-salt of Cheshire ; 
 while the enveloping sea-water — of old the only source of the 
 salt manufactured in the village — constituted but a mere 
 auxiliary source of supply, and a solvent. 
 
168 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 Walk to the Clent Hills — Incident in a fruit-shop — St. Kenelm's Chapel — Legend of St. 
 Keuelm —Ancient village of Clent ; its appearance and character — View from the 
 Clent Hills — Mr. Thomas Moss — Geologic peculiarities of the landscape ; illustration 
 — The Scotch drift — Boulders ; these transported by the agency of ice floes — Evidence 
 of the former existence of a broad ocean channel — The geography of the geologist — 
 Aspect of the earth ever changing — Geography of the palaeozoic period; of the 
 secondary ; of the terti!i.ry — Ocean the great agent of change and dilapidation. 
 
 Let us now return to Hales Owen, and thence pass on to 
 the Clent Hills — famous resorts, in those parts, of many a 
 summer pic-nic party from the nearer villages, and of pale-faced 
 artisans and over-laboured clerks, broken loose for a few happy 
 days from the din and smoke of the more distant Birmingham. 
 I was fortunate in a pleasant day — rather of the warmest for 
 walking along the low dusty roads, but sufficiently cool and 
 breezy on the grassy slopes of the hill. A humble fruit-shop 
 stood temptingly open among the naileries in the outer skirts 
 of Hales Owen, and I stepped in to purchase a few pears : a 
 sixpenceworth would have been by no means an overstock in 
 Scotland to one who had to travel several miles up-hill in a 
 warm day; and so I asked for no less here. The fruitman 
 began to fill a capacious oaken measure, much like what in 
 Scotland we would term a meal lippy, and to pile up the fruit 
 over it in a heap. " How much is that?" I asked. " Why, 
 only fivepenn'orth," replied the man ; '* but I'll give thee the 
 other penn'orth arter." " No, no, stop," said I j " give me 
 just the half of five penn'orth : you are much more liberal here 
 than the fruit-dealers in my country ; and I find the half wiU 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 169 
 
 be quite as much as I can manage." The incident reminded 
 me of the one so good-humouredly related by Franklin. When 
 fresh from Boston, where food was comparatively high, he 
 went into a baker's shop in Philadelphia to purchase threepence 
 worth of bread on which to breakfast, and received, to his 
 astonishment, for the money, three huge loaves, two of which 
 he had to carry through the streets stuck under his arms, while 
 satiating his hunger to the full on the third. 
 
 When little more than a mile out of town, I struck off the 
 high road through a green lane, flanked on both sides by ex- 
 tensive half-grown woods, and overhung by shaggy hedges, 
 that were none the less picturesque from their having been 
 long strangers to the shears, and much enveloped in climbing, 
 beny-bearing plants, honeysucldes, brambles, and the woody 
 niglit-shade. As the path winds up the acclivity, the scene 
 assimies an air of neglected wildness, not very common in 
 England : the tangled thickets rise in irregular groups in the 
 foreground; and, closing in the prospect behind, I could see 
 through the frequent openings the gieen summits of the Clent 
 HiUs, now scarce half a mile away. I was on historic ground 
 — the " various wild," according to Shenstone, " for Kenelm's 
 fate renowned ;" and which at a still earlier period had formed 
 one of the battle-fields on which the naked Briton contended 
 on unequal terms with the mail-enveloped Roman. Half-way 
 up the ascent, at a turning in the lane, where the thicket opens 
 into a grassy glade, there stands a fine old chapel of dark red 
 sandstone, erected in the times of the Heptarchy, to mark the 
 locale of a tragedy characteristic of the time — the murder of 
 the boy-king St. Kenelm, at the instigation of his sister Ken- 
 drida. I spent some time in tracing the half-obliterated carv- 
 ings on the squat Saxon door-way — by far the most ancient 
 part of the edifice — and in straining hard to find some ap- 
 proximation to the human figure in the rude effigy of a child 
 sculptured on the wall, with a crown on its head and a book 
 
170 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 in its hand, intended, say the antiquaries, to represent the 
 murdered prince, but at present not particularly like anything. 
 The story of Kenelm we find indicated, rather than told, in 
 one of Shenstone's elegies : — 
 
 " Fast by the centre of yon various wild, 
 
 Where spreading oaks embower a Gothic fane, 
 Kendrida's arts a brother's youth beguiled ; 
 
 There nature urged her tenderest pleas in vain. 
 Soft o'er his birth, and o'er his infant hours, 
 
 The ambitious maid could every care employ; 
 And with assiduous fondness crop the flowers. 
 
 To deck the cradle of the princely boy. 
 
 • But soon the bosom's pleaang calm is flown ; 
 
 Love fires her breast ; the sultry passions rise ; 
 A favoured lover seeks the Mercian throne, 
 
 And views her Kenelm with a rival's eyes. 
 See, garnished for the chase, the fraudful maid 
 
 To these lone hills direct his devious way : 
 The youth, all prone, the sister-guide obeyed ; 
 
 Ill-fated youth ! himself the destined prey." 
 
 The minuter details of the incident, as given by William of 
 Malmesbury and Matthew of Westminster, though admirably 
 fitted for the purposes of the true ballad-maker, are of a kind 
 which would hardly have suited the somewhat lumbrous dignity 
 of Shenstone's elegiacs. Poor Kenelm at the time of his death 
 was but nine years old. His murderer, the favoured lover of 
 his sister, after making all sure by cutting off his head with a 
 long-bladed knife, had buried head, knife, and body, under a 
 bush in a '' low pasture" in the forest, and the earth concealed 
 its dead. The deed, however, had scarce been perpetrated, 
 when a white dove came flying into old St. Peter's, at Rome, a 
 full thousand miles away, bearing a scroll in its bill, and, 
 dropping the scrull on the high altar, straightway disappeared. 
 And on the scroll there was found inscribed in Saxon charac- 
 ters the following couplet : — 
 
 " In Clent, in Caubage, Kenelm, kinge-bom, 
 Lyeth under a thorn e, his hede ofi'shorne." 
 
 So marvellous an intimation — miraculous among its other par- 
 

 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 171 
 
 ticulars, in the fact that rhyme of such angelic origin should be 
 s<) very bad — though this part of the miracle the monks seem to 
 have missed — was, of course, not to be slighted. The church- 
 men of Mercia were instructed by the pontiff to make diligent 
 s(;arch after the body of the slain prince; and priests, monks, 
 and canons, with the Bishop of Mercia at their head, proceeded 
 forthwith in long procession to the forest. And there, in what 
 Milton, in telling the story, terms a " mead of kine," they found 
 a cow lowing pitifully, beside what seemed to be a newly-laid 
 Bod. The earth was removed, the body of the murdered prince 
 discovered, the bells of the neighbouring churches straightway 
 began " to rongen a peale without mannes helpe," and a beauti- 
 ful spring of water, the resort of many a pilgrim for full seven 
 centuries after, burst out of the excavated hollow. The chapel 
 was erected immediately beside the well; and such was the 
 odour of sanctity which embalmed the memory of St. Kenelm, 
 that there was no saint in the calendar on whose day it was 
 more unsafe to do anything useful. There is a furrow still to 
 be seen, scarce half a mile to the north of the chapel, from 
 which a team of oxen, kept impiously at work during the festival 
 of the saint, ran away, and were never after heard of; and the 
 owner lost not only his cattle, but, shortly after, his eyes to boot. 
 The chapel received gifts in silver, and gifts in gold — " crouns," 
 and " ceptres," and ** chalysses : " there grew up around it, 
 mainly through the resort of pilgrims, a hamlet, which in the 
 times of Edward the First contained a numerous population, and 
 to which Henry the Third granted an annual fair. At length 
 the age of the Reformation arrived ; Henry the Eighth seized 
 on the gold and silver ; Bishop Latimer broke down the well ; the 
 pilgrimages ceased ; the hamlet disappeared ; the fair, after linger- 
 ing on till the year 1784, disappeared also; and St. Kenelm's, 
 save that the ancient chapel still survived, became exactly such 
 a scene of wild woodland solitude as it had been ere the boy- 
 prince fell under the knife of the assassin. The drama of a 
 
172 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 thousand years was over, when, some time about the close of 
 the last century, a few workmen, engaged in excavating the 
 foundations of the ruined monastery of Winchcomb, in which, 
 according to the monkish chroniclers, the body of the young 
 prince had been interred near that of his father, lighted on a 
 little stone coffin, beside a larger, which lay immediately under 
 the great eastern window of the church. They raised the lid. 
 There rested within, a little dust, a few fragments of the more 
 solid bones, a half-grown human skull tolerably entire, and be- 
 side the whole, and occupying half the length of the little coffin, 
 lay a long-bladed knife, converted into a brittle oxide, which fell 
 in pieces in the attempt to remove it. The portion of the story 
 that owed its existence to the monks had passed into a little 
 sun-gilt vapour ; but here was there evidence corroborative of its 
 truthful nucleus surviving still. 
 
 I reached the nearest summit in the Clent range, and found 
 it an oblong grassy level, many acres in extent, bounded on the 
 right by a secluded valley that opens among the hills, with a 
 small stream running through it. The green slopes on both 
 sides of the hollow, for half their heights, from the summits 
 downwards, retain all their old irregularities of surface, un- 
 scarred by plough or harrow: a few green fields, and a few 
 picturesque cottages environed by hedge-rows, with an old mill 
 and mill-pond, occupy the lower declivities and the bottom; 
 and just where the valley opens into the level country we find 
 the little ancient village of Clent, one of the prettiest and most 
 characteristic of all old English villages. It stands half en- 
 wrapped in tall wood, and half embraced by the outstretched 
 arms of the valley, with its ancient time-eaten church rising in 
 the midst, like the central obelisk in a Dniidic circle, and its 
 old, venerable dwellings betimbered with dark oak and belatticed 
 with lead, and much beshrouded in ivy and honeysuckle, scat- 
 tered irregularly around. There were half-a-dozen children at 
 play in the grass-grown street as I passed ; and a gentleman, 
 
p 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 173 
 
 who seemed the clergyman of the place, stood in earnest talk, 
 ai: one of the cottage doors, with an aged matron in a black 
 gown and very white cap ; but I saw no other inhabitants, and 
 scarce any mark of more : no noisy workshops — no stir of busi- 
 n(;ss — nothing doing, or like to be done. Clent, for the last 
 nine hundred years, seems to have had a wonderfid easy life of 
 it — an indolent, dreamy, uncaring, summer-day sort of life. It 
 wjis much favoured by Edward the Confessor, as a curious char- 
 ter, exempting its inhabitants from the payment of tolls at fairs, 
 and from serving as jurors, still survives to show ; and, regarding 
 itself as a village fairly provided for, it seems to have thrust its 
 hands into its pockets at the time, and to have kept them there 
 ever since. Its wood-embosomed churchyard, as might be an- 
 ticipated from its years, seems vastly more populous than its 
 cottages. According to the practice of this part of the country, 
 the newer tombstones are all in deep black, and the lettering in 
 gold : the stones rise thick around the grey old church, half- 
 concealing the sward; and the sun gleaming partially through 
 openings in the tall trees, that run hedge-like round the whole, 
 glistens here and there with a very agreeable effect on the bright 
 letters. It would seem as if the tomb, less gloomy here than 
 elsewhere, was smiling in hope, amid the general quiet. I had 
 come down on the left-hand side of the valley to visit the vil- 
 lage, which I now quitted by ascending the hill on the right, 
 through long hollow lanes, rich in black-berries and ivy, and 
 over which aged trees shoot out their gnarled branches, roughly 
 bearded with moss. The hill-top I found occupied, like that on 
 the other side of the valley, by an uneven plain, covered by a 
 short sward, and thinly mottled with sheep ; and all around to 
 the dim horizon lay, spread out as in a map, the central districts 
 ''•f England, 
 
 One half the prospect from this hill-top is identically that 
 wliich Thomson described from the eminence over Hagley. 
 There stretches away along the horizon a blue line of hills, from 
 
174 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 the Wrekin and the Welsh mountains on the north, to the steep 
 Malvems and the hills that surround Worcester on the south. 
 The other half of the prospect embraces the iron and coal districts, 
 with their many towns and villages, their smelting furnaces, 
 forges, steam-engines, tall chimneys, and pitrfires innumerable; 
 and beyond the whole lies the huge Birmingham, that covers 
 its four square miles of surface with brick. No day, however 
 bright and clear, gives a distinct landscape in this direction ; all 
 is dingy and dark; the iron furnaces vomit smoke night and 
 noon, Sabbath-day and week-day; and the thick reek rises 
 ceaselessly to heaven, league beyond league, like the sulphurous 
 cloud of some never-ending battle. The local antiquary can point 
 out amid the haze a few scenes of historic and literary interest. 
 Yonder church due north, in the middle distance, that seems to 
 lead so unquiet and gloomy a life among the furnaces — a true 
 type of the Church militant — had for its minister, many years 
 ago, one Mr. Thomas Moss, who wrote, amid the smoke, a little 
 poem known to every English reader — " The Beggar's Petition." 
 In an opposite direction there may be seen, when the sun shines, 
 an old building, in which the conspirator Garnet, whose head 
 wrought miracles on the straw amid which it was cast,^ and 
 several of the other Gunpowder Plot conspirators, secreted them- 
 selves for many days in a cavity in the wall. I have already 
 
 1 The miracle of the straw seems to have been considerably less remarkable than the 
 belief in it. A young Jesuit-presumptive, attached to his reverend brother the " Martyr 
 Garnet," had possessed himself, by way of relic, of one of the bloody ears of straw, stained 
 by contact with the gory head, and stored it up in a bottle. Looking at it shortly after, 
 he saw through the glass, on one of the chaff sheathes, the miniature semblance of a 
 human head surrounded by a glory, and called on several of his co-religionists to admire 
 the miracle. It was, however, unsafe in those days for Jesuits to work miracles in Eng- 
 land. Tidings of the prodigy got abroad ; law proceedings were instituted at the instance 
 of the Privy Council ; and though straw, bottle, and Jesuit, had prudently disappeared, 
 witnesses were cited to give evidence in court regarding it ; among the rest, a painter 
 named Bowen. And the painter's testimony was very amusing, and much to the point. 
 He had seen the miniature head on the straw, he said; there could be no doubt of that; 
 but then he had quite as little doubt that he could make as good, or even a better head, 
 on an ear of straw, him.self. And such was the miracle on the faith of which it was held 
 that either Garnet was innocent of the Gunpowder Plot, or the Gunjowder Plot laudable 
 in itself. 
 

 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 175 
 
 referred to the scene of the old British battle, and of the assassi- 
 nation of St. Kenelm, both full in view ; and to the literary re- 
 collections that linger around Hagley and the Leasowes, both 
 full in view also. But the prospect is associated with an im- 
 mensely more ancient history than that of the days of the 
 Komans or of the Heptarchy, and with a literature considerably 
 more modem than that of Lord Lyttelton or Mr. Moss , and it 
 is on this more ancient history, as recorded in tliis more modern 
 literature, that I shall attempt fixing the attention of the reader. 
 When Signor Sarti exhibits his anatomical models, he takes up 
 one cover after another — first the skin, than the muscles, then the 
 viscera, then the great blood-vessels and deeper nerves — until at 
 length the skeleton is laid bare. Let us, in the same way, strip 
 th(} vast landscape here of its upper integuments, coat after coat, 
 beginning first with the vegetable mould — the scarf-skin of the 
 country — ^wherein its beauty lies, with all its fields and hedge- 
 rows, houses and trees; and proceed downwards, cover after, 
 cover, venturing a few remarks on the anatomy of each covering 
 as we go, till we reach those profound depths which carry within 
 their blank folds no record of their origin or history. 
 
 The vegetable mould is stripped away, with all its living in- 
 habitants, animal and vegetable ; man himself has disappeared, 
 with all that man has built or dug, erected or excavated ; and 
 the vast panorama, far as the eye can reach, presents but a dreary 
 wilderness of diluvial clays and gravels, with here a bare rock 
 sticking through, and there a scattered group of boulders. Now, 
 mark a curious fact. The lower clays and gravels in this desert 
 are chiefly of local origin ; they are formed mainly of the rock 
 on which they rest. These quartz pebbles, for instance, so ex- 
 tensively used in this part of the country in causewaying foot- 
 ways, were swept out of the magnesian conglomerate of the 
 Lmoer New Red ; these stiif clays are but re-formations of the 
 saliferous marls of the Upper Red ; these darkened gravels are 
 derived from the neighbouring coal-field ; and yonder grey, 
 
176 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 mud-coloured stratum, mixed up with fragments of limestone, 
 is a deposit from the rather more distant Silurians. But not 
 such the character of the widely-spread upper stratum, with its 
 huge granitic boulders. We may see within the range of the 
 landscape, where all the lower beds have come from ; but no 
 powers of vision could enable us to descry where the granitic 
 boulders and gravels have come from. Strange as the circum- 
 stance may seem, they are chiefly Scotch — travellers, in the re- 
 mote past, from the granitic rocks of Dumfries and Kircud- 
 bright. They lie amid sea-shells of the existing species — the 
 common oyster, the edible cockle and periwinkle, island cyprina, 
 rock-whelk (purpura lapillm), and a host of others of the kind 
 we may any day pick up on our shores. Now, mark the story 
 which they tell. This region of central England was once a 
 broad ocean sound, that ran nearly parallel to St. George's 
 Channel : there rose land on both sides of it : Wales had got 
 its head above water ; so had the Cotteswold Hills in Glouces- 
 tershire ; and not a particle of the Scotch drift is to be found 
 on either side where the ancient land lay. But the drift marks 
 the entire course of the central channel, lying thick in Lanca- 
 shire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, and Worcestershire ; in some 
 localities to the depth of a hundred and fifty feet. And in its 
 present elevation it averages in its course from fifty to five hun- 
 dred feet over the existing sea. This ancient sound seems to 
 have narrowed towards the south, where it joined on to the 
 Bristol Channel ; but such was its breadth where we now stand, 
 that the eye would have failed to discover the eastern shore. 
 Its waves beat against the Malverns on the one side, and the 
 Cotteswold Hills on the other ; it rose high along the flanks of 
 the Wrekin ; the secluded dells of Hagley were but the recesses 
 of a submarine rock, shaggy with sea-weed, that occupied its 
 (central tide-way ; while the Severn, exclusively a river of 
 Wales in those days, emptied its waters into the sea at the 
 Breidden Hills in Montgomeryshire, a full hundred miles from 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 177 
 
 where it now falls into the Bristol Channel. Along this broad 
 sound, every spring, when the northern ice began to break up 
 — for its era was that of the British glacier and iceberg — huge 
 ice-floes came drifting in shoals from the Scottish coast, loaded 
 underneath with the granitic blocks which they had enveloped 
 when forming in firths and estuaries ; and as they floated along, 
 the loosened boulders dropped on the sea-bottom beneath. Here 
 lie scores in the comparatively still water, and there lie hundreds 
 where the conflicting tides dashed fierce and strong. . " In the 
 tract extending from the hamlet of Trescot to the village of Try- 
 sull, in the south-western parts of Staff'ordshire," says Sir 
 Roderick Murchison, " the quantity, and occasionally gigantic 
 dimensions, of" these northern boulders (several tons in weight) 
 may well excite surprise, seeing that they there occupy one of 
 the most central districts of England. Here the farmer is in- 
 cessantly labouring to clear the soil, either by burying them or by 
 piling them up into walls or hedge-banks ; and his toil, like that 
 of Sisyphus, seems interminable ; for in many spots new crops 
 of them, as it were, appear as fast as the surface is relieved from 
 its sterilizing burden. So great, indeed, is their abundance, 
 that an observer unacquainted with the region would feel per- 
 suaded he was approaching the foot of some vast granitic range ; 
 and yet the source of their origin is one hundred and fifty miles 
 distant." 
 
 There are few things that speak more powerfully to the ima- 
 gination of the geologist than the geography of his science. It 
 seems natural to man to identify the solid globe which he inhabits 
 by its great external features, particularly by its peculiar ar- 
 rangement of Continent and Ocean. We at once recognise it 
 in tlie prints of our popular astronomical treatises, as seen from 
 the moon, or through the telescope from some of the more dis- 
 tant planets, by the well-known disposition of its land and 
 water ; and were that disposition made greatly different in the 
 repnisentation, we should at once fail to regard it as the earth 
 
 M 
 
178 FIEST IMPEESSIONS OF 
 
 on which we ourselves reside. It might be some of the other 
 planets, we would say, but not ours. And yet these great fea- 
 tures are exceedingly evanescent, compared with the enduring 
 globe which they diversify and individualize — mere changing 
 mist- wreaths on the surface of an unchanging firmament. The 
 up-piled clouds of one sunset, all gorgeous with their tints of 
 bronze and fire, are not more diverse in place, arrangement and 
 outline, from the streaked and mottled cloudlets of another, 
 radiant in their hues of gold and amber, than the lands and 
 oceans of any one great geologic system from the lands and 
 oceans of the system that had preceded or come after it. Every 
 geologic era has had a geography of its own. The earth, like 
 a child's toy, that exhibits a dozen different countenances peep- 
 ing out in succession from under the same hood, has presented . 
 with every revolution a new face. The highest lands of Asia 
 and Continental Europe formed ocean-beds in the times of the 
 Oolite : the highest lands of our own country were swam over 
 by the fish of the Old Red Sandstone. 
 
 There is much to exercise the imagination in facts such as 
 these, whether one views in fancy the planet as a whole, ever 
 changing its aspect amid the heavens, or calls up more in de- 
 tail the apparition of vanished states of things amid existing 
 scenes of a character altogether diverse — buried continents, for 
 instance, on the blue open sea, or long evanished oceans, far 
 inland, amid great forests and mighty hills. I can well under- 
 stand the feeling experienced by Dr. Friedrich Parrot, as he 
 travelled day after day in his journey to Ararat along the flat 
 bank of the Manech, and saw in the salt marshes and brine lakes 
 of the district irrefragable evidence that a great inland sea, of 
 which the Caspian and the Sea of Aral are but minute fragments 
 — mere detached pools, left amid the general ebb — had once oc- 
 cupied that vast central basin of Asia into which the Volga and 
 the Oxus fall. He was ever realizuig to himself — and deriving 
 much quiet enjoyment from the process — a time when a sea 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLK 179 
 
 without visible shore ocupied, league beyond league, the surround- 
 ing landscape, and picturing in fancy the green gleam of the 
 waves, interposed, cloud-like, between him and the sun. Very 
 similar must be the feelings of the voyager on the great Pacific. 
 We find trace in this ocean of a sinking continent — a continent 
 once of greater area than all Europe — in the act of foundering, 
 with but merely its mast-heads above the water. Great coral 
 reefs, that whiten the green depths league after league and de- 
 gree after degree, for hundreds and thousands of miles, with 
 here and there a tall mountain-peak existing as a surf-engirdled 
 island, are all that remain to show where a " wide continent 
 bloomed," that bad existed as such myriads of ages after the tnie 
 geologic Atlantis had been engulfed. 
 
 It seems more than questionable whether we shall ever arrive 
 at a knowledge approximating to correct, regarding the distribu- 
 tion of ocean and continent in the earlier, or even secondary 
 geologic formations. The Silurian and Old Red Sandstone 
 systems give but few indications of land at all, and certainly no 
 indications whatever of its place or extent. The Coal Measures, 
 on the other hand, puzzle with the multiplicity of their alterna- 
 tions of land and water — in some instances, of sea and land. We 
 know little more than that an ocean deposit forms very generally 
 the base of the system, and that the deep bottom occupied by 
 the sea came afterwards to be a platform, on which great forests 
 sprang up and decayed ; and that amid the broken stumps of 
 these forests, when again submerged, the Holoptychius and Me- 
 galichthys disported. The same sort of obscurity hangs over the 
 geography of the New Bed Sandstone : we but know that land 
 and water there were, from finding, wrapped up in the strata, 
 the plants and reptiles of the one, and the fish and shells of the 
 other. A few insulated facts dawn upon us in the Oolite. 
 Wo ascertain that the Jurassic Alps formed, in those early times, 
 the bottom of the sea — nay, that the cuttle-fish discharged its 
 ink, and the ammonite reared its sail, over the side of the gigantir. 
 
180 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 Himalaya range ; whereas, from the disposition of the Oolitic 
 patches on both the eastern and western coasts of Scotland, it 
 seems at least probable that, in that remote period, this ancient 
 country — "O^c? Scotland" — had got its head and shoulders above 
 water. From the Weald we merely learn that a great river en- 
 tered the sea somewhere near what now forms the south of" 
 England or north of France — a river which drained the waters 
 of some extensive continent, that occupied, it is probable, no 
 small portion of the space now covered up by the Atlantic. It is 
 not at all impossible that the long trails of sea-weed, many fathoms 
 in length, which undulate in mid ocean to the impulses of the 
 gulf stream, and darken the water over an area hundreds of miles 
 in extent, are anchored beneath to what once formed the Rocky 
 Mountains of this submerged America. The Cretaceous system, 
 as becomes its more modern origin, tells a somewhat more dis- 
 tinct story. It formed the bed of a great ocean, which extended 
 from central England to, at least, the shores of the Red Sea, 
 and included within its area considerable portions of France, 
 Spain, Italy, Dalmatia, Albania, and the Horea — a considerable 
 part of Syria, as indicated in the ichthyolitic strata of Lebanon 
 — and large tracts of the great valley of Egypt, as shown by the 
 nummulitic limestone of the pyramids. But the geography of 
 these older formations, whether Palaeozoic or Secondary, cannot 
 be other than imperfect. Any one system, as shown on the 
 geologic map, is but a thing of shreds and patches. Here it 
 occurs as a continuous belt — there as a detached basin — yonder 
 as an insulated outlier; and it is only on these shreds and 
 patches that the geography of each system can be traced, when 
 we can trace it at all. The j&eld of the map in each instance re- 
 sembles one of those dilapidated frescoes of Pompeii, in which 
 by much the greater part of the plaster has fallen from the wall, 
 and we can trace but broken fragments of the picture on the 
 detached bits that remain. The geologic geographer finds himself 
 in the circumstances of. the cod-fishing skipper, who, in going one 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 181 
 
 day, when crossing the Atlantic, to consult his charts, found them 
 reduced to detached tatters, and came on deck in a paroxysm of 
 consternation, to tell his crew that they might put about ship 
 when they pleased, for the rats had eaten Newfoundland. 
 
 With the dawn of the Tertiary ages the fragments greatly ex- 
 tend, and tolerably adequate notions of the arrangements of land 
 and water over wide areas may be formed.^ The reader must 
 have seen Lyell's map of Europe, as Europe existed in the Eocene 
 period — a map constructed mainly on the geologic data of M. 
 A. Bond The land which it exhibits exists as detached groups 
 of islands. There is, first, the British group, little different in 
 form and extent from what it is now, save that the south-eastern 
 comer of England is cut off diagonally, from the Wash to the 
 I«le of Wight ; next the Swedish and Norwegian group, con- 
 
 ' One of the most ingenious pieces of geologic geography to be anywhere met with in 
 tbe literature of the science, may be found in Mr. Charles Maclaren's well-known 
 " Sketch of the Geology of Fife and the Lothians." It occurs as part of a theory of the 
 diluvial phenomena of " Crag and Tail," and appeals with equal eflFect to the reason and 
 imagination of the reader. *' If there has been a good deal of denudation on the east 
 side of Scotland," says Mr. Maclarcn, " there has been much more on the west. The ab- 
 sence of sand-banks on the west coast, the greater depth of the ocean there, the numer- 
 ous and profound ndentations of the land, in the shape of bays, estuaries, and lakes ; the 
 rocky islands, which had once been parts of the mainland ; the removal of so large a 
 part of the red sandstone of Ross and Sutherland, which had once covered a hundred 
 miles of the western coast to the depth of two or three thousand feet, and is now reduced 
 to a few isolated cones — all these facts, with the familiar examples of Crag and Tail, in- 
 dicate that the surface of Scotland has been swept by powerful denuding currents coming 
 from the west. The west coast of England and Ireland also exhibits deep indentations 
 in hi^h rocky land. We find the same appearances in a less marked degree on the coast 
 of Normandy and Brittany in France, and on a still smaller scale upon the west coasts of 
 Spain and Portugal The west coast of Norway is one long line of islands, promontories, 
 and deep fiords — showing that the primary rocks, in spite of their hardness, have been 
 breached in a thousand places by powerful currents. The western coasts of Denmark. 
 Holland, and Belgium, having the British Isles before them as a breakwater, have few 
 indentations, except where laid open by tbe rivers. An effect so general should have a 
 general cause, and perhaps physical geography may afford a clue to it. If the land rose 
 in detached portions, and by successive lifts, from the sea, we may suppose that there was 
 a time vihen the surface of the globe consisted of a great expanse of ocean studded with 
 ishvnds. Such Adolphe Brongniart supposes its condition to have been, at least in Europe, 
 when the Coal Measures were dejKisitcd. In this state of things there would be three 
 great and constant currents — one within the tropics, rimning westward ; and two running 
 euHtward between the tropics and the poles. The trade-winds in the torrid tone, and the 
 prevailing westerly winds in the extra-tropical regions, would alone account for these cur- 
 Tenta. But to these causes must be added the southward course of an imder-current, 
 from the pole, of cold water, with a low velocity of revolution, and tbe northward 
 
182 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 sisting mainly of one great island ; and then a still larger group 
 than either, scattered over the existing area of France, Southern 
 Austria, part of Turkey in Europe, and part of Italy. Running 
 through the midst, there is a broad ocean sound, that stretches 
 across, where it opens into the German Sea, from Norway to 
 Dover, and that then expands in breadth, and sweeps eastwards 
 — covering in its course the beds of the Black and the Caspian 
 Seas — into the great Asiatic basin. And in this Europe of shreds 
 and fragments — of detached clusters of islets, with broad ocean 
 channels flowing between — the strange existences described by 
 Cuvier enjoyed life during the earlier ages of the Tertiary. As 
 we descend towards the present state of things, and lands and 
 seas approximate to their existing relations, the geographic data 
 become more certain. One side of the globe has, we find, its 
 
 course of an upper current, from the equator, of warm water, with a high velocity 
 of revolution. The first would become a westerly current when it reached the tropics ; 
 and the second an easterly current when it reached the temperate zone. Such 
 would be the state of an open ocean from the equator to the north pole ; and, mutatis 
 mutandis, the same description applies to the southern hemisphere. All the three cur- 
 rents, in truth, exist at this day, but enfeebled and metamorphosed by the transverse 
 position of the two great continents. Now, if these currents were acting permanently, 
 and with the force which they would have if little obstructed, their operation, when 
 tracts of land rose above the sea, would be thus : — They would form deep indentations on 
 the east side of inter-tropical, and on the west side of extra-tropical lands ; and, when 
 acting in very favourable circumstances, would form islands, by making breaches through 
 continents, or separating their prominent parts. The boundary between the opposite 
 currents would be between the latitudes of 28° and 30°, where a zone of still water would 
 exist ; and their maximum effort would be near the equator, and within the polar circle. 
 When the land was rising, and near the surface of the water, or partially above it, the 
 currents would produce the phenomena of Crag and Tail. The crag or head would point 
 to the east within the tropics, and to the west in the temperate regions. The current 
 would of course not flow invariably in one precise direction, but be occasionally deflected 
 by high lands to the north or south of its true direction. We must keep in mind alr^o, 
 that though not perhaps very strong, it would be constant : and that transitory storms and 
 hurricanes would generally incorporate themselves with it, and augment its force. A 
 temporary current evidently would not exf)lain the facts. If the same agent swept away 
 the so' id rocks which once environed and covered Arthur's Seat and North Berwick Law, 
 and also deposited the tail of clay and gravel lying behind these mountains, it must have 
 acted for thousands of years. But it is more probable that there were two or more cur- 
 rents at distant epochs. Perhaps New Holland, New Guinea, Borneo, the Philippines, 
 and Spice Islands, may be the remnants of what was once the southern prolongation of 
 the Asiatic continent, and which had been breached and divided by the tropical current 
 before Africa and South America rose from the deep to arrest its free course. The idea, 
 however, is thrown out merely as a conjecture on a subject requiring much additional 
 investigation." 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 183 
 
 vanishing continent — the other its disappearing ocean. The 
 northern portion of our own country presents almost the identi- 
 cal outline which the modern geographer transfers to his Atlas, 
 save that there is here and there a narrow selvedge clipped off 
 and given to the sea, and that while the loftier headlands pro- 
 trude as far as now into the ocean, the firths and bays sweep 
 further inland : but in the southern part of the island the map 
 is greatly different ; a broad channel sweeps onwards through 
 the middle of the land ; and the Highlands of Wales, south and 
 north, exist as a detached, bold-featured island, placed half-way 
 between the coasts of England and Ireland. I found it exceed- 
 ingly pleasant to lie this day on the soft short sward, and look 
 do^^n through the half-shut eye, as the clouds sailed slowly 
 athwart the landscape, on an apparition of this departed sea, now 
 in sunshine, now in shadow. Adventurous keel had never ploughed 
 it, nor had human dwelling arisen on its shores; but I could 
 see, amid its deep blue, as the light flashed out amain, the white 
 gleam of wings around the dark tumbling of the whale and the 
 grampus : and now, as the shadows rested on it dim and sombre, 
 a huge shoal of ice-floes came drifting drearily from the north — 
 the snow-laden rack brushing their fractured summits, and the 
 stormy billows chafing angrily below. 
 
 Was it the sound of the distant surf that was in mine ears, 
 or the low moan of the breeze, as it crept through the neigh- 
 bouring wood 1 Oh, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent 
 since time first began — where has it not been uttered ! There 
 is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless desert, where 
 no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan 
 plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand, and 
 the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But once and again, 
 and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. It is his sands 
 that the winds heap up ; and it is the skeleton remains of hia 
 vassals — shells, and fish, and the stony coral — that the rocks 
 underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall mountain peak 
 
184 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 with its glittering mantle of snow, where the panting lungs 
 labour to inhale the thin bleak air — where no insect murmurs / 
 and no bird flies, and where the eye wanders over multitudinou^ 
 hill-tops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests that sweep oa 
 to the distant horizon, and along long hollow valleys where tie 
 great rivers begin. And yet once and again, and yet again, 
 has the roar of Ocean been there. The efiigies of his more 
 ancient denizens we find sculptured on the crags, where they 
 jut from beneath the ice into the mist-wreath ; and his later 
 beaches, stage beyond stage, terrace the descending slopes. 
 Wliere has the great destroyer not been — the devourer of con- 
 tinents — the blue foaming dragon, whose vocation it is to eat 
 up the land 1 His ice-floes have alike furrowed the flat steppes 
 of Siberia and the rocky flanks of Schehallion ; and his num- 
 mulites and fish lie embedded in great stones of the pyramids, 
 hewn in the times of the old Pharaohs, and in rocky folds of 
 Lebanon still untouched by the tool. So long as Ocean exists 
 there must be disintegration, dilapidation, change : and shoidd 
 the time ever arrive when the elevatory agencies, motionless, 
 and chill, shall sleep within their profound depths, to awaken 
 no more — and should the sea still continue to impel its currents 
 and to roll its waves — every continent and island would at 
 length disappear, and again, as of old, <* when the fountains of 
 the great deep were broken up," 
 
 " A shoreless ocean tumble round the globe." 
 
 Was it with reference to this principle, so recently recognised, 
 that we are so expressly told in the Apocalypse respecting the 
 renovated earth, in which the state of things shall be fixed and 
 eternal, that "there shall be no more sea?" or are we to regard 
 the revelation as the mere hieroglyphic — the pictured shape — of 
 some analogous moral truth*? " Reasoning from what we know" 
 — and what else remains to us 1 — an earth without a sea would 
 be an earth without rain, without vegetation, without life — ^^a 
 
 I 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 185 
 
 dead and doleful planet of waste places, such as the telescope 
 reveals to us in the moon. And yet the Ocean does seem pecu- 
 liarly a creature of time — of all the great agents of vicissitude 
 and change, the most influential and untiring; and to a state 
 in which there shall be no vicissitude and no change — in which 
 the earthquake shall not heave from beneath, nor the mountains 
 wear down and the continents melt away — it seems inevitably 
 necessary that there should be " no more sea." 
 
 But, carried away by the speculation, I lag in my geological 
 suiTey. 
 
186 FTRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 Geological colouring of the landscape — Close proximity in this neighbourhood of the 
 various geologic systems— The Oolite; its medicinal springs; how formed— Chelten- 
 ham — StrathpeflFer — The saliferous system ; its organic remains and foot-prints — 
 Record of curious passages in the history of the earlier reptiles— Salt deposits- 
 Theory — The abstraction of salt from the sea on a large scale probably necessary to 
 the continued existence of its denizens — Lower New Red Sandstone— Great geologic 
 revolution— Elevation of the trap— Hills of Clent ; era of the elevation— Coal Mea- 
 sures; their three forests in the neighbourhood of Wolverhampton — Comparatively 
 small area of the Birmingham coal-field— Vast coal-fields of the United States- 
 Berkeley's prophecy— Old Red Sandstone— Silurian system— Blank. 
 
 Let us now raise from off the landscape another integument 
 — let us remove the boulder clays and gravels, as we formerly 
 removed the vegetable mould, and lay the rock everywhere bare. 
 There is no longer any lack of colour in the prospect ; it re- 
 sembles, on the contrary, a map variously tinted by the geo- 
 grapher, to enable the eye to trace his several divisions, natural 
 or arbitrary. The range of trap-hills which furnishes our peak 
 of survey is of a deep olive green; the New Red Sandstone 
 that spreads out so widely around it, of a bright brick-red. There 
 is a coal-field on either hand — the barren field of the Forest of 
 Wyre, and the singularly productive field of Dudley ; and they 
 both are irregularly chequered black, yellow, and grey. Beyond 
 the Wyre field lies an immense district of a deep chocolate-red 
 tint — a huge development of the Old Red Sandstone. Still 
 further beyond, we may discern in the distance a bluish-grey 
 province of great extent, much broken into hills, which consists 
 of an at least equally huge development of the Silurian ; while, 
 rising over the red saliferous marls in an opposite direction, we 
 may see a series of flat, low-lying rocks of the Oolite system, pass^ 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 187 
 
 ing from a pale neutral tint into a smoky brown and a light 
 straw yellow. In such close proximity are the geological systems 
 in this part of the country, that the geologist who passes the 
 night in Birmingham on the Lower New Red Sandstone, may 
 go and take an early breakfast on the Silurian, the Old Red, 
 the Carboniferous, the Saliferous, or the Oolitic systems, just as 
 he inclines. Good sections, such as our northern sea -coasts 
 fiimish, are all that are wanting to render the locality one of 
 the finest in the kingdom to the student of the stony science ; 
 but these he misses sadly ; and he, alas ! cannot deal with the 
 stubborn integuments of the country in reality, as we are deal- 
 ing with them so much at our ease in imagination on one of 
 the summits of the Clent HilLs. 
 
 The integument that falls to be examined first in order after 
 the boulder drift and the gravels is the Oolitic one; but it 
 occupies merely a comer on the verge of the horizon, and need 
 not engage us long. One remark regarding it, however, though 
 rendered familiar to the geologic reader by the writings of Mur- 
 chison and Mantell, I shall venture to repeat. We have seen 
 how this central district of the kingdom has its storehouses of 
 coal, iron, salt, lime — liberal donations to the wants of the 
 human animal, from the Carboniferous, Saliferous, and Silurian 
 systems ; and to these we must now add its inexhaustible de- 
 posits of medicine — contributions to the general stock by the 
 Oolitic system. Along the course of the Lias, medicinal springs 
 abound; there is no other part of England where they rise so 
 thickly, or of a quality that exerts a more powerful influence 
 on the human frame. The mineral w^aters of Cheltenham, for 
 instance, so celebrated for their virtues, are of the number ; and 
 the way in which they are elaborated in such vast quantities 
 seems to be simply as follows : — They all rise in the Lias — a 
 formation abounding in sulphate of iron, lime, magnesia, lignite, 
 and various bituminous matters ; but they have their origin far 
 buueath, in the saliferous marls of the Upper New Red, which 
 
1 88 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 the Lias overlies. In the inferior formation they are simply 
 brine springs ; but brine is a powerful solvent : passing through 
 the Lias, it acts upon the sulphur and the iron; becomes, by 
 means of the acid thus set free and incorporated with it, a more 
 powerful solvent still; operates upon the lime, upon the mag- 
 nesia, upon the various lignites and bitumens ; and at length 
 rises to the surface, a brine-digested extract of Liassic minerals. 
 The several springs yield various analyses, according to the 
 various rocks of the upper formation which they pass through 
 — some containing more, some less lime, sulphur, iron, magnesia ; 
 but in all, the dissolving menstruum is the same. And such, it 
 would appear, is the mode in which Nature prepares her simples 
 in this rich district, and keeps her medicine-chest ever full. 
 
 Let us trace the progress of a single pint of the water thus 
 elaborated, from where it first alights on the spongy soil in a 
 wintry shower, till where it sparkles in. the glass in the pump- 
 room at Cheltenham. It falls among the flat hills that sweep 
 around the ancient city of Worcester, and straightway buries 
 itself, aU fresh and soft, in the folds of the Upper New Red 
 Sandstone, where they incline gently to the east. It percolates, 
 in its downward progress, along one of the unworkable seams 
 of rock-salt that occur in the superior marls of the formation ; 
 and as it pursues, furlong after furlong, its subterranean journey, 
 savours more and more strongly of the company it keeps; be- 
 comes in succession hard, brackish, saline, briny; and then, 
 many fathoms below the level at which it had entered, escapes 
 from the saliferous stratum, through a transverse fissure, into 
 an inferior Liassic bed. And here it trickles, for many hundred 
 yards, through a pyritiferous shale, on which its biting salts act 
 so powerfully, that it becomes strongly tinctured by the iron 
 oxide, and acidulated by the sulphur. And now it forces its 
 upward way through the minute crevices of a dolomitic lime- 
 stone, which its salts and acids serve partially to decompose ; 
 so that to its salt, iron, and sulphur, it now adds its lime and 
 
f 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 189 
 
 its magnesia. And now it flows through beds of organic re- 
 mains, animal and vegetable — now through a stratum of belem- 
 mt(;s, and now a layer of fish — now beside a seam of lignite, 
 and now along a vein of bitumen. Here it carries along with 
 it a dilute infusion of what had been once the muscular tissue 
 of a crocodile, and here the strainings of the bones of an ichthyo- 
 saurus. And now it comes gushing to the light in an upper 
 Liassic stratum, considerably higher in the geologic scale than 
 the saliferous sandstone into which it had at first sunk, but 
 considerably lower with reference to the existing levels. And 
 now take it and drink it off at once, without pause or breathing 
 space. It is not palatable, and it smells villanously; but never 
 did apothecary mix up a more curiously-compounded draught ; 
 and if it be not as salutary as it is elaborate, the Faculty are 
 sadly in error. 
 
 The underground history of the mineral springs of Great 
 Britain would form an exceedingly curious chapter. I visited, 
 a few weeks since, the springs at Strathpeffer, and explored, as 
 carefully as rather imperfect sections and rather limited time 
 permitted, the geology of the valley. The lower hills that rise 
 ' around it are composed of the great conglomerate base of the 
 Old Red Sandstone system. The denudation of ages has swept 
 every trace of the superior strata from their sides and summits ; 
 but in the sheltered trough of the valley at least one of the 
 overlying beds has escaped. We find laid at length along the 
 hollow bottom, like a pancake in a platter, the lower ichthyolitic 
 bed of the formation, so rich in other parts of the comitry in 
 animal remains, but which exists in this locality as a grey 
 brecciated rock, devoid of visible fossils, but so largely saturat- 
 ed with the organic matter into which they have been resolved, 
 that, when struck by the hammer, the impalpable dust set 
 loose affects very sensibly the organs of taste, and appeals 
 scarce less strongly to those of smell than the swine-stones of 
 England. And it is through this saturated bed that the mineral 
 
190 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 
 waters take their course. Even the upper springs of the valley, 
 as they pass over it, contract, in a sensible degree, its peculiar 
 taste and odour. The dweller on the sea-coast is struck, on 
 entering the pump-room, by the familiarity of the powerful 
 smell which fills the place. It is that of a muddy sea-bottom 
 when uncovered by the ebb. He finds that, whatever else may 
 have changed within the rock since the times of the Lower Old 
 Red Sandstone, the scent of the ancient ooze of this system is 
 exactly what it ever was ; and he drinks the water, convinced, 
 if a geologist, that if man did not come early enough in the 
 day to breakfast on the fish of the Old Red — AcanthodienSy 
 BipterienSj Coccostei, and Pterichthyes — he has at least come 
 quite in time enough to gulp down as medicine an infusion of 
 their juices and their bones. 
 
 We strip ofi" the Liassic integument, " as ye peel the fig when 
 its fruit is fresh;" and it is with the Upper New Red forma- 
 tion, on which the Lias rests — its saliferous marls and vast 
 beds of rock-salt — that we have now to deal. There occurs, 
 among the superior strata of the formation, a bed of variously- 
 coloured sandstone, of little depth, but great horizontal extent, 
 remarkable for containing what, in England at least, is com- 
 paratively rare in the New Red, organic remains. We find it 
 chiefly characterized by an inequilateral bivalve, not larger than 
 a small pea, which conchologists term the Posidonomya ; and 
 by the teeth and ichthyodorulites of fishes : on the surface, too, 
 of some of its ripple-marked slabs, curious records lie inscribed . 
 of the doings of the earlier reptiles. On one large slab in the 
 Warwick Museum, figured by Sir Roderick Murchison, we may 
 see the footprints of some betailed batrachian, that went wad- 
 dling along, greatly at its leisure, several hundred thousand ^ 
 years ago, like the sheep of the nursery rhyme, " trailing its 
 tail behind it." There is a double track of footprints on the 
 flag — those of the right and left feet : in the middle, between 
 the two, lies the long groove formed by the tail; — a groove 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 191 
 
 ontinuous, but slightly zig-zagged, to indicate the waddle. 
 The creature half-way in its course lay down to rest, having 
 apparently not much to do, and its abdomen formed a slight 
 hollow in the sand beneath. In again rising to its feet, it 
 sprawled a little ; and the hinder part of its body, in getting 
 into motion, fretted the portion of the surface that furnished 
 the main fulcrum of the movement, into two wave-like curves. 
 The marks on another slab of the same formation compose such 
 a notice of the doings of one of the earlier chelonians as a pro- 
 vincial editor would set into type for his newspaper, were the 
 reptile My Lord Somebody his patron. The chelonian jour- 
 neyed adown a moist sandy slope, furrowed by ripple-markings, 
 apparently to a watering-place. He travelled leisurely, as be- 
 came a reptile of consequence, set down his fuU weight each 
 step he took, and left a deep-marked track in double line 
 behind him. And yet, were his nerves less strong, he might 
 have bestirred himself j for the southern heavens were dark 
 with tempest at the time, and a thunderous-like shower, scarce 
 a mile away, threatened to wet him to the skin. On it came ; 
 and the large round drops, driven aslant by a gale from the 
 south, struck into the sand like small shot, at an angle of sixty. 
 How the traveller fared on the occasion has not transpired; 
 but clear and palpable it is that he must have been a firm 
 fellow, and that the heavy globular drops made a much less 
 marked impression on the sand consolidated by his tread than 
 when they fell elsewhere on the incoherent surface around him. 
 Such are two of the curious old-world stories recorded on this 
 upper bed of New Red Sandstone ; and there are many more of 
 the same class. A lower bed of light-coloured stone occupies 
 the base of the saliferous system, forming its pavement, and 
 ' parating it from the inferior New Red. And this bed has 
 also its organisms, chiefly vegetable — flabelliform palm-leaves — 
 narrow, slender spikes, resembling those of the gi-asses — and a 
 Peculiarly formed ear-like cone or catkin, termed the echino- 
 
192 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 stachys. And these constitute some of the earliest remains 
 known to the geologist of a flora specifically different from that 
 of the Coal Measures. Interposed between this pavement and 
 the fossiliferous sandstone band above, there occurs a vast 
 thickness of saliferous marls, interstratified with those enormous 
 beds of rock-salt, continuous over wide areas, in which all the 
 salt-mines of England have been excavated, and which now 
 forces upon us, a second time, the problem of the saliferous 
 deposits. The wind-bound shipmaster, detained in port long 
 after the specified day of sailing, takes instruments in the hands 
 of a legal official, and, " protesting against the weather," frees 
 liimself from all risk of prosecution from passenger or super- 
 cargo. I have already, in like manner, entered my protest 
 against the difficulties which environ this subject; and shall 
 now launch into it, shielded by the document against the 
 responsibility of failure, or the odium consequent on entering a 
 wrong port. 
 
