(5RHYDAY5 KQD GOLD ^jaiQTSR ? « ? <> ^^ ? ?' f. V' f0i) Mi ? UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES 5' < GRAY DAYS AND GOLD ^><^m GRAY DAYS AND GOLD IN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND BY WILLIAM WINTER NEW EDITION BOSTON JOSEPH KNIGHT COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1892, By MACMILLAN AND CO. •^ J,* Set up and electrotyped June, 1892. Reprinted . ., November, 1892; January^ June, August, 1893; April, .' ' ^894. NorojooU 5Press: J. 8. CushiiiR & Co. — Berwick & Si Boston, Mass., U.S.A. YV73gr TO REMEMBERING A FRIENDSHIP OF MANY YEARS I DEDICATE THIS BOOK "Est animus tibi J Rerumque prudens, et secundis K^ Temporibus dubiisque rectus " 207187 PKEFACE. This book, a companion to " Shake- speare's England," relates to the gray days of an American wanderer in the British islands, and to the gold of thought and fancy that can he found there. In " Shake- speare's England" an attempt was made to depict, in an unconventional manner, those lovely scenes that are intertwined with the name and the memory of Shakespeare, and also to reflect the spirit of that English scenery in general which, to an imaginative mind, must always he venerable with historic antiquity and tenderly hallowed idth poetic and romantic associatioii. The present hook continues the same treatment of kin- dred themes, referring not only to the land of Shakespeare hut to the land of Burns and 7 8 PREFACE. Scott. After so much had been done, and superbly done, by Washington Irving and by other authors, to celebrate the beauties of our ancestral home, it was perhaps an act of presumption on the part of the present writer to touch those subjects. He can only plead, in extenuation of his boldness, an irresistible impulse of reverence and affection for them. His presefitment of them can give no offence, and perhaps it may be found sufficiently sympathetic and diversified to awaken and sustain at least a momentary interest in the minds of those readers who love to muse and dream over the relics of a storied past. If by Happy fortune it shotdd do more than that, — if it should help to imptress his countrymen, so many of whom annually travel in Great Britain, with the superlative importance of adorning the phys- ical aspect and of refining the material civilisation of America by a reproduction within its borders of whatever is valuable in the long experience and whatever is noble and beautiful in the domestic and religious PREFACK. 9 spirit of the British islands^ — his labour will not have been in vain. TJie supreme need of this age in America is a practical convic- tion that progress does not consist in mate- rial prosperity but in spiritual advance- ment. Utility has long been exclusively loorshipped. The welfare of the future lies in the worship of beauty. To that worship these pages are devoted., with all that it im- plies of sympathy with the higher instincts and faith in the divine destiny of the human race. Many of the sketches here assembled were originally printed in the New York Tribune., with which journal their author has been continuously associated as a contributor since 1865. They have been revised for pub- lication in this form. Most of the paper on Sir Walter Scott first appeared in Harper's Weekly., for which periodical also the author has written many things. TJie paper on the Wordsworth country was contributed to the New York Mirror. The alluring field of Scottish antiquity and romance, which the lO PREFACE. author has ventured but slightly to touchy may perhaps he explored hereafter^ for treas- ures of contemplation that earlier seekers have left ungathered. The fact is recorded that an important recent hook called Shake- speare'' s True Life, written by James Walter, incorporates into its text, without credit, several passages of original description and reflection taken from the present writers sketches of the Shakespeare country, and also quotes, as his work, an elaborate narrative of a nocturnal visit to Anne Ilathaivay's cottage, which he never wrote and never claimed to have written. Tliis statement is made as a safeguard against future in- justice. jY. W. contents; — • — CHAP. PAGE I. CLASSIC SHRINES .... 15 II. HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES , 27 III. OLD YORK 40 IV. THE HAUNTS OF MOORE . . 55 V. BEAUTIFUL BATH - . .72 VI. THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH . 80 VII. SHAKESPEARE RELICS AT WOR- CESTER 98 VIII. BYRON AND HUCKNALL-TORKARD, 109 IX. HISTORIC NOOKS AND CORNERS . 133 X. SHAKESPEARE'S TOWN . . . 142 XI, UP AND DOWN THE AVON . . 167 XII. RAMBLES IN ARDBN . . . 175 CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE XIII. THE STRATFORD FOUNTAIN . 183 XIV. BOSWORTH FIELD . . . 195 XV. THE HOME OP DR. JOHNSON . 209 XVI. FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH . 224 XVII. INTO THE HIGHLANDS . . . 233 XVni. HIGHLAND BEAUTIES . . . 241 XIX. THE HEART OF SCOTLAND . . 253 XX. SIR WALTER SCOTT . . . 269 XXI. ELEGIAC MEMORIALS . . .296 XXII. SCOTTISH PICTURES . . . 308 XXIII. IMPERIAL RUINS . . . .315 XXIV. THE LAND OF MARMION . . 324 " Whatever withdraws us frojn the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the fj4ture predominate over the present, ad- vances us in the dignity of thinking beings. . . . AU travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries he may learn to itnprove his own, and if fortune carries him to worse he may lear7i to enjoy it." — Dr. Johnson. " There is given. Unto the things of earth which Time hath bent, A spirit's feeling ; afid where he hath leant His ha7id, bid broke his scythe, there is a power And magic in the ruined battlement, For which the palace of the present hour Must yield its pomp, and wait till ages are its dower'' Byron. GRAY DAYS AND GOLD. CLASSIC SHRINES. LONDON, June 29, 1888. — The poet Emerson's injunction, "Set not thy' foot on graves," is wise and right ; and being in merry England in the montli of June it certainly is your own fault if you do not fulfil the rest of the philosophical commandment and ' ' Hear what wine and roses say." Yet the history of England is largely written in her ancient churches and crumbling ruins, and the pilgrim to historic and literary shrines in this country will find it difficult to avoid setting his foot on graves. It is possible here, as elsewhere, to live entirely in the present ; but to certain temperaments and in certain moods the temptation is irresistible to live mostly in the past. I write these words in a house that was once occupied by Nell Gwyiin, and '5 1 6 CLASSIC SHRINES. as I glance into the garden I see a venerable acacia that was planted by her own fair hands, in the far-off time of the Merry- Monarch. Within a few days I have stood in the dungeon of Guy Fawkes, in the Tower, and sat at luncheon in a manor- house of Warwickshire wherein were once convened the conspirators of the Gun- powder Plot, The newspapers of this morning announce that a monument will be dedicated on July 19 to commemorate the defeat of the Spanish Armada, three hundred years ago. Surely it is not unnat- ural that some of us should live in the past and often should find ourselves musing over its legacies. One of the most sacred spots in England is the churchyard of Stoke-Pogis. I revis- ited that place on June 13 and once again rambled and meditated in that hallowed haunt. Not many months ago it seemed likely that Stoke Park would pass into the possession of a sporting ring and be turned into a race-course and kennel. A track had already been laid there. Fate was kind, however, and averted the final disaster. Only a few changes are to be noted in that part of the park which to the reverent pil- grim must always be dear. The church- CLASSIC SHRINES. \^ yard has been extended in front, and a solid wall of flint, pierced by an oak porch, richly carved, has replaced the plain fence, with its simple turnstile, that formerly enclosed that rural cemetery. The additional land was given by the new proprietor of Stoke Park, who wished that his own tomb might be made in it ; and this has been built beneath a large tree not far from the en- trance. The avenue from the gate to the church has been widened, and it is now fringed with thin lines of twisted stone; and where once stood only two or three rose- trees there are now sixty-two — set in lines on either side of the path. But the older part of the graveyard remains michanged. The yew-trees cast their dense shade, as of old. The quaint porch of the sacred build- ing has not suffered under the hand of restoration. The ancient wooden memori- als of the dead continue to moulder above their ashes. And still the abundant ivy gleams and trembles in the sunshine and in the summer wind that plays so sweetly over the spired tower and dusky walls of this lovely temple — ** All green and wildly fresh without, But worn and gray beneath." l8 CLASSIC SHRINES. It would still be a lovely church, even if it were not associated with the immortal Elegy. I Stood for a long time beside the tomb of the noble and tender poet and looked with deep emotion on the surround- ing scene of pensive, dream-like beauty — the great elms, so dense of foliage, so stately and graceful ; the fields of deep, waving grass, golden with buttercups and white with daisies; the many unmarked mounds ; the many mouldering tombstones ; the rooks sailing and cawing around the tree-tops ; and over all the blue sky flecked with floating fleece. Within the church nothing has been changed. The memorial window to Gray, for which contributions have been taken during several years, has not yet been placed. As I cast a farewell look at Gray's tomb, on turning to leave the churchyard, it rejoiced my heart to see that two American ladies, who had then just come in, were placing fresh flowers over the poet's dust. He has been buried more than a hundred years — but his mem- ory is as bright and green as the i^y on the tower within whose shadow he sleeps, and as fragrant as the roses that bloom at its base. Many Americans visit Stoke-Pogis churchyard , and surely no visitor to the old CLASSIC SHRINES. I9 world, who knows how to vahie what is best in its treasures, will omit that act of reverence. The journey is easy. A brief run by railway from Paddington takes you to Slough, which is near to Windsor, and thence it is a charming drive, or a still more charming walk, mostly through green, em- bowered lanes, to the "ivy-mantled tower," the "yew-trees' shade," and the simple tomb of Gray. What a gap there would be in the poetry of our language if the Elegy in a Country Churchyard were absent from it ! By that sublime and tender rev- erie upon the most important of all subjects that can engage the attention of the human mind Thomas Gray became one of the chief benefactors of his race. Those lines have been murmured by the lips of sorrow- ing affection beside many a shrine of buried love and hope, in many a churchyard all round the world. The sick have remem- bered them with comfort. The great sol- dier, going into battle, has said them for his solace and cheer. The dying statesman, closing his weary eyes upon this empty world, has spoken them with his last falter- ing accents, and fallen asleep with their heavenly music in his heart. Well may we pause and ponder at the grave of that di- 20 CLASSIC SHRINES. vine poet ! Every noble mind is made nobler, every good heart is made better, for the experience of such a pilgrimage. In such places as these pride is rebuked, vanity is dispelled, and the revolt of the passionate human heart is humbled into meekness and submission. There is a place kindred with Stoke-Pogis churchyard, a place destined to become, after a few years, as famous and as dear to the heart of the reverent pilgrim in the footsteps of genius and pure renown. On Sunday afternoon (June 17) I sat for along time beside the grave of Matthew Arnold. It is in a little churchyard at Laleham in Surrey, where he was born. The day was chill, sombre, and, except for an occasional low twitter of birds and the melancholy cawing of distant rooks, soundless and sadly calm. So dark a sky might mean November rather than June ; but it fitted well with the scene and with tlie pensive thoughts and feelings of the hour. Lale- ham is a village on the south bank of the Thames, about thirty miles from London and nearly midway between Staines and Chertsey. It consists of a few devious lanes and a cluster of houses, shaded with large trees and everywhere made beautiful with CLASSIC SHRINES. 21 flowers, and it is one of tliose fortunate and happy places to wliicli access cannot be ob- tained by railway. There is a great house in the centre of it, secluded in a walled garden, fronting the square immediately opposite to the village church. The rest of the houses are mostly cottages made of red brick and roofed with red tiles. Ivy flourishes, and many of the cottages are overrun with climbing roses. Roman relics are found in the neighbourhood — a camp near the ford, and other indications of the military activity of Csesar. The church, All Saints', is of great antiquity. It has been in part restored, but its venerable aspect is not impaired. The large low tower is of brick, and this and the church walls are thickly covered with glistening ivy. A double-peaked roof of red tiles, sunken here and there, contributes to the picturesque beauty of this building, and its charm is further heightened by the contiguity of trees, in which the old church seems to nestle. Within there are low, massive pil- lars and plain, symmetrical arches — the remains of Norman architecture. Great rafters of dark oak augment in this quaint structure the air of solidity and of an age at once venerable and romantic, while a 22 CLASSIC SHRINES bold, spirited, beautiful painting of Christ and Peter upon the sea imparts to it an ad- ditional sentiment of sanctity and solemn pomp. That remarkable work is by George Henry Harlow, and it is placed back of the altar, where once there would have been, in the Gothic days, a stained window. The explorer does not often come upon such a gem of a church even in England — so rich in remains of the old Catholic zeal and devotion ; remams now mostly converted to the use of Protestant worship. The churchyard of All Saints' is worthy of the church — a little enclosure, irregular in shape, surface, shrubbery, and tomb- stones, bordered on two sides by the village square and on one by a . farmyard, and shaded by many trees, some of them yews, and some of great size. Almost every house that is visible near by is bowered with trees and adorned with flowers. No person was anywhere to be seen, and it was only after inquiry at various dwellings that the sex- ton's abode could be discovered and access to the church obtained. The poet's grave is not within the church, but in a secluded spot at the side of it, a little removed from the highway, and screened from immediate view by an ancient dusky yew-tree. I read- CLASSIC SHRINES. 23 ily found it, perceiving a large wreath of roses and a bunch of white flowers that were lying upon it, — recent offerings of tender remembrance and sorrowing love, but already beginning to wither. A small square of turf, bordered with white marble, covers the tomb of the poet and of three of his children.i At the head are three crosses of white marble, alike in shape and equal in size, except that the first is set upon a pedestal a little lower than those of the others. On the first cross is written : " Basil Francis Arnold, youngest child of Matthew and Frances Lucy Arnold. Born August 19, 1866. Died January 4, 1868. Suffer little children to come unto me. ' ' On the second : ' ' Thomas Arnold, eldest child of Matthew and Frances Lucy Arnold. Born July 6, 1852. Died November 23, 1868. Awake, thou. Lute and Harp ! I will awake right early." On the third: " Trevener William Arnold, second child of Matthew and Fran- 1 Since these words were written a plain headstone of white marble has been placed on this spot bearing the following inscription : — " Matthew i^rnold, eldest son of the late Thomas Arnold, D.D., Head Master of Rugby School. Born December 24, 1822. Died April 15, 1888. ' There is sprung up a light for the righteous, and joyful glad- ness for such as are true-hearted.' " 24 CLASSIC SHRINES. ces Lucy Arnold. Born October 15, 1853. Died February 16, 1872. In tlie morning it is green and growetli up." Near by are otlier tombstones bearing tlie name of Ar- nold — the dates inscribed on them refer- ring to about the beginning of this century. These mark the resting-place of some of the poet's kindred. His father, the famous Dr. Arnold of Rugby, rests in Rugby chapel — that noble father, that true friend and ser- vant of humanity, of whom the son wrote those memorable words of imperishable no- bility and meaning, "Thou, my father, wouldst not be saved alone." Matthew Arnold himself is buried in the same grave with his eldest son and side by side with his little children. He who was himself as a little child in his innocence, goodness, and truth, where else and how else could he so fitly rest ? " Awake, thou, Lute and Harp ! I will awake right early." Every man will have his own thoughts in such a place as this ; will reflect upon his own afflictions, and from knowledge of the manner and spirit in which kindred griefs have been borne by the great heart of intel- lect and genius will seek to gather strength and patience to endure them well. Matthew Arnold taught many lessons of immense CLASSIC SHRINES. 25 value to those who are able to think. He did not believe that happiness is the destiny of the human race on earth, or that there is a visible ground for assuming that happi- ness in this mortal condition is one of the inherent rights of humanity. He did not think that this world is made an abode of delight by the mere jocular affirmation that everything in it is well and lovely. He ktiew better than that. But his message, delivered in poetic strains that will endure as long as our language exists, is the mes- sage, not of gloom and despair, but of spir- itual purity and sweet and gentle patience. The man who heeds Matthew Arnold's teaching will put no trust in creeds and superstitions, will place no reliance upon the cobweb structures of theology, will take no guidance from the animal and unthinking multitude ; but he will " keep the whiteness of his soul"; he will be simple, unselfish, and sweet ; he will live for the spirit and not the flesh ; and in that spirit, pure, ten- der, fearless, strong to bear and patient to suffer, he will find composure to meet the inevitable disasters of life and the awful mystery of death. Such w^as the burden of my thought, sitting there, in the gloaming, beside the lifeless dust of him whose hand 26 CLASSIC SHRINES. had once, with kindly greeting, been clasped in mine. And such will be the thought of many and many a pilgrim who will stand in that sacred place, on many a summer evening of the long future — •* While the stars come out and the night wind Brings, up the stream, Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea." HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. 27 II. HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. WARWICK, July 6, 1888. — One night about fifty years ago a brutal murder was done at a louely place on the highroad between Hampton Lucy and Stratford- upon-Avon. The next morning the mur- dered man (a farmer named Irons) was found lying by the roadside, his man- gled head resting in a small hole. The assassins, two in number, were shortly afterward discovered, and they were hanged at Warwick. From that day to this the hole wherein the dead man's head reposed remains unchanged. No matter how often it may be filled, whether by the wash of heavy rains or by stones and leaves that wayfarers may happen to cast into it as they pass, it is soon found to be again empty. No one takes care of it. No one knows whether or by whom it is guarded. Fill it at nightfall and you will find it empty in the morning. That is the local 28 HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. belief and affirmation. This spot is about two miles north of Stratford and not dis- tant from the gates of Charlcote Park. I looked at this hole one bright day in June and saw that it was empty. Nature, it is thought by the poets, abhors complicity with the concealment of crime and brands with her curse the places that are linked with the shedding of blood. Hence that strong line in Tom Hood's poem of Eu- gene Aram — " And a mighty wind had swept the leaves, And still the corse was bare." There are many haunted spots in War- wickshire. The benighted peasant never lingers on Ganerslie Heath — for there, at midnight, dismal bells have been heard to toll from Blacklow Hill, the place where Sir Piers Gaveston, the corrupt, handsome, for- eign favourite of King Edward the Second, was beheaded, by order of the grim barons whom he had insulted and opposed. The Earl of Warwick led them, whom Gaveston had called the Black Dog of Arden. This was long ago. Everybody knows the his- toric incident but no one can so completely realise it as when standing on the place. The scene of the execution is marked by a HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. 29 simple cross, bearing this inscription : "In tlie liollow of this rock was beheaded, on tlie first day of July 1312, by Barons law- less as himself, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall. In life and death a memorable instance of misrule." No doubt the birds were singing and the green branches of the trees were waving in the summer wind on that fatal day, just as they are at this moment. Gaveston was a man of much personal beauty and some talent, and only twenty-nine years old. It was a melan- choly sacrifice and horrible in the circum- stances that attended it. No wonder that doleful thoughts and blood-curdling sounds should come to such as walk on Ganerslie Heath in the lonely hours of the night. Another haunted place is Clopton — haunted certainly with memories if not with ghosts. In the reign of Henry VII. this was the manor of Sir Hugh Clopton, Lord Mayor of London, he who built the bridge over the Avon — across which, many a time, William Shakespeare must have ridden, on his way to Oxford and the capi- tal. The dust of Sir Hugh Clopton rests in Stratford church and his mansion has passed through many hands. In our time it is the residence of Sir Arthur Hodgson, 30 HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. by whom it was purchased m 1871. It was my privilege to see Cloj)ton under the guid- ance of its lord, and a charming and im- pressive old house it is — full of quaint objects and fraught with singular associa- tions. They show you there, among many fine paintings, the portrait of a wild- eyed lady with thin figau-e, delicate features, long light hair, and sensitive countenance, who in the far-off Tudor time drowned herself in a dismal well, back of the mansion — one of the many victims, doubtless, of un- happy love. And they show yor. the por- trait of still another Clopton girl, of ancient times, who is thought to have been acci- dentally buried alive — because when it chanced that the family tomb was opened, a few days after her interment, the corse was found to be turned over in its coffin and to present indications that the wretched victim of premature burial had, in her agonised frenzy, gnawed her own flesh. It is the blood-stained corridor of Clop- ton, however, that most impresses imagi- nation. This is at the top of the house, and access to it is gained by a winding stair of oak boards, uncarpeted, solid, sim- ple, and consonant with the times and manners that it represents. Many years HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. 3 1 ago, it is said, a man was murdered in a little bedroom near the top of this stair- case, and his body was dragged along the corridor to be secreted. A thin dark stain, seemingly a streak of blood, runs from the door of that bedroom in the di- rection of the stairhead, and this is so deeply imprinted in the wood that it can- not be removed. Opening from this cor- ridor, opposite to the murder-room, is an odd apartment, which in the remote days of a Catholic occupant was used as an ora- tory, i In the early part of the reign of Henry VI. John Carpenter obtained from the Bishop of Worcester permission to es- tablish this chapel. In 1885 the walls of this chamber were committed to the tender mercies of a paper-hanger, who presently discovered on them several inscriptions in black letter, and who fortunately mentioned his discoveries before they were obliterated. Richard Savage, the antiquary, was called to examine them, and by him they were restored. The effect of those little patches of letters — isles of significance in a barren sea of wall-paper — is that of extreme sin- * An entry in the Diocesan Register of Worcester states that in 1374 John Clopton of Stretforde ob- tained letters dimissory to the order of priest. 32 HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. gularity. Most of them are sentences from the Bible. All of them are devout. One imparts the solemn injunction : ' ' Whether you rise yearlye or goe to bed late, Remem- ber Christ Jesus who died for your sake." [This may be fomid in Jolm Weever's Funeral 3Ionuments : 1631.] Clopton has a long and various history. One of the most significant facts in its record is the fact that for about ten months, in the year 1605, it was occupied by Ambrose Roke- wood, of Coldham Hall, Suffolk, a breeder of race-horses, whom Robert Catesby brought into the ghastly Gunpowder Plot, in the reign of James I. Hither came Sir Everard Digby, and Tom and Robert Win- ter, and the specious Jesuit, Father Garnet, chief hatcher of the conspiracy, with his vile train of sentimental fanatics, on that pUgrimage of sanctification with which he formally prepared for an act of such hide- ous treachery and wholesale murder as only a religious zealot could ever have con- ceived. That may have been a time when the little oratory of Clopton was in Cath- olic use. Not many years since it was a bedroom ; but one of Sir Arthur Hodgson's guests, who undertook to sleep in it, was afterward heard to declare that he wished HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. 33 not ever again to experience the hospitality of that chamber, because the sounds that he had heard all around the place through- out that night were of a most infernal de- scription. A house containing many rooms and staircases, a house full of long corri- dors and winding ways, a house so large that you may readily get lost in it — such is Clopton ; and it stands in its own large park, removed from other buildings and bowered in trees. To sit in the great hall of that mansion on a winter midnight, when the snow-laden wind is howling around it, and then to think of the bleak, sinister oratory, and the stealthy, gliding shapes upstairs, invisible to mortal eye, but felt, with a shuddering sense of some unseen presence watching in the dark, — this would be to have quite a sufficient ex- perience of a haunted house. Sir Arthur Hodgson talked of the legends of Clopton with that merry twinkle of the eye which suits well with kindly incredulity. All the same I thought of Milton's lines — " Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we Warwickshire swarmed with conspirators c 34 HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. while the Gunpowder Plot was in progress. The Lion Inn at Dunchurch was the chief tryst of the captains who were to lead their forces and capture the Princess Elizabeth and seize the throne and the country after the expected explosion — which never came. And when the game was up and Pawkes in captivity, it was through Warwickshire that the "racing and chasing" was fleetest and wildest, till the desperate scramble for life and safety went down in blood at Hewel Grange. Various houses associated with that plot are still extant in this neighbour- hood, and when the scene shifts to London and to Garnet's Tyburn gallows, it is easily possible for the patient antiquarian to tread in almost every footprint of that great con- spiracy. Since Irish ruffians began to toss dyna- mite about in public buildings it has been deemed essential to take especial precaution against the danger of explosion in such places as the Houses of Parliament, West- minster Abbey, and the Tower of London. Much more damage than the newspapers recorded was done by the explosions that occurred some time ago in the Tower and the Palace. At present you cannot enter even into Palace Yard unless connected HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. 35 with the public business or authorised by an order ; and if you visit the Tower with- out a special permit you will be restricted to a few sights and places. I was fortu- nately the bearer of the card of the Lord Chamberlain, on a recent prowl through the Tower, and therefore was favoured by - the beef-eaters who pervade that structure. Those damp and gloomy dungeons were displayed wherein so many Jews perished miserably in the reign of Edward I. ; and "Little Ease" was shown — the cell in which for several months Guy Fawkes was incarcerated, during Cecil's wily investiga- tion of the Gunpowder Plot. A part of the rear wall has been removed, affording access to the adjacent dungeon ; but originally the cell did not give room for a man to lie down in it, and scarce gave room for him to stand upright. The massive door, of ribbed and iron-bound oak, still solid though worn, would make an impressive picture. A poor, stealthy cat was crawling about in those subterranean dens of darkness and horror, and was left locked in there when we emerged. In St. Peter's, on the green — that little cemetery so eloquently described by Macaulay — they came some time ago Mpon the coffins of Lovat, Kilmarnock, and 36 HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. Balmerino, the Scotch lords who perished upon the block for their complicity witli the rising for Charles Edward Stuart, the Pretender, in 1745-47. The coffins were much decayed. The plates were removed, and these may now be viewed in a glass case on the church wall, just over against the spot where those unfortunate gentlemen were buried.^ One is of lead and is in the form of a large open scroll. The other two are oval in shape, large, and made of pewter. Much royal and noble dust is heaped together beneath the stones of the chancel — Anne Boleyn, Catherine How- ard, Lady Jane Grey, Margaret Duchess of Salisbury, the Duke of Monmouth, the Earl of Northumberland, Essex, Overburj'-, Thomas Cromwell, and many more. The body of the infamous and execrable Jeffreys was once buried there, but it has been re- moved. St. Mary's church at Warwick has been restored since 1885, and now it is made a show place. You see the Beauchamp chapel, in which are entombed Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, the founder 1 It is said, however, that the remains of Lord Lovat were secretly removed and buried at his home near Inverness; and that the head was sewed to the body. HAUNTED GLKXS AND HOUSES. },'] of the church ; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in whose Latin epitaph it is stated that ' ' his sorrowful wife, Laetitia, daughter, of Francis Knolles, through a sense of conjugal love and fidelity, hath put up this monument to the best and dear- est of husbands" ; Ambrose Dudley, elder brother to Elizabeth's favourite, and kno\vn as the Good Earl (he relinquished his title and possessions to Robert) ; and thatFulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who lives in fame as "the friend of Sir I'hilip Sidney." There are other notable sleepers in that chapel, but these perhaps are the most famous and con- siderable. One odd epitaph records of William Viner, steward to Lord Brooke, that "he was a man entirely of ancient manners, and to whom you will scarcely find an equal, particularly in point of liber- ality. ... He was added to the number of the heavenly inhabitants maturely for himself, but permaturely for his friends, in his 70th year, on the 28th of Aprid, a.d. 1639." Another, placed for himself by Thomas Hewett during his lifetime, mod- estly describes him as " a most miserable sinner." Sin is always miserable when it knows itself. Still another, and this in good verse, by Gervas Clifton, gives a tender 38 HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. tribute to Lsetitia ("the excellent and pious Lady Lettice "), Countess of Leices- ter, who died on Christmas morning, 1634: — ** She that in her younger years Matched Avith two great English peers ; She that did supply the wars With thunder, and the Court with stars; She that in her youth had been Darling to the maiden Qvieene, Till she was content to quit Her favour for her favourite. . . . While she lived she lived thus, Till that God, displeased with us, Suffered her at last to fall, Not from Him, but from us all." A noble bust of that fine thinker and exquisite poet Walter Savage Landor has been placed on the west wall of St. Mary's church. He was a native of Warwick and he is fitly commemorated in that place. The bust is of alabaster and is set in an alabaster arch with carved environment, and with the family arms displayed above. The head of Landor shows great intellectual power, rugged yet gentle. Coming sud- denly upon the bust, in this church, one is forcibly and pleasantly reminded of the at- tribute of sweet and gentle reverence in the English character which so invariably HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES. 39 expresses itself, all over this land, in hon- ourable memorials to the honourable dead. No rambler in Warwick omits to explore Leicester's hospital, or to see as much as he can of the Castle. That glorious old place has long been kept closed for fear of the dynamite fiend ; but now it is once more accessible. I walked agam beneath the stately cedars and along the bloom- bordered avenues where once Joseph Addi- son used to wander and meditate, and traversed again those opulent state apart- ments wherein so many royal, noble, and beautiful faces look forth from the radiant canvas of Holbein and Vandyke. There is a wonderful picture, in one of those rooms, of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, when a young man — a face prophetic of stormy life and baleful struggles and a hard and miserable fate. You may see the hel- met that was worn by Oliver Cromwell, and also a striking death-mask of his face. The finest portraits of King Charles I. that exist in this kingdom are shown at War- wick Castle. 