Project Gutenberg's Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, by Francis W. Halsey
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
Title: Seeing Europe with Famous Authors
Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two
Author: Francis W. Halsey
Release Date: December, 2005 [EBook #9503]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on October 6, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEEING EUROPE WITH FAMOUS AUTHORS ***
Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Emily Ratliff
and PG Distributed Proofreaders
SEEING EUROPE WITH FAMOUS AUTHORS
Selected And Edited With Introduction, Etc.
By Francis W. Halsey
_Editor of "Great Epochs in American History" Associate Editor of "The
World's Famous Orations" and of "The Best of the World's
Classics," etc._
In Ten Volumes
Illustrated
Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland
Part Two
[_Printed in the United States of America_]
II
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--PART TWO
IV-ENGLISH LITERARY SHRINES--
(_Continued_)
STOKE POGIS--By Charles T. Congdon
HAWORTH--By Theodore F. Wolfe
GAD'S HILL--By Theodore F. Wolfe
RYDAL MOUNT--By William Howitt
TWICKENHAM--By William Howitt
V-OTHER ENGLISH SCENES
STONEHENGE--By Ralph Waldo Emerson
MAGNA CHARTA ISLAND--By Mrs. S. C. Hall
THE HOME OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS--By James M. Hoppin
OXFORD--By Goldwin Smith
CAMBRIDGE--By James M. Hoppin
CHESTER--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE--By Frederick A. Talbot
THE CAPITAL OF THE BRITISH, SAXON AND NORMAN KINGS--By William Howitt
VI--SCOTLAND
EDINBURGH--By Robert Louis Stevenson
HOLYROOD--By David Masson
LINLITHGOW--By Sir Walter Scott
STIRLING--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
ABBOTSFORD--By William Howitt
DRYBURGH ABBEY--By William Howitt
MELROSE ABBEY--By William Howitt
CARLYLE'S BIBTHPLACE AND EARLY HOMES--By John Burroughs
BURNS'S LAND--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
HIGHLAND MARY'S HOME AND GRAVE--By Theodore F. Wolfe
THROUGH THE CALEDONIA CANAL TO INVERNESS--By H. A. Taine
THE SCOTCH HIGHLANDS--By H. A. Taine
BEN LOMOND AND THE HIGHLAND LAKES--By Bayard Taylor
TO THE HEBRIDES--By James Boswell
STAFFA AND IONA--By William Howitt
VII--IRELAND
A SUMMER DAY IN DUBLIN--By William Makepeace Thackeray
DUBLIN CASTLE--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDHAL--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
LIMERICK--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
FROM BELFAST TO DUBLIN--By William Cullen Bryant
THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY--By Bayard Taylor
CORK--by William Makepeace Thackeray
BLARNEY CASTLE--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
MUCROSS ABBEY--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
FROM GLENGARIFF TO KILLARNEY--By William Makepeace Thackeray
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME II
FRONTISPIECE
PRINCESS STREET AND SCOTT'S MONUMENT, EDINBURGH
STRATFORD-ON-AVON
INTERIOR OF TRINITY CHURCH, STRATFORD
ANNE HATHAWAY'S COTTAGE, NEAR STRATFORD
ROOM IN STRATFORD IN WHICH SHAKESPEARE WAS BORN
NEWSTEAD ABBEY, BYRON'S ANCESTRAL HOME
STOKE POGIS, THE SCENE OF GRAY'S "ELEGY"
OXFORD
EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE
ST. MARTIN'S CHURCH, CANTERBURY
EDINBURGH CASTLE AND NATIONAL GALLERY
OLD GREYFRIAR'S CHURCH, EDINBURGH
HOLYROOD PALACE, EDINBURGH
STIRLING CASTLE
RUINS OF HOLYROOD ABBEY, EDINBURGH
MELROSE ABBEY
GLASTONBURY ABBEY
CRAIGMILLAR CASTLE, SCOTLAND
DUMBARTON ROCK AND CASTLE
LIMERICK CASTLE
ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL, DUBLIN
THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY
BLARNEY CASTLE
MUCROSS ABBEY
THE LAKES OF KILLARNEY
SACKVILLE STREET, DUBLIN
THE GAP OF DUNLOE
IV
ENGLISH LITERARY SHRINES
(_Continued_)
STOKE POGIS [Footnote: From "Reminiscences of a Journalist." By special
arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton,
Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1884. Mr. Congdon was, for many years, under
Horace Greeley, a leading editorial writer for the New York "Tribune."]
BY CHARLES T. CONGDON
It was a comfort as I came out of the Albert Memorial Chapel, and
rejoined nature upon the Terrace, to mutter to myself those fine lines
which not a hundred years ago everybody knew by heart: "The boast of
heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth ere
gave, Await alike th' inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to
the grave,"--a verse which I found it not bad to remember as in the
Chapel Royal I gazed upon the helmets, and banners, and insignia of many
a defunct Knight of the Garter. I wondered if posterity would care much
for George the Fourth, or Third, or Second, or First, whose portraits I
had just been gazing at; I was sure that a good many would remember the
recluse scholar of Pembroke Hall, the Cambridge Professor of Modern
History, who cared for nothing but ancient history; who projected twenty
great poems, and finished only one or two; who spent his life in
commenting upon Plato and studying botany, and in writing letters to his
friend Mason; and who with a real touch of Pindar in his nature, was
content to fiddle-faddle away his life. He died at last of a most
unpoetical gout in the stomach, leaving behind him a cartload of
memoranda, and fifty fragments of fine things; and yet I, a stranger
from a far distant shore, was about to make a little pilgrimage to his
tomb, and all for the sake of that "Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard," which has so held its own while a hundred bulkier things
have been forgotten.
The church itself is an interesting but not remarkable edifice, old,
small, and solidly built in a style common enough in England. Nothing,
however, could be more in keeping with the associations of the scene.
The very humility of the edifice has a property of its own, for anything
more magnificent would jar upon the feelings, as the monument in the
Park does most decidedly. It was Gray's wish that he might be buried
here, near the mother whom he loved so well; otherwise he could hardly
have escaped the posthumous misfortune of a tomb in Westminster Abbey or
St. Paul's. In such case the world would have missed one of the most
charming of associations, and the great poem the most poetical of its
features. For surely it was fit that he who sang so touchingly of the
dead here sleeping, should find near them his last resting-place; that
when the pleasant toil in libraries was over, the last folio closed by
those industrious hands, the last manuscript collated, and the last
flower picked for the herbarium, he who here so tenderly sang of the
emptiness of earthly honors and the nothingness of worldly success should
be buried humbly near those whom he best loved, and where all the moral
of his teaching might be perpetually illustrated. I wondered, as I stood
there, whether Horace Walpole ever thought it worth his while, for the
sake of that early friendship which was so rudely broken, to come there,
away from the haunts of fashion, or from his plaything villa at
Strawberry Hill, to muse for a moment over the grave of one who rated
pedigrees and peerages at their just value. Probably my Lord Orford was
never guilty of such a piece of sentimentality. He was thinking too much
of his pictures and coins and eternal bric-a-brac for that.
A stone set in the outside of the church indicates the spot near which
the poet is buried. I was very anxious to see the interior of the
edifice, and, fortunately I found the sexton busy in the neighborhood.
There was nothing, however, remarkable to be seen, after sixpence had
opened the door, except perhaps the very largest pew which these eyes
ever beheld. It belonged to the Penn family, descendants of drab-coated
and sweet-voiced William Penn, whose seat is in the neighborhood. I do
not know what that primitive Quaker would have said to such an enormous
reservation of space in the house of God for the sole use and behoof of
two or three aristocratic worshipers. Probably few of my readers have
ever seen such a pew as that. It was not so much a pew as a room. It was
literally walled off, and quite set apart from the plebeian portion of
the sanctuary, was carpeted, and finished with comfortable arm-chairs,
and in the middle of it was a stove. The occupants could look out and
over at the altar, but the rustics could not look in and at them. The
Squire might have smoked or read novels, or my lady might have worked
worsted or petted her poodle through the service, without much scandal.
The pew monopolized so much room that there was little left for the
remainder of the "miserable offenders," but I suspect that there was
quite enough for all who came to pray. For it was, as I have said,
literally a country church; and those who sleep near it were peasants.
It is difficult to comprehend the whole physiognomy of the poem, if I
may use the expression, without seeing the spot which it commemorates. I
take it for granted that the reader is familiar with it. There are
"those rugged elms," and there is "that yew tree's shade." There are
"the frail memorials," "with uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture
decked;" there "the name, the years, spelt by the unlettered muse;" and
the holy texts strewn round "that teach the rustic moralist to die."
There is still "the ivy-mantled tower," tho the "moping owl" that
evening did not "to the moon complain," partly because there was no moon
to complain to, and possibly because there was no moping owl in the
tower. But there was one little circumstance which I may be pardoned for
mentioning. Gray, somehow, has the reputation of being an artificial
poet, yet for one who wrote so little poetry he makes a good many
allusions to childhood and children. As I passed through the Park on my
way to the churchyard, I encountered a group of merry boys and girls
playing about the base of the monument; and I recalled that verse which
Gray wrote for the Elegy, and afterward discarded, under the impression
that it made the parenthesis too long.
There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.
I have often wondered how Gray could bear to give up these sweet, tender
and most natural lines. I have sometimes surmised that he thought them a
little too much like Ambrose Philips's verses about children--Namby
Pamby Philips, as the Pope set nicknamed that unfortunate writer.
I lingered about the churchyard until that long twilight, of which we
know nothing in America, began to grow dimmer and dimmer. If it was
still before, it seemed all the stiller now. I was glad that I had
waited so long, because by doing so I understood all the better how true
the Elegy is to nature. The neighborhood, with its agreeable variety of
meadow and wood, has all the hundred charms of the gentle and winning
English scenery. The hush, hardly broken even by the songs of the birds,
brought forcibly to my mind that beautiful line of the Elegy: "And all
the air a solemn stillness holds;" while that other line: "Now fades the
glimmering landscape on the sight," is exactly true. The landscape did
glimmer, and as I watched the sun go down, I pleased myself with the
fancy that I was sitting just where the poet sat, as he revolved those
lines which the world has got by heart. Just then came the cry of the
cattle, and I knew why Gray wrote: "The lowing herd winds slowly o'er
the lea," nor did I fail to encounter a plowman homeward plodding his
weary way.
As I strolled listlessly back to the station, there was such a serenity
on the earth about me, and in the sky above me, that I could easily give
myself to gentle memories and poetic dreams. I recalled the springtime
of life, when I learned this famous Elegy by heart as a pleasant task,
and, as yet unsophisticated by critical notions, accepted it as perfect.
I thought of innumerable things which I had read about it; of the long
and patient revision which its author gave it, year after year, keeping
it in his desk, and then sending it, a mere pamphlet, with no flourish
of trumpets, into the world. Many an ancient figure came to lend
animation to the scene. Horace Walpole in his lace coat and spruce wig
went mincing by; the mother of Gray, with her sister, measured lace for
the customers who came to her little shop in London; the wags of
Pembroke College, graceless varlets, raise an alarm of fire that they
may see the frightened poet drop from the window, half dead with alarm;
old Foulis, the Glasgow printer, volunteers to send from his press such,
a luxurious edition of Gray's poems as the London printers can not
match; Dr. Johnson, holding the page to his eyes, growls over this
stanza, and half-grudgingly praises that. I had spent perhaps the
pleasantest day which the fates vouchsafed me during my sojourn in
England; and here I was back again in Slough Station, ready to return to
the noisy haunts of men. The train came rattling up, and the day with
Gray was over.
HAWORTH [Footnote: From "A Literary Pilgrimage." By arrangement with,
and by permission of, the publishers, J. B. Lippincott Co.
Copyright, 1895.]
BY THEODORE F. WOLFE
Other Brontë shrines have engaged us,--Guiseley, where Patrick Brontë
was married and Neilson worked as a mill-girl; the lowly Thornton home,
where Charlotte was born; the cottage where she visited Harriet
Martineau; the school where she found Caroline Helstone and Rose and
Jessy Yorke; the Fieldhead, Lowood, and Thornfield of her tales; the
Villette where she knew her hero; but it is the bleak Haworth hilltop
where the Brontës wrote the wonderful books and lived the pathetic lives
that most attracts and longest holds our steps. Our way is along
Airedale, now a highway of toil and trade, desolated by the need of
hungry poverty and greed of hungrier wealth; meads are replaced by
blocks of grimy huts, groves are supplanted by factory chimneys that
assoil earth and heaven, the one "shining" stream is filthy with the
refuse of many mills.
At Keighley our walk begins, and altho we have no peas in our "Pilgrim
shoon," the way is heavy with memories of the sad sisters Brontë who so
often trod the dreary miles which bring us to Haworth. The village
street, steep as a roof, has a pavement of rude stones, upon which the
wooden shoes of the villagers clank with an unfamiliar sound. The dingy
houses of gray stone, barren and ugly in architecture, are huddled along
the incline and encroach upon the narrow street. The place and its
situation are a proverb of ugliness in all the countryside; one dweller
in Airedale told us that late in the evening of the last day of creation
it was found that a little rubbish was left, and out of that Haworth was
made. But, grim and rough as it is, the genius of a little woman has
made the place illustrious and draws to it visitors from every quarter
of the world. We are come in the "glory season" of the moors, and as we
climb through the village we behold above and beyond it vast undulating
sweeps of amethyst-tinted hills rising circle beyond circle,--all now
one great expanse of purple bloom stirred by zephyrs which waft to us
the perfume of the heather.
At the hilltop we come to the Black Bull Inn, where one Brontë drowned
his genius in drink, and from our apartment here we look upon all the
shrines we seek. The inn stands at the churchyard gates, and is one of
the landmarks of the place. Long ago preacher Grimshaw flogged the
loungers from its taproom into chapel; here Wesley and Whitefield lodged
when holding meetings on the hilltop; here Brontë's predecessor took
refuge from his riotous parishioners, finally escaping through the low
easement at the back,--out of which poor Branwell Brontë used to vault
when his sisters asked for him at the door. This inn is a quaint
structure, low-eaved and cosy; its furniture is dark with age. We sleep
in a bed once occupied by Henry J. Raymond, [Footnote: In the editorial
sense, the founder of the New York "Times." Mr. Raymond died in 1869,
eighteen years after the paper was started.] and so lofty that steps are
provided to ascend its heights. Our meals are served in the
old-fashioned parlor to which Branwell came. In a nook between the
fireplace and the before-mentioned easement stood the tall arm-chair,
with square seat and quaintly carved back, which was reserved for him.
The landlady denied that he was summoned to entertain travelers here;
"he never needed to be sent for, he came fast enough of himself." His
wit and conviviality were usually the life of the circle, but at times
he was mute and abstracted and for hours together "would just sit and
sit in his corner there." She described him as a "little, red-haired,
light-complexioned chap, cleverer than all his sisters put together.
What they put in their books they got from him," quoth she, reminding us
of the statement in Grundy's Reminiscences that Branwell declared he
invented the plot and wrote the major part of "Wuthering Heights."
Certain it is he possest transcending genius and that in this room that
genius was slain. Here he received the message of renunciation from his
depraved mistress which finally wrecked his life; the landlady, entering
after the messenger had gone, found him in a fit on the floor. Emily
Brontë's rescue of her dog, an incident recorded in "Shirley," occurred
at the inn door.
The graveyard is so thickly sown with blackened tombstones that there is
scant space for blade or foliage to relieve its dreariness, and the
villagers, for whom the yard is a thoroughfare, step from tomb to tomb;
in the time of the Brontës the village women dried their linen on these
graves. Close to the wall which divides the churchyard from the vicarage
is a plain stone set by Charlotte Brontë to mark the grave of Tabby, the
faithful servant who served the Brontës from their childhood till all
but Charlotte were dead. The very ancient church-tower still "rises dark
from the stony enclosure of its yard;" the church itself has been
remodeled and much of its romantic interest destroyed. No interments
have been made in the vaults beneath the aisles since Mr. Brontë was
laid there. The site of the Brontë pew is by the chancel; here Emily sat
in the farther corner, Anne next and Charlotte by the door, within a
foot of the spot where her ashes now lie.
A former sacristan remembered to have seen Thackeray and Miss Martineau
sitting with Charlotte in the pew. And here, almost directly above her
sepulcher, she stood one summer morning and gave herself in marriage to
the man who served for her as "faithfully and long as did Jacob for
Rachel." The Brontë tablet in the wall bears a uniquely pathetic record,
its twelve lines registering eight deaths, of which Mr. Brontë's at the
age of eighty-five, is the last. On a side aisle is a beautiful stained
window inscribed "To the Glory of God, in Memory of Charlotte Brontë, by
an American citizen." The list shows that most of the visitors come from
America, and it was left for a dweller in that far land to set up here
almost the only voluntary memento of England's great novelist. A worn
page of the register displays the tremulous autograph of Charlotte as
she signs her maiden name for the last time, and the signatures of the
witnesses to her marriage,--Miss Wooler, of "Roe Head," Ellen Nussy, who
is the E of Charlotte's letters and the Caroline of "Shirley."
The vicarage and its garden are out of a corner of the churchyard and
separated from it by a low wall. A lane lies along one side of the
churchyard and leads from the street to the vicarage gates. The garden,
which was Emily's care, where she tended stunted shrubs and borders of
unresponsive flowers and where Charlotte planted the currant-bushes, is
beautiful with foliage and flowers, and its boundary wall is overtopped
by a screen of trees which shuts out the depressing prospect of the
graves from the vicarage windows and makes the place seem less "a
churchyard home" than when the Brontës inhabited it. The dwelling is of
gray stone, two stories high, of plain and somber aspect. A wing is
added, the little window-panes are replaced by larger squares, the stone
floors are removed or concealed, curtains--forbidden by Mr. Brontë's
dread of fire--shade the window, and the once bare interior is furbished
and furnished in modern style; but the arrangement of the apartments is
unchanged.
Most interesting of these is the Brontë parlor, at the left of the
entrance; here the three curates of "Shirley" used to take tea with Mr.
Brontë and were upbraided by Charlotte for their intolerance; here the
sisters discuss their plots and read each other's MSS.; here they
transmuted the sorrows of their lives into the stories which make the
name of Brontë immortal; here Emily, "her imagination occupied with
Wuthering Heights," watched in the darkness to admit Branwell coming
late and drunken from the Black Bull; here Charlotte, the survivor of
all, paced the night-watches in solitary anguish, haunted by the
vanished faces, the voices forever stilled, the echoing footsteps that
came no more. Here, too, she lay in her coffin. The room behind the
parlor was fitted by Charlotte for Nichols's study. On the right was
Brontë's study, and behind it the kitchen, where the sisters read with
their books propt on the table before them while they worked, and where
Emily (prototype of "Shirley"), bitten by a dog at the gate of the lane,
took one of Tabby's glowing irons from the fire and cauterized the
wound, telling no one till danger was past.
Above the parlor is the chamber in which Charlotte and Emily died, the
scene of Nichols's loving ministrations to his suffering wife. Above
Brontë's study was his chamber; the adjoining children's study was later
Branwell's apartment and the theater of the most terrible tragedies of
the stricken family; here that ill-fated youth writhed in the horrors of
mania-a-potu; here Emily rescued him--stricken with drunken stupor--from
his burning couch, as "Jane Eyre" saved Rochester; here he breathed out
his blighted life erect upon his feet, his pockets filled with
love-letters from the perfidious woman who brought his ruin. Even now
the isolated site of the parsonage, its environment of graves and
wild-moors, its exposure to the fierce winds of the long winters, make
it unspeakably dreary; in the Brontës' time it must have been cheerless
indeed. Its influence darkened the lives of the inmates and left its
fateful impression upon the books here produced. Visitors are rarely
admitted to the vicarage; among those against whom its doors have been
closed is the gifted daughter of Charlotte's literary idol, to whom
"Jane Eyre" was dedicated, Thackeray.