 If, in the existing state of things, we seek for phenomena 
 similar in hind to those which produced the Coal Measures, we 
 shall not be disappointed ; but we shall be greatly disappointed 
 if we seek for phenomena not only similar in kind, but also equal 
 in power. An American swamp or a Scotch morass gives us 
 but the equivalent of a single thin seam of coal ; a submarine 
 peat-moss, based on a layer of vegetable mould, and topped by 
 a bed of sea-sand, the equivalent merely of a single thin seam, 
 resting on an earthy shale, and overlaid by a shelly sandstone. 
 Swamp, morass, submerged peat-moss, nay, even if we add to 
 these some river delta, which, like that of the Mississippi, re- 
 ceives the spoils of a wide forest-covered continent, are but 
 slender representatives of even our Scottish coal-field, with its 
 three hundred and eighty-seven successive beds, of which eighty- 
 four are seams of coal. We must be content, in our illustra- 
 tions drawn from the present scene of things, with phenomena 
 similar in kind, without looking for aught corresponding in ex- 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 193 
 
 tent. Even had we now the Carboniferous vegetation, the stiff 
 and rigid earth, grown old, would not exhibit the ever-recurring 
 sinkings, with occasional risings of surface, which buried the 
 lower beds of the Carboniferous system full four thousand feet 
 beneath its upper deposits. Now, in dealing with the Saliferous 
 system, let us content ourselves, as in dealing with the Coal 
 Measures, with simply illustrating the foregone phenomena by 
 phenomena of the existing state of things, apparently similar in 
 kind, though palpably dissimilar in extent and degree. Let us 
 take for granted, as we do in the case of the Carboniferous 
 period, a comparatively flexible state of the earth's crust — fre- 
 , quent sinkings of the surface, with occasional risings, and pro- 
 gressive depositions of matter, that keep pace with the general 
 subsidence. And let us then refer to some of the salt forma- 
 tions of the present time, as illustrative of the way in which, 
 amid greatly more active energies of nature, vastly more enor- 
 mous deposits of this mineral came to be formed ; just as our 
 writers on the Coal Measures refer, on a similar understanding, 
 to existing swamps and mosses. 
 
 We are told by Major Harris, in his "Highlands of Ethiopia," 
 that when on his journey, he reached with his party, near the 
 Abyssinian frontier, a desert valley, occupied by a salt lake, the 
 Bahr Assal, which forms a prolongation of the Gulf of Tadjura. 
 A broad bar of lava had cut off its waters from those of the 
 gulf ; and, fed by no rivers, and exposed in a burning climate 
 to the unmitigated rays of the sun, intensified by reflection 
 IVom hot rocky mountains, they had shrunk into "an elliptical 
 luisin, seven miles in its transverse axis, half-filled with smooth 
 water of the deepest ceralean hue, and half with a solid sheet 
 of glittering, snow-white salt, the offspring of evaporation." 
 Here, at least, was one extensive bed of salt in the forming ; 
 nor is it difficult to conceive how : the work of evaporation 
 completed, and the entire lake rendered a white, solid mass, 
 some general sinking of the surface continued, till the waves of 
 
 N 
 
194 FTEST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 the outer gulf toppled for a time over the lava bar, and then, 
 succeeded, as such sinkings so often were during the Carboni- 
 ferous period, by a slight elevatory movement, might give to it 
 a second supply of brine with which to double its thickness. 
 We find no lava bars in the saliferous sandstone ; but sand 
 bars, raised by the surf on a flat arenaceous coast during a slow 
 and equable sinking of the surface, would meet the emergencies 
 of our theory less clumsily and better. Let us conceive, then, 
 along a range of flat coast, extending from the northern parts of 
 Lancashire to the Bristol Channel, a chain of lagoons, some of 
 lesser, some of larger extent, and separated from the main sea 
 by sand spits or bars raised by the surf ; let us suppose the 
 climate to be at least as warm as that on the African shore of 
 the Red Sea, in which the salt of the Bahr Assal is forming ; 
 let us imagine a subsidence of the land going on, so exceedingly 
 slow and gradual as to be counterbalanced by the deposition of 
 earthy matter taking place in the sea on the one hand — by the 
 crystallization of the salt in the lagoons, fed by occasional sup- 
 plies of salt water on the other — and by the rise of the bar, 
 ever operated upon by the surf, in the line between. A paroxysm 
 of sudden subsidence would, of course, bring the formation of 
 the salt-bed to a close, and cover it up with a stratum of sand 
 or marl ; a slight elevatory movement succeeding the paroxysm 
 would have the eff'ect of rendering the superimposed stratum 
 the foundation of a second lagoon and second bed of salt. Ac- 
 cording as the periods between the elevatory movements and 
 the paroxysms of subsidence were long or short, the beds of 
 salt would be thick or thin. Among the five beds that occur 
 at Stoke Prior, in the vicinity of Droitwich, there is one more 
 than thirty feet in depth, and one not more than six inches. 
 According as the duration of the term of submergence was ex- 
 tended or brief, would be the thickness or thinness of the bars 
 by which the salt-beds were separated. At Stoke Prior, one of 
 these separating bars falls short of three feet, while another 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 195 
 
 Boniewhat exceeds twenty-four. As the lagoons chanced to be 
 well or ill protected from the introduction of extraneous matter, 
 the salt which formed in them would be pure or impure. One 
 of the Stoke Prior beds contains full twenty-five per cent, of 
 reddish marl, while another is so unmixed with earthy matter, 
 that it might be used, without any previous refining prepara- 
 tion, for the purpose of the fish-curer. And thus deposition 
 after deposition would take place, and, as in the Coal Measures, 
 subsidence succeed subsidence, until the entire saliferous system 
 would come to be formed. It has been started as an objection 
 to the lagoon theory, that the salt-beds contain no organic re- 
 mains, which, it is held, they would have done had they owed 
 their origin to sea-water. I am, however, not sure that the 
 objection is particularly sl/rong. Let us remember that the 
 organisms of the entire system in England are but few and ill 
 preserved, and that the marls which alternate with the salt 
 have failed to preserve organisms at all ; while the shells of 
 the superior band occui but as mere casts in an incoherent clay. 
 Let us further remember what takes place in the upper pots 
 and hollows of our rocky shores, when, at the height of a 
 stream-tide, they receive their fill of sea-water mingled with 
 sea-wrack, and are then left during the neaps to present their 
 festering contents undisturbed and undiluted to the influence of 
 the sun. Their waters assume a turbid blue colour and a strong 
 fetid odour, and become in this state so powerful a dissolvent, 
 that a few warm days converts the wrack which they contain 
 into an impalpable mud. Fmlher, it may be deemed a fact 
 worthy of consideration, as at least not hostile to the sea-water 
 theory, that the rock-salt of England contains, like the bilge- 
 ^^ ;iter of these tide-forsaken pots, a considerable admixture of 
 iodine — a substance which enters largely into the composition 
 of the sponges and marine alga). 
 
 Single masses of salt, like those of Cordova, might come to 
 be elaborated by a greatly more simple process. The Mediter- 
 
196 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 ranean is not an intertropical sea ; but what, notwithstanding, 
 would be the probable result were it to be cut off from the 
 Atlantic by some such bar of rock as severed the Bahr Assal 
 from the Gulf of Tadjura ? There is no other inland sea that, 
 in proportion to its extent of surface, receives such scanty con- 
 tributions of river water ; and, to supply the waste of evapora- 
 tion from its million of square miles of surface, its deep throat 
 is continually gulping up the waters of the Atlantic at the rate 
 of many thousand tons hourly. A powerful current flows 
 incessantly inwards through the Straits of Gibraltar, and yet the 
 level within is not more than maintained. Were the Atlantic 
 excluded, the inland sea would of course gradually dry up, until 
 its area had so considerably lessened, that its rivers would be o) 
 themselves sufficient to counterbalance its waste of surface ; an(f 
 were its rivers wanting, as might well be the case had it j' 
 desert of Sahara on its northern, as on its southern side, even 
 its profounder depths of more than a thousand fathoms would 
 in time evaporate, and but enormous beds of salt remain behind 
 It seems not improbable that the loose arenaceous materials c. 
 the New Ked Sandstone may have existed, ere they formed ai) 
 ocean bottom, as the incoherent sands of some geologic Sahara 
 that encircled the inland seas and lagoons of this system, and 
 that a consequent lack of rivers may have operated influentially 
 in the formation of the salt. By the way, may not this pro- 
 cess of separating huge deposits of this mineral from the sea — 
 a process which has been going on, we find, in every formation, 
 from the Onondago salt groUp of the Upper Silurian, as developed 
 in the United States of America, down to the recent salt-lakes 
 of the Asiatic basin — be a provision in nature for preserving to 
 the ocean its proper degree of density and saturation? In the 
 natural course of things, the sea would necessarily be growing 
 Salter and heavier. The waves wash out of every shore, and 
 receive from every river, minute supplies of salt, which evapo- 
 ration has scarce any tendency to dissipate, and which, in the* 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 197 
 
 lapse of ages, would be necessarily accumulating in the waters, 
 till the delicate gills and branchi* of the various inmates, formed 
 with reference to a rarer medium, would labour amid the dense 
 and briny fluid, and their bodies, heretofore of a gravity exactly 
 proportioned to that of their element, but now grown too light 
 for it, would float helplessly a-top.^ True, the salt seems 
 in every instance to have been abstracted and locked up by 
 accident; but then the recurrence of the accident in every 
 geologic formation demonstrates it to be one of those on which 
 the adept in the doctrine of chances might safely calculate. It 
 seems an accident of the fixed class on which Goldsmith bases 
 his well-known reflection in the " Vicar of Wakefield." " To 
 what a fortuitous concurrence," he remarks, " do we not owe 
 every pleasure and convenience of our lives ! How many seem- 
 ing accidents must unite before we can be clothed or fed ! The 
 peasant must be disposed to labour, the shower must fall, the 
 wind fill the merchant's sail, or numbers must want the usual 
 supply." 
 
 And now we strip off the thick saliferous integument of the 
 Upper New Red, with all its marls, rock-salts, and sandstones, 
 and lay bare the lower formation. Within at least the range 
 of our prospect, we shall find in it few marks of organic exist- 
 ence, and these few doubtful and indistinct. Some of the red 
 incoherent sandstones which form its base contain carbonaceous 
 markings, but of a character too obscure to be interpreted ; and 
 we may occasionally detect in the calcareous conglomerate above 
 — its upper member — shells and encrinital stems ; but they occur 
 in merely the enclosed fragments, and belong to the older rocks. 
 And. yet there attaches no little geologic interest to this barren 
 formation : it marks the era of a great change. The rugged 
 conglomerate, which rises so high along the flanks of the hill 
 
 * lodinposition prevented me from hearing Professor Fleming lecture last spring on 
 the 8 tliferouR deposits ; but the idea started here belongH, I am inclined to suspect, to 
 the Professor notwithstanding. I think I mu«>t have received it in conversation fi-om 
 some attendant on the course, who hud enjoyed the pleasure which I unluckily misMd. 
 
198 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 on which we stand, represents in this locality the Magnesian 
 limestone — the formation with which the long-derived and 
 darkly-antique Palaeozoic systems end, and on whose upper plat- • 
 form the first of the Secondary systems begins. A strange 
 shifting of scenes took place on that rough stratum at our feet ; 
 but it would seem as if the theatre had been darkened when 
 the alterative process was going on. The lamps burnt low, and 
 concealed the machinery of the stage. In the long course of 
 geologic history there have been many medals struck — many 
 previous to the time of this revolution, and many after it j but 
 none records the nature of the revolution itself; nor is there 
 geology enough in the world to fill up the gap. It yawns in 
 the middle of the forum, and no one has dared to fling even a 
 plausible conjecture into it. Up till the deposition of that 
 Magnesian stratum had taken place, all the fish of which we 
 possess specimens sufficiently well-preserved to indicate the fact, 
 were characterized by the heterocercal tail — the vertebral 
 column was prolonged into the upper lobe of the caudal fin;^ 
 but with that stratum the peculiarity ceased, and fishes with 
 the homocercal tail of our common osseous varieties took their 
 place. In that Magnesian formation, too, just ere the occur- 
 rence of the revolution, we find the first trace of reptiles. The 
 long drama of the Palaeozoic period, with all its distinct acts, 
 ended with the dethronement of the huge sauroid fish, for untold 
 ages the master-existence of creation ; and the new-born reptile 
 reigned in its stead. We find, too, numerous well-known types 
 of shells, familiar in the older rocks, appearing in this formation 
 for the last time. So far as is yet known, tlie Magnesian Lime- 
 stone contains the last-created species of Producta, and the last- 
 
 1 At the annual general meeting of the Geological Society, held in February last (1846), 
 it was stated by the President, Mr. Horner, in his admirable address, that certain highly 
 characteristic genera of the fishes of the Old Red Sandstone, such as the Coccostem and 
 Pterichthys, do not possess the heterocercal tail. It should hrtve perhaps been added, 
 however, to prevent misconception, that neither do they possess tails of the horn<)ceroal 
 tvpe The form of tail in both cases is quite as unique atnong the auciciit Ganoid order, 
 as that of the tail of the Ray family among existing Placoids. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 199 
 
 created Spirifer.^ We ascertain that these shells continued to 
 exist up till the breaking out of this great geologic revolution, and 
 that then, like some of the extinct French noblesse cut short 
 by the guillotine, they disappear for evermore. And now, raising 
 from off the landscape this curious integument, and setting it 
 aside, as Signor Sarti removes to a side table one of the bits of 
 his figure — a piece of the external skin, mayhap, thickened by 
 its adipose lining, or a well-compacted sheet of muscle and sinew 
 — we lay bare the coal-fields, and the range of trappean emi- 
 nences that broke them up as with wedges, just as their upper 
 strata had been consolidated, and they had received their first 
 thin covering of the Lower New Ked. 
 
 I must, I find, employ, though with considerable modifica- 
 tions, an illustration which I have used at least once before. 
 Here is a small shallow pond, covered over with a thick cake 
 of ice, and with a line of boulders rising in its centre. There 
 have been two frosts and an intervening thaw. Just as the first 
 frost set in, the boulder tops lay under the surface, and the 
 earlier-formed crust of ice stretched over them ; but, as frequently 
 happens when the temperature sinks suddenly below the freezing 
 point, a great shrinking of the water took place : the ice, im- 
 supported from beneath, leaned for a little while on the boul- 
 ders, and then giving way on both sides, half-way between their 
 summits and the shore, and, as a direct consequence, cracking 
 also directly over them, the sunmiits came through, and the 
 ice-sheets lay reclining in masses against them, broken by faults, 
 and shivered by transverse cuttings. At this stage, however, 
 the thaw came on, and encircled with a shallow ring of water, 
 that rose over the depressed surface, the central patch of shivered 
 ice, and the boulders in the midst; and then the second frost 
 •set in, and the shallow liquefied ling became a solid. Now, let 
 
 ' Since this pnnsnge was* written (1845/, a few Spirifers, with a few almost micro- 
 KO])ic Producta, liave been detected in the Lower Liu« ; and trace <>f the reptile h&s been 
 found In the Coal Measures, and even in the upper beds of the Old lied SundBtoue. — 
 . Third Edition. 
 
200 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 US mark the phenomena exhibited. There, first, in the centre 
 of the pond, rises the line of boulders. There is an isolated 
 area all around them — a formation of the earlier frost, much 
 broken by faults; and these radiate from the stones rudely and 
 irregularly, but still, on the whole, distinctly enough to indicate 
 the boulder line as a producing cause of the fracturing and dis- 
 location. And then, around this broken and disjointed area, 
 we find an encircling formation of the latter frost — the solidified 
 ring — in which there are no faults or cuttings, but in which all 
 is undisturbed and entire. Our geological model is now com- 
 plete ; that row of boulders represents the chain of Trap and 
 Silurian hills which runs along the Dudley coal-field, and whose 
 elevation from below has so broken up the formation with long 
 lines of radiating faults and transverse fractures. The fractured, 
 insulated area of the ice of the first frost represents the coal- 
 field itself; the unbroken enveloping ring of the second, the 
 surrounding New Red Sandstone. 
 
 Now, there are several points worthy of notice in this model. 
 Observe, first, that we can ascertain with great certainty, rela- 
 tively at least, at what period the dislocations and fracturings 
 of the central area took place. They occurred at the close, or 
 not long after the close, of the first ice formation, and not later ; 
 for had they taken place during the time of the second ice for- 
 mation, it also would have been broken up, whereas we find it 
 entire. Observe, next, that under the shallow solidified ring of 
 the second frost we may naturally expect to find existing, as a 
 nether stratum, a prolongation of the shattered ice of the first. 
 And founding on exactly this same principle, the New Red 
 Sandstone of this part of the country, i.e., the unfractured ice 
 of the second frost, has been lately pierced through, to get at 
 the Coal Measures, i.e., the fractured ice of the first ; and very 
 valuable though deeply-seated seams of coal have repaid the 
 boldness of the search, and confirmed the justness of the reason- 
 ing. Observe, further, that this broken condition of the coal- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 201 
 
 field, if its surface -^ere bared in the style we have dared to im- 
 cover it from our hill-top, as Asmodeus uncovered the houses 
 of Madrid, would present, viewed from above, a very striking 
 appearance. Of the twelve panes in the window opposite to 
 which I write, by far the most conspicuous is the pane through 
 the centre of which an unlucky urchin sent yesterday a stone. 
 There is a little hole in the middle, from which some fifteen 
 or twenty bright rays proceed, star-like, to every part of the 
 astnigal frame. The ray-like cracks of the coal-field are, of 
 course, wholly obscured by the diluvium and the vegetable 
 mould. A shower of snow — to return to our first illustration — 
 has covered up, with a continuous veil, central boulders, flawed 
 area, and encircling ring, reducing them all to one aspect of 
 blank uniformity ; and we can but dip down upon the cracks 
 and flaws, here the point of a finger, there the end of a stick ; 
 and so, after many soundings have thus been taken, piece out 
 a plan of the whole. It would seem as if, in at least one of 
 the planets to which we point the telescope, there is no such 
 enveloping integument, and the starred and fractured surface 
 remains exposed and naked, like that of the ice of the pond ere 
 the snow-shower came on. Those who have enjoyed the luxury 
 of hearing Professor Nichol of Glasgow lecture on the lunar 
 phenomena, must remember his graphic description of the num- 
 erous ray-like lines, palpable as the cracks in a damaged pane, 
 that radiate in every direction, some of them extending for hun- 
 dreds of miles, from all the larger craters of the moon. 
 
 There are not a few interesting appearances in this Dudley 
 coal-field. Its seams, like those of every other coal-field yet 
 known, have been formed under very various conditions : some 
 of them must have been deposits of vegetable matter washed by 
 rivers into seas or lakes ; some of them seem to have formed in 
 marshy hollows, like our existing peat-mosses, or, if we must 
 seek our analogies from somewhat wanner climates than those 
 ill which peat is elaborated, like; tlie Dismal Swamp of the 
 
202 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 United States ; and some evidently covered as great forests, the 
 sites" which they now occupy as coal seams. There is a colliery 
 about a mile and a half to the south of Wolverhampton, where 
 an outcrop of what is termed the bottom coal is wrought in the 
 open air The surface, in consequence, has been bared of the 
 debris and diluvium, and in one corner the upper plane of a 
 thin seam of coal exposed for about a quarter of an acre. It 
 is found to present exactly the appearance of a moor on which 
 a full-gro\vn fir wood had been cut down a few months before, 
 and only the stumps left behind. Stump rises beside stump, to 
 the number of seventy-three in all : the thick-diverging roots 
 strike out on every side into what had been once vegetable 
 mould, but which now exists as an indurated, brownish-coloured 
 shale. Many trunks, sorely flattened, lie recumbent on the coal, 
 some of them full thirty feet in length, while some of the larger 
 stumps measure rather more than two feet in diameter. There 
 lie thick around, stigmaria, lepidodendra, calamites, and frag- 
 ments of ulodendra ; and yet, with all the assistance which 
 these lent, the seam of coal formed by this ancient forest does 
 not exceed five inches in thickness. It must have required no 
 little vegetable matter to consolidate into the mineral which 
 supplies us, year after year, with our winter fuel : the coal 
 which loads a single large collier would, when it existed as 
 wood, have built many large colliers. Not a few of the stumps 
 in this area are evidently water-worn j and there have been 
 found immediately over them scales of Megaliclithys, and the 
 shells of an Unio, somewhat resembling in form the common 
 pearl muscle of our rivers, but considerably smaller. The pros- 
 trate forest had been submerged, and molluscs lived and fishes 
 swam over it. It is further worthy of notice, that this upper 
 forest is underlaid, at the depth of a few feet, by a second forest, 
 in which the stumps lie as thickly, and are of as great a size, 
 as in the first ; and that this second forest is underlaid, in 
 turn, by the remains of yet a third. We find three full-gi'own 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 203 
 
 forests closely packed up in a depth of not more than twelve 
 feet. 
 
 Once more, ere we wrap up this Carboniferous integument 
 of the landscape, and lay bare the Old Red Sandstone, let us 
 mark to how small a coal-field central England has, for so many 
 years, owed its flourishing trade. Its area, as I have already 
 had occasion to remark, scarcely equals that of one of our larger 
 Scottish lakes ; and yet how many thousand steam-engines has 
 it set in motion — how many railway trains has it propelled 
 across the country — how many thousand waggon-loads of salt 
 has it elaborated from the brine — how many million tons of iron 
 has it furnished, raised to the surface, smelted, and hammered ! 
 It has made Birmingham a great city — the first iron dep6t of 
 Europe ; and filled the country with crowded towns and busy 
 villages. And if one small field has done so much, what may 
 we not expect from those vast basins, laid down by Lyell in the 
 geological map of the United States, prefixed to his recent 
 singularly interesting work of travels 1 When glancing, for the 
 first time, over the three huge coal-fields of the States, each 
 surrounded by its ring of Old Red Sandstone, like patches of 
 mineral bitumen floating in their clay-tinged pools, I called to 
 mind the prophecy of Berkeley, and thought I could at length 
 see, what Berkeley could not, the scheme of its fulfilment. The 
 metaphysical bishop marked the westivard course of empire : he 
 saw Persia resigning the sceptre to Macedonia, and Macedonia 
 yielding it, in turn, to Rome, and to those western nations of 
 Europe that abut on the Atlantic. And at a time when North 
 America was still covered with the primeval forests, he antici- 
 pated an age in which that country would occupy as pre-eminent 
 a place among the nations as had been occupied in other ages 
 l>y Assyria or Rome. Its enormous coal-fields — equal in extent, 
 '^'♦nie of them, to all England, and whose dark seams, exposed 
 to the light for miles, inlay the landscape as with ebony, and 
 impart to it its most striking peculiarity of feature — seem des- 
 
204 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 tined to form no mean element in its greatness. If a patch 
 containing but a few square miles has done so much for central 
 England, what may not fields containing many hundred square 
 leagues do for the United States 1 
 
 " Westward the course of empire takes its way ; 
 The four first acts alroady past, 
 A fifth shall close the drama with the day ; 
 Time's noblest oflFspring is the last." 
 
 And now, stripping off the dark Coal Measures like a pall, 
 we expose the chocolate-coloured beds of the Old Red Sand- 
 stone. In our immediate neighbourhood there is a hiatus in 
 the geologic series — the Carboniferous system rests on the 
 Silurian ; but westwards, and on the south-west, we may see 
 the Old Red Sandstone stretching away in enormous develop- 
 ment. As estimated by a practised eye — that of Sir Roderick 
 Murchison — its entire thickness in this part of the country falls 
 little short of ten thousand feet. Here, as everywhere else, it 
 seems chiefly remarkable for its strange forms of the vertebrate 
 animals, exclusively fish. The upper Old Red formation, so 
 rich in Scotland in the remains of Holoptychius, Platygnathm, 
 Bothriolepisj and their contemporaries, is comparatively barren 
 in England. The middle formation, however, we find mottled 
 with ichthyolitic fragments, representative of the two great 
 orders of fish in which, at this early period, and for long ages 
 after, all vertebrate existence was comprised. Fragments of the 
 ichthyodorulites of Placoids are not unfrequent ; and the occi- 
 pital plates of the Ganoid Cephalaspides abound. The true, 
 fish seems to have overspread and taken full possession of the 
 seas during the deposition of this system, as the Trilobite had 
 taken possession of them in the preceding one. But we hasten 
 on : the thick Old Red coils up and away, like a piece of old 
 elastic parchment that had been acquiring for ages the set of the 
 roll ; and now the still more ancient Silurian system occupies 
 the entire prospect. In this system the remains of the verte- 
 brate animals first appear — few and far between, and restricted, 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 205 
 
 go far as is yet known, to its great upper division exclusively. 
 We pass hurriedly downwards. The vertebrata vanish from 
 creation. We have traced the dynasty to its first beginnings ; 
 and now an ignobler though more ancient race of kings occupy 
 the throne. We have reached in our explorations, the dynasty 
 of the Crustacea. In all creation, as it exists in this period of 
 dusk antiquity, we see nothing that overtops the Trilobite, with 
 his jointed mail of such exquisite workmanship, and his pro- 
 minent eye of many facets, that so capriciously refuses to a4mit 
 the light through more or less than just its four hundred and 
 ten spherical lenses. The Cephalopoda, indeed, may have held 
 with him a divided empire ; but the Brachiopoda, the Ptero- 
 poda, the Gasteropoda, and the Acephala, must have been un- 
 resisting subjects, and all must have been implicit deference 
 among the Crinoidea, the Pennularia, the Corals, and the 
 Sponges. As we sink lower and lower, the mine of organic 
 existence waxes unproductive and poor : a few shells now and 
 then appear, a few graptolites, a few sponges. Anon we reach 
 the outer limits of life : a void and formless desert stretches 
 beyond, and dark night comes down upon the landscape. 
 
 Library. 
 
 J>f 0»llfhf nV» 
 
 I 
 
206 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 Birmingham ; incessant clamour of the place — Toy-shop of Britain ; serious character of 
 the games in which its toys are chiefly employed — Museum — Liberality of the scien- 
 tific English— Musical genius of Birmingham — Theory — Controversy with the Yorkers 
 — Anecdote — The English language spoken very variously by the English ; in most 
 cases spoken very ill — English type of person — Attend a Puseyite chapel — Puseyism 
 a feeble imitation of Popery — Popish cathedral — Popery the true resting-place of the 
 Puseyite — Sketch of the rise and progress of the Puseyite principle : its purposed 
 object not attained; hostility to science — ^English funerals. 
 
 The sun had set ere • I entered Birmingham through a long 
 low suburb, in which all the houses seemed to have been built 
 during the last twenty years. Particularly tame-looking houses 
 they are ; and I had begun to lower my expectations to the 
 level of a flat, mediocre, three-mile city of brick — a sort of 
 manufactory in general, with offices attached — when the coach 
 drove up through New Street, and I caught a glimpse of the 
 Town Hall, a noble building of Anglesea marble, of which 
 Athens in its best days might not have been ashamed. The 
 whole street is a fine one. I saw the lamps lighting up under 
 a stately new edifice — the Grammar School of King Edward 
 the Sixth, which, like most recent erections of any pretension, 
 either in England or among ourselves, bears the mediaeval stamp : 
 still farther on I could descry, through the darkening twilight, 
 a Roman-looking building that rises over the market-place ; 
 and so I inferred that the humble brick of Birmingham, singu- 
 larly abundant, doubtless, and widely spread, represents merely 
 the business necessities of the place ; and that, when on any 
 occasion its taste comes to be displayed, it proves to be a not 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 207 
 
 •worse taste than that shown by its neighbours. What first 
 struck my ear as peculiar among the noises of a large town — 
 and their amount here is singularly great — ^was what seemed to 
 be somewhat irregular platoon firing, carried on, volley after 
 volley, with the most persistent deliberation. The sounds came, 
 I was told, from the " proofing-house " — an iron-lined building, 
 in which the gun-smith tests his musket-barrels, by giving them 
 a quadruple charge of powder and ball, and then, after ranging 
 them in a row, firing them from outside the apartment by means 
 of a train. Birmingham produces on the average a musket 
 per minute, night and day, throughout the year : it, besides, 
 furnishes the army with its swords, the navy with its cutlasses 
 and pistols, and the busy writers of the day with their steel 
 pens by the hundredweight and the ton ; and thus it labours to 
 deserve its name of the " Great Toy-shop of Britain," by fashion- 
 ing toys in abundance for the two most serious games of the 
 day — the game of war and the game of opinion-making. 
 • On the morrow I visited several points of interest connected 
 ^\ ith the place and its vicinity. I found at the New Cemetery, 
 on the north-western side of the town, where a party of Irish 
 labourers were engaged in cutting deep into the hill-side, a 
 good section, for about forty feet, of the Lower New Ked 
 Sandstone; but its only organisms — carbonized leaves and 
 Klems, by much too obscure for recognition — told no distinct 
 I story ; and so incoherent is the enclosing sandstone matrix, that 
 the labourers dug into it with their mattocks as if it were a 
 bank of clay. I glanced over the Geological Museum attached 
 to the Birmingham Philosophical Institution, and found it, 
 thijugh small, beautifully kept and scientifically arranged. It 
 has its few specimens of New Red Sandstone fossils, chiefly 
 Posidonomj/ay from the upper sandstone band which overlies 
 the saliferous marls; but their presence in a middle place here, 
 between the numerous fossils of the Carboniferous and Oolitic 
 systems, serves but to show the great poverty in organic 
 
208 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 remains of the intermediate system, as developed in England. 
 Though of course wholly a stranger, I found free admission to 
 both the Dudley and Birmingham Museums, and experienced, 
 with but few exceptions, a similar liberality in my visits to all 
 the other local collections of England which fell in my way. 
 We have still great room for improvement in this respect in 
 Scotland. We are far behind at least the laymen of England — 
 its liberal mechanicians and manufacturers, and its cultivators of 
 science and the arts — in the generosity with which they throw 
 open their collections ; and resemble rather that portion of the 
 English clergy who make good livings better by exhibiting 
 their consecrated places — not too holy, it would seem, to be 
 converted into show-boxes — for paltry twopences and groats. 
 I know not a museum in Edinburgh or Glasgow, save that of 
 the Highland Society, to which a stranger can get access at 
 once so ready and so free as that which I obtained, in the 
 course of my tour, to the Newcastle, Dudley, Birmingham, and 
 British Museums. 
 
 Almost all the larger towns of England manifest some one 
 leading taste or other. Some are peculiarly literary, some 
 decidedly scientific; and the taste paramount in Birmingham 
 seems to be a taste for music. In no town in the world are 
 the mechanical arts more noisy : hammer rings incessantly on 
 anvil; there is an unending clang of metal, an unceasing clank 
 of engines ; flame rustles, water hisses, steam roars, and from 
 time to time, hoarse and hollow over all, rises the thunder of 
 the proofing-house. The people live in an atmosphere con- 
 tinually vibrating with clamour; and it would seem as if their 
 amusements had caught the general tone, and become noisy 
 like their avocations. The man who for years has slept soundly 
 night after night in the neighbourhood of a foundry, awakens 
 disturbed if by some accident the hammering ceases : the im- 
 prisoned linnet or thrush is excited to emulation by even the 
 screeching of a knife-grinder's wheel or the din of a copper- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 209 
 
 iltli's .slu)[), and pours out its soul in music. It seems not 
 vciy improbable that the two principles on which these pheno- 
 mena hinge — principles as diverse as the phenomena them- 
 selves — may have been influential in inducing the peculiar 
 characteristic of Birmingham; that the noises of the place, 
 grown a part of customary existence to its people — inwrought, 
 as it were, into the very staple of their lives — exerts over 
 them some such unmarked influence as that exerted on the 
 sleeper by the foundry ; and that, when they relax from their 
 labours, they seek to fill up the void by modulated noises, first 
 caught up, like the song of the bird ])eside the cutler's wheel 
 or coppersmith's shop, in unconscious rivalry of the clang of 
 their hammers and engines. Be the tmth of the tlieoiy vv'Jiat 
 it may, there can be little doubt regarding the fact on which it 
 hinges. No town of its size in the empire spends more time 
 
 1 money in concerts and musical festivals than Birmingham ; 
 small [)roportion of its people are amateur performers ; 
 
 uost all are musical critics; and the organ in its great hall, 
 property of the town, is, with scarce the exception of that 
 
 York, the largest in the empire, and the finest, it is said, 
 
 liout any exception. But on tliis last point there hangs a 
 
 ■n controversy. 
 
 The Yorkers contend that their organ is both the greater 
 
 I the finer organ of the two; whereas the Birminghamers 
 rt, on the contrary, that theirs^ though it may not measure 
 
 >re, plays vastly better. " It is impossibh;," retort the 
 rkers, " that it can play even equally well; nay, were it 
 
 II as large and as fine an organ — which it is not — it would 
 inferior by a half and more, unless to an instrument such 
 ours you could add a Minster such as ours also." " Ah," 
 )in the Birminghamers, "fair play! organ to organ: you 
 ' coming Yorhhlre over us now : the building is not in the 
 (^ at issue. You are surely conscious your instrument, single- 
 11 (led, is no match for ours, or you would never deem it 
 
210 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 necessary to back it in this style by so imposing an auxiliary." 
 But the argument of the York controversialists I must give in 
 their own words : — " It is worse than idle in the Birmingham 
 people," say the authors of the " Guide to York Minster," 
 " to boast of their organ being unrivalled: we will by and by 
 show how much it falls short of the York organ in actual size. 
 But even were their instrument a facsimile of ours, it would 
 not avail in a comparison ; for it would still lack the building, 
 which, in the case of our magnificent cathedral, is the better 
 half of the organ after all. In this, old Ebor stands unrivalled 
 among all competitors in this kingdom. Even in the noble 
 cathedrals that are dispersed through the country, no equal can 
 be found to York Minster in dimensions, general proportions, 
 grandeur of effect to the eye, and the sublimity and mellowness 
 which it imparts to sound. It is true, indeed, that such a 
 building requires an instrument of vast power to fill it with 
 sound ; but when it is filled, as with its magnificent organ it 
 now is, the effect is grand and affecting in the highest degree; 
 and yet there are in this organ many solo stops of such beauti- 
 fully vocal, soft, and varied qualities of tone, as actually to 
 require (as they fascinatingly claim) the closest attention of the 
 listener. We beg it to be clearly understood that we have not 
 the slightest intention of depreciating the real merits of the 
 Birmingham organ, as it is confessedly a very complete and 
 splendid instrument; but when we notice such unscrupulous 
 violations of truth as have been so widely disseminated, we 
 deem it a duty incumbent upon us to set the public right." 
 
 That I might be the better able to take an intelligent part in 
 so interesting a controversy — a controversy in which, considering 
 the importance of the point at issue, it is really no wonder 
 though people should lose temper — I attended a musical meet- 
 ing in the Town Hall, and heard the great organ. The room — 
 a very large one — was well filled, and yet the organ was the sole 
 performer; for so musical is the community, that night after 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 211 
 
 night, though the instrument must have long since ceased to be 
 a novelty, it continues to draw together large audiences, who sit 
 listening to it for hours. I have unluckily a dull ear, and, in 
 order to enjoy music, must be placed in circumstances in which 
 I can draw largely on the associative faculty : I must have airs 
 that breathe forth old recollections, and set me a-dreaming ; and 
 so, though neither Yorker nor Birminghamer, I may be deemed 
 no competent authority in the organ controversy. I may, how- 
 ever, at least venture to say, that the Birmingham instniment 
 makes a considerably louder noise in its own limited sphere than 
 that of York in the huge Minster j and that I much preferred 
 its fine old Scotch melodies — though a country maiden might 
 perhaps bring them out more feelingly in a green holm at a 
 claes-Ufting — to the " great Psalm-tune" of its rival. When 
 Hstening, somewhat awearied, to alternations of scientific music 
 and the enthusiastic plaudits of the audience, I bethought me 
 of a Birmingham musical meeting which held rather more than 
 a century ago, and of the especial plaudit through which its 
 memory has been embalmed in an anecdote. One of the pieces 
 performed on the occasion was the " II Penseroso" of Milton 
 set to music ; but it went on heavily, till the well-known couplet 
 ending 
 
 " Iron tears down Pluto's cheek " 
 
 at once electrified the meeting. "Iron tears!" "Iron tears!" 
 Could there be anything finer or more original? Tears made 
 of iron were the only kind of iron articles not manufactured in 
 Birmingham. 
 
 I ^^sited the Botanic Gardens in the neighbourhood, but found 
 them greatly inferior to those of Edinburgh ; and made several 
 short excursions into the surrounding country, merely to ascer- 
 tain, as it proved, that unless one extends one's walk some ten 
 or twelve miles into the Dudley, Hagley, Droitwich, or Hales 
 Owen districts, there is not a great deal worth seeing to be seen. 
 Still, it was something to get the eye familiarized with the ex- 
 
212 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 tenials of English life, and to throw one's-self in the way of 
 those chance opportunities of conversation with the common 
 people, which loiterings by the lanes and road-sides present. 
 My ear was now gradually becoming acquainted with the several 
 varieties of the English dialect, and my eye with the peculiarities 
 of the English form and countenance. How comes it that in 
 Great Britain, and I suppose, everywhere else, every six or eight 
 square miles of area, nay, every little town or village, has its 
 own distinguishing intonations, phrases, modes of pronunciaticjn, 
 in short, its own style of speaking the general language, almost 
 always sufficiently characteristic to mark its inhabitants'^ 
 Tliere are not two towns or counties in Scotland that speak 
 Scotch after exactly the same fashion ; and I now found in the 
 sister country, varieties of English quite as marked, parcelled out 
 into geographical patches as minute. In workmen's barracks, 
 where parties of mechanics, gathered from all parts of the coun- 
 try, spend the greater part of a twelvemonth together at a time, 
 I have, if I ndstake not, marked these colloquial peculiarities in 
 the forming. There are few men who have not their set phrases 
 and forms of speech, acquired inadvertently, in most cases at 
 an early period, when the habit of giving expression to their 
 ideas is in the forming — phrases and set forms which they learn 
 to use a good deal oftener than the necessities of their thinking 
 require; and I have seen, in the course of a few months, the 
 peculiarities of this kind of some one or two of the more intel- 
 ligent and influential mechanics of a party, caught all un^^it- 
 tingly by almost all its members, and thus converted, to a con- 
 siderable extent, into peculiarities of the party itself; and pecu- 
 liar tones, inflections, modes of pronunciation, at first, mayhap, 
 chance-derived seem at least equally catching. A single stnt- 
 tering boy has been known to infect a whole class ; and no 
 young person, with the imitative faculty active within him, ever 
 spent a few months in a locality distant from his home, without 
 bringing back with him, on his return, a sensible twang of 
 
EI-TGLAMD AND ITS PEOPLE. 213 
 
 its prevalent intouations and idioms. Of com*se, wlien tlie 
 lansjiiage of a town or district difters greatly from that of the 
 M>ral standard of the country, or very nearly approximates to 
 there must have been some original cause of the peculiarity, 
 eh imparted aim and object to the imitative faculty. For 
 ijistance, the Scotch spok(;n in Aberdeen differs more from the 
 pure English standard than that of any other town in Scotland ; 
 whcireas the Scotch spoken in Inverness, if Scotch it may l>e 
 called, most nearly approximates to it; and we may detect a 
 producmg cause in both cases. The common dialect of Inver- 
 ness, though now acquired by the ear, was originally, and that 
 at no very remote period, the book-taught English of an edu- 
 cated Celtic people, to whom Gaelic was the mother tongue ; 
 while in Aberdeen — one of the old seats of learning in the 
 country, and which seems to have been brought, in compara- 
 tively an early age, under the influence of the ancient Scotch 
 literature — the language of Barbour ^ and Dunbar got a firm 
 lodgment among the educated classes, which, from the remote- 
 ness of the place, the after influence of the English Court served 
 but tardily to afl'ect. Obviously, in some other cases, the local 
 peculiarity, when it involves a marked departure from the ex- 
 isting standard, has to be traced, not to literature, but to the 
 want of it. But at least the great secondaiy cause of all such 
 pinndiarities — the invariable, ever-operative cause in its own 
 sulH)rdinate place — seems to be that faculty of unconscious imi- 
 tation univei-sally developed in the species, which the philosophic 
 Hume deemed so actively operative in the formation of national 
 cliaiacter, and one of whose si)ecial vocations it is to transfer 
 personal traits and characteristics from leading, influential indi- 
 viduals, to septs and communities. Next to the degree of sui- 
 piise that a stranger feels in England that the language should 
 be 8])oken so variously by the peoj)lo, is that of wonder that it 
 should in most cases be spoken so ill. Lord Nugent, in remark- 
 
 ^ Barbour was Archdi-acou of Abcrdeeu. 
 
214 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 ing, in his " Lands Classical and Sacred," that " the English lan- 
 guage is the one which, in the present state of the habitable 
 globe — what with America, India, and Australia — ^is spoken by 
 tlie greatest number of people," guards his statement by a sly 
 proviso ; that is, he adds, if we recognise as English " what 
 usually passes for such in most parts of Scotland and the United 
 States." Really, his Lordship might not have been so particu-. 
 lar. If the rude dialects of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and North- 
 umberland, stand muster as part and parcel of the language 
 written by Swift and Addison, and spoken by Burke and Boling- 
 broke, that of old Machar and Kentucky may be well suiSered 
 to pass. 
 
 I had entered a considerable way into England ere I was 
 struck by the peculiarities of the English face and figure. There 
 is no such palpable difference between the borderers of North- 
 umberland and those of Roxburghshire, as one sometimes marks 
 in the inhabitants of contiguous counties in Scotland itself ; no 
 such difference, for instance, as obtains between the Celtic popu- 
 lation of Sutherland, located on the southern side of the Ord 
 Hill, and the Scandinavian population of Caithness, located on 
 its northern side. But as the traveller advances on the mid- 
 land counties, the English cast of person and countenance be- 
 comes very apparent. The harder frame and thinner face of 
 the northern tribes disappear shortly after one leaves Newcastle ; 
 and one meets, instead, with ruddy, fleshy, compactly-built Eng- 
 lishmen, of the true national type. There is a smaller develop- 
 ment of bone ; and the race, on the average, seem less tall ; 
 but the shoulders are square and broad, the arms muscular, and 
 the chest full ; and if the lower part of the figure be not always 
 in keeping with the upper, its inferiority is perhaps rather an 
 effect of the high state of civilization at which the country has 
 arrived, and the consequent general pursuit of mechanical arts 
 that have a tendency to develop the arms and chest, and to 
 leave the legs and thighs undeveloped, than an original pecu- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLR 215 
 
 liarity of the EDglish as a race. The English type of face and 
 person seems peculiarly well adapted to the female countenance 
 and figure ; and the proportion of pretty women to the popula- 
 tion — women with clear fair complexions, well-turned arms, 
 soft features, and fine busts — seems very great. Even the not 
 xery feminine employment of the naileresses of Hales Owen, 
 though hereditary in their families for generations, has failed to 
 render their features coarse or their forms masculine. To my 
 eye, however, my countiymen — and I have now seen them in 
 almost every district of Scotland — ^present an appearance of 
 lugged strength which the English, though they take their place 
 .'iinong the more robust European nations, do not exhibit ; and 
 1 find the carefully-constructed tables of Professor Forbes, based 
 m a large amount of actual experiment, corroborative of the im- 
 [iression. As tested by the dynamometer, the average strength 
 ' ^" the full-grown Scot exceeds that of the full-grown English- 
 m by about one-twentieth — to be sure, no very great dif- 
 r.rence, but quite enough in a prolonged contest, hand to hand, 
 and man to man, with equal skill and courage on both sides, 
 decidedly to turn the scale. The result of the conflict at 
 V.i.nnockburn, where, according to Barbour, steel rung upon 
 
 : iiiour in hot close fight for hours, and at Otterburn, where, 
 i I' cording to Froissart, the English fought with the most ob- 
 stinate bravery, may have a good deal liinged on this purely 
 })hysical difference. 
 
 I attended public worship on the Sabbath, in a handsome 
 
 lapel, in connexion with the Establishment, which rises in 
 ;iri outer suburb of the town. There were many conversions 
 taking place at the time from Puseyism to Popery ; almost 
 < veiy newspaper had its new list; and as I had learned that 
 
 ' e clergyman of the chapel was a high Puseyite, I went to 
 
 luaint myself, at first hand, with the sort of transition faith 
 
 tliat was precipitating so much of the altered Episcopacy of 
 
 i'ugland upon Rome. The clergyman was, I was told, a 
 
216 Fiu.sT i-viruKssioNS of 
 
 charitable, benevolent man, who gave the poor proportionally 
 much out of his little — for his living was a small one — and 
 who was exceedingly diligent in the duties of his office ; but 
 his congregation, it was added, had sadly fallen away. The 
 high Protestant part of it had gone off when he first became 
 decidedly a Puseyite ; and latterly, not a few of his warmer 
 friends had left him for the Popish Cathedral on the other 
 side of the town. The hive ecclesiastical had cast off its two 
 swarms — its best Protestants and its best Puseyites. I saw 
 the clergyman go through the service of the day, and deemed 
 his various Puseyitic emendations rather poor things in a pic- 
 torial point of view. They reminded me — for the surrounding 
 atmosphere was by much too clear — of the candle-light deco- 
 rations of a theatre, when submitted to the blaze of day, in all 
 the palpable rawness of size and serge, ill-jointed carpentry, and 
 ill-ground ochre. Tliey seemed sadly mis-timed, too, in coming 
 into being in an age such as the present ; and reminded one of 
 maggots developed into flies by artificial heat amid the chills of 
 winter. The altar stood in the east end of the building ; there 
 was a golden crucifix inwrought in the cloth which covered it; 
 and directly over, a painting of one of our Saviour's miracles, 
 and a stained window. But the tend ensemble was by no means 
 striking ; it was merely fine enough to make one miss something 
 finer. The clergyman prayed with his back to the people ; but 
 there is nothing grand in the exhibition of a back where a face 
 should be. He preached in a surplice, too ; but a surplice is a poor 
 enough thing in itself, and in no degree improves a monotonous 
 discourse. And the appearance of the congregation was as little 
 imposing as that of the service : the great bulk of the people 
 seemed drowsily inattentive. The place, like a bed of residuary 
 cabbage-plants twice divested of its more promising embryos, 
 had been twice thinned of its earnestness — first of its Protes- 
 tant earnestness, which had flowed over to the meeting-house 
 and elsewhere — next of its Puseyite earnestness, which had 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 217 
 
 driobled out into the Cathedral : and there had been little else 
 left to it than a communit}^ of what I shall venture to term cat- 
 Christians — people whose attachments united them, not to the 
 clergyman or his doctrines, but simply, like those of the domestic 
 cat, to the walls of the building. The chapel contained the 
 desk from which their banns had been proclaimed, and the font 
 in which their children had been baptized ; and the comer in 
 which they had sat for so many years was the only corner any- 
 where in England in which they could fairly deem themselves 
 " at church." And zo there were they to be found. Sabbath 
 after Sabbath, regardless of the new face of doctrine that flared 
 upon them from the pulpit. The sermon, though by no means 
 striking as a piece of composition or argument, was fraught with 
 its important lesson. It inscribed the " Do this and live " of 
 the abrogated covenant, so congenial to the proud confidence of 
 the unsubdued human heart, on a substratum of that lurking 
 fear of unforgiving trespass, not less natural to man, which 
 suggests the mediation of the merely human priest, the merit 
 of penance, and the necessity of the confessional It represented 
 man as free to will and work out his own salvation ; but ex- 
 hilited him also as a very slave, because he had failed to will 
 and to work it. It spoke of a glorious privilege, in which all 
 jiivsent had shared — the privilege of being converted through 
 1 ajttism ; but left every one in doubt whether, in hU individual 
 I >(', the benefit had not been greatly more than neutralized by 
 isgression since committed, and whether he were not now in 
 ;i:i immensely more perilous state of reprobation than if he had 
 IK \ er been convetied. Such always is the vaulting liberty of a 
 
 M^ theology, when held in sincerity. Its liberty invariably 
 
 >\(Tleap8 itself, and falls on the other side." It i^ a liberty 
 which "gendereth to bondage." 
 
 I next visited the Popish Cathedral, and there I found in 
 ]'• rfection all that Pusoyism so palpably wanted. What perhaps 
 
 : .struck was the air of real belief — of creduliiv all awake 
 
 I. 
 