40 OLD YORK. III. OLD YORK. TOEK, August 12, 1888. — All summer long the sorrowful skies liave been weeping over England, and my first pros- pect of this ancient city was a prospect through drizzle and mist. Yet even so it was impressive. York is one of the quaint- est cities in the kingdom. Many of the streets are narrow and crooked. Most of the buildings are of low stature, built of brick, and roofed with red tiles. Here and there you find a house of Queen Elizabeth's time, picturesque with overhanging timber- crossed fronts and peaked gables. One such house, in Stonegate, is conspicuously marked with its date, 1574. Another, in College street, enclosing a quadrangular court and lovely with old timber and carved gateway, was built by the Neville family in 1460. There is a wide area in the centre of the town called Parliament street, where the market is opened by torchlight on cer- n V OLD YORK. 41 tain evenings of every vt^eek. It was market-time last evening, and, wandering through the motley and merry crowd that filled the square, about nine o'clock, I bought at a flower-stall the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster — twin- ing them together as an emblem of the set- tled peace that here broods so sweetly over the venerable relics of a wild and stormy past. Four sections of the old wall of York are still extant and the observer is amused to perceive the ingenuity with which these gray and mouldering remnants of the feudal age are blended into the structures of the democratic present. From Bootham to Monk Gate (so named in honour of General Monk at the Restoration), a distance of about half a mile, the wall is absorbed by the adjacent buildings. But you may walk upon it from Monk Gate to Jewbury, about a quarter of a mile, and afterward, crossing the Foss, you may find it again on the south- east of the city, and walk upon it from Eed Tower to old Fishergate, descending near York Castle. There are houses both within the walls and without. The walk is about eight feet wide, protected on one hand by a fretted battlement and on the other by an 42 OLD YORK. occasional bit of iron fence. The "base of the wall, for a considerable part of its ex- tent, is fringed with market gardens or with grassy banks. In one of its towers there is a gate-house, still occupied as a dwelling ; and a comfortable dwelling no doubt it is. In another, of which nothing now remains but the walls, four large trees are rooted ; and as they are already tall enough to wave their leafy tops above the battlement they must have been growing there for twenty years. At one point the Great Northern Railway enters through an arch in the an- cient wall, and as you look down from the battlements your gaze rests upon long lines of rail and a spacious station — together with its adjacent hotel ; objects which con- sort but strangely with what your fancy knows of York ; a city of donjons and bar- bicans, the moat, the drawbridge, the port- cullis, the citadel, the man-at-arms, and the knight in armour, with the banners of Wil- liam the Norman flowing over all. The river Ouse divides the city of York, which lies mostly upon its east bank, and in order to reach the longest and most at- tractive portion of the wall that is now available to the pedestrian you must cross the Ouse either at Skeldergate or Lendal, OLD YORK. 43 paying a halfpenny as toll, both when you go and when you return. The walk here is three-quarters of a mile long, and from an angle of this wall, just above the railway arch, may be obtained the best view of the mighty cathedral — one of the most stupen- dous and sublime works that ever were erected by the inspired brain and loving labour of man. While I walked there last night, and mused upon the story of the Wars of the Roses, and strove to conjure up the pageants and the horrors that must have been presented all about this region in that remote and turbulent past, the glorious bells of the minster were chiming from its towers, while the fresh evening breeze, sweet with the fragrance of wet flowers and foliage, seemed to flood this ancient, vener- able city with the golden music of a celes- tial benediction. The pilgrim to York stands in the centre of the largest shire in England and is sur- rounded with castles and monasteries, now mostly in ruins but teeming with those associations of history and literature that are the glory of this delightful land. From the summit of the great central tower of the cathedral, which is reached by two hun- dred and thirty-seven steps, I gazed out 44 OLD YORK. over the vale of York and beheld one of the loveliest spectacles that ever blessed the eyes of man. The wind was fierce, the sun brilliant, and the vanquished storm-clouds were streaming away before the northern blast. Far beneath lay the red- roofed city, its devious lanes and its many gray churches — crumbling relics of ancient ecclesiastical power — distinctly visible. Through the plain, and far away toward the south and east, ran the silver thread of the Ouse, while all around, as far as the eye could reach, stretched forth a smiling landscape of emerald meadow and cultivated field ; here a patch of woodland, and there a silver gleam of wave ; here a manor-house nestled amid stately trees, and there an ivy-covered fragment of ruined masonry ; and every- where the green lines of the flowering hedge. The prospect is finer here than even it is from the summit of Strasburg cathedral ; and indeed, when all is said that can be said about natural scenery and architectural sublimities, it seems amazing that any lover of the beautiful should deem it necessary to quit the infinite variety of the British islands. Earth cannot show you anything more softly fair than the lakes and mountains of Cumberland and OLD YORK. 45 Westmoreland. No city can excel Edin- burgh in stately solidity of character or tranquil grandeur, or in magnificence of jjosition. The most exquisitely beautiful of churches is Roslin chapel. And though you search the wide world through you will never find such cathedrals — so fraught with majesty, sublimity, the loveliness of human art, and the ecstatic sense of a divine ele- ment in human destiny ! — as those of York, Canterbury, Gloucester, and Lincoln. While thus I lingered in wondering medita- tion upon the crag-like summit of York minster, the mufifled thunder of its vast, sonorous organ rose, rolling and throbbhig, from the mysterious depth below, and seemed to shake the gi'eat tower as with a mighty blast of jubilation and worship. At such moments, if ever, when the tones of human adoration are floating up to heaven, a man is lifted out of himself and made to forget his puny mortal existence and all the petty nothings that weary his spirit, darken his vision, and weigh him down to the level of the sordid, trivial world. Well did they know this — those old monks who built the abbeys of Britain, laying their fovmdations not alone deeply in the earth but deeply in the human soul I 46 OLD YORK. All the ground that you survey from the top of York minster is classic ground — at least to those persons whose imaginations are kindled by associations with the stately and storied past. In the city that lies at your feet stood once the great Constantine, to be proclaimed emperor and to be invested with the imperial purple of Rome. In the original York minster — for the present is the fourth church that has been erected upon this site — was buried that valiant soldier "Old Siward," whom "gracious England" lent to the Scottish cause, under Malcolm and Macduff, when time at length was ripe for the ruin of Glamis and Caw- dor. Close by is the field of Stamford bridge, where Harold defeated the Danes, with terrible slaughter, only nine days be- fore he himself was defeated and slain at Hastings. Southward, following the line of the Ouse, you look down upon the ruins of Clifford's Tower, built by William the Conqueror, in 1068, and destroyed by the explosion of its powder magazine in 1684. Not far away is the battlefield of Towton, where the great Warwick slew his horse that he might fight on foot and possess no advantage over the common soldiers of his force. Henry VI. and Margaret were wait- OLD YORK. 47 ing in York for news of the event of that fatal battle — which, in its effect, made them exiles and bore to an assured suprem- acy the rightful standard of the White Rose. In this church Edward IV. was crowned and Richard III. was proclaimed king and had his second coronation. Southward you may see the open space called the Pavement, connecting with Par- liament street, and the red brick church of St. Crux. In the Pavement the Earl of Northumberland was beheaded for treason agamst Queen Elizabeth in 1572, and in St. Crux (one of Wren's churches) his remains he buried, beneath a dark blue slab, still shown to visitors. A few miles away, but easily within reach of your vision, is the field of Marston Moor, where the im- petuous Prmce Rupert imperilled and well- nigh lost the cause of Charles I. in 1644 ; and as you look toward that fatal spot you can almost hear, in the chamber of your fancy, the pseans of thanksgiving for the victory that were uttered in the church beneath. Cromwell, then a subordinate officer in the Parliamentary army, was one of the worshippers, Charles also has knelt at this altar. Indeed, of the fifteen kings, from William of Normandy to Henry of 48 OLD YORK. Windsor, whose sculptured efiSgies appear upon the chancel screen in York minster, there is scarcely one who has not wor- shipped in this cathedral. York minster has often been described, but no description can convey an adequate impression of its grandeur. Canterbury is the lovelier cathedral of the two — though not the grander — and Canterbury possesses the inestimable advantage of a spacious close. It must be said also, for the city of Canterbury, that the presence and influence of a great church are more distinctly and delightfully felt in that place than they are in York. There is a more spiritual tone at Canterbury, a tone of superior delicacy and refinement, a certain aristocratic coldness and repose. In York you perceive the coarse spirit of a democratic era. The walls, that ought to be cherished with scrupulous care, are found in many places to be defiled. At intervals along the walks upon the banks of the Ouse you behold placards requesting the co-operation of the public in protecting from harm the swans that navigate the river. Even in the cathe- dral itself there is displayed a printed notice that the Dean and Chapter are amazed at disturbances which occur in the nave while OLD YORK. 49 divine service is proceeding in the choir. These things imply a rough element in the population, and in such a place as York such an element is exceptionally offensive and deplorable. It was said by the late Lord Beaconsfield that progress in the nineteenth century is found to consist chiefly in a return to an- cient ideas. There may be places to which the characteristic spirit of the present day contributes an element of beauty ; but if so I have not seen them. Wherever there is beauty there is the living force of tradition to account for it. The most that a con- servative force in society can accomplish, for the preservation of an instinct in favour of whatever is beautiful and impressive, is to protect what remains from the past. Modem Edinburgh, for example, has con- tributed no building that is comparable with its glorious old castle, or with Roslin, or with what we know to have been Mel- rose and Dryburgh ; but its castle and its chapels are protected and preserved. York, in the present day, erects a commodious railway-station and a sum5)tuous hotel, and spans its ample river with two splendid bridges ; but its modern architecture is puerile beside that of its ancient mmster j D 50 OLD YORK. and so its best work, after all, is the pres- ervation of its cathedral. One finds it diffi- cult to understand how anybody, however lowly born or poorly endowed or meanly nurtured, can live within the presence of that heavenly building, and not be purified and exalted by the contemplation of so much majesty, and by its constantly irradia- tive force of religious sentiment and power. But the spirit which in the past created objects of beauty and adorned common life with visible manifestations of the celestial aspiration in human nature had constantly to struggle against insensibility or violence ; and just so the few who have inherited that spirit in the present day are compelled steadily to combat the hard materialism and gross animal proclivities of the new age. What a comfort their souls must find in such an edifice as York minster ! What a solace and what an inspiration ! There it stands, dark and lonely to-night, but sym- bolising, as no other object upon earth can ever do, except one of its own great kindred, God's promise of immortal life to man and man's unquenchable faith in the promise of God. Dark and lonely now, but during many hours of its daily and nightly life OLD YORK. 51 sentient, eloquent, vital, participating in all the thought and conduct and experience of those who dwell around it. The beautiful peal of its bells that I heard last night was for Canon Baillie, one of the oldest and most beloved and venerated of its clergy. This morning, sitting in its choir, I heard the tender, thoughtful eulogy so simply and sweetly spoken by the aged Dean, and once again learned the essential lesson that an old age of grace, patience, and benignity means a pure heart, an unselfish spirit, and a good life passed in the service of others. This afternoon I had a place among the worshippers that thronged the nave to hear the special anthem chanted for the deceased Canon ; and, as the organ pealed forth its mellow thunder, and the rich tones of the choristers swelled and rose and broke in golden waves of melody upon the groined arches and vaulted roof, my soul seemed borne away to a peace and rest that are not of this world. To-night the rising moon, as she gleams through drifting clouds, will pour her silver rays upon that great east window — at once the largest and the most beautiful in existence — and all the Bible stories told there in such exquisite hues and forms will glow with heavenly lustre 52 OLD YORK. on the dark vista of chancel and nave. And when the morning comes the first beams of the rising sun will stream through the great casement and illumine the figures of saints and archbishops, and gild the old tattered battle-flags in the chancel aisle, and touch with blessing the marble effigies of the dead ; and we who walk there, re- freshed and comforted, shall feel that the vast cathedral is indeed the gateway to heaven. York minster is the loftiest of all the English cathedrals, and the second in length — Winchester being thirty feet longer. The present structure is six hundred years old, and two hundred years were occupied in the building of it. They show you, in the crypt, some fine remains of the Norman church that preceded it upon the same site, together with traces of the still older Saxon church that preceded the Norman. The first one was of wood and was totally de- stroyed. The Saxon remains are a frag- ment of stone staircase and a piece of wall built in the ancient ' ' herring-bone ' ' fashion. The Norman remains are four clustered columns, embellished in the dog-tooth style. There is not much of commemorative statu- ary at York minster, and what there is of OLD YORK. 53 it was placed chiefly in tlie chancel. Arch- bishop Scrope, who figures in Shakespeare's historical play of Henry /F., was buried in the lady chapel. Laurence Sterne's grandfather, who was chaplain to Laud, is represented there, in his ecclesiastic dress, reclining upon a couch and supporting his mitred head upon his hand — a squat figTire uncomfortably posed, but sculptured with delicate skill. Many historic names occur in the inscriptions — Wentworth, Finch, Fenwick, Carlisle, and Heneage, — and in the north aisle of the chancel is the tomb of "William of Hatfield, second son of Edward III., who died m 1343-44, in the eighth year of his age. An alabaster statue of the royal boy reclines upon his tomb. In the cathedral library, which contains eight thousand volumes and is kept at the Deanery, is the Princess Elizabeth's prayer- book, containing her autogi-aph. In one of the chapels is the original throne-chair of Edward III. In St. Leonard's Place still stands the York theatre, erected by Tate Wilkinson in 1765. In York Castle Eugene Aram was imprisoned and suffered. Knares- borough, the scene of his crime, is but a few miles distant. The poet Porteous, the 54 OLD YORK sculptor Flaxman, and the fanatic Guy Fawkes, were natives of York, and have often walked its streets. Standing on Skeldergate bridge, few readers of English fiction could fail to recall that exquisite description of the place in the novel of JVo Name. In his artistic use of weather, atmosphere, and colour Wilkie Collins is always remarkable equally for his fidelity to nature and fact, and for the felicity and beauty of his language. His portrayal of York seems more than ever a gem of liter- ary art, when you have seen the veritable spot of poor Magdalen's meeting with Cap- tain Wragge. The name of Wragge is on one of the signboards in the city. The river, on which I did not omit to take a boat, was picturesque, with its many quaint barges, bearing masts and sails and embel- lished with touches of green and crimson and blue. There is no end to the associa- tions and suggestions of the storied city. But you are weary of them by this time. Let me respect the admonition of the mid- night bell, and seek repose beneath the hospitable wing of the old Black Swan in Coney street, whence I send this humble memorial of ancient York. THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. 55 IV. THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. DEVIZES, Wiltshire, August 20, 1888. — The scarlet discs of the poppies and tlie red and white blooms of the clover, together with wild-flowers of many hues, bespangle now the emerald sod of England, while the air is rich with fragrance of lime- trees and of new-mown hay. The busy and sagacious rooks, fat and bold, wing their way in great clusters, bent on forage and mischief. There is almost a frosty chill in the autumnal air, and the brimming rivers, dark and deep and smoothly flowing through the opulent, cultivated, and park-like re- gion of Wiltshire, look cold and bright. In many fields the hay is cut and stacked. In others the men, and often the women, armed with rakes, are tossing it to dry in the reluctant, intermittent, bleak sunshine of this rigorous August. Overhead the sky is now as blue as the deep sea and now grim and ominous with great drifting masses of 56 THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. slate-coloured cloud. There are moments of beautiful sunshine by day, and in some hours of the night the moon shines forth in all her pensive and melancholy glory. It is a time of exquisite loveliness, and it has seemed a fitting time for a visit to the last English home and the last resting-place of the poet of loveliness and love, the great Irish poet Thomas Moore. When Moore first went up to London, a young author seeking to launch his earliest writings upon the stream of contemporary literature, he crossed from Dublin to Bristol and then travelled to the capital by way of Bath and Devizes ; and as he crossed sev- eral times he must soon have gained famili- arity with this part of the country. He did not, however, settle in Wiltshire until some years afterward. His first lodging in London was a front room, up two pair of stairs, at No. 44 George Street, Portman Square. He slibsequently lived at No. 46 Wigmore Street, Cavendish Square, and at No. 27 Bury Street, St. James's. This was in 1805. In 1810 he resided for a time at No. 22 Molesworth Street, Dublin, but he soon returned to England. One of his homes, shortly after his marriage with Elizabeth Dyke ("Bessie," the sister of the THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. 57 great actress Mary Duff) was in Brompton. In the spring of 1812 he settled at Kegworth, but a year later he is found at Mayfield Cottage, near Ashbourne, Derbyshire. "I am now as you wished," he wrote to Mr. Power, the music-publisher, July 1, 1813, "within twenty -four hours' drive of town." In 1817 he occupied a cottage near the foot of Muswell Hill, at Hornsey, Middlesex, but after he lost his daughter Barbara, who died there, the place became distressful to him and he left it. In the latter part of September that year, the time of their affliction, Moore and his Bessie were the guests of Lady Donegal at No. 56 Davies Street, Berkeley Square, London. Then they removed to Sloperton Cottage, at Bromham, near Devizes (November 19, 1817), and their permanent residence was established in that place. Lord Lansdowne, one of the poet's earliest and best friends, was the owner of this estate, and doubtless he was the impulse of Moore's resort to it. The present Lord Lansdowne still owns Bowood Park, about four miles away. Devizes impresses you with the singular sense of being a place in which something is always about to happen ; but nothing ever does happen m it, or ever will. Quieter 58 THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. it could not be unless it were dead. The principal street in it runs nearly northwest and southeast. There is a Northgate at one end of it and a Southgate at the other. Most of the streets are narrow and crooked. The houses are low, and built of brick. Few buildings are pretentious. A canal intersects the place, but in such a subterra- nean and furtive manner as scarcely to attract even casual notice. Public-houses are sufificiently numerous and they appear to be sufficiently prosperous. Even while I write, the voice of song, issuing some- what discordantly from one of them in this immediate neighbourhood, declares, with beery emphasis, that " Britons never, never, never will be slaves." Close by stands a castle — a new one, built, however, upon the basis and plan of an ancient structure that was long included in the dowry settled upon successive Queens of England, In the centre of the town is a large square, which only needs a fringe of well-grown trees to make it exceedingly pleasant — for its com- modious expanse is seldom invaded by a vehicle or a hmnan being. Pilgrims in quest of peace could not do better than to tarry here. Nobody is in a hurry about anything and manners are primitive and frank. THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. 59 The city bell which officially strikes the hours in Devizes is subdued and thought- ful, and although furnished with chimes it always speaks under its breath. The church-bell, however, rings long and heart- ily and with a melodious clangour — as though the local sinners were more than commonly hard of hearing. In the public square there are two works of art — one a fountain, the other a market cross. The latter, a good specimen of the perpendicular Gothic, has thirteen spires, rising above an arched canopy for a statue. One face of it is inscribed as follows ; ' ' This Market Cross was erected by Henry Viscount Sidmouth, as a memorial of his grateful attachment to the Borough of Devizes, of which he has been Recorder thirty years, and of which he was six times mianimously chosen a rep- resentative in Parliament. Anno Domini 1814." Upon the other face appears a record vastly more significant — being indic- ative, as to the city fathers, equally of credulity and a frugal mind, and being in it- self freighted with tragic import unmatched since the Bible narrative of Ananias and Sapphira. It reads thus : — " The Mayor and Corporation of Devizes avail themselves of the stability of this build- 6o THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. ing to transmit to future times the record of an awful event which occurred in this market- place in the year 1753, hoping that such a rec- ord may serve as a salutary warning against the danger of impiously invoking the Divine vengeance, or of calling on the holy name of God to conceal the devices of falsehood and fraud. " On Thursday, the 25th January 1753, Ruth Pierce, of Potterne, in this county, agreed, with three other women, to huy a sack of wheat in the market, each paying her due pro- portion toward the same. "One of tliese women, in collecting the sev- eral quotas of money, discovered a deficiency, and demanded of Ruth Pierce the sum which was wanted to make good the amount. " Ruth Pierce protested that she had paid her share, and said, ' Slie wished she might drop down dead if she had not.' " She rashly repeated this awful wish, when, to the consternation of the surrounding multi- tude, she instantly fell down and expired, having the money concealed in her hand." An interesting church in Devizes is that of St. John, the Norman tower of which is a relic of the days of King Henry II. , a vast, grim structure with a circular turret on one corner of it. Eastward of this church is a long and lovely avenue of trees, and around it lies a large burial-place, remark- THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. 6l able for the excellence of the sod and for the number visible of those heavy, gray, oblong masses of tombstone which appear to have obtained great public favour about the time of Cromwell. In the centre of the church- yard stands a monolith, inscribed with these words : — "Remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy. — This moumneut, as a solemn mouitor to Youug People to remember their Creator iu the days of their youth, was erected by sub- scrii)tiou. — In memory of the sudden and aw- ful end of Robert Merrit and his wife, Eliz. Tiley, her sister, Martha Carter, and Josiah Denham, who were drowned, iu the flower of their youth, in a pond, near this town, called Drews, on Sunday evening, the 30th of June, 1751, and are together underneath entombed." In one corner of the churchyard I came upon a cross, bearing a simple legend far more solemn, sensible, touching, and ad- m onitory : " In Memoriam — Robert Samuel Thomley. Died August 5, 1871. Aged 48 years. For fourteen years surgeon to the poor of Devizes. ' There shall be no more pain.' " And over still another sleeper was written, upon a flat stone, low in the ground — "Loving, beloved, in all relations true. Exposed to follies, but subdued by few : 62 THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. Keader, reflect, and copy if you can The simple virtues of this honest man." As I was gazing at one of the old cliurches, surrounded with many ponder- ous tombstones and looking gi-ay and cheer- less in the gloaming, an old man approached me and civilly began a conversation about the antiquity of the church and the elo- quence of its rector. - When I told him that I had walked to Bromham to attend the ser- vice there, and to see the cottage and grave of Moore, he presently furnished to me that little touch of personal testimony which is always so interesting and significant in such circumstances. ' ' I remember Tom Moore, ' ' he said; " I saw him when he was alive. I worked for him once in his house, and I did some work once on his tomb. He was a little man. He spoke to us very jDleasantly. I don't think he was a preacher. He never preached that I heard tell of. He was a poet, I believe. He was very much liked here. No, I never heard a word against him. I am seventy-nine years old the 13th of December, and that'll soon be here. I've had three wives in my time, and my third is still living. It's a fine old church, and there's figures in it of bishops, and kings, and queens." THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. 63 Most observers have remarked the odd way, garrulous, and sometimes uncon- sciously humorous, in which senile persons prattle their incongruous and sporadic rec- ollections. But — "How pregnant some- times his replies are ! " Another resident of Devizes, with whom I conversed, like- wise remembered the poet, and spoke of him with affectionate regard. " My sister, when she was a child," he said, "was often at Moore's house, and he was fond of her. Yes, his name is widely remembered and honoured here. But I think that many of the poor people hereabout, the farmers, ad- mired him chiefly because they thought that he wrote Moore's Almanac. They often used to say to him : ' Mister Moore, please tell us what the weather's gomg to be.'" From Devizes to the village of Bromham, a distance of about four miles, the walk is delightful. Much of the path is between green hedges and is embowered by elms. The exit from the town is by Northgate and along the Chippenham road — which, like all the roads in this neighbourhood, is smooth, hard, and white. A little way out of Devizes, going northwest, this road makes a deep cut in the chalk-stone and so 64 THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. winds down hill into the level plain. At intervals you come upon sweetly pretty specimens of the English thatch-roof cot- tage. Hay-fields, pastures, and market- gardens extend on every hand. Eastward, far off, are visible the hills of Westbury, upon which, here and there, the copses are lovely, and upon one of which, cut in the rock, is the figure of a colossal white horse — said to have been put there by the Saxons to commemorate the victories of King Alfred. Soon the road winds over a hill and you pass through the little red vil- lage of Rowde, with its gray church-tower. The walk may be shortened by a cut across the fields, and this indeed is found the sweet- est part of the journey — for now the path lies through gardens, and through the centre or along the margin of the wheat, which waves in the strong wind and spar- kles in the bright sunshine and is every- where tenderly touched with the scarlet of the poppy and with hues of other wild- flowers — making you think of Shake- speare's " Rank fumiter and furrow weeds, With hemlock, harlock, nettles, cuckoo- flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn." THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. 65 There is one field through which I passed, just as the spire of Bromham churcli came into view, in which a surface more than three hundred yards square was blazing with wild-flowers, white and gold and crim- son and purple and blue, upon a growth of vivid green, so that to look upon it was almost to be dazzled, while the air that floated over it was scented as if with honey- suckle. You may see the delicate spire and the low gray tower of Moore's church some time before you come to it, and in some respects the prospect is not unlike that of Shakespeare's church at Stratford. A sweeter spot for a poet's sepulchre it would be hard to find. No spot could be more harmonious than this one is with the gen- tle, romantic spirit of Moore's poetry, and with the purity, refinement, and serenity of his life. Bromham village consists of a few red brick buildings, scattered along a few irregular little lanes, on a ridge over- looking a valley. Amid these humble homes stands the gray church, like a shep- herd keeping his flock. A part of it is very old, and all of it, richly weather-stained and delicately browned with fading moss, is beautiful. Upon the tower and along the south side the fantastic gargoyles are £ 66 THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. much decayed. The building is a cross. The cliancel window faces eastward, and the window at the end of the nave looks toward the west — the latter being a memo- rial to Moore. At the southeast corner of the building is the lady chapel, in which are suspended various fragments of old armour, and in the centre of which, recum- bent on a great dark tomb, is a grim-visaged knight, clad from top to toe in his mail, beautifully sculptured in marble that looks like yellow ivory. Other tombs are adja- cent, with inscriptions that implicate the names of Sir Edward Bayntun, 1679, and Lady Anne Wilmot, elder daughter and co- heiress of John, Earl of Eochester, who successively was the wife of Henry Bayntun and Francis Greville, and who died in 1703. The window at the end of the nave is a simple but striking composition, in stained glass, richer and nobler than is commonly seen in a country church. It consists of twenty-one lights, of which five are lancet shafts, side by side, these being surmounted with smaller lancets, forming a cluster at the top of the arch. In the centre is the figure of Jesus and around Him are the Apostles. The colouring is soft, true, and beautiful. Across the base of the window THE HAUNTS OF MOORE, 6/ appear the words, in the glass: "This window is placed in this church by the combined subscriptions of two hundred persons who honour the memory of the poet of all circles and the idol of his own, Thomas Moore." It was beneath this win- dow, in a little pew in the corner of the church, that the present writer joined in the service, and meditated, throughout a long sermon, on the lovely life and charac- ter and the gentle, noble, and abiding influ- ence of the poet whose hallowed grave and beloved memory make this place a perpetual shrine. Moore was buried in the churchyard. An iron fence encloses his tomb, which is at the base of the church tower, in an angle formed by the tower and the chancel, on the north side of the building. Not more than twenty tombs are visible on this side of the church, and these appear upon a level lawn as green and sparkling as an emerald and as soft as velvet. On three sides the churchyard is enclosed by a low wall, and on the fourth by a dense hedge of glistening holly. Great trees are all around the church, but not too near. A massive yew stands dark]y at one corner. Chestnuts and elms blend their branches in fraternal embrace. Close by 68 THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. the poet's grave a vast beech uprears its dome of fruited boughs and rustling foliage. The sky was blue, except for a few strag- gling masses of fleecy and slate-coloured cloud. Not a human creature was any- where to be seen while I stood in this sacred spot, and no sound disturbed the Sabbath stillness, save the faint whisper of the wind in the lofty tree-tops and the low twitter of birds in their hidden nests. I thought of his long life, unblemished by personal guilt or public error ; of his sweet devotion to parents and wife and children ; of his pure patriotism, which scorned equally the blatant fustian of the dema- gogue and the frenzy of the revolutionist ; of his unsurpassed fidelity in friendship ; of his simplicity and purity in a corrupt time and amid many temptations ; of his meek- ness in affliction ; of the devout spirit that made him murmur on his deathbed, "Bes- sie, trust in God" ; of the many beautiful songs that he added to our literature, — every one of which is the perfectly melodi- ous and absolutely final expression of one or another of the elemental feelings of human nature ; and of the obligation of endless gratitude that the world owes to his fine and high and beneficent genius. THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. 