By the vicarage lane were the cottage of Tabby's sister, the school the
Brontës daily visited, and the sexton's dwelling where the curates
lodged. Behind the vicarage a savage expanse of gorse and heather rises
to the horizon and stretches many miles away; a path oft-trodden by the
Brontës leads between low walls from their home to this open moor, their
habitual resort in childhood and womanhood. The higher plateaus afford a
wide prospect, but, despite the August bloom and fragrance and the
delightful play of light and shadow along the sinuous sweeps, the aspect
of the bleak, treeless, houseless waste of uplands is even now
dispiriting; when frosts have destroyed its verdure, and wintry skies
frown above, its gloom and desolation must be terrible beyond
description. Remembering that the sisters found even these usually
dismal moors a welcome relief from their tomb of a dwelling, we may
appreciate the utter dreariness of their situation and the pathos of
Charlotte's declaration, "I always dislike to leave Haworth, it takes so
long to be content again after I return."
GAD'S HILL [Footnote: From "A Literary Pilgrimage." By arrangement with,
and by permission of, the publishers, J. B. Lippincott Co.
Copyright, 1895.]
BY THEODORE F. WOLFE
"To go to Gad's Hill," said Dickens, in a note of invitation, "you leave
Charing Cross at nine o'clock by North Kent Railway for Higham." Guided
by these directions and equipped with a letter from Dickens's son, we
find ourselves gliding eastward among the chimneys of London and, a
little later, emerging into the fields of Kent,--Jingle's region of
"apples, cherries, hops, and women." The Thames is on our left; we pass
many river-towns,--Dartford where Wat Tyler lived, Gravesend where
Pocahontas died,--but most of our way is through the open country, where
we have glimpses of "fields," "parks," and leafy lanes, with here and
there picturesque camps of gypsies or of peripatetic rascals "goin'
a-hoppin.'" From wretched Higham a walk of half an hour among orchards
and between hedges of wild-rose and honeysuckle brings us to the hill
which Shakespeare and Dickens have made classic ground, and soon we see,
above the tree tops, the glittering vane which surmounted the home of
the world's greatest novelist.
The name Gad's (Vagabond's) Hill is a survival of the time when the
depredations of highwaymen upon "pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich
offerings and traders riding to London with fat purses" gave to this
spot the ill repute it had in Shakespeare's day; it was here he located
Falstaff's great exploit. The tuft of evergreens which crowns the hill
about Dickens' retreat is the remnant of thick woods once closely
bordering the highway, in which the "men in buckram" lay concealed, and
the robbery of the Franklin was committed in front of the spot where the
Dickens house stands. By this road passed Chaucer, who had property near
by, gathering from the pilgrims his "Canterbury Tales." In all time to
come the great master of romance who came here to live and die will be
worthily associated with Shakespeare and Chaucer in the renown of
Gad's Hill.
In becoming possessor of this place Dickens realized a dream of his
boyhood and ambition of his life. In one of his travelers' sketches he
introduces a "queer small boy" (himself) gazing at Gad's Hill House and
predicting his future ownership, which the author finds annoying
"because it happens to be my house and I believe what he said was true."
When at last the place was for sale, Dickens did not wait to examine it;
he never was inside the house until he went to direct its repair.
Eighteen hundred pounds was the price; a thousand more were expended for
enlargement of the grounds and alterations of the house, which, despite
his declaration that he had "stuck bits upon it in all manner of ways,"
did not greatly change it from what it was when it became the goal of
his childish aspirations. At first it was his summer residence
merely,--his wife came with him the first summer,--but three years later
he sold Tavistock House, and Gad's Hill was thenceforth his home. From
the bustle and din of the city he returned to the haunts of his boyhood
to find restful quiet and time for leisurely work among these "blessed
woods and fields" which had ever held his heart. For nine years after
the death of Dickens Gad's Hill was occupied by his oldest son; its
ownership has since twice or thrice changed.
Its elevated site and commanding view render it one of the most
conspicuous, as it is one of the most lovely, spots in Kent. The mansion
is an unpretentious, old-fashioned, two-storied structure of fourteen
rooms. Its brick walls are surmounted by Mansard roofs above which rises
a bell-turret; a pillared portico, where Dickens sat with his family on
summer evenings, shades the front entrance; wide bay-windows project
upon either side; flowers and vines clamber upon the walls, and a
delightfully home-like air pervades the place. It seems withal a modest
seat for one who left half a million dollars at his death. At the right
of the entrance-hall we see Dickens's library and study, a cosy room
shown in the picture of "The Empty Chair;" here are shelves which held
his books; the panels he decorated with counterfeit bookbacks; the nook
where perched, the mounted remains of his raven, the "Grip" of "Barnaby
Rudge." By this bay-window, whence he could look across the lawn to the
cedars beyond the highway, stood his chair and the desk where he wrote
many of the works by which the world will know him always. Behind the
study was his billiard-room, and upon the opposite side of the hall the
parlor, with the dining-room adjoining it at the back, both bedecked
with the many mirrors which delighted the master.
Opening out of these rooms is a conservatory, paid for out of "the
golden shower from America" and completed but a few days before Dickens'
death, holding yet the ferns he tended. The dining-room was the scene of
much of that emphatic hospitality which it pleased the novelist to
dispense, his exuberant spirits making him the leader in all the jollity
and conviviality of the board. Here he compounded for bibulous guests
his famous "cider-cup of Gad's Hill," and at the same table he was
stricken with death; on a couch beneath yonder window, the one nearest
the hall, he died on the anniversary of the railway accident which so
frightfully imperiled his life. From this window we look out upon a lawn
decked with shrubbery and see across undulating cornfields his beloved
Cobham. From the parqueted hall, stairs lead to the modest
chambers--that of Dickens being above the drawing-room. He lined the
stairway with prints of Hogarth's works, and declared he never came down
the stairs without pausing to wonder at the sagacity and skill which had
produced these masterful pictures of human life.
The house is invested with roses, and parterres of the red geraniums
which the master loved are ranged upon every side. It was some fresh
manifestation of his passion for these flowers that elicited from his
daughter the averment, "Papa, I think when you are an angel your wings
will be made of looking-glasses and your crown of scarlet geraniums."
Beneath a rose-tree not far from the window where Dickens died, a bed
blooming with blue lobelia holds the tiny grave of "Dick" and the tender
memorial of the novelist to that "Best of Birds." The row of gleaming
limes which shadow the porch was planted by Dickens's own hands. The
pedestal of the sundial upon the lawn is a massive balustrade of the old
stone bridge at nearby Rochester, which little David Copperfield crossed
"footsore and weary" on his way to his aunt, and from which Pickwick
contemplated the castle-ruin, the cathedral, the peaceful Medway. At the
left of the mansion are the carriage-house and the school-room of
Dickens' sons. In another portion of the grounds are his tennis-court
and the bowling-green which he prepared, where he became a skilful and
tireless player. The broad meadow beyond the lawn was a later purchase,
and the many limes which beautify it were rooted by Dickens. Here
numerous cricket-matches were played, and he would watch the players or
keep the score "The whole day long."
It was in this meadow that he rehearsed his readings, and his talking,
laughing, weeping, and gesticulating here "all to himself" excited among
his neighbors suspicion of his insanity. From the front lawn a tunnel
constructed by Dickens passes beneath the highway to "The Wilderness," a
thickly-wooded shrubbery, where magnificent cedars up-rear their
venerable forms and many somber firs, survivors of the forest which erst
covered the countryside, cluster upon the hill top. Here Dickens's
favorite dog, the "Linda" of his letters, lies buried. Amid the leafy
seclusion of this retreat, and upon the very spot where Falstaff was
routed by Hal and Poins ("the eleven men in buckram"), Dickens erected
the chalet sent to him in pieces by Fechter, the upper room of which--up
among the quivering boughs, where "birds and butterflies fly in and out,
and green branches shoot in at the windows"--Dickens lined with mirrors
and used as his study in summer. Of the work produced at Gad's Hill--"A
Tale of Two Cities," "The Uncommercial Traveler," "Our Mutual Friend,"
"The Mystery of Edwin Drood," and many tales and sketches of "All the
Year Round"--much was written in this leaf-environed nook; here the
master wrought through the golden hours of his last day of conscious
life, here he wrote his last paragraph and at the close of that June day
let fall his pen, never to take it up again. From the place of the
chalet we behold the view which delighted the heart of Dickens--his desk
was so placed that his eyes would rest upon this view whenever he raised
them from his work--the fields of waving corn, the green expanse of
meadows, the sail-dotted river.
RYDAL MOUNT [Footnote: From "Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent
British Poets."]
BY WILLIAM HOWITT
As you advance a mile or more on the road from Ambleside toward
Grasmere, a lane overhung with trees turns up to the right, and there,
at some few hundred yards from the highway, stands the modest cottage of
the poet, elevated on Rydal Mount, so as to look out over the
surrounding sea of foliage, and to take in a glorious view. Before it,
at some distance across the valley, stretches a high screen of bold and
picturesque mountains; behind, it is overtowered by a precipitous hill,
called Nab-scar; but to the left, you look down over the broad waters of
Windermere, and to the right over the still and more embosomed flood
of Grasmere.
Whichever way the poet pleases to advance from his house, it must be
into scenery of that beauty of mountain, stream, wood, and lake, which
has made Cumberland so famous over all England. He may steal away up
backward from his gate and ascend into the solitary hills, or diverging
into the grounds of Lady Mary Fleming, his near neighbor, may traverse
the deep shades of the woodland, wander along the banks of the rocky
rivulet, and finally stand before the well known waterfall there. If he
descend into the highway, objects of beauty still present themselves.
Cottages and quiet houses here and there glance from their little spots
of Paradise, through the richest boughs of trees; Windermere, with its
wide expanse of waters, its fairy islands, its noble hills, allures his
steps in one direction; while the sweet little lake of Rydal, with its
heronry and its fine background of rocks, invites him in another.
In this direction the vale of Grasmere, the scene of his early married
life, opens before him, and Dunmail-raise and Langdale-pikes lift their
naked corky summits, as hailing him to the pleasures of old
companionship. Into no quarter of this region of lakes, and mountains,
and vales of primitive life, can he penetrate without coming upon ground
celebrated by his muse. He is truly "sole king of rocky Cumberland."
The immediate grounds in which his house stands are worthy of the
country and the man. It is, as its name implies, a mount. Before the
house opens a considerable platform, and around and beneath lie various
terraces and descend various walks, winding on amid a profusion of trees
and luxuriant evergreens. Beyond the house, you ascend various terraces,
planted with trees now completely overshadowing them; and these terraces
conduct you to a level above the house-top, and extend your view of the
enchanting scenery on all sides.
Above you tower the rocks and precipitous slopes of Nab-scar; and below
you, embosomed in its trees, lies the richly ornate villa of Mr. William
Ball, a friend, whose family and the poet's are on such social terms,
that a little gate between their premises opens both to each family
alike. This cottage and grounds were formerly the property of Charles
Lloyd, also a friend, and one of the Bristol and Stowey coterie. Both he
and Lovell have been long dead; Lovell, indeed, was drowned, on a voyage
to Ireland, in the very heyday of the dreams of Pantisocracy, in which
he was an eager participant.
The poet's house, itself, is a proper poet's abode. It is at once
modest, plain, yet tasteful and elegant. An ordinary dining-room, a
breakfast-room in the center, and a library beyond, form the chief
apartments. There are a few pictures and busts, especially those of
Scott and himself, a good engraving of Burns, and the like, with a good
collection of books, few of them very modern.
TWICKENHAM [Footnote: From "Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British
Poets."]
BY WILLIAM HOWITT
It seems that Pope did not purchase the freehold of the house and
grounds at Twickenham, but only a long lease. He took his father and
mother along with him. His father died there the year after, but his
mother continued to live till 1733, when she died at the great age of
ninety-three. For twenty years she had the singular satisfaction of
seeing her son the first poet of his age; carest by the greatest men of
the time, courted by princes, and feared by all the base. No parents
ever found a more tender and dutiful son. With him they shared in honor
the ease and distinction he had acquired. They were the cherished
objects of his home. Swift paid him no false compliment when he said, in
condoling with him on his mother's death, "You are the most dutiful son
I have ever known or heard of, which is a felicity not happening to one
in a million."
The property at Twickenham is properly described by Roscoe as lying on
both sides of the highway, rendering it necessary for him to cross the
road to arrive at the higher and more ornamental part of his gardens. In
order to obviate this inconvenience, he had recourse to the expedient of
excavating a passage under the road from one part of his grounds to the
other, a fact to which he alludes in these lines:
"Know all the toil the heavy world can heap,
Rolls o'er my grotto, nor disturbs my sleep."
The lower part of these grounds, in which his house stood, constituted,
in fact, only the sloping bank of the river, by much the smaller portion
of his territory. The passage, therefore, was very necessary to that far
greater part, which was his wilderness, shrubbery, forest, and every
thing, where he chiefly planted and worked. This passage he formed into
a grotto, having a front of rude stonework opposite to the river and
decorated within with spars, ores, and shells. Of this place he has
himself left this description:
"I have put the last hand to my works of this kind, in happily finishing
the subterranean way and grotto. I found there a spring of the clearest
water, which falls in a perpetual rill, that echoes through the cavern
night and day. From the River Thames you see through my arch, up a walk
of the wilderness, to a kind of open temple wholly composed of shells in
the rustic manner; and from that distance under the temple you look down
through a sleeping arcade of trees, and see the sails on the river
passing suddenly and vanishing, as through a perspective glass. When you
shut the door of this grotto, it becomes, on the instant, from a
luminous room, a camera obscura, on the walls of which all the objects
of the river, hills, woods, and boats are forming a moving picture, in
their visible radiations; and when you have a mind to light it less, it
affords you a very different scene. It is finished with shells,
interspersed with looking-glass in regular forms, and in the ceiling is
a star of the same material, at which, when a lamp of an orbicular
figure of thin alabaster is hung in the middle, a thousand pointed rays
glitter, and are reflected over the place. There are connected to this
grotto, by a narrow passage, two porches, one toward the river, of
smooth stones full of light and open; the other toward the garden,
shadowed with trees, rough with shells, flints, and iron ore. The bottom
is paved with simple pebbles, as is also the adjoining walk up the
wilderness to the temple, in the natural state, agreeing not ill with
the little dripping murmur, and the aquatic idea of the whole place. It
wants nothing to complete it but a good statue with an inscription, like
that beautiful antique one which you know I am so fond of. You will
think I have been very poetical in this description; but it is pretty
near the truth."
But it was not merely in forming this grotto that Pope employed himself;
it was in building and extending his house, which was in a Roman style,
with columns, arcades, and porticos. The designs and elevations of these
buildings may be seen by his own hand in the British Museum, drawn in
his usual way on backs of letters. The following passage, in a letter to
Mr. Digby, will be sufficient to give us his idea of both his Thamesward
garden and his house in a summer view: "No ideas you could form in the
winter could make you imagine what Twickenham is in this warm summer.
Our river glitters beneath the unclouded sun, at the same time that its
banks retain the verdure of showers; our gardens are offering their
first nosegays; our trees, like new acquaintance brought happily
together, are stretching their arms to meet each other, and growing
nearer and nearer every hour. The birds are paying their thanksgiving
songs for the new habitations I have made them. My building rises high
enough to attract the eye and curiosity of the passenger from the river,
where, upon beholding a mixture of beauty and ruin, he inquires, 'What
house is falling, or what church is arising?' So little taste have our
common Tritons for Vitruvius; whatever delight the poetical gods of the
river may take in reflecting on their streams, my Tuscan porticos, or
Ionic pilasters."
Pope's architecture, like his poetry, has been the subject of much and
vehement dispute. On the one hand, his grottos and his buildings have
been vituperated as most tasteless and childish; on the other, applauded
as beautiful and romantic. Into neither of these disputes need we enter.
In both poetry and architecture a bolder spirit and a better taste have
prevailed since Pope's time. With all his foibles and defects, Pope was
a great poet of the critical and didactic kind, and his house and place
had their peculiar beauties. He was himself half inclined to suspect the
correctness of his fancy in such matters, and often rallies himself on
his gimcracks and crotchets in both verse and prose....
Pope's building madness, however, had method in it. Unlike the great
romancer and builder of our time, [Footnote: Sir Walter Scott] he never
allowed such things to bring him into debt. He kept his mind at ease by
such prudence, and soothed and animated it under circumstances of
continued evil by working among his trees, and grottos, and vines, and
at his labors of poetry and translations. At the period succeeding the
rebellion of 1715, when that event had implicated and scattered so many
of his highest and most powerful friends, here he was laboring away at
his "Homer" with a progress which astonished every one. Removed at once
from the dissipations and distractions of London, and from the agreeable
interruptions of such society, he found leisure and health enough here
to give him vigor for exertions astonishing for so weak a frame. The
tastes he indulged here, if they were not faultless according to our
notions, were healthy, and they endured. To the end of his life he
preserved his strong attachment to his house and grounds.
V
OTHER ENGLISH SCENES
STONEHENGE [Footnote: From "English Traits." Published by Houghton,
Mifflin Co. Emerson's second visit to England, during which he saw
Stonehenge, was made in 1847. Of all the Druidical remains in Europe,
Stonehenge is perhaps the most remarkable, altho at Carnac in Brittany
on the northern shore of the Bay of Biscay, are Druidical remains more
numerous, but in general they are smaller and less suggestive of
constructive design.]
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
We left the train at Salisbury, and took a carriage to Amesbury, passing
by Old Sarum, a bare, treeless hill, once containing the town which sent
two members to Parliament--now, not a hut--and, arriving at Amesbury, we
stopt at the George Inn. After dinner we walked to Salisbury Plain. On
the broad downs, under the gray sky, not a house was visible, nothing
but Stonehenge, which looked like a group of brown dwarfs in the wide
expanse--Stonehenge and the barrows, which rose like green bosses about
the plain, and a few hay ricks. On the top of a mountain the old temple
would not be more impressive. Far and wide a few shepherds with their
flocks sprinkled the plain, and a bagman drove along the road. It looked
as if the wide margin given in this crowded isle to this primeval temple
were accorded by the veneration of the British race to the old egg out
of which all their ecclesiastical structures and history had proceeded.
Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with a diameter of a hundred feet,
and enclosing a second and third colonnade within. We walked round the
stones, and clambered over them, to wont ourselves with their strange
aspect and groupings, and found a nook sheltered from the wind among
them, where C. [Footnote: Thomas Carlyle, the author of "Sartor
Resartus," etc., etc.] lighted his cigar. It was pleasant to see that
just this simplest of all simple structures--two upright stones and a
lintel laid across--had long outstood all later churches, and all
history, and were like what is most permanent on the face of the planet:
these, and the barrows--(mere mounds of which there are a hundred and
sixty within a circle of three miles about Stonehenge)--like the same
mound on the plain of Troy, which still makes good to the passing
mariner on Hellespont, the vaunt of Homer and the fame of Achilles.
Within the enclosure grow buttercups, nettles, and, all around, wild
thyme, daisy, meadowsweet, goldenrod, thistle, and the carpeting grass.
Over us, larks were soaring and singing--as my friend said: "the larks
which were hatched last year, and the wind which was hatched many
thousand years ago." We counted and measured by paces the biggest
stones, and soon knew as much as any man can suddenly know of the
inscrutable temple. There are ninety-four stones, and there were once
probably one hundred and sixty. The temple is circular and uncovered,
and the situation fixt astronomically--the grand entrances here, and at
Abury, being placed exactly northeast, "as all the gates of the old
cavern temples are." How came the stones here, for these sarsens or
Druidical sandstones are not found in this neighborhood? The sacrificial
stone, as it is called, is the only one in all these blocks that can
resist the action of fire, and, as I read in the books, must have been
brought one hundred and fifty miles.
On almost every stone we found the marks of the mineralogist's hammer
and chisel. The nineteen smaller stones of the inner circle are of
granite. I, who had just come from Professor Sedgwick's Cambridge Museum
of megatheria and mastodons, was ready to maintain that some cleverer
elephants or mylodonta had borne off and laid these rocks one on
another. Only the good beasts must have known how to cut a well-wrought
tenon and mortise, and to smooth the surface of some of the stones. The
chief mystery is, that any mystery should have been allowed to settle on
so remarkable a monument, in a country on which all the muses have kept
their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. We are not yet too late to
learn much more than is known of this structure. Some diligent Fellowes
or Layard will arrive, stone by stone, at the whole history, by that
exhaustive British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its choice of
objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to the rabbits,
while it opens pyramids, and uncovers Nineveh. Stonehenge, in virtue of
the simplicity of its plan, and its good preservation, is as if new and
recent; and, a thousand years hence, men will thank this age for the
accurate history it will yet eliminate.