218 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 and earnest — which characterized the congregation. The mind, 
 as certainly as the body, seemed engaged in the kneelings, the 
 bowings, the responses, the crossings of the person, and the 
 dippings of the finger-tip in the holy water. It was the harvest 
 season, and the passages of the building were crowded with 
 Irish reapers — a ragged and many-patched assemblage. Of the 
 corresponding class in England and Scotland, Protestantism has 
 no hold — they have broken loose from her control ; but Popery 
 in Ireland has been greatly more fortunate : she is peculiarly 
 strong in the ignorant and the reckless, and formidable in their 
 possession. In the services of the Cathedral everything seemed 
 in keeping. The altar, removed from the congregation by an 
 architectural screen, and enveloped in a dim obscurity, gave evi- 
 dence, in its picturesque solemnity — its twinkling lights and its 
 circling incense — that the church to which it belonged had fully 
 mastered the principles of effect. The musically modulated 
 prayer, sounding in the distance from within the screen — the 
 imposing procession — the mysterious genuflexions and frequent 
 kneelings — the sudden music, rising into paroxysms of melody 
 in the crises of the passing ceremony — the waving of the smoking 
 censer — the tolling of the great bell at the elevation of the 
 host — all spoke of the accumulative art of more than a thousand 
 years. The trick of scenic devotion had been well caught- - 
 the theatric religion that man makes for himself had been skil- 
 fully made. The rites of Puseyism seem but poor shadows in 
 comparison — mere rudimentary efforts in the way of design, that 
 but serve to beget a taste for the higher style of art. I did not 
 wonder that such of the Puseyites of the chapel as were genuine 
 admirers of the picturesque in religion should have found their 
 way to the Cathedral. 
 
 In doctrine, however, as certainly as in form and ceremony, 
 the Eomish Church constitutes the proper resting-place of the 
 Puseyite. The ancient Christianity, as it exists in the Anglican 
 Church, is a mere inclined slide, to let him down into it. It 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 219 
 
 furnishes him with no doctrinal resting-place of its own. In 
 every form of Christianity in which men are earnest, there must 
 exist an infallibility somewhere. By the Episcopalian Protest- 
 ant, as by the Presbyterian, that infallibility is recognised as 
 resting in the Scriptures ; and by the consistent Papist that 
 infallibility is recognised as resting in the Church. But where 
 does the infallibility of the Puseyite rest 1 Not in the Scrip- 
 tures; for, repudiating the right of private judgment, he is 
 necessarily ignorant of what the Scriptures truly teach. Not in 
 tradition ; for he has no trustworthy guide to show him where 
 tradition is right, or where wrong. Not in his church ; for his 
 church has no voice ; or, what amounts to exactly the same 
 thing, her voice is a conflicting gabble of antagonistic sounds. 
 Now one bishop speaks after one fashion — now another bishop 
 speaks after another — and anon the Queen speaks, through the 
 '(••^lesiastical courts, in tones differing from them all. Hence 
 the emphatic complaint of Mr. Ward, in the published letter in 
 tt'hich he assigns his reasons for entering the communion of 
 tvi»nie: — " He can find," he says, "no teaching" in the English 
 I'hurch ; and, repudiating, as he does, the right of private 
 udgment, there is logic in his objection. " If we reverence," 
 le argues, " the fact of the apostolicity of creeds on the author- 
 ty of the English Church, so far as we do not believe the 
 lish Church to be infallibly directed, exactly so far we do 
 believe the creeds to be infallibly true." Consistent Pusey- 
 can find its desiderated infallibility in Rome only. 
 The rise and progress of this corruption in the Church of 
 'iii^dand promises to form a curious episode in the ecclesiastical 
 ^ory of the age. It is now rather more than ten years since 
 > iiiggism, yielding to the pressure of re-invigorated Popery, 
 nppressed the ten Irish bishoprics, and a body of politic church- 
 'i met to deliberate how best, in the future, such deadly 
 ressions on their cluirch might be warded off. They saw 
 imwieldy bulk lymg in a state of sjucope before the spoiler ; 
 
220 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OE 
 
 and concluded that the only way to save was to rouse and ani* 
 mate her, by breathing into her some spirit of life. Unless they 
 succeeded in stirring her up to defend herself, they found de- 
 fence would be impracticable ; it was essential to the protection 
 of her goods and chattels that she should become a living soul, 
 too formidable to be despoiled ; and, in taking up their line of 
 policy, they seem to have set themselves as coolly to determine 
 respecting the nature and kind of spirit which they should 
 breathe into her, as if they were a conclave of chemists deliber- 
 ating regarding the sort of gas with which a balloon was to be 
 inflated. I'hey saw two elements of strength in the contempo- 
 rary churches, and but two only — the Puritanic and the Popish 
 element; and, making their choice between them, they selected 
 the Popish one, as that with which the Church of England 
 should be animated.^ On some such principle, it would seem, 
 as that through which the human body is enabled to resist, by 
 means of the portion of the atmospheric air within, the enor- 
 mous pressure of the atmospheric air without, strength was 
 sought in an internal Popery from the pressure of the aggressive 
 Popery outside. An extensive and multifarious machineiy was 
 set in motion, in consequence of the determination, with the 
 scarce concealed design of '^ unprotestantizing the Enghsh 
 Church." Ceremonies less imposing than idle were introduced 
 into her services; altars displaced at the Reformation were 
 again removed to their prescribed site in the east ; candles were 
 lighted at noon-day; crucifixes erected; the clergyman, after 
 praying with his back to the people, ascended the pulpit in his 
 surplice to expatiate on the advantages of the confessional, and 
 the real presence in the sacrament ; enticing pictures were held 
 up to the suffering poor of the comforts and enjoyments of their 
 
 1 1 am far from asserting here that they had it as much in their power to avail them- 
 selves of the Puritanic as of the Popish element; or yet that if they had, any mere con- 
 siderations of policy would have led them to adopt it. As shown by such publicationB as 
 Keble's "Sacred Year," and Froud's " Remains," the current of tendency in the English 
 Church had beirim to flow for several years previous in a mediaeval channel, and the 
 members of this meeting had already got afloat on the stream. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 221 
 
 class in the middle ages; and the pew-battle was fought for 
 tlieni, that they might be brought under the influence of the 
 revived doctrines. To the aristocracy, hopes were extended of a 
 K turn to the old state of implicit obedience on the part of the 
 )]»le, and of absolute authority on the part of the people's 
 I >r(ls. The whole artillery of the press was set in requisition — 
 f Vnm the novelette and poem for the young lady, and the tale 
 ; the cliild, to the high-priced review for the curious theologian, 
 d the elaborate '' Tract for the Times." Nay, the first journal 
 tlie world was for a season engaged in advocating the designs 
 of the party. And the exertions thus made were by no means 
 f iiitless. The unprotestantizing leaven introduced into the mass 
 the English Establishment began to ferment, and many of 
 clergy, and not a few of the laity, were infected. 
 f)ut there was a danger in thus animating with the Popish 
 iit the framework of the English Church, on which the ori- 
 Mitors of tlie scheme could not have fully calculated. It has 
 11 long held in Scotland as one of the popular superstitions 
 I lie country, that it is a matter of extreme danger to simulate 
 ith or personate the dead. There is a story told in the far 
 th of a young fellow, who, going out one night, wrapped in 
 Aiiiding-sheet, to frighten his neighbours, was met, when 
 -lug through the parish churchyard, by a real ghost, that 
 isted, as their vocation was the same, on their walking to- 
 iler; and so terrible, says the story, was the shock which 
 young fellow received, that in a very few days he became a 
 i ghost too. There is another somewhat similar story told of 
 id who had, at a lyke-wake, taken the place of the corpse, 
 h the intention of rising in the middle of the night to terrify 
 watchers, and was found, when a brother wag gave the 
 •cd signal, deaf to time; for in the interval he had become 
 true a corpse as the one whose stretching -board he had 
 nptid. Now, the original Puseyites, in dressing out their 
 ical brethren in the cerements of Popery, and setting them 
 
222 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 a-walking, could hardly have foreseen that many of them were 
 to become the actual ghosts which they had decked them to 
 simulate. They did not know that the old Scotch superstition, 
 in at least its relation to them, was not an idle fancy, but a 
 sober fact ; and that these personators of the dead were them- 
 selves in imminent danger of death. Some suspicion of the 
 kind, however, does seem to have crossed them. Much that is 
 peculiar in the ethics of the party appears to have been framed 
 with an eye to the uneasinesses of consciences not quite seared, 
 when bound down by the requirements of their position to pro- 
 fess beliefs of one kind, and by the policy of their party to pro- 
 mulgate beliefs of another — to be ostensibly Protestant, and yet 
 to be instant in season and out of season in subverting Protest- 
 antism ; in short, in the language of Mr. Ward, " to be Anglican 
 clergymen, and yet hold Roman Catholic doctrine." But the 
 moral sense in earnest Puseyism is proving itself a too tender 
 and sensitive thing to bear with the morality which politic 
 Puseyism, ere it gathered heat and life, had prepared for its 
 use. It finds that the English Church is not the Church of 
 Rome — that the Convocation is not the Vatican, nor Victoria 
 the Pope — that it is not honest to subvert Protestantism under 
 cloak of the Protestant name, nor to muster in its ranks, and 
 eat its bread, when in the service of the enemy. And so Pusey- 
 ism, in its more vital scions, is fast ceasing to be Puseyism. 
 The newspapers still bear their lists of conversions to Rome; 
 and thus the means so invidiously resorted to of strengthening 
 the English Establishment against Popery, is fast developing 
 itself into a means of strengthening Popery at the expense of 
 the English Establishment. 
 
 The influence on science of this mediaeval Christianity, s^ 
 strangely revived, forms by no means the least curious part of 
 its history. It would appear as if the doctrine of authority, as 
 taught by Puseyism and Popery — the doctrine of a human in- 
 fallibility in religious matters, whetlier vested in Popes, Councils, 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 
 
 223 
 
 or Churches — cannot co-exist in its integrity, as a real belief, 
 with the inductive philosophy. It seems an antagonist force ; 
 for wherever the doctrine predominates, the philosophy is sure 
 to decline. The true theologic counterpart to the inductive 
 scheme of Bacon is that Protestant right of private judgment, 
 which, dealing by the Word of God, as the inductive philosophy 
 deals by the works of God, involves as its principle what may 
 be termed the inductive philosophy of theology. There is cer- 
 tainly nothing more striking in the history of the resusci- 
 tation of the mediaeval faith within the English Church, than 
 its marked hostility to scientific truth, as exhibited in the great 
 educational institutions of England. Every product of a sound 
 philosophy seems disappearing under its influence, like the fruits 
 and flowers of the earth when the chilling frosts of winter set 
 in. But it is impossible to state the fact more strongly than 
 it has been already stated by Mr. Lyell, in his lately published 
 "Travels in America." "After the year 1839," he says, "we 
 may consider three-fourths of the sciences still nominally taught 
 at Oxford to have been virtually exiled from the University. 
 The class-rooms of the professors were some of them entirely, 
 others nearly deserted. Chemistry and botany attracted, be- 
 tween the years 1840 and 1844, from three to seven students ; 
 geometry, astronomy, and experimental philosophy, scarcely 
 more ; mineralogy and geology, still taught by the same pro- 
 fessor who, fifteen years before, had attracted crowded audi- 
 ences, from ten to twelve ; political economy still fewer ; even 
 Dcient history and poetry scarcely commanded an audience ; 
 Dd, strange to say, in a country with whose destinies those of 
 ndia are so closely bound up, the first of Asiatic scholars gave 
 stures to one or two pupils, and these might have been absent, 
 not the cherished hope of a Boden scholarship for Sanscrit 
 nduced them to attend." I may state, in addition, on the best 
 athority, that the geological professor here referred to — Dr. 
 uckland — not only one of the most eminent masters of his 
 
22 1: FIRST IMPRESSIOXS OF 
 
 scieuco, but also one of the most popular of its exponents, lec- 
 tured, duiiiig his last course, to a class of three. Well may it 
 be asked whether the prophecy of Pope is not at length on the 
 eve of fulfilment : — 
 
 " She comes ! she comes ! the sable throne behold. 
 Of Night primeval and of Chaos old, 
 As, one by one, at dread Medea's strain. 
 The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain — 
 As Argus' eyes, by Hermes' wand oppres,--ed, 
 Close one by one in everlasting rest. 
 Thus, at her felt approach find secret might, 
 Art after art goes out, and all is night." 
 
 The anti-scientific influences of the principle have, however, 
 not been restricted to the cloisters of the University. They 
 have l>een (creeping of late over the surface of English society, 
 as that suljjhurous fog, into which the arch-fiend in Milton 
 traiKslornu'd liimself when he sought to dash creation into chaos, 
 crept of old over tlie surface of Eden. The singularly extended 
 front of opposition presented last autumn by the newspaper 
 press of England to the British Association, when holding its 
 sittings at Southampton, and the sort of running fire kept up 
 for weeks after on its more distinguished members — men such 
 as Sir Roderick Murchison, Dr. Buckland, and Mr. Lyell — seem 
 to have been an indirect consequence of a growing influence in 
 the country <ni tlie part of the revived superstition. One of 
 the earli<^st assaults made on the Association, as hostile in its 
 nature and tendencies to religion, appeared several years ago iu 
 the leading organ of Tractarianism, the "British Critic;" but 
 the " Critic " in those days stood much alone. Now, however, 
 thougli no longer in the field, it has got not a few successors in 
 t]i6 work, and its party many an active ally. The mediaeval 
 miasma, originated in the bogs and fens of Oxford, has been 
 blown aslant over the face of the country ; and not only religious 
 but scientific truth is to experience, it would seem, the influence 
 of its poisonovLs bliglits and rotting mildews. 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 225 
 
 it is not difficult to conceive liow the revived superstition of 
 the middle ages should bear no good- will to science or its insti- 
 tutions. Their influences are naturally antagonistic. The in- 
 ductive scheme of interrogating nature, that takes nothing for 
 granted, and the deferential, submissive scheme, that, in ecclesi- 
 astical matters, yields wholly to authority, and is content though 
 nothing should be proved, cannot well co-exist in one and the 
 same mind. " I believe because it is impossible," says the de- 
 vout Medisevalist ; " I believe because it is demonstrable," says 
 the solid Baconian. And it is scarce in the nature of things 
 that one and the same individual should be a Baconian in one 
 portion of his mind and a Medisevalist in another — that in 
 whatever relates to the spiritual and ecclesiastical he should 
 take all on trust, and hi whatever relates to the visible and 
 mat(3rial, believe nothing without evidence. The Bactunian state 
 of mind is decidedly anti mediaeval ; and hence the avowed 
 Pustiyite design of unprotestantizing the English Church finds a 
 scarce more determined enemy in the truth elicited by the en- 
 lightened and well-directed study of the Word of God, than in 
 the habit of mind induced by the enlightened and well-directed 
 study of the works of God. Nor is it in any degree matter of 
 wonder that modern Tractarianism should on this principle be 
 an especial enemy of the British Association — an institution 
 rendered peculiarly provoking by its peripatetic propensities. 
 It takes up the empire piecemeal, by districts and scpiares, and 
 works its special efl'orts on the national mind much in the way 
 that an agriculturist of the modem school, by making his sheep- 
 fold walk bit by bit over the area of an entire moor, imparts 
 »uch fertility to the soil, that the dry unproductive heaths and 
 mosses wear out and disappear, and the succulent grasses si)ring 
 up instead. A similar Association located in London or Edin- 
 burgh would be, to borrow from Dr. Chalmers, a scientific in- 
 iitut(5 on merely the aUractive scheme : men in whom the love 
 jf science had been already excited would seek it out, and 
 
226 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 derive profit and pleasure in that communion of congenial 
 thought and feeling which it created ; but it could not be re- 
 garded as a great intellectual machine for the production of 
 men of science, and the general formation of habits of scientific 
 inquiry. But the peripatetic character of the Association con- 
 stitutes it a scientific institute on the aggressive system. It 
 sets itself down every year in a new locality ; excites attention ; 
 awakens curiosity ; furnishes the provincial student with an 
 opportunity of comparing the fruits of his researches with those 
 of labours previously directed by resembling minds to similar 
 walks of exploration ; enables him to test the value of his dis- 
 coveries, and ascertain their exact degrees of originality ; above 
 all, brings hundreds around him to experience an interest they 
 never felt before in questions of science ; imparts facts to them 
 never to be forgotten, and habits of observation not to be re- 
 linquished ; in short, communicates to all its members a dis- 
 position of mind exactly the reverse of that indolent and passive 
 quiescence of mood which Puseyism so strongly inculcates by 
 homily and novelette, on at least its lay adherents. Truly, it 
 is by no means strange that the revived principle, and those 
 organs of the public press which it influences, should be deter- 
 mined enemies of the British Association. It is, however, but 
 just to add, that Tractarianism and its myrmidons have not 
 been the only assailants. Tractarianism first raised the fog, 
 but not a few good simple people of the opposite party have 
 since got bewildered in it ; and, through the confusion incident 
 on losing their way, they have fallen in the quarrel into the 
 ranks of their antagonists, and have been doing battle in their 
 behalf^ 
 
 On quitting the Puseyite chapel, I met a funeral, the first I 
 had seen in England. It was apparently that of a person in 
 the middle walks, and I was a good deal struck with its dis- 
 
 1 As shown by the a saults on the Association of such organs of the Low Church party 
 »s the Dublin " Statesman " and London " Record." 
 
Rift 
 
 I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 227 
 
 lilarity, in various points, to our Scotch funerals of the same 
 class. The coffin of planed elm, finished off with all the care 
 usually bestowed on pieces of household furniture made of the 
 commoner forest hardwood, was left uncoloured, save on the 
 edges, which, like those of a mourning card, were belted with 
 black. There was no pall covering it ; and instead of being 
 borne on staves, or on the shoulders, it was carried, basket-like, 
 by the handles. An official, bearing a gilded baton, marched 
 in front ; some six or eight gentlemen in black paced slowly 
 beside the bearers ; a gentleman, and lady, in deep mourning, 
 walked arm in arm at the coffin-head ; and a boy and girl, also 
 arm in arm, and in mourning, came up behind them. Such 
 was the English funeral — one of those things which, from their 
 familiarity, are not described by the people of the country to 
 whi(ih they belong, and which prove unfamiliar, in consequence, 
 to tlie people of other countries. On the following Monday I 
 took an outside seat on a stage-coach, for Stratford-on-Avoii. 
 
228 FTSST IMPKES3I0NS OP 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 Drive from Birmingham to Stratford rather tame — Ancient building in a modern-looking 
 street; of rude and humble appearance — "The Immortal Shakspere born in this | 
 house" — DescTiption of the interior— The walls and ceiling covered with names — | 
 Albums— Shakspere, Scott, Dickens ; gi-eatly different in their intellectual statmre, 
 but yet all of one family — Principle by which to take their measure— No dramatist 
 ever draws an intelloct taller than his own — Imitative faculty — The R ports of Dickens 
 — ^Learning of Shakspere— New Place— The Rev, Francis Gastrall— Stratford Church 
 — The poeb'-'-^grave; his bust; far superior to the idealized representations— The 
 Avon — The- jubilee, and Oowper's description of it — The true hero-worship — Quit 
 Straford for Olney — Get into bad company by the way— Gentlemen of the Fancy — 
 Adventure. 
 
 The drive from Birmingham, for the greater part of the way, 
 is rather tame. There is no lack of fields and hedge-rows, 
 houses and trees ; but from the great flatness of the coimtry, 
 they are doled out to tlie eye in niggardly detail, at the rate of 
 about two fields and three hedge-rows at a time. Within a few 
 miles of Stratford-on-Avon, however, the scenery improves. We 
 are still on the Upper New Red Sandstone, and on this forma- 
 tion the town is built : but the Lias beyond shoots out, just in 
 the line of our route, into a long promontory, capped by two 
 insulated outliers, that, projected far in advance, form the outer 
 piquets of the newer and higher system ; and for some four or 
 five miles ere we enter the place, we coast along the tree-mottled 
 shores of this green headland and its terminal islands. A scat- 
 tered suburb introduces us to a rather commonplace-looking 
 street of homely brick houses, that seem as if they had all been 
 reared within the last half centuiy; all, at least, save one, a 
 rude, unsightly specimen of the oak-framed domicile of the days 
 of Elizabeth and James. Its v^^alls are incrusted with staring 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. . 229 
 
 ||jhite-\vash, its beams carelessly daubed over with lamp-black ; 
 lideserted butcher's shop, of the fifth-rate class, with the hooks 
 still sticking in the walls, and the sill-board still spread out, as 
 i if to exhibit the joints, occupies the ground-floor ; the one 
 upper storey contains a single rickety casement, with a forlorn 
 flower-pot on the sill ; and directly in front of the buildmg 
 there is what seems a rather clumsy signboard, hung bet\yeen 
 two poles, that bears on its weather-beaten surface a double line 
 of white faded letters on a ground of black. We read the in- 
 scription, and this humblest of dwellings — humble, and rather 
 vulgar to boot — rises in interest over the palaces of kings :- — 
 " The immortal Shakspere was born in thi^^'house." I shall 
 first go and see the little corner his birthplacefi^id, and then 
 the little comer his burial-place : they are scarce half a mile 
 ai)art ; nor, after the lapse of more than two centuries, does the 
 intervening modicum of time between the two events, his birth 
 and his burial, bulk much larger than the modicum of space 
 that separates the respective scenes of them ; but how marvel- 
 lously is the world filled with the cogitations which employed 
 that one brain in that brief period ! Could it have been some 
 four pounds' weight of convoluted matter, divided into two hemi- 
 spheres, that, after originating these buoyant immaterialities, 
 projected them upon the broad current of time, and bade them 
 sail onwards and downwards for ever? I cannot believe it : 
 the sparks of a sky-rocket survive the rocket itself but a very 
 •;w seconds. I cannot believe that these thoughts of Shak- 
 i[)ere, " that wander through eternity," are the mere sparks of 
 --:i exploded rocket — the mere scintillations of a little galvanic 
 attery, made of fibre and albumen, like that of the torpedo, and 
 .viiose ashes would now lie in the comer of a snuff'-box. 
 
 I passed through the butclier's shop, over a broken stone 
 avement, to a little gloomy kitchen behind, and then, under 
 1 large of the guide, up a dark narrow stair, to the low-browed 
 uom in wliich the poet was born. The floor of old oak, much 
 
230 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 worn in the seams, has apparently undergone no change since ^ 
 little Bill, be-frocked and be-booted in woollen prepared from 
 the rough material by the wool-comber, his father, coasted it 
 along the walls, in bold adventure, holding on, as he went, by 
 tables and chairs. The ceiling, too, though unluckily covered 
 up by modern lath and plaster, is in all probability that which 
 stretched over the head of the boy. It presents at least no 
 indication of having been raised. A man rather above the 
 middle size may stand erect under its central beam with his hat 
 on, but with certainly no room to spare; and it seems more 
 than probable that, had the old ceiling been changed for another, 
 the new one would have been heightened. But the walls have 
 been sadly altered. The one window of the place is no longer 
 that through which Shakspere first saw the light; nor is the 
 fireplace that at which he stealthily lighted little bits of stick, 
 and twirled them in the air, to see the fiery points converted 
 into fiery circles. There are a few old portraits and old bits of 
 furniture, of somewhat doubtful lineage, stuck round the room ; 
 and, on the top of an antique cabinet, a good plaster cast of 
 the monumental bust in the church, in which, from its greater 
 accessibility, one can better study than in the original the ex- 
 ternal signs affixed by nature to her mind of largest calibre. 
 Every part of the walls and ceiling is inscribed with names. 
 I might add mine, if I chose, to the rest, the woman told me ; 
 but I did not choose it. Milton and Dryden would have added 
 theirs ; he, the sublimest of poets, who, ere criticism had taken 
 the altitude of the great writer whom he so fervently loved and 
 admired, could address him in the fondness of youthful enthu- 
 siasm as "my Shakspere;" and he, the sympathetic critic, who 
 first dared to determine that '' of all modern, and perhaps ancient 
 poets, Shakspere had the largest and most comprehensive soul." 
 Messrs Wiggins and Tims, too, would have added their names ; 
 and all right. They might not exactly see for themselves what 
 it was that rendered Shakspere so famous; but their admira- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 231 
 
 tion, entertained on trust, would be at least a legitimate echo of 
 his renown ; and so their names would have quite a right to be 
 there as representative of the outer halo — the second rainbow, 
 if I may so express myself — of the poet's celebrity. But I was 
 ashamed to add mine. I remembered that I was a writer; that 
 it was my business to write — to cast, day after day, shavings 
 from oJBf my mind — the figure is Cowper's — that went rolling 
 away, crisp and dry, among the vast heap already on the floor, 
 and were never more heard of; and so I didn't add my name. 
 The woman pointed to the album, or rather set of albums, which 
 form a record of the visitors, and said her mother could have 
 turned up for me a great many names that strangers liked to 
 look at ; but the old woman was confined to her bed, and she, 
 considerably less at home in the place, could show me only a 
 few. The first she turned up was that of Sir Walter Scott ; 
 the second, that of Charles Dickens. " You have done remark- 
 ably well," I said ; " your mother couldn't have done better. 
 Now, shut the book." 
 
 It was a curious coincidence. Shahspere, Scott, Dickens! 
 The scale is a descending one; so is the scale from the lion to 
 the leopard, and from the leopard to the tiger cat; but cat, 
 leopard, and lion, belong to one great family; and these three 
 poets belong unequivocally to one great family also. They are 
 generically one; masters, each in his own sphere, not simply of 
 the art of exhibiting character in the truth of nature — for that 
 a Hume or a Tacitus may possess — but of the rarer and more 
 difiicult dramatic art of making characters exhibit themselves. 
 It is not uninstructive to remark how the peculiar ability of 
 portraying character in tliis form is so exactly proportioned to 
 the general intellectual power of the writer who possesses it. 
 No dramatist, whatever he may attempt, ever draws taller men 
 than himself : as water in a bent tube rises to exactly tlie same 
 height in the two limbs, so intellect in the character produced 
 ris(;s to but the level of the intellect of the producer. Milton's 
 
 talB 
 
232 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 fiends, with all their terrible strength and sublimity, are but 
 duplicates of the Miltonic intellect united to vitiated moral 
 natures; nor does that august and adorable being, who perhaps 
 should not have been dramatically introduced into even the 
 '' Paradise Lost," excel as an intelligence the too daring poet by 
 whom He is exhibited. Viewed with reference to this simple 
 rule, the higher characters of Scott, Dickens, and Shakspere, 
 curiously indicate the intellectual stature of the men who pro- 
 duced them. Scott's higher characters possess massive good 
 sense, gi'eat shrewdness, much intelligence : they are always 
 very superior, if not always great men ; and by a careful arrange- 
 ment of drapery, and much study of position and attitude, they 
 play their parts wonderfully well. The higher characters of 
 Dickens do not stand by any means so high ; the fluid in the 
 original tube rests at a lower level ; and no one seems better 
 aware of the fact than Dickens himself. He knows his proper 
 walk ; and, content with expatiating in a comparatively humble 
 province of human life and character, rarely stands on tiptoe, 
 in the vain attempt to portray an intellect taller than his own. 
 The intellectual stature of Shakspere rises, on the other hand, 
 to the highest level of man. His range includes the loftiest 
 and the lowest characters, and takes in all between. There was 
 no human gi'eatness which he could not adequately conceive and 
 portray ; whether it was a purely intellectual greatness, as in 
 Hamlet ; or a purely constitutional greatness — forceful and 
 massive — as in Coriolanus and Othello ; or a happy combina- 
 tion of both, as in Julius Csesar. He could have drawn with 
 equal effect, had he flourished in an after period, the Lord Pro- 
 tector of England and the Lord Protector's Latin Secretary; 
 and men would have recognised the true Milton in the one, and 
 the genuine Cromwell in the other. 
 
 It has frequently occurred to me, that the peculiar dramatic 
 faculty — developed so prominently in these three authors, that, 
 notwithstanding their disparities of general intellect, we regard 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 233 
 
 • it tis constituting their generic stamp, and so range them to- 
 gether in one class — seems, in the main, rather a humble one, 
 when dissociated from the auxiliary faculties that exist in the 
 mind of genius. Like one of our Scotch pebbles, so common 
 in some districts in their rude state that they occur in almost 
 every mole-hill, it seems to derive nearly all its value and beauty 
 from the cutting and the setting. A Shakspere without gemus 
 would have been merely the best mimic in Stratford. He would 
 have caught every peculiarity of character exhibited by his neigh- 
 bours — every little foible, conceit, and awkwardness — every 
 singularity of phrase, tone, and gesture. However little heeded 
 when he spoke in his own character, he would be deemed worthy 
 of attention when he spoke in the character of others ; for what- 
 ever else his viva voce narratives might want, they would be at 
 least rich in the dramatic ; men would recognise in his imita- 
 tions peculiarities which they had failed to remark in the 
 originals, but which, when detected by the keen eye of the 
 mimic, would delight them as " natural, though not obvious ;'* 
 and though perhaps regarded not without fear, he would, at all 
 events, be deemed a man of infinite anmsement. But to this 
 imitative faculty — this mere perception of the peculiarities that 
 confer on men the stamp of individuality — there was added a 
 world-wide invention, an intellect of vast calibre, depths un- 
 sounded of the poetic feeling, with a breadth of sympathy which 
 embraced all nature ; and the aggregate was a Shakspere. I 
 have seen this imitative ability, so useless in the abstract, ren- 
 dered valuable by being set in veiy humble literary attainment 
 — that of the newspaper reporter ; and have had to estimate 
 at a different rate of value the respective reports of gentlemen 
 of the press, equal in their powers of memory and in general 
 acquirement, and unequal merely in the degree in which they 
 possessed the imitative faculty. In the reports of the one class 
 I have found but the meaning of tlie speakers ; in those of 
 the other, both the meaning and the speakers too. Dickens, 
 
234 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 ere he became the most popular of living English authors, must 
 have been a first-class reporter ; and the faculty that made 
 him so is the same which now leads us to speak of him in the 
 same breath with Shakspere. Bulwer is evidently a man of 
 greater reflective power ; but Bulwer, though a writer of novels 
 and plays, does not belong to the Shaksperian genius. Like 
 those dramatists of English literature that, maugre their play- 
 writing propensities, were not dramatic — the Dry dens and 
 Thomsons of other days — he lacks the imitative power. By 
 the way, in this age of books, I marvel no bookseller has 
 ever thought of presenting the public with the Bow Street 
 reports of Dickens. They would form assuredly a curious work 
 — not less so, though on a different principle, than the Parlia- 
 mentary reports of Dr. Samuel Johnson. 
 
 No one need say what sort of a building the church of 
 Stratford-on-Avon is : no other edifice in the kingdom has half 
 so often employed the pencil and the burine. I may just re- 
 mark, however, that it struck me at a little distance, rising 
 among its graceful trees, beside its quiet river, as one of the 
 finest old English churches I had yet seen. One passes, in 
 approaching it from the poet's birthplace, through the greater 
 part of Stratford. We see the town-hall, a rather homely 
 building — the central point of the bizarre Jubilee Festival of 
 1769 — ^with a niche in front, occupied by a statue of Shak- 
 spere, presented to the town by David Garrick, the grand 
 master of ceremonies on the occasion. We then pass a lane, 
 which leads down to the river, and has a few things worth 
 looking at on either hand. There is an old Gothic chapel on 
 the one side, with so ancient a school attached to it that it 
 existed as such in the days of the poet's boyhood ; and in this 
 school, it is supposed, he may have acquired the little learning 
 that served fairly to enter him on his after-course of world-wide 
 attainment. Little, I suppose, would have served the purpose : 
 a given knowledge of the alphabet, and of the way of com- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 235 
 
 poiiiiding its letters into words as his premises, would have 
 enabled the little fellow to work out the rest of the problem 
 for liimself. There has been much written on the learning of 
 Shakspere, but not much to the purpose : one of our old 
 Scotch proverbs is worth all the dissertations on the subject I 
 have yet seen. " God's bairns," it says, " are eath to lear,'' 
 i.e., easily instructed. Shakspere must, I suppose, have read 
 many more books than Homer (we may be sure, every good 
 one that came in his way, and some bad ones), and yet Homer 
 is held to have known a thing or two : the more ancient poet 
 was unquestionably as ignorant of English as the more modern 
 one of Greek; and as the one produced the "Iliad" without 
 any acquaintance with " Hamlet," I do not see why the other 
 might not have produced " Hamlet" without any acquaintance 
 with the " Iliad." Johnson was quite in the right in holding, 
 that though the writings of Shakspere exhibit " much know- 
 ledge, it is often such knowledge as books did not supply." 
 He might have added further, that the knowledge they dis- 
 play which books did supply, is of a kind which might be 
 all found in English books at the time — fully one-half of it, 
 indeed, in the romances of the period. Every great writer, 
 in the department in which he achieves his gi'eatness, whether 
 he be a learned Milton or an unlearned Burns, is self-taught. 
 One stately vessel may require much tugging ere she gets fairly 
 off the beach, whereas another may float off, unassisted, on the 
 top of the flowing tide ; but when once fairly prosecuting their 
 voyage in the open sea, both must alike depend on the spread 
 ''"'] and the guiding rudder, on the winds of heaven and the 
 
 I eiits of the deep. 
 
 On the opposite side of the lane, directly fronting the chapel, 
 and forming the angle where lane and street unite, there is a 
 I>l;iiu garden-wall, and an equally plain dwelling-house; and 
 
 se indicate the site of Shakspere's domicile — the aristocra- 
 
 iiiansion — one of the " greatest," it is said, in Stratford — 
 
236 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 which the vagrant lad, who had fled the country in disgrace, 
 returned to purchase for himself, when still a young man — 
 no longer a vagrant, however, and " well-to-do in the world." 
 The poet's wildnesses could not have lain deep in his nature, 
 or he would scarce have been a wealthy citizen of Stratford in 
 his thirty-third year. His gardens extended to the river side 
 — a distance of some two or three hundred yards; and doubt- 
 less the greater part of some of his later dramas must have been 
 written amid their close green alleys and straight-lined walks 
 — for they are said to have been quaint, rich, and formal, in 
 accordance with the taste of the period ; and so comfortable a 
 mansion was the domicile, that in 1643, Queen Henrietta, 
 when at Stratford with the Royalist army, made it her place of 
 residence for three weeks. I need scarce tell its subsequent 
 story. After passing through several hands, it was purchased, 
 about the middle of the last century, by the Rev. Francis 
 Gastrall — a nervous, useless, ill-conditioned man, much troubled 
 by a bad stomach and an unhappy temper. The poet's mul- 
 berry tree had become ere now an object of interest ; and his 
 reverence," to get rid of the plague of visitors, cut it down and 
 chopped it into faggots. The enraged people of the town 
 threw stones and broke his reverence's windows ; and then, to 
 spite them still more, and to get rid of a poor-rate assessment 
 to boot, he pulled down the poet's house. And so his reve- 
 rence's name shares, in consequence, in the celebrity of that of 
 Shakspere — " pursues the triumph and partakes the gale." 
 The Rev. Francis Gastrall must have been, I greatly fear, a 
 pitiful creature ; and the clerical prefix in no degree improves 
 the name. 
 
 The quiet street gets still quieter as one approaches the church. 
 We see on either side a much greater breadth of garden-walls 
 than of houses — walls with the richly-fruited branches peeping 
 over ; and at the churchyard railing, thickly overhung by trees, 
 there is so dense a mass of foliage, that of the church, which 
 
* ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 
 
 towers so high in the distance, we can discern no part save the 
 door. A covered way of thick o'er-arching limes runs along the 
 smooth flat gravestones from gateway to doorway. The sunlight 
 was streaming this day in many a fantastic patch on the lettered 
 pavement below, though the chequering of shade predominated ; 
 but at the close of the vista the Gothic door opened dark and 
 gloomy, in the midst of broad sunshine. The Avon flows past 
 the churchyard wall. One may drop a stone at arm's length 
 over the edge of the parapet, into four-feet water, and look 
 down on shoals of tiny fish in play around the sedges. I en- 
 
 . d the silent church, and passed along its rows of old oak 
 pews, on to the chancel. The shadows of the trees outside were 
 projected dark against the windows, and the numerous marbles 
 iA' the place glimmered cold and sad in the thickened light. The 
 cliancel is raised a single step over the floor — a step some twelve 
 or fourteen inches in height ; and, ranged on end along its edge, 
 just where the ascending foot would rest, there lie three flat 
 tombstones. One of these covers the remains of *' William 
 Sluikspere, Gentleman;" the second, the remains of his wife, 
 Anne Hathaway; while the third rests over the dust of his fa- 
 \"urite daughter Susanna, and her husband John Hall. And 
 tlie well-known monument — in paly tints of somewhat faded 
 wliite lead — is fixed in the wall immediately above, at rather 
 more than a man's height from the floor. 
 
 At the risk of being deemed sadly devoid of good taste, I must 
 
 <1 arc assert that I better like the homely monumental bust of the 
 
 1 " 't, low as is its standing as a work of art, than all the idealized 
 
 i< lircsentations of him which genius has yet transferred to marble 
 
 'I canvas. There is more of the true Shakspere in it. Burns 
 
 I plained that the criticisms of Blau', if adopted, would make 
 
 verse " too fine for either warp or woof ;" and sucli has been 
 
 grand defect of the artistic idealisms which have been given 
 
 t lie world as portraits of the dramatist. They make him so 
 i'-tty a fellow, all redolent of poetic odours, "shining so biisk" 
 
 11 
 
238 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 and *' smelling so sweet," like the fop that annoyed Hotspur, 
 that one seriously asks if such a person could ever have got 
 through the world. No such type of man, leaving Stratford 
 penniless in his twenty-first year, would have returned in his 
 thirty-third to purchase the "capital messuage" of New Place, 
 " with all the appurtenances," and to take rank amid the mag- 
 nates of his native town. The poet of the artists would never 
 have been " William Shakspere, Gentleman^'' nor would his bury- 
 iug-ground have lain in the chancel of his parish church. About 
 the Shakspere of the stone bust, on the contraiy, there is a pur- 
 pose-like strength and solidity. The head, a powerful mass of 
 brain, would require all Dr. Chalmers's hat ; the forehead is as 
 broad as that of the doctor, considerably taller, and of more 
 general capacity ; and the whole countenance is that of a shrewd, 
 sagacious, kindly-tempered man, who could, of course, be poetical 
 when he willed it — vastly more so, indeed, than anybody else — 
 but who mingled wondrous little poetry in the management of 
 his everyday business. The Shakspere of the stone bust could, 
 with a very slight training, have been Chancellor of the Exchequer \ 
 and in opening the budget, his speech would embody many of 
 the figures of Cocker, judiciously arranged, but not one poetical 
 figure. 
 
 On quitting the church, I walked for the better part of two 
 miles upwards along the Avon — ^first on the Stratford side to the 
 stone bridge, which I crossed, and then on the side opposite, 
 through quiet, low-lying meadows, bordered by fields. Up to the 
 bridge the stream is navigable, and we may see the occasional 
 sail gleaming white amid the green trees, as it glides past the 
 resting-place of the poet. But on the upper side there are reaches 
 through which even a slight shallop would have difficulty in 
 forcing her way. The bulrush attains, in the soft oozy soil that 
 forms the sides and bottom of the river, to a great size : I pulled 
 stems from eight to ten feet in height ; and in the flatter inflec- 
 tions, where the current stagnates, it almost chokes up the channel 
 
^Bm 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 239 
 
 Imside to side. Here it occurs in tall hedge-like fringes that 
 line and overtop the banks — there, in island-like patches, in the 
 middle of the stream — ^yonder, in diffused tranverse thickets, 
 that seem to connect the fringes on the one side with the fringes 
 on the other. I have rarely seen anything in living nature — 
 nature recent and vital — that better enabled me to realize the 
 luxuriant aquatic vegetation of the Coal Measures. The unbroken 
 stream dimples amid the rushes ; in the opener depths we may 
 mark, as some burnished fly flutters along the surface, the sullen 
 plunge of the carp ; the eel, startled by the passing shadow, 
 wriggles outward from its bank of mud ; while scores of careless 
 gudgeons, and countless shoals of happy minnows, dart hither 
 and thither, like the congregated midges that dance unceasingly 
 in tlie upper element, but a few inches over them. For the first 
 mile or so, the trees which line the banks are chiefly old willow 
 pollards, with stiff" rough stems and huge bunchy heads. Shrubs 
 of various kinds, chiefly however the bramble and the woody 
 nightshade, have struck root a-top into their decayed trunks, as 
 if these formed so many tall flower-pots ; and we may catch, in 
 consequence, the unwonted glitter of glossy black and crimson 
 berries from amid the silvery leaves. The scenery improves as 
 we ascend the stream. The willow pollards give place to forest 
 trees, carelessly grouped, that preserve, unlopped and unmutilated, 
 their proper proportions. But the main features of the land- 
 scape remain what they were. A placid stream, broadly befringed 
 with sedges, winds in tortuous reaches through rich meadows ; 
 and now it sparkles in open sunlight, for the trees recede ; and 
 anon it steals away, scarce seen, amid the gloom of bosky thickets. 
 And such is the Avon — Shakspere's own river. Here must he 
 have wandered in his boyhood, times unnumbered. That stream, 
 with its sedges and its quick glancing fins — those dewy banks, 
 with their cowslips and daff'odils — trees chance-grouped, exactly 
 such as these, and to which these have succeeded — nuist all 
 have stamped their deep impress on his mind ; and, when an 
 
240 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 unsettled adventurer in London, they must have risen before 
 him in all their sunshiny peacefulness, to inspire feelings of sad- 
 ness and regret ; and when, in after days, he had found his true 
 vocation, their loved forms and colours must have mingled 
 with the tissue of his poetry. And here must he have walked 
 in sober middle life, when fame and fortune had both been 
 achieved, haply to feel amid the solitude that there is but little 
 of solid good in either, and that, even were it otherwise, the 
 stream of life glides away to its silent bourne, from their gay 
 light and their kindly shelter, to return no more for ever. What 
 would his thoughts have been, if, after spending in these quiet 
 recesses his fiftieth birthday, he could have foreseen that the 
 brief three score and ten annual revolutions — few as certainly as 
 evil — which have so long summed up the term of man's earthly 
 existence, were to be mulcted, in his case, of full seventeen years ! 
 How would this master of human nature have judged of the 
 homage that has now been paid him for these two centuries? 
 and what would have been his theory of " Hero Worship ?" 
 Many a bygone service of this inverted religion has Stratford- 
 on-Avon witnessed. The Jubilee devised by Garrick had no 
 doubt much of the player in it ; but it possessed also the real 
 devotional substratum, and formed the type, on a splendid 
 scale, not less in its hollo wness than in its groundwork of leal 
 feeling, of those countless acts of devotion of which the poet's 
 birth and burial places have been the scene. " Man praises 
 man;" Garrick, as became his occupation, was a little more 
 ostentatious and formal in his Jubilee services — more studious . 
 of rich ceremonial and striking forms — more High Church in 
 spirit — than the simpler class of hero-devotees who are content 
 to worship extempore ; but that was just all. 
 
 " He drew the Liturgy, and framed the rites 
 And solemn ceremonial of the day, 
 And called the world to worshij) on the banks 
 Of Avon, fained in song. Ah ! pleasant proof 
 That piety has still in human hearts 
 Some place, a spark or two not yet extinct. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 
 
 241 
 
 The mulberry-tree was hung with blooming wreaths 
 The mulberry-tree stood centre of the dance ; 
 The mulberry-tree was hymned with dulcet airs ; 
 And from his touchwood trunk the mulberry-tree 
 Supplied such relics as devotion holds 
 Still sacred, and preserves with pious care. 
 So 'twas a hallowed time ; decorum reigned. 
 And mirth without offence. No few returned 
 Doubtless much edified, and all refreshed." 
 
 Such was Cowper's estimate — to be siu-e, somewhat sarcasti- 
 cally expressed — of the services of the Jubilee. What would 
 Shakspere's have been of the deeply-based sentiment, inherent, 
 it would seem, in human nature, in w^hich the Jubilee origi- 
 nated 1 An instinct so widely diffused and so deeply implanted 
 cannot surely be a mere accident : it must form, however far 
 astray of the proper mark it may wander, one of the original 
 components of the mental constitution, which we have not 
 given ourselves. What would it be in its integrity 1 It must, 
 it would appear, have humanity on which to rest — a nature 
 identical with our own ; and yet, when it finds nothing higher 
 than mere humanity, it is continually running, as in the case 
 of the Stratford Jubilee, into grotesque idolatry. Did Shak- 
 spere, with all his vast knowledge, know where its aspirations 
 could be directed aright 1 The knowledge seems to have got 
 somehow into his family ; nay, she who appears to have pos- 
 sessed it was the much-loved daughter on whom his affections 
 mainly rested — 
 
 *' Witty above her sexe ; but that's not all- 
 Wipe to salvutiou was good Mistress HalL" 
 
 I says her epitaph in the chancel, where she sleeps at the feet 
 her father. There is a passage in the poet's will, too, 
 
 kitten about a month ere his death, which may be, it is true, 
 
 piece of mere form, but which may possibly be something 
 
 er. " I commend my soul into the hands of God my 
 
 ator, hoping, and assuredly believing, through the only 
 
 brits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of 
 \ everlasting." It is, besides, at least something, that this 
 
242 T-IRST mPEESSIONS OF 
 
 play-writer, and play-actor, with wit at will, and a shrewd ap- 
 preciation of the Ukes and dislikes of the courts and monarchs 
 he had to please, drew for their amusement no Mause Head- 
 riggs or Gabriel Kettledrummles. Puritanism could have been 
 no patronizer of the Globe Theatre. Both Elizabeth and James 
 hated the principle with a perfect hatred, and strove hard to 
 trample it out of existence; and such a laugh at its expense as 
 a Shakspere could have raised, would have been doubtless a 
 high luxury ; nay, Puritanism itself was somewhat sharp and 
 provoking in those days, and just a little coarse in its jokes, as 
 the Martin Mar-Prelate tracts survive to testify; but the 
 dramatist, who grew wealthy under the favour of Puritan- 
 detesting monarchs, was, it would seem, not the man to make 
 reprisals. There are scenes in his earlier dramas, from which, 
 as eternity neared upon his view, he could have derived little 
 satisfaction; but there is no " Old Mortality" among them. 
 Had the poor player some sense of what his beloved daughter 
 seems to have clearly discovered — the true " Hero Worship f' 
 In his broad survey of nature and of man, did he mark one 
 solitary character standing erect amid the moral waste of crear 
 tion, untouched by taint of evil or of weakness — a character 
 infinitely too high for even his vast genius to conceive, or his 
 profound comprehension to fathom^ Did he draw near to 
 inquire, and to wonder, and then fall down humbly to adore ? 
 I took the evening coach for Warwick, on my way to Olney, 
 and passed through the town for the railway station, a few 
 minutes before sunset. It was a delightful evening, and the 
 venerable castle and ancient town, with their surrounding 
 woods and quiet river, formed in the red light a gorgeous 
 picture. I could fain have waited for a day to explore Guy's 
 Cliff, famous of old for its c^ves and its hermits, and to go 
 over the ancient castle of king-making Warwick — at once the 
 most extensive and best-preserved monument in the kingdom of 
 the bygone feudal grandeur. The geology of the locality, too, 
 
■ 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 243 
 
 is of considerable interest. From Stratford to the western 
 suburbs of Warwick, the substratum of the landscape is com- 
 posed, as every fallow field which we pass certifies, in its flush 
 of chocolate red, of the saliferous marls. Just, however, where 
 the town borders on the country, the lower pavement of sand- 
 stone, on which the marls rest, comes to the surface, and 
 stretches away northward in a long promontory, along which 
 we find cliffs and quarries, and altogether bolder features than 
 the denuding agents could have sculptured out of the inco- 
 herent marls. Guy's Cliff, and the cliff on which Warwick 
 Castle stands, are both composed of this sandstone. It is 
 richer, too, in remains of vertebrate animals than the Upper 
 New Red anywhere else in England. It has its bone bed, 
 I containing, though in a sorely mutilated state, the remains of 
 ifish, chiefly teeth, and the remains of the teeth and vertebne of 
 saurians. The saurian of Guy's Cliff, with the exception of 
 Ithe saurian of the Dolomitic Conglomerate, near Bristol, is the 
 oldest British reptile known to geologists. Time pressed, how- 
 !•; and leaving behind me the antiquities of Warwick, 
 l(^gic and feudal, I took my seat in the railway train for the 
 ion nearest Olney — that of Wolverton. And the night fell 
 . we had gone over half the way. 
 I had now had some little experience of railway travelling in 
 :land, and a not inadequate idea of the kind of quiet, com- 
 ; able-looking people whom I might expect to meet in a 
 )nd-class carriage. But my fellow-passengers this evening 
 \vi re of a difterent stamp. They were chiefly, almost exclusively 
 'I' Iced, of the male sex — vulgar, noisy, rufiian-like fellows, full 
 oarse oaths and dogged asseverations, and singularly redolent 
 -:in; and I was quite glad enough, when the train stopped 
 ! he Wolverton station, that I was to get rid of them. At the 
 ion, however, they came out en masse. All the other car- 
 ies disgorged similar cargoes; and I found myself in the 
 Idle of a crowd that represented very unfairly the people of 
 
244 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 England. It was now nine o'clock. I had intended passing 
 the night in the inn at Wolverton, and then walking on in the 
 morning to Olney, a distance of nine miles; but when I came 
 to the inn, I found it all ablaze with light, and all astir with 
 commotion. Candles glanced in eveiy window; and a thorough 
 Babel of sound — singing, quarrelling, bell-ringing, thumping, 
 stamping, and the clatter of mugs and glasses — issued from 
 every apartment. I turned away from the door, and met, 
 under the lee of a fence which screened him from observation, a 
 rural policeman. " Wliat is all this about?" I asked. " Do 
 you not know]" was the reply. "No; I am quite a stranger 
 here." " Ah, there are many strangers here. But do you not 
 know?" " I have no idea whatever," I reiterated; "I am on 
 my way to Olney, and had intended spending the night here, 
 but would prefer walking on, to passing it in such a house as 
 that." "Oh, beg pardon; I thought you had been one of 
 themselves : Bendigo of Nottingham has challenged Gaunt of 
 London to fight for the championship. The battle comes on to- 
 morrow, somewhere hereabouts ; and we have got all the black- 
 guards in England, south and north, let loose upon us. If you 
 walk on to Newport Pagnell — just four miles — you will no 
 doubt get a bed ; but the way is lonely, and there have been 
 akeady several robberies since nightfall." " I shall take my 
 chance of that," I said. " Ah, — well — your best way, then, is 
 to walk straight forwards, at a smart pace, keeping the middle 
 of the highway, and stopping for no one." I thanked the 
 friendly policeman, and took the road. It was a calm pleasant 
 night ; the moon in her first quarter, was setting dim and light- 
 less in the west ; and an incipient frost, in the form of a thin 
 film of blue vapour, rested in the lower hollows. 
 