69 And thus it seemed good to be in this place and to lay with reverent hands the white roses of honour and affection upon his tomb. On the long, low, flat stone that covers the poet's dust are mscribed the following words: " Anastatia Mary Moore. Born March 16, 1813. Died March 8, 1829. Also her brother, John Russell Moore, who died November 23, 1842, aged 19. years. Also their father, Thomas Moore, tenderly beloved by all who knew the goodness of his heart. The Poet and Patriot of his Country, Ireland. Born May 28, 1779. Sank to rest February 25, 1852. Aged 72. God is Love. Also his wife, Bessie Moore, who died 4th September 1865. And to the memory of their dear son, Thomas Lans- downe Parr Moore. Born 24th October 1818. Died in Africa, January 1846." Moore's little daughter, Barbara, is buried at Hornsey, near London, in the same churchyard where rest the bones of the poet Samuel Rogers. On the stone that marks that spot is written, ' ' Anne Jane Barbara Moore. Born January the 4th, 1812. Died September the 18th, 1817." Northwest from Bromham church and about one mile away stands Sloperton Cot- 70 THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. tage, the last home of the poet and the house m which he died. A deep valley intervenes between the church and the cot- tage, but, as each is built upon a ridge, you may readily see the one from the other. There is a road across the valley, but the more pleasant walk is along a pathway through the meadows and over several stiles, ending almost in front of the storied house. It is an ideal home for a poet. The building is made of brick but it is so com- p»etely enwrapped in ivy that scarcely a particle of its surface can be seen. It is a low building, with three gables on its main front and with a wing ; it stands in the middle of a garden enclosed by walls and by hedges of ivy ; and it is embowered by great trees, yet not so closely embowered as to be shorn of the prospect from its win- dows. Flowers and flowering vines were blooming around it. The hard, white road, lowing past its gateway, looked like a thread of silver between the green hedge- rows which here for many miles are rooted in high, grassy banks, and at intervals are diversified with large trees. Sloperton Cot- tage is almost alone, but there are a few neighbours and there is a little rustic village about half a mile westward. Westward THE HAUNTS OF MOORE. 7 1 was the poet's favourite prospect. He loved the sunset, and from a certain terrace in his garden he rarely failed to watch the pageant of the dying day. Here, for thirty- five years, was his peaceful and happy home. Here he meditated many of those gems of lyrical poetry that will live in the hearts of men as long as anythmg lives that ever was written by mortal hand. And here he " sank to rest," worn out at last by in- cessant labour and by many sorrows — the bitter fruit of domestic bereavement and disappointment. The sun was sinking as I turned away from this hallowed haunt of genius and virtue, and, through green pas- tures and flower-spangled fields of waving gram, set forth upon my homeward walk. Soon there was a lovely peal of chimes from Bromham church tower, answered far off by the bells of Rowde, and, while I de- scended into the darkening valley, Moore's tender words came singing through my thought : — ** And so 'twill be when I am gone — That tuneful peal will still ring on, "While other bards shall walk these dells And sing your praise, sweet evening bells ! " 72 BEAUTIFUL BATH. V. BEAUTIFUL BATH. FROM Devizes the traveller naturally turns toward Bath, which is only a few miles distant. A beautiful city, marred somewhat by the feverish, disturbing spirit of the present day, this old place — in which the Saxon King Edgar was crowned, A.D, 973 — nevertheless retains many inter- esting characteristics of its former glory. More than a century has passed since the wigged, powdered, and jewelled days of Beau Nash. The Avon (for there is another Avon here, distinct from that of Warwick- shire and that of Yorkshire) is spanned by bridges that Smollett never dreamed of and Sheridan never saw. The town has crept upward, along both the valley slopes, nearer and nearer to the hill-tops that used to look down upon it. Along the margins of the river many gray, stone structures are mouldering in neglect and decay ; but a tramcar rattles through the principal street ; V uJ m CD hrey Clinker or indicated in The Rivals. The Bath chairs, some- times pulled by donkeys, and sometimes trundled by men, are among the most rep- resentative relics now to be seen. Next to the theatre (where it was my privilege to enjoy and admire John L. Toole's richly humorous performance of The Don) stands a building, just at the foot of Gascoigne 74 BEAUTIFUL BATH. Place, before wliicli the traveller pauses with interest, because upon its front he may read the legend, neatly engraved on a white marble slab, that ' ' In this house lived the celebrated Beau Nash, and here he died, February 1761." It is an odd structure, consisting of two stories and an attic, the front being of the monotonous stucco that came in with the Regent. Earlier no doubt the building was timbered. There are eleven windows in the front, four of them being painted on the wall. The house is used now by an auctioneer. In the historic Pump Room — dating back to 1797 — raised aloft in an alcove at the east end, still stands the effigy of the Beau, even as it stood in the days when he set the fashions, regulated the customs, and gave the laws, and was the King of Bath ; but the busts of Newton and Pope that formerly stood on either side of this statue stand there no more — save in the fancy of those who recall the epigram which was sug- gested by that singular group : — "This statue placed these busts between Gives satire all its strength ; Wisdom and Wit are little seen. But Folly at full length." Folly, though, is a word that carries a BEAUTIFUL BATH. 75 different meaning to different ears. Doug- las Jerrold made a play on the subject of 3eau Nash — an ingenious, effective, bril- liantly written play, in which he is depicted as anything but foolish. Much always de- pends on the point of view. Quin was buried in Bath Abbey, and Bath is the scene of The Rivals. It would be pleasant to fancy the trim figure of the truculent Sir Lucius O' Trigger strutting along the Parade ; or bluff and choleric Sir Anthony Absolute gazing with imperious condescension upon the galaxy of the Pump Room ; Acres in his absurd finery ; Lydia with her sentimental novels ; and Mrs. Malaprop, rigid with decorum, in her Bath chair. The Abbey, begun in 1405 and com- pleted in 1606, has a noble west front and a magnificent door of carved oak, and cer- tainly it is a superb church ; but the eyes that have rested upon such cathedrals as those of Durham, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, such a heavenly jewel as Roslin, and such an astounding and overwhelming edifice as York minster, can dwell calmly on Bath Abbey, A surprising feature in it is its mural record of the dead that are entombed beneath- or around it. Sir Lucius might well declare that " There is snug lying in 76 BEAUTIFUL BATH, the Abbey." Almost every foot of the walls is covered with monumental slabs, and like Captain Cuttle, after the wedding of Mr. Dombey and Edith Granger, I "pervaded the church and read the epitaphs," — solic- itous to discover that of the renowned actor James Quin. His tablet was formerly to be found in the chancel, but now it is obscurely placed in a porch, on the north corner of the building, on what may be termed the outer wall of the sanctuary. It presents the face of the famous comedian carved in white marble and set against a black slab. Beneath is the date of his death, "Ob. mdcclxvi. Aetat lxxiii.," and his epitaph, written by David Garrick. At the base are dramatic emblems — the mask and the dagger. As a portrait this medallion of Quin bears internal evidence of scrupulous fidelity to nature, and cer- tainly it is a fine work of art. The head is dressed as it was in life, with the full wig of the period. The features are delicately cut and are indicative of austere beauty of countenance — impressive if not attractive. The mouth is especially handsome — the upper lip being a perfect Cupid's bow. The face is serious, expressive, and fraught with intellect and power. This was the BEAUTIFUL BATH. TJ last great declaimer of the old school of acting, discomfited and almost obliterated by Garrick ; and here are the words that Garrick wrote upon his tomb : — " That tongue which set the table on a roar ' And charmed the public ear is heard no more; Closed are those eyes, the harbingers of wit, Which spoke, before the tongue, what Shakespeare writ ; Cold is that hand which, living, was stretched forth, At friendship's call, to succour modest worth. Here lies JAIVIES QUIN. Deign, reader, to be taught Whate'er thy strength of body, force of thought. In nature's happiest mould however cast. To this complexion thou must come at last." A printed reminder of mortality is super- fluous in Bath, for you almost continually behold afflicted and deformed persons who have come here to ' ' take the waters. ' ' For rheumatic sufferers this place is a paradise — as, indeed, it is for all wealthy persons who love luxury. Walter Savage Landor said that the only two cities of Europe in which he could live were Bath and Florence ; but that was long ago. When you have 78 BEALTIFTTL BATH. walked in Milsom street and Lansdowne Crescent, sailed upon the Avon, observed the Abbey, without and within — for its dusky, weather-stained walls are extremely picturesque — attended the theatre, climbed the hills for the view of the city and the Avon valley, and taken the baths, you will have had a satisfying experience of Bath. The greatest luxury in the place is a swim- ming tank of mmeral water, about forty feet long, by twenty broad, and five feet deep — a tepid pool of most refreshing potency. And the chief curiosity is the ruin of a Roman bath which was discovered and laid bare in 1885. This is built in the form of a rectangular basin of stone, with steps around it, and it was environed with stone chambers that were used as dressing- rooms. The basin is nearly perfect. The work of restoration of this ancient bath is in progress, but the relic will be preserved only as an emblem of the past. Haynes Bayly, the song-writer, was bom in Bath, and there he melodiously recorded that " She wore a wreath of roses," and there he dreamed of dwelling " in marble halls." But Bath is not nearly as rich in literary associations as its neighbour city of Bristol. Chatterton, Southey, Hannah More, Mary Robinson — the actress, the BEAUTIFUL BATH. 79 lovely and unfortunate "Perdita," — all these were born in Bristol. Richard Savage, the poet, died there (1743), and so did John Hippesley, the comedian, manager, and farce-writer (1748). St. Mary Redclyffe church, built in 1292, is still standing there, of which Chatterton's father was the sexton, . and in the tower of which "the marvel- lous boy" discovered, according to his in- genious plan of literary imposture, the original Canynge and Rowley manuscripts. That famous preacher, the Rev. Robert Hall (1764-1831), had a church in Bristol. Southey and Coleridge married sisters, of the name of Fricker, who resided there, and the house once occupied by Coleridge is still extant in the contiguous village of Clevedon — one of the loveliest places on the English coast. Jane Porter and Anna Maria Porter lived in Bristol, and Maria died at Mont- pelier near by. These notes indicate but a tithe of what may be seen and studied and enjoyed in and about Bristol, — the city to which poor Chatterton left his curse ; the region hallowed by the dust of Arthur Hallam — the inspiration of Tennyson's In Memoriam., the loftiest poem that has been created in the English language since the pen that wrote Childe Harold fell from the divine hand of Byron. 8o THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. VI. THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. A GOOD way by which to enter the Lake District of England is to travel to Penrith and thence to drive along the shore of Ullswater J or sail upon its crystal bosom, to the blooming solitude of Patterdale. Penrith lies at the eastern slope of the mountains of Westmoreland, and you may there see the ruins of Penrith Castle, once the property and the abode of Kichard, Duke of Gloucester, before he became King of England. Penrith Castle was one of the estates that were forfeited by the great Earl of Warwick, and King Edward IV. gave it to his brother Eichard in 1471. Not much remains of this ancient structure, and the remnant is now occupied by a florist. I saw it, as I saw almost everything else m Great Britain during the summer of 1888, under a tempest of rain ; for it rained there, with a continuity almost ruinous, from the time of the lilac and aDple-blossom till when the THE LAND OF WORDSWOKTH. 8 1 clematis began to show the splendour of its purple shield and the acacia to drop its milky blossoms on the autumnal grass. But travellers must not heed the weather. If there are dark days there are also bright ones — and one bright day in such a para- dise as the English Lakes atones for the dreariness of a month of rain. Beside, even the darkest days may be brightened by gentle companionship. Henry Irving and Ernest Bendall, two of the most intellectual and genial men in England, were my asso- ciates in that expedition. We went from London into Westmoreland on a mild, sweet day in July, and we rambled for several days in that enchanted region. It was a delicious experience ; and I often close my eyes and dream of it — as I am dreaming now. In the drive between Penrith and Patter- dale you see many things that are worthy of regard. Among these are the parish church of Penrith, a building made of red stone, remarkable for a massive square tower of great age and formidable aspect. In the adjacent churchyard are "The Gi- ant's Grave" and "The Giant's Thumb," relics of a distant past that strongly and strangely affect the imagination. The grave 82 THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. is said to be that of Owen Csesarius, a gigan- tic individual who reigned over Cumberland in remote Saxon times. The Thumb is a rough stone, about seven feet high, pre- senting a clumsy cross, and doubtless com- memorative of another mighty warrior. Sir Walter Scott, who traversed Penrith on his journeys between Edinburgh and London, seldom omitted to pause for a view of those singular memorials — and Scott, like Words- worth, has left upon this region the abiding impress of his splendid genius. " Ulfo's Lake " is Scott's name for Ullswater, and thereabout is laid the scene of his poem of The Bridal of Triermain. In Scott's day the traveller went by coach or on horseback, but now, "On lonely Threlkeld's solemn waste," at the foot of craggy Blencathara, you pause at a railway station having "Threlkeld" in large letters on its official signboard. Another strange thing that is passed on the road between Penrith and Patterdale is "Arthur's Kound Table" — a circle of turf slightly raised above the surrounding level, and certainly remarka- ble, whatever may be its historic or anti- quarian merit, for fine texture, symmetrical form, and lovely, luxuriant colour. Scholars think it was used for tournaments in the THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. b^ days of chivalry, but no one rightly knows anything about it, save that it is old. Not far from this bit of mysterious antiquity the road winds through a quaint village called Tirril, where, in the Quaker burial-ground, is the grave of an unfortunate young man, Charles Gough, who lost his life by falling from the Striding Edge of Helvellyn in 1805, and whose memory is hallowed by Words- worth and Scott, in poems that almost every schoolboy has read, and could never forget — associated as they are with the story of the faithful dog for three months in that lonesome wilderness vigilant beside the dead body of his master, " A lofty precipice in front, A silent tarn below." Patterdale possesses this advantage over certain other towns and hamlets of the lake region — that it is not much frequented by tourists. The coach does indeed roll through it at intervals, laden with those miscellane- ous, desultory visitors whose pleasure it is to rush wildly over the land. And those objects serve to remind you that now, even as in Wordsworth's time, and in a double sense, "the world is too much with us." But an old-fashioned inn (Kidd's hotel) 84 THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. Still exists at the head of Ullswater, to which fashion has not resorted and where kindness presides over the traveller's com- fort. Close by also is a sweet nook called Glenridding, where, if you are a lover of solitude and peace, you may find an ideal abode. One house wherein lodging may be obtained was literally embowered in roses on that summer evening when first I strolled by the fragrant hay -fields on the Patterdale shore of Ullswater. The rose flourishes in wonderful luxuriance and profusion throughout Westmoreland and Cumber- land. As you drive along the lonely roads your way will sometimes be, for many miles, between hedges that are bespangled with wild roses and with the silver globes of the laurel blossom, while all around you the lonely mountains, bare of foliage save for matted grass and a dense growth of low ferns, tower to meet the clouds. It is a wild place, and yet there is a pervading spirit of refinement over it all — as if Nature had here wrought her wonders in the mood of the finest art. And at the same time it is a place of infinite variety. The whole territory occupied by the lakes and moun- tains of this famous district is not more than fifty miles square ; yet within this THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. 85 limit, comparatively narrow, are comprised all possible beauties of land and water that the most passionate devotee of natural loveliness could desire. My first night in Patterdale was one of such tempest as sometimes rages in Amer- ica about the time of the fall equinox. The wind shook the building. It was long after midnight when I went to rest, and the storm seemed to increase in fury as the night wore on. Torrents of rain were dashed against the windows. Great trees near by creaked and groaned beneath the strength of the gale. The cold was so se- vere that blankets were welcome. It was my first night in Wordsworth's country, and I thought of Wordsworth's lines : — ** There was a roaring in the wind all night; The rain came heavily and fell in floods." The next morning was sweet with sunshine and gay with birds and flowers, and all semblance of storm and trouble seemed banished forever. " But now the sun is shining calm and bright, And birds are singing in the distant woods." Wordsworth's poetry expresses the in- most soul of those lovely lakes and mighty hills, and no writer can hope to tread, save 86 THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. remotely and with reverent humility, in the footsteps of that magician. You under- stand Wordsworth better, however, and you love him more dearly, for having ram- bled over his consecrated ground. There was not a day when I did not, in some shape or another, meet with his presence. Whenever I was alone his influence came upon me as something unspeakably majes- tic and solemn. Once, on a Sunday after- noon, I climbed to the topmost height of Place Fell (which is 2154 feet above the sea- level, while Scawfell Pike is 3210, and Hel- vellyn is 3118), and there, in the short space of two hours, I was thrice cut off by rain- storms from all view of the world beneath. Not a tree could I find on that mountain- top, nor any place of shelter from the blast and the rain — except when crouching be- side the mound of rock at its summit, which in that country they call a " man." Not a living creature was visible, save now and then a lonely sheep, who stared at me for a moment and then scurried away. But when the skies cleared and the cloudy squadrons of the storm went careering over Helvellyn, I looked down into no less than fifteen val- leys beavitifully coloured by the foliage and the patches of cultivated land, each vale THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. 87 being sparsely fringed with little gray stone dwellings that seemed no more than card- houses, in those appalling depths. You think of Wordsworth in such a place as that — if you know his poetry. You cannot choose hut think of him. " Who comes not hither ne'er shall know How beautiful the world below." Yet somehow it happened that whenever friends joined in those rambles the great poet was sure to dawn upon us in a comic way. When we were resting on the bridge at the foot of "Brothers Water," which is a little lake, scarcely more than a mountain tarn, lying between Ullswater and the Kirk- stone Pass, some one recalled that Words- worth had once rested there and written a poem about it. We were not all as devout admirers of the bard as I am, and certainly it is not every one of the great author's compositions that a lover of his genius would wish to hear quoted under such cir- cumstances. The Brothers Water poem is the one that begins "The cock is crowing, the stream is flowing," and I do not think that .its insipidity is much relieved by its famous picture of the grazing cattle, " forty feeding like one." Henry Irving, not much 65 THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. given to enthusiasm about Wordsworth, heard those lines with undisguised merri- ment, and made a capital travesty of them on the spot. It is sigiiificant to remember, with reference to the inequality of Words- worth, that on the day before he wrote " The cock is crowing," and at a place but a short distance from the Brothers Water bridge, he had written that peerless lyric about the daffodils — "I wandered lonely as a cloud. ' ' Gowbarrow Park is the scene of that poem — a place of ferns and haw- thorns, notable for containing Lyulph's Tower, a romantic, ivy-clad lodge owned by the Duke of Norfolk, and Aira Force, a waterfall much finer than Lodore. Upon the lake shore in Gowbarrow Park you may still see the daffodils as Wordsworth saw them, a golden host, ' ' glittering and danc- ing in the breeze." No one but a true poet could have made that perfect lyric, with its delicious close : — " For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude : And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils." The third and fourth lines were written THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. 89 by the poet's wife — and they show that she was not a poet's wife in vain. It must have been in his "vacant mood" that he rested and wrote on the bridge at Brothers Water. " I saw Wordsworth often wlien I was a child," Frank MarslialH said (who had joined us at Penrith); "he used to come to my father's house, Patterdale Hall, and once I was sent to the garden by Mrs. Wordsworth to call him to supper. He was musing there, I suppose. He had a long, horse-like face. I don't think I liked him. I said, ' Your wife wants you.' He looked down at me and he answered, ' My boy, you should say Mrs. Wordsworth, and not "your wife." ' I looked up at him and I replied, ' She is your wife, isn't she ? ' Whereupon he said no more. I don't think he liked me either." We were going up Kirkstone Pass when Marshall told this story — which seemed to bring the pensive and homely poet plamly before us. An hour later at the top of the pass, while waiting in the old inn called the Travel- lers' Rest, which incorrectly proclaims it- 1 F. A. Marshall, editor of The Henry Irving edi- tion of Shakespeare and author of A Study of Hamlet, the comedy of False Shame, and many other works, died in London, December, 1889, much lamented. 90 THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. self the highest inhabited house in England [it is 1481 feet above the sea-level, whereas the inn called The Cat and Fiddle, — a corruption of Caton le Fidele, governor of Calais, — on Axe Edge, near Buxton, is 1700 feet above the level of the sea], I spoke with an ancient, weather-beaten hos- tler, not wholly unfamiliar with the medici- nal virtue of ardent spirits, and asked for his opinion of the great lake poet. They all know him in that region. "Well," he said, "people are always talking about Wordsworth, but I don't see much in it. I've read it, but I don't care for it. It's dry stuff — it don't chime." Truly there are all sorts of views, just as there are all sorts of people. Mementos of Wordsworth are frequently encountered by the traveller among these lakes and fells. One of these, situated at the foot of Place Fell, is a rustic cottage that the poet once selected for his residence, and partly purchased. It somewhat re- sembles the Shakespeare cottage at Strat- ford — the living-room being floored with stone slabs, irregular in size and shape and mostly broken by hard use. In a corner of the kitchen stands a fine carved oak cup- board, dark with age, inscribed with the date of the Merry Monarch, 1660. THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. 9I What were the sights of those sweet days that linger still, and will always linger, in my remembrance ? A ramble in the old park of Patterdale Hall, which is full of American trees ; a golden morning in Dove- dale, with Henry Irving, much like Jaques, reclined upon a shaded rock, half-way up the mountain, musing and moralising in his sweet, kind way, beside the brawling stream; the first prospect of Windermere, from above Ambleside — a vision of heaven upon earth ; the drive by Kydal Water, which has all the loveliness of celestial pic- tures seen in dreams ; the glimpse of stately Rydal Hall and of the sequestered Rydal Mount, where Wordsworth so long lived and where he died ; the Wishing Gate, where one of us, I know, wished in his heart that he could be young again and be wiser than to waste his youth in self-willed folly ; the restful hours of observation and thought at delicious Grasmere, where we stood in silence at Wordsworth's grave and heard the murmur of Rotha singing at his feet ; the lovely drive past Matterdale, across the moorlands, with only clouds and rooks for our chance companions, and mountains for sentinels along our way ; the ramble through Keswick, all golden and 92 THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. glowing in the afternoon sun, till we stood by Crosthwaite church and read the words of commemoration that grace the tomb of Robert Soutliey ; the divine circuit of Der- went — surely the loveliest sheet of water in England ; the descent into the vale of Keswick, with sunset on the rippling crystal of the lake and the perfume of countless wild roses on the evening whid. These things, and the midnight talk about these things — Irving, so tranquil, so gen- tle, so full of keen and sweet apprecia- tion of them — Bendall, so bright and thoughtful — Marshall, so quaint and jolly, and so full of knowledge equally of nature and of books ! — can never be forgotten. In one heart they are cherished forever. Wordsworth is buried in Grasmere church- yard, close by the wall, on the bank of the little river Rotha. "Sing him thy best," said Matthew Arnold, in his lovely dirge for the great poet — " Sing him thy best ! for few or none Hears thy voice right, now he is gone." In the same grave with Wordsworth sleeps his devoted wife. Beside them rest the poet's no less devoted sister Dorothy (who died at Rydal Mount in 1855, aged THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. 93 83), and his favourite daughter, Dora, together with her husband, Edward Quilli- nan, of whom Arnold wrote so tenderly : — " Alive, we would have changed his lot, We would not change it now." On the low gravestone that marks the sepulchre of Wordsworth are written these words : " William Wordsworth, 1850. Mary Wordsworth, 1859." In the neighbouring church a marble tablet on the wall presents this inscription : — " To the memory of William Wordsworth. A true poet and philosopher, who by the special gift and calling of Almighty God, whether he discoursed on man or nature, failed not to lift up the heart to holy things, tired not of maintaining the cause of the poor and simple, and so in perilous times was raised up to be a chief minister, not only of noblest poetry, but of high and sacred truth. The memorial is raised here by his friends and neighbours, in testimony of respect, affection, and gratitude. Anno mdcccli." A few steps from this memorable group will bring you to the marble cross that marks the resting-place of Hartley Cole- ridge, son of the great author of The An- cient Mariner^ himself a poet of exquisite genius ; and close by is a touching memo- 94 THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. rial to the gifted man wlio inspired Mattliew Arnold's poems of The Scholar- Gipsy and Thyrsis. This is a slab laid upon his mother's grave, at the foot of her own tomb- stone, inscribed with these words : — " In memory of Arthur Hugh Clough, some time Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, the be- loved son of James Butler and Anne Clough. This remembrance in his own country is placed on his mother's grave by those to whom life was made happy by his presence and his love. He is buried in the Swiss cemetery at Florence, where he died, November 13, 1861, aged 42. * ' ' So, dearest, now thy brows are cold I see thee what thou art, and know Thy likeness to the wise below, Thy kindred with the great of old.' " Southey rests in Crosthwaite churchyard, about half a mile north of Keswick, where he died. They show you Greta Hall, a fine mansion on a little hill enclosed in tall trees, which for forty years, ending in 1843, was the poet's home. In the church is a marble figure of Southey, recumbent on a large stone sarcophagus, which does no justice to his great personal beauty. His grave is in the ground, a little way from the church, marked by a low flat tomb, on the end of which THE LAND OF WOKDSWOKTll. 95 appears an inscription commemorative of an old servant who had lived fifty years in his family and is buried with him. There was a pretty scene at this grave. When I came near it Irving was already there, and was speaking to a little girl who had guided him to the spot. " If any one were to give you a shilling, my dear," he said, " what would you do with it ? " The child was confused and she murmured softly, "I don't know, sir." "Well," he con- tinued, "if any one were to give you two shillings, what would you do with it ? " She said she would save it. "But what if it were three shillings ? " he went on, and every time he spoke he dropped a silver coin into her hand, till he must have given her more than a dozen of them. " Four — five — six — seven — what would you do with the money ? " "I would give it to my mother, sir," she answered at last, her little face all smiles, gazing up at the stately, sombre stranger, whose noble countenance never looked more radiant than it did then, with gentle kindness and pleasure. It is a trifle to mention, but it was touching in its simplicity ; and that amused group around the grave of Southey, in the blaze of the golden sun of a July afternoon, with Skid- 96 THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. daw looming vast and majestic over all, will linger with me as long as anything lovely and of good report is treasured in my memory. Lcng after we had left the place I chanced to speak of its peculiar interest. " The most interesting thing I saw there," said Irving, " was that sweet child." I do not think the great actor was ever much impressed with the beauties of the lake poets. Another picture glimmers across my dream — a picture of peace and happiness which may close this rambling reminis- cence of gentle days. We had driven up the pass between Glencoin and Gowbarrow, and had reached Matterdale, on our way toward Troutbeck station — not the beauti- ful Windermere Troutbeck, but the less famous one. The road is lonely, but at Matterdale one sees a few houses, and there our gaze was attracted by a small gray church nestled in a hollow of the hillside. It stands sequestered in its little place of graves, with bright greensward around it and a few trees. A faint sound of organ music floated from this sacred building and seemed to deepen the hush of the summer wind and shed a holier calm upon the lovely solitude. We dismounted and softly en- THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH. 97 tered the church. A youth and a maiden, apparently lovers, were sitting at the organ — the young fellow playing and the girl listening, and looking with tender trust and innocent affection into his face. He recog- nised our presence with a kindly nod, but went on with his anthem. I do not think she saw us at all. The place was full of soft, warm light streaming through the stained glass of Gothic windows and fra- grant with perfume floating from the hay- fields and the dew-drenched roses of many a neighbouring hedge. Not a word was spoken, and after a few moments we de- parted as silently as we had come. Those lovers will never know what eyes looked upon them that day, what hearts were com- forted with the sight of their happiness, or how a careworn man, three thousand miles away, fanning upon his hearthstone the dying embers of hope, now thinks of them with tender sympathy, and murmurs a blessing on the gracious scene which their presence so much endeared. 