MAGNA CHARTA ISLAND [Footnote: From "Pilgrimages to English Shrines."
Magna Charta Island lies in the Thames, a few miles below Windsor.]
BY MRS. S. C. HALL.
The Company of Basket-makers (if there be such a company) have claimed a
large portion of the field--where the barons, "clad in complete steel,"
assembled to confer with King John upon the great charter of English
freedom, by which, Hume truly but coldly says, "very important
liabilities and privileges were either granted or secured to every order
of men in the kingdom; to the clergy, to the barons, and to the
people"--the Basket-makers, we say, have availed themselves of the low
land of Runnymead to cultivate osiers; piles and stacks of "withies" in
various stages of utility, for several hundred yards shut out the river
from the wayfarer, but as he proceeds they disappear, and Cooper's Hill
on the left, the rich flat of Runnymead, the Thames, and the groves of
time-honored Anckerwycke, on its opposite bank, form together a rich and
most interesting picture.
It is now nearly a hundred years since it was first proposed to erect a
triumphal column upon Runnymead; but we have sometimes a strange
antipathy to do what would seem avoidable; the monument to the memory of
Hampden is a sore proof of the niggardliness of liberals to the liberal;
but all monuments to such a man or to such a cause must appear poor; the
names "Hampden" and "Runnymead" suffice; the green and verdant mead,
encircled by the coronet of Cooper's Hill, reposing beneath the sun, and
shadowed by the passing cloud, is an object of reverence and beauty,
immortalized by the glorious liberty which the bold barons of England
forced from a spiritless tyrant.
Tho Cooper's Hill has no claim to the sublimity of mountain scenery, its
peculiar situation commands a broad expanse of country. It rises
abruptly from the Runnymead meadows, and extends its long ridge in a
northwesterly direction; the summit is approached by a winding road,
which from different points of the ascent progressively unfolds a
gorgeous number of fertile views, such as no other country in the
world can give.
"Of hills and dales, and woods, and lawns, and spires,
And glittering towns, and silver streams."
We have heard that the views from Kingswood Lodge--the dwelling of the
hill--are delicious, and that its conservatory contains an exquisite
marble statue of "Hope." On the west of Cooper's Hill is the interesting
estate of Anckerwycke Purnish. Anckerwycke has been for a series of
years in the possession of the family of Harcourt. There is a "meet" of
the three shires in this vicinity--Surrey, Buckinghamshire, and
Berkshire. The views from the grounds of Anekerwycke are said to be of
exceeding beauty, and the kindness of its master makes eloquent the poor
about his domain. All these things, and the sound of the rippling waters
of the Thames, and the songs of the myriad birds which congregate in its
groves, and the legends sprung of its antiquity, all contribute to the
adornment of the gigantic fact that here, King John, sorely against his
will, signed Magna Charta! How that single fact fills the soul, and
nerves the spirit; how proudly the British birthright throbs within our
bosoms. We long to lead the new Napoleon, the absolute Nicholas, the
frank, hospitable, and brave, but sometimes overconfident American, to
this green sward of Runnymead and tell them that here was secured to the
Englishman a liberty which other nations have never enjoyed! Here in the
thickset beauty of yon little island, was our Charter granted.
There has been much dispute as to whether the Charter was signed upon
the Mead or on the island called "Magna Charta Island," which forms a
charming feature in the landscape, and upon which is built a little sort
of altar-house, so to call it. We leave the settlement of such matters
to wiser and more learned heads; but we incline to the idea that John
would have felt even the mimic ferry a protection. The island looks even
now exclusive, and as we were impelled to its shore, we indulged the
belief that the charter was really there signed by the king.
There was a poetic feeling in whoever planted the bank of
"Forget-me-not" just at the entrance to the low apartment which was
fitted up to contain the charter stone, by the late Simon Harcourt,
Esq., in the year 1835. The inscription on the stone is as follows:--"Be
it remembered, that on this island, in June, 1215, John, King of
England, Signed the Magna Charta, and in the year 1834, this building
was erected in commemoration of that great and important event by George
Simon Harcourt, Esq., Lord of the Manor and then High Sheriff of the
county." A gentleman rents the island from Mr. Harcourt, and has built
there a Gothic cottage in excellent keeping with the place. It adjoins
the altar-room, but does not interfere with it, nor with the privileges
so graciously bestowed on the public by Mr. Harcourt--permitting
patriots or fishermen to visit the island, and picnic in a tent prepared
for the purpose, under the shelter of some superb walnut trees.
THE HOME OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS [Footnote: From "Old England: Its
Scenery, Art and People." Published Toy Houghton, Mifflin Co.]
BY JAMES M. HOPPIN.
Twelve miles to the south of Doncaster, on the great Northern line of
railway, and just at the junction of Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and
Lincolnshire, in the county of Nottingham, but bordering upon the fenny
districts of Lincolnshire, whose monotonous scenery reminds one of
Holland, lies the village of Scrooby. Surely it is of more interest to
us than all the Pictish forts and Roman walls that the "Laird of
Monkbarns" ever dreamed of. I was dropt out of the railway-carriage,
which hardly stopt upon a wide plain at a miniature station-house, with
some suspicions of a church and small village across the flat rushy
fields in the distance. This was indeed the humble village (tho now
beginning to be better known) which I had been searching for; and which
nobody of whom I inquired in Doncaster, or on the line of the railway,
seemed to know anything about, or even that such a place existed. I made
its discovery by the help of a good map. The station-master said he came
to Scrooby in 1851, and then it numbered three hundred inhabitants; and
since that time there had been but twelve deaths.
My search for the manor-house where Brewster and Bradford established
the first church of the Pilgrims, was, for a time, entirely fruitless. I
inquired of a genuine "Hodge" working in the fields; but his round red
face showed no glimmer of light on the matter so far removed from beans
and barley. I next encountered a good Wesleyan minister, trudging his
morning circuit of pastoral visitation, but could gain nothing from him,
tho a chatty, communicative man. At the venerable stone church of
Scrooby, very rude and plain in architecture, but by no means devoid of
picturesqueness, I was equally unsuccessful. The verger of the church,
who is generally the learned man of the village, was absent; and his
daughter knew nothing outside the church and churchyard.
I strolled along the grassy country road that ran through the place till
I met a white-haired old countryman, who proved to be the most
intelligent soul in the neighborhood. He put his cane to his chin, shut
and opened his eyes, and at last told me in broad Yorkshire, that he
thought the place I was looking for must be what they called "the
bishop's house," where Squire Dickinson lived. Set at last upon the
right track, I walked across two swampy meadows that bordered the Idle
River--pertinently named--till I came to a solitary farmhouse with a
red-tiled roof. Some five or six slender poplar-trees stood at the back
of it, and a ditch of water at one end, where there had been evidently
an ancient moat--"a moated grange."
It was a desolate spot, and was rendered more so just then by the coming
up of a thunder-storm, whose "avant courier," the wind, made the slender
poplars and osiers bend and twist. Squire John Dickinson, the present
inhabitant of the house, which is owned by Richard Monckton Milnes, the
poet, gave me a hearty farmer's welcome. I think he said there had been
one other American there before; at any rate he had an inkling that he
was squatted on soil of some peculiar interest to Americans. He
introduced me to his wife and daughters, healthy and rosy-cheeked
English women, and made me sit down to a hospitable luncheon. He
entertained me with a discourse upon the great amount of hard work to be
done in farming among these bogs, and wished he had never undertaken it,
but had gone to America or Australia. The house, he said, was rickety
enough, but he contrived to make it do. It was, he thought, principally
made of what was once a part of the stable of the Manor House.
The palace itself has now entirely disappeared; "but," said my host,
"dig anywhere around here and you will find the ruins of the old
palace." Dickinson said that he himself was reared in Austerfield, a few
miles off in Yorkshire; and that a branch of the Bradford family still
lived there. After luncheon I was shown Cardinal Wolsey's mulberry-tree,
or what remained of it; and in one of the barns, some elaborately carved
woodwork and ornamental beams, covered with dirt and cobwebs, were
pointed out, which undoubtedly belonged to the archiepiscopal palace.
This was all that remained of the house where Elder Brewster once lived,
and gathered his humble friends about him, in a simple form of
worship.... This manor was assigned to the Archbishop of York in the
"Doomsday Book." Cardinal Wolsey, when he held that office, passed some
time at this palace. While he lived there, Henry VIII. slept a night in
the house. It came into Archbishop Sandys's hands in 1576. He gave it by
lease to his son, Samuel Sandys, under whom Brewster held the manor.
Brewster, as is now well known, was the Post-Superintendent of Scrooby,
an important position in those days, lying as the village did, and does
now, upon the great northern line of travel from London to Yorkshire,
Northumberland, and Scotland....
But to look at this lonely and decayed manor-house, standing in the
midst of these flat and desolate marshes, and at this most obscure
village of the land, this Nazareth of England, slumbering in rustic
ignorance and stupid apathy, and to think of what has come out of this
place, of what vast influences and activities have issued from this
quiet and almost listless scene, one has strange feelings. The storied
"Alba Longa," from which Rome sprang, is an interesting spot, but the
newly discovered spiritual birthplace of America may excite
deeper emotions.
OXFORD [Footnote: From "Oxford and Her Colleges." By arrangement with
the publishers, Macmillan Co. Copyright, 1893.]
BY GOLDWIN SMITH
There is in Oxford much that is not as old as it looks. The buildings of
the Bodleian Library, University College, Oriel, Exeter, and some
others, medieval or half medieval in their style, are Stuart in date. In
Oxford the Middle Ages lingered long. Yon cupola of Christ Church is the
work of Wren, yon towers of All Souls' are the work of a still later
hand. The Headington stone, quickly growing black and crumbling, gives
the buildings a false hue of antiquity. An American visitor, misled by
the blackness of University College, remarked to his host that the
buildings must be immensely old. "No," replied his host, "their color
deceives you; their age is not more than two hundred years." It need not
be said that Palladian edifices like Queen's, or the new buildings of
Magdalen, are not the work of a Chaplain of Edward III., or a Chancellor
of Henry VI. But of the University buildings, St. Mary's Church and the
Divinity School, of the College buildings, the old quadrangles of
Merton, New College, Magdalen, Brasenose, and detached pieces not a few
are genuine Gothic of the Founders' age.
Here are six centuries, if you choose to include the Norman castle, here
are eight centuries, and, if you choose to include certain Saxon
remnants in Christ Church Cathedral, here are ten centuries, chronicled
in stone. Of the corporate lives of these Colleges, the threads have run
unbroken through all the changes and revolutions, political, religious,
and social, between the Barons' War and the present hour. The economist
goes to their muniment rooms for the record of domestic management and
expenditure during those ages.
Till yesterday, the codes of statutes embodying their domestic law, tho
largely obsolete, remained unchanged. Nowhere else in England, at all
events, unless it be at the sister University, can the eye and mind feed
upon so much antiquity, certainly not upon so much antique beauty, as on
the spot where we stand. That all does not belong to the same remote
antiquity, adds to the interest and to the charm. This great home of
learning, with its many architectures, has been handed from generation
to generation, each generation making its own improvements, impressing
its own tastes, embodying its own tendencies, down to the present hour.
It is like a great family mansion, which owner after owner has enlarged
or improved to meet his own needs or tastes, and which, thus chronicling
successive phases of social and domestic life, is wanting in uniformity
but not in living interest or beauty.
Oxford is a federation of Colleges. It had been strictly so for two
centuries, and every student had been required to be a member of a
college when, in 1856, non-collegiate students, of whom there are now a
good many, were admitted. The University is the federal government. The
Chancellor, its nominal head, is a non-resident grandee, usually a
political leader whom the University delights to honor and whose
protection it desires. Only on great state occasions does he appear in
his gown richly embroidered with gold. The acting chief is the
Vice-Chancellor, one of the heads of Colleges, who marches with the
Bedel carrying the mace before him, and has been sometimes taken by
strangers for the attendant of the Bedel. With him are the two Proctors,
denoted by their velvet sleeves, named by the Colleges in turn, the
guardians of University discipline.
The University Legislature consists of three houses--an elective
Council, made up equally of heads of Colleges, professors, and Masters
of Arts; the Congregation of residents, mostly teachers of the
University or Colleges; and the Convocation, which consists of all
Masters of Arts, resident or non-resident, if they are present to vote.
Congregation numbers 400, Convocation nearly 6,000. Legislation is
initiated by the Council, and has to make its way through Convocation
and Congregation, with some chance of being wrecked between the
academical Congregation, which is progressive, and the rural
Convocation, which is conservative. The University regulates the general
studies, holds all the examinations, except that at entrance, which is
held by the Colleges, confers all the degrees and honors, and furnishes
the police of the academical city. Its professors form the general and
superior staff of teachers. Each College, at the same time, is a little
polity in itself. It has its own governing body, consisting of a Head
(President, Master, Principal, Provost, or Warden) and a body of
Fellows. It holds its own estates; noble estates, some of them are. It
has its private staff of teachers or tutors, usually taken from the
Fellows, tho the subjects of teaching are those recognized by the
University examinations....
The buildings of the University lie mainly in the center of the city
around us. There is the Convocation House, the hall of the University
Legislature, where, in times of collision between theological parties,
or between the party of the ancient system of education and that of the
modern system, lively debates have been heard. In it, also, are
conferred the ordinary degrees. They are still conferred in the
religious form of words, handed down from the Middle Ages, the candidate
kneeling down before the Vice-Chancellor in the posture of medieval
homage. Oxford is the classic ground of old forms and ceremonies. Before
each degree is conferred, the Proctors march up and down the House to
give any objector to the degree--an unsatisfied creditor, for
example--the opportunity of entering a caveat by "plucking" the
Proctor's sleeve. Adjoining the Convocation House is the Divinity
School, the only building of the University, saving St. Mary's Church,
which dates from the Middle Ages. A very beautiful relic of the Middle
Ages it is when seen from the gardens of Exeter College. Here are held
the examinations for degrees in theology, styled, in Oxford of old,
queen of the sciences, and long their tyrant. Here, again, is the
Sheldonian Theater, the gift of Archbishop Sheldon, a Primate of the
Restoration period, and as readers of Pepys's "Diary" know, of
Restoration character, but a patron of learning....
The Clarendon was built with the proceeds of the history written by the
Minister of the early Restoration, who was Chancellor of the University,
and whose touching letter of farewell to her, on his fall and flight
from England, may be seen in the Bodleian Library. There, also, are
preserved documents which may help to explain his fall. They are the
written dialogs which passed between him and his master at the board of
the Privy Council, and they show that Clarendon, having been the
political tutor of Charles the exile, too much bore himself as the
political tutor of Charles the king. In the Clarendon are the University
Council Chamber and the Registry. Once it was the University press, but
the press has now a far larger mansion yonder to the northwest, whence,
besides works of learning and science, go forth Bibles and prayer-books
in all languages to all quarters of the globe. Legally, as a printer of
Bibles the University has a privilege, but its real privilege is that
which it secures for itself by the most scrupulous accuracy and by
infinitesimal profits.
Close by is the University Library, the Bodleian, one of those great
libraries of the world in which you can ring up at a few minutes' notice
almost any author of any age or country. This Library is one of those
entitled by law to a copy of every book printed in the United Kingdom,
and it is bound to preserve all that it receives, a duty which might in
the end burst any building, were it not that the paper of many modern
books is happily perishable.... We stand in the Radcliffe, formerly the
medical and physical library, now a supplement and an additional
reading-room of the Bodleian, the gift of Dr. Radcliffe, Court Physician
and despot of the profession in the times of William and Anne, of whose
rough sayings, and sayings more than rough, some are preserved in his
"Life." He it was who told William III. that he would not have His
Majesty's two legs for his three kingdoms, and who is said to have
punished the giver of a niggardly fee by a prediction of death, which
was fulfilled by the terrors of the patient. Close at hand is the
Ashmolean, the old University Museum, now only a museum of antiquities,
the most precious of which is King Alfred's gem. Museum and Medical
Library have together migrated to the new edifice on the north side
of the city.
But of all the University buildings the most beautiful is St. Mary's
Church, where the University sermons are preached, and from the pulpit
of which, in the course of successive generations and successive
controversies, a changeful and often heady current of theology has
flowered. There preached Newman, Pusey, and Manning; there preached
Hampden, Stanley, and the authors of "Essays and Reviews." ...
On the north of the city, where fifty years ago stretched green fields,
is now seen a suburb of villas, all of them bespeaking comfort and
elegance, few of them overweening wealth. These are largely the
monuments of another great change, the removal of the rule of celibacy
from the Fellowships, and the introduction of a large body of married
teachers devoted to their profession, as well as of the revival of the
Professorships, which were always tenable by married men. Fifty years
ago the wives of Heads of Houses, who generally married late in life if
they married at all, constituted, with one or two officers of the
University, the whole female society of Oxford. The change was
inevitable, if education was to be made a profession, instead of being,
as it had been in the hands of celibate Fellows of Colleges, merely the
transitory occupation of a man whose final destination was the parish.
Those who remember the old Common Room life, which is now departing, can
not help looking back with a wistful eye to its bachelor ease, its
pleasant companionship, its interesting talk and free interchange of
thought, its potations neither "deep" nor "dull."
Nor were its symposia without important fruits when such men as Newman
and Ward, on one side, encountered such men as Whateley, Arnold, and
Tait, on the other side in Common Room talk over great questions of the
day. But the life became dreary when a man had passed forty, and it is
well exchanged for the community that fills those villas, and which,
with its culture, its moderate and tolerably equal incomes, permitting
hospitality but forbidding luxury, and its unity of interests with its
diversity of acquirements and accomplishments, seems to present the
ideal conditions of a pleasant social life. The only question is, how
the College system will be maintained when the Fellows are no longer
resident within the walls of the College to temper and control the
younger members, for a barrack of undergraduates is not a good thing.
The personal bond and intercourse between Tutor and pupil under the
College system was valuable as well as pleasant; it can not be resigned
without regret. But its loss will be compensated by far
superior teaching.
CAMBRIDGE [Footnote: From "Old England: Its Scenery, Art and People."
Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co.]
BY JAMES M. HOPPIN.
I was struck with the positive resemblances between Oxford and
Cambridge. Both are situated on slightly rising ground, with broad green
meadows and a flat, fenny country stretching around them. The winding
and muddy Cam, holding the city in its arm, might be easily taken for
the fond but still more capricious Isis, tho both of them are
insignificant streams; and Jesus' College Green and Midsummer Common at
Cambridge, correspond to Christ Church Meadows and those bordering the
Cherwell at Oxford. At a little distance, the profile of Cambridge is
almost precisely like that of Oxford, while glorious King's College
Chapel makes up all deficiencies in the architectural features and
outline of Cambridge.
Starting from Bull Inn, we will not linger long in the streets, tho we
might be tempted to do so by the luxurious book-shops, but will make
straight for the gateway of Trinity College. This gateway is itself a
venerable and imposing structure, altho a mass of houses clustered about
it destroys its unity with the rest of the college buildings. Between
its two heavy battlemented towers are a statue of Edward III. and his
coat-of-arms; and over the gate Sir Isaac Newton had his observatory.
This gateway introduces into a noble court, called the Great Court, with
a carved stone fountain or canopied well in the center, and buildings of
irregular sizes and different ages inclosing it. The chapel which forms
the northern side of this court dates back to 1564. In the ante-chapel,
or vestibule, stands the statue of Sir Isaac Newton, by Roubiliac. It is
spirited, but, like all the works of this artist, unnaturally
attenuated. The head is compact rather than large, and the forehead
square rather than high. The face has an expression of abstract
contemplation, and is looking up, as if the mind were just fastening
upon the beautiful law of light which is suggested by the hand holding a
prism. By the door of the screen entering into the chapel proper, are
the sitting statues of Sir Francis Bacon and Dr. Isaac Barrow, two more
giants of this college. The former represents the philosopher in a
sitting posture, wearing his high-crowned hat, and leaning thoughtfully
upon his hand.