 The way was quite lonely enough ; nor were the few strag- i 
 gling travellers whom I met of a kind suited to render its so- 
 litariness more cheerful. About half-way on, where the road 
 runs between tall hedges, two fellows started out towards me, 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 245 
 
 * m each side of the way. " Is this the road," asked one, 
 "to Newport Pagnell]" "Quite a stranger here," I replied, 
 Avithout slackening my pace; "don't belong to the kingdom 
 even." " No!" said the same fellow, increasing his speed, as if 
 to overtake me; " to what kingdom, then?" " Scotland," I 
 said, turning suddenly round, somewhat afraid of being taken 
 from behind by a bludgeon. The two fellows sheered off in 
 double quick time, the one who had already addressed me, mut- 
 tering, "More like an Irishman, I think;" and I saw no more 
 of them. I had luckily a brace of loaded pistols about me, and 
 had at the moment a trigger under each fore-finger ; and though 
 the ruffians — for such I doubt not they were — could scarcely 
 have been cognizant of the fact, they seemed to have made at 
 least a shrewd approximation towards it. In the autumn of 
 1842, during the great depression of trade, when the entire 
 country seemed in a state of disorganization, and the law in 
 some of the mining districts failed to protect the lieges, I was 
 engaged in following out a course of geologic exploration in our 
 Lothian Coal Field; and, unwilling to suspend my labours, had 
 got the pistols, to do for myself, if necessary, what the authori- 
 ties at the time could not do for me. But I had fortunately 
 found no use for them, though I had visited many a lonely 
 hollow and little-frequented water-course — exactly the sort of 
 place in which, a century ago, one would have been apt to raise 
 footpads as one now starts hares ; and in crossing the Borders, 
 I had half resolved to leave them behind me. They gave con- 
 fidence, however, in unknown neighbourhoods, or when travelling 
 alone in the night-time ; and so I had brought them with me 
 into England, to support, if necessary, the majesty of the law 
 and the rights of the liege subject, and certainly did not regret 
 this evening that I had. 
 
 I entered Newport Pagnell a little after ten o'clock, and foimd 
 I its inns exactly such scenes of riot and uproar as the inn at 
 
246 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 Wolverton. There was the same display of glancing lights in 
 the windows, and the same wild hubbub of sound. On I went. 
 A decent mechanic, with a white apron before him, whom I found 
 in the street, assured me there was no chance of getting a bed in 
 Newport Pagnell, but that I might possibly get one at Skirving- 
 ton, a village on the Olney road, about three miles further on. 
 And so, leaving Newport Pagnell behind me, I set out for Skir- 
 vington. It was now wearing late, and I met no more travellers : 
 the little bit of a moon had been down the hill for more than 
 an hour, the fog rime had thickened, and the trees by the way- 
 side loomed through the clouds like giants in dominos. In 
 passing through Skirvington, I had to stoop down and look be- 
 tween me and the sky for sign posts. There were no lights in 
 houses, save here and there in an upper casement; and all was 
 quiet as in a churchyard. By dint of sky-gazing, I discovered 
 an inn, and rapped hard at the door. It was opened by the 
 landlord sans coat and waiscoat. Tliere was no bed to be had 
 there, he said ; the beds were all occupied by travellers who 
 could get no accommodation in Newport Pagnell ; but there was 
 another inn in the place further on, though it wasn't unlikely, 
 as it didn't much business, the family had gone to bed. This 
 was small comfort. I had, however, made up my mind that if 
 I failed in finding entertainment at inn the second, I should ad- 
 dress myself to hay-rick the first; but better fortune awaited 
 me. I sighted my way to the other sign-post of the village : 
 the lights within had gone up stairs to the attics; but as I 
 tapped and tapped, one of them came trippingly down; it 
 stood pondering behind the door for half a second, as if in de- 
 liberation, and then bolt and bar were withdrawn, and a very 
 pretty young Englishwoman stood in the door- way. " Could I 
 get accommodation there for a night — supper and bed?" 
 There was a hesitating glance at my person, followed by a very 
 welcome " yes;" and thus closed the adventures of the evening. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 
 
 247 
 
 On the following morning I walked on to Olney. It was with 
 some little degree of solicitude that, in a quiet comer by the 
 way, remote from cottages, I tried my pistols to ascertain what 
 sort of a defence I would have made had the worst come to the 
 worst in the encounter of the previous evening. Pop, pop ! — 
 they went off beautifully, and sent their bullets through an inch 
 board; and so in all probability I should have succeeded in 
 astonishing the " fancy-men." 
 
 I JLihrary^ 
 
248 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OJP 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 Cowper ; his singular magnanimity of character ; argument furnished by his latter re- 
 ligious history against the selfish philosophy — Valley of the Ouse — Approach to 
 Olney— Appearance of the town — Cowper's house; parlour; garden — Pippin tree 
 planted by the poet — Summer-house written within and without — John Tawell — 
 Delightful old woman — Weston-Underwood — Thomas Scott's house — The park of the 
 Tbrockmortons — Walk described in " The Task" — Wilderness— Ancient Avenue — 
 Alcove ; prospect which it commands, as drawn by Cowper — Colonnade — Rustic 
 Bridge — Scene of the " Needless Alarm'" — The milk thistle. 
 
 Olney ! Weston-Underwood ! Yardley-Chase ! the banks of 
 the Ouse, and the park of the Throckmortons ! Classic ground 
 once more — the home and much-loved haunts of a sweet and 
 gentle, yet sublimely heroic nature, that had to struggle on in 
 great unhappiness with the most terrible of all enemies — the 
 obstinate unreasoning despair of a broken mind. Poor Cowper ! 
 There are few things more affecting in the history of the species 
 than the heaven-inspired magnanimity of this man. Believing 
 himself doomed to perish everlastingly — for such was the 
 leading delusion of his unhappy malady — he yet made it ' 
 the grand aim of his enduring labours to show forth the mercy 
 and goodness of a God who, he believed, had no mercy for him, 
 and to indicate to others the true way of salvation — deeming it 
 all the while a way closed against himself. Such, surely, is not 
 the character or disposition of the men destined to perish. We 
 are told by his biographers, that the well-known hymn, in 
 which he celebrates the "mysterious way" in wiiich "God 
 works" to "perform his wonders," was written at the close of 
 the happy period which intervened between the first and second 
 attacks of his cruel malady j and that what suggested its com- 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 249 
 
 I 
 
 position were the too truly interpreted indications of a relapse. 
 His mind had been wholly restored to him ; he had been sin- 
 gularly happy in his religion ; and he had striven earnestly, as 
 in the case of his dying brother, to bring others under its influ- 
 ence. And now, too surely feeling that his intellect was again 
 on the eve of being darkened, he deemed the providence a 
 frowning one, but believed in faith that there was a " smiling 
 face" behind it. In his second recovery, though his intellectual 
 stature was found to have greatly increased — as in some racking 
 maladies the person of the patient becomes taller — he never en- 
 joyed his whole mind. There was a missing faculty, if faculty 
 I may term it : his well-grounded hope of salvation never re- 
 turned. It were presumptuous to attempt interpreting the real 
 S(3ope and object of the afflictive dispensation which Cowper 
 could contemplate with such awe ; and yet there does seem a 
 key to it. There is surely a wondrous sublimity in the lesson 
 which it reads. The assertors of the selfish theory have dared 
 to regard Christianity itself, in its relation to the human mind, 
 as but one of the higher modifications of the self-aggrandizing 
 sentiment. May we not venture to refer them to the grief- 
 worn hero of Olney — the sweet poet who first poured the 
 stream of Divine truth into the channels of our literature, after 
 they had been shut against it for more than a hundred years — 
 and ask them whether it be in the power of sophistry to square 
 his motives with the ignoble conclusions of their philosophy? 
 
 Olney stands upon the Oolite, on the northern side of the 
 valley of the Ouse, and I approached it this morning from the 
 south, across the valley. Let the reader imagine a long green 
 ribbon of flat meadow, laid down in the middle of the landscape 
 like a web on a bleaching green, only not quite so straightly 
 drawn out. It is a ribbon about half a mile in breadth, and it 
 stretches away lengthwise above and below, far as the eye can 
 r(\ach. There rises over it on each side a gentle line of accli- 
 vity, that here advances upon it in flat promontories, there re- 
 
2 50 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 cedes into shallow bays, and very much resembles the line of a 
 low-lying but exceedingly rich coast ; for on both sides, field 
 and wood, cottage and hedge-row, lie thick as the variously 
 tinted worsteds in a piece of German needlework ; the flat rib- 
 bon in the midst is bare and open, and through it there winds, 
 from side to side, in many a convolution, as its appropriate pat- 
 tern, a blue sluggish stream, deeply fringed on both banks by 
 an edging of tall bulmshes. The pleasantly grouped village 
 directly opposite, with the long narrow bridge in front, and the 
 old handsome church and tall spire rising in the midst, is Olney ; 
 and that other village on the same side, about two miles further 
 up the stream, with the exceedingly lofty trees rising over it — 
 trees so lofty that they overhang the square tower of its church, 
 as a churchyard cypress overhangs a sepulchral monument — is 
 We&ton- Undei'wood. In the one village Cowper produced ^'The 
 Task;" in the other he translated "Homer." 
 
 I crossed the bridge, destined, like the " Brigs of Ayr" and 
 the " Bridge of Sighs," long to outlive its stone-and-lime exist- 
 ence ; passed the church — John Newton's ; saw John New- 
 ton's house, a snug building, much garnished with greenery ; 
 and then entered Olney proper — the village that was Olney a 
 hundred years ago. Unlike most of the villages of central Eng- 
 land, it is built, not of brick, but chiefly at least of a calcareous 
 yellow stone from the Oolite, which, as it gathers scarce any 
 lichen or moss, looks clean and fresh after the lapse of centuries ; 
 and it is not until the eye catches the dates on the peaked gable 
 points, 1682, 1611, 1590, that one can regard the place as no 
 hastily run up town of yesterday, but as a place that had a 
 living in other times. The main street, which is also the 
 Bedford road, broadens towards the middle of the village into a 
 roomy angle, in shape not very unlike the capacious pocket of 
 a Scotch housewife of the old school ; one large elm-tree rises 
 in the centre ; and just opposite the elm, among the houses 
 which skirt the base of the angle — i.e., the bottom of the pocket 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 251 
 
 I 
 
 ^Ht>we see an old-fashioned house, considerably taller than the 
 ^^thers, and differently tinted ; for it is built of red brick, some- 
 what ornately bordered with stone. And this tall brick house 
 was Cowper's home for nineteen years. It contains the par- 
 lour, which has become such a standard paragon of snugness 
 and comfort that it will need no repairs in all the future ; and 
 the garden behind is that in which the poet reared his cucum- 
 bers and his Ribston pippins, and in which he plied hammer 
 and saw to such excellent purpose, in converting his small 
 greenhouse into a summer sitting-room, and in making lodging- 
 houses for his hares. He dated from that tall house not a few 
 of the most graceful letters in the English language, and ma- 
 tured, from the first crude conceptions to the last finished 
 touches, "Truth," "Hope," "The Progress of Error," "Retire- 
 ment," and " The Task." I found the famed parlour vocal with 
 the gabble of an infant-school : carpet and curtains were gone, 
 sofa and bubbling urn ; and I saw, instead, but a few deal forms, 
 and about two dozen chubby children, whom all the authority 
 of the thin old woman, their teacher, could not recall to dili- 
 gence in the presence of the stranger. The walls were sorely 
 soiled, and the plaster somewhat broken ; there was evidence, 
 too, that a partition had been removed, and that the place was 
 roomier by one-half than when Cowper and Mrs. Unwin used to 
 sit down in it to their evening tea. But at least one interest- 
 ing feature had remained unchanged. There is a small port- 
 hole, in the plaster, framed by a narrow facing of board ; and 
 through this port-hole, cut in the partition for the express purpose, 
 Cowper's hares used to come leaping out to their evening gambols 
 on the carpet. I found the garden, like the house, much changed. 
 It had been broken up into two separate properties ; and the pro- 
 prietors having mn a wall through the middle of it, one must 
 now seek the pippin-tree which the poet planted, in one little 
 detached bit of garden ; and the lath-and-plaster summer-house, 
 which, when the weather was fine, used to form his writing- 
 
252 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 room, in another. The Ribston pippin looks an older-like tree, 
 and has more lichen about it, though far from tall for its age 
 than might be expected of a tree of Cowper's planting ; but it 
 is now seventy-nine years since the poet came to Olney, and in 
 less than seventy-nine years young fruit-trees become old ones. 
 The little summer-house, maugre the fragility of its materials, is 
 in a wonderfully good state of keeping : the old lath still re- 
 tains the old lime ; and all the square inches and finger-breadths 
 of the plaster, inside and out, we find as thickly covered with 
 names as the space in our ancient Scotch copies of the " Solemn 
 League and Covenant." Cowper would have marvelled to 
 have seen his little summer-house — for little it is — scarce 
 larger than a four-posted bed-stead — written, like the roll 
 described in sacred vision, " within and without." It has still 
 around it, in its green old age, as when it was younger and 
 less visited, a great profusion of flowering shrubs and hollyhocks ; 
 we have seen from its window the back of honest John New- 
 ton's house, much enveloped in wood, with the spire of the 
 church rising over ; and on either side there are luxuriant 
 orchards, in which the stiffer forms of the fruit-trees are relieved 
 by lines of graceful poplars. Some of the names on the plaster 
 are not particularly classical. My conductress pointed to one 
 signature, in especial, which was, she said, an object of great 
 curiosity, and which a " most respectable person" — ^^jvM after 
 the execution''' — had come a day's journey to see. It was that 
 of the hapless " John Tawell, Great Birkenstead, Hants," who 
 about two years ago was hung for the murder of his mistress. 
 It had been added to the less celebrated names, for so the legend 
 bore, on the *' 21st day of seventh month 1842 ;" and just be- 
 side it some kind friend of the deceased had added, by way of 
 postscript, the significant hieroglyphic of a minute human figure 
 suspended on a gibbet, with the head rather uncomfortably 
 twisted awry. 
 
 I had made several unsuccessful attempts to procure a guide 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 253 
 
 I 
 
 ^H cquainted with the walks of the poet, and had inquired of my 
 ^^B Dnductress (an exceedingly obliging person, I may mention — 
 ^^B ousekeeper of the gentleman to whom the outermost of the 
 ^Bwo gardens belongs), as of several others, whether she knew 
 any one at once willing and qualified to accompany me for part 
 of the day in that capacity. But she could bethink herself of 
 nobody. Just however, as we stepped out from the garden 
 into the street, there was an old woman in a sad-coloured cloak, 
 and bearing under the cloak a bulky basket, passing by. "Oh," 
 said the housekeeper, " there is just the person that knows more 
 about Cowper than any one else. She was put to school, when 
 a little girl, by Mrs. Unwin, and was much about her house at 
 Weston-Underwood. Gossip, gossip ! come hither." And so 
 I secured the old woman as my guide ; and we set out together 
 for Weston and the pleasure-grounds of the Throckmortons. 
 She was seventy-one, she said ; but she walked every day with 
 her basket from Weston-Underwood to Olney — sometimes, in- 
 deed, twice in the day — to shop and market for her neighbours. 
 She had now got a basket of fresh herrings, which were great 
 rarities in these parts, and it behoved her to get them delivered ; 
 but she would then be quite free to accompany me to all the 
 walks in which she had seen Squire Cowper a hundred and a 
 hundred times — to the '* Peasant's Nest," and the "alcove," and 
 the " avenue," and the " rustic bridge," and the " Wilderness," 
 and " Yardley oak," and, in short, anywhere or everywhere. I 
 could not have been more in luck : my delightful old woman 
 had a great deal to say ; she would have been equally garrulous, 
 I doubt not, had Cowper been a mere country squire, and Mrs. 
 Unwin his housekeeper ; but as he chanced to be a great poet, 
 and as his nearer friends had, like the planets of a central sun, 
 l)ecome distinctly visible, from their proximity, by the light 
 which he cast, and were evidently to remain so, her gossip about 
 him and them I found vastly agreeable. The good Squir(» 
 Cowper ! she said — well did she remember him, in his white 
 
 i 
 
254 FIKST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 cap, and his suit of green turned up with blaclc. She knew 
 the Lady Hesketh too. A kindly lady was the Lady Hesketh ; 
 there are few such ladies now-a-days : she used to put coppers 
 into her little velvet bag every time she went out, to make the 
 children she met happy ; and both she and Mrs. Unwin were 
 remarkably kind to the poor. The road to Weston-Underwood 
 looks down upon the valley of the Ouse. "Were there not 
 water-lilies in the river in their season ?" I asked ; " and did 
 not Cowper sometimes walk out along its banks ?" " yes," 
 she replied ; " and I remember the dog Beau, too, who brought 
 the lily ashore to him. Beau was a smart, petted little crea- 
 ture, with silken ears, and had a good deal of red about him." 
 My guide brought me to Cowper's Weston residence, a hand- 
 some, though, like the Olney domicile, old-fashioned house, still 
 in a state of good repair, with a whitened many-windowed front, 
 and tall steep roof flagged with stone ; and I whiled away some 
 twenty minutes or so in the street before it, while my old woman 
 went about dispersing her herrings. Weston-Underwood, as 
 villages go, must enjoy a rather quiet do-nothing sort of exist- 
 ence, for in all that time not a passenger went by. The houses 
 — steep-roofed, straw-thatched, stone-built erections, with the 
 casements of their second storeys lost in the eaves — straggle 
 irregularly on both sides of the road, as if each house had an 
 independent will of its o^vn, and was somewhat capricious in 
 the exercise of it. There is a profusion of well-grown, richly- 
 leaved vines, trailed up against their walls : the season had 
 been unfavourable, and so the grapes, in even the best bunches, 
 scarcely exceeded in size our common red currants ; but still 
 they were bona fide vines and grapes, and their presence served 
 to remind one of the villages of sunnier climates. A few tall 
 walls and old gateway columns mingle with the cottages, and 
 these are all that now remain of the mansion-house of the 
 Throckmortons. One rather rude-looking cottage, with its upper 
 casement half hid in the thatch, is of some note, as the scene of 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 255 
 
 I 
 
 PW long straggle in a strong ragged mind — honest, but not 
 amiable — which led ultimately to the production of several use- 
 ful folios of solid theology. In that cottage a proud Socinian 
 curate studied and prayed himself, greatly against his will, into 
 one of the soundest Calvinists of modem times : it was for many 
 years the dwelling-place of Thomas Scott ; and his well-kno\vn 
 narrative, <' The Force of Trath," forms a portion of his history 
 during the time he lived in it. The road I had just travelled 
 over with the woman was that along which John Newton had 
 come, in the January of 1774, to visit, in one of these cottages, 
 two of Scott's parishioners — a dying man and woman ; and the 
 Socinian, who had not visited them, was led to think seriously, 
 for the first time, that he had a duty as a clergyman which he 
 had failed to perform. It was along the same piece of road, 
 some three years later, that Scott used to steal, when no longer 
 a Socinian, but still wofuUy afraid of being deemed a Methodist, 
 to hear Newton preach. There were several heaps of stones 
 lying along the street — the surplus materials of a recent repair — 
 that seemed to have been gathered from the neighbouring fields, 
 but had been derived, in the first instance, from some calcareous 
 grit of the Oolite ; and one of these lay opposite the windows 
 of Cowper's mansion. The first fragment I picked up contained 
 a well-marked Plagiostoma ; the second, a characteristic frag- 
 ment of a Pecten. T bethought me of Cowper's philippic on 
 the earlier geologists, which, however, the earlier geologists too 
 certainly deserved, for their science was not good, and their 
 theology wretched ; and I indulged in, I daresay, something 
 approaching to a smile. Genius, when in earnest, can do a 
 great deal ; but it cannot put down scientific truth, save now 
 and then for a very little time, and would do well never to try. 
 My old woman had now pretty nearly scattered over the 
 neighbourhood her basket of herrings ; but she needed, she said, 
 just to look in upon her grandchildren, to say she was going to 
 the woodlands, lest the poor things should come to think they 
 
 I 
 
256 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 had lost her ; and I accompanied her to the cottage. It was 
 a humble low -roofed hut, with its earthen floor sunk, as in 
 many of our Scottish cottages, a single step below the level of 
 the lane. Her grandchildren, little girls of seven and nine 
 years, were busily engaged with their lace bobbins : the younger 
 was working a piece of narrow edging, for her breadth of attain- 
 ment in the lace department extended as yet over only a few 
 threads ; whereas the elder was achieving a little belt of open 
 work, with a pattern in it. They were orphans, and lived with 
 their poor grandmother, and she was a widow. We regained 
 the street, and then, passing through a dilapidated gateway, 
 entered the pleasure-grounds — the scene of the walk so enchant- 
 ingly described in the opening book of '* The Task." But before 
 taking up in detail the minuter features of the place, I must 
 attempt communicating to the reader some conception of it as 
 a whole. 
 
 The road from Olney to Weston-Underwood lies parallel to 
 the valley of the Ouse, at little more than a fieldVbreadth up 
 the slope. On its upper side, just where it enters Weston, 
 there lies based upon it (like the parallelogram of a t3a'0 geo- 
 metrician, raised on a given right line), an old-fashioned rect- 
 angular park — that of the Throckmortons — about half a mile 
 in breadth by about three-quarters of a mile in length. The 
 sides of the enclosure are bordered by a broad belting of very 
 tall and very ancient wood ; its grassy area is mottled by nu- 
 merous trees, scattered irregularly; its surface partakes of the 
 general slope; it is traversed by a green valley, with a small 
 stream trotting along the bottom, that enters it from above, 
 nearly about the middle of the upper side, and that then, cut- 
 ting it diagonally, passes outwards and downwards towards the 
 Ouse through the lower corner. About the middle of the park 
 this valley sends out an ofF-shoot valley, or dell ratlier, towards 
 that upper corner furthest removed from the corner by which it 
 makes its exit ; the off-shoot dell has no stream a-bottom, but is 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 257 
 
 a mere grassy depression, dotted with trees. It serves, how- 
 ever, with the valleys into which it opens, so to break the sur- 
 face of the park, that the rectangular formality of the lines of 
 boundary almost escapes notice. Now, the walk described in 
 '^The Task" lay along three of the four sides of this parallelo- 
 gram. The poet, quitting the Olney road at that lower comer, 
 where the diagonal valley finds egress, struck up along the side 
 of the park, turned at the nearer upper corner, and passed 
 tlirough the belting of wood that runs along the top ; turned 
 again at the further upper comer, and, coming down on Weston, 
 joined the Oluey road just where it enters the village. After 
 first quitting the highway, a walk of two furlongs or so brought 
 him abreast of the " Peasant's Nest ;" after the first turning 
 a-top, and a walk of some two or three furlongs more, he de- 
 scended into the diagonal valley, just where it enters the park, 
 cr )ssed the rastic bridge which spans the stream at the bottom, 
 marked the doings of the mole, and then ascended to the level 
 on the other side. Near the second turning he found the al- 
 cove, and saw the trees in the streamless dell, as if " sunk and 
 shortened to their topmost boughs ;" then coming down upon 
 Weston, he passed under the "light and graceful arch" of the 
 ancient avenue; reached the "Wilderness" as he was nearing 
 the village; and, emerging from the thicket full upon the 
 houses, saw the " thrasher at his task," through the open door 
 of some one of the barns of the place. Such is a hard outline, 
 in road-map fashion, of the walk which, in the pages of Cowper, 
 forms such exquisite poetry. I entered it somewhat unluckily 
 to-day at the wrong end, commencing at the western corner, 
 and passing on along its angles to the corner near Olney, thus 
 reversing the course of Cowper, for my old woman had no 
 acquaintance with " The Task," or the order of its descriptions ; 
 but after mustering the various scenes in detail, I felt no ditti- 
 culty in restufmg them to the integiity of the classic arrange- 
 ment. 
 
 & 
 
258 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 On first entering the park, among the tall forest trees that, 
 viewed from the approach to Olney, seem to overhang the 
 village and its church, one sees a square, formal comer, sepa- 
 rated from the opener ground by a sunk dry-stone fence, within 
 which the trees, by no means lofty, are massed as thickly to- 
 gether as saplings in a nursery-bed run wild, or nettles in a 
 neglected burying-ground. There are what seem sepulchral urns 
 among the thickets of this enclosure ; and sepulchral urns they 
 are — raised, however, to commemorate the burial-places, not of 
 men, but of beasts. Cowper in 1792 wrote an epitaph for a 
 favourite pointer of the Throckmortons ; and the family, stirred 
 up by the event, seem from that period to have taken a dog- 
 burying bias, and to have made their Wilderness the cemetery ; 
 for this square enclosure in the comer, with its tangled thickets 
 and its green mouldy urns, is the identical Wilderness of " The 
 Task," 
 
 " Whose well-rolled walks, I 
 
 With curvature of slow and easy sweep, — j 
 
 Deception innocent, — give ample space ! 
 
 To narrow bounds." ' 
 
 One wonders at the fortune that assigned to so homely and | 
 obscure a comer — ^a comer which a nursery-gardener could get j 
 up to order in a fortnight — so proud and conspicuous a niche | 
 in English literatura We walk on, however, and find the j 
 scene next described greatly more worthy of the celebrity con- i 
 ferred on it. In passing upwards, along the side of the park, j 
 we have got into a noble avenue of limes — tall as York Minster, ! 
 and very considerably longer, for the vista diminishes till the ! 
 lofty arch seems reduced to a mere doorw^ay ; the smooth glossy j 
 trunks form stately columns, and the branches, interlacing high I 
 overhead, a magnificent roof. 
 
 " How airy and how light the graceful arch. 
 Yet awful as the consecrated roof 
 Re-echoing pious anthems ! while beneath 
 The chequered earth seems restless as a flood 
 Brushed by the wind. So sportive is the lignt 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 259 
 
 Shot through the boughs, it dances as they d-ince. 
 Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick, 
 And darkening atid enlightening, as thu leaves 
 Play wanton, every moment, every spot." 
 
 What exquisite description ! And who, acquainted with 
 Cowper, ever walked in a wood when the sun shone, and the 
 wind ruffled the leaves, without realizing it ! It was too dead 
 a calm to-day to show me the dancing light and shadow where 
 the picture had first been taken : the feathery outline of the 
 f- iliage lay in diluted black, moveless on the grass, like the foliage 
 of an Indian ink-drawing newly washed in ; but all else was pre- 
 sent, just as Cowper had described half a century before. Two 
 minutes' walk, after passing through the avenue, brought me to 
 the upper corner of the park, and " the proud alcove that crowns 
 it" — for the *' proud alcove" does still crown it. But time, and 
 the weather, and rotting damps, seem to be working double tides 
 on the failing pile, and it will not crown it long. The alcove is a 
 somewhat clumsy erection of wood and plaster, with two squat 
 wooden columns in front, of a hybrid order between the Tuscan 
 and Doric, and a seat within. A crop of dark-coloured mush- 
 rooms, cherished by the damp summer, had shot up along the 
 joints of the decaying floor; the plaster, flawed and much stained, 
 dangled from the ceiling in numerous little bits, suspended, like 
 the sword of old, by single hairs ; the broad deal architrave had 
 given way at one end, but the bolt at the other still proved true ; 
 and so it hung diagonally athwart the two columns, like the 
 middle bar of a gigantic letter N. The "characters uncouth" 
 of the "rural carvers" are, however, still legible; and not a 
 it'w names have since been added. This upper corner of the 
 park forms its highest ground, and the view is very fine. The 
 treamless dell — not streamless always, however, for the poet de- 
 
 ribes the urn of its little Naiad as tilled in winter — lies imme- 
 '1 lately in front, and wc see the wood within its hollow recesses, 
 a.> if "sunk, and shortened to the topmost boughs." The green 
 
 dulating surface of the park, still more deeply grooved in the 
 
260 FIRST IMPHESSIONS OF 
 
 distance by the diagonal valley, and mottled with trees, stretches 
 away beyond to the thick belting of tall wood below. There is 
 a wide opening, just where the valley opens — a great gap in an 
 immense hedge — that gives access to the further landscape; the 
 decent spire of John Newton's church rises, about two miles 
 away, as the central object in the vista thus formed ] we see in 
 front a few silvery reaches of the Ouse ; and a blue uneven line 
 of woods that runs along the horizon closes in the prospect. 
 The nearer objects within the pale of the park, animate and in- 
 animate — the sheepfold and its sheep, the hay-wains, empty and 
 full, as they pass and repass to and from the hay-field — the dis- 
 tinctive characters of the various trees, and their shortened ap- 
 pearance in the streamless valley — occupy by much the larger 
 part of Cowper's description from the alcove; while the con- 
 cluding five lines afford a bright though brief glimpse of the 
 remoter prospect, as seen through the opening. But I must not 
 withhold the description itself — at once so true to nature and 
 so instinct with poetry — familiar as it must prove to the great 
 bulk of my readers : — 
 
 " Now roves the eye : 
 And, posted on this speculative height, 
 Exults in its command. The sheepfold here 
 Pours out its fleecy tenants o'er the glebe. 
 At first, progressive as a stream, they seek 
 The middle field ; but, scattered by degrees. 
 Each to his choice, soon whiten all the land. 
 There from the sunburnt hayfield homeward creeps 
 The loaded wain ; while, lightened of its charge. 
 The wain that meets it passes swiftly by. 
 The boorish driA'er leaning o'er his team 
 Vociferous, and impatient of delay. 
 Nor less attractive is the woodland scene. 
 Diversified with trees of every growth. 
 Alike, yet various. Here the grey smooth trunks 
 Of ash, or lime, or beech, distinctly shine 
 Within the twilight of their distant shades ; 
 There, lost behind a rising ground, the wood 
 Seems sunk, and shortened to its topmost boughs. 
 No tree in all the grove but has its charms, 
 Though each its hue peculiar ; paler some. 
 And of a wannish grey ; the willow such, 
 And poplar, that witli silver lines his leaf. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 261 
 
 And ash far stretching his umbrageous arm ; 
 
 Of deeper green the elm ; and deeper still. 
 
 Lord of the woods, the long-surviving oak. 
 
 Some glossy-leaved, and shining in the i*un. 
 
 The maple, and the beech of oily nuts 
 
 Prolific, and the iime at dewy eve 
 
 Diffusing odours : nor unnoted pass 
 
 The sycamore, capricious in attire, 
 
 Now green, now tawny, and ere autumn yet 
 
 Have changed the woods, in scarlet honours bright. 
 
 O'er these, but far beyond (a spacious map 
 
 Of hill and valley interposed between), 
 
 The Ouse, dividing the well-watered land, 
 
 jSow glitters in the sun, and now retires, 
 
 As bashful, yet impatient to be seen." 
 
 Quitting the alcove, we skirt the top of the park of the 
 Throckmortous, on a retired grassy walk that runs straight as a 
 tightened cord along the middle of the belting which forms the 
 park's upper boundary — its enclosing hedge, if I may so speak 
 without offence to the dignity of the ancient forest-trees which 
 compose it. There is a long line of squat broad-stemmed chest- 
 nuts on either hand, that fling their interlacing arms athwart 
 the pathway, and bury it, save where here and there the sun 
 1 leaks in through a gap, in deep shade ; but the roof overhead, 
 unlike that of the ancient avenue already described, is not the 
 ro< )f of a lofty nave in the light Florid style, but of a low-browed, 
 tiiickly-ribbed Saxon crypt, flanked by ponderous columns, of 
 dwarfish stature but gigantic strength. And this double tier 
 of chestnuts extended along the park-top from comer to comer, 
 is the identical " length of colonnade" eulogized by Cowper in 
 "The Task":— 
 
 " Monument of ancient taste. 
 Now scorned, but worthy of a better fate. 
 Our fathers knew the value of a screen 
 From sultry suns : and, in their shaded walks 
 And long-protracted bowers, enjoyed at noon 
 The gloom and coolness of declining day. 
 Thanks to Benevolus — he spares me yet 
 These chestnuts ranged in corresponding lined ; 
 And, though himself so polished, still reprieves 
 The obsolete prolixity of shade." 
 
 Half-way on we descend into the diagonal valley — "but cau- 
 
 11 
 
262 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 tious, lest too fast" — just where it enters the park from the 
 uplands, and find at its bottom the *' rustic bridge." It was 
 rustic when at its best — an arch of some four feet span or so, 
 built of undressed stones, fenced with no parapet, and covered 
 overhead by a green breadth of turf ; and it is now both rustic 
 and ruinous to boot, for one-half the arch has fallen in. The 
 stream is a mere sluggish runnel, much overhung by hawtliorn 
 bushes : there are a good many half-grown oaks scattered about 
 in the hollow ; while on the other hand the old massy chestnuts 
 top the acclivities. 
 
 Leaving the park at the rustic bridge, by a gap in the fence, 
 my guide and I struck outwards through the valley towards the 
 uplands. We had left, on crossing the hedge, the scene of the 
 walk in "The Task;" but there is no getting away in this lo- 
 cality from Cowper. The first field we stepped into " adjoining 
 close to Klilwick's echoing wood," is that described in the "Need- 
 less Alarm;" and we were on our way to visit " Yardley oak." 
 The poet, conscious of his great wealth in the pictorial, was no 
 niggard in description ; and so the field, though not very re- 
 markable for anything, has had its picture drawn. 
 
 " A naiTow brook, by rushy banks concealed. 
 Runs in a bottom, and divides the field ; 
 Oaks intersperse it that had once a head, 
 But now wear crests of oven-wood instead ; 
 And where the land slopes to its watery bourne, 
 Wide yawns a gulf beside a ragged thorn ; 
 Bricks line the sides, but shivered long ago. 
 And horrid brambles intertwine below ; 
 A hollow scooped, I judge, in ancient time, 
 For bukinii earth, or burning rock to lime." 
 
 The " narrow brook" here is that which, passing downwards into 
 the park, runs underneath the rustic bridge, and flows towards 
 the Ouse through the diagonal valley. The field itself, which 
 lies on one of the sides of the valley, and presents rather a steep 
 slope to the plough, has still its sprinkling of trees ; but the 
 oaks, with the oven-wood crests, have nearly all disappeared;, 
 and for the ^' gulf beside the thorn," T could find but a small 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 263 
 
 oblong, steep-sided pond, half over-shadowed by an ash tree. 
 Improvement has sadly defaced the little field since it sat for 
 its portrait ; for, though never cropped in Squire Cowper's days, 
 as the woman told me, it now lies like the ordinary work-day 
 pieces of ground beyond and beside it, in a state of careful till- 
 age, and smelt rank at the time of a flourishing turnip crop. 
 " Oh," said the woman, who for the last minute had been pok- 
 ing about the hedge for something which she could not find, 
 " do you know that the Squire was a beautiful drawer?" " I 
 know that he drew," I replied ; " but I do not know that his 
 drawings were fine ones. I have in Scotland a great book filled 
 with the Squire's letters; and I have learned from it, that ere 
 he set himself to write his long poems, he used to draw ' moun- 
 tains and valleys, and ducks and dab-chicks,' and that he 
 thr(;atened to charge his friends at the rate of a half-penny 
 a-piece for them." " Ah," said the woman, " but he drew 
 grandly for all that ; and I have just been looking for a kind of 
 thistle that used to grow here — but the farmer has, I find, 
 weeded it all out — that he made many fine pictures of I have 
 seen one of them with Lady Hesketh, that her Ladyship thought 
 \ cry precious. The thistle was a pretty thistle, and I am sorry 
 they are all gone. It had a deep red flower, set round with 
 long thorns, and the green of the leaves was crossed with bright 
 white streaks." I inferred from the woman's description that 
 ilie plant so honoured by Cowper's pencil must have been the 
 •^ milk thistle," famous in legendary lore for bearing strong, trace, 
 <ui its leaves of glossy green, of the milk of the Virgin Mother, 
 'iropped on it in the flight to Egypt. 
 
264 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 Yardley Oak ; of immense size and imposing appearance — Cowper's description singu- 
 larly illustrative of his complete mastery over language — Peasant's nest — The poet's 
 vocation peculiarly one of revolution — The school of Pope; supplanted in its unpro- 
 ductive old age by tb.it of Cowjter — Cowper's coadjutors in the work — Economy of 
 literary revolution — The old English yeoman — Quit Olney — Companions in the jour- 
 ney — Incident — Newport Pagnell — Mr. Bull and the French Mystics — Lady of the 
 Fancy — Champion of all England — Pugilism — Anecdote. 
 
 Half an hour's leisurely walking — and, in consideration of 
 my companion's three-score and eleven summers, our walking 
 was exceedingly leisurely — brought us, through field ajud dingle, 
 and a country that presented, as we ascended, less of an agricul- 
 tural and more of a pastoral character, to the woods of Yardley 
 Lodge. We enter through a coppice on a grassy field, and see 
 along the opposite side a thick oak wood, with a solitaiy brick 
 house the only one in sight, half hidden amid foliage in a comer. 
 The oak wood has, we find, quite a character of its own. The 
 greater part of its trees, still in their immature youth, were 
 seedlings within the last forty years : they have no associates 
 that bear in their well-developed proportions, untouched by 
 decay, the stamp of solid mid-aged treehood; but here and 
 there — standing up among them, like the long-lived sons of 
 Noah, in their old age of many centuries, amid a race cut down 
 to the three-score and ten — we find some of the most ancient 
 oaks in the empire — trees that were trees in the days of William 
 the Conqueror. These are mere hollow trunks, of vast bulk, 
 but stinted foliage, in which the fox shelters and the owl builds 
 — mere struldhrugs of the forest. The bulkiest and most pic- 
 turesque among their number we find marked by a white lettered 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 265 
 
 oard; it is a hollow pollard of enormous girth, twenty-eight 
 et five inches in circumference a foot above the soil, with 
 Ikeleton stumps, bleached white by the winters of many cen- 
 |uries, stretching out for a few inches from amid a ragged 
 tdrapery of foliage that sticks close to the body of the tree, and 
 ^bearing on its rough grey bole, wens and warts of astounding 
 magnitude. The trunk, leaning slightly forward, and wearing 
 all its huger globosities behind, seems some fantastic old-world 
 mammoth, seated kangaroo-fashion on its haunches. Its foliage 
 this season had caught a tinge of yellow, when the younger 
 trees all around retained their hues of deep green ; and, seen in 
 the bold relief which it owed to the circumstance, it reminded 
 me of ^neas's golden branch, glittering bright amid the dark 
 woods of Cumea. And such is Yardley oak, the subject of one 
 of the finest descriptions in English poetry — one of the most 
 characteristic, too, of the muse of Cowper. If asked to illus- 
 trate that peculiar power which he possessed above all modern 
 poets, of taking the most stubborn and untractable words in 
 the language, and bending them with all ease round his thinking, 
 so as to fit its every indentation and irregularity of outline, as 
 the ship-carpenter adjusts the stubborn planking, grown flexible 
 in his hand, to the exact mould of his vessel, I would at once 
 instance some parts of the description of Yardley oak. But 
 fjirewell, noble tree ! so old half a century ago, when the poet 
 conferred on thee immortality, that thou dost not seem older 
 now ! 
 
 " Time made the6 what thou wast— king of the woods ; 
 And time hath made thee what thou art— a cave 
 For owls to roost in. Once thy spreading boughs 
 O'erhung the champaign ; and the numerous flocks 
 That grazed it stood beneath that ample cope 
 Uncrowded, yet safe sheltered from the storm. 
 No flock frequents thee now. Thou hast outlived 
 Thy popularity, and art become 
 (Unless verse rescue thee awhile) a thing 
 Forgotten as the foliage of thy youth. 
 While thus through all the stages thou hast pushed 
 Of treeshlp— first u seedling hid In giass; 
 
2G6 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 Th«n twig; then sapling; and, as century rolled 
 81 ow after century, a giant bulk 
 Of girth enormous, with moss-cushioned root 
 Upheaved above the soil, and sides emboss'd 
 With prominent wens globose — till at the last, 
 The rottenness, which time is charged to inflict 
 On other mighty ones, found also thee." 
 
 I returned with my guide to the rustic bridge ; resumed my 
 walk through the hitherto unexplored half of the chestnut colon- 
 nade ; turned the comer ; and then, passing downwards along 
 the lower side of the park, through neglected thickets — the 
 remains of an extensive nursery run wild-r-I struck outwards 
 beyond its precincts, and reached a whitened dwelling-house that 
 had been once the " Peasant's Nest." But nowhere else in the 
 course of my walk had the hand of improvement misimproved 
 S(j sadly. For the hill-top cottage, 
 
 " Environed with a ring of branching elms 
 That overhung the thatch," 
 
 I found a modern hard-cast farm-house, with a square of offices 
 attached, all exceedingly utilitarian, well kept, stiff, and dis- 
 agreeable. It was sad enough to find an erection that a jour- 
 neyman bricklayer could have produced in a single month, sub- 
 stituted for the " peaceful covert " Cowper had so often wished 
 his own, and which he had so frequently and fondly visited. 
 But those beauties of situation which awakened the admiration, 
 and even half excited the envy, of the poet, improvement could 
 not alter, and so they are now what they ever were. The 
 diagonal valley to which I have had such frequent occasion to 
 refer is just escaping from the park at its lower corner ; the 
 slope, which rises from the runnel to the level, still lies on the 
 one hand within the enclosure, but it has escaped from it on 
 the other, and forms, where it merges into the higher grounds, 
 the hill-top on which the " Nest " stands ; and the prospect, no 
 longer bounded by the tall belting of the park, is at once very 
 extensive and singularly beautiful. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 267 
 
 " Here Ouse, slow winding throuiih a level plain 
 Of spacious meads, with cattle sprinkled o er. 
 Conducts the eye along its sinuous course. 
 Delighted. There, fast-rooted in his bank, 
 Stand, never overlooked, our favourite elms, 
 That screen the herdsman's solitary but; 
 While far beyond, and overthwart the stream. 
 That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale, 
 The sloping land recedes into the clouds. 
 Displaying on its varied side the grace 
 Of hedge-row beauties numberles?:, square tower. 
 Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells 
 Just undulates upon the listening ear. 
 Groves, heaths, and smoking villages remote." 
 
 Leaving the farm-house, I descended into the valley ; passed 
 along a tangled thicket of yew, plane, and hazel, in which I 
 lingered awhile to pick black-berries and nuts, where Cowper 
 may have picked them ; came out upon the Olney road by the 
 ^\'icket gate through which he used to quit the highway and 
 St; like up to the woodlands ; and, after making my old woman 
 })articularly happy by a small gratuity, returned to Olney. 
 
 I trust it will not be held that my descriptions of this old- 
 fiishioned park, with its colonnade and its avenues — its dells 
 and its dingles — its alcove and its wilderness — have been too 
 minute. It has an interest as independent of any mere beauty 
 or picturesqueness which it may possess, as the field of Bannock- 
 burn or the meadows of Runnimede. It indicates the fulcrum, 
 if I may so speak, on which the lever of a great original genius 
 first rested, when it upturned from its foundations an efiete 
 school of English verse, and gave to the literature of the country 
 a new face. Its scenery, idealized into poetry, wrought one of 
 tlie greatest literary revolutions of which the history of letters 
 I ) reserves any record. The school of Pope, originally of but 
 small compass, had sunk exceedingly low ere the times of Cow- 
 l)er : it had become, like Nebuchadnezzar's tree, a brass-bound 
 stump, that sent forth no leafage of refreshing green, and no 
 blossoms of pleasant smell ; and yet for considerably more tlinn 
 half a century it had been the only existing English school. 
 
268 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 And when the first volume of "Poems by William Cowper, 
 Esq., of the Inner Temple," issued from the press, there seemed 
 to be no prospect whatever of any other school rising to supplant 
 it. Several writers of genius had appeared in the period, and 
 had achieved for themselves a standing in literature ; nor were 
 they devoid of originality, in both their thinking and the form 
 of it, without which no writer becomes permanently eminent. 
 But their originality was specific and individual, and terminated 
 with themselves ; whereas the school of Pope, whatever its 
 other defects, was of a generic character. A second Collins, a 
 second Gray, a second Goldsmith, would have been mere timid 
 imitators — mere mock Paganinis, playing each on the one ex- 
 quisite string of his master, and serving by his happiest efforts 
 but to establish the fidelity of the imitation. But the poetry 
 of Pope formed an instrument of larger compass and a more 
 extensive gamut, and left the disciples room to achieve for 
 themselves, in running over the notes of their master, a certain 
 amount of originality. Lyttelton's " Advice to Belinda," and 
 Johnson's " London," exhibit the stamp of very different minds; 
 and the " Pursuits of Literature " is quite another sort of poem 
 from the "Triumphs of Temper ;" but they all alike belong to 
 the school of Pope, and bear the impress of the "Moral Essays," 
 the " Satires," or the " Rape of the Lock." The poetical mind 
 of England had taken an inveterate set ; it had grown up into 
 . artificial attitudes, like some superannuated posture-maker, and 
 had lost the gait and air natural to it. Like the painter in the 
 fable, it drew its portraits less from the life than from cherished 
 models and familiar casts approved by the connoisseur ; and 
 exhibited nature, when it at all exhibited it, through a dim 
 haze of coloured conventionalities. And this school, grown 
 rigid and unfeeling in its unproductive old age, it was part of 
 the mission of Cowper to supplant and destroy. He restored 
 to English literature the wholesome freshness of nature, and 
 sweetened and invigorated its exhausted atmosphere, by letting 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 269 
 
 in upon it the cool breeze and the bright sunshine. The old 
 park, with its noble trees and sequestered valleys, were to him 
 what the writings of Pope and of Pope's disciples were to his 
 contemporaries : he renewed poetry by doing what the first 
 poets had done. 
 