98 SHAKESPEARE RELICS VII. SHAKESPEARE RELICS AT WORCESTER. WORCESTEE, July 23, 1889.— The present wanderer came lately to "the Faithful City," and these words are written in a midnight hour at the Uni- corn Hotel. This place is redolent of the wars of the Stuarts, and the moment you enter it your mind is filled with the pres- ence of Charles the Martyr, Charles the Merry, Prince Rupert, and Oliver Cromwell. From the top of Red Hill and the margin of Perry Wood — now sleeping in the starlight or momentarily vocal with the rustle of leaves and the note of half-awakened birds — Cromwell looked down over the ancient walled city which he had beleaguered. Upon the summit of the great tower of Worcester cathedral Charles and Rupert held their last council of war. Here was fought and lost (1651) the battle that made the merry monarch a hunted fugitive and an exile. With a stranger's interest I have rambled on AT WORCESTER. 99 those heights ; traversed the battlefield ; walked in every part of the cathedral; attended divine service there ; revelled in the antiquities of Edgar Tower ; roamed through most of the city streets ; traced all that can be traced of the old wall — there is little remaining of it now, and no part that can be walked upon ; explored the royal porcelain works, for which Worces- ter is rightly famous ; viewed several of its old churches and its one theatre (in Angel street) ; entered its Guildhall, where they preserve a fine piece of artillery and nine suits of black armour that were left by Charles 11. wiien he fled from Worces- ter ; paced the dusty and empty Trinity Hall, now abandoned and condemned to demolition, where once Queen Elizabeth was feasted ; and visited the old " Com- mandery " — a rare piece of antiquity, re- maining from the tenth century — wherein the Duke of Hamilton died of his wounds, after Cromwell's "crowning mercy," and beneath the floor of which he was laid in a temporary grave. The Commandery is now owned and occupied by a printer of direc- tories and guide-books (the genial and hospitable Mr. Littlebury), and there, as everywhere else in storied Worcester, the lOO SHAKESPEARE RELICS arts of peace prevail over all the scenes and all the traces of " Old, unhappy, far-off things And battles long ago." In the Edgar Tower at Worcester they keep the original of the marriage-bond that was given as a preliminary to the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hatha- way, by Eulk Sandells and John Richard- son, of Shottery. It is a long, narrow strip of parchment, and it has been glazed and framed. Two seals of light-coloured wax were originally attached to it, dependent by strings, but these were removed — ap- parently for the convenience of the me- chanic who put this relic into its present frame. The handwriting is crabbed and obscure. There are but few persons who can read the handwriting in old documents of this kind, and thousands of such docu- ments exist in the church- archives, and elsewhere in England, that have never been examined. The name of Hathaway in this marriage-bond resembles the name of Whateley. The contract vouches that there was no impediment, through consan- guinity or otherwise, to the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. AT WORCESTER. lOI It was executed on November 28, 1582, and it is supposed that the marriage took place immediately — since the first child of it, Susanna Shakespeare, was baptized in the church of the Holy Trinity at Stratford on May 26, 1583. No registration of the mar- riage has been found, but that is no proof that it does not exist. The law in those days jDrescribed that the marriage-bond should designate three parishes within the residential diocese, in any one of which tne marriage might be made ; but the cus- tom in those days permitted the contract- ing parties, when they had complied with this legal requirement, to be married in whatever parish, within the diocese, they might prefer. Three parishes were named in the Shakespeare marriage-bond. The reg- isters of two of them have been searched, and searched in vain. The register of the third — that of Luddington, which is close by Shottery — was destroyed long ago, in a fire that burnt down Luddington church ; and conjecture therefore assumes that Shakespeare was married at Luddington. It may be so, but there is no certainty about it, and until every old church regis- ter in the ancient diocese of Worcester has been examined, the quest of the registra- 102 SHAKESPEARE RELICS tion of his marriage ought not to be aban- doned, Richard Savage, the learned and diligent librarian of the Shakespeare Birth- place, has long been occupied with this inquiry, and he has transcribed several of the old church registers in the vicinity of Stratford. The Rev. Thomas Proctor Wad- ley, another local antiquary of great learn- ing and incessant industry, has also taken part in this labour. The ^ong-desired entry of the marriage of William and Anne re- mains undiscovered, but one gratifying and valuable result of these investigations is the disclosure that many of the names used in Shakespeare's works are the names of per- sons who were residents of Warwickshire in his time. It has pleased various crazy sensation-mongers to ascribe the authorship of Shakespeare's writings to Francis Bacon. This could only be done by ignoring posi- tive evidence — the evidence, namely, of Ben Jonson, who knew Shakespeare personally, and who has left a written description of the manner in which Shakespeare composed his plays. Effrontery was to be expected from the advocates of the preposterous Bacon theory ; but when they have ignored the positive evidence, and the internal evi- dence, and the circumstantial evidence, and AT WORCESTER. IO3 every other sort of evidence, they have still a serious obstacle to surmount — an obstacle that the researches of such patient scholars as Mr. Savage and Mr. Wadley are strengthening day by day. The man who wrote Shakespeare's plays knew War- wickshire as it could only be known to a native of it ; and there is no proof that Francis Bacon knew it or ever was in it. With reference to the Shakespeare mar- riage-bond, and with reference to all the records that are kept in the Edgar Tower at Worcester, it should perhaps be said that they are not preserved with the scrupulous care to which such treasures are entitled. The Tower — a gi-ay and venerable relic, an ancient gate of the monastery, dating back to the time of King John — affords an ap- propriate receptacle for those documents ; but it would not withstand fire, and it does not contain either a fire-proof chamber or a safe. The Shakespeare marriage-bond — which assuredly ought to be in the Shake- speare Birthplace, at Stratford — was taken from the floor of a closet, where it had been lying, together with a number of dusty books, and I was kindly permitted to hold it in my hands and to examine it. The frame provided for this priceless relic is 104 SHAKESPEARE RELICS such as you may see on an ordinary scliool slate. From another dusty closet an attend- ant extricated a manuscript diary kept by William Lloyd, Bishop of Worcester (1627- 1717), and by his man-servant, for several years, about the beginning of the reign of Queen Anne ; and in this are many quaint and humorous entries, valuable to the stu- dent of history and manners. In still an- other closet, having the appearance of a rubbish-bin, I saw heaps upon heaps of old parchment and paper wi'itings — a mass of antique registry that it would need the la- bour of several years to examine, decipher, and classify. Worcester is especially rich in old records, and it is not impossible that the missing clew to Shakespeare's marriage may yet be found on that spot — where nobody has expected to find it. Worcester is rich also in a superb library, which, by the kindness of Mr. Hooper, the custodian, I was allowed to explore, high up beneath the roof of the lovely cathedral. That collection of books, numbering about five thousand, consists mostly of folios, many of which were printed in France. They keep it in a long, low, oak-timbered room, the triforium of the south aisle of the nave. The approach is by a circular stone AT WORCESTER. I05 staircase. In an anteroom to the library I saw a part of the ancient north door of this church, — a fragment dating back to the time of Bishop Wakefield, 1386 — to which is still afi&xed a piece of the skin of a human being. The tradition is that a Dane com- mitted sacrilege, by stealing the sanctus bell from the high altar, and was thereupon flayed alive for his crime, and the skin of him was fastened to the cathedral door. In the library are magnificent editions of Aris- totle and other classics ; the works of the fathers of the church ; a beautiful illumi- nated manuscript of Wickliffe's New Testa- ment — written on vellum in 1381 ; and several books, in splendid preservation, from the press of Caxton and that of Wyn- ken de Worde. The world moves — but printing is not better done now than it was then. This library, which is for the use of the clergy of the diocese of Worcester, was founded by Bishop Carpenter in 1461, and originally was stored in the chapel of the charnel-house. Reverting to the subject of old docu- ments, a useful word may perhaj^s be said here about the registers in Trinity church at Stratford — documents which, in a spirit of disparagement, have sometimes been Io6 SHAKESPEARE RELICS designated as " copies." This sort of pert- ness in the discussion of Shakespearean subjects is not unnatural in days wlien fanatical zealots are allowed freely to be- smirch the memory of Shakespeare, in their wildly foolish advocacy of what they call the Bacon theory of the authorship of Shakespeare's works. The facts about the Stratford Kegisters, as here set down, are stated, by one who has many times held them in his hands and explored their quaint pages. Those records are contained in twenty-two volumes. They begin with the first year of Queen Elizabeth, 1558, and they end, as to the old parchment form, in 1812. From 1558 to 1600 the entries were made in a paper book, of the quarto form, still occasionally to be found in ancient parish churches of England. In 1600 an order-in-council was made commanding that those entries should be copied into parchment volumes, for their better preser- vation. This was done. The parchment volumes, which have been freely shown to me by my good friend William Butcher, the parish clerk of Stratford, date back to 1600. The handwriting of the copied portion, cov- ering the period from 1558 to 1600, is care, ful and uniform. Each page is certified, as AT WORCESTER. I07 to its accuracy, by the vicar and the church- wardens. After 1600 the handwritings vary. In the register of marriage a new handwrit- ing appears on September 17 that year, and in tlie registers of Baptism and Burial it appears on September 20. The sequence of marriages is complete until 1756 ; that of baptisms and burials until 1812 ; when in each case a book of printed forms comes into use, and the expeditious march of the new age begins. The entry of Shakespeare's baptism, April 26, 1564, from which it is inferred that he was born on April 23, is extant as a certified copy from the earlier paper book. The entry of Shakespeare's burial is the original entry made in the original register. Some time ago an American writer chose to declare that Shakespeare's widow — seven years his senior at the start, and therefore fifty-nine years old when he died — subsequently contracted another mar- riage. Mrs. Shakespeare survived her hus- band seven years, dying at the age of sixty- six. The entry in the Stratford register of burial contains, against the date of 1623, August 28, the names of " Mrs. Shake- speare " and " Anna uxor Richard James." These two names, written one above the Io8 SHAKESPEARE RELICS. other, are connected by a bracket on the left side ; and this is supposed to be evi- dence that Shakespeare's widow married again. The use of the bracket could not possibly mislead anybody possessing the faculty of clear vision. When two or more persons were baptized or buried on the same day the parish clerk, in making the requisite entry in the register, connected their names with a bracket. Three instances of this practice occur upon a single page of the register, in the same handwriting, close to the page that records the burial, on the same day, of Mrs. Shakespeare, widow, and Anna the wife of Eichard James. But folly needs only a slender hook on which to hang itself. Prince Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII., is buried in a beautiful chapel in Worcester cathedral. Bishop Gauden rests there, who wrote Eikon Basilike, The Duke of Ham- ilton was transferred there, from the Com- mandery. And in the Sacrarium stands the tomb of King John (obiit October 19, 1216, at Newark), in which, when it was opened, in 1797, the remains of that tyrant presented a ghastly spectacle. BYRON AND HUCKNALL-TORKARD. I09 VIII. BYRON AND HUCKNALL-TOKKARD. ON a night in 1785, when Mrs. Siddons was acting at Edinburgh, the play being Tlie Fatal Marriage and the char- acter Isabella, a young lady of Aberdeen- shire, Miss Catherine Gordon, of Gight,was among the audience. There is a point in that tragedy at which Isabella recognises her first husband, whom she had supposed to be dead, and in whose absence she had been married to another, and her conster- nation, grief, and rapture are sudden and excessive. Mrs. Siddons, at that point, always made a great effect. The words are, "OmyBiron, my Biron ! " On this night, at the moment when the wonderful actress sent forth her wailing, heart-pierc- ing cry, as she uttered those words. Miss Gordon gave a frantic scream, fell into violent hysterics, and was borne out of the theatre, repeating "0 my Biron, my Biron ! " At the time of that incident she no BYRON AND HUCKNALL-TORKARD. had not met tlie man by whom she was afterward wedded — the Hon. John Byron, whose wife she became about a year later. Their first-born and only child was George Gordon, afterward Lord Byron, the poet ; and among the many aspects of his life which impress the thoughtful reader of that strange and melancholy story none is more striking than the dramatic aspect of it — so strangely prefigured in this event. Censure of Byron, whether as a man or as a writer, may be considered to have spent its force. It is a hundred years (January 22, 1888), since he was born, and almost as many since he died. Everybody who wished to say a word against him has had ample oi^portunity for saying it, and there is evidence that this opportunity has not been neglected. The record was long ago made up. Everybody knows that Byron's con- duct was sometimes deformed with frenzy and stained with vice. Everybody knows that Byron's writings are occasionally marred with profanity and licentiousness, and that they contain a quantity of crude verse. If he had never been married, or if, being married, his domestic life had not ended in disaster and scandal, his personal reputation would stand higher than it does BYRON AND HUCKNALL-TORKARD. 1 1 1 at present, in the esteem of virtuous society. If about one-third of wliat he wrote had never been publislied, his reputation as a man of letters would stand higher than it now does m the esteem of the sternest judges of literary art. After an exhaustive discussion of the subject in every aspect of it, after every variety of hostile assault, and after praise sounded in every key of en- thusiasm and in every language of the world, these truths remain. It is a pity that Byron was not a virtuous man and a good husband. It is a pity that he was not invariably a scrupulous literary artist, that he wrote so much, and that almost every- thing he wrote was published. But, when all this has been said, it remains a solid and immovable truth that Byron was a great poet and that he continues to be a great power in the literature and life of the world. Nobody who pretends to read any- thing omits to read Childe Harold. To touch this complex and delicate sub- ject in only a superficial manner it may not be amiss to say that the world is under obligation to Byron, if for nothing else, for the spectacle of a romantic, impressive, and instructive life. His agency in that spectacle no doubt was involuntary, but 112 BYROX AND HUCKNALL-TORKARD. all the same he presented it. He was a great poet ; a man of genius ; his faculty of expression was colossal, and his conduct was absolutely genuine. No man in litera- ture ever lived who lived himself more fully. His assumptions of disguise only made him more obvious and transparent. He kept nothing back. His heart was laid absolutely bare. We know even more about him than we know about Dr. Johnson — and still his personality endures the test of our knowledge and remains unique, romantic, fascinating, prolific of moral ad- monition, and infinitely pathetic. Byron in poetry, like Edmund Kean in acting, is a figure that completely fills the imagination, profoundly stirs the heart, and never ceases to impress and charm, even while it afflicts, the sensitive mind. This consideration alone, viewed apart from the obligation that the world owes to the better part of his writings, is vastly significant of the great personal force that is inherent in the name and memory of Byron. It has been considered necessary to ac- count for the sadness and gloom of Byron's poetry by representing him to have been a criminal afflicted with remorse for his many and hideous crimes. His widow, appar- BYRON AND HUCKNALL-TOKKARD. 1 13 ently a monomaniac, after long brooding over the remembrance of a calamitous mar- ried life — brief but unhappy, and termin- ated in separation — whispered against him, and against his half-sister, a vile and hid- eous charge ; and this, to the disgi'ace of American literature, was subsequently brought forward by a distinguished female writer of America, much noted for her works of fiction and especially memora- ble for this one. The explanation of the mental distress exhibited in the poet's writings was thought to be effectually pro- vided in that disclosure. But, as this re- volting and inhuman story — desecrating graves, insulting a wonderful genius, and casting infamy upon the name of an affec- tionate, faithful, virtuous woman — fell to pieces the moment it was examined, the student of Byron's grief- stricken nature re- mained no wiser than before this figment oi a diseased imagination had been divulged. Surely, however, it ought not to be con- sidered mysterious that Byron's poetry is often sad. The best poetry of the best poets is touched with sadness. Hamlet has never been mistaken for a merry production. Macbeth and King Lear do not commonly produce laughter. Shelley H 114 BYRON AND HUCKNALL-TORKARD. and Keats sing as near to heaven's gate as anybody, and both of them are essentially sad. Scott was as brave, hopeful, and cheery as any poet that ever lived, and Scott's poetry is at its best in his dirges and his ballads of love and loss. The Elegy and Tlie Ancient Mariner certainly are great poems, but neither of them is festive. Byron often wi'ote sadly because he was a man of a melancholy temperament, and because he deeply felt the pathos of mortal life, the awful mystery with which it is surrounded, the pam with which it is usually attended, the tragedy with which it commonly is accompanied, the frail tenure with which its loves and hopes are held, and the inexorable death with which it is continually environed and at last extin- guished. And Byron was an unhappy man for the reason that, possessing every ele- mental natural quality in excess, his ex- quisite goodness was constantly outraged and tortured by his inordinate evil. The tempest, the clangour, and the agony of his writings are denotements of the struggle between good and evil that was perpetually afflicting his soul. Had he been the wicked man depicted by his detractors he would have lived a life of comfortable depravity BYRON AXD HUCKXALL-TORKARD. II5 and never would have written at all. Monsters do not suffer. The true appreciation of Byron is not that of youtli but that of manhood. Youth is captured by his pictorial and sentimental attributes. Youtli beholds him as a nautical Adonis, standing lonely upon a barren cliff and gazing at a stormy sunset over the -S^gean sea. Everybody knows that famil- iar picture — with the wide, open collar, the great eyes, the wild hair, and the ample neckcloth flowing in the breeze. It is pretty but it is not like the real man. If ever at any time he was that sentimental image he speedily outgrew that condition, just as those observers of him who truly under- stand Byron have long outgrown their juve- nile sympathy with that frail and puny ideal of a great poet. Manhood perceives a different individual and is captured by a different attraction. It is only when the first extravagant and effusive enthusiasm has run its course, and perhaps ended in revulsion, that we come to know Byron for what he is really worth, and to feel the tre- mendous power of his genius. Sentimental folly has commemorated him in the margin of Hyde Park, as in the fancy of many a callow youth and green girl, with the statue Il6 BYRON AND HUCKNALL-TORKARD. of a pretty sailor-lad waiting for a spark from heaven, while a big Newfoundland dog dozes at his feet. It is a caricature. Byron was a man, and terribly in earnest ; and it is only by earnest persons that his mind and works are understood. At this distance of time the scandals of a corrupt age, equally with the frailties of its most brilliant and most illustrious poetical gen- ius, may well be left to rest in the oblivion of the grave. The generation that is living at the close of the nineteenth century will remember of Byron only that he was the uncompromising friend of liberty ; that he did much to emancipate the human mind from every form of bigotry and tyranny ; that he augmented, as no man had done since Dryden, the power and flexibility of the noble English tongue ; and that he en- riched literature with passages of poetry which, for sublimity, beauty, tenderness, and eloquence, have seldom been equalled and have never been excelled. It was near the close of a fragrant, golden summer day (August 8, 1884) when, having driven out from Nottingham, I alighted in the market-place of the little town of Huck- nall-Torkard, on a pilgrimage to the grave of Byron. The town is modern and com- V lJ m < D R. JOHNSOT^. " Decipimus YOtis ; et tempore f allimur ; Et Mors deridet curas ; anxia vita nihil." The father of the illustrious Joseph Addison was Dean of this cathedral from 1688 to 1703, and his remains are buried in the ground, near the west door. The stately Latin epitaph was written by his son. This and several other epitaphs here attract the interested attention of literary students. A tablet on the north wall, in the porch, commemorates the courage and sagacity of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who introduced into England the practice of inoculation for the small-pox. Anna Seward, the poet, who died in 1809, aged sixty-six, and who was one of the friends of Dr. Johnson, was buried and is commem- orated here, and the fact that she placed a tablet here in memory of her father is celebrated in sixteen eloquent and felicitous lines by Sir Walter Scott. The father was a canon of Lichfield, and died in 1790. The reader of Boswell will not fail to remark the epitaph on Gilbert Walmesley, once registrar of the ecclesiastical court of Lich- field, and one of Dr. Johnson's especial friends. Of Chappel Woodhouse it is sig- nificantly said, upon his memorial stone, that he was ' ' lamented most by those who THE HOME OF DR. JOHNSON. 21 3 knew him best." Here one sees two of the best works of Chantrey — one called "The Sleeping Children," erected in 1817, in memory of the two young daughters of the Rev. William Robinson ; the other a kneel- ing figure of Bishop Ryder, who died in 1836. The former was one of the earliest triumphs of Chantrey — an exquisite sem- blance of sleeping innocence and heavenly purity 1 — and the latter was his last. Near by is placed one of the most sumptuous mon- uments in England, a recumbent statue, done by the master-hand of Watts, the painter, presenting Bishop Lonsdale, who died in 1867. This figure, in which the mod- elling is very beautiful and expressive, rests upon a bed of marble and alabaster. In Chantrey' s statue of Bishop Ryder, which seems no effigy but indeed the living man, there is marvellous perfection of drapery — the marble having the effect of flowing silk. Here also, in the south transept, is the urn of the Gastrells, formerly of Stratford-upon- Avon, to whom was due the destruction (1759) of the house of New Place in which 1 Chantrey had seen the beautiful sculpture of little Penelope Boothby, in Ashbourne church, Derbyshire, made by Banks, and he may well have been inspired by the specUicle. 214 THE HOME OF DR. JOHNSON. Shakespeare died. No mention of the Rev. Gastrell occurs in the epitaph, but copi- ous eulogium is lavished on his widow, botli in verse and prose, and she must indeed have been a good woman if the line is true which describes her as " A friend to want when each false friend withdrew." Her chief title to remembrance, however, like that of her husband, is an mihallowed association with one of the most sacred of literary shrines. In 1776 Johnson, accom- panied by Boswell, visited Lichfield, and Bos well records that they dined with Mrs. Gastrell and her sister Mrs. Aston. The Rev. Mr. Gastrell was then dead. "I was not informed till afterward," says Boswell, "that Mrs. Gastrell' s husband was the clergyman who, while he lived at Stratford- upon-Avon, with Gothic barbarity cut down Shakespeare's mulberry -tree, and as Dr. Johnson told me, did it to vex his neigh- bours. His lady, I have reason to believe, on the same authority, participated in the guilt of what the enthusiasts of our immor- tal bard deem almost a species of sacrilege." The destruction of the house followed close upon that of the tree, and to both their deaths the lady was doubtless accessary. Upon the ledge of a casement on the east THE HOME OF DR. JOHNSON. 215 side of the chancel, separated by the central lancet of a threefold window, stand the marble busts of Samuel Johnson and David Garrick. Side by side they went through life ; side by side their ashes repose in the great abbey at Westminster ; and side by side they are commemorated here. Both the busts were made by Westmacott, and obviously each is a portrait. The head of Johnson appears without his customary wig. The colossal individuality of the man plainly declares itself in form and pose, in every line of the eloquent face and in the superb dignity of the figure and the action. This work was based on a cast taken after death, and this undoubtedly is Johnson's self. The head is massive yet graceful, denoting a compact brain and great natural refinement of intellect. The brow is indicative of un- common sweetness. The eyes are finely shaped. The nose is prominent, long, and slightly aquiline, with wide and sensitive nostrils. The mouth is large, and the lips are slightly parted, as if in speech. Pro- digious perceptive faculties are shown in the sculpture of the forehead — a feature that is characteristic, in even a greater degree, of the bust of Garrick. The total expression of the countenance is benignant, 2l6 THE HOME OF DR. JOHNSON. yet troubled and rueful. It is a thought- ful and venerable face, and yet it is the passionate face of a man who has passed through many storms of self-conflict and been much ravaged by spiritual pain. The face of Garrick, on the contrary, is eager, animated, triumphant, happy, showing a nature of absolute simplicity, a sanguine temperament, and a mind that tempests may have ruffled but never convulsed. Garrick kept his "storm and stress" for his tragic performances ; there was no par- ticle of it in his personal experience. It was good to see those old friends thus associated in the beautiful church that they knew and loved in the sweet days when their friendship had just begun and their labours and their honours were all before them. I placed myself where, during the service, I could look upon both the busts at once ; and presently, in the deathlike silence, after the last amen of evensong had died away, I could well believe that those familiar figures were kneeling beside me, as so often they must have knelt beneath this glorious and vener- able roof : and for one worshipper at least the beams of the westering sun, that made a solemn splendour through the church, illu- mined visions no mortal eyes could see. THE HOME OF DR. JOHNSON. 217 Beneath the bust of Johnson, upon a stone slab affixed to the wall, appears this inscription : — The friends of SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D,, a native of Lichfield, erected this monument as a tribute of respect to the memory of a man of extensive learning, a distinguished moral writer and a sincere Christian. He died the 13th of December 1784, aged 75 years. A similar stone beneath the bust of Gar- rick is inscribed as follows : — Eva Maria, relict of DAVH) GARRICK, Esq., caused this monument to be erected to the memory of her beloved husband, who died the 20th of January 1779, aged 63 years. He had not only the amiable qualities of private life, but such astonishing dramatick talents as too well verified the observation of his friend : " His death eclipsed the gayety of nations and impoverished the publick stock of harmless pleasure." This "observation" is the well-known eulogium of Johnson, who, however much he may have growled about Garrick, always loved him and deeply mourned for him. These memorials of an author and an actor are not rendered the more impressive by being surmounted, as at present they are, 2l8 THE HOME OF DR. JOHNSON. in Lichfield cathedral, with old battle-flags — commemorative souvenirs of the 80th Eegiment, Staffordshire volunteers — hon- ourable and interesting relics in their place, but inappropriate to the effigies of Johnson and Garrick. The house in w^hich Johnson was born stands at the corner of Market street and Breadmarket street, facing the little Mar- ket Place of Lichfield. It is an antiquated building, three stories in height, having a long, peaked roof. The lower story is re- cessed, so that the entrance is sheltered by a pent. Its two doors — for the structure now consists of two tenements — are ap- proached by low stone steps, guarded by an iron rail. There are ten windows, five in each row, in the front of the upper stories. The pent-roof is supported by three sturdy pillars. The house has a front of stucco. A bill in one of the lower windows certifies that now this house is "To Let." Here old Michael Johnson kept his bookshop, in the days of good Queen Anne, and from this door young Samuel Johnson went forth to his school and his play. The whole various, pathetic, impressive story of his long, laborious, sturdy, beneficent life drifts through your mind as you stand at that THE HOME OF DR. JOHNSON. 2I9 threshold and conjure up the pictures of the past. Opposite to the house, and fac- ing it, is the statue of Johnson presented to Lichfield in 1838 by James Thomas Low, then Chancellor of the diocese. On the sides of its massive pedestal are sculptures, showing first the boy, borne on his father's shoulders, listening to the preaching of Dr. Sacheverell ; then the youth, victorious in school, carried aloft in triumph by his admiring comrades ; and, finally, the re- nowned scholar and author, in the meridian of his greatness, standing bareheaded in the market-place of Uttoxeter, doing pen- ance for his undutiful refusal, when a lad, to relieve his weary, infirm father in the work of tending the bookstall at that place. Every one knows that touching story, and no one who thinks of it when standing here will gaze with any feeling but that of rev- erence, commingled with the wish to lead a true and simple life, upon the noble, thoughtful face and figure of the great mor- alist, who now seems to look down with benediction upon the scenes of his innocent and happy youth. The statue, which is in striking contrast with the humble birth- place, points the expressive moral of a splendid career. No tablet has yet been 220 THE HOME OF DR. JOHNSON. placed on the house in which Johnson was born. Perhaps it is not needed. Yet surely this place, if any place on earth, ought to be preserved and protected as a literary shrine. Johnson was not a great creative poet ; neither a Shakespeare, a Dryden, a Byron, or a Tennyson ; but he was one of the most massive and majestic characters in English literature. A superb example of self-conquest and moral supremacy, a mine of extensive and diversified learning, an intellect remarkable for deep penetra- tion and broad and sure grasp of the great- est subjects, he exerted, as few men have ever exerted, the original, elemental force of genius ; and his immortal legacy to his fellow- men was an abiding influence for good. The world is better and happier because of him, and because of the many earnest characters and honest lives that his example has inspired ; and this cradle of greatness ought to be saved and marked for every succeeding generation as long as time endures. One of the interesting features of Lich- field is an inscription that vividly recalls the ancient strife of Roundhead and Cavalier, two centuries and a half ago. This is found upon a stone scutcheon, set in the wall over THE HOME OF DR. JOHNSON. 