The hall of Trinity College, which separates the Great Court from the
Inner or Neville Court, (courts in Cambridge, quads in Oxford), is the
glory of the college. Its interior is upward of one hundred feet in
length, oak-wainscoted, with deep beam-work ceiling, now black with age,
and an enormous fireplace, which in winter still blazes with its old
hospitable glow. At the upper end where the professors and fellows sit,
hang the portraits of Bacon and Newton. I had the honor of dining in
this most glorious of banqueting-halls, at the invitation of a fellow of
the college. Before meals, the ancient Latin, grace, somewhat
abbreviated, is pronounced.
We pass through the hall into Neville Court, three sides of which are
cloistered, and in the eastern end of which stands the fine library
building, built through the exertions of Dr. Barrow, who was determined
that nothing in Oxford should surpass his own darling college.
The library room is nearly two hundred feet long, with tesselated marble
floor, and with the busts of the great men of Trinity ranged around the
walls. The wood-carvings of Grinling Gibbons that adorn this room, of
flowers, fruit, wheat, grasshoppers, birds, are of singular beauty, and
make the hard oak fairly blossom and live. This library contains the
most complete collection of the various editions of Shakespeare's Works
which exists. Thorwaldsen's statue of Byron, who was a student of this
college, stands at the south end of the room. It represents him in the
bloom of youth, attired as a pilgrim, with pencil in hand and a broken
Grecian column at his feet....
The next neighbor to Trinity on the north, and the next in point of size
and importance in the University, is St. John's College. It has four
courts, one opening into the other. It also is jealously surrounded by
high walls, and its entrance is by a ponderous old tower, having a
statue of St. John the Evangelist over the gateway. Through a covered
bridge, not unlike "the Bridge of Sighs," one passes over the stream to
a group of modern majestic castellated buildings of yellow stone
belonging to this college. The grounds, walks, and thick groves
connected with this building form an elegant academic shade, and tempt
to a life of exclusive study and scholarly accumulation, of growing fat
in learning, without perhaps growing muscular in the effort to
use it....
King's College, founded by Henry VII., from whom it takes its name,
comes next in order. Its wealthy founder, who, like his son, loved
architectural pomp, had great designs in regard to this institution,
which were cut off by his death, but the massive unfinished gateway of
the old building stands as a regal specimen of what the whole plan would
have been had it been carried out. Henry VIII., however, perfected some
of his father's designs on a scale of true magnificence. King's College
Chapel, the glory of Cambridge and England, is in the perpendicular
style of English Gothic. It is three hundred and sixteen feet long,
eighty-four feet broad, its sides ninety feet, and its tower one hundred
and forty-six feet high. Its lofty interior stone roof in the
fan-tracery form of groined ceiling has the appearance of being composed
of immense white scallop-shells, with heavy corbels of rich flowers and
bunches of grapes suspended at their points of junction. The ornamental
emblem of the Tudor rose and portcullis is carved in every conceivable
spot and nook. Twenty-four stately and richly painted windows, divided
into the strong vertical lines of the Perpendicular style, and crossed
at right angles by lighter transoms and more delicate circular moldings,
with the great east and west windows flashing in the most vivid and
superb colors, make it a gorgeous vision of light and glory....
On the same street, and nearly opposite St. Peter's, is Pembroke
College, a most interesting and venerable pile, with a quaint gable
front. Its buildings are small, and it is said, for some greatly needed
city improvement, will probably be soon torn down; on hearing which, I
thought, would that some genius like Aladdin's, or some angel who bore
through the air the chapel of the "Lady of Loretto," might bear these
old buildings bodily to our land and set them down on the Yale grounds,
so that we might exchange their picturesque antiquity for the present
college buildings, which, tho endeared to us by many associations, are
like a row of respectable brick factories.
Edmund Spenser and William Pitt belonged to Pembroke; and Gray, the
poet, driven from St. Peter's by the pranks and persecutions of his
fellow students, spent the remainder of his university life here. Some
of the cruel, practical jokes inflicted upon the timid and delicate
nature sound like the modern days of "hazing freshmen." Among his other
fancies and fears, Gray was known to be especially afraid of fire, and
kept always coiled up in his room a rope-ladder, in case of emergency.
By a preconcerted signal, on a dark winter night, a tremendous cry of
fire was raised in the court below, which caused the young poet to leap
out of bed and to hastily descend his rope-ladder into a mighty tub of
ice-cold water, set for that purpose....
Sidney Sussex and Imanuel Colleges were called by Archbishop Laud "the
nurseries of Puritanism." The college-book of Sidney Sussex contains
this record: "Oliver Cromwell of Huntingdon was admitted as an associate
on the 26th day of April, 1616. Tutor Richard Howlet." He had just
completed his seventeenth year. Cromwell's father dying the next year,
and leaving but a small estate, the young "Protector" was obliged to
leave college for more practical pursuits. "But some Latin," Bishop
Burnett said, "stuck to him." An oriel window looking upon Bridge
Street, is pointed out as marking his room; and in the master's lodge is
a likeness of Cromwell in his later years, said to be the best extant.
The gray hair is parted in the middle of the forehead, and hangs down
long upon the shoulders, like that of Milton. The forehead is high and
swelling, with a deep line sunk between the eyes. The eyes are gray. The
complexion is florid and mottled, and all the features rugged and large.
Heavy, corrugated furrows of decision and resolute will are plowed about
the mouth, and the lips are shut like a vice. Otherwise, the face has a
calm and benevolent look, not unlike that of Benjamin Franklin.
In Sidney Sussex, Cromwell's College, and in two or three other colleges
of Cambridge University, we find the head-sources of English Puritanism,
which, in its best form, was no wild and unenlightened enthusiasm, but
the product of thoughtful and educated minds. We shall come soon upon
the name of Milton. John Robinson, our national father, and the Moses of
our national exodus, as well as Elder Brewster, John Cotton and many
others of the principal Puritan leaders and divines, were educated at
Cambridge. Sir Henry Vane, the younger, whom Macintosh regarded as not
inferior to Bacon in depth of intellect, and to whom Milton addrest the
sonnet, who was chosen Governor of Massachusetts, and who infused much
of his own thoughtful and profound spirit into Puritan institutions at
home and in America, was a student of Magdalen College, Oxford.
A little further on to the south of Sidney Sussex, upon St. Andrew's
Street, is Christ's College. The front and gate are old; the other
buildings are after a design by Inigo Jones. In the garden stands the
famous mulberry-tree said to have been planted by Milton. It is still
vigorous, tho carefully propt up and mounded around, and its aged trunk
is sheathed with lead. The martyr Latimer, John Howe, the prince of
theological writers, and Archdeacon Paley, belonged to this college; but
its most brilliant name is that of John Milton. He entered in 1624; took
the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1628, and that of Master of Arts in
1632. This is the entry in the college record: "John Milton of London,
son of John Milton, was entered as a student in the elements of letters
under Master Hill of the Pauline School, February 12, 1624...." Milton
has indignantly defended himself against the slander of his political
enemies, that he left college in disgrace, and calls it "a
commodious lie." ...
It is noticeable that Cambridge has produced all the great poets;
Oxford, with her yearnings and strivings, none. Milton were glory
enough; but Spenser, Gray, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson (a
Lincolnshire man), may be thrown in. It might be said of Cambridge, as
Dr. Johnson said of Pembroke College, "We are a nest of singing birds
here." Milton, from the extreme elegance of his person and his mind,
rather than from any effeminateness of character, was called while in
the University, "the lady of Christ's College." The young poet could not
have been inspired by outward Nature in his own room; for the miniature
dormer-windows are too high to look out of at all. It is a small attic
chamber, with very steep narrow stairs leading up to it. The name of
"Milton" (so it is said to be, tho hard to make out) is cut in the old
oaken door.
CHESTER [Footnote: From "English Note-Books." By special arrangement
with, and by permission of the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co.
Copyright, 1870-1898.]
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
I went with Mr. Ticknor to Chester by railway. It is quite an
indescribable old town, and I feel as if I had had a glimpse of old
England. The wall encloses a large space within the town, but there are
numerous houses and streets not included within its precincts. Some of
the principal streets pass under the ancient gateways; and at the side
there are flights of steps, giving access to the summit. Around the top
of the whole wall, a circuit of about two miles, there runs a walk, well
paved with flagstones, and broad enough for three persons to walk
abreast....
The most utterly indescribable feature of Chester is the Rows, which
every traveler has attempted to describe. At the height of several feet
above some of the oldest streets, a walk runs through the front of the
houses, which project over it. Back of the walk there are shops; on the
outer side is a space of two or three yards, where the shopmen place
their tables, and stands, and show-cases; overhead, just high enough for
persons to stand erect, a ceiling. At frequent intervals little narrow
passages go winding in among the houses, which all along are closely
conjoined, and seem to have no access or exit, except through the shops,
or into these narrow passages, where you can touch each side with your
elbows, and the top with your hand. We penetrated into one or two of
them, and they smelt anciently and disagreeably.
At one of the doors stood a pale-looking, but cheerful and good-natured
woman, who told us that she had come to that house when first married,
21 years before, and had lived there ever since; and that she felt as if
she had been buried through the best years of her life. She allowed us
to peep into her kitchen and parlor--small, dingy, dismal, but yet not
wholly destitute of a home look. She said she had seen two or three
coffins in a day, during cholera times, carried out of that narrow
passage into which her door opened. These avenues put me in mind of
those which run through ant-hills, or those which a mole makes
underground. This fashion of Rows does not appear to be going out; and,
for aught I can see, it may last hundreds of years longer. When a house
becomes so old as to be untenantable, it is rebuilt, and the new one is
fashioned like the old, so far as regards the walk running through its
front. Many of the shops are very good, and even elegant, and these Rows
are the favorite places of business in Chester. Indeed, they have many
advantages, the passengers being sheltered from the rain, and there
being within the shops that dimmer light by which tradesmen like to
exhibit their wares.
A large proportion of the edifices in the Rows must be comparatively
modern; but there are some very ancient ones, with oaken frames visible
on the exterior. The Row, passing through these houses, is railed with
oak, so old that it has turned black, and grown to be as hard as stone,
which it might be mistaken for, if one did not see where names and
initials have been cut into it with knives at some bygone period.
Overhead, cross-beams project through the ceiling so low as almost to
hit the head. On the front of one of these buildings was the
inscription, "God's Providence is mine Inheritance," said to have been
put there by the occupant of the house two hundred years ago, when the
plague spared this one house only in the whole city. Not improbably the
inscription has operated as a safeguard to prevent the demolition of the
house hitherto; but a shopman of an adjacent dwelling told us that it
was soon to be taken down. Here and there, about some of the streets
through which the Rows do not run, we saw houses of very aged aspect,
with steep, peaked gables. The front gable-end was supported on stone
pillars, and the sidewalk passed beneath. Most of these old houses
seemed to be taverns,--the Black Bear, the Green Dragon, and such names.
We thought of dining at one of them, but, on inspection, they looked
rather too dingy and close, and of questionable neatness. So we went to
the Royal Hotel, where we probably fared just as badly at much more
expense, and where there was a particularly gruff and crabbed old
waiter, who, I suppose, thought himself free to display his surliness
because we arrived at the hotel on foot. For my part, I love to see John
Bull show himself. I must go again and again and again to Chester, for
I suppose there is not a more curious place in the world.
EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE [Footnote: From "Lightships and Lighthouses."
Courtesy of J. B. Lippincott Co., the publishers.]
BY FREDERICK A. TALBOT.
It is doubtful whether the name of any lighthouse is so familiar
throughout the English-speaking world as the "Eddystone." Certainly no
other "pillar of fire by night, of cloud by day," can offer so romantic
a story of dogged engineering perseverance, of heartrending
disappointments, disaster, blasted hopes, and brilliant success.
Standing out in the English Channel, about sixty miles east of the
Lizard, is a straggling ridge of rocks which stretches for hundreds of
yards across the marine thoroughfare, and also obstructs the western
approach to Plymouth Harbor. But at a point some nine and a half miles
south of Rame Head on the mainland the reef rises somewhat abruptly to
the surface, so that at low-water two or three ugly granite knots are
bared, which tell only too poignantly the complete destruction they
could wreak upon a vessel which had the temerity or the ill luck to
scrape over them at high-tide. Even in the calmest weather the sea curls
and eddies viciously around these stones; hence the name "Eddystone," is
derived....
As British overseas traffic expanded, the idea of indicating the spot
for the benefit of vessels was discust. The first practical suggestion
was put forward about the year 1664, but thirty-two years elapsed before
any attempt was made to reduce theory to practise. Then an eccentric
English country gentleman, Henry Winstanley, who dabbled in mechanical
engineering upon unorthodox lines, came forward and offered to build a
lighthouse upon the terrible rocks. Those who knew this ambitious
amateur were dubious of his success, and wondered what manifestation his
eccentricity would assume on this occasion. Nor was their scepticism
entirely misplaced. Winstanley raised the most fantastic lighthouse
which has ever been known, and which would have been more at home in a
Chinese cemetery than in the English Channel. It was wrought in wood and
most lavishly embellished with carvings and gilding.
Four years were occupied in its construction, and the tower was anchored
to the rock by means of long, heavy irons. The light, merely a flicker,
flashed out from this tower in 1699, and for the first time the
proximity of the Eddystones was indicated all around the horizon by
night. Winstanley's critics were rather free in expressing their opinion
that the tower would come down with the first sou'wester, but the
eccentric builder was so intensely proud of his invention as to venture
the statement that it would resist the fiercest gale that ever blew,
and, when such did occur, he hoped that he might be in the tower at
the time.
Fate gratified his wish, for while he was on the rock in the year 1703
one of the most terrible tempests that ever have assailed the coasts of
Britain gript the structure, tore it up by the roots, and hurled it into
the Channel, where it was battered to pieces, its designer and five
keepers going down with the wreck. When the inhabitants of Plymouth,
having vainly scanned the horizon for a sign of the tower on the
following morning, put off to the rock to investigate, they found only
the bent and twisted iron rods by which the tower had been held in
position projecting mournfully into the air from the rock-face.
Shortly after the demolition of the tower, the reef, as if enraged at
having been denied a number of victims owing to the existence of the
warning light, trapt the "Winchelsea" as she was swinging up Channel,
and smashed her to atoms, with enormous loss of life.
Altho the first attempt to conquer the Eddystone had terminated so
disastrously, it was not long before another effort was made to mark the
reef. The builder this time was a Cornish laborer's son, John Rudyerd,
who had established himself in business on Ludgate Hill as a silk
mercer. In his youth he had studied civil engineering, but his friends
had small opinion of his abilities in this craft. However, he attacked
the problem boldly, and, altho his tower was a plain, business-looking
structure, it would have been impossible to conceive a design capable of
meeting the peculiar requirements of the situation more efficiently. It
"was a cone, wrought in timber, built upon a stone and wood foundation
anchored to the rock, and of great weight and strength. The top of the
cone was cut off to permit the lantern to be set in position. The result
was that externally the tower resembled the trunk of an oak tree, and
appeared to be just about as strong. It offered the minimum of
resistance to the waves, which, tumbling upon the ledge, rose and curled
around the tapering form without starting a timber.
For forty years Rudyerd's structure defied the elements, and probably
would have been standing to this day had it not possest one weak point.
It was built of wood instead of stone. Consequently, when a fire broke
out in the lantern on December 4, 1755, the flames, fanned by the
breeze, rapidly made their way downward.
No time was lost in erecting another tower on the rock, for now it was
more imperative than ever that the reef should be lighted adequately.
The third engineer was John Smeaton, who first landed on the rock to
make the surveys on April 5, 1756. He was able to stay there for only
two and a quarter hours before the rising tide drove him off, but in
that brief period he had completed the work necessary to the preparation
of his design. Wood had succumbed to the attacks of tempest and of
fire in turn.
Smeaton would use material which would defy both--Portland stone. He
also introduced a slight change in the design for such structures, and
one which has been universally copied, producing the graceful form of
lighthouse with which everyone is so familiar. Instead of causing the
sides to slope upward in the straight lines of a cone, such as Rudyerd
adopted, Smeaton preferred a slightly concave curve, so that the tower
was given a waist about half its height. He also selected the oak tree
as his guide, but one having an extensive spread of branches, wherein
will be found a shape in the trunk, so far as the broad lines are
concerned, which coincides with the form of Smeaton's lighthouse. He
chose a foundation where the rock shelved gradually to its highest
point, and dropt vertically into the water upon the opposite side. The
face of the rock was roughly trimmed to permit the foundation stones of
the tower to be laid. The base of the building was perfectly solid to
the entrance level, and each stone was dovetailed securely into
its neighbor.
From the entrance, which was about 15 feet above high water, a central
well, some five feet in diameter, containing a staircase, led to the
storeroom, nearly 30 feet above high water. Above this was a second
storeroom, a living-room as the third floor, and the bedroom beneath the
lantern. The light was placed about 72 feet above high water, and
comprised a candelabra having two rings, one smaller than and placed
within the other, but raised about a foot above its level, the two being
held firmly in position by means of chains suspended from the roof and
secured to the floor. The rings were adapted to receive twenty-four
lights, each candle weighing about two and three-quarter ounces. Even
candle manufacture was in its infancy in those days, and periodically
the keepers had to enter the lantern to snuff the wicks. In order to
keep the watchers of the lights on the alert, Smeaton installed a clock
of the grandfather pattern in the tower, and fitted it with a gong,
which struck every half hour to apprise the men of these duties. This
clock is now one of the most interesting relics in the museum at Trinity
House.... [Footnote: Trinity House, an association founded in London in
1512-1514, is "empowered by charter to examine, license and regulate
pilots, to erect beacons and lighthouses, and to place buoys in channels
and rivers."]
The lighthouse had been standing for 120 years when ominous reports were
received by the Trinity Brethren concerning the stability of the tower.
The keepers stated that during severe storms the building shook
alarmingly. A minute inspection of the structure was made, and it was
found that, altho the work of Smeaton's masons was above reproach, time
and weather had left their mark. The tower itself was becoming decrepit.
The binding cement had decayed, and the air imprisoned and comprest
within the interstices by the waves was disintegrating the structure
slowly but surely.
Under these circumstances it was decided to build a new tower on another
convenient ledge, forming part of the main reef, about 120 feet distant.
Sir James Douglass, the engineer-in-chief to Trinity House, completed
the designs and personally superintended their execution. The Smeaton
lines were taken as a basis, with one important exception. Instead of a
curve commencing at the foundation, the latter comprized a perfect
cylindrical monolith of masonry 22 feet in height by 44 feet in
diameter. From this basis the tower springs to a height which brings the
local plane 130 feet above the highest spring tides. The top of the base
is 30 inches above high water, and, the tower's diameter being less than
that of its plinth, the set-off forms an excellent landing-stage when
the weather permits.
The site selected for the Douglass tower being lower than that chosen by
Smeaton, the initial work was more exacting, as the duration of the
working period was reduced. The rock, being gneiss, was extremely tough,
and the preliminary quarrying operations for the foundation stones which
had to be sunk into the rock were tedious and difficult, especially as
the working area was limited. Each stone was dovetailed, not only to its
neighbor on either side, but below and above as well. The foundation
stones were dovetailed into the reef and were secured still further by
the aid of tow bolts, each one and a half inches in diameter, which were
passed through the stone and sunk deeply into the rock below....
The tower has eight floors, exclusive of the entrance; there are two oil
rooms, one above the other, holding 4,300 gallons of oil, above which is
a coal and store room, followed by a second storeroom. Outside the tower
at this level is a crane, by which supplies are hoisted, and which also
facilitates the landing and embarkation of the keepers, who are swung
through the air in a stirrup attached to the crane rope. Then, in turn,
come the living-room, the "low light" room, bedroom, service room, and
finally the lantern. For the erection of the tower, 2,171 blocks of
granite, which were previously fitted temporarily in their respective
positions on shore and none of which weighed less than two tons, were
used. When the work was commenced, the engineer estimated that the task
would occupy five years, but on May 18, 1882, the lamp was lighted by
the Duke of Edinburgh, the Master of Trinity House at the time, the
enterprise having occupied only four years. Some idea may thus be
obtained of the energy with which the labor was prest forward, once the
most trying sections were overcome....