 It is not uninteresting to mark the plan on which nature 
 delights to operate in producing a renovation of this character 
 in the literature of a country. Cowper had two vigorous coad- 
 jutors in the work of revolution ; and all three, though essen- 
 tially unlike in other respects, resembled one another in the 
 preliminary course through which they were prepared for their 
 proper employment. Circumstances had conspired to throw 
 them all outside the pale of the existing literature. Cowper, 
 at the ripe age of thirty-three, when breathing in London the 
 literary atmosphere of the day, amid his friends — the Lloyds, 
 Colmans, and Bonnel Thorntons — was a clever and tasteful 
 imitator, but an imitator merely, both in his prose and his 
 verse. His prose in "The Connoisseur" is a feeble echo of 
 that of Addison ; wliile in his verse we find unequivocal traces 
 of Prior, of Philips, and of Pope, but scarce any trace whatever 
 of a poet at least not inferior to the best of them — Cowper 
 himself Events over which he had no control suddenly removed 
 him outside this atmosphere, and dropped him into a profound 
 retirement, in which for nearly twenty years he did not peruse 
 the works of any English poet. The chimes of the existing 
 literature had fairly rung themselves out of his head, ere, with 
 a heart grown familiar in the interval with all earnest feeling — 
 an intellect busied with ever-ripening cogitation — an eye and 
 ear conversant, day after day, and year after year, with the face 
 and voice of nature — he struck, tis the key-notes of his own 
 noble poetry, a series of exquisitely modulated tones, that had 
 no counterparts in the artificial gamut. Had his preparatory 
 c(turse been difterent — had he been kept in the busy and literary 
 world, instead of passing, in his ijisulated solitude, through the 
 
270 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 term of second education, which made him what we all know 
 it seems more than questionable whether Cowper would have 
 ever taken his place in literature as a great original poet.^ His 
 two coadjutors in the work of literary revolution were George 
 Crabbe and Robert Burns. The one, self-taught, and wholly- 
 shut out from the world of letters, laid in his vast stores of 
 observation, fresh from nature, in an obscure fishing village on 
 the coast of Suffolk ; the other, educated in exactly the same 
 style and degree — Crabbe had a little bad Latin, and Burns a 
 little bad French — and equally secluded from the existing litera- 
 ture, achieved the same important work on the bleak farm of 
 Mossgeil. And the earlier compositions of these three poets — 
 all of them true backwoodsmen in the republic of letters — 
 clearers of new and untried fields in the rich unopened provinces 
 — appeared within five years of each other — Crabbe's first, and 
 Burns' s last. This process of renovating a worn-out literature 
 does certainly seem a curious one. Circumstances virtually ex- 
 communicated three of the great poetic minds of the age, and 
 flung them outside the literary pale ; and straightway they be- 
 came founders of churches of their own, and earned away with 
 them all the people. 
 
 Cowper, however, was better adapted by nature, and more 
 prepared by previous accomplishment, for the work of literary 
 revolution than either Bums or Crabbe. His poetry — to return 
 to a previous illustration, rather, however, indicated than actu- 
 ally employed — was in the natural what Pope's was in the 
 artificial walk of a generic character ; whereas theirs was of a 
 
 ' Cowper himself seems to have been thoroughly aware that his long seclus-ion from 
 the world of letters told in his favour. " I reckon it among my principal advrtnt^iges :is 
 a composer of verses," we find him saying, in one of his letters to the younger Uiiwin, 
 "that I have not read an English' poet these thirteen years, and but one these twenty 
 years. Imitation even of the best models is my aversion. It is servile and mechanical 
 — a trick that has enabled many to usurp the name of author who could not have written 
 at all, if they had not written upon the pattern of some one indeed origin/il. But when 
 the ear and taste have been much accustomed to the manner of others, it is almost im- 
 possible to avoid it : and we imitate in spite of ourselves, just in proportion as we ad- 
 mire." — {Correspondence, 1781.) 
 
 1 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 271 
 
 Strongly specific cast. The writers who have followed Crabbe 
 and Bums we at once detect as imitators ; whereas the writers 
 to whom Cowper furnished the starting note have attained to 
 tlie dignity of originals. He withdrew their attention from the 
 old models — thoroughly commonplaced by reproduction — and 
 sent them out into the fields and the woods with greatly en- 
 larged vocabularies, to describe new things in fresh language. 
 And thus has he exercised an indirect but potent influence on 
 the thinking and mode of description of poets whose writings 
 furnish little or no trace of his peculiar style and manner. Even 
 in style and manner, however, we discover in his pregnant 
 writings the half-developed germs of after schools. In his lyrics 
 we find, for instance, the starting notes of not a few of the 
 happiest lyrics of Campbell. The noble ode " On the Loss of 
 the Royal George," must have been ringing in the ears of the 
 poet who produced the "Battle of the Baltic;" and had the 
 " Castaway " and the " Popular Field " been first given to the 
 world in company with the " Exile of Erin " and the " Soldier's 
 Dream," no critic could have ever suspected that they had 
 emanated from quite another pen. We may find similar traces 
 in his works of the minor poems of the Lake School. " The 
 Distressed Travellers, or Labour in Vain ;" "The Yearly Dis- 
 tress, or Tithing-Time ;" "The Colubriadj" "The Retired 
 Cat ;" "The Dog and the Water Lily ;" and "The Diverting 
 History of John Gilpin," might have all made tluir first a}>- 
 pearance among the "Lyrical Ballads," and would certainly 
 have formed high specimens of the work. But it is not form 
 and manner that the restored literature of England mainly owes 
 to Cowper — it is spirit and life ; not so much any particular 
 mode of exhibiting nature, as a revival of the habit of looking 
 at it. 
 
 I had selected as my inn at Olney a quiet old house, kept by 
 a quiet old man, who, faithful to bygone greatness, continued 
 to sell his ale under the somewhat faded countenance of the 
 
272 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 late Duke of York. On my return, I found him smoking a 
 pipe, in his clean, tile-paved kitchen, with a man nearly as old 
 as himself, but exceeding vigorous for his years — a fresh- 
 coloured, square-shouldered, deep-chested, English-looking man, 
 with good sense and frank good humour broadly impressed 
 on every feature. The warm day and the long walk had ren- 
 dered me exceedingly thirsty : I had been drinking, as I came 
 along, at every runnel ; and I now asked the landlord whether 
 he could not get me something to slake my drought less heady 
 than his ale. " Oh," said his companion, taking from his 
 pocket half-a-dozen fine jargonelle pears, and sweeping them to- 
 wards me across the old oak table, " these are the things for 
 your thirst." I thanked him, and picked out of the heap a 
 single pear. " Oh," he exclaimed, in the same tone of refresh- 
 ing frankness, " take all, take all ; they are all of my own 
 rearing ; I have abundance more on my trees at home." With 
 so propitious a beginning, we were soon engaged in conversa- 
 tion. He was, as I afterwards learned from my host, a very 
 worthy man, Mr. Hales of Pemberton, the last, or nearly the 
 last, of the race of old English yeomen in this part of the 
 country. His ancestors had held their small property of a few 
 fields for centuries, and he continued to hold it still. He well 
 remembered Cowper, he told me ; Newton had left Olney be- 
 fore his day, some sixty-five or sixty-six years ago ; but of 
 Thomas Scott he had some slight recollection. The connexion 
 of these men with the locality had exerted, he said, a marked 
 influence on the theologic opinions and beliefs of the people ; 
 and there were few places in England, in consequence, in which 
 the Puseyite doctrines had made less way. The old parishioners 
 of Newton and Scott, and the town's-folk and neighbours of 
 Cowper, had felt, of course, an interest in their writings ; and 
 so there were more copies of the " Poems," and the " Cardi 
 phonia," and the '' Force of Truth," and the " Essays," scat- 
 tered over the place, than over perhaps any other locality in 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 273 
 
 England. And so the tnith was at least known in Olney and 
 its neighbourhood, whatever use might be made of it. I in- 
 quired whether he had ever Heard of one Moses Brown, who 
 had been curate in Olney exactly a hundred years before — a 
 good man, a poet, and a friend of James Hervey, and whose 
 poems, descriptive and devotional, though not equal by a great 
 deal to those of Cowper, had passed through several editions in 
 their day 1 Mr. Hales had barely heard that such a man there 
 had been, and had some recollection of an aged woman, one of 
 his daughters. I parted from the old frank yeoman, glad I 
 should have seen so fine a specimen of a class fast hastening to 
 extinction. The reader will remember that Gulliver, in the 
 island of the sorcerers, when the illustrious dead were called up 
 to hold converse with him, had the curiosity to summon, among 
 the rest, a few English yeomen of the old stamp — "once so 
 famous," says the satirist, " for the simplicity of their manners, 
 diet, and dress — for justice in their dealings — for their true 
 spirit of liberty and love of their country." And I deemed 
 myself somewhat in luck in having found a representative of 
 the class still in the land of the living, considerably more than 
 a century after Swift had deemed it necessary to study his 
 specimens among the dead. 
 
 After exhausting the more interesting walks of the place, I 
 quitted Olney next morning for the railway, by an omnibus that 
 plies daily between Bedford and Wolverton. There were two 
 gentlemen in the vehicle. The one dressed veiy neatly in black, 
 with a white neck-cloth, and somewhat prim-looking beaver hat, 
 I at once set down as a Dissenting minister ; the other, of a nitlier 
 more secular cast, but of staid and sober aspect, might, I in- 
 ferred, be one of his deacons or elders. They were engaged, as 
 I entered, in discussing some theological question, which they 
 dropped, however, as we drove on through the street, and 
 nvinced a curiosity to know where Newton and Thouuw Soott 
 had lived. I pointed out to them the houfle of Cowpor, and 
 
274 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 the house and church of Newton ; and, in crossing the famous 
 bridge over the Ouse, directed their attention to the distant 
 village of Weston-Underwood, in which Scott had officiated for 
 many years as a curate. And so I got fairly into their good 
 graces, and had my share assigned me in the conversation. 
 They discussed Newton and Scott, and characterized as sound 
 and excellent the " Commentary" of the one, and the "Letters" 
 of the other; but the labours of Cowper, whose rarer genius, 
 and intellect of finer texture, seemed removed beyond the legi- 
 timate range of their appreciation, they regarded apparently as 
 of less mark and importance. I deemed them no inadequate 
 representatives of a worthy section of the English people, and 
 of an obvious power in the country — a power always honestly 
 and almost always well directed, but rather in obedience to the 
 instincts of a wise religion than the promptings of a nicely-dis- 
 criminating intelligence. The more secular-looking traveller of 
 the two, on ascertaining that I had come from Edinburgh, and 
 was a citizen of the place, inquired whether I was not a parish- 
 ioner of Dr. Chalmers — the one Scotchman, by the way, with 
 whose name I found every Englishman of any intelligence in 
 some degree acquainted ; and next, whether I was not a member 
 of the Free Church. The Disruption both gentlemen regarded 
 as a great and altogether extraordinary event. They knew 
 almost nothing of the controversy which had led to it; but 
 there was no mistaking the simple fact of which it was an 
 embodiment, namely, that from four to five hundred ministers 
 of the Established Church had resigned their livings on a point 
 of principle. To this effect, at least, the iron tongue of rumour 
 had struck with no uncertain sound ; and the tones were of a 
 kind suited not to lower the aspirations of the religious senti- 
 ment, nor to cast a shade of suspicion on its reality as a priii- 
 ciplo of conduct. 
 
 In the middle of a weary ascent immediately over the old 
 yeoman's hamlet of Pembertou, tlie horse that dragged us fairly 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 275 
 
 itood still ; and so we had to get out and walk ; and though 
 we paced over the ground quite leisurely enough, both vehicle 
 and driver were left far behind ere we got to the top of the 
 hill. We paused, and paused, and sauntered on for a few hun- 
 dred yards at a time, and then paused again and again ; and 
 still no omnibus. At length the driver came puffing up behind 
 us afoot, on the way to Newport Pagnell, he said, for another 
 " hanimal," for his " poor hoss" had foundered on that " cussed 
 hill." My fellow-traveller, the presumed deacon, proved con- 
 siderably more communicative than his companion the minister. 
 He had, I found, notwithstanding his gravity, some town-bred 
 smartness about him, and was just a little conceited withal — or, 
 I should perhaps rather say, was not quite devoid of what consti- 
 tutes the great innate impression of the true Englishman — an 
 impression of his own superiority, simply in virtue of his country, 
 over aU and sundry who speak his language with an accent nut 
 native to the soil. But I never yet quarrelled with a feeling at 
 once so comfortable, and so harmless, and which the Scotch — 
 though in a form less personal as it regards the individual 
 entertaining it, and with an eye more to Scotland in the average 
 — cherish as strongly ; and so the Englishman and I agreed dur- 
 ing our walk excellently well. He had unluckily left his hat in 
 the vehicle, bringing with him instead, what served as his coach- 
 cap, a pinched Glengaiy bonnet, which, it must be confessed, 
 looked nearly as much out of place on his head as Captain 
 Knockdunder's cocked hat, trimmed with gold lace, when 
 mounted high over philabeg and plaid, on the head of the 
 redoubted Captain. And on nearing the village of Skirvington, 
 he seemed to feel that the bonnet was not the sort of head-dress 
 in which a demure Englishman looked most himself. " It 
 might do well enough for a Scotchman like me," he said, " but 
 not so well for him." I wore, by chance, a tolerably good hat, 
 and proposed making a temporary exchange, until we should 
 have passed the village; but fate declared itself against the 
 
276 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 transaction. The Englishman's bonnet would have lain, we 
 found, like a coronet upon a cushion on the Scotch head; and 
 the Scotch hat, on the other hand, threatened to swallow up the 
 Englishman. I found myself in error in deeming him an 
 acquaintance of our fellow-traveller the minister : he did not 
 even know his name, and was exceedingly anxious to find it 
 out — quite fidgety on the point; for he was, he said, a pro- 
 foundly able man, and, he was certain, a person of note. At 
 the inn at Newport Pagnell, however, he succeeded, I know not 
 how, in ferreting the name out, and whispered into my ear as 
 we went, that he was assured he was in the right in deeming 
 our companion somebody : the gentleman in black beside us 
 
 was no other than Dr. . But the Doctor's name was 
 
 wholly unfamiliar to me, and I have since forgotten it. 
 
 Newport Pagnell ! I had but just one association with the 
 place, besides the one formed as I had passed through its streets 
 two evenings before, on the night of riot and clamour : it had 
 been for many years the home of worthy, witty, bluff William 
 Bull — the honest Independent minister who used so regularly 
 to visit poor Cowper in his affliction, ere Cowper had yet become 
 famous, and whom the affectionate poet learned so cordially to 
 love. How strangely true genius does brighten up whatever 
 object it falls upon ! It is, to borrow from Sir Walter's illus- 
 tration, the playful sunbeam that, capriciously selecting some 
 little bit of glass or earthenware in the middle of a ploughed 
 field, renders it visible across half a county, by the light which 
 it pours upon it. An old astronomer, ere the heavens had been 
 filled up with their fantastic signs — crabs, and fish, scorpions, 
 bulls and rams, and young ladies, and locks of young ladies' 
 hair — could give a favourite toy or pet companion a place in 
 the sky ; but it is only the true poet who possesses an analogous 
 power now. He can fix whatever bauble his fancy rests upon 
 high in the literary heavens ; and no true poet ever exercised 
 the peculiar privilege of his order more sportively than Cowper. 
 
w 
 
 m 
 
 ^ 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 277 
 
 ;e lias fixed Mr. Bull's tobacco-box and his pipe amid the signs, 
 and elicited many a smile by setting the honest man a-smoking 
 High up in the moon. But even to the moon his affection fol- 
 'Towed him, as may be seen from the characteristic passage, glit- 
 tering, as is Cowper's wont, with an embroidery of playful 
 umour, inwrought into a sad-coloured ground-work of melan- 
 loly, in which he apostrophizes the worthy minister in his new 
 idgment. '' Mon aimable and tr^s-cher ami, — It is not in the 
 power of chaises or chariots to carry you where my affections 
 will not follow you. If I heard that you were gone to finish 
 our days in the moon, I should not love you the less, but 
 ihould contemplate the place of your abode as often as it 
 ap})eared in the heavens, and say, ^ Farewell, my friend, for ever ! 
 Lost, but not forgotten ! Live happy in thy lantern, and smoke 
 the remainder of thy pipes in peace ! Thou art rid of earth, at 
 least of all its cares, and so far can I rejoice in thy removal; 
 and as to the cares that are to be found in the moon, I am 
 resolved to suppose them lighter than those below — heavier 
 ikhey can hardly be.'" 
 
 Cowper's translation of the better devotional poems of 
 Madame Guyon were made at the request of Mr. Bull, who, 
 though himself a Calvinist, was yet so great an admirer of the 
 mystic Frenchwoman — undoubtedly sincere, though not always 
 judicious, in her devotional aspirations — that he travelled on 
 one occasion twenty miles to see her picture. He urged him, 
 too, during that portion of partial convalescence in which his 
 greater poetical works were produced, again to betake himself 
 to the composition of original hymns ; but it was the hour of 
 the power of darknc^ss, and this second request served but to 
 distress the mind of the suffering poet. He had " no objection," 
 he said, " to giving the graces of the foreigner an English dress," 
 but ''insuperable ones to affected exhibitions of what he did 
 not feel." "Ask possibilities," he adds, " and they sliall be 
 performed; but ask no hymns from a man suffering from 
 
278 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 despair, as I do. I could not sing the Lord's song were it to 
 save my life, banished as I am, not to a strange land, but to a 
 remoteness from His presence, in comparison with which tlie 
 distance from east to west is no distance — is vicinity and cohe- 
 sion." Alas, poor Cowper! — sorely smitten by the archers, and 
 ever carrying about with him the rankling arrow in the wound. 
 It is not improbable that one of the peculiar doctrines of the 
 Mystics, though it could scarce have approved itself to his 
 judgment, may have yet exercised a soothing influence on the 
 leading delusion of his unhappy malady ; and that he may have 
 been all the more an admirer of the writings of Madame Guyon 
 — for a great admirer he was — in consequence of her pointed 
 and frequent allusion to it. It was held by the class of Chris 
 tians to which she belonged — among the rest by Fdnelon — that 
 it would be altogether proper, and not impossible, for the soul 
 to acquiesce in even its own destruction, were it to be God's 
 will that it should be destroyed. We find the idea brought 
 strongly out in one of the poems translated by Cowper; but it 
 is in vain now to inquire respecting the mood of strangely 
 mingled thought and feeling — of thought, solid and sane, and 
 of acute feeling, quickened by madness — in which he must have 
 given to it its first embodiment in English verse. 
 
 " Yet He leaves me, — cruel fate! 
 Leaves me in my lost estate. 
 Have I sinn'd ? Oh, say wherein ; 
 Tell me, and forgive my sin ! 
 King and Lord, wl ora l ..dore. 
 Shall I see thy face no more ? 
 Be not angry ; I i:esign 
 Henceforth all my will to thine: 
 I consent that thou depart, 
 Though thine absence breaks my heart. 
 Go then, and for ever too; 
 All is right that Thou wilt do " 
 
 A mile beyond Skirvington, when we had almost resigned 
 ourselves to the hardship of walking over all the ground which 
 we had bargained for being carried over, we were overtaken by 
 the omnibus drawn by the " fresh hoss." It stopped for a few 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 279 
 
 seconds as we entered Newport Pagnell, to pick up a passenger ; 
 and a tall, robust, hard-featured female, of some five-and-forty 
 or so, stepped in. " Had we heard," she asked, when adjusting 
 herself with no little bustle in a comer of the conveyance — 
 " had we heard how the great fight had gone ?" " No !" — ^my 
 two companions had not so much as heard that a great fight 
 there had been. "0 dear!" exclaimed the robust female, "not 
 heard that Bendigo challenged Gaunt for the championship ! — 
 ay, and he has beaten him too. Three hundred guineas a-side ! " 
 " Bad work, I am afraid," said the gentleman in black. " Yes," 
 exclaimed the robust female; "bad work, foul work; give 'em 
 fair play, and Bendigo is no match for Gaunt. Hard stiff 
 fellow, though! But there he is!" We looked out in the 
 direction indicated, and saw the champion of all England stand- 
 ing at a public-house door, with a large white patch over one 
 eye, and a deep purple streak under the other. He reminded 
 me exceedingly of Bill Sikes, in the illustrations by Gmick- 
 sliank of Oliver Twist. For two mortal hours had he stood up, 
 under the broiling sun of the previous day, to knock down, and 
 be knocked down in turn, all in a lather of blood and sweat, 
 and surrounded by a ring of the greatest scoundrels in the king- 
 dom. And the ninety-third round had determined him the best 
 man of two, and the champion of all England. I felt convinced, 
 however, like the old king in the ballad, that England holds 
 
 " within its realine 
 Five hundred as good as hee." 
 
 There had been sad doings in the neighbourhood — not a little 
 thieving in the houses, several robberies on the highway, and 
 much pocket-picking among the crowds; in short, as the re- 
 porter of a sporting paper, " The Era," who seemed to have got 
 bitten somehow, summed up his notice of the fight, " had the 
 crowds brought together been transported eii masse to Botany 
 iJBay, they would have breathed forth such a moral pestilence as 
 ^Hkuld have infected the atmosphere of the place." Pugilism 
 
 I 
 
280 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 has been described as one of the manifestations of English char- 
 acter and manners. I suspect, however, that in the present 
 day it manifests nothing higher than the unmitigated black- 
 guardism of England's lowest and most disreputable men. Ee- 
 garding the English ladies who take an interest in it, I must of 
 course venture nothing untender; indeed, I saw but a single 
 specimen of the class, and that for but twenty minutes or so, 
 for the robust female left us at the first stage. 
 
 A pugilist, notwithstanding his pugilism, may be, I doubt 
 not, a brave fellow ; the bottom he displays is, in most instances, 
 the identical quality which, in the desperate tug of war, so dis- 
 tinguishes, over all the other troops of Europe, the British 
 soldier. But the "science of defence" can have in itself no 
 tendency either to strengthen native courage, or to supply the 
 want of it. It must take its place rather among those artificial 
 means of inspiring confidence, that, like the bladders of the 
 swimmer, serve but to induce a state of prostration and help- 
 lessness when they unexpectedly give way, and can be but an 
 indifferent preparation for meeting full in front the bayonet- 
 point that breaks in upon its guards, or the whizzing bullet 
 that beats them down. I have been told by an aged relative, 
 now deceased, who saw nuich service, that in the first great 
 naval battle in which he was engaged, and the first great storm 
 he experienced, there were two men — one in each instance — - 
 whose cowardice was palpable and apparent to the whole crew, 
 and who agreed so far in character, that each was the champion- 
 pugilist and bully of his vessel. The dastard in the engagement 
 — that of Camperdown — was detected coiling up his craven 
 bulk in a place of concealment, out of reach of the shot ; the 
 dastard in the storm was rendered, by the extremeness of his 
 terror, unfit for duty. The vessel in which my relative sailed 
 at the time — the same relative who afterwards picked up the 
 (nirious shell amidst the whistling of the bullets in Egypt — was 
 one of those old-fashioned, iron-fastened ships of the line, that, 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 281 
 
 previous to the breaking out of the first revolutionary war, had 
 been lying in dock for years, and that, carefully kept, so far at 
 least as externals were concerned, looked extremely well when 
 fiist sent to sea, but proved miserable weather-boats amid the 
 straining of a gale, when their stiff rusty bolting began to slacken 
 and work out. The gale, in this especial instance, proved a very 
 tremendous one ; and the old Magnificent went scudding before 
 it, far into the Northern Ocean, under bare poles. She began 
 to open in the joints and seams like a piece of basket-work ; 
 and though the pumps were plied incessantly by half-hour re- 
 lays, the water rose fast within the hold, and she threatened to 
 settle down. My relative was stationed in the well-room during 
 one of the night-watches, just as the tempest had reached its 
 crisis, to take note of the state of the leakage : and a man came 
 round every quarter of an hour to receive his report. The 
 water, dimly visible by the lantern of honi, rose fast along the 
 gauge, covering, inch after inch, four feet and a half — four feet 
 nine — five feet — five feet three — five feet and a half : the cus- 
 tomary quarter of an hour had long elapsed, yet no one appeareil 
 to report; and the solitary watcher, wondering at the delay, 
 raised the little hatch directly above head, and stepped out upon 
 the orlop, to represent the state of matters below. Directly 
 over the opening, a picture of cold, yellow terror, petrifying into 
 stone, stood the cowed bruiser, with a lantern dangling idly 
 from his finger-points. "What make you here?" asked my 
 relative. ''Come to report." "Report! is that reporting?" 
 " Oh ! I — how many feet water?" " Five and a half" " Five 
 feet and a half!" exclaimed the unnerved bully, striking his 
 hands together, and letting his lantern fall into the open hatch 
 — " Five feet and a half ! Gracious heaven ! it's all over with 
 us!" Nothing, I have oftener than once heard my relative 
 remark, so strongly impressed him during the terrors of the 
 ^'ale, as the dread-impressed features and fear-modulated tones 
 of that unhappy man. 
 
282 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 Cowper and the geologista — Geology in the poet's days in a state of great immaturity — 
 Case different now — Folly of committing the Bible to a false science — Galileo — Geo- 
 logists at one in all their more important deductions ; vast antiquity of the earth one 
 of these- Stata uf the question— Illustration — Presumed thickness of the fossiliferous 
 strata— Peculiar order of their organic contents ; of their fossil fish in particular, as 
 ascertained by Agassiz— The geolo:;ic races of animals entirely different from those 
 which sheltered with Noah in the aik — Alleged discrepancy between geologic fact 
 and the Alo.-aic record not real — luferenco based on the opening verses of the book 
 of Genesis — Parallel passage adduced to prove the inference unsound — The supposi- 
 tion that fossils may have been created such exnmined ; unworthy of the Divine 
 wisdom ; contr-iry to the principles which regulate human belief; subversive of the 
 grand argument founded on design — The profounder theologians of the day not anti- 
 geologists — Geologic fact in reality r,f a kind fitted to perform important work in the 
 two theologies, natural and revealed ; subversive of the " infinite-series " argument 
 of the atheist ; subvtiraive, too, of the objection drawn by iufidelity from an astro- 
 nomical analogy — Counter-objection — Illustration. 
 
 It may have been merely the effect of an engrossing study 
 long prosecuted, but so it was, that of all I had witnessed amid 
 the scenes rendered classic by the muse of Cowper, nothing 
 more permanently impressed me than a few broken fossils of 
 the Oolite which I had picked up immediately opposite the 
 poet's windows. There had they lain, as carelessly indifferent 
 to the strictures in " The Task," as the sun in the central 
 heavens, two centuries before, to the denunciations of the In- 
 quisition. Geology, however, in the days of Cowper, had not 
 attained to the dignity of a science. It lacked solid footing as 
 it journeyed amid the wastes of Chaos ; and now tipped, ar? 
 with its toe-points, a '' crude consistence " of ill-understood 
 facts, and now rose aloft into an atmosphere of obscure con- 
 jecture, on a " tumultuous cloud " of ill-digested theory. In a 
 science in this unformed, rudiinental stage, whether it deal with 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 2 (S3 
 
 the stars of heaven or the strata of the earth, the old anarch of 
 Infidelity is sure always to effect a transitory lodgment ; and 
 beside hira stand his auxiliaries, 
 
 " Rumour, and Chance, 
 And Tumult, and Confusion, all embroiled, 
 And Discord with a thousand various mouths." 
 
 And so it is in no degree derogatory to the excellent sense of 
 Cowper that he should have striven to bring Revelation in 
 direct antithetical collision with the inferences of the geo- 
 logists. 
 
 There exists, liowever, no such apology for the Dean Cock- 
 burns and London " Records " of the present day. Geology, 
 though still a youthful science, is no longer an immature one : 
 it lias got firm foothig on a continent of fact : and the man 
 ^^■h() labours to set the doctrines of Revelation in array against 
 its legitimate deductions, is employed, whatever may be his own 
 estimate of his vocation, not on the side of religious truth, but 
 of scepticism and infidelity. His actual work, however ex- 
 cellent his proposed object, is identically tliat of all the shrewder 
 infidels — the Humes, Volneys, Voltaires, and Bolingbrokes — 
 who have compassed sea and land, and pressed every element 
 into their service, in attempting to show that the facte and 
 doctrines of the Bible traverse those great fixed laws which 
 regulate human belief. No scientific question was ever yet 
 settled dogmatically, or ever will. If the question be one in 
 the science of numbers, it must be settled arithmetically ; if in 
 the science of geometry, it must be settled mathematically ; if 
 in the science of chemistry, it must be settled experimentally. 
 The Church of Rome strove hard, in the days of Galileo, to 
 settle an astronomical question theologically, and did its utmost 
 to commit the Bible to the belief that the earth occupies a 
 central position in the system, and that the sun performs a 
 daily revolution around it ; but the astronomical question, 
 maugre the Inquisition, refused to be settled other than astro- 
 
284 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 nomically. And all now believe that the central position Ib 
 occupied, not by the earth, but by the sun ; and that it is the 
 lesser body tliat moves round the larger, not the larger that 
 moves round the lesser. What would have been the result, 
 had Rome, backed by the Franciscan, succeeded in pledging the 
 verity of Scripture to a false astronomy ? The astronomical 
 facts of the case would have, of course, remain unchanged. The 
 seviTe truth of geometry would have lent its demonstrative aid 
 to establish their real character. All the higher minds would 
 have become convinced for themselves, and the great bulk of 
 the lower at second hand, that the Scripture pledge had been 
 given, not to scientific truth, but to scientific error ; and the 
 Bible, to the extent to which it stood committed^ would be justly 
 regarded as occupying no higher a level than the Shaster or 
 Koran. Infidelity never yet succeeded in placing Revelation 
 in a position so essentially false as that in which it was placed 
 by Rome, to the extent of Rome's ability, in the case of 
 Galileo. 
 
 Now, ultimately at least, as men have yielded to astronomy 
 the right of decision in all astronomical questions, must they 
 resign to geology the settlement of all geological ones. I do not 
 merely speak of what ought, but of what assuredly must and 
 will be. The successive geologic systems and formations, with 
 all their organic contents, are as real existences as the sun itself; • 
 and it is quite as possible to demonstrate their true place and 
 position, relative and absolute. And so long as certain fixed 
 laws control and regulate human belief, certain inevitable deduc- 
 tions must and will continue to be based on the facts which these 
 systems and formations furnish. Geologists of the higher order 
 differ among themselves, on certain minutiae of their science, to 
 nearly as great an extent as the Episcopalian differs in matters 
 ecclesiastical from the Presbyterian, or the Baptist or Indepen- 
 dent from both. But their differences militate no more against 
 tiie great conclusions in which they all agree, than the theolo- 
 
p 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE . 285 
 
 gical differences of the Protestant Ch^arches against the credibility 
 of those leading truths of Christianity on which all true Churches 
 are united. And one of these great conclusions respects the in- 
 calculably vast antiquity of the earth on which we dwell. It 
 seems scarce possible to over-estimate the force and weight of 
 the evidence already expiscated on this point ; and almost every 
 new discovery adds to its cogency and amount. That sectional 
 thickness of the earth's crust in which, mile beneath mile, the 
 sedimentary strata are divided into many-coloured and variously- 
 composed systems and formations, and which abounds from top 
 to bottom in organic remains, forms but the mere pages of the 
 register. And it is rather the nature and order of the entries 
 with which these pages are crowded, than the amazing greatness 
 of their number, or the enormous extent of the space which they 
 occupy (rather more than five miles) — though both have, of course, 
 weight — that compel belief in the remoteness of the period to 
 which the record extends. Let me attempt elucidating the 
 point by a simple illustration. 
 
 In a well-kept English register, continuous from a distant 
 antiquity to the present time, there are many marks demonstra- 
 tive of the remoteness of the era to which it reaches, besides the 
 bulk and number of the volumes which compose it, and the 
 multitude of the entries which they contain. In an earlier 
 volume we find the ancient Saxon character united to that some- 
 what meagre yet not inexpressive language in which Alfred 
 wrote and conversed. In a succeeding volume, the Saxon, both 
 in word and letter, gives place to Norman French. The Nor- 
 man French yields, in turn, in a yet succeeding one, to a massive 
 black-letter character, and an antique combination of both tongues, 
 which we term the genuine Old English. And then, in after 
 \ olumes, the Old English gradually modernizes and improves, 
 till we recognise it as no lunger old: we see, too, the hea\7' 
 1 lack-letter succeeded by the lighter Italian hand, at first dog- 
 K'dly stiff and upright, but anon bent elegantly forward along 
 
286 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 the line. And in these various successions of character and 
 language we recognise the marks of a genuine antiquity. Nor,i 
 in passing from these — the mere externals of the register — to the! 
 register itself, are the evidences less conclusive. In reading up-i 
 wards we find the existhig families of the district preceded by! 
 families now extinct, and these, in turn, by families which hadi 
 become extinct at earlier and still earlier periods. Names dis-i 
 appear — ^titles alter — the boundaries of lands vary as the pro-i 
 prietors change — smaller estates are now absorbed by larger, and ' 
 now larger divide into smaller. There are traces not a few of 
 customs long abrogated and manners become obsolete ; and we 
 see paroxysms of local revolution indicated by a marked group- 
 ing of events of corresponding character, that assume peculiar 
 force and significancy when we collate the record with the 
 general histoiy of the kingdom. Could it be possible, I ask, to 
 believe, regarding such a many-volumed register — with all its 
 various styles, characters, and languages — its histories of the 
 rise and fall of families, and its records of conquests, settlements, 
 and revolutions — that it had been all hastily written at a heat 
 on a Saturday night, some three or four weeks ago, without any 
 intention to deceive on the part of the writer — nay, without any 
 intention even of making a register at all 1 The mere bulk and 
 number of the volumes would militate sadly against any such 
 supposition ; but the peculiar character and order of their con- 
 tents would militate against it more powerfully still. 
 
 Now, the geologic register far excels any human record, in 
 the number and significancy of the marks of a strictly analogous 
 cast which demonstrate its vast antiquity. As we ascend higher, 
 and yet higher, the characters of the document strangely alter. 
 In the Tertiary ages we find an evident approximation to the 
 existing style. An entire change takes place as we enter the 
 Secondary period. A change equally marked characterizes the 
 Palaeozoic eras. Up till the commencement of the Cretaceous sys- 
 tem, two great orders of fish — the Ctenoid and Cycloid — fish fur- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 287 
 
 Ihed with homy scales and bony skeletons — comprise, as they 
 now do, the great bulk of the finny inhabitants of the waters. But 
 immediately beyond the Cretaceous group these two orders wholly 
 disappear, and the Ganoid and Placoid orders — fish that wear an 
 armature of bone outside, and whose skeletons are chiefly cartillagi- 
 nous — take their places. Up till the period of the Magnesian Lime- 
 stone, the homocercal or two-lobed type of fish-tail greatly pre- 
 ponderates, as at the present time ; but in all the older formations 
 — those of the immensely extended Palaeozoic period — not a 
 single tail of this comparatively modem type is to be found, and 
 the heterocercal or one-sided tail obtains exclusively. Down till 
 the deposition of the Chalk has taken place, all the tme woods 
 are coniferae of the Pine or Araucarian families. After the Chalk 
 has been deposited, hardwood trees, of the dicotyledonous order, 
 are largely introduced. Down till the times of the Magnesian 
 Limestone, plants of an inferior order — fems, stigmaria, club- 
 mosses, and calamites — attain to a size so gigantic that they 
 rival the true denizens of the forest ; whereas with the dawn of 
 the Secondary period we find the immaturities of the vegetable 
 kingdom reduced to a bulk and size that consort better with the 
 palpable inferiority of their rank in creation. And not only are 
 the styles and characters of the several periods of the geologic 
 register thus various, but, as in the English register of my illus- 
 tration, the record of the rise and fall of septs and families is 
 singularly distinct. The dynasties of the crustacean, the fish, 
 tlie reptile, and the mammiferous quadruped, succeed each other 
 in an order as definite as the four great empires in the " Ancient 
 History" of Rollin. Nor are the periods when single families 
 arose and sank less carefully noted. The trilobite family came 
 into existence with the first beginnings of the Palaeozoic division, 
 and ceased at its close. The belemnite family began and became 
 extinct with the Secondary formations. The ammonite and 
 f,Typhite, in all their many species, did not outlive the deposition 
 of the Chalk. Tliere is one definite period — the close of tlio 
 
288 rmsT impressions op 
 
 Palseozoic era — at which the Brachiopoda, singularly numerous 
 throughout many previous formations, and consisting of many 
 great families, suddenly, with the exception of a single genus, 
 drop off and disappear. There is another definite period — the 
 close of the Secondary era — at which the Cephalopoda, with 
 nearly as few exceptions, disappear as suddenly. At this latter 
 period, too, the Enaliosaurians, so long the monster tyrants of 
 the ocean, cease for ever, and the Cetacea take their places : the 
 be-paddled reptiles go off the stage, and the bc-paddled mamma- 
 lia come on. But perhaps the most striking series of facts of 
 this nature in the whole range of geological literature, is that 
 embodied in the table afl&xed by Agassiz to his great work on 
 fossil fish. 
 
 This singularly interesting document — which, like the annual 
 balance-sheet of a great mercantile house or banking company, 
 that comprises in its comparatively few lines of figures the re- 
 sult of every arithmetical calculation made by the firm during 
 the twelvemonth — condenses, in a single page, the results of 
 the naturalist's observations in his own peculiar department for 
 many years. It marks at what periods the great families of 
 the extinct fishes began, and when they ceased, and at what 
 periods those great families arose which continue to exist in the 
 present state of things. The facts are exceedingly curious. 
 Some of the families are, we find, of comparatively brief stand- 
 ing, and occupy but small space in the record ; others sweep 
 across well-nigh the whole geological scale. Some come into 
 existence with the beginning of a system, and cease at its close ; 
 others continue to exist throughout almost all the systems to- 
 gether. The salmon and herring families, though the species 
 were different, lived in the ages of the Chalk, and ever since, 
 throughout the periods of the Tertiary ; while the cod and had- 
 dock family pertains, on the contrary, to but the existing scene 
 of things. The Cephalaspides — that family to which the 
 Pterichthys and Coccosteus belong — were restricted to a single 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 289 
 
 fiySfcem, the Old Red Sandstone ; nor had its contemporaries the 
 Dipterians — that family to which the Osteolepis and Diplopterus 
 belong — a longer term ; whereas the Coelacanthes — the family 
 of the Holoptychitis, Glyptolepis^ and Asterolepis — while it be- 
 gan as early, passed down to the times of the Chalk ; and the 
 C^stracions — even a more ancient family still — continue to have 
 their living representatives. It is held by the Dean of York, 
 that the fact of the Noachian Deluge may be made satisfactorily 
 to account for all the geologic plienomena. Alas ! No cata- 
 clysm, however great or general, could have produced diversities 
 of style, each restricted to a determinate period, and which 
 become more broadly apparent, the more carefully we collate 
 t'lP geologic register as it exists in one country with the same 
 register as it exists in another. No cataclysm could have 
 ar]*angcd an infinitude of entries in exact chron(jlogical order, 
 or assigned to the tribes and families which it destroyed and 
 interred, distinct consecutive periods arid formations. It is 
 but common sense to hold that the Deluge could not have 
 produced an ancient church-yanl — such as the Greyfriars of 
 Edinburgh — with its series of tombstones in all their succes- 
 sive styles — Gothic, Elizabethan, Roman, and Grecian — com- 
 plete for many centuries. It could not have been the author 
 of the old English register of my illustration. Geologists affirm 
 regarding the Flood, merely to the effect that it could not have 
 written Hume's History of England, nor even composed and 
 set into type Mr. Burke's British Peerage. 
 
 Such are a few of the difficulties with which the anti-geolo- 
 '4 has to contend. That leading fact of the Deluge — the ark 
 
 taken in connexion with the leading geologic fact that the 
 " ,nanic remains of the various systems, from the Lower Silurian 
 lo the Chalk inclusive, are the remains of extinct races ai:d 
 tribes, forms a difficulty of another kind. The fjxct of tlie ark 
 satisfactorily shows, tliat man in his present state has been con- 
 temporarv with but one creation. The preservation by sevcua 
 
 T 
 
290 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 and by pairs of the identical races amid which he first started 
 into existence, superseded the necessity of a creation after the 
 Flood ; and so it is the same tribes of animals, wild and domes- 
 tic, which share with him in his place of habitation now, that 
 surrounded him in Paradise. But the Palaeozoic, Secondary, 
 and older Tertiary animals, are of races and tribes altogether 
 diverse. We find among them not even a single species which 
 sheltered in the ark. The races contemporary with man were 
 preserved to bear him company in his pilgrimage, and to minis- 
 ter to his necessities ; but those strange races, buried, in many 
 instances, whole miles beneath the surface, and never seen save 
 embedded in rock and transformed into stone, could not have 
 been his contemporaries. They belong, as their place and ap- 
 pearance demonstrate, to periods long anterior. Nor can it be 
 rationally held, that of those anterior periods revelation should 
 have given us any history. They lie palpably beyond the scope 
 of the sacred record. On what principle, seeing it is silent on 
 the contemporary creations of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter, ought 
 it to have spoken on the consecutive creations of the Silurian, 
 Carboniferous, and Oolitic periods ? Why should it promulgate 
 the truths of geology, seeing that those of astronomy it has 
 withheld ? Man everywhere has entertained the expectation of 
 a book, heaven-inspired, that should teach him what God is, 
 and what God demands of him. The sacred books of all the 
 false religions, from those of Zoroaster and the Brahmins to 
 those of Mahomet and the Mormons, are just so many evidences 
 that the expectation exists. And the Bible is its fulfilment. 
 But man has entertained no such expectation of a revelation 
 from God of the truths of science ; nor is it according to the 
 economy of Providence — the economy manifested in the slow 
 and gradual development of the species — that any such expec- 
 tation should be realized. The " Principia" of Newton is an 
 uninspired volume ; and only the natural faculties were en- 
 gaged in the discovery of James Watt. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 291 
 
 But it is not urged, it may be said, that the Scriptures 
 reveal geologic truth as such ; it is merely urged that geologists 
 must not traverse Scripture statements respecting the age of 
 the earth, as revealed for purely religious purposes by God to 
 Moses. But did God reveal the earth's age to Moses"? Not 
 directly, surely, or else men equally sound in the faith would 
 not be found lengthening or shortening the brief period which 
 intervenes between Adam and Abraham, just as they adopt the 
 Hebrew or Septuagint chronology, by nearly a thousand years. 
 Here, however, it may be said that we are in doubt regarding 
 the real chronology, not because God has not indirectly revealed 
 it, but because man, in either the Hebrew or Samaritan record, 
 has vitiated the revelation. Most true : still, however, the 
 doubt is doubt. But did God reveal the earth's age, either 
 directly or otherwise ? Let us examine the narrative. " In 
 the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the 
 eai'th was without form and void ; and darkness was upon the 
 face of the deep : and the Spirit of God moved upon the face 
 of the waters. And God said. Let there be light : and there 
 was light." Now, let it be admitted, for the argument's sake, 
 tliat the earth existed in the dark and void state described here 
 only six days, of twenty-four hours each, before the creation of 
 man ; and that the going forth of the Spirit and the breaking 
 out of the light, on this occasion, were events immediately 
 introductory to the creation to which we ouraelves belong. 
 And what theni It is evident from the continuity of the 
 narrative in the passage, say the anti-geologists, that there 
 could have been no creations on this earth prior to the present 
 one. Nay, not so: for aught that appears in the narrative, 
 tlitTe might have been many. Between tlie creation of the 
 iHMtter of which the earth is composed, as enunciated in the 
 
 t verse, and the earth's void and chaotic state, as described 
 . > the second, a thousand creations might have intervened. As 
 may be demonstrated from even the writings of Moses hiinsel£ 
 
 Ki 
 
292 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 the continuity of a narrative furnishes no evidence whatever 
 that the facts which it records were continuous. 
 
 Take, for instance, the following passage : — " There went 
 a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter 
 of Levi. And the woman conceived and bare a son : and 
 when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him 
 three months. And when she could not longer hide him, she 
 took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime 
 and with pitch, and put the child therein ; and she laid it in 
 the flags by the river's brink." ^ The narrative here is quite 
 as continuous as in the first three verses of Genesis. In the 
 order of the relation, the marriage of the parents is as directly 
 followed in the one case by the birth of a son, as the creation 
 of matter is followed in the other by the first beginnings of 
 the existing state of things. The reader has as slight grounds 
 to infer in the one case, that between the marriage of the 
 parents and the birth of the child, the births of several other 
 children of the family had taken place, as to infer in the other, 
 that between the creation of matter and the subsisting creation 
 there had taken place several other creations. And if the con- 
 tinuity of the narrative would not justify the inference in the 
 one case, just as little can it justify it in the other. We know, 
 however, from succeeding portions of Scripture, that the father 
 and mother of this child had several other children bom to 
 them in the period that intervened between their marriage and 
 his birth. They had a son named Aaron, who had been born 
 at least two years previous; and a daughter, Miriam, who was 
 old enough at the time to keep sedulous watch over the little 
 ark of bulrushes, and to suggest to Pharaoh's daughter that it 
 
 1 I owe this passage, in iis bearing on the opening narrative in Genesis, to the Rev. 
 Alexander Stewart of Cromarty — for fifteen years my parish minister, and one of decid- 
 edly the most original-minded men and most accomplished theologians his country has 
 ever produced. And he, I may add, like all careful students of Scripture of the higher 
 calibre, can see no irreconcilable difference between Bible truth and the great facts of 
 tLe geoloiiist. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 293 
 
 might be well for her to go and call one of the Hebrew women 
 to be nurse to the child. It was essential, in the course of 
 Scripture narrative, that we should be introduced to personages 
 s<j famous as Aaron and Miriam, and who were destined to 
 en net parts so important in the history of the Church ; and so 
 V, c have been introduced to them. And had it been as neces- 
 6;iiy for the purposes of revelation that reference should have 
 bi^en made to the intervening creations in the one case, as to 
 tlie intervening births in the other, we should doubtless have 
 lieard of them too. But, as has been already said, it was not 
 so necessary ; it was not necessary at all. The ferns and 
 lepidodendra of the Coal Measures are as little connected with 
 the truths which influence our spiritual state, as the vegetable 
 productions of Mercury or of Pallas; the birds and reptiles of 
 the Oolite, as the unknown animals that inJiabit the plains or 
 disport in the rivers of Saturn or Uranus. And so revelation 
 is as silent on the geological phenomena as on the contem- 
 porary creations — on the periods and order of systems and 
 formations, as on the relative positions of the earth and sun, 
 or the places and magnitudes of the planets. 
 
 But organic remains may, it is urged, have been created 
 such; and the special miracle through which the gourd of 
 Jonah, though it must have seemed months old, sprang up in 
 a single night, and the general miracle through which the trees 
 of Paradise must have appeared, even on the first evening of 
 their creation, half a century old, have been adduced to show 
 that the globe, notwithstanding its marks of extreme anticfuity, 
 may have been produced with all these marks stamped upon it, 
 as if in the mint. " The very day when the ocean dashed its 
 first wav(5s on the shore," says Chateaubriand, <' it bathed, let 
 us not doubt, rocks akeady worn by the breakers, and beaches 
 strewn with the wrecks of shells." " For aught that appears 
 in the bowels of the earth," said the " Record" newspaper, 
 8ome two years ago, in adopting this pecuUar view, as expressed 
 
294 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 by a worthy Presbyterian minister, " the world might have 
 been called into existence yesterday." Let us just try whether, 
 as creatures to whom God has given reason, and who cannot 
 acquire facts without drawing inferences, we can believe the 
 assertion; and ascertain how much this curious principle of 
 explaining geologic fact actually involves. 
 
 " The earth, for anything that appears to the contrary, may 
 have been made yesterday!" We stand in the middle of an 
 ancient burying-ground in a northern district. The monuments 
 of the dead, lichened and grey, rise thick around us ; and there 
 are fragments of mouldering bones lying scattered amid the 
 loose dust that rests under them, in dark recesses impervious to 
 the rain and the sunshine. We dig into the soil below : here 
 is a human skull, and there numerous other well-known bones 
 of the human skeleton — vertebrse, ribs, arm and leg bones, with 
 the bones of the breast and pelvis. Still, as we dig, the bony 
 mass accumulates ; — we disinter portions, not of one, but of 
 many skeletons, some comparatively fresh, some in a state of 
 great decay; and with the bones there mingle fragments of 
 coffins, with the wasted tinsel-mounting in some instances still 
 attached, and the rusted nails still sticking in the joints. We 
 continue to dig, and, at a depth to which the sexton almost 
 never penetrates, we find a stratum of pure sea-sand, and then 
 a stratum of the sea-shells common on ihe neighbouring coast 
 — in especial, oyster, mussel, and cockle shells. It may be 
 mentioned, in the passing, that the churchyard to which I 
 refer, though at some little distance from the sea, is situated 
 on one of the raised beaches of the north of Scotland ; and 
 hence the shells. We dig a little further, and reach a thick 
 bed of sandstone, which we penetrate, and beneath which we 
 find a bed of impure lime, richly charged with the remains of 
 fish of strangely antique forms. *' The earth, for anything that 
 appears to the contrary, might have been made yesterday!" 
 Do appearances such as these warrant the inference 1 Do these 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 295 
 
 \ human skeletons, in all their various stages of decay, appear as 
 \ if they had been made yesterday 1 Was that bit of coffin, with 
 \ the soiled tinsel on the one side, and the corro'ded nail sticking 
 ^, out of the other, made yesterday 1 Was yonder skull, instead 
 of having ever formed part of a human head, created yesterday, 
 exactly the repulsive-looking sort of thing we see it? Indis- 
 putably not. Such is the nature of the human mind — such 
 the laws that regulate and control human belief — that in the 
 very existence of that churchyard, we do and must recognise 
 positive proof that the world was not made yesterday. 
 