221 the door of the house that is No, 24 Dam street, and these are its words : — " March 2d, 1643, Lord Brooke, a General of the Tarliament Forces preparing to Besiege the Close of Lichfield, then garrisoned For King Charles the First, Received his death- wound on the spot Beneath this Liscription, By a shot in the forehead from Mr. Dyott, a gentleman who had placed himself on the Battlements of the great steeple, to annoy the Besiegers." One of them he must have "annoyed" seriously. It was "a long shot, Sir Lucius," for, standing on the place of that catastrophe and looking up to "the battlements of the great steeple," it seemed to have covered a distance of nearly four hundred feet. Other relics of those Roundhead wars were shown in the cathe- dral, in an ancient room now used for the bishop's consistory court — these being two cannon-balls (fourteen-pounders) and the ragged and rusty fragments of a shell that were dug out of the ground near the church a few years ago. Many of these practical tokens of Puritan zeal have been discov- ered. Lichfield cathedral close, in the time of Bishop Walter de Langton, who died in 1321, was surrounded with a wall and fosse, and thereafter whenever the wars came it 222 THE HOME OF DR. JOHNSON. was used as a fortification. In the Stuart times it was often besieged. Sir John Gell succeeded Lord Brooke, when the latter had been shot by Mr. Dyott — who is said to have been "deaf and dumb," but who certainly was not blind. The close was sur- rendered on March 5, 1643, and thereupon the Parliamentary victors, according to their ruthless and brutal custom, straight- way ravaged the church, tearing the brasses from the tombs, breaking the effigies, and utterly despoiling beauty which it had taken generations of pious zeal and loving devo- tion to create. The great spire was bat- tered down by those vandals, and in falling it wrecked the chapter-house. The noble church, indeed, was made a ruin — and so it remained till 1661, when its munificent benefactor. Bishop Hackett, began its res- toration, now happily almost complete. Prince Eupert captured Lichfield close for the king in April 1643, and General Lothian recovered it for the Parliament in the sum- mer of 1646, after which time it was com- pletely dismantled. Charles I. came to this place after the fatal battle of Naseby, and sad enough that picturesque, vacillating, shortsighted, beatific aristocrat must have been, gazing over the green fields of Lich- THE HOME OF DR. JOHNSON. 223 field, to know — as surely even he must then have known — that his cause was doomed, if not entirely lost. It will not take you long to traverse Lichfield, and you may ramble all around it through little green lanes between hedge- rows. This you will do if you are wise, for the walk, especially at evening, is peaceful and lovely. The wanderer never gets far away from the cathedral. Those three superb spires steadily dominate the scene, and each new view of them seems fairer than the last. All around this little city the fields are richly green, and many trees diversify the prospect. Pausing to rest awhile in the mouldering graveyard of old St. Chad's, I saw the rooks flocking home- ward to the great tree-tops not far away, and heard their many querulous, sagacious, humorous croakings, while over the dis- tance, borne upon the mild and fragrant evening breeze, floated the solemn note of a warning bell from the minster tower, as the shadows deepened and the night came down. Scenes like this sink deep into the heart, and memory keeps them forever. 224 FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH. XVI. FROM LONDON TO EDINBTTRGH. EDINBURGH, September 9, 1889.— Scotland again, and never more beau- tiful than now ! The harvest moon is shin- ing upon the grim old castle, and the bag- pipes are playing under my v^indows to-night. It has been a lovely day. The train rolled out of King's Cross, London, at ten this morning, and it rolled into Waverley, Edinburgh, about seven to-night. The trip by the Great Northern railway is one of the most interesting journeys that can be made in England. At first indeed the scenery is not striking ; but even at first you are whirled past spots of excep- tional historic and literary interest — among them the battlefield of Barnet, and the old church and graveyard of Hornsey where Tom Moore buried his little daughter Barbara, and where the venerable poet Samuel Rogers sleeps the last sleep. Soon these are gone, and presently, dashing through a flat coun- FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH. 225 try, you get a clear view of Peterborough cathedral, massive, dark, and splendid, with its graceful cone-shaped pinnacles, its vast square central tower, and the three great pointed and recessed arches that adorn its west front. This church contains the dust of Queen Katherine, the Spanish wife of Henry VIII., who died at Kimbolton Cas- tle, Huntingdonshire, in 1535 ; and there the remains of Mary Stuart were first buried (1587), — resting there a long time before her son, James I. , conveyed them to West- minster Abbey. Both those queens were buried by one and the same gravedigger — that famous sexton, old Scarlett, whose por- trait is in the cathedral, and who died July 2, 1591, aged ninety-eight. The country is so level that the receding tower of Peterborough remains for a long time in sight, but soon, — as the train speeds through pastures of clover and through fields of green and red and yellow herbage, divided by glimmering hedges and diversi- fied with red-roofed villages and gray church- towers, — the land grows hilly, and long white roads are visible stretching away like bands of silver over the lonely hill-tops. Figures of gleaners are seen, now and then, scattered throuo-h fields whence the harvest 226 FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH. has lately been gathered. Sheep are feed- ing in the pastures, and cattle are couched under fringes of wood. The bright emerald of the sod sparkles with the golden yellow of the colt's-foot, and sometimes the scarlet waves of the poppy come tumbling into the plam like a cataract of fire. Windmills spread their whirling sails upon the summits round about, and over the nestling ivy-clad cottages and over the stately trees there are great flights of rooks. A gray sky broods above, faintly suffused with sunshine, but there is no glare and no heat, and often the wind is laden with a fragrance of wild- flowers and of hay. It is noon at Grantham, where there is just time enough to see that this is a flourish- ing city of red-brick houses and fine spa- cious streets, with a lofty, spired church, and far away eastward a high line of hills. Historic Newark is presently reached and passed — a busy, contented town, smihng through the sunshine and mist, and as it fades in the distance I remember that we are leaving Lincoln, with its glorious cathe- dral, to the southeast, and to the west New- stead Abbey, Annesley, Southwell, and Hucknall-Torkard — places memorably as- sociated with the poet Byron and dear to FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH. 227 the heart of every lover of poetic literature. At Markham the country is exceedingly pretty, with woods and hills over which multitudes of rooks and starlings are in full career, dark, rapid, and garrulous. About Bawtry the land is flat, and flat it continues to be until we have sped a considerable way beyond York. But in the meantime we flash through opulent Doncaster, famed for manufactories and for horse-races, rosy and active amid the bright green fields. There are not many trees in this region, and as we draw near Selby — a large red-brick city upon the banks of a broad river — its mas- sive old church-tower looms conspicuous under smoky skies. In the outskirts of this town there are cosy houses clad with ivy, in which the pilgrim might well be pleased to linger. But there is no pause, and in a little while magnificent York bursts upon the view, stately and glorious, under a black sky that is full of driving clouds. The minster stands out like a mountain, and the giant towers rear themselves in solemn majesty — the grandest piece of church architecture in England ! The brim- ming Ouse shines as if it were a stream of liquid ebony. The meadows around the city glow like living emeralds, while the 228 FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH. harvest-fields are stored and teeming with stacks of golden grain. Great flights of startled doves people the air — as white as snow under the sable fleeces of the driving storm. I had seen York under different guises, but never before under a sky at once so sombre and so romantic. We bear toward Thirsk now, leaving behind us, westward of our track, old Ripon, in the distance, memorable for many associations, and cherished in theatrical annals as the place of the death and burial of the distinguished founder of the Jeffer- son family of actors. Bleak Haworth is not far distant, and remembrance of it prompts many reverent thoughts of the strange genius of Charlotte Bronte. Dar- lington IS the next important place, a town of manufacture, conspicuous for its tall, smoking chimneys and evidently prosper- ous. This is the land of stone walls and stone cottages — the grim precinct of Durham. The country is cultivated, but rougher than the Midlands, and the essen- tially diversified character of this small island is once again impressed upon your mind. All through this region there are little white -walled houses with red roofs. At Ferry Hill the scenery changes again and FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH. 229 becomes American — a mass of rocky gorges and densely wooded ravines. All trace of storm has vanished by this time, and when, after a brief interval of eager expectation, the noble towers of Durham cathedral sweep into the prospect, that suburb monu- ment of ancient devotion, together with all the dark gray shapes of that pictorial city — so magnificently placed, in an abrupt precipitous gorge, on both sides of the brimming Weir — are seen under a sky of the softest Italian blue, dappled with white clouds of drifting fleece. Durham is all too quickly passed — fading away in a land- scape sweetly mellowed by a faint blue mist. Then stately rural mansions are seen, half hidden among great trees. Wreaths of smoke curl upward from scattered dwell- ings all around the circle of the hills. Each distant summit is seen to be crowned with a tower or a town. A fine castle springs into view just before Birtley glances by, and we see that this is a place of wood- lands, piquant with a little of the roughness of unsophisticated nature. But the scene changes suddenly, as in a theatre, and al- most in a moment the broad and teeming Tyne blazes beneath the scorching summer sun, and the gray houses of Gateshead and 230 FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH. Newcastle fill the picture with life and motion. The waves glance and sparkle — a wide plain of shimmering silver. The stream is alive with shipping. There is movement everywhere, and smoke and in- dustry and traffic — and doubtless noise, though we are on a height and cannot hear it. A busier scene could not be found in all this land, nor one more strikingly repre- sentative of the industrial character and interests of England. After leaving Newcastle we glide past a gentle, winding ravine, thickly wooded on both its sides, with a bright stream glanc- ing in its depth. The meadows all around are green, fresh, and smiling, and soon our road skirts by beautiful Morpeth, bestrid- ing a dark and lovely river and crouched in a bosky dell. At Widdrington the land shelves downward, the trees become sparse, and you catch a faint glimpse of the sea — the broad blue wilderness of the Northern Ocean. From this point onward the pano- rama is one of perfect and unbroken loveli- ness. Around you are spacious meadows of fern, diversified with clumps of fir-trees, and the sweet wind that blows upon your face seems glad and buoyant with its exult- ant vitality. At Warkworth Castle the FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH. 23 1 ocean view is especially magnificent — the brown and red sails of the ships and vari- ous craft descried at sea contributing to the prospect a lovely element of pictur- esque character. Alnwick, with its storied associations of ' ' the Percy out of North- umberland," is left to the westward, while on the east the romantic village of Aln- mouth woos the traveller with an irre- sistible charm. No one who has once seen that exquisite place can ever be con- tent without seeing it again — and yet there is no greater wisdom in the conduct of life than to avoid forever a second sight of any spot where you have once been happy. This village, with its little lighthouse and grace- ful steeple, is built upon a promontory in the sea, and is approached over the sands by a long, isolated road across the bridge of four fine arches. All the country-side in this region is rich. At Long Houghton a grand church uprears its vast square tower, lonely and solemn in its place of graves. Royal Berwick comes next, stately and serene upon its ocean crag, with the white-crested waves curling on its beach and the glad waters of the Tweed kissing the fringes of its sovereign mantle as they rush into the sea. The sun is sinking now. 232 FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH. and over the many-coloured meadows, red and brown and golden and green, the long, thin shadows of the trees slope eastward and softly hint the death of day. The sweet breeze of evening stirs the long grasses, and on many a gray stone house shakes the late pink and yellow roses and makes the ivy tremble. It is Scotland now, and as we pass through the storied Border we keep the ocean almost constantly in view — losing it for a little while at Dun- bar, but finding it again at Drem — till, past the battlefield of Prestonpans and past the quaint villages of Cockenzie and Mussel- burgh and the villas of Portobello, we come slowly to a pause in the shadow of Arthur's Seat, where the great lion crouches over the glorious city of Edinburgh. INTO THE HIGHLANDS. 233 XVII. INTO THE HIGHLANDS. LOCH AWE, September 14, 1889. — Under a soft gray sky, and through fields that still are slumbering in the early morning mist, the train rolls out of Edin- burgh, bound to the north. The wind blows gently ; the air is cool ; strips of thin, fleecy cloud are driving over the distant hill-tops, and the birds are flying low. The track is by Queensferry, and in that region many little low stone cottages are seen, surrounded with simple gardens of flowers. For a long time the train runs through a deep ravine, with rocky banks on either hand, but pres- ently it emerges into pastures where the sheep are grazing, and into fields in which the late harvest stands garnered in many graceful sheaves. Tall chimneys, vigorously smoking, are visible here and there in the distant landscape. The fat, black rooks are taking their morning flight, clamouring as they go. Stone houses with red roofs 234 INTO THE HIGHLANDS. glide into the picture, and a graceful churcli- spire rises on a remote hill-top. In all directions there are trees, but they seem of recent growth, for no one of them is large. Soon the old cattle-market town of Falkirk springs up in the prospect, girt with fine hills and crested with masses of white and black smoke that is poured upward from the many tall chimneys of its busy ironworks. The houses here are made of gray stone and of red brick, and many of them are large, square buildings, seemingly commodious and opulent. A huge cemetery, hemmed in with trees and shrubs, is seen to skirt the city. Carron River, with its tiny but sounding cataract, is presently passed, and at Larbert your glance rests lovingly upon "the little gray church on the windy hill." North of this place, beyond the Forth, the country in the distance is mountainous, while all the intermediate region is rich with harvest- fields. Kinnaird lies to the eastward, while northward a little way is the famous field of Bannockburn. Two miles more and the train pauses in "gray Stirling," glorious with associations of historic splendour and ancient romance. Tlie Castle of Stirling is not as ruggedly grand as that of Edinburgh, but it is a noble architectural pile, and it is INTO THE HIGHLANDS. 235 nobly placed on a great crag fronting tlie vast mountains and the gloomy heavens of the north. The best view of it is obtained looking at it soutliward, and as I gazed upon it, under the cold and frowning sky, the air was populous with many birds that circled around its cone-shaped turrets, and hovered over the plain below, while across the distant mountain-tops, east, west, and north, dark and ragged masses of mist were driven in wild, tempestuous flight. Speed- ing onward now, along the southern bank of the Forth, the traveller takes a westerly course, past Gargunnock and Kippen, see- ing little villages of gray stone cottages nestled in the hill-gaps, distant mountain- sides, clad with furze, dark patches of woodland, and moors of pui-ple heather com- mingled with meadows of brilliant green. The smi breaks out, for a few moments, and the sombre hue of the gray sky is light- ened with streaks of gold. At Bucklyvie there is a second pause, and then the course is northwest, through banks and braes of heather, to peaceful Aberfoyle and the mountains of Menteith. The characteristic glory of the Scottish hills is the infinite variety and beauty of their shapes and the loveliness of their 236 INTO THE HIGHLANDS. colour. The English mountains and lakes in Westmoreland and Cumberland possess a sweeter and softer grace, and are more calmly and wooingly beautiful ; but the Scottish mountains and lakes excel them in grandeur, majesty, and romance. It would be presumption to undertake to describe the solemn austerity, the lofty and lonely magnificence, the bleak, weird, haunted isolation, and the fairy-like fantasy of this poetic realm ; but a lover of it may de- clare his passion and speak his sense of its enthralling and bewitching charm. Sir "Walter Scott's spirited and trenchant lines on the emotion of the patriot sang them- selves over and over in my thought, and were wholly and gi-andly ratified, as the coach rolled up the mountain road, ever climbing height after height, while new and ever new prospects continually unrolled themselves before delighted eyes, on the familiar but always novel journey from Aberfoyle to the Trosachs. That mountain road, on its upward course, and during most part of the way, winds through treeless pastureland, and in every direction, as your vision ranges, you behold other mountains equally bleak, save for the bracken and the heather, among which the sheep wander and the INTO THE HIGHLANDS. 237 grouse nestle in concealment, or whir away on frightened wings. Ben Lomond, wrapt in straggling mists, was dimly visible far to the west ; Ben A' an towered conspicuous in the foreground ; and further north Ben Ledi heaved its broad mass and rugged sides to heaven. Loch Vennacher, seen for a few moments, shone like a diamond set in emeralds, and as we gazed we seemed to see the bannered barges of Roderick Dhu and to hear the martial echoes of " Hail to the Chief." Loch Achray glimmered forth for an instant under the gray sky, as when " the small birds would not sing aloud" and the wrath equally of tempest and of war hung silently above it in one awful moment of sus- pense. There was a sudden and dazzling vision of Loch Katrine, and then all prospect was broken, and, rolling down among the thickly wooded dwarf hills that give the name of Trosachs to this place, we were lost in the masses of fragrant foliage that girdle and adorn in perennial verdure the hallowed scene of The Lady of the Lake. Loch Katrine is another Lake Horicon, with a grander environment, and this — like all the Scottish lakes — has the advantage of a more evenly sharp and vigorous air and of leaden and frowning skies (in which, 238 INTO THE HIGHLANDS. nevertheless, there is a peculiar, penetrating light) , that darken their waters and impart to them a dangerous aspect that yet is strangely beautiful. As we swept past " Ellen's Island " and Fitz- James's " Silver Strand" I was grateful to see them in the mystery of this gray light and not in the garish sunshine. All around this sweet lake are the sentinel mountains, — Ben Venue rising in the south, Ben A' an in the east, and all the castellated ramparts that girdle Glen Finglas in the north. The eye dwells enraptured upon the circle of the hills ; but by this time the imagination is so acutely stimulated, and the mind is so filled with glorious sights and exciting and ennobling reflections, that the sense of awe is tempered with a pensive sadness, and you feel your- self rebuked and humbled by the final and effectual lesson of man's insignificance that is taught by the implacable vitality of these eternal mountains. It is a relief to be brought back for a little to common life, and this relief you find in the landing at Stronachlachar and the ensuing drive — across the narrow strip of the shire of Stirling that intervenes between Loch Ka- trine and Loch Lomond — to the port of In- versnaid. This drive is through a wild and INTO THE HIGHLANDS. 239 picturesque country, but after the mountain road from Aberfoyle to the Trosachs it could not well seem otherwise than calm — at least till the final descent into the -vale of Invers- naid. From Inversnaid there is a short sail upon the northern waters of Loch Lomond — forever haunted by the shaggy presence of Rob Roy and the fierce and terrible image of Helen Macgregor — and then, landing at Ardlui, you drive past Inverarnan and hold a northern course to Crianlarich, travers- ing the vale of the Falloch and skirting along the western slope of the grim and gloomy Grampians — on which for miles and miles no human habitation is seen, nor any living creature save the vacant, abject sheep. The mountains are everywhere now, brown with bracken and purple with heather, stony, rugged, endless, desolate, and still with a stillness that is awful in its pitiless sense of inhumanity and utter isolation. At Crianlarich the railway is found again, and thence you whirl onward through lands of Breadalbane and Argyle to the proud mountains of Glen Orchy and the foot of that loveliest of all the lovely waters of Scotland — the ebony crystal of Loch Awe. The night is deepening over it as I write these words. The dark and solemn mountains 240 INTO THE HIGHLANDS. that guard it stretch away into the myste- rious distance and are lost in the sliuddering gloom. The gray clouds have drifted by, and the cold, clear stars of autumnal heaven are reflected in its crystal depth, unmarred by even the faintest ripple, upon its surface. A few small boats, moored to anchored buoys, float motionless upon it a little way from shore. There, on its lonely island, dimly visible in the fading light, stands the gray ruin of Kilchurn. A faint whisper comes from the black woods that fringe the mountain base, and floating from far across this lonely, haunted water there is a drowsy bird-note that calls to silence and to sleep. HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. 24 1 XVIII. HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. OBAN, September 17, 1889. — Seen in the twilight, as I first saw it, Oban is a pretty and picturesque seaside village, gay with glancing lights and busy with the movements of rapid vehicles and expedi- tious travellers. It is called the capital of the Western Highlands, and no doubt it deserves the name, for it is the common centre of all the trade and enterprise of this region, and all the threads of travel radiate from it. Built in a semicircle, along the margin of a lovely sheltered bay, it looks forth upon the wild waters of the Firth of Lorn, visible, southwesterly, through the sable sound of Kerrera, while behind and around it rises a bold range of rocky and sparsely wooded hills. On these are placed a few villas, and on a point toward the north stand the venerable, ivy-clad ruins of Dunolly Castle, m the ancestral domain of the ancient Highland family of Macdougall. 242 HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. The houses of Oban are built of gray stone and are mostly modern. There are many hotels fronting upon the Parade, which ex- tends for a long distance upon the verge of the sea. The opposite shore is Kerrera, an island about a mile distant, and beyond that island, and beyond Lorn water, ex- tends the beautiful island of Mull, con- fronting iron-ribbed Morven. In many ways Oban is suggestive of an American seaport upon the New England coast. Various characteristics mark it that may be seen at Gloucester, Massachusetts (al- though that once romantic place has been spoiled by the Irish peasantry), and at Mount Desert in Maine. The surround- ings, indeed, are different ; for the Scottish hills have a delicious colour and a wildness all their own ; while the skies, unlike those of blue and brilliant America, lower and gloom and threaten, and tinge the whole world beneath them — the moors, the momi- tains, the clustered gray villages, the lonely ruins, and the tumbling plains of the deso- late sea — with a melancholy, romantic, shadowy darkness, the perfect twilight of poetic vision. No place could be more practical than Oban is, in its everyday life, nor any place more sweet and dreamlike to HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. 243 the pensive mood of contemplation and the roving gaze of fancy. Viewed, as I viewed it, under the starlight and the drifting cloud, between two and three o'clock this morning, it was a picture of beauty, never to be forgotten. A few lights were twin- kling here and there among the dwellings, or momentarily flaring on the deserted Pa- rade. No sound was heard but the moan- ing of the night-wind and the plash of waters softly surging on the beach. Now and then a belated passenger came wan- dering along the pavement and disappeared in a turn of the road. The air was sweet with the mingled fragrance of the heathery hills and the salt odours of the sea. Upon the glassy bosom of the bay — dark, clear, and gently undulating with the pressure of the ocean tide — more than seventy small boats, each moored at a buoy and all veered in one direction, swung careless on the water ; and mingled with them were up- ward of twenty schooners and little steam- boats, all idle and all at peace. Many an hour of toil and sorrow is yet to come be- fore the long, strange journey of this life is ended ; but the memory of that wonderful midnight moment, alone with the majesty of Nature, will be a solace in the darkest of them. 244 HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. The Highland journey, from first to last, is an experience altogether novel and pre- cious, and it is remembered with gratitude and delight. Before coming to Oban I gave two nights and days to Loch Awe — a place so beautiful and so fraught with the means of happiness that time stands still in it, and even "the ceaseless vulture" of care and regret ceases for a while to vex the spirit with remembrance of anything that is sad. Looking down from the summit of one of the great mountains that are the rich and rugged setting of this jewel, I saw the crumbling ruin of Kilchurn upon its little island, gray relic first of the Macgregors and then of the Campbells, who dispossessed them and occupied their realm. It must have been an imperial residence once. Its situation — cut off from the mainland and commanding a clear view, up the lake and down the valleys, southward and northward — is superb. No enemy could approach it unawares, and doubtless the followers of the Macgregor occupied every adjacent pass and were ambushed in every thicket on the heights. Seen from the neighbouring moun- tain-side the waters of Loch Awe are of such crystal clearness that near some part of the shore the white sands are visible in perfect HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. 245 outline beneath them, while all the glorious eiigirdhng hills are reflected in their still and shining depth. Sometimes the sun flashed out and changed the waters to liquid silver, lighting up the gray ruin and flooding the mountain slopes with gold ; but more often the skies kept their sombre hue, darkening all beneath them with a lovely gloom. All around were the beautiful hills of Glen Orchy, and far to the eastward great waves of white and leaden mist, slowly drifting in the upper ether, now hid and now dis- closed the Olympian head of Ben Lui and the tangled hills of Glen Shirra and Glen Fyne. Close by, in its sweet vale of Sab- bath stillness, was couched the little town of Dalmally, sole reminder of the presence of man in these remote solitudes, where Nature keeps the temple of her worship, and where words are needless to utter her glory and her praise. All day long the peaceful lake slumbered in placid beauty under the solemn sky — a few tiny boats and two little steamers swinging at anchor on its bosom. All day long the shadows of the clouds, commingled with flecks of sunshine, went drifting over the mountain. At night- fall two great flocks of sheep, each attended by the pensive shepherd in his plaid, and 246 HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. each guided and managed by those wonder- fully intelligent collies that are a never- fail- ing delight in these mountain lands, came slowly along the vale and presently vanished in Glen Strae. Nothing then broke the stillness but the sharp cry of the shepherd's dog and the sound of many cataracts, some hidden and some seen, that lapse in music and fall in many a mass of shattered silver and flying spray, through deep, rocky rifts down the mountain-side. After sunset a cold wind came on to blow, and soon the heavens were clear and " all the number of the stars" were mirrored in beautiful Loch Awe. They speak of the southwestern extremity of this lake as the head of it. Loch Awe station, accordingly, is at its foot, near Kilchurn. Nevertheless, " where Macgregor sits is the head of the table," for the foot of the loch is lovelier than its head. And yet its head also is lovely, although in a less positive way. From Loch Awe station to Ford, a distance of twenty-six miles, you sail in a toy steamboat, sitting either on the open deck or in a cabin of glass and gazing at the panorama of the hills on either hand, some wooded and some bare, and all mag- nificent. A little after passing the mouth HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. 24/ of the river Awe, which flows through the black Pass of Brander and unites with Loch Etive, I saw the double crest of great Ben Cruachan towering into the clouds and visi- ble at intervals above them — the higher peak magnifxcently bold. It is a wild country all about this region, but here and there you see a little hamlet or a lone farm-house, and among the moorlands the occasional figure of a sportsman with his dog and gun. As the boat sped onward into the moorland district the mountains became great shapes of snowy crystal, under the sullen sky, and presently resolved into vast cloud-shadows, dimly out- lined against the northern heavens, and seemingly based upon a sea of rolling vapour. The sail is past Inisdrynich, the island of the Druids, past Inishail and Inis Fraoch, and presently past the lovely ruin of Inis- chonnel Castle, called also Ardchonnel, facing southward, at the end of an island promontory, and covered thick with ivy. The landing is at Ford Pier, and about one mile from that point you may see a little inn, a few cottages crumbling in pictu- resque decay, and a diminutive kirk, that constitute the village of Ford My purpose here was to view an estate close by this village, now owned by Henry Bruce, Esq., 248 HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. but many years ago the domain of Alexander Campbell, an ancestor of my children, being their mother's grandsire ; and not in all Scotland could be found a more romantic spot than the glen by the lochside that shel- ters the melancholy, decaying, haunted fab- ric of the old house of Ederline. Such a poet as Edgar Poe would have revelled in that place — and well he might ! There is a new and grand mansion on higher ground in the park, but the ancient house, almost aban- doned now, is a thousand times more char- acteristic and interesting than the new one. Both are approached through a long, wind- ing avenue, overhung with great trees that interlace their branches above it and make a cathedral aisle ; but soon the pathway to the older house turns aside into a grove of chest- nuts, birches, and yews, — winding under vast dark boughs that bend like serpents completely to the earth and then ascend once more, — and so goes onward through sombre glades and through groves of rho- dodendron to the levels of Loch Ederline and the front of the mansion, now desolate and half in ruins. It was an old house a hundred years ago. It is covered with ivy and buried among the trees, and on its sur- face and on the tree-trunks around it the HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. 