When the new tower was completed and brought into service, the Smeaton
building was demolished. This task was carried out with extreme care,
inasmuch as the citizens of Plymouth had requested that the historic
Eddystone structure might be erected on Plymouth Hoe, on the spot
occupied by the existing Trinity House landmark. The authorities agreed
to this proposal, and the ownership of the Smeaton tower was forthwith
transferred to the people of Plymouth. But demolition was carried out
only to the level of Smeaton's lower storeroom. The staircase, well, and
entrance were filled up with masonry, the top was beveled off, and in
the center of the stump an iron pole was planted. While the Plymouth Hoe
relic is but one-half of the tower, its reerection was completed
faithfully, and, moreover, carries the original candelabra which the
famous engineer devised.
Not only is the Douglass tower a beautiful example of lighthouse
engineering, but it was relatively cheap. The engineer, when he prepared
the designs, estimated that an outlay of £78,000, or $390,000, would be
incurred. As a matter of fact, the building cost only £59,255, or
$296,275, and a saving of £18,000, or $90,000, in a work of this
magnitude is no mean achievement. All things considered, the Eddystone
is one of the cheapest sea-rock lights which has ever been consummated.
THE CAPITAL OF THE BRITISH, SAXON AND NORMAN KINGS [Footnote: From
"Visits to Remarkable Places."]
BY WILLIAM HOWITT
What an interesting old city is Winchester! and how few people are aware
of it! The ancient capital of the kingdom--the capital of the British,
and the Saxon, and the Norman kings--the favorite resort of our kings
and queens, even till the revolution of 1688; the capital which, for
ages, maintained a proud, and long a triumphant, rivalry with London
itself; the capital which once boasted upward of ninety churches and
chapels, whose meanest houses now stand upon the foundations of noble
palaces and magnificent monasteries; and in whose ruins or in whose yet
superb minster lie enshrined the bones of mighty kings, and fair and
pious queens; of lordly abbots and prelates, who in their day swayed not
merely the destinies of this one city, but of the kingdom. There she
sits--a sad, discrowned queen, and how few are acquainted with her in
the solitude of her desertion! Yet where is the place, saving London
itself, which can compete with her in solemn and deep interest? Where is
the city, except that, in Great Britain, which can show so many objects
of antique beauty, or call up so many national recollections?
Here lie the bones of Alfred--here he was probably born, for this was at
that time the court and the residence of his parents. Here, at all
events, he spent his infancy and the greater portion of his youth. Here
he imbibed the wisdom and the magnanimity of mind with which he
afterward laid the foundations of our monarchy, our laws, liberties and
literature, and in a word, of our national greatness.
Hence Alfred went forth to fight those battles which freed his country
from the savage Dane; and, having done more for his realm and race than
ever monarch did before or since, here he lay down, in the strength of
his years, and consigned his tomb as a place of grateful veneration to a
people whose future greatness even his sagacious spirit could not be
prophetic enough to foresee.
Were it only for the memory and tomb of this great king, Winchester
ought to be visited by every Englishman with the most profound
veneration and affection; but here also lie the ashes of nearly all
Alfred's family and kin: his father Ethelwolf, who saw the virtues and
talents, and prognosticated the greatness of his son; his noble-minded
mother, who breathed into his infant heart the most sublime sentiments;
his royal brothers, and his sons and daughters. Here also repose Canute,
who gave that immortal reproof on the Southampton shore to his
sycophantic courtiers, and his celebrated queen Emma, so famous at once
for her beauty and her trials. Here is still seen the tomb of Rufus, who
was brought hither in a charcoal-burner's cart from the New Forest,
where the chance arrow of Tyrrel, avenged, in his last hunt, the
cruelties of himself and his father on that ground....
Historians claim a high antiquity for Winchester as the Caer Gwent of
the Celtic and Belgic Britons, the Venta Belgarum of the Romans, and the
Wintanceaster of the Saxons. The history of Winchester is nearly coeval
with the Christian era. Julius Caesar does not seem to have been here,
in his invasion of Britain, but some of his troops must have passed
through it; a plate from one of his standards, bearing his name and
profile, having been found deep buried in a sand bed in this
neighborhood; and here, within the first half century of Christendom,
figured the brave descendants of Cassivelaunus, those noble sons of
Cunobelin or Cymbeline, Guiderius and Arviragus, whom Shakespeare has so
beautifully presented to us in his "Cymbeline." ...
Here it was that, while Caractacus himself reigned, the fate of the
brave Queen Boadicea was sealed. Stung to the quick with the insults she
had received from the Romans, this noble queen of the Iceni, the Bonduca
of some writers, and the Boo Tika of her own coins, had sworn to root
out the Roman power from this country. Had she succeeded, Caractacus
himself had probably fallen, nor had there ever been a king Lucius here.
She came, breathing utter extermination to every thing Roman or of Roman
alliance, at the head of 230,000 barbarians, the most numerous army then
ever collected by any British prince. Already had she visited and laid
in ashes Camulodunum, London, and Verulam, killing every Roman and every
Roman ally to the amount of 70,000 souls. But in this neighborhood she
was met by the Roman general Paulinus, and her army routed, with the
slaughter of 80,000 of her followers. In her despair at this
catastrophe, she destroyed herself, and instead of entering the city in
triumph was brought in, a breathless corpse, for burial.
Henry III. was born here, and always bore the name of Henry of
Winchester; Henry IV. here married Joan of Brittany; Henry VI. came
often hither, his first visit being to study the discipline of Wykeham's
College as a model for his new one at Eton, to supply students to King's
College, Cambridge, as Wykeham's does to his foundation of New College,
Oxford; and happy had it been for this unfortunate monarch had he been a
simple monk in one of the monasteries of a city which he so loved,
enjoying peace, learning and piety, having bitterly to learn:
"That all the rest is held at such a rate
As brings a thousand-fold more care to keep
Than in possession any jot of pleasure."
Henry VIII. made a visit with the Emperor Charles V., and stayed a week
examining its various antiquities and religious institutions; but he
afterward visited them in a more sweeping manner by the suppression of
its monasteries, chantries, etc., so that, says Milner, "these being
dissolved, and the edifices themselves soon after pulled down, or
falling to decay, it must have worn the appearance of a city sacked by a
hostile army." Through his reign and that of Edward VI., the destruction
of the religious houses, and the stripping of the churches, went on to a
degree which must have rendered Winchester an object of ghastly change
and desolation.
"Then," says Milner, "were the precious and curious monuments of piety
and antiquity, the presents of Egbert and Ethelwolph, Canute, and Emma,
unrelentingly rifled and east into the melting-pot for the mere value of
the metal which composed them. Then were the golden tabernacles and
images of the Apostles snatched from the cathedral and other altars,"
and not a few of the less valuable sort of these sacred implements were
to be seen when he wrote (1798), and probably are now, in many private
houses of this city and neighborhood.
The later history of this fine old city is chiefly that of melancholy
and havoc. A royal marriage should be a gay thing; but the marriage of
Bloody Mary here to Philip of Spain awakes no great delight in an
English heart. Here, through her reign and that of Elizabeth, the chief
events were persecutions for religion. James I. made Winchester the
scene of the disgraceful trials of Sir Walter Raleigh, Lords Cobham and
Grey, and their assumed accomplices--trials in which that most vain and
pedantic of tyrants attempted, on the ground of pretended conspiracies,
to wreak his personal spite on some of the best spirits of England.
VI
SCOTLAND
EDINBURGH [Footnote: From "Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh."]
BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Venice, it has been said, differs from all other cities in the sentiment
which she inspires. The rest may have admirers; she only, a famous fair
one, counts lovers in her train. And, indeed, even by her kindest
friends, Edinburgh is not considered in a similar sense. These like her
for many reasons, not any one of which is satisfactory in itself. They
like her whimsically, if you will, and somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon
his cabinet. Her attraction is romantic in the narrowest meaning of the
term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so much beautiful as interesting.
She is preeminently Gothic, and all the more so since she has set
herself off with some Greek airs, and erected classic temples on her
crags. In a word, and above all, she is a curiosity.
The palace of Holyrood has been left aside--in the growth of Edinburgh,
and stands gray and silent in a workman's quarter and among breweries
and gas-works. It is a house of many memories. Great people of yore,
kings and queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors, played their stately
farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing has
lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chambers. There
Prince Charlie held his fantom levées, and in a very gallant manner
represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, all these things of
clay are mingled with the dust, the king's crown itself is shown for
sixpence to the vulgar; but the stone palace has outlived these changes.
For fifty weeks together, it is no more than a show for tourists and a
museum of old furniture; but on the fifty-first, behold the palace
reawakened and mimicking its past.
The Lord Commissioner, a kind of stage sovereign, sits among stage
courtiers; a coach and six and clattering escort come and go before the
gate; at night, the windows are lighted up, and its near neighbors, the
workmen, may dance in their own houses to the palace music. And in this
the palace is typical. There is a spark among the embers; from time to
time the old volcano smokes. Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and
still wears, in parody, her metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and
half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has
long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the
Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble. There are
armed men and cannon in the citadel overhead; you may see the troops
marshaled on the high parade; and at night after the early winter
even-fall, and in the morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind
carries abroad over Edinburgh the sound of drums and bugles. Grave
judges sit bewigged in what was once the scene of imperial
deliberations. Close by, in the High Street perhaps, the trumpets may
sound about the stroke of noon; and you see a troop of citizens in
tawdry masquerade; tabard above, heather-mixture trouser below, and the
men themselves trudging in the mud among unsympathetic bystanders. The
grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets with a better
presence. And yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of Scotland, who
are about to proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom before two score
boys, and thieves, and hackney coachmen.
Meanwhile, every hour the bell of the University rings out over the hum
of the streets, and every hour a double tide of students, coming and
going, fills the deep archways. And, lastly, one night in the
springtime--or, say, one morning rather, at the peep of day--late folk
may hear the voices of many men singing a psalm in unison from a church
on one side of the Old High Street; and a little after, or perhaps a
little before, the sound of many men singing a psalm in unison from
another church on the opposite side of the way. There will be something
in the words about the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it is to see
brethren dwelling together in unity. And the late folk will tell
themselves that all this singing denotes the conclusion of two yearly
ecclesiastical parliaments--the parliaments of churches, which are
brothers in many admirable virtues, but not specially like brothers in
this particular of a tolerant and peaceful life.
Again, meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy
between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history. Few
places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye.
In the very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature--a
Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden shaken by passing trains,
carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its warlike
shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the New Town.
From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon
the open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning
themselves along Prince's Street, with its mile of commercial palaces
all beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley
set with statues, where the washings of the Old Town flutter in the
breeze at its high windows.
And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of architecture! In this one
valley, where the life of the town goes most busily forward, there may
be seen, shown one above and behind another by the accidents of the
ground, buildings in almost every style upon the globe. Egyptian and
Greek temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires, are huddled one over
another in a most admired disorder; while, above all, the brute mass of
the Castle and the summit of Arthur's Seat look down upon these
imitations with a becoming dignity, as the works of Nature may look down
upon the monuments of Art. But Nature is a more indiscriminate patroness
than we imagine, and in no way frightened of a strong effect. The birds
roost as willingly among the Corinthian capitals as in the crannies of
the crag; the same atmosphere and daylight clothe the eternal rock and
yesterday's imitation portico; and as the soft northern sunshine throws
out everything into a glorified distinctness--or easterly mists, coming
up with the blue evening, fuse all these incongruous features into one,
and the lamps begin to glitter along the street, and faint lights to
burn in the high windows across the valley--the feeling grows upon you
that this is a piece of nature in the most intimate sense; that this
profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock, is
not a drop-scene in a theater, but a city in the world of everyday
reality, connected by railway and telegraph wire with all the capitals
of Europe, and inhabited by citizens of the familiar type, who keep
ledgers, and attend church, and have sold their immortal portion to a
daily paper....
The east of new Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy hill, of no great
elevation, which the town embraces. The old London road runs on one side
of it; while the New Approach, leaving it on the other hand, completes
the circuit.... Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is perhaps
the best; since you can see the Castle, which you lose from the Castle,
and Arthur's Seat, which you can not see from Arthur's Seat. It is the
place to stroll on one of those days of sunshine and east wind which are
so common in our more than temperate summer. The breeze comes off the
sea, with a little of the freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar
to the quarter, which is delightful to certain very ruddy organizations,
and greatly the reverse to the majority of mankind. It brings with it a
faint, floating haze, a cunning decolorizer, altho not thick enough to
obscure outlines near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to
windward at the far end of Musselburgh Bay; and over the Links of
Aberlady and Berwick Law and the hump of the Bass Bock it assumes the
aspect of a bank of thin sea fog.
Immediately underneath, upon the south, you command the yards of the
High School, and the towers and courts of the new Jail--a large place,
castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a
steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the Castle. In the
one, you may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise like a string
of nuns; in the other, schoolboys running at play, and their shadows
keeping step with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic
chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller and a shapelier
edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a little farther, and there is
Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red
sentry pacing smartly to and fro before the door like a mechanical
figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single out the
little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers made their
escape, and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in
white wine to retain her loveliness.
Behind and overhead lie the Queen's Park, from Musehat's Cairn to
Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of Salisbury's
Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark and precipitous slope, the
eye rises to the top of Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain
in virtue of its bold design. This upon your left. Upon the right, the
roofs and spires of the Old Town climb one above another to where the
citadel prints its broad bulk and jagged crown of bastions on the
western sky.... Perhaps it is now one in the afternoon; and at the same
instant of time, a ball rises to the summit of Nelson's flagstaff close
at hand, and, far away, a puff of smoke, followed by a report, bursts
from the half-moon battery at the Castle. This is the time-gun by which
people set their watches, as far as the sea coast or in hill farms upon
the Pent-lands. To complete the view, the eye enfilades Prince's Street,
black with traffic, and has a broad look over the valley between the Old
Town and the New; here, full of railway trains and stept over by the
high North Bridge upon its many columns, and there, green with trees
and gardens.
On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so abrupt in itself, nor has it
so exceptional an outlook; and yet even here it commands a striking
prospect. A gully separates it from the New Town. This is Greenside,
where witches were burned and tournaments held in former days. Down that
almost precipitous bank Bothwell launched his horse, and so first, as
they say, attracted the bright eyes of Mary. It is now tesselated with
sheets and blankets out to dry, and the sound of people beating carpets
is rarely absent. Beyond all this, the suburbs run out to Leith; Leith
camps on the seaside with her forests of masts; Leith roads are full of
ships at anchor; the sun picks out the white pharos upon Inchkeith
Island; the Firth extends on either hand from the Ferry to the May; the
towns of Fifeshire sit, each in its bank of blowing smoke, along the
opposite coast; and the hills enclose the view, except to the farthest
east, where the haze of the horizon rests upon the open sea. There lies
the road to Norway; a dear road for Sir Patrick Spens and his Scots
Lords; and yonder smoke on the hither side of Largo Law is Aberdour,
from whence they sailed to seek a queen for Scotland.
These are the main features of the scene roughly sketched. How they are
all tilted by the inclination of the ground, how each stands out in
delicate relief against the rest, what manifold detail, and play of sun
and shadow, animate and accentuate the picture, is a matter for a person
on the spot, and, turning swiftly on his heels, to grasp and bind
together in one comprehensive look. It is the character of such a
prospect, to be full of change and of things moving. The multiplicity
embarrasses the eye; and the mind, among so much, suffers itself to grow
absorbed with single points. You remark a tree in a hedgerow, or follow
a cart along a country road. You turn to the city, and see children,
dwarfed by distance into pigmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you
have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you
note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind
another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one
of the innumerable windows you watch a figure moving; on one of the
multitude of roofs you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind takes a
run and scatters the smoke; bells are heard, far and near, faint and
loud, to tell the hour; or perhaps a sea bird goes dipping evenly over
the housetops, like a gull across the waves. And here you are in the
meantime, on this pastoral hillside, among nibbling sheep and looked
upon by monumental buildings.
HOLYROOD [Footnote: From "Edinburgh Sketches and Memories."]
BY DAVID MASSON
Mary, Queen of Scots, on her return to Scotland after her thirteen years
of residence and education in France, had to form her first real
acquaintance with her native shores and the capital of her realm. She
had left Calais for the homeward voyage on Thursday, the 14th of August,
with a retinue of about one hundred and twenty persons, French and
Scottish, embarked in two French state galleys, attended by several
transports. They were a goodly company, with rich and splendid baggage.
The Queen's two most important uncles, indeed--the great Francis de
Lorraine, Duke of Guise, and his brother, Charles de Lorraine, the
Cardinal--were not on board. They, with the Duchess of Guise, and other
senior lords and ladies of the French court, had bidden Mary farewell at
Calais, after having accompanied her thither from Paris, and after the
Cardinal had in vain tried to persuade her not to take her costly
collection of pearls and other jewels with her, but to leave them in his
keeping till it should be seen how she might fare among her
Scottish subjects.
But on board the Queen's own galley were three others of Guise or
Lorraine uncles--the Duc d'Aumale, the Grand Prior, and the Marquis
d'Elbeuf--with M. Danville, son of the Constable of France, and a number
of French gentlemen of lower rank, among whom one notes especially young
Pierre de Bourdeilles, better known afterward in literary history as
Sieur de Brantôme, and a sprightly and poetic youth from Dauphiné, named
Chastelard, one of the attendants of M. Danville. With these were mixed
the Scottish contingent of the Queen's train, her four famous "Marys"
included--Mary Fleming, Mary Livingstone, Mary Seton, and Mary Beaton.
They had been her playfellows and little maids of honor long ago, in her
Scottish childhood; they had accompanied her when she went abroad, and
had lived with her ever since in France; and they were now returning
with her, Scoto-French women like herself, and all of about her own age,
to share her new fortunes....
Then, as now, the buildings that went by the general name of Holyrood
were distinguishable into two portions. There was the Abbey, now
represented only by the beautiful and spacious fragment of ruin called
the Royal Chapel, but then, despite the spoliations to which it had been
subjected by recent English invasions, still tolerably preserved in its
integrity as the famous edifice, in early Norman style, which had been
founded in the twelfth century by David I., and had been enlarged in the
fifteenth by additions in the later and more florid Gothic. Close by
this was Holyrood House, or the Palace proper, built in the earlier part
of the sixteenth century, and chiefly by James IV., to form a distinct
royal dwelling, and so supersede that occasional accommodation in the
Abbey itself which had sufficed for Scottish sovereigns before Edinburgh
was their habitual or capital residence.
One block of this original Holyrood House still remains in the
two-turreted projection of the present Holyrood which adjoins the ruined
relic of the Abbey, and which contains the rooms now specially shown as
"Queen Mary's Apartments." But the present Holyrood, as a whole, is a
construction of the reign of Charles II., and gives little idea of the
Palace in which Mary took up her abode in 1561. The two-turreted
projection on the left was not balanced then, as now, by a similar
two-turreted projection on the right, with a façade of less height
between, but was flanked on the right by a continued chateau-like
frontage, of about the same height as the turreted projections, and at a
uniform depth of recess from it, but independently garnished with towers
and pinnacles. The main entrance into the Palace from the great outer
courtyard was through this chateau-like flank, just about the spot where
there is the entrance through the present middle façade; and this
entrance led, like the present, into an inner court or quadrangle, built
round on all the four sides.
That quadrangle of chateau, touching the Abbey to the back from its
northeastern corner, and with the two-turreted projection to its front
from its northwestern corner, constituted, indeed, the main bulk of the
Palace. There were, however, extensive appurtenances of other buildings
at the back or at the side farthest from the Abbey, forming minor inner
courts, while part of that side of the great outer courtyard which faced
the entrance was occupied by offices belonging to the Palace, and
separating the courtyard from the adjacent purlieus of the town. For the
grounds of both Palace and Abbey were encompassed by a wall, having
gates at various points of its circuit, the principal and most strongly
guarded of which was the Gothic porch admitting from the foot of the
Canongate into the front courtyard. The grounds so enclosed were ample
enough to contain gardens and spaces of plantation, besides the
buildings and their courts. Altogether, what with the buildings
themselves, what with the courts and gardens, and what with the natural
grandeur of the site--a level of deep and wooded park, between the
Calton heights and crags, on the one hand, and the towering shoulders of
Arthur's Seat and precipitous escarpment of Salisbury Crags on the
other--Holyrood in 1561 must have seemed, even to an eye the most
satiated with palatial splendors abroad, a sufficiently impressive
dwelling-place to be the metropolitan home of Scottish royalty.