 But can we stop in our process of inference at the mouldering 
 remains of the churchyard] Can we hold that the skull was 
 not created a mere skull, and yet hold that the oyster, mussel, 
 and cockle shells beneath are not the remains of molluscous 
 aiiimals, but things originally created in exactly their present 
 state, as empty shells 1 The supposition is altogether absurd. 
 Such is the constitution of our minds, that we must as certainly 
 hold yonder oyster-shell to have once formed part of a mollusc, 
 as we hold yonder skull to have once formed part of a man. 
 And if we cannot stop at the skeleton, how stop at the shells ? 
 Why not pass on to the fish 1 The evidence of design is quite as 
 irresistible in them as in the human or the molluscous remains 
 above. We can still see the scales which covered them occupy- 
 ing their proper places, with all their nicely-designed bars, hooks, 
 and nails of attachment : the fins which propelled them through 
 the water, with the multitudinous pseudo-joints, formed to 
 impart to the rays the proper elasticity, lie widely spread on 
 the stone ; the sharp-pointed teeth, constructed, like those of 
 fish generally, rather for the purpose of holding fast slippery 
 substances than of mastication, still bristle in their- jaws ; nay, 
 the very plates, spines, and scales of the fish on which they had 
 fed, still lie undigested in their abdomens. We cannot stop 
 short at the shells : if the human skull was not created a mere 
 skull, nor the shell a mere dead shell, then the fossil fish could 
 
296 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 not have been created a mere fossil. Tliere is no broken link 
 in the chain at which to take our stand ; and yet having once 
 recognised the fishes as such — having recognised them as the 
 remains of animals, and not as stones that exist in their ori- 
 ginal state — we stand committed to all the organisms of the 
 geological scale. 
 
 But we limit the Divine power, it may be said. Could not 
 the Omnipotent First Cause have created all the fossils of they 
 earth, vegetable and animal, in their fossil state 1 Yes, cer* 
 tainly ; the act of their creation, regarded simply as an act of 
 power, does not and cannot transcend His infinite ability. He 
 could have created all the burying-grounds of the earth, with 
 all their broken and v.asted contents, brute and human. He 
 could have created all the mummies of Mexico and of Egypt as 
 such, and all the skeletons of the catacombs of Paris. It would 
 manifest, however, but little reverence for his character to com- 
 pliment his infinite power at the expense of his infinite wisdom. 
 It would be doing no honour to his name to regard Him as 
 a creator of dead skeletons, mummies, and churchyards. Nay, 
 we could not recognise Him as such, without giving to the winds 
 all those principles of common reason which in his goodness He 
 has imparted to us for our guidance in the ordinary affairs of 
 life. In this, as in that higher sense adduced ])y our Saviour, 
 " God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." In the 
 celebrated case of Eugene Aram, the skeleton of his victim, the 
 nmrdered Clark, was found in a cave ; but how, asked the 
 criminal, in his singularly ingenious and eloquent defence, could 
 that skeleton be known to be Clark's ? The cave, he argued, 
 had once been a hermitage ; and in times past hermitages had 
 been places not only of religious retirement, but of burial also. 
 *' And it has scarce or ever been heard of," he continued, " but 
 that every cell now known contains or contained those relics 
 of humanity — some mutilated, some entire. Give me leave to 
 remind the court that here sat solitary sanctity, and here the 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 297 
 
 hermit and tho anchorite hoped that repose for their bones 
 when dead, they here enjoyed when living. Every place conceals 
 such remains. In fields, on hills, on highway sides, on wastes, 
 on commons, lie frequent and unsuspected bones. But must some 
 (jf the living be made answerable for all the bones that earth 
 has concealed and chance exposed V Such were the reasonings, 
 on this count, of Eugene Aram ; and it behoved the jury that 
 sat upon him in judgment to bestow upon them their careful 
 consideration. But how very different might not his line of 
 argument have been, had the conclusions of the anti-geologist 
 squared with the principles of human belief! If the fossil 
 exuviae of a fish, or the fossil skeleton of a reptile, may have 
 iiever belonged to either a reptile or a fish, then the skeleton of 
 a man may have never belonged to a man. No more could 
 be argued, Aram might have said, from the finding of a human 
 skeleton in the floor of a cave, than from the finding of a pebble 
 or a piece of rock in the floor of a cave. So far from being 
 justified in inferring from it that a murder had been perpe- 
 trated, a jury could not have so much as inferred from it that 
 a human creature had existed. 
 
 Is the anti-geologist, I would fain ask, prepared to give up 
 the great argument founded on design, as asserted and illus- 
 trated by all the master-minds who have written on the Evi- 
 dences ? Is he resolved, in the vain hope of bearing down the 
 geologist, to make a full surrender to the infidel 1 Let us mark 
 how Paley's well-known illustration of the watch found on the 
 moor would apply in this controversy. From the design ex- 
 hibited in the construction of the watch, the existence of a 
 <]esigner is inferred ; whereas, from a stone found on the same 
 moor, in which no such marks of design are apparent, the Arch- 
 deacon urges that no such inference regarding the existence of 
 a designer could be drawn. But what would be thought of the 
 man who could assert that the watch, with all its seeming 
 design, was not a watch but a stone ; and that, notwithstanding 
 
 tai 
 
298 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 its spring, its wheels, and its index, it had never been intended 
 to measure time] What could be said of a sturdily avowed 
 belief in a design not designed^ and not the work of a designer 
 — in a watch furnished with all the parts of a watch, that is, 
 notwithstanding, a mere stone, and occupies just its proper 
 place wiien lying among the other stones of a moor ? What 
 could be said of such a belief, paraded not simply as a belief, but 
 actually as of the nature of reasoning, and fitted to bear weight 
 in controversy ? And yet such is the position of tlie anti- 
 geologist, who sees in the earth, with all its fossils, no evidence 
 that it might not have been created yesterday. For obvious it 
 is, that in whatever has been designed, fitness of parts bears 
 reference to the purposed object which the design subserves ; 
 and that if there be no purposed object, there can exist no 
 fitness of parts in relation to it, and in reality no de.sign. The 
 analogy drawn in the case from the miracle of creation is no 
 analogy at all. It is not contrary to the laws v/hich control 
 human belief, that the first races of every succeeding creation 
 should have been called into existence in a state of full deve- 
 lopment ; nay, it is in palpable and harmonious accordance 
 with these laws. It is necessary that the animal which had no 
 parents to care or provide for it should come into existence in 
 a state of maturity sufficient to enable it to care and provide 
 for itself ; it is equally necessary that the contemporary veget- 
 able, its food, should be created in a condition that fitted it for 
 being food. Had the first man and first woman been created 
 mere infants, they would, humanly speaking, have shared the 
 fate of the " babes in the wood." Had the productions of the 
 vegetable kingdom been created in an analogous state of imma- 
 turity, " the horse," to borrow from an old proverb, " would 
 have died when the grass was growing." But it is contrary to 
 the laws which control human belief, that the all-wise Creator 
 should be a maker of churchyards, full of the broken debris of 
 carcases — of skeletons never purposed to compose the frame- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 299 
 
 work of animals — of watches never intended to do aught than 
 perform the part of stones.^ 
 
 I confess it grieves me more than if Puseyism were the of- 
 fender, to see a paper such as the London " Record " — the organ 
 of no inconsiderable section of the Evangelical Episcopacy of 
 England — committing itself to the anti-geologists on this ques- 
 tion. At the meeting of the British Association which held at 
 York in 1844, the puerilities of Dean Cockburn were happily 
 
 » In the pages of no writer is the argument drawn from the miracle of creation — if 
 argument it may be termed — at once so ingeniously asserted and so exquisitely adorned, 
 as in the pa^es of Chateaubriand. The passage is comparatively little known in this 
 country, and so I quote it entire from the translation of a friend : — 
 
 " We approach the last objection concerning the modern origin of the globe. ' The 
 earth,' it is said, 'is an old nurse, whose decrepitude everything announces. Exnmine 
 its lossils, its marbles, its granites, and you will decipher its innumerable years, marked 
 by circle, by stratum, or by branch, like those of the serpent by his rattles, the horse by 
 his teeth, or the stag by his horns,' 
 
 " This difficulty has been a hundred times solved by this answer — ' God should have 
 created, and without question has created, the world, with all the murks of antiquity and 
 completeness which we now see.' 
 
 " Indeed, it is probable that the Author of nature at first planted old forests and young 
 shoots— that animals were produced, some full of days, others adorned with all the graces 
 of infancy. Oak-, as they pierced the fruitful soil, would bear at once the forsaken nest 
 o! the crow and the young posterity of the dove ; the caterpillar was chrysalis and butter- 
 fly ; the insect, fed on the herb, suspended its golden egg amid the forests, or trembled 
 in the wavy air ; the bee which had lived but a single morning, reckoned its ambrosia by 
 generations of flowers. We must believe that the .sheep was not without its young, the 
 fawn without its little ones, that the thickets hid nightingales, astonished with their own 
 first music, in warming the fleeting hopes of their first loves. If the world had not been 
 at once young and old, the grand, the serious, the moral, would disappear from nature ; 
 for these sentiments belong essentially to the antique. Every scene would have lost its 
 wonders. The ruined rock could not have hung over the abyss ; the wood.s, despoiled of 
 every chance appearance, would not have displayed that touching disorder of trees bending 
 over their roots, and of trunks leaning over the courses of the rivers. In-pired thoughts, 
 venerable sounds, magic voices, the sacred gloom of forests, would vanish with the vaults 
 which served them for retreats ; and the solitudes of heaven and earth would remain naked 
 and disenchanted, in losing those columns of oak whicn unite them. The very day when 
 the ocean dashed its first waves on the shores, it bathed — let us not doubt — rocks already 
 worn by the breakers, beaches strevvn with the wrecks of shells, and headlands which 
 sustained iigainst the assaults of the waters the crumbling shores of earth. Without this 
 inherent old tige, there would have been neither pomp nor majesty in the work of the 
 Eternal; and, what could not possibly be, nature in its innocence would have been less 
 beautiful than it is to-day amid its corruption. An insipid infancy of plants, animal?, 
 and elements, would have crowned a world without poetry. But Ood was no»j bo taste- 
 less a designer of the bowers of Eden as infidels pretend. The man king was himself born 
 thirty years old, in order to accord in his majesty with the ancient grandeur of his new 
 kingdom ; and his companion reckoned sixteen sprmgs which she had not lived, that bo 
 
300 * FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 met with and exposed by the Rev. Mr. Sedgwick ; and it was" 
 on that occasion that the "Record," after pronouncing it no 
 slight satire on this accomplished man of science, that one of 
 the members present should have eulogized his " boldness as a 
 clergyman," adopted the assertion — can it be called belief? — 
 that for aught which appears to the contrary, " the world might 
 have been made yesterday." Attempts to support the true in 
 religion by the untrue in science, manifest, I am afraid, exceed- 
 
 might harmonize with flowers, birds, innocence, love, and all the youthful part of the 
 creation." 
 
 This is unquestionably fine writing, and it contains a considerable amount of general 
 truth. But mot. a particle of the true does it contain in connexion with the one point 
 which the writer sets himself to eatablifih. There exists, as has been shown, a reason, 
 palpable in the nature of things, why creation, in eyen its earliest dawn, should not have 
 exhibited an insipid infancy of plants and animals; the animals, otherwise, conld not 
 have survived, and thus the great end of crea'ion would have been defeated. But though 
 there exists an obvious reason for the creation of the full-grown and the mature, there 
 exists no reason whatever for the creation of the ruined and the broken. It is a verv 
 indifl'erent argument to allege, that the poetic sentiment deraunded the production of 
 fr ictured shells on the shores, or of deserted crows' nest.«. in the trees. If sentiment 
 demanded the creation of broken shells that had never belonged to molluscous animals, 
 how much more imperatively must it have demanded the creation of broken human 
 skeletons that had never belonged to men ! or. if it rendered necessary the creation of 
 deserted crows' nests, how much more urgent the necessity tor the creation of deserted 
 palaces and temples, sublime in their solitude, or of desolate cities partially buried in 
 the sands of the desert! There is a vast deal more of poetry in the ancient sepulchres 
 of Thebes and of Luxor, with their silent millions of the embalmed dead, than in the 
 comminuted shells of sea-beaches ; and in Palmyra and the Pyramids, than in deserted 
 crows' nests. Nor would the creation of the one class of productions be in any degree less 
 probable, or less according to the principles of human belief, than the otlier. And mark 
 the inevitable effects on human conduct ! The man who honestly held with Chateau- 
 briand in this passage, and was consistent in following out to their legitimate consequences 
 the tenets which it embodies, could not sit as a juryman in either a coroner's inquest or 
 a trial for murder, conducted on circumstantial evidence. If he held that an old crow's 
 nest might have been called into existence as such, how could he avoid holding that 
 an ancient human dwelling might not have been called into existence as such ? If he 
 held that a broken patella or whelk-shell might have been created a broken shell, how 
 could he avoid liolding that a human skuH, fractured like that of the murdered Clark, 
 might not have been created a broken skull ? To him Paley's watch, picked up on a 
 moor, could not appe;ir as other than merely a curious stone, charged with no evidence, 
 in the peculiarity of its construction, that it had been intended to measure time. The 
 entire passage is eminently characteristic of that magnificent work of imagination, "The 
 Genius of Christianity," in which Chateaubriand set himself to reconvert to Romanism 
 the infidelity of France. He ever attempts dealing by the reasoning faculty in his 
 countrymen, as the Philistines of old dealt by the Jewish champion : instead of meeting 
 it in the open field and with the legitimate weapons, he sends forth the exquisitely beau- 
 tiful Delilah of his fancy to cajole and set it asleep, and then bind it as with green withes. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 301 
 
 ingly little wisdom. False witnesses, when engaged in just 
 causes, serve but to injure them ; and certainly neither by anti- 
 geologists nor at the Old Bailey should " kissing the book " be 
 made a preliminary to supporting the untrue. I do not find 
 that the truly great theologians of the day manifest any uneasy 
 jealousy of geological discovery. Geologists, expatiating in their 
 proper province, have found nothing antagonistic in the massive 
 intellect and iron logic of Dr. Cunningham of Edinburgh, nor 
 in the quick comprehensiveness and elastic vigour of Dr. Cand- 
 lish. Chalmers has already given his deliverance on this 
 science — need it l^e said after what manner 1 — and in a recent 
 Number of the ^' North British Review " may be found the 
 decision regarding it of a kindred spirit, the author of the 
 " Natural History of Enthusiasm." " The reader," says this 
 distinguished man, in adverting to certain influential causes 
 tliat in the present day widely affect theologic opinion and the 
 devotional feeling, " will know that we here refer to that in- 
 direct modification of religious notions and sentiments, that 
 results insensibly from the spread and consolidation of the 
 modern sister sciences, Astronomy and Geology, which, immea- 
 surably enlarging as they do our conceptions of the universe in 
 its two elements of space and time, expel a congeries of narrow 
 errors, heretofore regarded as unquestionable truths, and open 
 before us at once a Chart and a History of the Dominions of 
 Infinite Power and Wisdom. We shall hasten to exclude the 
 supposition," he continues, " that, in thus mentioning the rela- 
 tion of the modem sciences to Christianity, we are thinking of 
 anything so small and incidental as are the alleged discrepancies 
 Ix 'tween the terms of Biblical history, in certain instances, and 
 the positive evidence of science. All such discordances, whether 
 rral or apparent, will find the proper means of adjustment 
 readily and finally in due time. We have no anxieties on the 
 subject. Men 'easily shaken in mind' will rid themselves of 
 the atoms of faith which perhaps they once possessed, by the 
 
302 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 means of * difficulties ' such as these. But it is not from causes 
 80 superficial that serious danger to the faith of a people is to 
 be apprehended." The passages which follow this very signifi- 
 cant one are eminently beautiful and instructiA^e ; but enough 
 is here given to indicate the judgment of the writer on the 
 point at issue. 
 
 There is, I doubt not, a day coming, when writers on the 
 evidences of the two Theologies, Natural and Revealed, will be 
 content to borrow largely from the facts of the geologist. Wlio 
 among living men may anticipate the thinking of future genera- 
 tions, or indicate in what direction new avenues into the regions 
 of thought shall yet be opened up by the key of unborn genius ! 
 The births of the human intellect, like those which take place 
 in the human family, await their predestined time. There are, 
 however, two distinct theologic vistas, on the geologic field, that 
 seem to open up of themselves. Infidelity has toiled hard to 
 obviate the necessity of a First Great Cause, by the fiction of 
 an Infinite Series ; and Metaphysic Theology has laboured hard, 
 in turn, to prove the fiction untenable and absurd. But meta- 
 physicians, though specially assisted in the work by such men 
 as Bentley and Robert Hall, have not been successful. They 
 have, indeed, shown that an infinite series is, from many points 
 of view, wholly inconceivable, but they have not shown that it 
 is impossible; and its inconceivability merely attaches to it in 
 its character as an infinity contemplated entire. Exactly the 
 same degree of inconceivability attaches to " the years of the 
 Eternal," if we attempt comprehending the eternity of Deity 
 otherwise than in the progressive mode which Locke so surely 
 demonstrates to be the only possible one : we can but take our 
 stand at some definite period, and realize the possibility of 
 measuring backwards, along the course of His existence for ever 
 and ever, and have at every succeeding stage an undiminished 
 infinitude of work before us. Metaphysic Theology furnishes no 
 real argument against the •' Infinite Series" of the atheist. But 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 303 
 
 Geology supplies the wanting link, and laughs at the idle fiction 
 of a race of men without beginning. Infinite series of human 
 (.Teatures! Why, man is but of yesterday. The fish enjoyed 
 life during many creations — the bird and reptile during not a 
 few — ^the marsupial quadruped ever since the times of the Oolite 
 — the sagacious elephant in at least the latter ages of the Ter- 
 tiary. But man belongs to the present creation, and to it ex- 
 (jlusively. He came into being late on the Saturday evening. 
 He has come, as the great and moral instincts of his nature so 
 surely demonstrate, to prepare for the sacred to-morrow. In 
 the chariot of God's providence, as seen by the prophet in vision, 
 there are wheels within wheels — a complex duality of type and 
 symbol; and there may possibly exist a similar complexity of 
 arrangement — a similar duality of typical plan — in the divine 
 iQstitution of the Sabbath. Its place, as the seventh day, may 
 bear reference, not only to that special subordinate week in which 
 the existing scene of things was called into being, but also to 
 that great geologic week, within which is comprised the entire 
 scheme of creation. 
 
 Tlie second theological vista into the geologic field opens up 
 a still more striking prospect. There is a sad oppressiveness in 
 that sense of human littleness which the great truths of astro- 
 • uomy have so direct a tendency to inspire. Man feels himself 
 lost amid the sublime magnitudes of creation — a mere atom in 
 the midst of infinity ; and trembles lest the scheme of revelation 
 should be found too large a manifestation of the Divine care 
 for so tiny an ephemera. Now, I am much mistaken, if the 
 truths of Geology have not a direct tendency to restore him to 
 liis true place. When engaged some time since in perusing one 
 of the sublimest philosophic poems of modern times — the 
 "Astronomical Discourses" of Dr. Chalmers — there occurred to 
 nie a new argument that might be employed against the infidel 
 objection which the work was expressly written to remove. Tlie 
 infidel points to the planets; and, reasoning from an analogy 
 
304 FIRST IMPEESSIONS OF 
 
 which, on other than geologic data, the Christian cannot chal- 
 lenge, asks whether it be not more than probable that each of 
 these is, like our own earth, not only a scene of creation, but 
 also a home of rational, accountable creatures. And then fol- 
 lows the objection, as fulty stated by Dr. Chalmers : — *' Does 
 not the largeness of that field which astronomy lays open to the 
 view of modern science, throw a suspicion over the truth of the 
 gospel history? and how shall we reconcile the greatness of 
 that wonderful movement which was made in heaven for the 
 redemption of fallen man, with the comparative meanness and 
 obscurity of our species?" Geology, when the Doctor wrote, 
 was in a state of comparative infancy. It has since been largely 
 developed, and we have been introduced, in consequence, to the 
 knowledge of some five or six different creations, of which this 
 globe was the successive scene ere the present creation was 
 called into being. At the time the *' Astronomical Discourses" 
 were published, the infidel could base his analogy on his know- 
 ledge of but one creation — that to which we ourselves belong ; 
 whereas we can now base our analogy on the knowledge of at 
 least six creations, the various productions of which we can 
 handle, examine, and compare. And how, it may be asked, 
 does this immense extent of basis affect the objection \nth 
 which Dr. Chalmers has grappled so vigorously ? It annihilates 
 it completely. You argue — may not the geologist say to the 
 infidel? — that yonder planet, because apparently a scene of 
 creation like our own, is also a home of accountable creatures 
 like ourselves. But the extended analogy furnished by geologic 
 science is full against you. Exactly so might it have been 
 argued regarding our own earth during the early creation repre- 
 sented by the Lower Silurian system, and yet the master-exist- 
 ence of that extended period was a crustacean. Exactly so 
 might it have been argued regarding the earth during the term 
 of the creation represented by the Old Red Sandstone, and yet 
 the master-existence of that not less extended period was a fish. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 30,5 
 
 During the creation represented by the Cai-boniferoiis period, 
 with all its rank vegetation and green reflected light, the master- 
 existence was a fish still. During the creation of the Oolite, 
 the master-existence was a reptile, a bird, or a marsupial 
 animal. During the creation of the Cretaceous period there 
 was no further advance. During the creation of the Tertiaiy 
 formations, the master-existence was a maramiferous qundniped. 
 Ft was not until the creation to which we ourselves belong was 
 called into existence, that a rational being, born to anticipate a 
 hereafter, was ushered upon the scene. Suppositions such as 
 yours would have been false in at least five out of six instances ; 
 and if in five out of six consecutive creations there existed no 
 ,'>ccountable agent, what shadow of reason can there be for 
 lioldin^ that a difl:erent arrangement obtains in five out of six 
 coiitemporary creations 1 Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, 
 ;uid Uranus, may have all their plants and animals; and yet 
 they may be as devoid of rational, accountable creatures, as 
 were the creations of the Silurian, Old Red Sandstone, Carboni- 
 ferous, Oolitic, Cretaceous, and Tertiary periods. They may be 
 merely some of the ''many mansions" prepared in the "Father's 
 liouse" for the immortal creature of kingly destiny, made in the 
 Father's own image, to whom this little world forms but the 
 cradle and the nursery. 
 
 But the eff'ect of this extended geologic basis may be neu- 
 tralized, tlie infidel may urge, by extending it yet a little fur- 
 ther. Why, he may ask, since we draw our analogies regard- 
 ing what obtains in the other planets from what obtains in our 
 own — why not conclude that each one of them has also had iis 
 geologic eras and revolutions — its Silurian, Old R(^d Sandstone, 
 Carboniferous, Oolitic, Cretaceous, and Tertiary periods; and 
 that now, contemporaiy with the creation of which man consti- 
 tutes the master existence, they have all their fidly-matured 
 creations headed by rationality? Why not carry the analogy 
 thus far? Simply, it may be unhesitatingly urged in reply, be 
 u 
 
306 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 cause to carry it so far would be to carry it beyond the legiti- 
 mate bounds of analogy; and because analogy pursued but a 
 single step beyond the limits of its proper province, is sure al- 
 ways to land the pursuer in error. Analogy is not identity. It 
 is safe when it deals with generals ; veiy unsafe when it grapples 
 with particulars. 
 
 Analogy, I repeat, is not identity. Let me attempt illustrat- 
 ing the fact in its bearing on this question. We find reason to 
 conclude, as Isaac Taylor well expresses it, that " the planetary 
 stuff is all one and the same." And we know to a certainty, 
 that human nature, wherever it exists in the present state 
 of things, " is all one and the same" also. But when rea- 
 soning analogically regarding either, we can but calculate on 
 generals, not particulars. Man being all over the world a con- 
 structive, house-making animal, and, withal, fond of ornament, 
 one would be quite safe in arguing analogically, from an ac- 
 quaintance with Europe alone, that wherever there is a civilized 
 nation, architecture must exist as an art. But analogy is not 
 identity ; and he would be egregiously in error who should con- 
 clude that nations, civilized or semi-civilized, such as the Chinese, 
 Hindoos, or ancient Mexicans, possess not only an ornate archi- 
 tecture, but an architecture divided into two great schools ; and 
 that the one school has its Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders, 
 and the other school its Saxon, Norman, and Florid styles. In 
 like manner, man's nature being everywhere the same, it may 
 be safely inferred that man wiU everywhere be an admirer of 
 female beauty. But analogy is not identity; and it would be 
 a sad mistake to argue, just as one chanced to be resident in 
 Africa or England, that man everywhere admired black skins 
 and flat noses, or a fair complexion and features approximating 
 to the Grecian type. And instances of a resembling character 
 may be multiplied without end. Analogy, so sagacious a guide 
 in its own legitimate field, is utterly blind and senseless in the 
 precincts that lie beyond it : it is nicely correct in its generals — ■ 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 307 
 
 perversely erroneous in its particulars ; and no sooner does it quit 
 its proper province, the general, for the particular, than there 
 start up around it a multitude of solid objections, sternly to 
 challenge it as a trespasser on grounds not its own. How infer, 
 we may well ask the infidel — admitting, for the argument's sake, 
 that all the planets come under the law of geologic revolution 
 — how infer that they have all, or any of them save oiu* own 
 earth, arrived at the stage of stability and ripeness essential to 
 a fully developed creation, with a reasoning creature as its 
 master-existence? Look at the immense mass of Jupiter, and at 
 tliat mysterious mantle of cloud, barred and streaked in the dir-ec- 
 tion of his trade winds, that for ever conceals his face. May 
 not that dense robe of cloud be the ever-ascending steam of a 
 globe that, in consequence of its vast bulk, has not sufficiently 
 cooled down to be a scene of life at all 1 Even the analogue of 
 our Silurian creation may not yet have begun in Jupiter. Look, 
 again, at Mercury, where it bathes in a flood of light — enveloped 
 within the sun's halo, like some forlorn smelter sweltering be- 
 side his furnace-mouth. A similar state of things may obtain on 
 the surface of that planet, from a different though not less ade- 
 quate cause. But it is unnecessary to deal further with an 
 analogy so palpably overstrained, and whose aggressive place 
 and position in a province not its own so many unanswerable 
 objections start up to elucidate and fix. 
 
 The subject, however, is one which it would be difficult to 
 exhaust. The Christian has nothing to fear, the infidel nothing 
 to hope, from the great truths of Geology. It is assuredly not 
 through any enlargement of man's little apprehension of tlie 
 Infinite and the Eternal that man's faith in the scheme of salva- 
 tion by a Redeemer need be shaken. We are incalculably more 
 in danger from one unsubdued passion of our lower nature, 
 even the weakest and the least, than from all that the astrono- 
 mer has yet discovered in the depths of heaven or the geologist 
 in the bowels of the earth. If one's heart be right, it is surely 
 
 i 
 
308 FIKST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 a good, not an evil, that one's view should be expanded ; and 
 Geology is simply an expansion of view in the direction of the 
 eternity that hath gone by. 
 
 It is not less, but more sublime, to take one's stand on the 
 summit of a lofty mountain, and thence survey the great ocean 
 over many broad regions — over plains, and forests, and undulat- 
 ing tracts of hills, and blue promontories, and far-seen islands — 
 than to look forth on the same vast expanse from the level cham- 
 paign, a single field' s-breadth from the shore. Tt can indeed 
 be in part conceived from either point how truly sublime an 
 object that ocean is — how the voyager may sail over it day 
 after day, and yet see no land rise on the dim horizon — how its 
 numberless waves roll, and its great currents ceaselessly flow, 
 and its restless tides ever rise and fall — how the lights of heaven 
 are mirrored on its solitary surface, solitary though the navies 
 of a world be there — and how, where plummet-line never 
 sounded, and where life and light alike cease, it reposes with 
 marble-like density, and more than Egyptian blackness, on the 
 regions of a night on which there dawns no morning. But the 
 larger view inspires the profounder feeling. The emotion is less 
 overpowering, the conception less vivid, when from the humble 
 flat we see but a band of water rising, to where the sky rests, 
 over a narrow selvedge of land, than when, far beyond an ample 
 breadth of foreground, and along an extended line of coast, and 
 streaked with promontories and mottled with islands, and then 
 spreading on and away in an ample plain of diluted blue, to tlie 
 far horizon, we see the great ocean in its true character, wide 
 and vast as human ken can descry. And such is the sublime 
 prospect presented to the geologist as he turns him towards the 
 shoreless ocean of the upper eternity. The mere theologian 
 views that boundless expanse from a flat, and there lies in front 
 of him but the narrow strip of the existing creation — a green 
 selvedge of a field' s-breadth, fretted thick by the tombs of dead 
 men ; while to the eye purged and strengthened by the euphrasy 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 309 
 
 of science, the many vast regions of other creations — promontory 
 beyond promontory — island beyond island — stretch out in sui> 
 lime succession into that boundless ocean of eternity, whose 
 sumless, irreduceable area their vast extent fails to lessen by a 
 single handbreadth — that awful, inconceivable eternity — God's 
 past lifetime in its relation to God's finite creatures — with re- 
 lation to the Infinite I AM Himself, the indivisible element of 
 the eternal now. And there are thoughts which arise in con- 
 nexion with the ampler prospect, and analogies, its legitimate 
 produce, that have assuredly no tendency to^onfine man's aspira- 
 tions, or cramp his cogitative energies, within the narrow pre- 
 cincts of mediocre unbelief. What mean the peculiar place and 
 standing of our species in the great geologic week? There are 
 tombs everywhere; each succeeding region, as the eye glances 
 upwards towards the infinite abyss, is roughened with graves ; 
 the pages on which the histoiy of the past is written are all 
 tombstones ; the inscriptions epitaphs : we read the characters 
 of the departed inhabitants in their sepulchral remains. And all 
 these unreasoning creatures of the bygone periods — these hum- 
 bler pieces of workmanship produced early in the week — died, 
 as became their natures, without intelligence or hope. They 
 perished ignorant of the past, and unanticipative of the future 
 — knowing not of the days that had gone before, nor recking of 
 tlic days that were to come after. But not such the character 
 of the last born of God's creatm-es — the babe that came into 
 being late on the Saturday evening, and that now whines and 
 murmurs away its time of extreme infancy during the sober 
 hours of preparation for the morrow. Already have the quick 
 eyes of the child looked abroad upon all the past, and already 
 has it noted why the passing time should be a time of sedulous 
 diligence and expectancy. The work-day week draws fast to 
 its close, and to-morrow is the Sabbath ! 
 
 fe 
 
310 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 CHAPTER XVIIL 
 
 Tiie Penny-a-mile Train and its Passengers— ^uni Jonathan — London by night— St. 
 Paul's; the City as seen from the Dome — The Lord Mayor's coach — Westminster 
 Abbey — The Gothic architecture a less exquisite production of the human mind than 
 the Grecian — Poets' Corner — The Mission of the Poets — The tombs of the kings — The 
 monument of James Watt — A humble coffee-house and its frequenters — The woes of 
 genius in London — Old 110 Thame-* .Street— The Tower — The Thames Tunnel — Long- 
 ings of the true Londoner for rural life and the country; their influence on literature 
 — The British Museum ; its splendid collection of fossil remains — Human skeleton of 
 Guadaloupe — The Egyptian Room — Domesticities of the ancient Egyptians — Cycle of 
 reproduction — Tlie Mummies. 
 
 I MUST again take the liberty, as on a former occasion, of 
 antedating a portion of my tour: I did not proceed direct to 
 London from Olney; but as I have nothing interesting to re- 
 cord (»f my journeyings in the interval, I shall pursue the 
 thread of my narrative as if I had. 
 
 For the sake of variety, I had taken the penny-a-mile train ; 
 and derived some amusement from the droll humours of my 
 travelling companions — a humbler, coarser, freer, and withal 
 merrier section of the people, than the second-class travellers, 
 whose acquaintance, in at least my railway peregrinations, I had 
 chiefly cultivated hitherto. We had not the happiness of pro- 
 ducing any very good jokes among us; but there were many 
 laudable attempts ; and though the wit was only tolerable, the 
 laughter was hearty. There was an old American lady of the 
 company, fresh from Yankee-land, who was grievously teased 
 for the general benefit ; but Aunt Jonathan, though only indif- 
 ferently furnished with teeth, had an eftective tongue; and 
 Mister Bull, in most of the bouts, came off but second best. 
 The American, too, though the play proved noAv and then some- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 311 
 
 what of a horse character, was evidently conscious that her 
 country lost no honour by her, and seemed rather gratified than 
 otherwise. There were from five-and-twenty to thirty passen- 
 gers in the van ; among the rest, a goodly proportion of town- 
 bred females, who mingled in the fun at least as freely as was 
 becoming, and were smart, when they could, on the American ; 
 and immediately beside the old lady there sat a silent, ruddy, 
 country girl, who seemed travelling to London to take service 
 in some family. The old lady had just received a hit from a 
 smart female, to whom she deigned no reply ; but turning round 
 to the country girl, she patted her on the shoulder, and tendered 
 her a profusion of thanks for some nameless obligation which, 
 she said, she owed to her. "La! to me. Ma'am?" said the 
 girl. " Yes, to you, my pretty dear," said the American ; " it 
 is quite cheering to find one modest Englishwoman among so 
 few.'' The men laughed outrageously; the females did not like 
 the joke half so well, and bridled up. And thus the war went 
 on. The weather had been unpromising — the night fell ex- 
 ceedingly dark and foul — there were long wearisome stoppages 
 ;it almost every station — and it was within an hour of mid- 
 night, and a full hour and a half beyond the specified time of 
 arrival, ere we entered the great city. I took my place in an 
 omnibus, beside a half-open window, and away the vehicle 
 trundled for the Strand. 
 
 The night was extremely dreary; the rain fell in torrents; 
 ;iud the lamps, flickering and flaring in the wind, threw dismal 
 gleams over the half-flooded streets and the wet pavement, re- 
 vealing the pyramidal rain-drops as they danced by myriads in 
 the pools, or splashed against the smooth slippery flagstones. 
 The better shops were all shut, and there were but few lights 
 in the windows : sober, reputable London seemed to have gone 
 to its bed in the hope of better weather in the morning ; but 
 here and there, as we hurried past the opening of some lane or 
 alley, I could mark a dazzlmg glare of light streaming out into 
 
312 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 the rain from some low cellar, and see forlorn figures of ill- 
 dressed men and draggled women flitting about in a style which 
 indicated that London, not sober and not reputable, was still 
 engaged in drinking hard drams. Some of the objects we passed 
 presented in the uncertain light a ghostly-like wildness, which 
 impressed me all the more, that I could but guess at their real 
 character. And the guesses, in some instances, were sufficiently 
 wide of the mark. I passed in New Road a singularly pic- 
 turesque community of statues, which, in the uncertain lights 
 seemed a parliament of spectres, held in the rain and the wind, 
 to discuss the merits of the "Interment in Towns" Commission, 
 somewhat in the style the two ghosts discussed, in poor Fer- 
 guson's days, in the Greyfriars' churchyard, the proposed in- 
 vestment of the Scotch Hospital funds in the Three per Cents. 
 But I found in the morning that the picturesque parliament of 
 ghosts were merely the chance-grouped figures of a stone-cutter's 
 yard. The next most striking object I saw were the long ranges 
 of pillars in Regent Street. They bore about them an air that 
 I in vain looked for by day, of doleful, tomb-like grandeur, as 
 the columns came in sight, one after one, in the thickening fog, 
 and the lamps threw their paly gleams along the endless archi- 
 trave. Then came Charing Cross, with its white jetting foun- 
 tains, sadly disturbed in their play by the wind, and its gloomy 
 shade-like equestrians. And then I reached a quiet lodging- 
 house in Hungerford Street, and tumbled, a little after midnight, 
 into a comfortable bed. The morning arose as gloomily as the 
 evening had closed ; and the first sounds I heard, as I awoke, 
 were the sharp patter of rain-drops on the panes, and the dash 
 of water from the spouts on the pavement below. 
 
 Towards noon, however, the rain ceased, and I sallied out to 
 see London. I passed great and celebrated places — Warren's 
 great blacking establishment, and the great house of the out- 
 fitting Jew and his son, so celebrated in "Punch," and then the 
 great "Punch's" own office, with great "Punch" himself, preg- 
 
^^Sn 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 313 
 
 ,iit with joke, and larger than the life, standing sentinel over 
 the door. And after just a little uncertain wandering, the un- 
 certainty of which mattered nothing, as I could not i)ossibly go 
 wrong, wander where I might, T came full upon St. Paul's, and 
 entered the edifice. It is comfortable to have only twopence to 
 pay for leave to walk over the area of so noble a pile, and to 
 liave to pay the twopence, too, to such grave clerical-looking 
 men as the officials at the receipt of custom. It reminds one of 
 the blessings of a religious establishment in a place where other- 
 wise they might possibly be overlooked : no private company 
 could afford to build such a pile as St. Paul's, and then show it 
 for twopences. A payment of eighteenpence more opened my 
 way to the summit of the dome, and I saw, laid fairly at my feet, 
 all of London that the smoke and the weather permitted, in its 
 existing state of dishabille, to come into sight. But though a 
 finer morning might have presented me with a more extensive 
 and more richly-coloured prospect, it would scarce have given me 
 one equally striking. I stood over the middle of a vast seething 
 caldron, and looked down through the blue reek on the dim indis- 
 tinct forms that seemed parboiling within. The denser clouds were 
 rolling away, but their huge volumes still lay folded all around 
 on the outskirts of the prospect. I could see a long reach of 
 the river, with its gigantic bridges striding across ; but both ends 
 of the tide, like those of the stream seen by Mirza, were enveloped 
 in darkness ; and the bridges, grey and unsolid-looking them- 
 selves, as if cut out of sheets of compressed vapour, seemed 
 leading to a spectral city. Immediately in the foreground there 
 lay a perplexed labyrinth of streets and lanes, and untraceable 
 ranges of buildings, that seemed the huddled-up fragments of a 
 fractured puzzle — difficult enough of resolution when entire, and 
 r(;ndered altogether unresolvable by the chance that had broken 
 it. As the scene receded, only the larger and more prominent 
 '^^jects came into view — here a spire, and there a monument, 
 
 id yonder a square Gothic tower; and as it still further 
 
314 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 receded, I could see but the dim fragment of things — bits of 
 churches inwrought into the cloud, and the insulated pediments 
 and columned fronts of public buildings, sketched off in diluted 
 grey. I was reminded of Sir Walter Scott's recipe for painting 
 a battle : a great cloud to be got up as the first part of the pro- 
 cess ; and as the second, here and there an arm or a leg stuck 
 in, and here and there a head or a body. And such was London, 
 the greatest city of the world, as I looked upon it this morning, 
 for the first time, from the golden gallery of St. Paul's. 
 
 The hour of noon struck on the great bell far below my feet ; 
 the pigmies in the thoroughfare of St. Paul's Yard, still further 
 below, were evidently increasing in number and gathering into 
 groups ; I could see faces that seemed no bigger than fists 
 thickening in the windows, and dim little figures starting up on 
 the leads of houses ; and, then, issuing into the Yard from one 
 of the streets, there came a long line of gay coaches, with the 
 identical coach in the midst, all gorgeous and grand, that I re- 
 membered to have seen done in Dutch gold, full five-and-thirty 
 years before, on the covers of a splendid sixpenny edition of 
 " Whittington and his Cat." Hurrah for Whittington, Lord 
 Mayor of London ! Without having once bargained for such a 
 thing — all unaware of what was awaiting me — I had ascended 
 St. Paul's to see, as it proved, the Lord Mayor's procession. 
 To be sure, I was placed rather high for witnessing with the 
 right feeling the gauds and the grandeurs. All human greatness 
 requires to be set in a peculiar light, and does not come out to 
 advantage when seen from either too near or too distant a point 
 of view ; and here the sorely diminished pageant at my feet 
 served rather provokingly to remind one of Addison's ant-hill 
 scene of the Mayor emmet, with the bit of white rod in its 
 mouth, followed by the long line of Aldermanic and Common 
 Council emmets, all ready to possess themselves of the bit of 
 white rod in their own behalf, should it chance to drop. Still, 
 however, there are few things made of leather and prunello really 
 
» 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 3 1 5 
 
 grander than the Lord Mayor's procession. Slowly the pageant 
 passed on and away ; the groups dispersed in the streets, the 
 faces evanished from the windows, the figures disappeared from 
 the house-tops; the entire apparition and its accompaniments 
 melted into thin air, like the vision seen in the midst of the hol- 
 low valley of Bagdad ; and I saw but the dim city parboiling 
 amid the clouds, and the long leaden-coloured reach of the river 
 bounding half the world of London, as the monstrous ocean 
 snake of the Edda more than half encircles the globe. 
 
 My next walk led to Westminster Abbey and the New Houses 
 of Parliament, through St. James's Park. The unpromising 
 character of the day had kept loungers at home ; and the dank 
 trees dripped on the wet grass, and loomed large through the 
 gi'ey fog, in a scene of scarce less solitude, though the roar of 
 the city was all around, than the trees of Shenstone at the Lea- 
 sowes. I walked leisurely once and again along the Abbey, as 
 I had done at St. Paul's, to mark the general aspect and effect, 
 and fix in my mind the proportions and true contour of the 
 building. And the conclusion forced upon me was just that at 
 which, times without number, I had invariably arrived before. 
 The Gothic architecture, with all its solemn grandeur and beauty, 
 is a greatly lower and less exquisite production of the human 
 intellect than the architecture of Greece. The saintly legends of 
 the middle ages are scarce less decidedly inferior to those fictions 
 of the classic mythology which the greater Greek and Koman 
 writers have sublimed into poetry. I have often felt that the 
 prevailing bias in favour of everything mediaeval, so character- 
 istic of the present time, from the theology and legislation of the 
 middle ages, to their style of staining glass and illuminating 
 manuscripts, cannot be other than a temporary eccentricity — a 
 mere cross freshet, chance-raised by some meteoric accident — not 
 one of the great permanent ocean-currents of tendency; but 
 never did the conviction press upon me more strongly than when 
 enabled on this occasion to contrast the neiv architecture of St. 
 
316 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 Paul's with the old architecture of Westminster. New! Old! 
 Modern! Ancient! The merits of the controversy li(3 summed 
 up in these words. The new architecture is the truly ancient 
 architecture, while the old is comparatively modern j but the im- 
 mortals are always young, whereas the mortals, though their 
 term of life may be as extended as that of Methuselah, grow old 
 apace. The Grecian architecture will be always the new archi- 
 tecture ; and, let fashion play whatever vagaries it pleases, the 
 Gothic will be always old. There is a wonderful amount of 
 genius in the contour and filling up of St. Paul's. In passing 
 up and down the river, which I did frequently during my short 
 stay in London, my eye never wearied of resting on it. Like 
 all great works that have had the beautiful inwrought into their 
 essence by the persevering touches of a master, the more I dwelt 
 on it, the more exquisite it seemed to become. York Minster, 
 the finest of English Gothic buildings, is perhaps equally im- 
 pressive on a first survey ; but it exhibits no such soul of beauty 
 as one dwells upon it — it lacks the halo that forms around the 
 dome of St. Paul's. I was not particularly struck by the New 
 Houses of Parliament. They seem prettily got up to order, on 
 a rich pattern, that must have cost the country a vast deal per 
 yard ; and have a great many little bits of animation in them, 
 which remind one of the communities of lives that dwell in 
 compound corals, or of the divisible life, everywhere diffused 
 and nowhere concentrated, that resides in poplars and willows ; 
 but they want the one animating soul characteristic of the superior 
 natures. Unlike the master-erection of Wren, they will not 
 breathe out beauty into the minds of the future, as pieces of 
 musk continue to exhale their odour for centuries. 
 
 I walked through Poets' Corner, and saw many a familiar 
 name on the walls ; among others, the name of Dry den, fami- 
 liar because he himself had made it so ; and the name of Shad- 
 well, familiar because he had quarrelled with Dryden. There 
 also I found the sepulchral slab of old cross John Dennis, 
 
^Sm( 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 317 
 
 lOus for but his warfare with Pope and Addison ; and there, 
 too, the statue of Addison at full length, not far from the peri- 
 wigged effigy of the bluff English admiral that had furnished 
 liim with so good a joke. There, besides, may be seen the 
 marble of the ancient descriptive poet Drayton ; and there the 
 ])ust of poor eccentric Goldie, with his careless Irish face, who 
 thought Drayton had no claim to such an honour, but whose 
 own claim has been challenged by no one. I had no strong 
 emotions to exhibit when pacing along the pavement in this 
 celebrated place, nor would I have exhibited them if I had ; 
 and yet I did feel that I had derived much pleasure in my time 
 from the men whose names conferred honour on the wall. 
 There was poor Goldsmith ; he had been my companion for 
 thirty years ; I had been first introduced to him through the 
 medium of a common school collection, when a little boy in the 
 humblest English class of a parish school ; and I had kept up 
 the acquaintance ever since. There, too, was Addison, whom I 
 had known so long, and, in his true poems, his prose ones, had 
 loved so much ; and there were Gay, and Prior, and Cowley, 
 and Thomson, and Chaucer, and Spenser, and Milton ; and 
 there, too, on a slab on the floor, with the freshness of recent 
 interment still palpable about it, as if to indicate the race at 
 least not lorn/ extinct, was the name of Thomas Campbell. I 
 had got fairly among my patrons and benefactors. How often, 
 shut out for months and years together from all literaiy con- 
 verse with the living, had they been almost my only companions 
 — my unseen associates, who, in the iTide work-shed, lightened 
 my labours by the music of their numbers, and who, in my 
 evening walks, that would have been so solitary save for them, 
 expanded my intellect by the solid bulk of their thinking, and 
 gave me eyes, by their exquisite descrii>tions, to look at nature ! 
 ITow thoroughly, too, had they served to break down in my 
 11 and at least the narrower and more illiberal partialities of 
 country, leaving untouched, however, all that was worthy of 
 
318 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 being cherished in my attachment to poor old Scotland ! I 
 learned to deem the English poet not less my countryman than 
 the Scot, if I but felt the true human heart beating in his 
 bosom j and the intense prejudices which I had imbibed, when 
 almost a child, from the fiery narratives of Blind Harry and 
 of Barbour, melted away, like snow-wreaths from before the sun, 
 under the genial influences of the glowing poesy of England. It 
 is not the harp of Orpheus that will effectually tame the wild 
 beast which lies ambushing in human nature, and is ever and 
 anon breaking forth on the nations in cruel, desolating war. 
 The work of giving peace to the earth awaits those divine har- 
 monies which breathe from the Lyre of Inspiration, when swept 
 by the Spirit of God. And yet the harp of Orpheus does exert 
 an auxiliaiy power. It is of the nature of its songs — so rich 
 in the human sympathies, so charged with the thoughts, the 
 imaginings, the hopes, the wishes, which it is the constitution 
 of humanity to conceive and entertain — it is of their nature to 
 make us feel that the nations are all of one blood — ^that man is 
 our brother, and the world our countiy. 
 