249 lichen and the yellow moss have gathered in rank luxuriance. The waters of the lake ripple upon a rocky landing almost at its door. Here once lived as proud a Campbell as ever breathed in Scotland, and here his haughty spirit wrought out for itself the doom of a lonely age and a broken heart. His grave is on a little island in the lake — a family burial-ground, i such as may often be found on ancient seques- tered estates in the Highlands — where the tall trees wave above it and the weeds are growing thick upon its surface, while over it the rooks caw and clamour and the idle winds career, in heedless indifference that is sadder even than neglect. So destiny 1 On the stone that marks this sepulchre are the following inscriptions, which may suitably be pre- served in this chronicle: — Alexander Campbell Esquire, of Ederline. Died 2d October, 1841. In his 76th year. Matilda Campbell. Second daughter of William Campbell Esq., of Ederline. Died on the 2l8t Novr 1842. In her e'^ year. "William Campbell, Esq. of Ederline. Died 15"» January 1855, in his 42°^ year. Lachlan Aderson Campbell. His son. Died Jan- uary 27'h, 1859. In his S"" year. [John Campbell, the eldest son of Alexander, died February 26, 1854, and is buried in the Necrop- olis, at Toronto, Canada.! 250 HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. vindicates its inexorable edict and the great law of retribution is fulfilled. A stranger sits in his seat and rules in his hall, and of all the followers that once waited on his lightest word there remains but a single one — aged, infirm, and nearing the end of the long journey — to scrape the moss from his forgotten gravestone and to think sometimes of his ancient greatness and splendour, for- ever passed away. We rowed around Loch Ederline and looked down into its black waters (that in some parts have never been sounded, and are fabled to reach through to the other side of the world), and as our oars dipped and plashed the timid moor- fowl scurried into the bushes and the white swans sailed away in haughty wrath, while, warned by gathering storm-clouds, multi- tudes of old rooks that long have haunted the place came flying overhead, with many a querulous croak, toward their nests in Ederline grove. Back to Loch Awe station, and presently onward past the Falls of Cruachan and through the grim Pass Of Brander — down which the waters of the Awe rush in a sable flood between jagged and precipitous cliffs for miles and miles — and soon we see the bright waves of Loch Etive smiling under a HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. 25 1 sunset sky, and the many bleak, brown hills that fringe Glen Lonan and range along to Oban and the verge of the sea. There will be an hour for rest and thought. It seems wild and idle to write about these things. Life in Scotland is deeper, richer, stronger and sweeter than any words could possibly be that any man could possibly expend upon it. The place is the natural home of imag- ination, romance, and poetry. Thought is grander here, and passion is wilder and more exuberant than on the velvet plains and among the chaste and stately elms of the South. The blood flows in a stormier torrent and the mind takes on something of the gloomy and savage majesty of those gaunt, barren, lonely hills. Even Sir Walter Scott, speaking of his own great works (which are precious beyond words, and must always be loved and cherished by readers who know what beauty is), said that all he had ever done was to polish the brasses that already were made. This is the soul of excellence in British literature, and this, likewise, is the basis of stability in British civilisation — that the country is lovelier than the loveliest poetry that ever was written about it or ever could be written about it, and that the land and the life 252 HIGHLAND BEAUTIES. possess an inherent fascination for the inhabitants that nothing else could supply, and that no influence can ever destroy or ever seriously disturb. Democracy is rife all over the vv^orld, but it will as soon impede the eternal courses of the stars as it w^ill change the constitution or shake the social fabric of this realm, " Once more upon the waters — yet once more ! " Soon upon the stormy billows of Lorn I shall see these lovely shores fade in the distance. Soon, merged again in the strife and tumult of the commonplace world, I shall murmur, with as deep a sorrow as the sad strain it- self expresses, the tender words of Scott : — " Glenorchy's proud mountains, Kilchiu'n and her towers, Glenstrae and Glenlyon No longer are ours." THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. 253 XIX. THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. *' The Heart of Scotland, Britain's other e^e." — Ben Jonson. EDINBURGH, August 24, 1890.— A bright blue sky, across which many masses of tliin white cloud are borne swiftly on the cool western wind, bends over the stately city, and all her miles of gray man- sions and spacious, cleanly streets sparkle beneath it in a flood of summer sunshine. It is the Lord's Day, and most of the high- ways are deserted and quiet. From the top of the Calton Hill you look down upon hun- dreds of blue smoke-wreaths curling upward from the chimneys of the resting and rest- ful town, and in every direction the pros- pect is one of opulence and peace. A thousand years of history are here crystal- lised within the circuit of a single glance, and while you gaze upon one of the grand- est emblems that the world contains of a storied and romantic past, you behold like- 254 THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. wise a living and resplendent pageant of the beauty of to-day. Nowliere else are the Past and the Present so lovingly blended. There, in the centre, towers the great crown of St. Giles. Hard by are the quaint slopes of the Canongate, — teeming with illustri- ous, or picturesque, or terrible figures of Long Ago. Yonder the glorious Castle Crag looks steadfastly westward, — its manifold, wonderful colours continuously changing in the changeful daylight. Down in the valley Holyrood, haunted by a myriad of memories and by one resplendent face and entrancing presence, nestles at the foot of the giant Salisbury Crag ; while the dark, rivened peak of Arthur's Seat rears itself supremely over the whole stupendous scene. Southward and westward, in the distance, extends the bleak range of the Pentland Hills ; eastward the cone of Ber- wick Law and the desolate Bass Rock seem to cleave the sea ; and northward, beyond the glistening crystal of the Forth, — with the white lines of embattled Inchkeith like a diamond on its bosom, — the lovely Lomonds, the virginal mountain breasts of Fife, are bared to the kiss of heaven. It is such a picture as words can but faintly suggest ; but when you look upon it you THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. 255 readily comprehend the pride and the pas- sion with which a Scotsman loves his native land. Dr. Johnson named Edinburgh as "a city too well known to admit description." That judgment was proclaimed more than a hundred years ago — before yet Caledonia had bewitched the world's heart as the haunted land of Robert Burns and Walter Scott — and if it were true then it is all the more true now. But while the reverent pilgrim along the ancient highways of his- tory may not wisely attempt description, which would be superfluous, he perhaps may usefully indulge in brief chronicle and impression — for these sometimes prove suggestive to minds that are kindred with his own. Hundreds of travellers visit Edinburgh ; but it is one thing to visit and another thing to see ; and every suggestion, surely, is of value that helps to clarify our vision. This capital is not learned by driv- ing about in a cab ; for Edinburgh to be truly seen and comprehended must be seen and comprehended as an exponent of the colossal individuality of the Scottish char- acter ; and therefore it must be observed with thought. Here is no echo and no imitation. Many another provincial city 256 THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. of Britain in a miniature copy of London ; but the quality of Edinburgh is her own. Portions of her architecture do indeed denote a reverence for ancient Italian models, while certain other portions reveal the influence of the semi-classical taste that prevailed in the time of the Regent, after- wards George IV. The democratic ten- dency of this period — expressing itself here precisely as it does everywhere else, in button-making pettiness and vulgar com- monplace — is likewise sufficiently obvious. Nevertheless in every important detail of Edinburgh, and of its life, the reticent, res- olute, formidable, impetuous, passionate character of the Scottish race is conspicu- ous and predominant. Much has been said against the Scottish spirit — the tide of cavil purling on from Dr. Johnson to Sydney Smith. Dignity has been denied to it, and so has magnanimity, and so has humour ; but there is no audience more quick than the Scottish audience to respond either to pathos or to mirth ; there is no literature in the world so musically, ten- derly, and weirdly poetical as the Scot- tish literature ; there is no place on earth where the imaginative instinct of the na- tional mind has resisted, as it has resisted THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. 257 in Scotland, the encroachment of utility upon the domain of romance ; there is no people whose history has excelled that of Scotland in the display of heroic, intellec- tual, and moral purpose, combined with passionate sensibility ; and no city could surpass the physical fact of Edinburgh as a manifestation of broad ideas, unstinted opulence, and grim and rugged grandeur. Whichever way you turn, and whatever object you behold, that consciousness is always present to your thought — the con- sciousness of a race of beings intensely original, individual, passionate, authorita- tive, and magnificent. The capital of Scotland is not only beauti- ful but eloquent. The present writer does not assume to describe it, or to instruct the reader concerning it, but only to declare that at every step the sensitive mind is impressed with the splendid intellect, the individual force, and the romantic charm of the Scottish character, as it is commem- orated and displayed in this delightful place. What a wealth of significance it possesses may be indicated by even the most meagre record and the most superficial commentary upon the passing events of a traveller's ordinary cLay. The greatest 258 THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. name in the literature of Scotland is Walter Scott. He lived and laboured for twenty- four years in the modest three-story, gray stone house which is No. 39 Castle street. It has been my privilege to enter that house, and to stand in the room in which Scott began the novel of Waverley. Many years roll backward under the spell of such an experience, and the gray-haired man is a boy again, with all the delights of the Waverley Novels before him, health shining in his eyes, and joy beating in his heart, as he looks onward through vistas of golden light into a paradise of fadeless flowers and of happy dreams. The room that was Scott's study is a small one, on the first floor, at the back, and is lighted by one large window, opening eastward, through which you look upon the rear walls of sombre, gray buildings, and upon a small slope of green lawn, in which is the un- marked grave of one of Sir Walter's dogs. "The misery of keeping a dog," he once wrote, "is his dying so soon; but, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of me?" My attention was called to a peculiar fastening on the window of the study, — invented and placed there by Scott himself, — so arranged THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. 259 that the sash can be safely kept locked when raised a few inches from the sill. On the south side of the room is the fireplace, facing which he would sit as he wrote, and into which, of an evening, he has often gazed, hearing meanwhile the moan of the winter wind, and conjuring up, in the blaz- ing brands, those figures of brave knights and gentle ladies that were to live forever in the amber of his magical art. Next to the study, on the same floor, is the larger apartment that was his dining-room, where his portrait of Claverhouse (now at Abbots- ford) once hung above the mantel, and where so many of the famous people of the past enjoyed his hospitality and his talk. On the south wall of this room now hang two priceless autograph letters, one of them in the handwriting of Scott, the other in that of Burns. Both rooms are used for business offices now, — the house being tenanted by the agency of the New-Zealand Mortgage Company, — and both are fur- nished with large presses for the custody of deeds and family archives. Nevertheless these rooms remain much as they were when Scott lived in them, and his spirit seems to haunt the place. I was brought very near to him that day, for in the same 20O THE HEAKT OF t5COTLA2. hour was placed in my hands the original manuscript of liis Journal, and I saw, in nis own iiandwriting, the last words that ever fell from his pen. That Journal is in two quarto volumes. One of them is filled with writing ; the other half filled ; and the lines in both are of a fine, small character, crowded closely together. Toward the last the writing manifests only too well the growing infirmity of the broken Minstrel — the forecast of the hallowed deathbed of Abbotsford and the venerable and glorious tomb of Dryburgh. These are his last words : ' ' We slept reasonably, but on the next morning" — and so the Jour- nal abruptly ends. I can in no way express the emotion with which I looked upon those feebly scrawled syllables — the last effort of the nerveless hand that once had been strong enough to thrill the heart of all the world. The Journal has been lovingly and carefully edited by David Douglas, whose line taste and great gentleness of nature, together with his ample knowledge of Scot- tish literature and society, eminently qualify him for the performance of this sacred duty ; and the world will possess this treasure and feel the charm of its beauty and pathos — which is the charm of a irreat nature ex- THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. 261 pressed in its perfect simplicity ; but the spell that is cast upon the heart and the imagination by a prospect of the actual handwriting of Sir Walter Scott, in the last words that he wrote, cannot be con- veyed in print. From the house in Castle street I went to the rooms of the Royal Society, where there is a portrait of Scott, by John Gra- ham Gilbert, more life-like — being repre- sentative of his soul as well as his face and person — than any other that is known. It hangs there, in company with other paintings of former presidents of this insti- tution, — notably one of Sir David Brews- ter and one of James Watt, — in the hall in which Sir Walter often sat, presiding over the deliberations and literary exercises of his comrades in scholarship and art. In another hall I saw the pulpit in which John Knox used to preach, in the old days of what Dr. Johnson expressively called ' ' The ruffians of Reformation," and hard by was "The Maiden," the terrible Scottish guil- lotine, with its great square knife set in a thick weight of lead, by which tlie grim Regent Morton w\as slain in 1581, the Mar- quis of Argyle in 16(51, and the gallant, magnanimous, devoted Earl of Argyle in 262 THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. 1685 — one more sacrifice to the insatiate House of Stuart. This monster has drunk the blood of many a noble gentleman, and there is a weird, sinister suggestion of grati- fied ferocity and furtive malignity in its rude, grisly, uncanny fabric of blackened timbers. You may see in the quaint little panelled chapel of St. Mary Magdalen, not many steps distant from the present abode of the sanguinary " Maiden, "— brooding over her hideous consummation of slaughter and misery, — the place where the mangled body of the heroic Earl of Argyle was laid, in secret sanctuary, for several nights after that scene of piteous sacrifice at the old Market Cross ; and when you w-alk in the solemn enclosure of the Greyfriars church, — so fitly styled by Sir Walter " The West- minster Abbey of Scotland," — your glance will fall upon a sunken pillar, low down upon the northern slope of that hamited, lamentable ground, which bears the letters " I. M.," and which marks the grave of the baleful Morton, whom the Maiden decapi- tated for his share in the murder of Kizzio. In these old cities there is no keeping away from sepulchres. " The paths of glory," in every sense, "lead but to the grave." George Buchanan and Allan Ramsay (poets THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. 263 whom no literary pilgrim will neglect) rest in this churchyard, though the exact places of their interment are not positively denoted, and here, likewise, rest the elegant historian Robertson, and "the Addison of Scotland," Henry Mackenzie. The building in the High street in which Allan Ramsay once had his abode and his bookshop, and in which he wrote his pastoral of The Gentle Shep- herd^ is occupied now by a barber ; but since he is one that scorns not to proclaim over his door in mighty letters the poetic lineage of his dwelling it seems not amiss that this haunt of the IMuses should have fallen into such pious though lowly hands. Of such a character, hallowed with asso- ciations that pique the fancy and touch the heart, are the places and the names that an itinerant continually encounters in his rambles in Edinburgh. One could muse for many an hour over the little Venetian mirror that hangs in the bedroom of Mary Stuart in Holyrood Palace. What faces and what scenes it must have reflected ! How often her own beautiful countenance and person — the dazzling eyes, the snowy brow, the red gold hair, the alabaster bosom — may have blazed in its crystal depths, now tarnished and dim, 264 THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. like Hie record of her own calamitous and wretched days ! Did those lovely eyes look into this mirror — and was their glance scared and tremulous, or fixed and terrible — on that dismal February night, so many years ago, when the fatal explosion in the Kirk o' Field resounded with an echo that has never died away ? Who can tell ? This glass saw the gaunt and livid face of Euth- ven when he led his comrades of murder into that royal chamber, and it beheld Kiz- zio screaming in mortal terror as he was torn from the skirts of his mistress and savagely slain before her eyes. Perhaps, also, when that hideous episode was over and done with, it saw Queen Mary and her despicable husband the next time they met and were alone together in that ghastly room. " It shall be dear blood to some of you," the queen had said, while the mur- der of Kizzio was doing. Surely, having so injured a woman, any man with eyes to see might have divined his fate, in the perfect calm of her heavenly face and the quiet tones of her gentle voice, at such a moment as that. "At the fireside tragedies are acted " — and tragic enough must have been the scene of that meeting, apart from human gaze, in the chamber of crime and death. THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. 265 No other relic of Mary Stuart stirs the im- agination as tliat mirror does — unless, per- haps, it be the little ebony crucifix, once owned and reverenced by Sir Walter Scott and now piously treasured at Abbotsford, which she held in her hands when she went to her death in the hall of Fotheringay Castle. Holyrood Palace, in Mary Stuart's time, was not of its present shape. The tower containing her rooms was standing, and from that tower the building extended east- ward to the abbey, and then it veered to the south. Much of this building was destroyed by fire in 1544, and again in Cromwell's time, but both church and palace were rebuilt. The entire south side, with its tower that looks directly towards the crag, was added in the later period of Charles II. The furniture in Mary Stuart's room is mostly spurious, but the rooms are genuine. Musing thus, and much striving to recon- struct those strange scenes of the past, in which that beautiful, dangerous woman bore so great a part, the pilgrim strolls away into the Cannongate, — once clean and elegant, now squalid and noisome, — and still the storied figures of history walk by his side or come to meet him at every 266 THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. close and wynd. John Knox, Robert Burns, Tobias Smollett, David Hume, Dugald Stuart, John Wilson, Hugh Miller — Gay, led onward by the blithe and gracious Duchess of Queensberry, and Dr. Johnson, escorted by the affectionate and faithful James Boswell, the best biographer that ever lived, — these and many more, the let- tered vs^orthies of long ago, throng into this haunted street and glorify it with the rekindled splendours of other days. You cannot be lonely here. This it is that makes the place so eloquent and so precious. For what did those men live and labour ? To what were their shining talents and wonderful forces devoted ? To the dissemi- nation of learning ; to the emancipation of the human mind from the bondage of error ; to the ministry of the beautiful — and thus to the advancement of the human race in material comfort, in gentleness of thought, in charity of conduct, in refinement of man- ners, and in that spiritual exaltation by which, and only by which, the true progress of mankind is at onoe accomplished and proclaimed. But the dark has come, and this Edin- burgh ramble shall end with the picture that closed its own magnificent day. You THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. 26/ are standing on the rocky summit of Arthur's Seat. From tliat superb mountain peak your gaze takes in the wliole capital, together with the country in every direction for many miles around. The evening is uncommonly clear. Only in the west dense masses of black cloud are thickly piled upon each other, through which the sun is sink- ing, red and sullen with menace of the storm. Elsewhere and overhead the sky is crystal, and of a pale, delicate blue. A cold wind blows briskly from the east and sweeps a million streamers of white smoke in turbulent panic over the darkening roofs of the city, far below. In the north the lovely Lomond Hills are distinctly visible across the dusky level of the Forth, which stretches away toward the ocean, one broad sheet of glimmering steel — its margin in- dented with many a graceful bay, and the little islands that adorn it shining like stones of amethyst set in polished flint. A few brown sails are visible, dotting the waters, and far to the east appears the graceful out- line of the Isle of May, — whicli was the shrine of the martyred St. Adrian, — and the lonely, wave-beaten Bass Rock, with its millions of seagulls and solan geese. Busy Leith and picturesque Newhaven and every 205 THE HEART OF SCOTLAND. little village on the coast is sharply defined in the frosty light. At your feet is St. Leonards, with the tiny cottage of Jeanie Deans. Yonder, in the south, are the gray ruins of Craigmillar Castle — once the favour- ite summer home of the Queen of Scots, now- open to sun and rain, mossgrown and deso- late, and swept by every wind that blows. More eastward the eye lingers upon Car- berry Hill, where Mary surrendered herself to her nobles just before the romantic epi- sode of Loch Leven Castle ; and far beyond that height the sombre fields, intersected by green hawthorn hedges and many-coloured with the various hues of pasture and har- vest, stretch away to the hills of Lammer- moor and the valleys of Tweed and Esk. Parker and darker gTow the gathering shad- ows of the gloaming. The lights begin to twinkle in the city streets. The echoes of the rifles die away in the Hunter's Bog. A piper far off is playing the plaintive music of The Blue Bells of Scotland. And as your steps descend the crag the rising moon, now nearly at the full, shines through a gauzy mist and hangs above the mountain like a shield of gold upon the towered citadel of night. SIR WALTER SCOTT. 269 XX. SIR WALTER SCOTT. MORE than a century has passed since Walter Scott was born — a poet des- tined to exercise a profound, far-reaching, permanent influence upon the feelings of the human race, and thus to act a conspicuous part in its moral and spiritual development and guidance. To the greatness of his mind, the nobility of his spirit, and the beauty of his life there is abundant testimony in his voluminous and diversified writings, and in his ample and honest biography. Every- body who reads has read something from the pen of Scott, or something commemorative of him, and in every mind to which his name is known it is known as the synonym of great faculties and wonderful achievement. There must have been enormous vitality of spirit, prodigiovis power of intellect, irresist- ible charm of personality, and lovable purity of moral nature in the man whom thousands that never saw him living — men and women 270 SIR WALTER SCOTT. of a later age and different countries — know and remember and love as Sir Walter Scott. Others have vs^ritten greatly. Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, Cowper, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Landor, — these are only a few of the imperial names that cannot die. But these names live in the world's respect. The name of Scott lives in its affection. What other name of the past in English literature — unless it be that of Shakespeare — arouses such a deep and sweet feeling of affectionate interest, gentle pleasure, gratitude, and reverential love? The causes of Sir Walter Scott's ascend- ency are to be found in the goodness of his heart ; the integrity of his conduct ; the ro- mantic and picturesque accessories and at- mosphere of his life ; the fertile brilliancy of his literary execution ; the charm that he ex- ercises, both as man and artist, over the imagination ; the serene, tranquillising spirit of his works ; and, above all, the buoyancy, the happy freedom, of his genius. He was not simply an intellectual power ; he was also a human and gentle comforter. He wielded an immense mental force, but he always wielded it for good, and always with tenderness. It is impossible to conceive of SIR WALTER SCOTT. 27 1 his ever having done a wrong act, or of any- contact with his influence that would not inspire the wish to be virtuous and noble. The scope of his sympathy was as broad as the weakness and the need are of the human race. He understood the hardship, the dilemma, in the moral condition of mankind : he wished people to be patient and cheerful, and he tried to make them so. His writings are full of sweetness and cheer, and they contain nothing that is morbid, — nothing that tends toward surrender and misery. He did not sequester himself in mental pride, but simply and sturdily, through years of conscientious toil, he employed the faculties of a strong, tender, gracious genius for the good of his fellow- creatures. The world loves him because he is worthy to be loved, and because he has lightened the burden of its care and augmented the sum of its happiness. Certain differences and confusions of opinion have arisen from the consideration of his well-known views as to the literary art, together with his equally well-known ambition to take and to maintain the rank and estate of a country squire. As an artist he had ideals that he was never able to fulfil. As a man, and one who was 272 SIR WALTER SCOTT. influenced by imagination, taste, patriotism, family pride, and a profound belief in es- tablished monarchical institutions, it was natural that he should wish to found a grand and beautiful home for himself and his posterity. A poet is not the less a poet because he thinks modestly of his writings and practically knows and admits that there is something else in the world beside literature ; or because he happens to want his dinner and a roof to cover him. In trying to comprehend a great man, a good method is to look at his life as a whole, and not to deduce petty inferences from the dis- torted interpretation of petty details. Sir Walter Scott's conduct of life, like the character out of which it sprang, was simple and natural. In all that he did you may perceive the influence of imagination acting upon the finest reason ; the involuntary con- sciousness of reserve power ; habitual defer- ence to the voice of duty ; an aspiring and picturesque plan of artistic achievement and personal distinction ; and deep knowledge of the world. If ever there was a man who lived to be and not to seem, that man was Sir Walter Scott. He made no pretensions. He claimed nothing, but he quietly and earnestly earned all. His means were the SIR WALTER SCOTT. 273 oldest and the best ; self-respect, hard work, and fidelity to duty. The development of his nature was slow, but it was thorough and it was salutary. He was not ham- pered by precocity and he was not spoiled by conceit. He acted according to himself, honouring his individuality and obeying the inward monitor of his genius. But, combined with the delicate instinct of a gentleman, he had the wise insight, foresight, and patience of a philosopher ; and therefore he respected the individuality of others, the established facts of life, and the settled con- ventions of society. His mind was neither embittered by revolt nor sickened by delu- sion. Having had the good fortune to be born in a country in which a right plan of government prevails — the idea of the family — the idea of the strong central power at the head, with all other powers subordinated to it, — he felt no impulse toward revolution, no desire to regulate all things anew ; and he did not suffer perturba- tion from the feverish sense of being sur- rounded with uncertainty and endangered by exposure to popular caprice. During the period of immaturity, and notwithstanding physical weakness and pain, his spirit was kept equable and cheerful, not less by the 274 SIR WALTER SCOTT. calm environment of a permanent civilisa- tion than by the clearness of his perceptions and the sweetness of his temperament. In childhood and youth he endeared himself to all who came near him, winning affection by inherent goodness and charm. In riper years that sweetness was reinforced by great sagacity, which took broad views of individual and social life ; so that both by knowledge and by impulse he was a serene and happy man. The quality that first impresses the stu- dent of the character and the writings of Sir Walter Scott is truthfulness. He was genuine. Although a poet, he suffered no torment from vague aspirations. Although once, and miserably, a disappointed lover, he permitted no morbid repining. Al- though the most successful author of his time, he displayed no egotism. To the end of his days he was frank and simple — not indeed sacrificing the reticence of a digni- fied, self-reliant nature, but suffering no blight from success, and wearing illustrious honours with spontaneous, unconscious grace. This truthfulness — the consequence and the sign of integrity and of great breadth of intellectual vision — moulded Sir Walter Scott's ambition and stamped the SIR WALTER SCOTT. 275 practical results of his career. A striking illustration of this is seen in his first adven- ture in literature. The poems originally sprang from the spontaneous action of the poetic impulse and faculty ; but they were put forth modestly, in order that the author might guide himself according to the re- sponse of the public mind. He knew that he might fail as an author, but for failure of that sort, although he was intensely am- bitious, he had no dread. There would al- ways remain to him the career of private duty and the life of a gentleman. This view of him gives the key to his character and explains his conduct. Neither amid the experimental vicissitudes of his youth, nor amid the labours, achievements, and splendid honours of his manhood, did he ever place the imagination above the con- science, or brilliant writing above virtuous living, or art and fame above morality and religion. "I have been, perhaps, the most voluminous author of the day," he said, toward the close of his life ; "and it is a comfort to me to think that I have tried to unsettle no man's faith, to corrupt no man's principles, and that I have written nothing which, on my deathbed, I should wish blotted." When at last he lay upon 276 SIR WALTER SCOTT. that deathbed the same thought animated and sustained him. " My dear," he said, to Lockhart, " be a good man, be virtuous, be religious — be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here." The mind which thus habit- ually dwelt upon goodness as the proper object of human ambition and the chief merit of human life was not likely to vaunt itself on its labours or to indulge any save a modest and chastened pride in its achievements. And this view of him explains the affec- tionate reverence with which the memory of Sir Walter Scott is cherished. He was pre-eminently a type of the greatness that is associated with virtue. But his virtue was not decorum and it was not goodyism. He does not, with Addison, represent ele- gant austerity ; and he does not, with Montgomery, represent amiable tameness. His goodness was not insipid. It does not humiliate ; it gladdens. It is ardent with heart and passion. It is brilliant with imagination. It is fragrant with taste and grace. It is alert, active, and triumphant with splendid mental achievements and practical good deeds. And it is the good- ness of a great poet — the poet of natural SIR WALTER SCOTT. 