LINLITHGOW [Footnote: From "Provincial Antiquities of Scotland."]
BY SIR WALTER SCOTT
The convenience afforded for the sport of falconry, which was so great a
favorite during the feudal ages, was probably one cause of an attachment
of the ancient Scottish monarchs to Linlithgow and its fine lake. The
sport of hunting was also followed with success in the neighborhood,
from which circumstance it probably arises that the ancient arms of the
city represent a black greyhound bitch tied to a tree....
A Celt, according to Chalmers, might plausibly derive the name of
Linlithgow from Lin-liah-cu, the Lake of the Greyhound. Chalmers himself
seems to prefer the Gothic derivation of Lin-lyth-gow, or the Lake of
the Great Vale. The Castle of Linlithgow is only mentioned as being a
peel (a pile, that is, an embattled tower surrounded by an outwork). In
1300 it was rebuilt or repaired by Edward I., and used as one of the
citadels by which he hoped to maintain his usurped dominion in Scotland.
It is described by Barbour as "meihle and stark and stuffed weel." Piers
Luband, a Gascoigne knight, was appointed the keeper, and appears to
have remained there until the autumn of 1313, when the Scots recovered
the Castle....
Bruce, faithful to his usual policy, caused the peel of Linlithgow to be
dismantled, and worthily rewarded William Binnock, who had behaved with
such gallantry on the occasion. From this bold yeoman the Binnies of
West Lothian are proud to trace their descent; and most, if not all of
them, bear in their arms something connected with the wagon, which was
the instrument of his stratagem.
When times of comparative peace returned, Linlithgow again became the
occasional residence of the sovereign. In 1411 the town was burned by
accident, and in 1414 was again subjected to the same calamity, together
with the Church and Palace of the king, as is expressly mentioned by
Bower. The present Church, which is a fine specimen of Gothic
architecture, having a steeple surmounted by an imperial crown, was
probably erected soon after the calamity.
The Palace arose from its ashes with greater splendor than before; for
the family of Stuart, unhappy in some respects, were all of them
fortunate in their taste for the fine arts, and particularly for that of
architecture. The Lordship of Linlithgow was settled as a dowry upon
Mary of Gueldres in 1449, and again upon Margaret of Denmark in 1468.
James IV., a splendid gallant, seems to have founded the most
magnificent part of Linlithgow Palace; together with the noble entrance
betwixt two flanking towers bearing, on rich entablatures, the royal
arms of Scotland, with the collars of the Orders of the Thistle, Garter,
and Saint Michael. James IV. also erected in the Church a throne for
himself, and twelve stalls for Knights Companions of the Thistle.... His
death and the rout of his army clouded for many a day the glory of
Scotland, and marred the mirth of her palaces.
James V. was much attached to Linlithgow, and added to the Palace both
the Chapel and Parliament Hall, the last of which is peculiarly
striking. So that when he brought his bride, Mary of Guise, there, amid
the festivities which accompanied their wedding, she might have had more
reason than mere complaisance for highly commending the edifice, and
saying that she never saw a more princely palace. It was long her
residence, and that of her royal husband, at Linlithgow. Mary was born
there in an apartment still shown; and the ill-fated father, dying
within a few days of that event, left the ominous diadem which he wore
to the still more unfortunate infant....
In the subsequent reign of Queen Mary, Linlithgow was the scene of
several remarkable events; the most interesting of which was the
assassination of the Regent Murray by Hamilton of Bothwell-haugh. James
VI. loved the royal residence of Linlithgow, and completed the original
plan of the Palace, closing the great square by a stately range of
apartments of great architectural beauty. He also made a magnificent
fountain in the Palace yard, now ruinous, as are all the buildings
around. Another grotesque Gothic fountain adorns the street of
the town....
When the scepter passed from Scotland, oblivion sat down in the halls of
Linlithgow; but her absolute desolation was reserved for the memorable
era of 1745-6. About the middle of January in that year, General Hawley
marched at the head of a strong army to raise the siege of Stirling,
then prest by the Highland insurgents under the adventurous Charles
Edward. The English general had exprest considerable contempt of his
enemy, who, he affirmed, would not stand a charge of cavalry. On the
night of the 17th he returned to Linlithgow, with all the marks of
defeat, having burned his tents, and left his artillery and baggage. His
disordered troops were quartered in the Palace, and began to make such
great fires on the hearth, as to endanger the safety of the edifice. A
lady of the Livingstone family who had apartments there remonstrated
with General Hawley, who treated her fears with contempt. "I can run
away from fire as fast as you can, General," answered the high-spirited
dame, and with this sarcasm took horse for Edinburgh. Very soon after
her departure her apprehensions were realized; the Palace of Linlithgow
caught fire and was burned to the ground. The ruins alone remain to show
its former splendor.
The situation of Linlithgow Palace is eminently beautiful. It stands on
a promontory of some elevation, which advances almost into the midst of
the lake. The form is that of a square court, composed of buildings of
four stories high, with towers at the angles. The fronts within the
square, and the windows, are highly ornamented, and the size of the
rooms, as well as the width and character of the staircase, are upon a
magnificent scale. One banquet room is 94 feet long, 30 feet wide, and
33 feet high, with a gallery for music. The king's wardrobe, or
dressing-room, looking to the west, projects over the walls so as to
have a delicious prospect on three sides, and is one of the most
enviable boudoirs we have ever seen.
There were two main entrances to Linlithgow Palace. That from the south
ascends rather steeply from the town, and passes through a striking
Gothic archway, flanked by two round towers. The portal has been richly
adorned by sculpture, in which can be traced the arms of Scotland with
the collars of the Thistle, the Garter, and Saint Michael. This was the
work of James V., and is of a most beautiful character.
The other entrance is from the eastward. The gateway is at some height
from the foundation of the wall, and there are opposite to it the
remains of a perron, or ramp of mason work, which those who desired to
enter must have ascended by steps. A drawbridge, which could be raised
at pleasure, united, when it was lowered, the ramp with the threshold of
the gateway, and when raised left a gap between them, which answered the
purpose of a moat. On the inside of the eastern gateway is a figure,
much mutilated, said to have been that of Pope Julius II., the same
Pontiff who sent to James IV. the beautiful sword which makes part of
the Regalia.
"To what base offices we may return!" In the course of the last war,
those beautiful remains, so full of ancient remembrances, very narrowly
escaped being defaced and dishonored, by an attempt to convert them into
barracks for French prisoners of war. The late President Blair, as
zealous a patriot as he was an excellent lawyer, had the merit of
averting this insult upon one of the most striking objects of antiquity
which Scotland yet affords. I am happy to add that of late years the
Court of Exchequer have, in this and similar cases, shown much zeal to
preserve our national antiquities, and stop the dilapidations which were
fast consuming them.
In coming to Linlithgow by the Edinburgh road, the first view of the
town, with its beautiful steeple, surmounted with a royal crown, and the
ruinous towers of the Palace arising out of a canopy of trees, forms a
most impressive object.
STIRLING [Footnote: From "English Note-Books." By special arrangement
with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co.
Copyright, 1870 and 1898.]
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
In the morning we were stirring betimes, and found Stirling to be a
pretty large town, of rather ancient aspect, with many gray stone
houses, the gables of which are notched on either side, like a flight of
stairs. The town stands on the slope of a hill, at the summit of which,
crowning a long ascent, up which the paved street reaches all the way to
its gate, is Stirling Castle. Of course we went thither, and found free
entrance, altho the castle is garrisoned by five or six hundred men,
among whom are bare-legged Highlanders (I must say that this costume is
very fine and becoming, tho their thighs did look blue and frost-bitten)
and also some soldiers of other Scotch regiments, with tartan trousers.
Almost immediately on passing the gate, we found an old artillery-man,
who undertook to show us round the castle. Only a small portion of it
seems to be of great antiquity. The principal edifice within the castle
wall is a palace, that was either built or renewed by James VI.; and it
is ornamented with strange old statues, one of which is his own.
The old Scottish Parliament House is also here. The most ancient part of
the castle is the tower, where one of the Earls of Douglas was stabbed
by a king, and afterward thrown out of the window. In reading this
story, one imagines a lofty turret, and the dead man tumbling headlong
from a great height; but, in reality, the window is not more than
fifteen or twenty feet from the garden into which he fell. This part of
the castle was burned last autumn; but is now under repair, and the wall
of the tower is still stanch and strong. We went up into the chamber
where the murder took place, and looked through the historic window.
Then we mounted the castle wall, where it broods over a precipice of
many hundred feet perpendicular, looking down upon a level plain below,
and forth upon a landscape, every foot of which is richly studded with
historic events. There is a small peep-hole in the wall, which Queen
Mary is said to have been in the habit of looking through. It is a most
splendid view; in the distance, the blue Highlands, with a variety of
mountain outlines that I could have studied unweariably; and in another
direction, beginning almost at the foot of the Castle Hill, were the
Links of Forth, where, over a plain of miles in extent the river
meandered, and circled about, and returned upon itself again and again
and again, as if knotted into a silver chain, which it was difficult to
imagine to be all one stream. The history of Scotland might be read from
this castle wall, as on a book of mighty page; for here, within the
compass of a few miles, we see the field where Wallace won the battle of
Stirling, and likewise the battle-field of Bannockburn, and that of
Falkirk, and Sheriffmuir, and I know not how many besides.
Around the Castle Hill there is a walk, with seats for old and infirm
persons, at points sheltered from the wind. We followed it downward, and
I think we passed over the site where the games used to be held, and
where, this morning, some of the soldiers of the garrison were going
through their exercises. I ought to have mentioned, that, passing
through the inner gateway of the castle, we saw the round tower, and
glanced into the dungeon, where the Roderic Dhu of Scott's poem was left
to die. It is one of the two round towers, between which the portcullis
rose and fell.
ABBOTSFORD [Footnote: From "Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British
Poets."]
BY WILLIAM HOWITT
Abbotsford, after twenty years' interval, and having then been seen
under the doubly exaggerated influence of youth and the recent influence
of Scott's poetry, in some degree disappointed me. I had imagined the
house itself larger, its towers more lofty, its whole exterior more
imposing. The plantations are a good deal grown, and almost bury the
house from the distant view, but they still preserve all their formality
of outline, as seen from the Galashiels road. Every field has a thick,
black belt of fir-trees, which run about, forming on the long hillside
the most fantastic figures. The house is, however, a very interesting
house. At first, you come to the front next to the road, which you do by
a steep descent down the plantation. You are struck, having a great
castle in your imagination, with the smallness of the place. It is
neither large nor lofty. Your ideal Gothic castle shrinks into a
miniature. The house is quite hidden till you are at it, and then you
find yourself at a small, castellated gateway, with its crosses cut into
the stone pillars on each side, and the little window over it, as for
the warden to look out at you.
Then comes the view of this side of the house with its portico, its bay
windows with painted glass, its tall, battlemented gables, and turrets
with their lantern terminations; the armorial escutcheon over the door,
and the corbels, and then another escutcheon aloft on the wall of stars
and crescents. All these have a good effect; and not less so the light
screen of freestone finely worked and carved with its elliptic arches
and iron lattice-work, through which the garden is seen with its
espalier trees, high brick walls, and greenhouse, with a doorway at the
end leading into a second garden of the same sort. The house has a dark
look, being built of the native whinstone, or grau-wacke, as the Germans
call it, relieved by the quoins and projections of the windows and
turrets in freestone. All look classic, and not too large for the poet
and antiquarian builder. The dog Maida lies in stone on the right hand
of the door in the court, with the well known inscription. The house can
neither be said to be Gothic nor castellated. It is a combination of the
poet's, drawn from many sources, but all united by good taste, and
forming an unique style, more approaching the Elizabethan than
any other.
Round the court, of which the open-work screen just mentioned is the
farther boundary, runs a covered walk, that is, along the two sides not
occupied by the house and the screen; and in the wall beneath the arcade
thus formed, are numerous niches, containing a medley of old figures
brought from various places. There are Indian gods, old figures out of
churches, and heads of Roman emperors. In the corner of the court, on
the opposite side of the portico to the dog Maida, is a fountain, with
some similar relics reared on the stonework around it.
The other front gives you a much greater idea of the size. It has a more
continuous range of façade. Here, at one end, is Scott's square tower,
ascended by outside steps, and a round or octagon tower at the other;
you can not tell, certainly, which shape it is, as it is covered with
ivy. On this the flagstaff stands. At the end next to the square tower,
i. e., at the right-hand end as you face it, you pass into the outer
court, which allows you to go around the end of the house from one front
to the other, by the old gateway, which once belonged to the Tolbooth of
Edinburgh. Along the whole of this front runs a gallery, in which the
piper used to stalk to and fro while they were at dinner. This man still
comes about the place, tho he has been long discharged. He is a
great vagabond.
Such is the exterior of Abbotsford. The interior is far more
interesting. The porch, copied from that of the old palace of
Linlithgow, is finely groined, and there are stags' horns nailed up in
it. When the door opens, you find yourself in the entrance-hall, which
is, in fact, a complete museum of antiquities and other matters. It is,
as described in Lockhart's Life of Scott, wainscoted with old wainscot
from the kirk of Dumfermline, and the pulpit of John Knox is cut in two,
and placed as chiffoniers between the windows. The whole walls are
covered with suits of armor and arms, horns of moose deer, the head of a
musk bull, etc. At your left hand, and close to the door, are two
cuirasses, some standards, eagles, etc., collected at Waterloo.
At the opposite end of the room are two full suits of armor, one
Italian, and one English of the time of Henry V., the latter holding in
its hands a stupendous two-handed sword, I suppose six feet long, and
said to have been found on Bosworth field. Opposite to the door is the
fireplace of freestone, imitated from an arch in the cloister at
Melrose, with a peculiarly graceful spandrel. In it stands the iron
grate of Archbishop Sharpe, who was murdered by the Covenanters; and
before it stands a most massive Roman camp-kettle. On the roof, at the
center of the pointed arches, runs a row of escutcheons of Scott's
family, two or three at one end being empty, the poet not being able to
trace the maternal lineage so high as the paternal. These were painted
accordingly in clouds, with the motto, "Night veils the deep." Around
the door at one end are emblazoned the shields of his most intimate
friends, as Erskine, Moritt, Rose, etc., and all around the cornice ran
the emblazoned shields of the old chieftains of the border....
Then there is the library, a noble room, with a fine cedar ceiling, with
beautiful compartments, and most lovely carved pendants, where you see
bunches of grapes, human figures, leaves, etc. It is copied from Rosslyn
or Melrose. There are three busts in this room; the first, one of Sir
Walter, by Chantrey; one of Wordsworth; and in the great bay window, on
a table, a cast of that of Shakespeare, from Stratford. There is a
full-length painting of the poet's son, the present Sir Walter, in his
hussar uniform, with, his horse. The work-table in the space of the bay
window, and the fine carved ceiling in this part of the room, as well as
the brass hanging lamp brought from Hereulaneum, are particularly worthy
of notice. There is a pair of most splendidly carved box-wood chairs,
brought from Italy, and once belonging to some cardinal. The other
chairs are of ebony, presented by George IV. There is a tall silver urn,
standing on a prophyry table, filled with bones from the Piraeus, and
inscribed as the gift of Lord Byron. The books in this room, many of
which are secured from hurt by wire-work doors are said to amount to
twenty thousand. Many, of course, are very valuable, having been
collected with great care by Scott, for the purpose of enabling him to
write his different works....
The armory is a most remarkable room; it is the collection of the author
of Waverly; and to enumerate all the articles which are here assembled,
would require a volume. Take a few particulars. The old wooden lock of
the Tolbooth of Selkirk; Queen Mary's offering-box, a small iron ark or
coffer, with a circular lid, found in Holyrood-house. Then Hofer's
rifle--a short, stout gun, given him by Sir Humphry Davy, or rather by
Hofer's widow to Sir Humphry for Sir Walter. The housekeeper said, that
Sir Humphry had done some service for the widow of Hofer, and in her
gratitude she offered him this precious relic, which he accepted for Sir
Walter, and delighted the poor woman with the certainty that it would be
preserved to posterity in such a place as Abbotsford. There is an old
white hat, worn by the burgesses of Stowe when installed. Rob Roy's
purse and his gun; a very long one, with the initials R. M. C., Robert
Macgregor Campbell, around the touch-hole. A rich sword in a silver
sheath, presented to Sir Walter by the people of Edinburgh, for the
pains he took when George IV. was there....
Lastly, and on our way back to the entrance-hall, we enter the
writing-room of Sir Walter, which is surrounded by book-shelves, and a
gallery, by which Scott not only could get at his books, but by which he
could get to and from his bedroom; and so be at work when his visitors
thought him in bed. He had only to lock his door, and he was safe. Here
are his easy leathern chair and desk, at which he used to work, and, in
a little closet, is the last suit that he ever wore--a bottle-green
coat, plaid waistcoat, of small pattern, gray plaid trousers, and white
hat. Near these hang his walking-stick, and his boots and walking-shoes.
Here are, also, his tools, with which he used to prune his trees in the
plantations, and his yeoman-cavalry accouterments. On the chimney-piece
stands a German light-machine, where he used to get a light, and light
his own fire. There is a chair made of the wood of the house at
Robroyston, in which William Wallace was betrayed; having a brass plate
in the back, stating that it is from this house, where "Wallace was done
to death by Traitors." The writing-room is connected with the library,
and this little closet had a door issuing into the garden; so that Scott
had all his books at immediate command, and could not only work early
and late, without anybody's knowledge, but, at will, slip away to wood
and field, if he pleased, unobserved.
DRYBURGH ABBEY [Footnote: From "The Ruined Abbeys of the Border."]
BY WILLIAM HOWITT
Dryburgh lies amid the scenes in which Scott not only took such peculiar
delight, but which furnished him themes both for his poems and romances,
and which were rich in those old songs and narratives of border feats
and raids which he has preserved in his Border Minstrelsy. Melrose, the
Eildon Hills, the haunt of Thomas of Ercildoune, Jedburgh, Yetholm, the
Cowdenknowes, the Yarrow, and Ettrick, all lie on different sides within
a circle of twenty miles, and most of them much nearer. Smailholme
Tower, the scene of some of Scott's youthful days, and of his ballad of
"The Eve of St. John," is also one of these. Grose tells us that "The
ruins of Dryburgh Monastery are beautifully situated on a peninsula
formed by the Tweed, ten-miles above Kelso, and three below Melrose, on
the southwestern confine of the county of Berwick." ...
The new Abbey of Dryburgh had the credit of being founded in 1150 by
David I., who was fond of the reputation, of being a founder of abbeys,
Holyrood Abbey, Melrose Abbey, Kelso Abbey, Jedburgh Abbey, and others,
having David I. stated as their founder. However it might be in other
cases, and in some of them he was merely the restorer, the real founders
of Dryburgh were Hugh de Morville, Lord of Lauderdale, and Constable of
Scotland, and his wife, Beatrice de Beauchamp....
Edward II., in his invasion of Scotland in 1323, burned down Dryburgh
Abbey, as he had done that of Melrose in the preceding year; and both
these magnificent houses were restored principally at the cost of Robert
Bruce. It was again destroyed by the English in 1544, by Sir George
Bowes and Sir Brian Latoum, as Melrose was also. Among the most
distinguished of its abbots we may mention Andrew Fordum, Bishop of
Moray, and afterward Archbishop of St. Andrews, and Ambassador to
France, and who held some of the most important offices under James IV.
and James V. The favors conferred upon him were in proportion to his
consequence in the state. Along with this abbey of Dryburgh, he held in
commendam those of Pittenweem, Coldingham, and Dunfermline. He resigned
Dryburgh to James Ogilvie, of the family of Deskford. Ogilvie was also
considerably employed in offices of diplomacy, both at London and Paris.