 The sepulchres of the old English monarchs, with all their 
 obsolete grandeur, impressed me more feebly, though a few 
 rather minute circumstances have, I perceive, left their stamp. 
 Among the royal cemeteries we find the tombs of Mary of Scot- 
 land, and her great rival Elizabeth, with their respective effigies 
 lying a-top, cut in marble. And though the sculptures exhibit 
 little of the genius of the modern statuary, the great care of 
 their finish, joined to their unideal, unflattering individuality, 
 afford an evidence of their truth which productions of higher 
 talent could scarce possess. . How comes it, then, I would fain 
 ask the phrenologist, that by far the finer head of the two should 
 be found on the shoulders of the weaker woman ? The forehead 
 of Mary — poor Mary, who had a trick of falling in love with 
 ^^ pretty men," but no power of governing them — is of very noble 
 development — broad, erect, powerful; while that of Elizabeth 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 319 
 
 -—-of queenly, sagacious Elizabeth — who could fall in love with 
 men and govern them too, and who was unquestionably a great 
 monarch, irrespective of sex — is a poor, narrow, pinched-up 
 thing, that rises tolerably erect for one-half its height, and 
 then slopes abruptly away. The next thing that caught my 
 eye were two slabs of Egyptian porphyry — a well-marked 
 stone, with the rich purple ground spotted white and pink — 
 inlaid as panels in the tomb of Edward the First. Whence, 
 in the days of Edward, could the English stone-cutter have 
 procured Egyptian porphyry 1 I was enabled to form at 
 hiast a guess on the subject, from possessing a small piece of 
 exactly the same stone, which had been picked up amid heaps 
 of rubbish in the deep rocky ravine of Siloam, and which, 
 as it does not occur in situ in Judea, was supposed to have 
 formed at one time a portion of the Temple. Is it not pro- 
 bible that these slabs, which, so far as is yet known, Europe 
 could not have furnished, were brought by Edward, the last of 
 the crusading princes of England, from the Holy Land, to con- 
 fer sanctity on his place of burial — mayhap originally — though 
 Edward himself never got so far — from that identical ravine of 
 Siloam which supplied my specimen 1 It was not uncommon for 
 the crasader to take from Palestine the earth in which his body 
 was to be deposited; and if Edward succeeded in procuring a 
 genuine bit of the true Temple, and an exceedingly pretty bit 
 to boot, it seems in meet accordance with the character of the 
 age that it should have been borne home with him in triumph, 
 to serve a similiar purpose. I was a good deal stnick, in one 
 of the old chapels — a little gloomy place, filled with antique 
 regalities sorely faded, and middle-age glories waxed dim — by 
 stumbling, very unexpectedly, on a noble statue of James Watt. 
 The profoundly contemplative countenance — so happily de- 
 scribed by Arago as a very personification of abstract thought 
 — contrasted strongly with the chivalric baubles and meaning- 
 less countenances on the surrounding tombs. The new and 
 
320 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 the old governing forces — the waxing and the waning powers 
 — seemed appropriately typified in that little twilight chapel. 
 
 My next free day — for of the four days I remained in Lon- 
 don, I devoted each alternate one to the British Museum — I 
 spent in wandering everywhere, and looking at everything — 
 in going up and down the river in steam-boats, and down and 
 athwart the streets on omnibuses. I took my meals in all sorts 
 of odd-looking places. I breakfasted one morning in an ex- 
 ceedingly poor-looking coffee-house, into whi{;h I saw several 
 people dressed in dirty moleskin enter, just that I might see 
 how the people who dress in dirty moleskin live in London. 
 Some of them made, I found, exceedingly little serve as a meal. 
 One thin-faced, middle-aged man brought in a salt herring witli 
 him, which he gave to the waiter to get roasted ; and the 
 roasted salt herring, with a penny's worth of bread and a 
 penny's worth of coffee, formed his breakfast. Another con- 
 siderably younger and stouter man, apparently not more a 
 . favourite of fortune, brought in with him an exceedingly small 
 bit of meat, rather of the bloodiest, stuck on a wooden pin, 
 which he also got roasted by the waiter, and which he sui)ple- 
 mented with a penny's worth of coffee, and but a halfpenny's 
 worth of bread. I too, that I might experience for one fore- 
 noon the sensations of the London poor, had my penny's worth of 
 coffee, and as I had neither meat nor herring, my three-halfpenny 
 worth of bread ; but both together formed a breakfast rather of 
 the lightest, and so I dined early. There is a passage which I 
 had read in Goldsmith's " History of the Earth and Animated 
 Nature" many years before, which came painfully into my 
 mind on this occasion. The poor poet had sad experience in 
 his time of the destitution of London : and when he came to 
 discourse as a naturalist on some of tlie sterner wants of the 
 species, the knowledge which he brought to bear on the subject 
 was of a deeply tragic cast. " The lower race of animals." he 
 says, " when satisfied, for the instant moment are perfectly 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 321 
 
 happy ; but it is otherwise with man. His mind anticipates 
 distress, and feels the pangs of want even before they arrest 
 him. Thus the mind being continually harassed by the situa- 
 tion, it at length influences the constitution, and unfits it for 
 rJl its functions. Some cruel disorder, but nowise like hunger, 
 seizes the unhappy sufferer ; so that almost all those men who 
 have thus long lived by chance, and whose every-day may be 
 considered as an happy escape from famine, are known at last 
 to die in reality of a disorder caused by hunger, but which, in 
 the common language, is often called a broken heart. Some 
 of these I have known myself when very little able to relieve 
 them ; and I have been told by a very active and worthy ma- 
 gistrate, that the number of such as die in London for want is 
 much greater than one would imagine — I think he talked of 
 two thousand in a year." 
 
 Rather a curious passage this to occur in a work of Natural 
 History. It haunted me awhile this morning : the weather, 
 though no longer wet, was exceedingly gloomy ; and I felt de- 
 pressed as T walked along the muddy streets, and realized, with 
 small effort, the condition of the many thousands who, without 
 friends or home, money or employment, have had to endure the 
 mingled pangs of want and anxiety in London. I remembered, 
 in crossing Westminster Bridge to take boat on the Surrey side, 
 that the poet Crabbe walked on it all night, when, friendless, 
 in distress, and his last shilling expended, he had dropped, at 
 the door of Edmund Burke, the touching letter on which his 
 last surviving hope depended. The Thames was turbid with the 
 rains — the tide was out — and melancholy banks of mud, here 
 and there overtopped by thickets of grievously befouled sedges, 
 lay along its sides. One straggling thicket, just opposite the 
 gloomy Temple Gardens — so solitary in the middle of a great 
 city — had caught a tattered jacket ; and the empty sleeve, 
 stretched against the taller sedges, seemed a human arm raised 
 above the unsolid oose. The scene appeared infinitely better 
 
322 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 suited than that drawn by the bard of Rhysdale, to remind one 
 
 " Of mighty poets in their misery dead."" 
 
 Here it was that Otway perished of hunger — Butler in great 
 neglect — starving Chatterton of poison. And these were the 
 very streets which Richard Savage and Samuel Johnson had so 
 often walked from midnight till morning, having at the time no 
 roof under which to shelter. Pope summons up old Father 
 Thames, in his " Windsor Forest," to tell a silly enough story : 
 how strangely different, how deeply tragic, would be the real 
 stories which Father Thames could tell ! Many a proud heart, 
 quenched in despair, has for ever ceased to beat beneath his 
 waters. Curiously enough, the first thing I saw on stepping 
 ashore at London Bridge, was a placard, intimating that on the 
 previous night a gentleman had fallen over one of the bridges, 
 and offering a reward of twenty shillings for the recovery of 
 the body. 
 
 There was a house in Upper Thames Street which I was de- 
 sirous to see. I had had no direct interest in it for the last 
 five-and-twenty years : the kind relative who had occupied it 
 when I was a boy had long been in his gi-ave — a far distant 
 one beyond the Atlantic ; and 110 Upper Thames Street might, 
 for aught I knew, be now inhabited by a Jew or a Mahom- 
 medan. But I had got some curious little books sent me from 
 it, at a time when my books were few and highly valued ; and 
 I could not leave London without first setting myself to seek 
 out the place they had come from. Like ' the tomb of the 
 lovers, however, which Tristram Shandy journeyed to Lyons to 
 see, and saw instead merely the place where the tomb had been, 
 I found that old 110 had disappeared ; and a tall modern 
 erection, the property of some great company, occupied its site. 
 I next walked on through the busiest streets I had ever seen, 
 
 " With carts, and cars, and coaches, roaring all," 
 
 to Tower Hill; and saw the Crown jewels of England, and the 
 
h 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE, 323 
 
 glish history done in iron — for such is the true character of 
 the old armoury, containing the mailed effigies of the English 
 kings. I saw, too, the cell in which imprisoned Raleigh wrote 
 his " History of the World;" and the dark narrow dungeon, 
 with its rude stone arch, and its bare walls, painfully lettered, 
 as with a nail-point, furnished me with a new vignette, by 
 which to illustrate in imagination some of the most splendid 
 poetry ever written in prose. From the Tower I walked on to 
 explore that most ingenious work and least fortunate under- 
 taking of modem times — the Thames Tunnel ; and found it m 
 extremely like the ordinary prints given of it in the " Penny 
 Magazine" and elsewhere, that I could scarcely believe I had 
 not seen it before. There were a good many saunterers, like 
 myself, walking up and down along the pavement, now cheapeii- 
 ing some of the toys exhibited for sale in the cross arches, and 
 now listening to a Welsh harper who was filling one of the 
 great circular shafts with sound ; but not a single passenger did 
 I see. The common English have a peculiar turn for possess- 
 ing themselves of aZwosMmpossibilities of the reel-in-the-bottle 
 class; and a person who drew rather indifferent profiles in 
 black seemed to be driving a busy trade among the visitors. 
 The great charm appeared to lie in the fact that the outlines 
 produced were outlines of their very selves, taken under the 
 Thames. I spent the rest of the day in riding along all the 
 greater streets on the tops of omnibuses, and in threading some 
 of the more characteristic lanes on foot. Nothing more sur- 
 prised me in my peripatetic wanderings than to find, when I 
 had now and then occasion to inquire my way, that the Lon- 
 doners do not know London. The monster city of which they 
 are so proud seems, like other very great ones of the earth, to 
 have got beyond the familiarities of intimate acquaintance with 
 even the men who respect it most. 
 
 I learned not to wonder, as I walked along tlie endless 
 labyrinth of streets, and saw there was no such thing for a 
 
324 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 pedestrian as getting fairly into the country, that the literature 
 of London — its purely indigenous literature — should be of so 
 rural a character. The mere wayside beauties of nature — 
 green trees, and fresh grass, and soft mossy hillocks sprinkled 
 over with harebells and daisies, and hawthorn bushes grey in 
 blossom, and slender woodland streamlets, with yellow prim- 
 roses looking down upon them from their banks — things com- 
 mon and of little mark to at least the ordinary men that live 
 among them — must be redolent of poetry to even the ordinal y 
 Londoner, who, removed far from their real presence, contem- 
 plates them in idea through an atmosphere of intense desire. 
 There are not a few silly things in what has been termed the 
 Cockney school of poetry : in no other school does a teasing 
 obscurity hover so incessantly on the edge of no meaning, or 
 is the reader so much in danger of embracing, like one of the 
 old mythologic heroes, a cloud for a goddess. But I can 
 scarce join in the laugh raised against its incessant " babble 
 about green fields," or marvel that, in its ceaseless talk of 
 flowers, its language should so nearly resemble that of Turkish 
 love-letters composed of nosegays. Its style is eminently 
 true to London nature — which, of course, is simply human 
 nature in London — in the ardent desire which it breathes for 
 rural quiet, and the green sunshiny solitude of the country. 
 " Shapes of beauty," according to one of its masters — poor 
 Keats — 
 
 " Move away the pall 
 From the tired spirit." 
 
 And then he tells us what some of those shapes of beauty are — 
 
 " Such the sun, the moon, 
 Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon 
 For simple sheep : and such are daffodils, 
 With the green world they live in : and clear rills. 
 That for themselves a cooling covert make 
 'Oainst the hot season ; the mid-forest brake. 
 Rich with a sprinkling of fi.ir musk-rose blooms." 
 
I 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 325 
 
 eats, the apprentice of a London surgeon, was an overtoiled 
 yiding man in delicate . health, cooped up by his employment 
 the whole week round for years together; and in this charac- 
 teristic passage — puerile enough, it must be confessed, and yet 
 poetical too — we have the genuine expression of the true city 
 calenture under which he languished. But perhaps nowhere in 
 the compass of English poetry is there a more truthful exhibi- 
 tion of the affection than in Wordsworth's picture of the hap- 
 less town girl, poor Susan. She is in the heart of the city, a 
 thoughtless straggler along the busy streets, when a sudden 
 burst of song from an encaged thrush hung against the wall, 
 touches the deeply-seated feeling, and transports her far and 
 away into the quiet country, where her days of innocency had 
 been spent. 
 
 " What ails her ? She sees 
 A mountain ascending, a vision of trees ; 
 Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide. 
 And a river flows ou through the vale of Cheapside, 
 Green pastures she views in the midst of the vale, 
 Down which she so often has tripped with her pail ; 
 And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's, 
 The only one dwelling on earth that she loves." 
 
 It is an interesting enough fact, that from the existence of this 
 strong appetite for the rural — intensified into poetry by those 
 circumstances which render all attempts at its gratification 
 mere tantalizing snatches, that whet rather than satisfy — the 
 influence of great cities on the literature of a countiy should 
 be, not to enhance the artificial, but to impart to the natural 
 prominence and value. The " Farmer's Boy" of Bloomfield 
 was written in a garret in the midst of London; and nowhere 
 jjerhaps in the empire has it been read with a deeper relish 
 than by the pale country -sick artisans and clerks of the neigh- 
 bouring close courts and blind alleys. Nowhere have Thom- 
 son, Cowper, and Crabbe, with the poets of the Lake School, 
 given a larger amount of pleasure than in London ; and when 
 London at length came to produce a school of poetry exclusively 
 
326 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 its own, it proved one of the graver faults of its productions, 
 that they were too incessantly descriptive, and too exclusively 
 rural. 
 
 I spent, as I have said, two days at the British Museum, 
 and wished I could have spent ten. And yet the ten, by ex- 
 tending my index acquaintance with the whole, would have 
 left me many more unsettled points to brood over than the 
 two. It is an astonishing collection ; and very astonishing is 
 the history of creation and the human family which it forms. 
 Such, it strikes me, is the proper view in which to regard it : 
 it is a great, many-chaptered work of authentic history, begin- 
 ning with the consecutive creations — dwelling at great Length 
 on the existing one — taking up and pursuing through many 
 sections the master production, Man — exhibiting in the Egyp- 
 tian section^ not only what he did, but what he was — illustrat- 
 ing in the Grecian and Roman sections the perfectibility of his 
 conceptions in all that relates to external form — indicating in 
 the middle-age section a refolding of his previously-developed 
 powers, as if they had shrunk under some chill and wintry 
 influence — exhibiting in the concluding section a broader and 
 more general blow of sentiment and faculty than that of his 
 earlier spring-time — nay, demonstrating the fact of a more con- 
 firmed maturity, in the very existence and arrangement of such 
 a many-volumed History of the Earth and its productions as 
 this great collection constitutes. I found in the geological 
 department — splendid, as an accumulation of noble specimens, 
 beyond my utmost conception — that much still remains to be 
 done in the way of arrangement — a very great deal even in the 
 way of further addition. The work of imparting order to the 
 whole, though in good hands, seems barely begun ; and years 
 must elapse ere it can be completed with reference to even the 
 present stage of geologic knowledge. But how very wonderful 
 will be the record which it will then form of those earlier 
 periods of our planet — its ages of infancy, childhood, and im- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 327 
 
 mature youth — which elapsed ere its connexion with the moral 
 and the responsible began ! From the Graptolite of the Grau- 
 wacke slate, to the fossil human skeleton of Guadaloupe, what a 
 strange list of births and deaths— of the productions and extinc- 
 tion of races — will it not exhibit ! Even in its present half- 
 arranged condition, I found the general progressive history of 
 the animal kingdom strikingly indicated. In the most ancient 
 section — that of the Silurian system — there are corals, molluscs, 
 Crustacea. In the Old Eed — for the fish of the Upper Ludlow 
 rock are wanting — the vertebrae begin. By the way, I found 
 that almost all the older ichthyolites in this section of tlie 
 Museum had been of my own gathering — specimens I had laid 
 open on the shores of the Cromarty Firth some ten or twelve 
 years ago. Upwards 'through the Coal Measures I saw nothing 
 higher than the reptile fish. With the Lias comes a splendid 
 array of the extinct reptiles. The Museum contains perhaps 
 the finest collection of these in the world. The earlier Tertiary 
 introduces us to the strange mammals of the Paris Basin — the 
 same system, in its second stage, to the Deinotherium of Darm- 
 stadt and the Megatherium of Buenos Ayres. A still later 
 period brings before us the great elephantine family, once so 
 widely distributed over the globe : we arrive at a monstrous 
 skeleton, entire from head to heel: 'tis that of the gigantic 
 mastodon of North America — a creature that may have been 
 contemporary with the earlier hunter tribes of the New World ; 
 and just beside it, last in the long series, we find the human 
 skeleton of Guadaloupe. Mysterious framework of bone locked 
 up in the solid marble — unwonted prisoner of the rock ! — an 
 irresistible voice shall yet call thee from out the stony matrix. 
 The other organisms, thy partners in the show, are incarcerated 
 in the lime for ever — thou but for a term. How strangely has 
 the destiny of the race to which thou belongcst re-stamped with 
 new meanings the old phenomena of creation ! I marked, as I 
 passed along, the prints of numerous rain-drops indented in a 
 
328 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 slab of sandstone. And the entire record from the earliest to 
 the latest times is a record of death. When that rain-shower 
 descended, myriads of ages ago, at the close of the Palaeozoic 
 period, the cloud, just where it fronted the sun, must have 
 exhibited its bow of many colours; and then, as now, nature, 
 made vital in the inferior animals, would have clung to life 
 with the instinct of self-preservation, and shrunk with dismay 
 and terror from the approach of death. But the prismatic bow 
 strided across the gloom, in blind obedience to a mere optical 
 law, bearing inscribed on its gorgeous arch no occult meaning ; 
 and death, whether by violence or decay, formed in the general 
 economy but a clearing process, through which the fundamental 
 law of increase found space to operate. But when thou wert 
 living, prisoner of the marble, haply as' an Indian wife and 
 mother, ages ere the koel of Columbus had disturbed the waves 
 of the Atlantic, the high standing of thy species had imparted 
 new meanings to death and the rainbow. The prismatic arch 
 had become the bow of the covenant, and death a great sign of 
 the unbending justice and purity of the Creator, and of the 
 aberration and fall of the living soul, formed in the Creator's 
 own image — reasoning, responsible man. 
 
 Of those portions of the Museum which illustrate the history 
 of the human mind in that of the arts, I was most impressed 
 by the Egyptian section. The utensils which it exhibits that 
 associate with the old domesticities of the Egyptians — the little 
 household implements which had ministered to the lesser com- 
 forts of the subjects of the Pharaohs — seem really more curious 
 — at any rate more strange in their familiarity — than those 
 exquisite productions of genius, the Laocoons, and Apollo Bel- 
 videres, and Venus de Medicis, and Phidian Jupiters, and Elgin 
 marbles, which the Greek and Roman sections exhibit. We 
 have served ourselves heir to what the genius of the ancient 
 nations has produced — to their architecture, their sculpture, 
 their literature; our conceptions piece on to theirs with so 
 
^vis: 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 329 
 
 \asible a dependency, that we can scarce imagine what they 
 would have been without them. We have been running new 
 metal into our castings, artistic and intellectual; but it is the 
 ancients who in most cases have furnished the moulds. And 
 so, though the human mind walks in an often-returning circle 
 of thought and invention, and we might veiy possibly have 
 struck out for ourselves not a few of the Grecian ideas, even 
 had they all perished during the middle ages — just as Shakspere 
 struck out for himself not a little of the classical thinking and 
 imagery — we are at least in doubt regarding the extent to which 
 this would have taken place. We know not whether our chance 
 reproduction of Grecian idea would have been such a one as the 
 reproduction of Egj^ptian statuary exhibited in the aboriginal 
 Mexican sculptures, or the reproduction of Runic tracery pal- 
 I)able in the Polynesian carvings — or whellier our inventions 
 laight not have expatiated, without obvious reproduction at all, 
 in types indigenously Gothic. As heirs of the intellectual wealth 
 of the ancients, and inheritors of the treasures which their 
 efforts accumulated, we know not what sort of fortunes we 
 would have carved out for ourselves had we been left to our 
 own unassisted exertions. But we surely did not fall heir to 
 the domestic inventions of the Egj^ptians. Their cooks did not 
 teach ours how to truss fowls ; nor did their bakers show ours 
 how to ferment their dough or mould their loaves ; nor could 
 we have learned from them a hundred other household arts, of 
 which we find both the existence and the mode of existence 
 indicated by the antiquities of this section ; and yet the same 
 fjiculty of invention which they possessed, tied do^vn in our as 
 in their case by the wants of a common nature to expatiate in 
 the same narrow circle of necessity, has reproduced tliem all. 
 Invention in this case has been but restoration ; and we find 
 that, in the broad sense of the Preacher, it has given us nothing 
 Tiew. What most impressed me, however, were the Egyptians 
 themselves — the men of three thousand years ago, still existing 
 
 ^ 
 
330 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 entire in their framework of bone, muscle, and sinew. It struck 
 me as a very wonderful truth, in the way in which truths great 
 in themselves, but common-placed by their familiarity, do some- 
 times strike, that the living souls should still exist which had 
 once animated these withered and desiccated bodies ; and that 
 in their separate state they had an interest in the bodies still. 
 This much, amid all their darkness, even the old Egyptians 
 knew; and this we — save where the vitalities of revelation in- 
 fluence — seem to be fast unlearning. It does appear strange, 
 that men ingenious enough to philosophize on the phenomena of 
 parental relation, on the mysterious connexion of parent and 
 child, its palpable adaptation to the feelings of the human heart, 
 and its vast influence on the destinies of the species, should yet 
 find in the doctrine of the resurrection but a mere target against 
 which to shoot their puny materialisms. It does not seem 
 unworthy of the All-Wise, by whom the human heart was 
 moulded and the parental relation designed, that the immature 
 "boy" of the present state of existence should be "father to 
 the man" in the next; and that as spirit shall be identical with 
 spirit — the responsible agent with the panel at the bar — so 
 body shall be derived from body, and the old oneness of the 
 individual be thus rendered complete, 
 
 " Bound each to each by natural piety." 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 331 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 Harrow-on-the-Hill — Descent through the formations from the Tertiary to the Coal 
 Measures — Journey of a hundred and twenty miles northwards, identical, geologi- 
 cally, with a journey of a mile and a quarter downwards — English very unlike Scot- 
 tish landscape in iis geologic framework — Birmingham fair — Credulity of the rural 
 English ; strikins< contrast wiiich they furnisn in this respect to their countrymen of 
 the knowing type— The English grades of intellectual character of immense range* 
 more in extremes than those of the Scotch — Front rank of British intellect in which 
 there stands no Scotchman ; probable cause —A class of English, on the other hand, 
 greatly lower than the Scotch; naturally less curious; acquu'e, in consequenci;, leas 
 of the developing pabulum — The main cause of the difference to be found, however, in 
 the very dissimilar relii^ious character of the two countries — The Scot naturally less 
 independent than the Englishman ; strengthened, however, where his character most 
 needs strengtli, by his religion — The independence of the Englishman s'jbj.cted 
 at the present time to two distinct adverse influences, the modern Poor Law and the 
 Tenant-at-will system — Walsall —Liverpool — Sort of lodging-houses in which one is 
 sure to meet many Dissenters. 
 
 On the fifth morning I quitted London on my way north, 
 without having once seen the sun shine on the city or its en- 
 virons. But the weather at length cleared up ; and as the train 
 passed Harrow-on-the-Hill, the picturesque buildings on the 
 acclivity, as they looked out in the sunshine, nest-like, from amid 
 their woods just touched with yellow, made a picture not un- 
 worthy of those classic recollections with which the place is so 
 peculiarly associated. 
 
 The railway, though its sides are getting fast covered over 
 with grass and debris, still furnishes a tolerably adequate section 
 of the geology of this part of England. We pass, at an early 
 stage of our journey, through the London Clay and then see 
 rising from under it the Chalk — the first representative of an 
 entirely different state of things from that which obtained in the 
 Tertiary, and the latest written record of that Secondary dynasty 
 
 ^ 
 
332 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 at whose terminal line, if we except one or two doubtful shells, 
 on which it is scarce safe to decide, all that had previously- 
 existed ceased to exist for ever. The lower members of the 
 Cretaceous group are formed of materials of too yielding a nature 
 to be indicated in the section; but the Oolite, on which they 
 rest, is well marked ; and we see its strata rising from beneath, 
 as we pass on to lower and yet lower depths, till at length we 
 reach the Lias, its base, and then enter on the Upper New Red 
 Sandstone. Deeper and yet deeper strata emerge ; and at the 
 commencement of the Lower New Red we reach another great 
 terminal line, where the Secondary dynasty ends, and the 
 Palaeozoic begins. We still pass downwards; encounter at 
 Walsall a misplaced patch of Silurian — a page transferred from 
 the earlier leaves of the volume, and stuck into a middle chapter ; 
 and then enter on the Coal Measures — the extremest depth to 
 which we penetrate in regular sequence on this line. Our 
 journey northwards from London to Wolverhampton has been 
 also a journey downwards along the geologic scale; but while 
 we have travelled northwards along the surface about a hundred 
 and twenty miles, we have travelled downwards into the earth's 
 crust not more than a mile and a quarter. Our descent has 
 been exceedingly slow, for the strata have lain at very low 
 angles. And hence the flat character of the country, so essen- 
 tially different from that of Scotland. The few hills which we 
 pass — if hills they may be termed — mere flat ridges, that 
 stretch, rib-like, athwart the landscape — are, in most cases, but 
 harder beds of rock, intercalated with the softer ones, and that, 
 relieved by the denuding agencies, stand up in bolder promin- 
 ence over the general level. Not an eruptive rock appears in 
 the entire line on to Walsall. How very different the frame- 
 work of Scottish landscape, as exhibited in the section laid bare 
 by the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway ! There, almost every 
 few hundred yards in the line brings the traveller to a trap-rock, 
 against which he finds the strata tilted at every possible angle 
 
^nft elevation. 
 
 ENGLAND AND IIS PEOPLE. 333 
 
 Here the beds go up, there they go dowTi ; m 
 this eminence they are elevated, saddle-like, on the back of some 
 vast eruptive mass ; in yonder hill, overflown by it. The coun- 
 try around exists as a tumultuous sea raised into tempest of 
 old by the fiery ground-swell from below; while on the skirts 
 ■ of the prospect there stand up eminences of loftier altitude, 
 characteristically marked in profile by their terrace-like preci- 
 pices, that rise over each other step by step — their trap-stairs^ 
 of trappean rock — for to this scenic peculiarity the volcanic 
 rocks owe their generic name. 
 
 I found Birmingham amid the bustle of its annual fair, and 
 much bent on gaiety and sight-seeing. There were double rows 
 of booths along the streets, a full half-mile in length — ginger- 
 bread booths, and carraway and barley-sugar booths, and nut and 
 apple booths, and booths rich in halfpenny dolls and penny 
 trumpets, and booths not particularly rich in anything, that 
 seemed to have been run up on speculation. There were shows, 
 too, of every possible variety of attraction — shows of fat boys, 
 and large ladies, and little men and great serpents, and wise 
 poneys ; and shows of British disaster in India, and of British 
 successes in China; madcap-minded merry-andrews, who lived 
 on their wits, nor wished for more ; agile tumblers, glittering in 
 tinsel; swings, revolvers, and roundabouts; and old original 
 Punch, in all his glory. But what formed by far the best part 
 of the exhibition were the round, ruddy, unthinking faces of the 
 country-bred English, that had poured into town, to stare, wonder, 
 purchase, and be happy. It was worth while paying one's penny 
 for a sight of the fat boys and the little men, just to see the eager 
 avidity with which they were seen, and the total want of sus- 
 picion with which all that was told regarding them was received. 
 The countrywoman who, on seeing a negro for the first time, 
 deemed him the painted monster of a show, and remarked that 
 ** mony was the way tried to wyle awa' the penny," betrayed 
 
 I Trap-ttairs / Scoticd, a stair of one flight 
 
334 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 her country not less by her suspicion than by her tongue. An 
 Englishwoman of the true rural type would have fallen into the 
 opposite mistake, of deeming some painted monster a reality. 
 Judging, however, from what the Bh'mingham fair exhibited, I 
 am inclined to hold that the preponderance of enjoyment lies 
 on the more credulous side. I never yet encountered a better- 
 pleased people : the very spirit of the fair seemed embodied in 
 the exclamation of a pretty little girl from the country, whom 
 I saw clap her hands as she turned the corner of a street where 
 the prospect first burst upon her, and shriek out, in a paroxysm 
 of delight, " Oh, what lots of — lots of shows ! " And yet, cer- 
 tainly, the English character does lie very much in extremes. 
 Among the unthinking, unsuspicious, blue-eyed, fair-complexion ed, 
 honest Saxons that crowded the streets, I could here and there 
 detect, in gangs and pairs, some of the most disagreeably smart- 
 looking men I almost ever saw — men light of finger and sharp 
 of wit — full of all manner of contrivance, and devoid of all sort 
 of moral principle. 
 
 Nothing in the English character so strikingly impressed me 
 as its immense extent of range across the intellectual scale. It 
 resembles those musical instruments of great compass, such as 
 the pianoforte and the harpsichord, that sweep over the entire 
 gamut, from the lowest note to the highest ; whereas the in- 
 tellectual character of the Scotch, like instruments of a narrow 
 range, such as the harp and the violin, lies more in the middle 
 of the scale. By at least one degree it does not rise so high ; 
 by several degrees it does not sink so low. There is an order 
 of English mind to which Scotland has not attained : our first 
 men stand in the second rank, not a foot-breadth behind the 
 foremost of England's second-rank men ; but there is a front 
 rank of British intellect in which there stands no Scotchman. 
 Like that class of the mighty men of David to which Abishai 
 and Benaiah belonged — great captains, who went down into 
 pits in the time of snow and slew lions, or " who lifted up tlie 
 
^Ipej 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 335 
 
 ear against three liiindred men at once and prevailed " — they 
 attain not, with all their greatness, to the might of the first 
 class. Scotland has produced no Shakspere ; Bums and Sir 
 AV^alter Scott united would fall short of the stature of the giant 
 of Avon. Of Milton we have not even a representative. A 
 Scotch poet has been injudiciously named as not greatly in- 
 ferior ; but I shall not do wrong to the memory of an ingenious 
 young man, cut off just as he had mastered his powers, by 
 naming him again in a connexion so perilous. He at least was 
 guiltless of the comparison ; and it would be cruel to involve 
 him in the ridicule which it is suited to excite. Bacon is as 
 exclusively unique as Milton, and as exclusively English ; and 
 though the grandfather of Newton was a Scotchman, we have 
 certainly no Scotch Sir Isaac. I question, indeed, whether any 
 Scotchman attains to the powers of Locke : there is as much 
 solid thinking in the " Essay on the Human Understanding," 
 greatly as it has become the fashion of the age to depreciate it, 
 and notwithstanding its fundamental error, as in the works of 
 all our Scotch metaphysicians put together. It is, however, a 
 curious fact, and worthy, certainly, of careful examination, as 
 bearing on the question of development purely through the 
 force of circumstances, that all the very great men of England 
 — all its first-class men — ^belong to ages during which the 
 grinding persecutions of the Stuarts repressed Scottish energy, 
 and crushed the opening mind of the country ; and that no 
 sooner was the weight removed, like a pavement-slab from over 
 a flower-bed, than straightway Scottish intellect spnmg up, and 
 attained to the utmost height to which English intellect was 
 
 j rising at the time. The English philosophers and literati of 
 the eighteenth century were of a greatly lower stature than the 
 
 ' Miltons and Shaksperes, Bacons and Newtons, of the two pre- 
 ceding centuries : they were second-class men — the tallest, 
 
 . however, of their age anywhere ; and among these the men of 
 
 \ Scotland take no subordinate place. Though absent from the 
 
336 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 competition in the previous century through the operation of 
 causes palpable in the history of the time, we find them quite 
 up to the mark of the age in which they appear. No English 
 philosopher for the last hundred and fifty years produced a 
 greater revolution in human affairs than Adam Smith, or exerted 
 a more powerful influence on opinion than David Hume, or did 
 more to change the face of the mechanical world than James 
 Watt. The " Histoiy of England " produced by a Scotchman, 
 is still emphatically the " English History ; " nor, with all its 
 defects, is it likely to be soon superseded. Robertson, if in- 
 ferior in the untaught felicities of narration to his illustrious 
 countryman, is at least inferior to none of his English contem- 
 poraries. The prose fictions of Smollett have kept their ground 
 quite as well as those of Fielding, and better than those of 
 Richardson. Nor does England during the century exhibit 
 higher manifestations of the poetic spirit than those exhibited 
 by Thomson and by Bums. To use a homely but expressive 
 Scotticism, Scotland seems to have lost her bairn-time of the 
 giants ; but in the after hairutiwe of merely tall men, her 
 children were quite as tall as any of their contemporaries. 
 
 Be this as it may, however, it is unquestionable that Erg- 
 land has produced an order of intellect to which Scotland has 
 not attained ; and it does strike as at least curious, in connexion 
 with the fact that the English, notwiths^a ding, should as 
 a people stand on a lower intellectual level than the Scotch. I 
 have had better opportunities of knowing the common people 
 of Scotland than most men ; I have lived among them for the 
 greater part of my life, and I belong to them ; and when in 
 England, I made it my business to see as much as possible of 
 the common English people. I conversed with them south and 
 north, and found them extremely ready — for, as I have already 
 had occasion to remark, they are much franker than the Scotch 
 — to exhibit themselves unbidden. And I have no hesitation 
 in affirming that their minds lie much more profoundly asleep 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 337 
 
 han inose of the common people of Scotland. We have no 
 class north of the Tweed that corresponds with the class of 
 ruddy, round-faced, vacant English, so abundant in the rural 
 districts, and whose very physiognomy, derived during the course 
 of centuries from untaught ancestors, indicates intellect yet un- 
 awakened. The reflective habits of the Scottish people have set 
 their stamp on the national countenance. What strikes the 
 Scotch traveller in this un awakened class of the English, is 
 their want of curiosity regarding the unexciting and the unex- 
 aggerated — things so much on the ordinary level as to be 
 neither prodigies nor shows. Let him travel into the rural 
 districts of the Scotch Higli lands, and he will find the inquisitive 
 element all in a state of ferment regarding himself He finds 
 every Highlander he meets adroit of fence, in planting upon 
 him as many queries as can possibly be thrust iu, and in ward- 
 ing off every query directed against himself. The wayside col- 
 loquy resolves itself into a sort of sword-and-buckler match ; 
 and he must be tolerably cunning in thrusting and warding 
 ■who proves an overmatch for the Higlilander.^ And in the 
 
 • One of the most amusing sketches of this sort of sword-and buckler play which I 
 have anywhere Seen ma> be found in Miiccullnch a " Travtls in the Wesern and Northern 
 Highlands." VVere I desirous to get up a counter sketch equally characteristic of the 
 incurious, communicative turn of the Enj^lish, I rtould choose as my subject a conversa- 
 tion — if conversation that could be ciiUed in w ich the speaking was all on the one side — 
 into which I entered with an En;:lishman near Stour'^ridge. He gave me fir^t his own 
 history, and then his father and mother's history, wi^h occasional episode- iilu>trati o 
 of the condition and prospects of his three aunts and his two uncles, i.nd w<.und up tlie 
 whole by a detail of certain love passages in thebio<:riphy of his brother, nho whs pleJj;* J 
 to a solid Scotch w( man. hut who had resolved not to <.'et married un'il his sweetheart 
 and himself, who were both in service, shtuld have saved a little more money. .*n<l 
 all that the narrator knew of me in turn, or wishe I to know, was simp'y that I wa.- a 
 Scot, and a good listener. Macculloch's sketch, ho^^ever, of the inquisitive Highlnn<ier 
 would have decidedly the advantage over any sketch of mine of the incurious English- 
 man ; his dialojiue is smart, compact, and amusing, though perhaps a little das'ed 
 with caric-iture ; w> ere:w the Kn-lishman's narratives were long, prosy, and dull. The 
 scene of the dialt gue fumii-hi'd by the traveller is laid n Glen Ijedmack. where he nieots 
 a snuffy-looking native cutting grass with a pocket ki;ife, and asks — " How far is it to 
 Killin ?" — "It's a fine day."— "Ay, it's a tine day for your hay." — "Ah! there- n<» 
 muckle hay ; this is an onoo cauld jrlen." — " I suppose this is the road to Killin ?" (tryins; 
 him on another tack.) — "That's an unco fat beast o' >ours.*'— " Yes; she is much too 
 fat; she is just from gnibs."— " Ah ! it's a mere, I ^ee ; it's a gude beast to gan^. I'ai* 
 Y 
 
338 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OP 
 
 Lowlands of Scotland, though in perhaps a less marked degree, 
 we find the same characteristic caution and curiosity. In the 
 sort of commerce of mutual information carried on, the stranger, 
 unless he exercise very great caution indeed, is in danger of 
 being the loser. For it is the character of the common Scotch 
 people, in this kind of barter, to take as much and give as little 
 
 warran' you ?" — " Yes, yes ; it's a very good pony."—" I selled ju?t sic another at Doune 
 fair five years by-past : I warran' ye she's a Highland-bred beast ?" — " I don't know ; I 
 bought her in Edinburgh." — " A-weel a-weel, mony sic like gangs to the Edinburgh niai ket 
 fraethe Highlands^." — " Very likely ; she seeins to have Highland blood in her."—" Ay. ay ; 
 would you be selling her ?"— "No, I don't want to sell her : do you want to buy her ?" — 
 " Na ! I was nae thinking o' that : has she had na a foal ?" — " Not that I know of." — " I 
 had a good colt out of ours when I selled her. Ye're ua ganging to Doune the year ? " — 
 " No, I am^oing to Killin, and want to know how far it is." — " Ay, ye'Il be gaing to the 
 sacrament there the morn?" — "No. I don't belong to your kirk." — " Ye'U be an Epis- 
 copalian then ?" — " Or a Roman Catholic !" — " Na, na; ye're nae Roman." — "And so 
 it is twelve miles to Killin ?" (putting a leading question.) — " Na ; it's nae just that." — 
 " It's ten, then, I suppose ?" — " Ye'U be for cattle then for the Falkirk tryst ?" — " No ; I 
 know nothing about cattle." — " I thocht ye'd ha'e been just ane o' thae English drovers. 
 Ye have nae sicc:»n hills as this in your country ?" — " No, not fo high."—" But ye'll ha'e 
 bonny farms ?" — " Yes, yes ; very good lands." — " Ye'll nae ha'e better farms than my 
 Lord's at Dunira ?" — "No. no; Lord Melville has very fine farms." — "Now, there's* 
 bonny bit land ; there's nae three days in the year there's nae meat for beasts on it ; and 
 it's to let. Ye'll be for a farm bereawa ?" — "No, I am just looking at the country." — 
 " And ye have nae business ?" — " No." — " Weel, that's the easiest way." — " And this w 
 the road to Killin ?" — " Will ye tak' some nuts ?" (producing a handful he had just 
 gathered.) — " No ; I cannot crack them." — " I suppose your teeth ffiiling. Ha'e ye ony 
 5nuff ?" — " Yes, yes ; here is a pinch for you." " Na, na; I'm unco he.ivy on the pipe, 
 ye see : but I like a hair o' snuflF; just a liair," (touching the snuff with the end of hi« 
 little finger, apparently to prolong time, and s.ave the answer about the road a little 
 longer, as he seemed to fear there were no more questions to ask. The snuff, however, 
 came just in time to allow him to recall his ideas, which the nuts were near dispersing.) 
 " And y«'ll be from the low country ?"— " Yes ; you may know I am an Englishman by 
 my tongue." — " Na; our ain geijtry .<-peiks high English the now." — " Well, well, I am 
 an Englishman at any rate." — "And yell be laying in London?" — "Yes, yes." — "I 
 wa.s ance at Sraithfleld mysel' wi' some beasts : it's an unco place London. And what's 
 your uarae ? asking your pardon." The name was given. " There's a hantel o' that 
 name i' the north. Yere father '11 maybe be a Highlander ?'' — " Yes ; that is the reason 
 why I like the Highlanders." — "Well" (nearly thrown out) "it's a bonny country now, 
 but it's^air cauld here in the winter." — " And so it is six miles to Killin ?" — "Ay, they 
 ch' it ."^ax " — " Scotch miles I suppo e ?" — " Ay, ay ; auld mile.-*." — " That is about twelve 
 English ?" — " Na, it '11 no be abune ten short miles," — (here we got on so fast, that I 
 began to think I should be dismissed at last) — " but I never see'd them measured. And 
 yeil ha'e left your family at Comrie r" — " No, I am alone "— " They'll be in the south 
 maybe ?" — " No ; I have no family." — " And are ye no married ?" — " No."— " I'm thinking 
 it's time."—" So am I."—" Weel, weel, ye'll ha'e the less fash."—" Yes. much less than 
 in flndiuir the way to Killin." — " O ay, ye'll excuse me ; but we countra folks speera 
 mu'-kle questions."—" Pretty well, I think.'*—" Weel. wee', yf'U find it safta bit in thi# 
 hill : but ye niaun haud wast, and it's nae abune itn mile. A iiude day." 
 
wm 
 
 as they cj 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 339 
 
 as they can. Not such, however, the character of the common 
 English. I found I could get from them as much information of a 
 personal nature as I pleased, and on the cheapest possible terms. 
 The Englishman seems rather gratified than otherwise to have an 
 opportunity of speaking about himself. He tells you what he i«, 
 and what he is doing, and what he intends doing — gives a full 
 account of his prospects in general — and adds short notices of tiie 
 condition and character of his relatives. As for you, the in- 
 quirer, you may, if you please, be communicative about yourself 
 and your concerns, and the Englishman will listen for a little ; 
 but the information is not particularly wanted — he has no curi- 
 osity to know anything about you. And this striking difference 
 which obtains between the two peoples seems a fundamental 
 one. The common Scot is naturally a more inquisitive, more 
 curious being, than the common Englishman : he asks many 
 more questions, and accumulates much larger hoai'ds of fact. 
 In circumstances equally unfavourable, he acquires, in conse- 
 quence, more of the developing pabulmn ; just as it is the 
 nature of some seeds to attract a larger amount of moisture than 
 others, and to shoot out their lobes and downward fibres, while 
 huskier germs lie undeveloped amid the aridity of their en- 
 veloping matrices. 
 
 But the broader foundations of the existing difference seem 
 to lie rather in moral than in natural causes. They are to be 
 found, I am strongly of opinion, in the very dissimilar religious 
 history of the two countries. Religion, in its character as a 
 serious intellectual exercise, was never brought down to the 
 common English mind, in the way in which it once pervaded, and 
 to a certain extent still saturates, the common mind of Scot- 
 land. Nor is the peculiar form of religion best known in En;;- 
 land so well suited as that of the Scotch to awaken the popular 
 uitellect. Liturgies and ceremonies may constitute the vehicles 
 of a sincere devotion ; but they have no tendency to exercise 
 the thinkuig faculties; their tendency bears rather the uthiT 
 
340 FIRST IMPEESSIONS OF 
 
 way — they constitute the ready-made channels, through which 
 abstract, unideal sentiment flows without effort. The Armiiii- 
 anism, too, so common in the English Church, and so largely 
 developed in at least one of the more influential and numerous 
 bodies of English Dissenters, is a greatly less awakening system 
 of doctrine than the Calvinism of Scotland. It does not lead 
 the earnest mind into those abstruse recesses of thought to 
 which the peculiar Calvinistic doctrines form so inevitable a 
 vestibule. The man who deems himself free is content simply 
 to believe that he is so ; while he who regards himself as bouiid 
 is sure to institute a narrow scrutiny into the nature of the 
 chain that binds him ; and hence it is that Calvinism proves 
 the best possible of all schoolmasters for teaching a religious 
 people to think. I found no such peasant metaphysicians in 
 England as those I have so often met in my own country — 
 men who, under the influence of earnest belief, had wrought 
 their way, all unassisted by the philosopher, into some of the 
 abstrusest questions of the schools. And yet, were I asked to 
 illustrate by example the grand principle of the intellectual 
 development of Scotland, it would be to the history of one of 
 the self-taught geniuses of England — John Bunyan, the inimit- 
 able Shakspere of theological literature — that I would refer. 
 Had the tinker of Elstow continued to be throughout life what 
 he was in his early youth — a profane, irreligious man — lie 
 would have lived and died an obscure and illiterate one. It 
 was the wild turmoil of his religious convictions that awakened 
 his mental faculties. Had his convictions slept, the whole 
 mind would have slept with them, and he would have remained 
 intellectually what the great bulk of the common English still 
 are ; but, as the case happened, the tremendous blows dealt by 
 revealed truth at the door of his conscience aroused the whole 
 inner man ; and the deep slumber of the faculties, reasoning 
 and imaginative, was broken for ever. 
 
 In at least one respect, however, religion — if we view it in a 
 
"S. 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLK 341 
 
 purely secular aspect, and with exclusive reference to its effects 
 on the present scene of things — was more essentially necessary 
 to the Scotch as a nation, than to their English neiglibours. 
 The Scottish cliaracter seems by no means so favourably consti- 
 tuted, for working out the problem of civil liberty as that of the 
 ]!]nglish. It possesses in a much less degree that innate spirit 
 of independence which, in asserting a proper position for itself, 
 sets consequences of a civil and economic cast at defiance. In 
 the courage that meets an enemy face to face in the field — that 
 triumphs over the sense of danger and the fear of death — that, 
 wdien the worst comes to the worst, never estimates the anta- 
 gonist strength, but stands firm and collected, however great 
 the odds mustered against it — no people in the world excel the 
 Scotch : but in the political courage manifested in the subor- 
 (] inate species of warfare that has to be maintained, not with 
 enemies that assail from without, but with class interests that 
 encroach from within, they stand by no means so high ; they 
 are calculating, cautious, timid. The man ready in the one 
 scirt of quarrel to lay down his life, is not at all prepared in 
 the other to sacrifice his means of living. And these striking 
 traits of the national character are broadly written in the 
 liistoiy of the country. In perhaps no other instance was so 
 l)oor and so limited a district maintained intact against sucli 
 formidable enemies for so many hundi*ed years. The story so 
 significantly told by the two Konian walls, is that of all the 
 after history of Scotland, down to the union of the two crowns. 
 But, on the other hand, Scotland has produced no tme patriots, 
 who were patriots only — none, at least, whose object it was to 
 elevate the mass of the people, and give to them the standing, 
 in relation to the privileged classes, which it is their right to 
 occupy. Fletcher of Saltoun, though, from the Grecian cast of 
 his political notions, an apparent exception, was, notwithstand- 
 ing, but a mere enthusiastic Scot of the common national tyj)e, 
 who, while he would have made good the claims of his country 
 
342 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 against the world, would, as shown by his scheme of domestic 
 slavery, have subjected one-half his countrymen to the unre- 
 strained despotism of the other half. It was reli'^on alone that 
 strengthened the character of the Scotch where it most needed 
 strength, and enabled them to struggle against their native 
 monarchs and the aristocracy of the country, backed by all the 
 power of the State, for more than a hundred years. Save for 
 the influence over them of the unseen and the eternal, the 
 Englishman in his struggle with Charles the First would have 
 found them useless allies ; Leslie would never have crossed the 
 Borders at the head of a determined army ; and the Parliament 
 of England would have shared, in this century, the fate of the 
 contemporary States-General of France. The devout Knox is 
 the true representative of those real patriots of Scotland who 
 have toiled and suffered to elevate the character and standing 
 of her common people ; and in the late Disruption may be seen 
 how much and how readily her better men can sacrifice for 
 principle's sake, when they deem their religion concerned. But 
 apart from religious considerations, the Scotch affect a cheap 
 and frugal patriotism, that achieves little and costs nothing. 
 