27/ beauty, of romantic legend, of adventure, of chivalry, of life in its heyday of action and its golden glow^ of pageantry and pleas- ure. It found expression, and it wields invincible and immortal power, through an art whereof the charm is the magic of sun- rise and sunset, the sombre, holy silence of mountains, the pensive solitude of dusky woods, the pathos of ancient, ivy-mantled ruins, and ocean's solemn, everlasting chant. Great powers have arisen in Eng- lish literature ; but no romance has hushed the voice of the author of Waverley, and no harp has drowned the music of the Minstrel of the North. The publication of a new book by Sir Walter Scott is a literary event of great importance. The time has been when the announcement of such a novelty would have roused the reading public as with the sound of a trumpet. That sensation, famil- iar in the early part of the present cen- tury, is possible no more. Yet there are thousands of persons all over the world through whose hearts the thought of it sends a thrill of joy. The illustrious author of Marmion and of Waverley passed away in 1832 : and now (1890), at the distance of fifty-eight years, his private Journal is made 278 SIR WALTER SCOTT. a public possession. It is the bestowal of a great privilege and benefit. It is like hearing the voice of a deeply-loved and long- lamented friend suddenly speaking from beyond the grave. In literary history the position of Scott is unique. A few other authors, indeed, might be named toward whom the general feeling was once exceedingly cordial, but in no other case has the feeling entirely lasted. In the case of Scott it endures in undimm- ished fervour. There are, of course, persons to whom his works are not interesting and to whom his personality is not significant. Those persons are the votaries of the photo- graph, who wish to see upon the printed page the same sights that greet their vision in the streets and m the houses to which they are accustomed. But those prosy per- sons constitute only a single class of the public. People m general are impressible through the romantic instinct that is a part of human nature. To that instinct Scott's writings were addressed, and also to the heart that commonly goes with it. The spirit that responds to his genius is univer- sal and perennial. Caprices of taste will reveal themselves and will vanish ; fash- ions will rise and will fall ; but these muta- SIR WALTER SCOTT. 279 tions toucli nothing that is elemental and they will no more displace Scott than they will displace Shakespeare. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott — valu- able for its copious variety of thought, humour, anecdote, and chronicle — is pre- cious, most of all, for the confirmatory light that it casts upon the character of its writer. It has long been known that Scott's nature was exceptionally noble, that his patience was beautiful, that his endurance was heroic. These pages disclose to his votaries that he surpassed even the highest ideal of him that their affectionate partiality has formed. The period that it covers was that of his adversity and decline. He began it on November 20, 1825, in his town house, No. 39 Castle street, Edinburgh, and he continued it, with almost daily entries — except for various sadly significant breaks, after July 1830 — until April 16, 1832. Five months later, on September 21, he was dead. He opened it with the expression of a regret that he had not kept a regular journal dur- ing the whole of his life. He had just seen some chapters of Byron's vigorous, breezy, off-hand memoranda, and the perusal of those inspiriting pages had revived in his mind the long-cherished, often-deferred plan 28o SIR WALTER SCOTT. of keeping a diary. " I have myself lost recollection," lie says, "of much that was interesting, and I have deprived my family and the public of some curious information by not carrying this resolution into effect." Having once begun the work he steadily persevered in it, and evidently he found a comfort in its companionship. He wrote directly, and therefore fluently, setting down exactly what was in his mind from day to day ; but, as he had a well-stored and well-ordered mind, he wrote with rea- son and taste, seldom about petty matters, and never in the strain of insipid babble that egotistical scribblers mistake for the spontaneous flow of nature. The facts that he recorded were mostly material facts, and the reflections that he added, whether se- rious or humorous, were important. Some- times a bit of history would glide into the current of the chronicle ; sometimes a frag- ment of a ballad ; sometimes an analytic sketch of character — subtle, terse, clear, and obviously true ; sometimes a memory of the past ; sometimes a portraiture of incidents in the present ; sometimes a glimpse of political life, a word about paint- ing, a reference to music or the stage, an anecdote, a tale of travel, a trait of social SIR WALTER SCOTT. 28 1 manners, a precept upon conduct, or a thought upon religion and the destiny of mankind. There was no pretence of order and there was no consciousness of an audience ; yet the Journal unconsciously assumed a symmetrical form ; and largely because of the spontaneous operation of its author's fine literary instinct it became a composition worthy of the best readers. It is one of the saddest and one of the strong- est books ever written. The original manuscript of this remark- able work is contained in two volumes, bound in vellum, each volume being fur- nished with a steel clasp that can be fas- tened. The covers are slightly tarnished by time. The paper is yellow with age. The handwriting is fine, cramped, and often obscure. "This hand of mine," writes Scott (vol. 1. page 386), " gets to be like a kitten's scratch, and will require much de- ciphering, or, what may be as well for the writer, cannot be deciphered at all, I am sure I cannot read it myself." The first volume is full of writing ; the second about half full. Toward the end the record is almost illegible. Scott was then at Rome, on that melancholy, mistaken journey whereby it had been hoped, but hoped in 282 SIR WALTER SCOTT. vain, that lie would recover his health. The last entry that he made is this unfinished sentence : ' ' We slept reasonably, but on the next morning ." It is not known that he ever wrote a word after that time. Lockhart, who had access to his papers, made some use of the Journal in his Life of ScoU^ which is one of the best biographies in our language ; but the greater part of it was withheld from publication till a more auspicious time for its perfect candour of speech. To hold those volumes and to look upon their pages — so eloquent of the great author's industry, so significant of his character, so expressive of his inmost soul — was almost to touch the hand of the Minstrel himself, to see his smile, and to hear his voice. Now that they have ful- filled their purpose, and imparted their in- estimable treasure to the world, they are restored to the ebony cabinet at Abbotsf ord, there to be treasured among the most precious relics of the past. " It is the sad- dest house in Scotland," their editor, David Douglas, said to me, when we were walking together upon the Braid Hills, ' ' for to my fancy every stone in it is cemented with tears." Sad or glad, it is a shrine to which reverent pilgrims find their way from every SIR WALTER SCOTT. 283 quarter of the earth, and it will be honoured and cherished forever. The great fame of Scott had been acquired by the time he began to write his Journal, and it rested upon a broad foundation of solid achievement. He was fifty-four years old, having been born August 15, 1771, the same year in which Smollett died. He had been an author for about thirty years — his first publication, a translation of Biirger's Lenore, having appeared in 1796, the same year that was darkened by the death of Robert Burns. His social eminence also had been established. He had been sheriff of Selkirk for twenty-five years. He had been for twenty years a clerk of the Court of Session. He had been for five years a baronet, having received that rank from King George IV., who always loved and admired him, in 1820. He had been for fourteen years the owner of Abbotsford, which he bought in 1811, occupied in 1812, and completed in 1824. He was yet to write Woodstock., the six tales called The Chronicles of the Canongate, The Fair Maid of Perth, Anne of Geierstein, Count Bohert of Paris, Castle Dangerotis, the Life of Napoleon, and the lovely Stories from the History of Scotland. All those works, 284 SIR WALTER SCOTT. together with many essays and reviews, were produced by him between 1825 and 1832, while also he was maintaining a con- siderable correspondence, doing his official duties, writing his Journal^ and carry- ing a suddenly imposed load of debt — which finally his herculean labours paid — amounting to £130,000. But between 1805 and 1817 he had written The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Ballads and Lyrical Pieces, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, The Vision of Don Roderick, Bokehy, The Lord of the Lsles, The Field of Waterloo, and Harold the Dauntless, — thus creating a great and diversified body of poetry, then in a new school and a new style, in which, although he has often been imitated, he never has been equalled. Between 1814 and 1825 he had likewise produced Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mor- tality, 'The Blaick Dwarf Boh Roy, Tlie Heart of Midlothian, A Legend of Mon- trose, The Bride of Lammermoor, Ivanhoe, The Monastery, TJie Abbot, Kenilworth, The Firate, the Fortunes of Nigel, Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, St. Ronan''s Well, Redgauntlet, The Betrothed, and The Talisman. This vast body of fiction was also a new creation in literature, for SIR WALTER SCOTT. 285 the English novel prior to Scott's time was the novel of manners, as chiefly represented by the works of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. That admirable author, Miss Jane Porter, had, indeed, written the Scottish Chiefs (1809), in which the note of imagi- nation, as applied to the treatment of his- torical fact and character, rings true and clear ; and probably that beautiful book should be remembered as the beginning of English historical romance. Scott himself said that it was the parent, in his mind, of the Waverley Novels. But he surpassed it. Another and perhaps a deeper impulse to the composition of those novels was the consciousness, when Lord Byron, by the publication of Childe Harold (the first and second cantos, in 1812), suddenly checked or eclipsed his immediate popularity as a poet, that it would be necessary for him to strike out a new path. He had begun Waverley in 1805 and thrown the fragment aside. He took it up again in 1814, wrought upon it for three weeks and finished it, and so began the career of " the Great Unknown." The history of literature pre- sents scarce a comparable example of such splendid industry sustained upon such a high level of endeavour, animated by such a 286 SIR WALTER SCOTT. glorious genius, and resultant in such a noble and beneficent fruition. The life of Balzac, whom his example inspired, and who may be accounted the greatest of French writers since Voltaire, is perhaps the only life that drifts suggestively into the scholar's memory as he thinks of the prodigious labours of Sir Walter Scott. During the days of his prosperity Scott maintained his manor at Abbotsford and his town-house in Edinburgh, and he fre- quently migrated from one to the other, dispensing a liberal hospitality at both. He was not one of those authors who think that there is nothing in the world but pen and ink. He esteemed living to be more impor- tant than writing about it, and the develop- ment of the soul to be a grander result than the production of a book. ' ' I hate an author that's all author," said Byron ; and in this virtuous sentiment Scott participated. His character and conduct, his miaffected mod- esty as to his own works, his desire to found a great house and to maintain a stately rank among the land-owners of his country, have, for this reason, been greatly misunderstood by dull people. They never, indeed, would have found the least fault with him if he had not become a bankrupt ; for the mouth of SIR WALTER SCOTT. 287 every dunce is stopped by practical success. When lie got into debt, though, it was dis- covered that he ought to have had a higher ambition than the wish to maintain a place among the landed gentry of Scotland ; and even though he ultimately paid his debts — literally working himself to death to do it — he was not forgiven by that class of censors ; and to some extent their chatter of paltry disparagement still survives. While he was rich, however, his halls were thronged with fashion, rank, and renown. Edinburgh, still the stateliest city on which the sun looks down, must have been, in the last days of George III. , a place of peculiar beauty, opu- lence, and social brilliancy. Scott, whose father was a Writer to the Signet, and who derived his descent from a good old Border family — the Scotts of Harden — had, from his youth, been accustomed to refined society and elegant surroundings. He was born and reared a gentleman, and a gentleman he never ceased to be. His father's house was in George Square (No. 25), then an aristo- cratic quarter, now somewhat fallen into the sere and yellow. In that house, as a boy, he saw some of the most distinguished men of the age. In after years, when his for- tunes were ripe and his fame as a poet had 288 sir' WALTER SCOTT. been established, he drew around himself a kindred class of associates. The record of his life blazes with splendid names. As a lad of fifteen, in 1786, he saw Burns, then twenty-seven, and in the heyday of fame ; and he also saw Dugald Stewart, seventeen years his senior. Lord Jeffrey was his con- temporary and friend — only two years younger than himself. With Henry Mac- kenzie, "the Addison of Scotland" — born in the first year of the last Jacobite rebel- lion, and therefore twenty-six years his senior — he lived on terms of cordial friend- ship. David Hume, who died when Scott was but five years old, was one of the great celebrities of his early days ; and doubtless Scott saw the Calton Hill when it was as Jane Porter remembered it, "a vast green slope, with no other buildings breaking the line of its smooth and magnificent brow but Hume's monument on one part and the astronomical observatory on the other." He knew John Home, the author of Douglas, who was his senior by forty-seven years ; and among his miscellaneous prose writings there is an effective review of Home's works, which was written for the Quarterly, in March 1827. Among the actors his espe- cial friends were John Philip Kemble, Mrs. SIR WALTER SCOTT. 289 Siddons, the elder Mathews, John Ban- nister, and Daniel Terry. He knew Yates also, and he saw Miss Foote, Fanny Kem- ble, and the Mathews of our day as " a clever, rather forward lad," Goethe was his correspondent. Byron was his friend and fervent admirer. Wordsworth and Moore were among his visitors and especial favourites. The aged Dr. Adam Ferguson was one of his intimates. Hogg, when in trouble, always sought him, and always was helped and comforted. He was the literary sponsor for Thomas Campbell. He met Madame D'Arblay, who was nine- teen years his senior, when she was seventy- eight years old ; and the author of Evelina talked with him, in the presence of old Samuel Rogers, then sixty-three, about her father, Dr. Burney, and the days of Dr. Johnson. He was honoured with the cordial regard of the great Duke of Wellington, a contemporary, being only two years his senior. He knew Croker, Haydon, Chan- trey, Landseer, Sydney Smith, and Theo- dore Honk. He read Vivian Greif as a new publication and saw Disraeli as a beginner. Coleridge he met and marvelled at. Mrs. Coutts, who had been Harriet Mellon, the singer, and who became the Duchess of St. T 290 SIR WALTER SCOTT. Albans, was a favourite with him. He knew and liked that savage critic William Gifford. His relations with Sir Humphry Davy, seven years his senior, were those of kind- ness. He had a great regard for Lord Castlereagh and Lord Melville. He liked Robert Southey, and he cherished a deep affection for the poet Crabbe, who was twenty-three years older than himself, and who died in the same year. Of Sir George Beaumont, the fond friend and wise patron of Wordsworth, who died in February 1827, Scott wrote that he was ' ' by far the most sensible and pleasing man I ever knew." Amid a society such as is indicated by those names Scott passed his life. The brilliant days of the Canongate indeed were gone, when all those wynds and closes that fringe the historic avenue from the Castle to Holy- rood were as clean as wax, and when the loveliest ladies of Scotland dwelt amongst them, and were borne in their chairs from one house of festivity to another. But New street, once the home of Lord Kames, still retained some touch of its ancient finery. St. John street, where once lived Lord Monboddo and his beautiful daughter, Miss Burnet (immortalised by Burns) , and where (at No. 10) Ballantyne often convoked ad- SIR WALTER SCOTT. 29I mirers of the unknown author of Waverley, was still a cleanly j)lace. Alison Square, George Square, Buccleuch Place, and kin- dred quarters were still tenanted by the polished classes of the stately old-time so- ciety of Edinburgh. The movement north- ward had begun but as yet it was inconsider- able. In those old drawing-rooms Scott was an habitual visitor, as also he was in many of the contiguous county manors — in Seton House, and Pinkie House, and Blackford, and Eavelstone, and Craigcrook, and Caroline Park, and wherever else the intellect, beauty, rank, and fashion of the Scottish capital assembled ; and it is certain that after his marriage, in December 1797, with Miss Charlotte Margaret Carpenter the scenes of hospitality and of elegant fes- tival were numerous and gay, and were peopled with all that was brightest in the ancient city, beneath his roof-tree in Castle street and his turrets of Abbotsford. There came a time, however, when the fabric of Scott's fortunes was to be shat- tered and his imperial genius bowed into the dust. He had long been a business associate with Constable, his publisher, and also with Ballantyne, his printer. The publishing business failed and they were 292 SIR WALTER SCOTT. ruined together. It has long been customary to place the blame for that catastrophe on Constable alone. Mr. Douglas, who has edited the Journal with characteristic dis- cretion and taste, records his opinion that "the three parties — printer, publisher, and author — were equal sharers in the im- prudences that led to the disaster ' ' ; and he directs attention to the fact that the charge that Constable ruined Scott was not made during the lifetime of either. It matters little now in what way the ruin was induced. Mismanagement caused it, and not misdeed. There was a blunder, but there was no fraud. The honour of all the men con- cerned stands vindicated before the world. Moreover, the loss was retrieved and the debt was paid — Scott's share of it in full : the other shares in part. It is to the period of this ordeal that Scott's Journal mainly relates. Great though he had been in pros- perity, he was to show himself greater amid the storms of disaster and affliction. The earlier pages of the diary are cheerful, vigorous, and confident. The mind of the writer is in no alarm. Presently the sky changes and the tempest breaks ; and from that time onward you behold a spectacle of indomitable will, calm resolution, inflexible SIR WALTER SCOTT. 293 purpose, patient endurance, steadfast indus- try, and productive genius tliat is simply sublime. Many facts of living interest and many gems of subtle thought and happy phrase are found in his daily record. The observations on immortality are in a fine strain. The remarks on music, on dramatic poetry, on the operation of the mental faculties, on painting, and on national char- acteristics, are freighted with suggestive thought. But the noble presence of the man overshadows even his best words. He lost his fortune in December 1825. His wife died in May 1826. On the pages that immediately follow his note of this bereave- ment Scott has written occasional words that no one can read unmoved, and that no one who has suffered can read without a pang that is deeper than tears. But his spirit was slow to break. "Duty to God and to my chil ii en," he said, "must teach me patience." Once he speaks of "the loneliness of th?se watches of the night." Not mitil his debts were paid and his duties fulfilled \^'ould that great soul yield. ' ' I may be bringing on some serious disease," he remarks, "by working thus hard ; if I had once justice done to other folks, I do not much care, only I would not 294 ^11^ WALTER SCOTT. like to suffer long pain. ' ' A little later the old spirit shows itself : " I do not like to have it thought that there is any way in which I can be beaten. . . . Let us use the time and faculties which God has left us, and trust futurity to His guidance. ... I want to finish my task, and then good-night. I will never relax my labour in these affairs either for fear of pain or love of life. I will die a free man, if hard working will do it. . . . My spirits are neither low nor high — grave, I think, and quiet — a complete twilight of the mind. . . . God help — but rather God bless — man must help himself. . . . The best is, the long halt will arrive at last and cure all. ... It is my dogged humour to yield little to external circum- stances. ... I shall never see the three- score and ten, and shall be summed up at a discount. No help for it, and no matter either." In the mood of mingled submis- sion and resolve denoted by these sentences (which occur at long intervals in the story), he wi'ought at his task until it was finished. By Woodstock he earned £8000; by the Life of Napoleon £18,000 ; by other writ- ings still other sums. The details of his toil appear day by day in these simple pages, tragic through all their simplicity. He was SIR WALTER SCOTT. 295 a heart-broken man from the hour when his wife died, but he sustained himself by force of will and sense of honour, and he en- dured and worked till the end without a murmur ; and when he had done his task he laid down his pen and died. The lesson of Scott's Journal is the most important lesson that experience can teach. It is taught in two words — honour and duty. Nothing is more obvious, from the nature and environment and the conse- quent condition of the human race, than the fact that this world is not, and was not intended to be, a place of settled happiness. All human beings have troubles, and as the years pass away those troubles become more numerous, more heavy, and more hard to bear. The ordeal through which human- ity is passing is an ordeal of discipline for spiritual development. To live in honour, to labour with steadfast industry, and to endure with cheerful patience is to be vic- torious. Whatever in literature will illus- trate this doctrine, and whatever in human example will commend and enforce it, is of transcendent value ; and that value is inher- ent in the example of Sir Walter Scott. 296 ELEGIAC MEMORIALS. XXI. ELEGIAC MEMORIALS. ONE denotement — among many — of a genial change, a relaxation of the old ecclesiastical austerity long prevalent in Scotland, is perceptible in the lighter char- acter of her modern sepulchral monuments. In the old churchyard of St, Michael, at Dumfries, the burial-place of Burns, there is a hideous, dismal mass of misshapen, weather-beaten masonry, the mere aspect of which — before any of its gruesome in- scriptions are read — is a rebuke to hope and an alarm to despair. Thus the relig- ionists of old tried to make death terrible. Much of this same order of abhorrent archi- tecture — the ponderous exponent of im- mitigable woe — may be found in the old Greyfriars churchyard in Edinburgh, and in that of the Canongate. But the pilgrim to the Dean cemetery and the Warriston — both comparatively modern, and beautifully situated at different points on the north ELEGIAC MEMORIALS. 297 side of the Water of Leith — finds them adorned with every grace that can hallow the repose of the dead, or soothe the grief, or mitigate the fear, or soften the bitter resentment of the living. Hope, and not despair, is the spirit of the new epoch in religion, and it is hope not merely for a sect but for all mankind. The mere physical loveliness of those cemeteries may well tempt you to explore them ; but no one will neglect them who cares for the storied associations of the past. Walking in the Dean, on an after- noon half-cloudy and half-bright, when the large trees that guard its western limit and all the masses of foliage in the dark ravine of the Leith were softly rustling in the balmy summer wind, while overhead and far aromid the solemn cawing of the rooks mmgled sleepily with the twitter of the sparrows, I thought, as I paced the sunlit aisles, that Nature could nowhere show a scene of sweeter peace. In this gentle sol- itude has been laid to its everlasting rest all that could die of some of the greatest leaders of thought in modern Scotland. It was no common experience to muse beside the tomb of Francis Jeffrey — the formida- ble Lord Jeffrey of The Edinhuryh Beview. 290 ELEGIAC MEMORIALS. He lies buried near tlie great wall on the western side of the Dean cemetery, with his wife beside him. A flat, oblong stone tomb, imposed upon a large stone platform and overshadowed with tall trees, marks the place, on one side of which is written that once-famous and dreaded name, now spoken with indifference or not spoken at all : " Francis Jeffrey. Born Oct. 23, 1773. Died Jan. 25, 1850." On the end of the tomb is a medallion portrait of Jeffrey, in bronze. It is a profile, and it shows a sym- metrical head, a handsome face — severe, refined, frigid — and altogether it is the de- notement of a personality remarkable for the faculty of taste and the instinct of decorum, though not for creative power. Close by Lord Jeffrey, a little to the south, are buried Sir Archibald Alison, the his- torian of Europe, and Henry Cockburn, the great jurist. Combe, the philosopher, rests near the south front of the wall that bisects this cemetery from east to west. Not far from the memorials of these famous persons is a shaft of honour to Lieutenant John Irving, who was one of the companions of Sir John Franklin, and who perished amid the Polar ice in King William's Land in 1848-49. ELEGIAC MEMORIALS. 299 In another part of the ground a tall cross commemorates David Scott, the painter (1807-18i9), presenting a superb effigy of his head, in one of the most animated pieces of bronze that have copied human life. Against the eastern wall, on the terrace overlooking the ravine and the rapid Water of Leith, stands the tombstone of John Blackwood, " Editor of Blackwood'' s Maga- zine for thirty-three years : Died at Strath- tyrum, 29th Oct. 1879. Age 60." This inscription, cut upon a broad white marble, with scroll-work at the base, and set against the wall, is surmounted with a coat of arms, in gray stone, bearing the motto, " Per vias rectas." Many other eminent names may be read in this garden of death ; but most interesting of all, and those that most of all I sought, are the names of Wilson and Aytoun. Those worthies were buried close together, almost in the centre of the ceme- tery. The grave of the great ' ' Christopher North " is marked by a simple monolith of Aberdeen granite, beneath a tree, and it bears only this inscription ; ' ' John Wilson, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Born 18th of May, 1785. Died 3d April, 1854." Far more elaborate is the white marble monu- ment — a square tomb, with carvings of re- 300 ELEGIAC MEMORIALS. cessed Gothic windows on its sides, support- ing a tall cross — erected to the memory of Aytoun and of his wife, who was Wilson's daughter. The inscriptions tell their suffi- cient story : " Jane Emily Wilson, beloved wife of William Edmondstoune Aytoun. Obiit 15 April, 1859." " Here is laid to rest William Edmondstoune Aytoun, D.C.L., Oxon., Professor of Ehetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh. Sheriff of Orkney and Zetland. Born at Edinburgh, 21st June, 1813. Died at Black- hills, Elgin, 4tli August, 1865. ' Waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.' 1 Cor. i. 7." So they sleep, the poets, wits, and scholars that were once so bright in genius, so gay in spirit, so splendid in achievement, so vigorous in affluent and brilliant life ! It is the old story, and it teaches the old moral. Warriston, not more beautiful than Dean, is perhaps more beautiful in situation ; cer- tainly it commands a more beautiful pros- pect. You will visit Warriston for the sake of Alexander Smith ; for you have not forgotten the Life Drama, the City Poems, Edwin of Deira, Alfred HagarVs House- hold, and A Summer in Skye. He lies in the northeast corner of the ground, at the foot ELEGIAC MEMORIALS. 30I of a large lona cross which is bowered by a chestnut-tree. Above him the green sod is like a carpet of satin. The cross is thickly- carved with laurel, thistle, and holly, and it bears upon its front the face of the poet, in bronze, and the harp that betokens his art. It is a bearded face, having small, refined features, a slightly pouted, sensitive mouth, and being indicative more of nervous sensi- bility than of rugged strength. The inscrip- tion gives simply his name and dates : "Alexander Smith, Poet and Essayist. Born at Kilmarnock, 31st December, 1829. Died at Wardie, 5th January, 1867 . Erected by some of his personal Friends." Standing by his grave, at the foot of this cross, you can gaze straight away southward to Ar- thur's Seat, and behold the whole line of imperial Edinburgh at a glance, from the Calton Hill to the Castle. It is such a spot as he would have chosen for his sepulchre — face to face with the city that he so dearly loved. Near him on the east wall appears a large slab of Aberdeen granite, to mark the grave of still another Scottish worthy, "James Ballantine, Poet. Born 11th June, 1808. Died 18th Dec, 1877." And mid- way along the slope of the northern terrace, a little eastward of the chapel, under a free- 302 ELEGIAC MEMORIALS. stone monolith bearing the butterfly that is Nature's symbol of immortality, you will see the grave of " Sir James Young Simpson, Bart., M.D., D.C.L. Born 1811. Died 1870." And if you are weary of thinking about the evanescence of the poets you can reflect that there was no exemption from the common lot even for one of the greatest physical benefactors of the human race. The oldest and the most venerable and mysterious of the cemeteries of Edinburgh is that of the Grey friars. Irregular in shape and uneven in surface, it encircles its famous old church, in the haunted neigh- bourhood of the West Bow, and is itself hemmed in with many buildings. More than four centuries ago this was the garden of the Monastery of the Greyfriars, founded by James I. of Scotland, and thus it gets its name. The monastery disappeared long ago : the garden was turned into a grave- yard in the time of Queen Mary Stuart, and by her order. The building, called the Old Church, dates back to 1G12, but it was burnt in 1845 and subsequently restored. Here the National Covenant was subscribed (1638) by the lords and by the people, and ■ in this doubly consecrated ground are laid ELEGIAC MEMORIALS. 303 the remains of many of those heroic Cove- nanters who subsequently suffered death for conscience and their creed. There is a large book of The Epitaphs and Monu- mental Inscriptions in Greyfriars Church- yard made by James Brown, keei^er of the grounds, and published in 1867. That record does not pretend to be complete, and yet it mentions no less than two thousand two hundred and seventy-one persons who are sepulchred in this place. Among those sleepers are Duncan Forbes of Culloden ; Robert Mylne, who built a part of Holyrood Palace ; Sir George Mackenzie, the persecutor of the Covenan- ters ; Carstares, the adviser of King AVil- liam III. ; Sir Adam Ferg-uson ; Henry Mackenzie ; Robertson and Ty tier, the histo- rians ; Sir Walter Scott's father ; and several of the relatives of Mrs. Siddons. Captain John Porteous, who was hanged in the Grass-market by riotous citizens of Edin- burgh, on the night of September 7, 1736, and whose story is so vividly told in TJie Heart of Midlothian, was buried in the Greyfriars Churchyard, "three dble. pace from the S. corner Chalmers' tomb " (1730). James Brown's record of the churchyard contains various particulars, quoted from 304 ELEGIAC MEMORIALS. the old church register. Of William Rob- ertson, minister of the parish, who died in 1745, we read that he "lies near the tree next Blackwood's ground." "Mr. Allan Ramsay," says the same quaint chronicle, "lies 6 dble. paces southwest the blew stone : A poet : old age : Buried 9th Janu- ary 1758." Christian Ross, his wife, who preceded the aged bard by fifteen years, lies in the same grave. Sir Walter Scott's father was laid there on April 18, 1799, and his daughter Anne was placed beside him in 1801. In a letter addressed to his brother Thomas, in 1819, Sir Walter wrote : " When poor Jack was buried in the Grey- friars churchyard, where my father and Anne lie, I thought their graves more en- croached upon than I liked to witness." The remains of the Regent Morton were, it is said, wrapped in a cloak and secretly buried there at night — June 2, 1581 — low down toward the northern wall. The sup- posed grave of the superb Latin poet George Buchanan ("the elegant Buchanan," Dr. Johnson calls him) is not distant from this spot ; and in the old church may be seen a beautiful window, a triple lancet, in the south aisle, placed there to commemorate that illustrious author. ELEGIAC MEMORIALS. 