The Erskines seemed to keep firm hold of the Abbey of Dryburgh; and Adam
Erskine, one of Abbot James's successors, was, under George Buchanan, a
sub-preceptor to James VI. This James I. of England dissolved the abbey
in 1604, and conferred it and its lands, together with the abbeys and
estates of Cambuskenneth and Inehmahorne, on John Erskine, Earl of Mar,
who was made, on this occasion, also Baron of Cardross, which barony was
composed of the property of these three monasteries. In this line,
Dryburgh descended to the Lords of Buchan. The Earls of Buchan, at one
time, sold it to the Halliburtons of Mortoun, from whom it was purchased
by Colonel Tod, whose heirs again sold it to the Earl of Buchan in 1786.
This eccentric nobleman bequeathed it to his son, Sir David Erskine, at
whose death in 1837 it reverted to the Buchan family.
Two monasteries in Ireland, the abbey of Druin-la-Croix in the County of
Armagh, and the abbey of Woodburn in the county of Antrim, acknowledged
Dryburgh as their mother. A copy of the Liber S. Mariae de Dryburgh is
in the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, containing all its ancient
charters. Such are the main points of history connected with Dryburgh;
but, when we open the ballad lore of the South of Scotland, we find this
fine old place figuring repeatedly and prominently....
Grose says: "The freestone of which the monastery of Dryburgh and the
most elegant parts of the Abbey of Melrose were built, is one of a most
beautiful color and texture, and has defied the influence of the weather
for more than six centuries; nor is the sharpness of the sculpture in
the least affected by the ravages of time. The quarry from which it was
taken is still successfully worked at Dryburgh; and no stone in the
island seems more perfectly adapted for the purpose of architecture, as
it hardens by age, and is not subject to be corroded or decomposed by
the weather, so that it might even be used for the cutting of
bas-reliefs and of statues." ...
As the remains of the abbey have since been carefully preserved, they
present still much the same aspect as at Grose's visit in 1797. When I
visited this lovely ruin and lovely neighborhood in 1845, I walked from
Melrose, a distance of between three and four miles. Leaving the Eildon
Hills on my right, and following the course of the Tweed, I saw, as I
progressed, Cowdenknowes, Bemerside, and other spots famous in border
song. Issuing from a steep and woody lane, I came out on a broad bend of
the river, with a wide strand of gravel and stones on this side, showing
with what force the wintry torrents rushed along here. Opposite rose
lofty and finely-wooded banks. Amid the trees on that side shone out a
little temple of the Muses, where they are represented as consecrating
James Thomson the poet. Farther off, on a hill, stands a gigantic statue
of William Wallace, which was originally intended for Burns; but, the
stone being too large, it was thought by the eccentric Lord Buchan, who
erected it, a pity to cut it down....
I was ferried over by two women, who were by no means sorry that the
winds and floods had carried my Lord Buchan's bridge away, as it
restored their business of putting people over. I then ascended a lane
from the ferry, and found myself in front of an apparently old castle
gateway; but, from the Latin inscription over it, discovered that it was
also erected by the same singular Lord Buchan, as the entrance to a
pomarium, or, in plain English, an orchard, dedicated to his honored
parents, who, I suppose, like our first parents, were particularly fond
of apples. That his parents or himself might enjoy all the apples, he
had under the Latin dedication, placed a simple English menace of steel
traps and spring guns. I still advanced through a pleasant scene of
trees and cottages, of rich grassy crofts, with cattle lying luxuriously
in them, and amid a hush of repose, indicative of a monastic scene.
Having found a guide to the ruins, at a cottage near the river, I was
led across a young orchard toward them, the two old gables and the fine
circular window showing themselves above the foliage. I found the
interior of the ruins carpeted by soft turf, and two rows of cedars
growing in the church, marking where the aisle formerly ran. The
cloisters and south transept were still entire, and displayed much fine
workmanship. The great circular window is especially lovely, formed of
five stars cut in stone, so that the open center between them forms a
rose. The light seen through this charming window produced a fine
effect. The chapter-house was also entire, the floor being now only of
earth; and a circle was drawn in the center, where the remains of the
founder and his lady lie. Here, again, however, the fantastic old Lord
Buchan had interfered, and a statue of Locke, reading an open book, and
pointing to his own forehead; one of Inigo Jones, and one of Newton,
made you wonder what they were doing there. So totally without regard to
fitness did this half-crazy nobleman put down his ornaments. The wonder
is that his successor had not removed these, and some statues or busts
which had as little business on the spot.
But the charm of the place in every sense was the grave of Scott. It was
in the Lady aisle, and occupies two arches of it; and the adjoining
space under the next arch is the burial place of the Erskines, as
Scott's burial-place was that of his ancestors, the Halliburtons. The
whole, with the tier of small sectional Norman arches above, forms a
glorious tomb much resembling one of the chapel tombs in Winchester
Cathedral. Taken in connection with the fine ruins, and the finer
natural scenery around, no spot can be supposed more suitable for the
resting-place of the remains of the great minstrel and romancer, who so
delighted in the natural, historic, and legendary charms of the
neighborhood, and who added still greater ones to them himself.
Since my visit, a massive tomb, of Aberdeen granite, has been placed
over the remains of Sir Walter and Lady Scott, and those of their eldest
son. A railway also now makes the place much more accessible, the
station for Dryburgh being at the village of Newtown, on the other side
of the river. Near St. Boswell's, opposite to Dryburgh, has also been
lately erected a bridge over the Tweed, opening up the communication
betwixt the north and south side of the river, and thus enabling the
tourist to explore at great convenience the scenes of ancient loves and
feuds, and the haunts of Scott. Here his dust lies amid the objects
redolent of his fame; and within a few miles, near Makerstoun, a view
may he obtained, from a hill, of Smailholme Tower, where the poet passed
some of the years of his boyhood, and the memory of which he has
perpetuated in one of the epistles which introduce each Canto
of Marmion.
MELROSE ABBEY [Footnote: From "The Ruined Abbeys of the Border."]
BY WILLIAM HOWITT.
The foundation of Melrose Abbey generally dates from 1136, when David I.
of Scotland, among his many similar erections, built a church here. But
Melrose, as a seat of religion, boasts a much earlier origin. It was one
of those churches, or more properly missionary stations, which the
fathers of Ireland and of Iona spread over Britain and the continent. It
was in fact a portion of that pure and beautiful British church which
existed prior to the Roman hierarchy in these islands, and of which the
professors presented in their primitive habits and primitive doctrines
so apostolic a character....
In 1136 the pious David raised a new and much superior abbey, about two
miles westward of the original site, but on the same south bank of the
Tweed, and established in it the Cistercians. He conferred on them
extensive lands and privileges; the lands of Melrose, Eldun, and
Dernwie; the lands and wood of Gattonside, with the fishings of the
Tweed along the whole extent of those lands; with the right of pasturage
and pannage in his forests of Selkirk and Traguair, and in the forest
between the Gala and the Leeder, with wood from those forests for
building and burning. In 1192 Jocelin, Bishop of Glasgow, granted to the
monks of Melrose the church of Hassindean, with its lands, tithes, and
other emoluments, "for the maintenance of the poor and of pilgrims
coming to the house of Melrose." From this cause the old tower of
Hassindean was called "Monks' Tower," and the farm adjoining the church
is still called "Monks' Croft." In fact, the Abbey of Melrose was a sort
of inn, not only to the poor, but to some of the greatest men of the
time. The Scottish kings from time to time, and wealthy subjects too,
added fresh grants; so that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the
Abbey had accumulated vast possessions and immunities; had many tenants,
great husbandmen, with many granges and numerous herds. It had much
other property in Ayrshire, Dumfriesshire, Selkirkshire, and
Berwickshire.
But the abbey church which David built was not that of which we have now
the remains. The whole place was repeatedly burned down by the English
invaders. In 1215 the rebellious barons of King John of England swore
fealty to Alexander II. of Scotland, at the altar of Melrose. Edward I.,
in 1295-6, when at Berwick, granted the monks of Melrose restitution of
the lands of which they had been deprived; but in 1332 Edward II. burned
down the abbey and killed the abbot William de Peeblis and several of
his monks. Robert I., of Scotland, in 1326 or four years afterward, gave
£2,000 sterling to rebuild it; and Edward II., of England, came from New
Castle at Christmas, 1341, and held his yule in the abbey, and made
restitution of the lands and other property which his father had seized
during the late war. In 1378 Richard II. granted a protection to the
abbot and his lands; but in 1385 he burned down Melrose and other
religious houses on his expedition into Scotland.
Robert Bruce, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, granted a
revenue to restore the abbey; and betwixt this period and the
Reformation arose the splendid structure, the ruins of which yet charm
every eye. It is in the highest style of the decorated order, every
portion is full of work of the most exquisite character, occasionally
mingled with the perpendicular. They are the only ruins of the church
which remain, and they present the finest specimen of Gothic
architecture and sculpture that Scotland possesses. One of Scotland's
most discriminating writers says, "To say that Melrose is beautiful, is
to say nothing. It is exquisitely--splendidly lovely. It is an object
possest of infinite grace and unmeasurable charm; it is fine in its
general aspect, and in its minutest details. It is a study--a glory."
The church is two hundred and eighty-seven feet in length, and at the
greatest breadth one hundred and fifty-seven feet. The west is wholly
ruined; but the great eastern window remains, and one above the southern
door, which are extremely fine. The pillars that remain to support the
roof are of singular grace, and wherever you turn you behold objects
that rivet the attention by their richness of sculpture, tho often only
in fragments. The only wonder is that so much has escaped the numberless
assaults of enemies.
During the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Elizabeth, the abbey
was continually suffering from their inroads, in which the spirit of
vengeance against the Scots who resisted their schemes of aggression was
mixed strongly with that of enmity to Popery. In the year 1545, it was
twice burned and ransacked by the English, first under Sir Ralph Eyre
and Sir Bryan Layton, and again by the Earl of Hertford. At the
Reformation, when all its lands and immunities were invested in the
Crown, they were valued at £1,758 Scots, besides large contributions in
kind. Among them, in addition to much corn were one hundred and five
stones of butter, ten dozens of capons, twenty-six dozens of poultry,
three hundred and seventy-six more fowl, three hundred and forty loads
of peats, etc. Queen Mary granted Melrose and its lands and tithes to
Bothwell, but they were forfeited on his attainder. They then passed to
a Douglas, and afterward to Sir James Ramsay, who rescured James VI. in
the conspiracy of Gowrie; then to Sir Thomas Hamilton in 1619, who was
made Earl of Melrose, and afterward Earl of Haddington.
About a century ago they became the property of the family of Buccleuch,
in which they remain. The Douglas built himself a house out of the
ruins, which may still be seen about fifty yards to the north of the
church. The ruins are preserved with great care, and are shown by a
family which is at once intelligent and courteous. The person going
round, most generally, points out the shattered remains of thirteen
figures at the great eastern window, in their niches, said to have been
those of our Savior and his Apostles. They were broken to pieces by a
fanatic weaver of Gattonside. A head is also pointed out, said to be
that of Michael Scott, the magician, who exerted his power so
wonderfully, according to tradition, in this neighborhood, as to split,
the Eildon hill into three parts....
The name of Melrose is clearly derived from the Ancient British,
Melross, the projection of the meadow. Moel in Welsh and Maol in Irish
signify something bald, naked, bare. Thus Moal-Ross, in the language of
the Irish monks who first built the church here, would signify the naked
promontory. Moel in Welsh is now usually applied to a smooth mountain,
as Moel-Siabod; and we find Ross continually showing its Celtic origin
where there is a promontory, as Ross on the Moray-frith, and Ross in
Herefordshire from a winding of the Wye. But some old sculptor, on a
stone still preserved in the village, has made a punning derivation for
it, by carving a mell, or mallet, and a rose over it. This stone was
part of a wall of the old prison, long since pulled down.
The site of Melrose, like all monastic ones, is fine. The abbey stands
on a broad level near the Tweed, but is surrounded by hills and fields
full of beauty, and peopled with a thousand beings of romance,
tradition, and poetry. South of the village rise the three peaks of the
Eildon hill, bearing aloft the fame of Michael Scott and Thomas the
Rhymer. On the banks of the Tweed, opposite to Melrose, lies Gattonside,
buried in its gardens and orchards, and still retaining its faith in
many a story of the supernatural; and about three miles westward, on the
same bank of the river, stands Abbotsford, raised by a magician more
mighty than Michael Scott. How is it possible to approach that haunted
abode without meeting on the way the most wonderful troop of wild, and
lofty, and beautiful beings that ever peopled earth or the realm of
imagination? Scotch, English, Gallic, Indian, Syrian come forth to meet
you. The Bruce, the Scottish Jameses, Coeur de Lion, Elizabeth,
Leicester, Mary of Scots, James I. of England, Montrose, Claverhouse,
Cumberland the Butcher. The Covenanters are ready to preach, and fight
anew, the Highland clans rise in aid of the Stuart. What women of
dazzling beauty--Flora M'Ivor, Rose Bradwardine, Rebecca the noble
Jewess, Lucy Ashton, and Amy Robsart, the lovely Effie Deans, and her
homely yet glorious sister Jenny, the bewitching Di Vernon, and Minna
and Brenda Troil, of the northern isles, stand radiant amid a host of
lesser beauties. Then comes Rob Roy, the Robin Hood of the hills; then
Balfour of Burley issues, a stalwart apparition, from his hiding-place,
and of infinite humor and strangeness of aspect. Where is there a band
like this--the Baron of Bradwardine, Dominie Sampson, Meg Merrilies,
Monkbarns, Edie Ochiltree, Old Mortality, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Andrew
Fairservice, Caleb Balderston, Flibbertigibbet, Mona of the Fitful head,
and that fine fellow the farmer of Liddesdale, with all his Peppers and
Mustards raffling at his heels? But not even out of Melrose need you
move a step to find the name of a faithful servant of Sir Walter. Tom
Purdie lies in Melrose Abbey-Yard; and Scott himself had engraven on his
tomb that he was "the Wood-forester of Abbotsford," probably the title
which Tom gave himself. Those who visit Melrose will take a peep at the
gravestone of Tom Purdie, who sleeps amid a long line of the dead,
reaching from the days of Aidan to our own, as alive he filled a little
niche in the regard! of a master who has given to both high and low so
many niches in the temple of immortality.
CARLYLE'S BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY HOMES [Footnote: From "Fresh Fields." By
special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers,
Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1884.]
BY JOHN BURROUGHS.
There was no road in Scotland or England which I should have been so
glad to have walked over as that from Edinburgh to Ecclefechan, a
distance covered many times by the feet of him whose birth and burial
place I was about to visit. Carlyle as a young man had walked it with
Edward Irving (the Scotch say "travel" when they mean going afoot), and
he had walked it alone, and as a lad with an elder boy, on his way to
Edinburgh College. He says in his "Reminiscences" he nowhere else had
such affectionate, sad, thoughtful, and in fact interesting and salutary
journeys....
Not to be entirely cheated out of my walk, I left the train at Lockerby,
a small Scotch market-town, and accomplished the remainder of the
journey to Ecclefechan on foot, a brief six-mile pull. It was the first
day of June; the afternoon sun was shining brightly. It was still the
honeymoon of travel with me, not yet two weeks in the bonnie land; the
road was smooth and clean as the floor of a sea beach, and firmer, and
my feet devoured the distance with right good will....
Four miles from Lockerby I came to Mainhill, the name of a farm where
the Carlyle family lived many years, and where Carlyle first read
Goethe, "in a dry ditch," Froude says, and translated "Wilhelm Meister."
The land drops gently away to the south and east, opening up broad views
in these directions, but it does not seem to be the bleak and windy
place Froude describes it. The crops looked good, and the fields smooth
and fertile. The soil is rather a stubborn clay, nearly the same as one
sees everywhere....
The Carlyles were living on this farm while their son was teaching
school at Annan, and later at Kircaldy with Irving, and they supplied
him with cheese, butter, ham, oatmeal, etc., from their scanty stores. A
new farmhouse has been built since then, tho the old one is still
standing; doubtless the same Carlyle's father refers to in a letter to
his son, in 1817, as being under way. The parish minister was expected
at Mainhill. "Your mother was very anxious to have the house done before
he came, or else she said she would run over the hill and hide herself."
From Mainhill the highway descends slowly to the village of Ecclefechan,
the site of which is marked to the eye, a mile or more away, by the
spire of the church rising up against a background of Scotch firs, which
clothe a hill beyond. I soon enter the main street of the village, which
in Carlyle's youth had an open burn or creek flowing through the center
of it. This has been covered over by some enterprising citizen, and
instead of a loitering little burn, crossed by numerous bridges, the eye
is now greeted by a broad expanse of small cobble-stones. The cottages
are for the most part very humble, and rise from the outer edges of the
pavement, as if the latter had been turned up and shaped to make their
walls. The church is a handsome brown-stone structure, of recent date,
and is more in keeping with the fine fertile country about than with the
little village in its front. In the cemetery back of it, Carlyle lies
buried. As I approached, a girl sat by the roadside, near the gate,
combing her black locks and arranging her toilet; waiting, as it proved,
for her mother and brother, who lingered in the village. A couple of
boys were cutting nettles against the hedge; for the pigs, they said,
after the sting had been taken out of them by boiling. Across the street
from the cemetery the cows of the villagers were grazing.
I must have thought it would be as easy to distinguish Carlyle's grave
from the others as it was to distinguish the man while living, or his
fame when dead; for it never occurred to me to ask in what part of the
inclosure it was placed. Hence, when I found myself inside the gate,
which opens from the Annan road through a high stone wall, I followed
the most worn path toward a new and imposing-looking monument on the far
side of the cemetery; and the edge of my fine emotion was a good deal
dulled against the marble when I found it bore a strange name. I tried
others, and still others, but was disappointed. I found a long row of
Carlyles, but he whom I sought was not among them. My pilgrim enthusiasm
felt itself needlessly hindered and chilled. How many rebuffs could one
stand? Carlyle dead, then, was the same as Carlyle living; sure to take
you down a peg or two when you came to lay your homage at his feet.
Presently I saw "Thomas Carlyle" on a big marble slab that stood in a
family inclosure. But this turned out to be the name of a nephew of the
great Thomas. However, I had struck the right plat at last; here were
the Carlyles I was looking for, within a space probably of eight by
sixteen feet, surrounded by a high iron fence. The latest made grave was
higher and fuller than the rest, but it had no stone or mark of any kind
to distinguish it. Since my visit, I believe, a stone or monument of
some kind has been put up. A few daisies and the pretty blue-eyed
speedwell were growing amid the grass upon it. The great man lies with
his head toward the south or southwest, with his mother, sister, and
father to the right of him, and his brother John to the left. I was glad
to learn that the high iron fence was not his own suggestion. His father
had put it around the family plot in his lifetime. Carlyle would have
liked to have it cut down about half-way. The whole look of the
cemetery, except in the size of the head-stones, was quite American....
A young man and his wife were working in a nursery of young trees, a few
paces from the graves and I conversed with them through a thin place in
the hedge. They said they had seen Carlyle many times, and seemed to
hold him in proper esteem and reverence. The young man had seen him come
in summer and stand, with uncovered head, beside the graves of his
father and mother. "And long and reverently did he remain there, too,"
said the young gardener. I learned this was Carlyle's invariable custom:
every summer did he make a pilgrimage to this spot, and with bared head
linger beside these graves. The last time be came, which was a couple of
years before he died, he was so feeble that two persons sustained him
while he walked into the cemetery.
BURNS'S LAND [Footnote: From "Our Old Home." Published by Houghton,
Mifflin Co.]
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
We left Carlisle at a little past eleven, and within the half-hour were
at Gretna Green. Thence we rushed onward into Scotland through a flat
and dreary tract of country, consisting mainly of desert and bog, where
probably the moss-troopers were accustomed to take refuge after their
raids into England. Anon, however, the hills hove themselves up to view,
occasionally attaining a height which might almost be called
mountainous. In about two hours we reached Dumfries, and alighted at the
station there....