 In the common English, on the contrary, there is much of 
 that natural independence which the Scotchman wants ; and 
 village Hampdens — men quite as ready to do battle in behalf 
 of their civil rights with the lord of the manor as the Sco; 
 with a foreign enemy — are comparatively common characters. 
 Nor is it merely in the history, institutions, and literature o) 
 the country — in its great Charter — its Petition of Right — its 
 Habeas Corpus Act — its trial by jury — in the story of it< 
 Hampdens, Russells, and Sidneys, or in the political writings 
 of its Miltons, Harringtons, and Lockes — that we recognise the 
 embodiment of this great national trait. One may see it scarce 
 less significantly stamped, in the course of a brief morning's 
 walk, on the face of the fields. There are in Scotland few of 
 the pleasant styles and sequestered pathways open to the public. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 343 
 
 which form in England one of the most pleasing features of the 
 agricultural provinces. The Scotch people, in those rural dis- 
 tricts in which land is of most value, find themselves shut out 
 of their country. Their patriotism may expatiate as it best can 
 on the dusty public road, for to the road they have still a claim ; 
 but the pleasant hedgerows, the woods, and j&elds, and nmning 
 streams, are all barred against them ; and so generally is this 
 the case, that if they could by and by tell that the Scotch had 
 taken Scotland, just as their fathers used to tell in a joke, as a 
 piece of intelligence, that " the Dutch had taken Holland," it 
 would be no joke at all, but, on the contrary, a piece of most 
 significant news, almost too grand to be true. From encroach- 
 ments of this character the independent spirit of the English 
 people has preserved them. The right of old pathways has 
 been jealously maintained. An Englishman would peril his 
 livelihood any day in behalf of a style that had existed in the 
 times of his grandfather. And hence England, in its richest 
 districts, with all its quiet pathways and pleasant green lanes, 
 has been kept open to the English. 
 
 There are, however, at least two causes in operation at the 
 present time, that are militating against this independent spirit. 
 One of these is the Whig poor-law ; the other, the tenant-at- 
 will system, now become so general in England. Under the old 
 poor-law, the English labourer in the rural districts indulged in 
 a surly, and by no means either amiable or laudable, indepen- 
 dence. The man who, when set aside from labour, or who, 
 when employment could not be procured, could compel from 
 his parish an allowance for his support, unclogged by the 
 horrors of the modem workhouse, occupied essentially different 
 ground from the man who, in similar circumstances, can but 
 compel admission into a frightful prison. The exposures of 
 journals such as the " Times" have been less successful in pro- 
 ducing an influential reaction against the Union Bastiles, than 
 in inspiring the poor with a thorough dread of them. A 
 
344 FIKST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 modern workliouse in the vista forms but a dreary prospect ; 
 and the independence of the English agricultural labourer is 
 sinking under the frequent survey of it which his circumstances 
 compel. Nor has the very general introduction of the tenant- 
 at-will system been less influential in lowering the higher-toned 
 and more manly independency of spirit of a better class of the 
 English people. One of the provisions of the Reform Bill has 
 had the effect of sinking the tenantry of England into a state 
 of vassalage and political subserviency without precedent in the 
 country since the people acquired standing-room within the pale 
 of the Constitution. It has been well remarked by Paley, that 
 the more direct consequences of political innovation are often 
 the least important, a', id that it is from the silent and unob- 
 served operation of causes set at work for different purposes, 
 that the greatest revolutions take their rise. In illustration of 
 the remark, he adduces that provision in the Mutiny Act, 
 introduced with but little perception of its vast importance, 
 which, by making the standing army dependent on an annual 
 grant of Parliament, has rendered the King's dissent from a law 
 which has received the sanction of both Houses too perilous 
 a step to be advised, and has thus altered the whole framework 
 and quality of the British Constitution. He adduces, further, 
 the arrangement, at first as inadequately estimated, which, by 
 conferring on the Crown the nomination to all employments in 
 the public service, has well-nigh restored to the Monarch, by 
 the amount of patronage which it bestows, the power which the 
 provision in the Mutiny Act had taken away. And thus the 
 illustrations of the philosopher run on — all of a kind suited to 
 show that " in politics the most important and permanent effects 
 have, for the most part, been incidental and unforeseen." It 
 is questionable, however, whether there be any of the adduced 
 instances more striking than that furnished by this indirect 
 consequence of the Reform Bill on the tenantry of England. 
 The provision which conferred a vote on the tenant-at-will. 
 
IT 
 
 ^Ibroffated lea: 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 345 
 
 brogated leases, and made the tiller of the soil a vassal. The 
 farmer who precariously holds his farm from year to year can- 
 not, of course, be expected to sink so much capital in the soil, 
 in the hope of a distant and uncertain return, as the lessee 
 certain of possession for a specified number of seasons ; but 
 some capital he must sink in it. It is impossible, according to 
 the modem system, or, indeed, any system of husbandry, that 
 all the capital committed to the earth in winter and spring 
 should be resumed in the following summer and autumn. A 
 considerable overplus must inevitably remain to be gathered up 
 in future seasons ; and this overplus, in the case of the tenant- 
 at-will, is virtually converted into a deposit lodged in the hands 
 of the landlord, to secure the depositor's political subserviency 
 and vassalage. Let him but once manifest a will and mind of 
 his own, and vote in accordance with his co ivictions, contrary 
 to the will of the landlord, and straightway the deposit, con- 
 verted into a penalty, is forfeited for the offence. 
 
 I spent a few fine days in revisiting the Silurian deposits of 
 Dudley, and in again walking over the grounds of Hagley and 
 the Leasowes. I visited also the Silurian patch at Walsall, 
 which, more than one-half surrounded by the New Red Sand- 
 stone, forms the advanced guard, or piquet, of this system in 
 England towards the east. It presents, however, over the 
 entire tract of some six or eight square miles which it occupies, 
 a flat, soil-covered surface, on which the geologist may walk 
 for hours without catching a glimpse of the rock underneath ; 
 and it is only from the stone brought to the surface at sinkings 
 made for lime, and wrought after the manner of coal-pits, that 
 he arrives at a knowledge of the deposits below. I picked up 
 beside the mouth of a pit near tlie town of Walsall, at least 
 two very characteristic fossils of the system — the Atrypa Affinis 
 and the Catenipora Escharoides; and saw that, notwithstanding 
 the proximity of the Coal Measures, the rock, though minora- 
 logically identical with the Carboniferous Limestone, cannot be 
 
?)ii} FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 regarded as belonging to that formation, which, with the Old 
 Eed Sandstone, is wlioUy wanting in the Dudley coal-field. 
 The coal here rests on the Upper Silurian, just as the Lias of 
 Cromartyshire rests on the Lower Old Ked, or the Wealden 
 of Moray on the Cornstone. On my way north, I quitted the 
 train at Nantwich, to see the salt-works which have been carried 
 on in that town for many years ; but I found them merely 
 editions in miniature of the works at Droitwich. I would fain 
 also have visited the salt-mines of Cheshire, so famous for their 
 beauty. They lay off my road, however ; and, somewhat in 
 haste to get home, I did what I afterwards regretted — quitted 
 England without seeing them. Before nightfall, after leaving 
 Nantwich, I got on to Livei-pool, and passed the night in a 
 respectable temperance coffee-house — one of the lodging-houses 
 of that middle grade in which, in England, the traveller is sure 
 to meet with a great many Dissenters, and the Dissenter with 
 a great many of his brethren ; and in which both, in conse- 
 quence, are apt to regard the cause of Dissent as rather stronger 
 in the country than it actually is. But the consideration of 
 this somewhat cuiious subject I shall defer till the next — my 
 concluding chapter. 
 
ENGLAJJD AND ITS PEOPLE. 347 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 IHssenta Mid-formation Organism in England— Church-of-Englandism strong among the 
 upper and lower classes ; its peculiar principle of streugch among the lower; among 
 the uppor — The Church of England one of the strongest institutions of the country — 
 Puseyi^ra, however, a canker-worm at its root ; partial success of the principle — The 
 type of English Dissent essentially different from that of Scotland; the cau>es of the 
 difference deep in th-:; diverse character of the tvyo peoples — Insulated character of 
 the Englishman jiroductive of Independency— Adhesive character of the Scotch pro- 
 ductive of Presbyterianism — Attempts to legislate for the Scotch in Church matters 
 on an English principle always unfortunate — Erastianism ; essentially a different tiling 
 to the English Churchman from Mhat it is to the Scot — Reason why — Independent 
 Scotch congregation in a rural district — Rarely well based ; and why — Conclus^ion. 
 
 When I first came among the English, I was impressed by 
 the apparent strength of Dissent in the country. At least two 
 out of every three Englishmen I met in the lodging-houses, and 
 no inconsiderable proportion of the passengers by the railway, 
 so far as I could ascertain their denominations, were, I found. 
 Dissenters. I had lodged in respectable second-class cofiee- 
 houses and inns : I had travelled on the rails by the second- 
 class carriages : I had thus got fairly into a middle stratum of 
 English society, and was not aware at the time that, like some 
 of the geologic formations, it has its own peculiar organisms, 
 essentially different, in the group, from those of either the 
 stratum above or the stratum below. Dissent is a mid-forma- 
 tion organism in England ; whereas Church-of-Englandism more 
 peculiarly belongs to the upper and lower strata. Church-of- 
 Englandism puts up at the first-class inns, travels by the first- 
 class carriages, possesses the titles, the large estates, and the 
 manor-houses, and enjoys, in short, the lion's share of the vested 
 interests. And in the lower stratum it is also strong after a sort : 
 
348 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 there exists in its favour a powerful prejudice, capable of being 
 directed to the accomplishment of purposes of either good or 
 evil. 
 
 Among the mid-stratum Dissent of England I found a marked 
 preponderance of Independency, which, indeed, seems the true 
 type of English Dissent in the middle walks; and shrewd, in- 
 telligent, thoroughly respectable men the English Independents 
 are. But when I descended to a humbler order of lodging- 
 houses, and got by this means among the lower English people, 
 I lost sight of Independency altogether. The only form of 
 Dissent I then encountered was Wesleyism : — in the New (Jon- 
 nexion, political, speculative, and not over sound in its theo- 
 logy; in the Old, apparently much more quiet, more earnest, 
 and more under the influence of religious feeling. The type of 
 Dissent seems as decidedly Wesleyan among the humbler English, 
 as it is Independent among the middle classes; nay, judging 
 from what I saw — and my observations, if necessarily not very 
 numerous, were at least made at points widely apart — I am 
 inclined to believe that a preponderating share of the vital reli- 
 gion of the labourers and handicraftsmen of the English people 
 is to be found comprised among the membership of this excellent 
 body. And yet, after all, it takes up but comparatively a small 
 portion of the lower population of the country. Among the 
 great bulk of the humbler people, religion exists, not as a vitality 
 — not even as a speculative system — but simply as an undefined 
 hereditary prejudice, that looms large and uncertain in the 
 gloom of darkened intellects. And, to the extent to which this 
 prejudice is influential, it favours the stability of the Established 
 Church. The class who entertain it evince a marked neglect of 
 the Church's services — give no heed to her teachings — rarely 
 enter her places of worship even — nay, her right has been chal- 
 lenged to reckon on them as adherents at all. They have been 
 described as a neutral party, that should be included neither in 
 the census of Dissent nor of the Establishment. But to the 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 349 
 
 Establishment they decidedly belong. They regard the National 
 Church as theirs — as a Church of which an Englishman may 
 well be proud, and in which each one of them, some short time 
 before he dies, is to become decent and devout. And there 
 may be much political strength, be it remarked, in prejudices 
 of this character. Protestantism in the Lord George Gordon 
 mobs was but a prejudice, not a religion. These mobs, scarce 
 less truly in history than as drawn by Dickens, were religious 
 mobs without religion; but the prejudice was, notwithstanding, 
 a strong political element, which, until a full half-century had 
 worn it out of the English mind, rendered concession to the 
 Papists unsafe. We see nearly the same phenomenon exhibited 
 by the Orangemen of Ireland of the present day — a class with 
 whom Protestantism is a vigorous, influential principle, though 
 it bears scarce any reference to a world to come; and find, in 
 like manner, the Episcopalian prejudice strong among the Eng- 
 lish masses broken loose from religion. 
 
 Church-of-Englandism is peculiarly strong in the upper walks 
 of English society. Like the old brazen statue, huge enough to 
 hold a lighthouse in its hand, it strides across the busy current 
 of middle English life, and plants its one colossal foot among 
 the lower orders, and the other among the aristocracy. It 
 undoubtedly possesses among the higher classes a double element 
 of strength. It is strong, on the principle eulogized by Burke, 
 from the union which it exhibits of high rank and the sacerdotal 
 character. Religion developed in the Puritanic type, and exist- 
 ing as an energetic reforming spirit, is quite as independent of 
 riches and exalted station in its ministers now as in the days 
 of the Apostles; but to religion existing simply as a conserva- 
 tive influence — and such is its character in the upper walks of 
 English society — wealth and title are powerful adjuncts. When 
 the mere conservative clergyman has Earls and Dukes to addrt «s, 
 he is considerably more influential as a Rector than as a Curat<-, 
 and as an Archbishop than as a Dean. The English hierarchy 
 
350 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 is fitted to the English aristocracy. And, further, the Church 
 of England, as an Establishment, derives no little strength 
 through an element from which the Establishment of Scotland, 
 owing in part to its inferior wealth, but much more to the very- 
 different genius of the Scotch people, derives only weakness — it 
 is strong in its secular and Erastian character. There is scarce 
 an aristocratic interest in the country, Whig or Tory, with which 
 it is not intertwined, nor a great family that has not a large 
 money stake involved in its support. Jjike a stately tree that 
 has sent its roots deep into the joints and crannies of a rock, 
 and that cannot be uprooted without first tearing open with 
 levers and wedges the enclosing granite, it would seem as if the 
 aristocracy would require to be shaken and displaced by revolu- 
 tion, ere, in the natural course of things, the English Establish- 
 ment could come down. The Church of England is, at the 
 present moment, one of the strongest institutions of the country. 
 There is, however, a canker-worm at its root. The revival 
 of the High Church element, in even its more modified form, 
 bodes no good ; while in the extreme Puseyite type it is fraught 
 with danger. In the conversions to Popery to which the re- 
 vival has led, the amount of damage done to the Establishment 
 is obvious. We see it robbed of some of its more earnest, 
 energetic men. These, however, form merely a few chips and 
 fragments struck off the edifice. But the eating canker, intro- 
 duced by the principle into its very heart, threatens results of a 
 gi'eatly more perilous cast — results none the less formidable 
 from the circumstance that the mischief inflicted is of too covert 
 a nature to be exactly estimated. If the axe of an enemy has 
 assailed the supporting posts of the hut of the Indian, he can 
 at once calculate on the extent of the damage received; but 
 the ravages of the white ants, that scoop out the body of the 
 wood, leaving merely a thin outside film, elude calculation, and 
 he trembles lest the first hurricane that arises should bury him 
 in the ruins of the weakened structure. This much at least is 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 351 
 
 obvious — the position in which the revived influence has placed 
 the English Church is one of antagonism to the tendencies 
 of the age; and equally certain it is that nistitutions waste 
 away, like ice-floes stranded in thaw-swollen rivers, when the 
 general current of the time has set in against them. The pre- 
 sent admiration of the mediaeval cannot be other than a mere 
 transitory freak of fashion. The shadow on the great dial of 
 human destiny will not move backward : vassalage and serfship 
 will not return. There is too wide a diffusion of the morning 
 light for bat-eyed superstition; and the light is that of the 
 morning — not of the close of the day. Science will continue to 
 extend the limits of her empire, and to increase the numbers of 
 her adherents, unscared by any spectre of the defunct scholastic 
 philosophy which Oxford may evoke from the abyss. Nay, 
 the goblin, like those spirits that used to carry away with them, 
 in their retreat, whole sides of houses, will be formidable, in the 
 end, to but the ecclesiastical institution in which it has been 
 raised. It is worthy of notice, too, that though Popery and 
 Puritanism — the grand antagonistic principles of church history 
 for at least the last four centuries — are both possessed of great 
 inherent power, the true analogue of modern Puseyism proved 
 but a weakling, even when at its best: it was found 7iot to 
 possess inherent power. The Canterburianism of the times of 
 Charles the First did that hapless monarch much harm. But 
 while many a gallant principle fought for him in the subsequent 
 struggle, from the old chivalrous honour and devoted loyalty of 
 the English gentleman, down to even the poetry of the play- 
 house and the esprit de corps of the green-room, we find in the 
 thick of the conflict scarce any trace of the religion of Liiud. 
 It resembled the mere scarlet rag that at the Spanish festival 
 irritates the bull, but is of no after-use in the combat. It Ip 
 I'urther deserving of remark, that an English Church reformed 
 in its legislative and judicial framework to the very heart's wish 
 of the Puseyite, wouM 1x3 greatly niore suited to the genius of 
 
 ^ 
 
352 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 the English people than in that existing state of the institntion 
 over which the Puseyite sighs. To no one circumstance is the 
 Church more indebted for its preservation than to the suppres- 
 sion of that Court of Convocation which Puseyism is so anxious 
 to restore. The General Assemblies and Synods of Presbyterian 
 Scotland form, from their great admixture of the lay element, 
 ecclesiastical parliaments that represent the people ; and their 
 meetings add immensely to the popular interest in the Churches 
 to which they belong ; but the Convocation was a purely sacer- 
 dotal court. It formed a mere clerical erection, as little repre- 
 sentative in its character as the Star-Chamber of Charles. It 
 was suppressed just as it was becoming thoroughly alien to the 
 English spirit ; and its restoration at the present time would be 
 one of the greatest calamities that could befall the English 
 Eotablishment. 
 
 Of the partial successes of Puseyism I cannot speak from 
 direct observation. There are cases, however, in which it seems 
 to have served to some extent the ends which it was resuscitated 
 to accomplisli — in one class of instances, through the support 
 lent it by a favouring aristocracy — in another class, through the 
 appliance of means more exclusively its own. And, at the risk 
 of being somewhat tedious, I shall present the reader with a 
 specimen of each. 
 
 It has been told me by an intelligent friend, who resided for 
 some time in a rich district in one of the midland counties, in 
 which the land for many miles round is parcelled out among 
 some three or four titled proprietors, that he found Protestant 
 Dissent wholly crushed in the locality — its sturdier adherents 
 cast out — ^its weaker ones detached from their old communions, 
 and brought within the pale of the Establishment — and a showy 
 if not very earnest Puseyism reigning absolute. The change 
 had been mainly brought about, he ascertained, by the female 
 members of the great landholding families. The ladies of the 
 manors had been vastly more active than their lords, with whose 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 353 
 
 Conservative leanings, however, the servile politics of Puseyism 
 agreed well. Charities to the poor of the district had been ex- 
 tensively doled out on the old non-compulsory scheme; but 
 regular attendance at the parish church, or the chapel attached 
 to the mansion-house, was rendered all-essential in constituting 
 a claim ; the pauper who absented himself might, if he pleased, 
 fall back on the workhouse and crush bones. Schools had been 
 erected in which the rising generation might be at once shown 
 the excellence and taught the trick of implicit submission to 
 authority; and the pupils who attended school had to attend 
 church also, as a matter of course. Even their parents had 
 been successfully hounded out. liords of the manor have no little 
 power in England where their tenants are tenants-at-will, and 
 where almost every cottage of the villages on their lands is their 
 own property. Obstinate Dissenters found the controversy 
 speedily settled by their removal from the scene of it; while 
 the less stubborn learned in time to gi'ope their way to the 
 parish church. Even the itinerant preacher now finds him- 
 self barred out of districts in which he could draw around him 
 considerable audiences only a few years ago. There are eyes on 
 his old hearers, and they keep out of ear-shot of his doctrine. 
 And this state of things obtains in localities in which the clergy, 
 though essentially Puseyite, are by no means so overburdened 
 by earnestness as to be in danger of precipitating themselves on 
 Rome. I have heard of a whole parish brought out by such means 
 to listen to a zealous sprig of High Churchism who preached to 
 them with a broken face — the result of an accident which he 
 had met at a fox-hunt a few days before ! 
 
 This, however, is not a safe, nor can it be an enduring 
 triumph. To use Cowper's figure, the bow forced into too 
 violent a curve will scarce fail to leap into its ** first position 
 "with a spring." The reaction in English society on the restraint 
 of the times of Cromwell, which so marked the reign of Charles 
 the Second, will be but faintly typical of the reaction destined 
 
 z 
 
354 FIRST IMPEESSIONS OF 
 
 to take place in these districts. It is according to the unvary- 
 ing principles of human nature, that the bitterest enemies of 
 High Churchism and a High Church aristocracy England ever 
 produced should be reared at the Puseyite schools and churches, 
 which mere tyrant compulsion has thus served to fill. In the 
 other class of cases in which the revived religion has triumphed, 
 its successes have been of a more solid and less perilous character. 
 I have been informed by a friend resident in one of the busier 
 English towns, that by far the most influential and flourishing 
 congregation of the place is a Puseyite one. Some eight or ten 
 years ago it had been genteelly Evangelistic; but, without be- 
 coming less earnest it had got fairly afloat on the rising tide of 
 revived Anglo-Catholicism, and had adopted both the doctrines 
 and the policy of the Puseyite party. It has its energetic, 
 active staff of visiting ladies, who recommend themselves to the 
 poor of the district by their gratuitous labours and their charities. 
 Its clergyman, too, is a laborious, devoted man, frequent in his 
 visits to families saddened by bereavement or afflicted by dis- 
 ease; and the congregation have their missionary besides-— a 
 person of similar character — to second and multiply in the same 
 walk the endeavours of his superior. Whatever Moderatism 
 and its cogeners may think of the aggressive system of Dr. 
 Chalmers, Puseyism at least does not deem it either unimportant 
 or impracticable. The revived principle is, besides, found sup- 
 plementing the system with expedients of its own. The Whig 
 poor-law adds, as has been shown, to Puseyite influence; and 
 Puseyism adds to that influence still more, by denouncing the 
 Whig poor-law. Is a pauper in the locality aggrieved through 
 the neglect or cruelty of some insolent official? — Puseyism in 
 this congregation takes up his cause and fights his battle ; and 
 hence its great popularity among the poorer classes, and pews 
 crowded with them to the doors; while Evangelistic clergymen 
 of the Establishment, in the same town, have to preach to 
 nearly empty galleries, and the Dissenters of the place are fain 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 355 
 
 "content themselves with retaining unshortened, and hardly 
 that, their old rolls of membership. The only aggressive, in- 
 crescent power in the locality is Puseyism. Nor is it found, as 
 in the case of the Popish converts, precipitating itself on Rome. 
 Much must depend, in matters of this kind, on the peculiar 
 character of the leading minds of a congregation. Mr. Newman 
 has become a zealous Papist ; but Dr. Piisey, on the other hand, 
 is still a member of the Church of England : and it is a well- 
 known historical fact, that Laud with all his Popish leanings, 
 refused a cardinal's hat, and died an English bishop. There 
 are minds that, like Mahomet's coffin, can rest in a middle region, 
 surrounded by balancing attractions — that can dwell on pre- 
 mises without passing to conclusions — and thus resist the gravi- 
 tating influence; and in the English Establishment the balan- 
 cing attractions are many and powerful. Hence the midwa}^ 
 position occupied by the great bulk of the English Puseyites, 
 and the bad metaphysics with which they bemuse themselves, in 
 justifying their sudden halt at what should be so palpable a 
 point of progress. As has been quaintly remarked by an Eng- 
 lish clergyman on the opposite side of the Church, " they set 
 out for Rome, but stopped short on reaching Appii Forum, and 
 got drunk at the Three Taverns." 
 
 But enough, and, I am afraid, more than enough, of Puseyism. 
 It forms, however, one of the most remarkable features of the 
 domestic histoiy of England in the present day ; and seems des- 
 tined powerfully to affect, in the future, the condition and stand- 
 ing of the great ecclesiastical institution of the country. And 
 it is worth while bestowing a little attention on a phenomenon 
 which the future chronicler may have to record as by far the 
 most influential among various causes which led to the downfall 
 of the English Establishment. It may yet come to be written 
 Ijas history, that this great and powerful institution, when casting 
 about for an element of strength, instead of availing herself of 
 the Evangelism of her first Reformers — the only form of religion 
 
 
356 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 fitted to keep ahead of the human mind in its forward move- 
 ment — attached herself to that old stationary religion of resus- 
 citated tradition, idle ceremony, and false science, which her 
 Reformers had repudiated ; and that, unable, in consequence, to 
 prosecute the onward voyage, the great tidal wave of advancing 
 civilisation bore her down, and she foundered at anchor. 
 
 I was a good deal impressed by the marked difference which 
 obtains between the types of English and Scotch Dissent. They 
 indicate, I am of opinion, the very opposite characters of the two 
 countries. No form of Dissent ever flourished in Scotland that 
 was not of the Presbyterian type. The Relief Body — the various 
 branches of the Secession — the Free Church — the followers of 
 Richard Cameron — are all Presbyterian. Wesleyism thrives but 
 indiiferently ; — Independency, save where sustained by the su- 
 perior talents of its preachers in large towns, where the character 
 of the people has become more cosmopolitan and less peculiarly 
 Scotch than in the smaller towns and the country, gets on at 
 least no better ; — Episcopacy, with fashion, title, and great wealth 
 on its side, scarce numbers in its ranks the one-sixtieth part of 
 the Scotch people. Presbyterianism, and that alone, is the true 
 national type of the religion of Scotland. In England, on the 
 other hand, there are two distinct national types — the Episco- 
 palian and the Independent ; and both flourish to the exclusion 
 of almost every other. Wesleyism also flourishes ; but Wesley- 
 ism may be properly regarded as an offshoot of Episcopacy. In 
 the New Connexion there is a palpable development of the In- 
 dependent spirit; but in that genuine Wesleyism established 
 by Wesley, which gives its preachers at will to its people, and 
 removes them at pleasure, and which possesses authority, order, 
 and union, without popular representation, the spirit and princi- 
 ple is decidedly Episcopalian. It may be worth while examining 
 into a few of the more prominent causes in which these ecclesias- 
 tical peculiarities of the two countries have in a great measure 
 originated, altogether independently of the jiLs divinum argu- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 357 
 
 ments of the theologian, or of the influences which these ex- 
 ercise. 
 
 There obtains a marked difference in one important respect 
 between English and Scotch character. The Englishman stands 
 out more separate and apart as an individual ; the Scotchman is 
 more mixed up, through the force of his sympathies, with the 
 community to which he belongs. The Englishman's house is his 
 castle, and he glories in its being such. England is a countiy 
 studded over with innimierable detached fortalices, each one 
 furnished with its own sturdy independent castellan, ready, no 
 doubt, to join for purposes of mutual defence with his brother 
 castellans, but not greatly drawn towards them by the operation 
 of any internal sympathy. Englishmen somewhat resemble in 
 this respect particles of matter lying outside the sphere of the 
 attractive influences, and included within that of the repulsive 
 ones. The population exists as separate parts, like loose grains 
 if sand in alieap — not in one solid mass, like agglutinated grains 
 the same sand consolidated into a piece of freestone. Nothing 
 struck my Scotch eyes in the rural districts as more unwonted 
 and peculiar than the state of separatism which neighbours of a 
 class that in Scotland would be on the most intimate terms, 
 maintain with respect to each other. I have seen, in instances 
 not a few, the whole farmers of a Scotch rural parish forming, 
 with their families, one unbroken circle of acquaintance, all on 
 visiting terms, and holding their not unfrequent tea-parties to- 
 gether, and all knowing much of one another's history and pro- 
 spects. And no Scotchman resident in the parish, however 
 humble — whether hind or labourer — but knew, I have found, 
 who lived in each farm-house, and was acquainted in some de- 
 gree with at least the more palpable concerns of its inmates. 
 Now, no such sociableness appears to exist in the rural parishes 
 of England ; and neighbour seems to know scarce anything of 
 neighbour. 
 HB In the *' Essay on National Character," we find Hume ro- 
 
 ■I' 
 
358 FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 marking a different phase of the same phenomenon, and assign- 
 ing a reason for it. " We may often observe," he says, " a 
 wonderful mixture of manners and characters in the same nation, 
 speaking the same language, and subject to the same Govern- 
 ment ; and in this particular the English are the most remark- 
 able of any people that perhaps ever were in the world. Nor 
 is this to be ascribed to the mutability and uncertainty of their 
 climate, or to any other physical causes, since all these causes 
 take place in the neighbouring country of Scotland, without 
 having the same effect. Where the Government of a nation is 
 altogether republican, it is apt to beget a peculiar set of man- 
 ners. Where it is altogether monarchical, it is more apt to have 
 the same effect — the imitation of superiors spreading the national 
 manners faster among the people. If the governing part of a 
 State consist altogether of merchants, as in Holland, their uniform 
 way of life will fix the character. If it consist chiefly of nobles 
 and landed gentry, like Germany, France, and Spain, the same 
 effect follows. Tlie genius of a particular sect or religion is also 
 apt to mould the manners of a people. But the English Govern- 
 ment is a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The 
 people in authority are composed of gentry and merchants. All 
 sorts of religion are to be found among them ; and the great 
 liberty and independency which every man enjoys, allows him to 
 display the manners peculiar to him. Hence the English, of 
 any people in the universe, have the least of a national charac- 
 ter, unless this very singularity may pass for such." Such is the 
 estimate of the philosopher ; and it seems but natural that, m a 
 country in which the people are so very various in character, 
 the extreme diversity of their tastes, feelings, and opinions should 
 fix them rather within the sphere of the repulsive than of the 
 attractive influences. 
 
 Certain it is that the multitudinous sources of character in 
 England do not merge into one great stream : the runnels keep 
 apart, each pursuing its own separate course; and hence, appa- 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 359 
 
 rently, one grand cause of the strange state of separatism which 
 appears among the people. It seems scarce possible to imagine 
 a fitter soil than that furaished by a characteristic so peculiar, 
 for the growth of an Independent form of Christianity. The 
 influences of Evangelism are attractive in their nature : they 
 form the social prayer-meeting, the congregation, the National 
 Church, and, spreading outwards and onwards, embrace next 
 the Church catholic and universal, and then the whole human 
 family. And unquestionably in the Evangelism of Independency, 
 as in Evangelism in every other form, there is much of this 
 attractive influence. But it is the distinctive peculiarity of its 
 structure that it insulates every congregation, as forming of 
 itself a complete Christian church, independent in its laws, and 
 not accountable to any ecclesiastical body for its beliefs; and 
 this peculiarity finds in the English mind the most suitable soil 
 possible for its growth. The country of insulated men is the 
 best fitted to be also the country of insulated churches. Even 
 the Episcopacy of the National Church has assumed in many 
 districts a decidedly Independent type. The congregations exist 
 as separate, detached communities — here Puseyite, there Evan- 
 gelical — High Church in one parish, Rationalistic in another : 
 and, practically at least, no general scheme of government or of 
 discipline binds them into one. 
 
 But while the Englishman is thus detached and solitary, the 
 Scotchman is mixed up, by the force of his sympathies, with the 
 community to which he belongs. He is a minute portion of a 
 great aggregate, which he always realizes to himself in its 
 aggregate character. And this peculiarity we find embodied in 
 our proverbs and songs, and curiously portrayed, in its more 
 blameable or more ludicrous manifestations, in the works of the" 
 English satirists. "Most Scotchmen," said Johnson, in allusion 
 to the Ossianic controversy, " love Scotland better than truth, 
 and almost all of them love it better than inquiry." " You are 
 almost the only instance of a Scotchman that I have known," 
 
360 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 we find him saying on another occasion to Boswell, " who diJ 
 not at every other sentence bring in some other Scotchman." 
 " One grand element in the success of Scotchmen in London," 
 he yet again remarks, <'is their nationality. Whatever any one 
 Scotchman does, there are five hundred more prepared to applaud. 
 I have been asked by a Scotchman to recommend to a place of 
 tmst a man in whom he had no other interest than simply that 
 he was a countryman." ^' ' Your Grace kens we Scotch are 
 clannish bodies,' " says Mrs. Glass in the " Heart of Mid- 
 Lothian," to the Duke of Argyll. " ' So much the better for 
 us,' " replies the Duke, ^' ' and the worse for those wJio meddle 
 with us.' " " Perhaps," remarks Sir Walter, in his own person, 
 in the same work, " one ought to be actually a Scotchman, to 
 conceive how ardently, under all distinctions of rank and situa- 
 tion, the Scotch feel the mutual connexion with each other, as 
 natives of the same country." But it may seem needless to 
 nmltiply illustrations of a peculiarity so generally recognised. 
 The gregariousness of the Scotch — " Highlanders ! shoulder to 
 shoulder" — the abstract coherency of the people as a nation — 
 their peculiar pri«ie in the history of their country — their strong 
 exhilarating associations with battle-fields on which the conflict 
 terminated more than six hundred years ago — their enthusiastic 
 regard for the memory of heroes many centuries departed, who 
 fought and bled in the national behalf — are all well-known 
 manifestations of a prominent national trait. Unlike the English, 
 the Scotch form, as a people, not a heap of detached particles, 
 but a mass of aggregated ones ; and hence, since at least the 
 days of Knox, Scotland has foiined one of the most favourable 
 soils for the growth of Protestantism, in a Presbyterian typo, 
 which the world has yet seen. The insulating bias of the 
 English character leads to the formation of insulated Churches ; 
 while this aggregate peculiarity of the Scottish character has a 
 tendency at least equally direct to bind its congregations to- 
 gether into one grand Church, with tlie area, not of a single 
 
II 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 361 
 
 mlding, hut of the whole kingdom, for its platform. It is not 
 uninstructive to mark, in the national history, how thoroughly 
 and soon the idea of Presbyterianism recommended itself to the 
 popular mind in Scotland. Presbyterianism found a soil ready 
 prepared for it in the national predilection : and its paramount 
 idea as a form of ecclesiastical government seemed the one natural 
 idea in the circumstances. An Englishman might have thought 
 of gathering together a few neighbours, and making a Church of 
 them; the Scotchman at once determined on making a Church 
 of all Scotland. 
 
 It seems necessary to the right understanding of the leading 
 ecclesiastical questions of Scotch and English history, that these 
 fundamental peculiarities of the two countries should be correctly 
 appreciated. The attempt to establish a Scottish Church on an 
 English principle filled an entire country with persecution and 
 !?uffering, and proved but an abortive attempt after all. And a 
 nearly similar transaction in our own times has dealt to the 
 cause of ecclesiastical Establishments in Britain by far the 
 severest blow it has ever yet sustained. What was perhaps 
 the strongest of the three great religious Establishments of the 
 empire, has become, in at least an equal degree, the weakest ; 
 and a weak State Church placed in the midst of a polemical 
 people, is weakness very perilously posted. 
 
 In no respect did the national Churches of England and Scot- 
 land differ more, as originally established — the one at the Ke- 
 formation and Restoration, the other at the Reformation and 
 Revolution — than in the place and degree of power which they 
 assigned to the civil magistrate. The Scottish Church gave uj) 
 to bis control all her goods and chattels, and the persons of htr 
 members, but allowed lum no voice in ecclesiastical matters ; 
 fully recognising, however, as an obvious principle of adjustment, 
 that when their decisions chanced to clash in any case, the civil 
 magistrate should preserve his powers as intact over the tem- 
 poralities involved, as the Church over the spiritualities. The 
 
 ^ 
 
362 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 magistrate maintained his paramount place in his own province, 
 and disposed at will, in every case of collision, of whatever the 
 State had given to the Church — ^lands, houses, or money ; while 
 the Church, on the other hand, maintained in her own peculiar 
 field her independence entire, and exercised uncontrolled those 
 inherent powers which the State had not conferred upon her. 
 She wielded in the purely ecclesiastical field a sovereign autho- 
 rity ; but, like that of the British monarch, it was authority 
 subject to a stringent check : the civil magistrate could, when 
 he willed, stop the supplies. In England, on the contrary, it 
 was deemed unnecessary to preserve any such nice balance of 
 civil and ecclesiastical power. The monarch, in his magisterial 
 capacity, assumed absolute supremacy in all cases, spiritual as 
 well as temporal; and the English Church, satisfied that it 
 should be so, embodied the principle in the Articles, which all 
 her clergy are necessitated to subscribe. So essentially different 
 was the genius of the two countries, that the claim on the part 
 of the civil magistrate, which convulsed Scotland for more than 
 a hundred years to be ultimately rejected at the Revolution, 
 was recognised and admitted in England at once and without 
 struggle. 
 
 The necessary eff'ects of this ecclesiastical supremacy on the 
 part of the Sovereign are of a kind easily estimated. One has 
 but to observe its workings, and then try it by its fruits. That 
 there exists no discipline in the Anglican Church, is an inevitable 
 consequence of the paramount place which her standards assign 
 to the civil magistrate. For it is of the nature of civil law 
 that it will not bear — let men frame its requirements and penal- 
 ties as they may — against what happen for the time to be the 
 gentlemanly vices. If hard drinking chance to be fashionable, 
 as fashionable it has been, no one is ever punished for hard 
 drinking. A gentleman may get drunk with impunity at a 
 chief magistrate's table, and have the chief magistrate's compa- 
 nionship in the debauch, to set him all the more at his ease. 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 363 
 
 In like manner, if swearing chance to be fashionable, as fashion- 
 able it has been, even grave magistrates learn to swear, and no 
 one is ever fined for dropping an oath. Exactly the same 
 principle applies to the licentious vices : there are stringent laws 
 in the statute-book against bastardy; but who ever saw them 
 enforced to the detriment of a magistrate or a man of fortune'^ 
 And it is by no means in exclusively a corrupt state of the 
 courts of law that this principle prevails ; it obtains also in their 
 ordinary efficient condition, in which they protect society against 
 the swindler and the felon, and do justice between man and 
 man. It is of their natures as civil courts — not a consequence 
 of any extraordinary corruption — that they will not bear against 
 the gentlemanly vices -, and it is equally of their nature, too, in 
 a countiy such as Britain, in which the influence of the tolera- 
 tion laws has been directing for ages the course of public 
 opinion, that they should be thoroughly indifferent to the varie- 
 ties of religious belief. Unless the heresiarch be an indecent 
 atheist, who insults society and blasphemes God, he is quite as 
 good a subject in the eye of the law as the orthodox assertor of 
 the national creed. 
 
 Now, the magistrate does not relinquish this indiflcrency to 
 mere matters of doctrine, and this leniency with regard to the 
 genteeler offences, by being made supreme in ecclesiastical 
 matters. On the contrary, he brings them with him into the 
 ecclesiastical court, where he decides in the name of the Sove- 
 reign; and the clergyman, whom he tries in his character as 
 such, is quite as safe if his vices be but of the gentlemanly cast, 
 or his offences merely offences of creed, as if he were simply a 
 layman. Hence the unvarying character of decisions by the 
 English Judges in Church cases. Is an appeal carried to the 
 civil magistrate by a clergyman deprived for di'unkenness ? — the 
 civil magistrate finds, as in a late instance, that the appellant 
 is, in the main, a person of kindly dispositions and a good heart, 
 and so restores him to his office. Is an appeal carried by a 
 
3G4 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 Clergyman deprived for licentiousness and common swearing? 
 — the magistrate concludes that there would be no justice in 
 robbing a person of his bread for mere peccadilloes of so harm- 
 less a character, and so restores him to his office. Is an appeal 
 carried by a clergyman deposed for simony? — the civil magis- 
 trate finds that a man is not to be cut off fronj his own living 
 for having sold some tv/o or three others, and so restores him 
 to his otiice. Is a clergyman a frequenter, on his own confes- 
 sion in open court, of houses of bad fame? What of that] 
 What civil magistrate could be so recklessly severe as to divest 
 a highly-c(;nnccted young man, for so slight an offence, of thir- 
 teen hundred a year ! As for mere affairs of doctrine, they are, 
 of course, slighter matters still. Let the Socinian teach undis- 
 turbed in this parish church, and the Puseyite in that — let the 
 Arminian discourse yonder, and the Calvinist here — the civil 
 magistrate in the British empire is toleration personified, and 
 casts his shield over them all. And such, in its workings, is 
 that flagrant dread and abhorrence of the Evangelistic Scotch, 
 Erastianism. It is impossible, in the nature of things, that it 
 can co-exist with discipline ; for it is inherent and constitutional 
 to it to substitute for the law of the New Testament, the indif- 
 ferency of the civil magistrate to mere theological distinctions, 
 and his sympathy with the gentlemanly vices. 
 
 But while such seems to be the real character of this Eras- 
 tian principle, the Scotch Presbyterian who judges the devout 
 English Episcopalian in reference to it by his own moral 
 standard, and the devout English Episcopalian who decides 
 respecting the Presbyterian Scot with regard to it by his own 
 peculiar feelings, may be both a good deal in error. In order 
 to arrive at a just conclusion in either case, it is necessary to 
 take into account the very opposite position and character of 
 the parties, not on]y as the members of dissimilar Churches, bi it 
 also as the inhabitants of different countries. That adhesive 
 coherency of character in the Presbyterian Scot, which so 
 
■p. 
 
 tliorougli 
 
 ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 365 
 
 tlioroughly identifies him with his country, and makes the entire 
 of his Church emphatically his, gives to the Erastian principle 
 a degree of atrocity, in his estimate, which, to the insulated 
 English Episcopalian, practically an Independent in his feelings, 
 and deeply interested in only his own congregation, it cannot 
 possess. A John Newton at Olney may feel grieved as a Chris- 
 tian that Mr. Scott, the neighbouring clergyman of Weston- 
 Underwood, should be a rank Socinian, just in the way a devout 
 Independent minister in one of the chapels of London may feel 
 grieved as a Christian that there should be a Unitarian minister 
 teaching what he deems deadly error in another of the city 
 chapels half a street away. But neither John Newton nor the 
 Independent feel aggrieved in conscience by the fact : enough 
 for them that they are permitted to walk, undisturbed, their 
 round of ministerial duty, each in his own nan*ow sphere. The 
 one, as an insulated Englishman and Independent, is the lead- 
 ing member of a little congregational state, and all congrega- 
 tions besides are mere foreign states, with whose internal 
 government he has nothing to do. The other, as an insulated 
 Englishman, and as holding in an unrepresentative slumbrous 
 despotism a subordinate command, which resolves itself practi- 
 cally, as certainly as in the case of the Independent, into a sort 
 of leading membership in a detached congregational state, feels 
 liimself as entu'ely cut off from the right or duty of interference 
 with his neighbours. And so long as the Erastian decision, 
 unequivocally legaUzed by statute, fails to press upon him indi- 
 vidually, or to operate injuriously on his charge, he deems it a 
 c<3mparatively light grievance : it affects a foreign state — not 
 the state that is emphatically his. But not such the estuuate 
 or the feelings of the Presbyterian Scot. He is not merely the 
 member of a congregation, but also that of a united coherent 
 Church, co-extensive with his country, and whose government is 
 representative. There is not a congregation within tlie pale of 
 the general body in which he has not a direct interest, and with 
 
366 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF 
 
 regard to which he may not have an imperative duty to pe^*- 
 form. He has an extended lino to defend from encroachment 
 a.nd aggression; and he feels that at whatever point the civil 
 magistrate threatens to cany in the contamination which, when 
 he assumes the ecclesiastical, it is his nature to scatter around 
 him, he must be determinedly resisted, at whatever expense. 
 Erastiauism to the Scot and the Presbyterian is thus an essen- 
 tially different thing from what it is to the Episcopalian and 
 the Englishman. It is a sort of iron boot to both ; but, so far 
 at least as feeling is concerned, it is around the vital limb of 
 the Scotchman that it is made to tighten, while in the case of 
 the Englishman it is wedged round merely a wooden leg. 
 
 The errors committed by the government of the country, in 
 legislating for Scotland in matters of religion as if it were not 
 a separate nation, possessed of a distinct and strongly-marked 
 character of its own, but a mere province of England, have led 
 invariably to disaster and suffering. Exactly the same kind of 
 mistakes, however, when dissociated from the power of the State, 
 have terminated in results of rather an amusing than serious 
 character. In a country district or small town in Scotland, in 
 w^hich the Presbyterian clergy were of the unpopular Moderate 
 type, I have seen an Independent meeting-house get into a 
 flourishing condition; its list of members would greatly lengthen, 
 and its pews fill ; and, judging from appearances, on which in 
 England it would be quite safe to calculate, one might deem it 
 fairly established. The Independent preacher in such cases 
 would be found to be a good energetic man of the Evangelistic 
 school ; and his earnest Evangelism would thus succeed in car- 
 rying it over the mere Presbyterian predilection of the people. 
 The true Scotch feehng, however, would be lying latent at 
 bottom all the while, and constituting a most precarious founda- 
 tion for the welfare of the Independent meeting-house. And 
 when in some neighbouring Presbyterian church an earnc;:5t 
 Evangelistic minister came to be settled, the predilection would 
 
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 367 
 
 """once "begin to tell : the Independent congregation would 
 commence gradually to break up and dissipate, until at length 
 but a mere skeleton would remain. The Independent minister 
 
 Iairould have but one point of attraction to present to the people 
 I— his Evangelism ; whereas the Presbyterian would be found 
 to have two — his Evangelism, and his Presbyterianism also ; 
 and the double power, like that of a double magnet, would 
 carry it over the single one. Some of my readers must remem- 
 ber the unlucky dispute into which the editor of a London 
 periodical, representative of English Independency, entered, about 
 a twelvemonth after the Disruption, with the Free Church. It 
 hinged entirely, though I daresay the English editor did not 
 know it, on the one verms the two attractive points. An Inde- 
 pendent chapel had been erected in the north of Scotland in a 
 Moderate district ; and Evangelism, its one attractive point, 
 had acquired for it a congregation. But through that strange 
 revolution in the course of affairs which terminated in the Dis- 
 ruption, the place got a church that was at once Evangelistic 
 and Presbyterian; and the church with the two points of 
 attraction mightily thinned the congregation of the church that 
 had but one. The deserted minister naturally enough got angry 
 and unreasonable ; and the Congregationalist editor, through the 
 force of sympathy, got angry and somewhat unreasonable too. 
 But had the latter seen the matter as it really stood, he would 
 have kept his temper. The cause lay deep in the long-derived 
 character of the Scotch; and it was a cause as independent of 
 either Congregationalism or the Free Church, as that peculinrity 
 in the soil and climate of an African island which makes 
 exactly the same kind of grapes produce Madeira in its vine- 
 yards, that in the vineyards of Portugal produce Sherry. 
 
 After a stay of rather more than two months in England, 
 I took my passage in one of the Liverpool steamers for Glasgow, 
 and in somewhat less than twenty-four hours after, was seated 
 at my own fireside, within half a mile of the ancient Palace of 
 
368 FIRST IMPEESSIONS OF ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 
 
 Holyrood. I had seeu much less of the English and their 
 country than I had hoped and proposed to see. I had left the 
 Chalk, the Wealden, and the London Clay unexplored, and many 
 an interesting locality associated with the literature of the country 
 unvisited. But I had had much bad weather, and much indif- 
 ferent health; I had, besides, newspaper article-writing to the 
 extent of at least a volume, to engage me in dull solitary rooms, 
 when the pitiless rain was dropping heavily from the eaves outside. 
 And so, if my journey, like that of Obidah, the son of Abensina, 
 has, in its discrepancies between expectation and realization, 
 promise and performance, resembled the great journey of life, 
 I trust to be not very severely dealt with by the reader who 
 has accompanied me thus far, and to whom I have striven to 
 communicate, as fairly as I have been able, and as fully as cir- 
 cumstances have permitted, my First Impressions of England 
 and its People. 
 
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 der Tales, the Publisher does not consider it necessary to say anything 
 in recommendation of a work which has stood the test of a general com- 
 petition, and which has increased in public favour with its years. 
 Equally suited to all classes of readers, it has been received with delight 
 in the school-room, the drawing-room, the parlour, and the village read- 
 ing-room. Many of the Tales have been publicly read. The high tone 
 of its morality renders it an admirable small library for young members 
 of the family. 
 
 The new Copyright Edition will contain four additional Volumes, 
 now first published, which will complete the work. It will be issued 
 in Twenty-four Monthly Volumes, price Is. each, sewed in elegant 
 wrapper, commencing March 1st, 1869. But at the same time the entire 
 work will bo kept on sale, so that all who desire to possess it — either com- 
 plete, or any separate volume thereof — can be supplied at once. Each 
 volume is complete in itself, forming an independent collection of stories. 
 The work may also be had in Twelve Double Volumes, handsomely 
 bound in cloth, price 3s. each, or in half- calf extra, for libraries, etc. 
 
 Those who already possess the first twenty Volumes are recommended 
 to complete their sets by purchasing the four New Volumes, the last of 
 which will contain a Steel Portrait of the Editor and principal contri- 
 butor, Alexander Leighton, with a copious Glossary. 
 
 In square 8vo, richly bound in cloth and gold, price 3s,, 
 
 THE LOVES OF ROSE PINK AND SKY BLUE, 
 
 AND OTHER STORIES TOLD TO CHILDREN. 
 
 By William Francis Collier, LL.D., 
 
 Author of ' Tales of Old English Life,' etc. etc. 
 
 Profusely Illustrated with Original humorous Illustrations on Wood. 
 
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