305 Hugh Miller and Dr. Chalmers were laid in the Grange cemetery, which is in the southern part of the city, near Morningside. Adam Smith is commemorated by a heavy piece of masonry, over his dust, at the south end of the Canongate churcliyard, and Dugald Stewart by a ponderous tomb at the north end of it, where he was buried, as also by the monument on the Calton Hill. It is to see Ferguson's gravestone, however, that the pilgrim explores the Canongate churchyard — and a dreary place it is for the last rest of a poet. Robert Burns placed the stone, and on the back of it is inscribed: "By special grant of the mana- gers to Robert Burns, who erected this stone, this burial-place is to remain for ever sacred to Robert Ferguson." That poet was born September 6, 1751, and died October 16, 1774. These lines, written by Burns, with an intentional reminiscence of Gray, whose Elegy he fervently admired, are his epitaph — " No sculptured marl)le here, nor pompous lay, No storied urn nor animated bust — This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way To pour her sorrows o'er her Poet's dust." One of the greatest minds of Scotland, and indeed of the world, was David Hume, u 306 ELEGIAC MEMORIALS. who could think more clearly and express his thoughts more precisely and cogently upon great subjects than almost any meta- physician of our English-speaking race. His tomb is in the old Calton cemetery, close by the prison, a grim Roman tower, pre- dominant over the Waverley Vale and visible from every part of it. This structure is open to the sky, and within it and close around its interior edge nine melancholy bushes are making a forlorn effort' to grow in the stony soil that covers the great his- torian's dust. There is an urn above the door of this mausoleum and surmounting the urn is this inscription : ' ' David Hume. Born April 26th, 1711. Died August 25th, 1776. Erected in memory of him in 1778." In another part of this ground you may find the sepulchre of Sir Walter Scott's friend and publisher, Archibald Constable, born 24th February 1774, died 21st July 1827. Several priests were roaming over the ceme- tery when I saw it, making its dismal aspect still more dismal by that rook-like, unctuous, furtive aspect which often marks the eccle- siastic of the Roman Catholic church. Another great man, Thomas de Quincey, is buried in the old churchyard of the West church, that lies in the valley just beneath ELEGIAC MEMORIAL*. 307 the west front of the crag of Edinhurgh Castle. I went to that spot on a bright and lovely autumn evening. The place was deserted, except for the presence of a gardener, to whom I made my request that he would guide me to the grave of De Quin- cej^ It is an inconspicuous place, marked by a simple slab of dark stone, set against the wall, in an angle of the enclosure, on a slight acclivity. As you look upward from this spot you see the grim, magnificent cas- tle frovming on its precipitous height. The grave was covered thick with grass, and in a narrow trench of earth cut in the sod around it many pansies and marigolds were in bloom. Upon the gravestone is written : "Sacred to the memory of Thomas de Quincey, who was born at Greenhay, near Manchester, August 15th, 1785, and died in Edinburgh, December 8th, 1859. And of Margaret, his wife, who died August 7, 1837." Just over the honoured head of the illustrious sleeper were two white daisies peeping through the green ; one of which I thought it not a sin to take away — for it is the symbol at once of peace and hope, and therefore a sufficient embodiment of the best that death can teach. 308 SCOTTISH PICTURES. XXII. SCOTTISH PICTURES. STRONACHLACHEK, Loch Katrine, September 1, 1890. — No one needs to be told that the Forth bridge is a wonder. All the world knows it, and knows that the art of the engineer has here achieved its masterpiece. The bridge is not beautiful, whether viewed from afar or close at hand. You see it — or some part of it — from every height to which you mount in Edinburgh. It is visible from the Calton Hill, from the Nelson column, from the Scott monument,, from the ramparts of the Castle, from Salis- bury Crags, from the Braid Hills, and of course from the eminence of Arthur's Seat. Other objects of interest there are which seek the blissful shade, but the Forth bridge is an object of interest that insists upon being seen. The visitor to the shores of the Forth need not mount any height in order to perceive it, for all along those shores, from Dirleton to Leith and from Elie I- SCOTTISH PICTURES. 309 to Burntisland, it frequently comes into the picture. While, however, it is not beautiful, it impresses the observer with a sense of colossal magnificence. It is a more triumphant structure even than the Eiffel tower, and it predominates over the vision and the imagination by the same audacity of purpose and the same consummate fulfilment which mark that other marvel and establish it in universal admiration. Crossing the bridge early this morning I deeply felt its superb potentiality, and was charmed like- wise with its pictorial effect. That effect is no doubt due in part to its accessories. Both ways the broad expanse of the Forth was visible for many miles. It was a still morn- ing, overcast and mournful. There was a light breeze from the southeast, — the air at that elevation being as sweet as new milk. Beneath, far down, the surface of the steel- gray water was wrinkled like the scaly back of a fish. Midway a little island rears its spine of rock out of the stream. Westward at some distance rises a crag, on which is a tiny lighthouse-tower, painted red. The long, graceful stone piers that stretch into the Forth at this point, — which are break- waters to form a harbour, — and all the little gray houses of Queensferry, Inverkeithing, 3IO SCOTTISH PICTURES. and the adjacent villages looked like the toy buildings which are the playthings of chil- dren. A steamboat was making her way up the river, while near the shores were many small boats swinging at their moor- ings, for the business of the day v^as not yet begun. Over this scene the scarce-risen sun, much obscured by dull clouds, cast a faint rosy light — and even while the picture was at its best we glided away from it into the pleasant land of Fife. In former days the traveller to Stirling commonly went by the w^ay of Linlithgow, •which is the place where Mary Stuart was born, and he was all the more prompted to think of that enchanting woman because he usually caught a glimpse of the ruins of Nid- dry Castle — one of the houses of her faith- ful Lord Seton — at which she rested, on the romantic and memorable occasion of her flight from Loch Leven. Now, since the Forth bridge has been opened, the most direct route to Stirling is by Dunfermline. And this is a gain, for Dunfermline is one of the most interesting places in Scotland. That Malcolm of whom we catch a glimpse when we see a representation of Shakespeare's tragedy of Macbeth had a royal castle there nine hundred years ago, of which a frag- SCOTTISH PICTURES. 3 II raent still remains ; and on a slope of the Coast, a few miles west from Dunfermline, the vigilant antiquarian has fixed the site of Macduff's castle, where Lady Macduff and her children were slaughtered by the tyrant. In the ancient church at Dunfermline, the church of the Holy Trinity, — devastated at the Reformation, but since restored, — you may see the great blue-gray stone which covers the tomb of Malcolm and of Margaret, his queen — an angel among women when she lived, and worthy to be remembered now as the saint that her church has made her. The body of Margaret, who died at Edinburgh Castle, November 16, 1093, was secretly and hastily conveyed to Dunferm- line, and there buried, — Edinburgh Castle (The Maiden Castle it was then called) being assailed by her husband's brother, Donald Bane. The remains of that noble and devoted woman, however, do not rest in that tomb, for long afterward, at the Reformation, they were taken away, and after various wanderings were enshrined at the church of St. Lawrence in the Escu- rial. I had often stood in the little chapel that this good queen founded in Edinburgh Castle, — a place which they desecrate now, by using it as a shop for the sale of pictures 312 SCOTTISH PICTUKES. and memorial trinkets, — and I was soon to stand in the ruins of Saint Oran's chapel in far lona, which also was built by her ; and so it was with many reverent thoughts of an exalted soul and a beneficent life that I saw the great dark tower of Dunfermline church vanish in the distance. At Stirling the rain, which had long been lowering, came down in floods, and after that for many hours there was genuine Scotch weather and a copious abundance of it. This also is an experience, and, although that superb drive over the mountain from Aberfoyle to Loch Katrine was marred by the wet, I was well pleased to see the Trosach country in storm, which I had before seen in sunshine. It is a land of in- finite variety, and lovely even in tempest. The majesty of the rocky heights ; the bleak and barren loneliness of the treeless hills ; the many thread-like waterfalls which, seen afar off, are like ri\Tilets of silver frozen into stillness on the mountain-sides ; the occasional apparition of precipitous peaks, over which presently are driven the white streamers of the mist — all these are strik- ing elements of a scene which blends into the perfection of grace the qualities of gentle beauty and wild romance. Ben SCOTTISH PICTURES. 313 Lomond in the west and Ben Venue and Ben Ledi in the north were indistinct, and so was Ben A' an in its nearer cloud ; but a brisk wind had swept tlie mists from Loch Drunkie, and under a bleak sky the smooth surface of "lovely Loch Achray " shone like a liquid diamond. An occasional grouse rose from the ferns and quickly winged its way to cover. A few cows, wet but indif- ferent, composed, and contented, were now and then visible, grazing in that desert; while high upon the crags appeared many sure-footed sheep, the inevitable inhabitants of those solitudes. So onward, breathing the sweet air that here was perfumed by miles and miles of purple heather, I de- scended through the dense coppice of birch and pine that fringes Loch Katrine, and all in a moment came out upon the levels of the lake. It was a long sail down Loch Katrine for a pilgrim drenched and chilled by the steady fall of a penetrating rain ; but Ellen's Isle and Fitz-James's silver strand brought pleasant memories of one of the sweetest of stories, and all the lonesome waters seemed haunted with a ghostly pageant of the radiant standards of Roderick Dhu. To-night the mists are on the mountains, and upon this little pine-clad promontory ot 314 SCOTTISH PICTURES. Stronachlacher the darkness comes down early and seems to close it in from all the world. The waters of Loch Katrine are black and gloomy and no sound is heard but the rush of the rain and the sigh of the pines. It is a night for memory and for thought, and to them let it be devoted. The night- wind that sobs in the trees — Ah, would that my spirit could tell What an infinite meaning it breathes, What a sorrow and longing it wakes I < n IMPERIAL RUINS. 315 XXIII. IMPERIAL RUINS. OBAN, September 4, 1890. — Going west- ward from Stronachlacher a drive of several delicious miles, through the country of Rob Roy, ends at Inversnaid and the shore of Loch Lomond. The rain had passed, but under a dusky, lowering sky the dense white mists, driven by a fresh morning wind, were drifting along the heath- clad hills, like a pageant of angels trailing robes of light. Loch Arklet and the little shieling where was born Helen, the wife of the Macgregor, were soon past — a peaceful region smiling in the vale ; and presently, along the northern bank of the Arklet, whose copious, dark, and rapid waters, broken into foam upon their rocky bed, make music all the way, I descended that precipitous road to Loch Lomond which, through many a devious turning and sudden peril in the fragrant coppice, reaches safety at last in one of the wildest of Highland 3l6 IMPERIAL RUINS. glens. This drive is a chief delight of High- land travel, and it appears to be one that "the march of improvement" — meaning the extension of railways — can never abol- ish ; for, besides being solitary and beauti- ful, the way is difficult. You easily divine what a sanctuary that region must have been to the bandit chieftain, when no road traversed it save perhaps a sheep-track or a path for horses, and when it was darkly cov- ered with the thick pines of the Caledonian forest. Scarce a living creature was any- where visible. A few hardy sheep, indeed, were grazing on the mountain slopes ; a few cattle were here and there couched among the tall ferns ; and sometimes a sable com- pany of rooks flitted by, cawing drearily overhead. Once I saw the slow-stepping, black-faced, puissant Highland bull, with his menacing head and his dark air of sus- pended hostility and inevitable predomi- nance. All the cataracts in those mountain glens were at the flood because of the con- tinuous heavy rains of an uncommonly wet season, and at Inversnaid the magnifi- cent waterfall — twin sister to Lodore and Aira Force — came down in great floods of black and silver, and with a long resounding roar that seemed to shake the forest. Soon IMPERIAL RUINS. 317 the welcome sun began to pierce the mists ; patches of soft blue sky became visible through rifts in the gray ; and a glorious rainbow, suddenly cast upon a mountain- side of opposite Inveruglas, spanned the whole glittering fairy realm with its great arch of incommunicable splendour. The place of Rob Roy's cavern was seen, as the boat glided down Loch Lomond, — a snug nest in the wooded crag, — and, after all too brief a sail upon those placid ebon waters, I mounted the coach that plies between Ardlui and Crianlarich. Not much time will now elapse before this coach is displaced — for they are building a railroad through Glen Falloch, which, running southerly from Crianlarich, will skirt the western shore of Loch Lomond and reach to Balloch and Helensburgh, and thus will make the railway communication complete, continu- ous, and direct between Glasgow and Oban. At intervals all along the glen were visible the railway embankments, the piles of " sleepers," the heaps of steel rails, the sheds of the builders, and the red flag of the dynamite blast. The new road will be a popular line of travel. No land " that the eye of heaven visits " is lovelier than this one. But it may perhaps be questioned 315 IMPERIAL RUINS. whether the exquisite loveliness of the Scottish Highlands will not become vulgar- ised by over-easiness of accessibility. Se- questration is one of the elements of the beautiful, and numbers of people invariably make common everything upon which they swarm. But nothing can debase the un- conquerable majesty of those encircling mountains, I saw "the skyish head'.' of Ben More, at one angle, and of Ben Lui at another, and the lonely slopes of the Gram- pian hills ; and over the surrounding pas- ture-land, for miles and miles of solitary waste, the thick, ripe heather burnished the earth with brown and purple bloom and filled the air with dewy fragrance. This day proved capricious, and by the time the railway train from Crianlarich had sped a little way into Glen Lochy the land- scape was once more drenched with wild blasts of rain, Loch-an-Beach, always gloomy, seemed black with desolation. Vast mists hung over the mountain-tops and partly hid them ; yet down their fern- clad and heather-mantled sides the many snowy rivulets, seeming motionless in the impetuosity of their motion, streamed in countless ribands of silver lace. The moun- tain ash, which is in perfect bloom in Sep- IMPERIAL RUINS. 3I9 tember, bearing great pendent clusters of scarlet berries, gave a frequent touch of brilliant colour to this wild scenery. A numerous herd of little Highland steers, mostly brown and black, swept suddenly into the picture as the express flashed along Glen Lochy, and at beautiful Dalmally the sun again came out with sudden transient gleams of intermittent splendour ; so that gray Kilchurn and the jewelled waters of sweet Loch Awe, and even the cold and grim grandeur of the rugged Pass of Bran- der, were momentarily clothed with tender, golden haze. It was afternoon when I alighted in the seaside haven of Oban ; yet soon, beneath the solemn light of the wan- ing day, I once more stood amid the ruins of Dunstaffnage Castle and looked upon one of the most representative, even as it is one of the most picturesque, relics of the feudal times of Scottish history. You have to journey about three miles out of the town in order to reach that place, which is upon a promontory where Loch Etive joins Loch Linnhe. The carriage was driven to it through a shallow water and across some sands which soon a returning tide would deeply submerge. The castle is so placed that, when it was fortified, it must have 320 IMPERIAL RUINS. been well-nigji impregnable. It stands upon a broad, high, massive, precipitous rock, looking seaward toward Lismore isl- and. Nothing of that old fortress now re- mains except the battlemented walls, upon the top of which there is a walk, and por- tions of its towers, of which originally there were but three. The roof and the floors are gone. The courtyard is turfed, and over the surface within its enclosure the grass grows thick and green, while weeds and wild-flowers fringe its slowly moulder- ing walls, upon which indeed several small trees have rooted themselves, in crevices stuffed with earth. One superb ivy-tree, of great age and size, covers much of the venerable ruin, upon its inner surface, with a wild luxuriance of brilliant foliage. There are the usual indications in the masonry, showing how the area of this castle was once subdivided into rooms of various shapes and sizes, some of them large, in which were ample fireplaces and deeply recessed embrasures, and no doubt arched casements opening on the inner court. Here dwelt the early kings of Scotland. Here the national story of Scotland be- gan. Here for a long time was treasured the Stone of Destiny (Lia Fail) before it IMPERIAL RUINS. 32 1 was taken to Scone Abbey, thence to be borne to London by Edward I., in 1296, and placed, where it has ever since re- mained, and is visible now, in the old coronation chair in the chapel of Edward the Confessor, at Westminster. Here through the slow-moving centuries many a story of love, ambition, sorrow, and death has had its course and left its record. Here, in the stormy, romantic period that followed 1745, was imprisoned for a while the beau- tiful, intrepid, constant, and noble Flora JNIacdonald — who had saved the person and the life of the fugitive Pretender, after the fatal defeat and hideous carnage of Culloden. What pageants, what festivals, what glories and what horrors have those old walls beheld ! Their stones seem agon- ised with ghastly memories and weary with the intolerable burden of hopeless age ; and as I stood and pondered amid their gray decrepitude and arid desolation, — while the light grew dim and the evening wind sighed in the ivy and shook the tremulous wall-flowers and the rustling grass, — the ancient, worn-out pile seemed to have a voice and to plead for the merciful death that should put an end to its long, consum- ing misery and dumb decay. Often before, X 322 IMPERIAL RUINS. when standing alone among ruins, have I felt this spirit of supplication, and seen this strange, beseechful look, in the silent, patient stones : never before had it appealed to my heart with such eloquence and such pathos. Truly nature passes through all the experience and all the moods of man, even as man passes through all the experi- ence and all the moods of nature. On the western side of the courtyard of Dunstaffnage stands a small stone building, accessible by a low tiight of steps, which bears upon its front the sculptured date 1725, intertwined with the letters AE. C. and LC, and the words Laus Deo. This was the residence of the ancient family of Dunstaffnage, prior to 1810. From the battlements I had a wonderful view of ad- jacent lakes and engirdling mountains, — the jewels and their giant guardians of the lonely land of Lorn, — and saw the red sun go down over a great inland sea of purple heather and upon the wide waste of the desolate ocean. These and such as these are the scenes that make this country dis- tinctive, and that have stamped their impress of stately thought and romantic sentiment upon its people. Amid such scenes the Scottish national character has IMPERIAL RUIXS. 323 been developed, and under their influence have naturally been created the exquisite poetry, the enchanting music, the noble art and architecture, and the austere civilisation of imperial Scotland. After dark the rain again came on, and all night long, through light and troubled slumber, I heard it beating on the window- panes. The morning dawned in gloom and drizzle, and there was no prophetic voice to speak a word of cheer. One of the expedi- tions that may be made from Oban compre- hends a visit to Fingal's Cave, on the island of Staffa, and to the ruined cathedral on Saint Columba's island of lona, and, in- cidentally, a voyage around the great island of Mull. It is the most beautiful, romantic, diversified, and impressive sail that can be made in these waters. The exf)editious itinerant in Scotland waits not upon the weather, and at an early hour this day I was speeding out of Oban, with the course set for Lismore Light and the Sound of Mull. 324 THE LAND OF MARMION. XXIV. THE LAND OF MARMION. BERWICK-UPON-TWEED, September 8, 1890. — It had long been my wish to see something of royal Berwick, and our acquaintance has at length begun. This is a town of sombre gray houses capped with red roofs ; of elaborate, old-fashioned, dis- used fortifications ; of dismantled military walls ; of noble stone bridges and stalwart piers ; of breezy battlement walks, fine sea- views, spacious beaches, castellated re- mains, steep streets, broad squares, narrow, winding ways, many churches, quiet cus- toms, and ancient memories. The present, indeed, has marred the past in this old town, dissipating the element of romance and putting no adequate substitute in its place. Yet the element of romance is here, for such observers as can look on Berwick through the eyes of the imagination ; and even those who can imagine nothing must at least perceive that its aspect is regal. THE LAND OF MARMION. 525 Viewed, as I had often viewed it, from the great Border bridge between England and Scotland, it rises on its graceful promon-^ tory, — bathed in sunshine and darkly- bright amid the sparkling silver of the sea, — a veritable ocean queen. To-day I have walked upon its walls, threaded its princi- pal streets, crossed its ancient bridge, ex- plored its suburbs, entered its municipal hall, visited its parish church, and taken long drives through the country that en- circles it ; and now at midnight, sitting in a lonely chamber of the King's Arms and musing upon the past, I hear not simply the roll of a carriage wheel or the footfall of a late traveller dying away in the distance, but the music with which warriors pro- claimed their victories and kings and queens kept festival and state. This has been a pensive day, for in its course I have said farewell to many lovely and beloved scenes. Edinburgh was never more beautiful than when she faded in the yellow mist of this autumnal morning. On Preston battlefield the golden harvest stood in sheaves, and the meadows glimmered green in the soft sunshine, while over them the white clouds drifted and the peaceful rooks made wing in happy indolence and peace. Soon the 326 THE LAND OF MARMION. ruined churcii of Seton came into view, with its singular stunted tower and its venerable gray walls couched deep in trees, and around it the cultivated, many-coloured fields and the breezy, emerald pastures stretchnig away to the verge of the sea, A glimpse — and it is gone. Bu'6 one sweet picture no sooner vanishes than its place is filled with another. Yonder, on the hillside, is the manor- house, with stately battlement ard tower, its antique aspect softened by great masses of clinging ivy. Here, nestled in the sunny valley, are the little stone cottages, roofed with red tiles and bright with the adornment of arbutus and hollyhock. All around are harvest- fields and market-gardens, — the abundant dark green of potato-patches be- ing gorgeously lit with the intermingled lustre of millions of wild-flowers, white and gold, over which drift many flights of doves. Sometimes upon tlie yellow level of the hay- fields a sudden wave of brilliant poppies seems to break, — dashing itself into scarlet foam. Timid, startled sheep scurry away mto their pastures as the swift train flashes by them. A woman standing at her cottage door looks at it with curious yet regardless gaze. Farms teeming with plenty are swiftly traversed, their many circular, cone-topped THE Land of marmion. 327 hayricks standing like towers of amber. Tall, smoking chimneys in the factory vil- lages flit by and disappear. Everywhere are signs of industry and thrift, and every- where also are denotements of the senti- ment and taste that are spontaneous in the nature of this people. Tantallon lies in the near distance, and speeding toward ancient Dunbar I dream once more the dreams of boyhood, and can hear the trumpets, and see the pennons, and catch again the silver gleam of the spears of Marmion, Dunbar is left behind, and with it the sad memory of Mary Stuart, infatuated with barbaric Bothwell, and whirled away to shipwreck and ruin, — as so many great natures have been before and will be again, — upon the black reefs of human passion. This heed- less train is skirting the hills of Lammer- moor now, and speeding through plains of a fertile verdure that is brilliant and beau- tiful down to the margin of the ocean. Close by Cockburnspath is the long, lonely, melancholy beach that well may have been in Scott's remembrance when he fashioned that weird and tragic close of the most poetical and pathetic of his works, while, near at hand, on its desolate headland, the grim ruin of Fast Castle, — which is deemed 328 THE LAND OF MARMIOiV. the original of Ms Wolf's Crag, — frowns darkly on the white breakers at its surge- beaten base. Edgar of Ravenswood is no longer an image of fiction, when you look upon that scene of gloomy grandeur and mystery. But do not look upon it too closely nor too long — for of all scenes that are conceived as distinctively weird it may truly be said that they are more impressive in the imagination than in the actual pros- pect. This coast is full of dark ravines, stretching seaward and thickly shrouded with trees, but in them now and then a glimpse is caught of a snugly sheltered house, overgrown with flowers, securely pro- tected from every blast of storm. The rest is open land, which many dark stone walls partition, and many hawthorn hedges, and many little white roads winding away toward the shore : for this is Scottish sea- side pageantry, and the sunlit ocean makes a silver setting for the jewelled landscape, all the way to Berwick. The profit of walking in the footsteps of the past is that you learn the value of the privilege of life in the present. The men and women of the past had their oppor- tunity and each improved it after his kind. These are the same plains in which Bruce THE LAND OF MARMIOX. 329 and Wallace fought for the honour and established the supremacy of the kingdom of Scotland. The same sun gilds these plains to-day, the same sweet wind blows over them, and the same sombre, majestic ocean breaks in solemn murmurs on their shore. "Hodie mihi, eras tibi " — as it was written on the altar skulls in the ancient chui'ches. Yesterday belonged to them ; to-day belongs to us — and well will it be for us if we improve it. In such an historic town as Berwick the lesson is brought home to a thoughtful mind with convincing force and significance. So much has happened here — and every actor in the great drama is long since dead and gone ! Hither came King John, and slaughtered the people as if they were sheep, and burnt the city — himself applying the torch to the house in which he had slept. Hither came Edward I., and mercilessly butchered the inhabitants, — men, women, and children, — violating even the sanctuary of the churches. Here, in his victorious days. Sir William Wallace reigned and prospered ; and here, when Menteith's treachery had wrought his ruin, a fragment of his mutilated body was long displayed upon the bridge. Here, in the castle, of which only a few fragments 3jO THE LAND OF MARMION. now remain (these being adjacent to the North British railway station), Edward I. caused to be confined in a wooden cage that intrepid Countess of Buchan who had crowned llobert Bruce at Scone. Hither came Edward III., after the battle of Hali- don Hill, which lies close by this place, had finally established the English power in Scotland. All the princes that fought in the wars of the Roses have been in Ber- wick and have wrangled over the possession of it. Richard III. doomed it to isolation. Henry VII. declared it a neutral state. By Elizabeth it was fortified, — in that wise sovereign's resolute and vigorous resistance to the schemes of the Roman Catholic church for the subjugation of her kingdom. John Knox preached here, in a church on Hide Hill, before he went to Edinburgh to shake . the throne with his tremendous eloquence. The picturesque, unhappy James IV. went from this place to Ford Castle and Lady Heron, and thence to his death, at Flodden Field. Here it was that Sir John Cope first paused in his fugitive ride from the fatal field of Preston, and here he was greeted as affording the only instance in which the first news of a defeat had been brought by the vanquished general himself. And THE LAND OF MARMION. 33 1 witliin siglit of Berwick ramparts are those perilous Fame islands, where, at the wreck of the steamer Forfarshire, in I'SSS, the heroism of a woman wrote upon the historic page of her country, in letters of imperishable glory, the name of Grace Darling. There is a monument to her memory in Bamborough churchyard. Im- agination, however, has done for this region what history could never do. Each foot of this ground was known to Sir Walter Scott, and for every lover of that great author each foot of it is hallowed. It is the Bor- der Land, — the land of chivalry and song, — the land that he has endeared to all the world — and you come to it mainly for his sake. " Day set on Norham's castled steep, And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep, And Cheviot's mountains lone." The village of Norham lies a few miles west of Berwick, upon the south bank of the Tweed, — a group of cottages clus- tered around a single long street. The buildings are low and are mostly roofed with dark slate or red tiles. Some of them are thatched, and grass and flowers grow wild upon the thatch. At one end of the main highway is a market- cross, near 332 THE LAND OF MARMION. to which is a little inn. Beyond that and nearer to the Tweed, which flows close beside the place, is a church of great antiq- uity, set toward the western end of a long and ample churchyard, in which many graves are marked with tall, thick, perpen- dicular slabs, many with dark, oblong tombs, tumbling to ruin, and many with short, stunted monoliths. The church tower is low, square, and of enormous strength. Upon the south side of the chancel are five windows, beautifully arched, — the dog- toothed casements being uncommonly com- plete specimens of that ancient architectural device. This church has been " restored " — the south aisle in 1846,by I, Bononi; the north aisle in 1852, by E. Gray. The western end of the churchyard is thickly masked in gTeat trees, and looking directly east from this point your gaze falls upon all that is left of the stately Castle of Norham — built by Flamberg of Durham in 1121, and restored by another Prince of that See in 1174. It must once have been a place of tremendous for- titude and of great extent. Now it is wide open to the sky, and nothing of it remains but roofless walls and crumbling arches, on which the grass is growing and the pendent bluebells tremble in the breeze. Looking THE LAND OF MARMIOX. ^33 through the embrasures of the east wall you see the tops of large trees that are rooted in the vast trench below, where once were the dark waters of the moat. All the court- yards are covered now with sod, and quiet sheep nibble and lazy cattle couch where once the royal banners floated and plumed and belted knights stood round their king. It was a day of uncommon beauty — golden with sunshine and fresh with a perfumed air ; and nothing was wanting to the per- fection of solitude. Near at hand a thin stream of pale blue smoke curled upward from a cottage chimney. At some distance the sweet voices of playing children mingled with the chirp of small birds and the occa- sional cawing of the rook. The long grasses that grow upon the ruin moved faintly, but made no sound. A few doves were seen, gliding in and out of crevices in the mould- ering turret. And over all, and calmly and coldly speaking the survival of nature when the grandest works of man are dust, sounded the rustle of many branches in the heedless wind. The day was setting over Norham as I drove away, — the red sun slowly obscured in a great bank of slate-coloured cloud, — but to the last I bent my gaze upon it, and 334 THE LAND OF MARMION. that picture of ruined magnificence can never fade out of my mind. The road eastward toward Berwick is a green lane, running between harvest-fields, which now were thickly piled with golden sheaves, while over them swept great flocks of sable rooks. There are but few trees in that landscape — scattered groups of the ash and the plane — to break the prospect. For a long time the stately ruin remained in view, — its huge bulk and serrated outline, relieved against the red and gold of sunset, taking on the perfect semblance of a colos- sal cathedral, like that of lona, with vast square tower, and chancel, and nave : only, because of its jagged lines, it seems in this prospect as if shaken by a convulsion of nature and tottering to its momentary fall. Never was illusion more perfect. Yet as the vision faded I could remember only the illusion that will never fade — the illusion that a magical poetic genius has cast over those crumbling battlements ; rebuilding the shattered towers, and pouring through their ancient halls the glowing tide of life and love, of power and pageant, of beauty, light, and song. THE END. NOTE. The Poems which, under the title At Ves- per Time, were associated with the foregoing sketches, in previous editions of Gray Days and Gold, have heen omitted here. They will, however, be included in a new edition, shortly to be published, of Wanderers — un- der which title a collection of the author's principal Poems has been for some time in circulation. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below MAY U UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FAClL:r> .,^ B 000 010 094 1 I.TBRARY S'