We asked for Burns's dwelling; and a woman pointed across a street to a
two-story house, built of stone, and whitewashed, like its neighbors,
but perhaps of a little more respectable aspect than most of them, tho I
hesitate in saying so. It was not a separate structure, but under the
same continuous roof with the next. There was an inscription on the
door, bearing no reference to Burns, but indicating that the house was
now occupied by a ragged or industrial school. On knocking, we were
instantly admitted by a servant-girl, who smiled intelligently when we
told our errand, and showed us into a low and very plain parlor, not
more than twelve or fifteen feet square. A young woman, who seemed to be
a teacher in the school, soon appeared, and told us that this had been
Burns's usual sitting-room, and that he had written many of his
songs here.
She then led us up a narrow staircase into a little bedchamber over the
parlor. Connecting with it, there is a very small room, or windowed
closet, which Burns used as a study; and the bedchamber itself was the
one where he slept in his later lifetime, and in which he died at last.
Altogether, it is an exceedingly unsuitable place for a pastoral and
rural poet to live or die in,--even more unsatisfactory than
Shakespeare's house, which has a certain homely picturesqueness that
contrasts favorably with the suburban sordidness of the abode
before us....
Coming to St. Michael's Church, we saw a man digging a grave, and,
scrambling out of the hole, he let us into the churchyard, which was
crowded full of monuments. There was a footpath through this crowded
churchyard, sufficiently well worn to guide us to the grave of Burns,
but a woman followed behind us, who, it appeared, kept the key to the
mausoleum, and was privileged to show it to strangers. The monument is a
sort of Grecian temple, with pilasters and a dome, covering a space of
about twenty feet square. It was formerly open to all the inclemencies
of the Scotch atmosphere, but is now protected and shut in by large
squares of rough glass, each pane being of the size of one whole side of
the structure. The woman unlocked the door, and admitted us into the
interior. Inlaid into the floor of the mausoleum is the gravestone of
Burns--the very same that was laid over his grave by Jean Armour, before
this monument was built. Displayed against the surrounding wall is a
marble statue of Burns at the plow, with the Genius of Caledonia
summoning the plowman to turn poet. Methought it was not a very
successful piece of work; for the plow was better sculptured than the
man, and the man, tho heavy and cloddish, was more effective than the
goddess. Our guide informed us that an old man of ninety, who knew
Burns, certifies this statue to be very like the original.
The bones of the poet, and of Jean Armour, and of some of their
children, lie in the vault over which we stood. Our guide (who was
intelligent, in her own plain way, and very agreeable to talk withal)
said that the vault was opened about three weeks ago, on occasion of the
burial of the eldest son of Burns. [Footnote: This was written in 1860.]
The poet's bones were disturbed, and the dry skull, once so brimming
over with powerful thought and bright and tender fantasies, was taken
away and kept for several days by a Dumfries doctor. It has since been
deposited in a new leaden coffin, and restored to the vault.
We went into the church, and found it very plain and naked, without
altar-decorations, and having its floor quite covered with unsightly
wooden pews. The woman led us to a pew cornering on one of the
side-aisles, and, telling us that it used to be Burns's family pew,
showed us his seat, which is in the corner by the aisle. It is so
situated, that a sturdy pillar hid him from the pulpit, and from the
minister's eye; "for Robin was no great friends with the ministers,"
said she. This touch--his seat behind the pillar, and Burns himself
nodding in sermon time, or keenly observant of profane things--brought
him before us to the life. In the corner-seat of the next pew, right
before Burns, and not more than two feet off, sat the young lady on whom
the poet saw that unmentionable parasite which he has immortalized in
song. We were ungenerous enough to ask the lady's name, but the good
woman could not tell it. This was the last thing which we saw in
Dumfries worthy of record; and it ought to be noted that our guide
refused some money which my companion offered her, because I had already
paid her what she deemed sufficient.
At the railway station we spent more than a weary hour, waiting for the
train, which at last came up, and took us to Mauchline. We got into an
omnibus, the only conveyance to be had, and drove about a mile to the
village, where we established ourselves at the Loudoun Hotel, one of the
veriest country inns which we have found in Great Britain. The town of
Mauchline, a place more redolent of Burns than almost any other,
consists of a street or two of contiguous cottages, mostly whitewashed,
and with thatched roofs. It has nothing sylvan or rural in the immediate
village, and is as ugly a place as mortal man could contrive to make, or
to render uglier through a succession of untidy generations. The fashion
of paving the village street, and patching one shabby house on the
gable-end of another, quite shuts out all verdure and pleasantness; but,
I presume, we are not likely to see a more genuine old Scotch village,
such as they used to be in Burns's time, and long before, than this of
Mauchline. The church stands about midway up the street, and is built of
red freestone, very simple in its architecture, with a square tower and
pinnacles. In this sacred edifice, and its churchyard, was the scene of
one of Burns's most characteristic productions, "The Holy Fair."
Almost directly opposite its gate, across the village street, stands
Posie Nansie's inn, where the "Jolly Beggars" congregated. The latter is
a two-story, red-stone, thatched house, looking old, but by no means
venerable, like a drunken patriarch. It has small, old-fashioned
windows, and may well have stood for centuries--tho seventy or eighty
years ago, when Burns was conversant with it, I should fancy it might
have been something better than a beggar's alehouse....
[Burns's farm of] Moss Giel is not more than a mile from Mauchline, and
the road extends over a high ridge of land, with a view of far hills and
green slopes on either side. Just before we reached the farm, the driver
stopt to point out a hawthorn, growing by the wayside, which he said was
Burns's "Lousie Thorn"; and I devoutly plucked a branch, altho I have
really forgotten where or how this illustrious shrub has been
celebrated. We then turned into a rude gateway, and almost immediately
came to the farmhouse of Moss Giel, standing some fifty yards removed
from the high-road, behind a tall hedge of hawthorn, and considerably
overshadowed by trees.
The biographers talk of the farm of Moss Giel as being damp and
unwholesome; but I do not see why, outside of the cottage walls, it
should possess so evil a reputation. It occupies a high, broad ridge,
enjoying, surely, whatever benefit can come of a breezy site, and
sloping far downward before any marshy soil is reached. The high hedge,
and the trees that stand beside the cottage, give it a pleasant aspect
enough to one who does, not know the grimy secrets of the interior; and
the summer afternoon was now so bright that I shall remember the scene
with a great deal of sunshine over it.
Leaving the cottage, we drove through a field, which the driver told us
was that in which Burns, turned up the mouse's nest. It is the
enclosure, nearest to the cottage, and seems now to be a pasture, and a
rather remarkably unfertile one. A little farther on, the ground was
whitened with an immense number of daisies--daisies, daisies everywhere;
and in answer to my inquiry, the driver said that this was the field
where Burns ran his plowshare over the daisy. If so, the soil seems to
have been consecrated to daisies by the song which he bestowed on that
first immortal one. I alighted, and plucked a whole handful of these
"wee, modest, crimson-tipped flowers," which will be precious to many
friends in our own country as coming from Burns's farm, and being of the
same race and lineage as that daisy which he turned into an amaranthine
flower while seeming to destroy it. Prom Moss Giel we drove through a
variety of pleasant scenes, some of which were familiar to us by their
connection with Burns.
By and by we came to the spot where Burns saw Miss Alexander, the Lass
of Ballochmyle. It was on a bridge, which (or, more probably, a bridge
that has succeeded to the old one, and is made of iron) crosses from
bank to bank, high in air, over a deep gorge of the road; so that the
young lady may have appeared to Burns like a creature between earth and
sky, and compounded chiefly of celestial elements. But, in honest truth,
the great charm of a woman, in Burns's eyes, was always her womanhood,
and not the angelic mixture which other poets find in her.
Our driver pointed out the course taken by the Lass of Ballochmyle,
through the shrubbery, to a rock on the banks of the Lugar, where it
seems to be the tradition that Burns accosted her. The song implies no
such interview. Lovers, of whatever condition, high or low, could desire
no lovelier scene in which to breathe their vows: the river flowing over
its pebbly bed, sometimes gleaming into the sunshine, sometimes hidden
deep in verdure, and here and there eddying at the foot of high and
precipitous cliffs.
Our ride to Ayr presented nothing very remarkable; and, indeed, a cloudy
and rainy day takes the varnish off the scenery and causes a woeful
diminution in the beauty and impressiveness of everything we see. Much
of our way lay along a flat, sandy level, in a southerly direction. We
reached Ayr in the midst of hopeless rain, and drove to the King's Arms
Hotel. In the intervals of showers I took peeps at the town, which
appeared to have many modern or modern-fronted edifices; altho there are
likewise tall, gray, gabled, and quaint-looking houses in the
by-streets, here and there, betokening an ancient place. The town lies
on both sides of the Ayr, which is here broad and stately, and bordered
with dwellings that look from their windows directly down into the
passing tide.
I crossed the river by a modern and handsome stone bridge, and recrossed
it, at no great distance, by a venerable structure of four gray arches,
which must have bestridden the stream ever since the early days of
Scottish history. These are the "Two Briggs of Ayr," whose midnight
conversation was overheard by Burns, while other auditors were aware
only of the rush and rumble of the wintry stream among the arches. The
ancient bridge is steep and narrow, and paved like a street, and
defended by a parapet of red freestone, except at the two ends, where
some mean old shops allow scanty room for the pathway to creep
between....
The next morning wore a lowering aspect, as if it felt itself destined
to be one of many consecutive days of storm. After a good Scotch
breakfast, however, of fresh herrings and eggs, we took a fly, and
started at a little past ten for the banks of the Doon. On our way, at
about two miles from Ayr, we drew up at a roadside cottage, on which was
an inscription to the effect that Robert Burns was born within its
walls. It is now a public-house; and, of course, we alighted and entered
its little sitting-room, which, as we at present see it, is a neat
apartment, with the modern improvement of a ceiling. The walls are much
overscribbled with names of visitors, and the wooden door of a cupboard
in the wainscot, as well as all the other woodwork of the room, is cut
and carved with initial letters. So, likewise, are two tables, which,
having received a coat of varnish over the inscriptions, form really
curious and interesting articles of furniture. I have seldom (tho I do
not personally adopt this mode of illustrating my humble name) felt
inclined to ridicule the natural impulse of most people thus to record
themselves at the shrines of poets and heroes.
On a panel, let into the wall in a corner of the room, is a portrait of
Burns, copied from the original picture by Nasmyth. The floor of this
apartment is of boards, which are probably a recent substitute for the
ordinary flagstones of a peasant's cottage. There is but one other room
pertaining to the genuine birthplace of Robert Burns: it is the kitchen,
into which we now went. It has a floor of flagstones, even ruder than
those of Shakespeare's house--tho, perhaps, not so strangely cracked and
broken as the latter, over which the hoof of Satan himself might seem to
have been trampling. A new window has been opened through the wall,
toward the road; but on the opposite side is the little original window,
of only four small panes, through which came the first daylight that
shone upon the Scottish poet. At the side of the room, opposite the
fireplace, is a recess, containing a bed, which can be hidden by
curtains. In that humble nook, of all places in the world, Providence
was pleased to deposit the germ of the richest human life which mankind
then had within its circumference.
These two rooms, as I have said, make up the whole sum and substance of
Burns's birthplace: for there were no chambers, nor even attics; and the
thatched roof formed the only ceiling of kitchen and sitting-room, the
height of which was that of the whole house. The cottage, however, is
attached to another edifice of the same size and description, as these
little habitations often are; and, moreover, a splendid addition has
been made to it, since the poet's renown began to draw visitors to the
wayside alehouse. The old woman of the house led us, through an entry,
and showed a vaulted hall, of no vast dimensions, to be sure but
marvelously large and splendid as compared with what might be
anticipated from the outward aspect of the cottage. It contained a bust
of Burns, and was hung round with pictures and engravings, principally
illustrative of his life and poems. In this part of the house, too,
there is a parlor, fragrant with tobacco-smoke; and, no doubt, many a
noggin of whisky is here quaffed to the memory of the bard, who profest
to draw so much inspiration from that potent liquor.
We bought some engravings of Kirk Alloway, the Bridge of Doon, and the
monument, and gave the old woman a fee besides, and took our leave. A
very short drive farther brought us within sight of the monument, and to
the hotel, situated close by the entrance of the ornamental grounds
within which the former is enclosed. We rang the bell at the gate of the
enclosure, but were forced to wait a considerable time; because the old
man, the regular superintendent of the spot, had gone to assist at the
laying of the corner-stone of a new kirk. He appeared anon, and admitted
us, but immediately hurried away to be present at the ceremonies,
leaving us locked up with Burns.
The enclosure around the monument is beautifully laid out as an
ornamental garden, and abundantly provided with rare flowers and
shrubbery, all tended with loving care. The monument stands on an
elevated site, and consists of a massive basement-story, three-sided,
above which rises a light and elegant Grecian temple--a mere dome,
supported on Corinthian pillars, and open to all the winds. The edifice
is beautiful in itself; tho I know not what peculiar appropriateness it
may have, as the memorial of a Scottish rural poet.
The door of the basement-story stood open; and, entering, we saw a bust
of Burns in a niche, looking keener, more refined, but not so warm and
whole-souled as his pictures usually do. I think the likeness can not be
good. In the center of the room stood a glass case, in which were
deposited the two volumes of the little Pocket Bible that Burns gave to
Highland Mary, when they pledged their troth to one another. It is
poorly printed, on coarse paper. A verse of Scripture, referring to the
solemnity and awfulness of vows, is written within the cover of each
volume, in the poet's own hand; and fastened to one of the covers is a
lock of Highland Mary's golden hair. This Bible had been carried to
America by one of her relatives, but was sent back to be fitly
treasured here.
There is a staircase within the monument, by which we ascended to the
top, and had a view of both Briggs of Doon; the scene of Tam O'Shanter's
misadventure being close at hand. Descending, we wandered through the
enclosed garden, and came to a little building in a corner, on entering
which, we found the two statues of Tam and Sutor Wat--ponderous
stonework enough, yet permeated in a remarkable degree with living
warmth and jovial hilarity. Prom this part of the garden, too, we again
beheld the old Briggs of Doon, over which Tam galloped in such imminent
and awful peril. It is a beautiful object in the landscape, with one
high, graceful arch, ivy-grown, and shadowed all over and around
with foliage.
When we had waited a good while, the old gardener came, telling us that
he had heard an excellent prayer at laying the corner-stone of the new
kirk. He now gave us some roses and sweetbrier, and let us out from his
pleasant garden. We immediately hastened to Kirk Alloway, which is
within two or three minutes' walk of the monument. A few steps ascend
from the roadside, through a gate, into the old graveyard, in the midst
of which stands the kirk. The edifice is wholly roofless, but the
side-walls and gable-ends are quite entire, tho portions of them are
evidently modern restorations. Never was there a plainer little church,
or one with smaller architectural pretension; no New England
meetinghouse has more simplicity in its very self, tho poetry and fun
have clambered and clustered so wildly over Kirk Alloway that it is
difficult to see it as it actually exists. By the by, I do not
understand why Satan and an assembly of witches should hold their revels
within a consecrated precinct; but the weird scene has so established
itself in the world's imaginative faith that it must be accepted as an
authentic incident, in spite of rule and reason to the contrary.
Possibly, some carnal minister, some priest of pious aspect and hidden
infidelity, had dispelled the consecration of the holy edifice, by his
pretense of prayer, and thus made it the resort of unhappy ghosts and
sorcerers and devils.
The interior of the kirk, even now, is applied to quite as impertinent a
purpose as when Satan and the witches used it as a dancing-hall; for it
is divided in the midst by a wall of stone masonry, and each compartment
has been converted into a family burial-place. The name on one of the
monuments is Crawfurd; the other bore no inscription. It is impossible
not to feel that these good people, whoever they may be, had no business
to thrust their prosaic bones into a spot that belongs to the world, and
where their presence jars with the emotions, be they sad or gay, which
the pilgrim brings thither. They shut us out from our own precincts,
too--from that inalienable possession which Burns bestowed in free gift
upon mankind, by taking it from the actual earth and annexing it to the
domain of imagination.
Kirk Alloway is inconceivably small, considering how large a space it
fills in our imagination before we see it. I paced its length, outside
of the wall, and found it only seventeen of my paces, and not more than
ten of them in breadth. There seem to have been but very few windows,
all of which, if I rightly remember, are now blocked up with mason-work
of stone. One mullioned window, tall and narrow, in the eastern gable,
might have been seen by Tam O'Shanter, blazing with devilish light, as
he approached along the road from Ayr; and there is a small and square
one, on the side nearest the road, into which he might have peered, as
he sat on horseback. Indeed, I could easily have looked through it,
standing on the ground, had not the opening been walled up. There is an
odd kind of belfry at the peak of one of the gables, with the small bell
still hanging in it. And this is all that I remember of Kirk Alloway,
except that the stones of its material are gray and irregular.
The road from Ayr passes Alloway Kirk, and crosses the Doon by a modern
bridge, without swerving much from a straight line. To reach the old
bridge, it appears to have made a bend, shortly after passing the kirk,
and then to have turned sharply toward the river. The new bridge is
within a minute's walk of the monument; and we went thither, and leaned
over its parapet to admire the beautiful Doon, flowing wildly and
sweetly between its deep and wooded banks. I never saw a lovelier scene;
altho this might have been even lovelier, if a kindly sun had shone upon
it. The ivy-grown, ancient bridge, with its high arch, through which we
had a picture of the river and the green banks beyond, was absolutely
the most picturesque object, in a quiet and gentle way, that ever blest
my eyes. Bonny Doon, with its wooded banks, and the boughs dipping into
the water! The memory of them, at this moment, affects me like the song
of birds, and Burns crooning some verses, simple and wild, in accordance
with their native melody.... We shall appreciate him better as a poet,
hereafter; for there is no writer whose life, as a man, has so much to
do with his fame, and throws such a necessary light upon whatever he has
produced. Henceforth, there will be a personal warmth for us in
everything that he wrote; and, like his countrymen, we shall know him in
a kind of personal way, as if we had shaken hands with him, and felt the
thrill of his actual voice.
HIGHLAND MARY'S HOME AND GRAVE [Footnote: From "A Literary Pilgrimage."
By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, J. B.
Lippincott Co. Copyright, 1895.]
BY THEODORE F. WOLFE.
There is no stronger proof of the transcending power of the genius of
Burns than is found in the fact that, by a bare half-dozen of his
stanzas, an humble dairy servant--else unheard of outside her parish and
forgotten at her death--is immortalized as a peeress of Petrarch's Laura
and Dante's Beatrice, and has been for a century loved and mourned of
all the world. We owe much of our tenderest poesy to the heroines whose
charms have attuned the fancy and aroused the impassioned muse of
enamoured bards; readers have always exhibited a natural avidity to
realize the personality of the beings who inspired the tender
lays--prompted often by mere curiosity, but more often by a desire to
appreciate the tastes and motives of the poets themselves. How little is
known of Highland Mary, the most famous heroine of modern song, is shown
by the brief, coherent, and often contradictory allusions to her which
the biographies of the plowman-poet contain. This paper--prepared during
a sojourn in "The Land of Burns"--while it adds a little to our meager
knowledge of Mary Campbell, aims to present consecutively and
congruously so much as may be known of her brief life, her relation to
the bard, and her sad, heroic death.
She first saw the light in 1764, at Ardrossan, on the coast, fifteen
miles northward from the "auld town of Ayr." Her parentage was of the
humblest, her father being a sailor before the mast, and the poor
dwelling which sheltered her was in no way superior to the meanest of
those we find to-day on the narrow streets of her village. From her
birthplace we see, across the Firth of Clyde, the beetling mountains of
the Highlands, where she afterward dwells and southward the great mass
of Ailsa Craig looming, a gigantic pyramid, out of the sea. Mary was
named for her aunt, wife of Peter McPherson, a ship-carpenter of
Greenock, in whose house Mary died. In her infancy her family removed to
the vicinage of Dunoon, on the western shore of the Firth, eight miles
below Greenock, leaving the oldest daughter at Ardrossan. Mary grew to
young womanhood near Dunoon then returned to Ayrshire, and found
occupation at Coilsfield, near Tarbolton, where her acquaintance with
Burns soon began. He told a lady that he first saw Mary while walking in
the woods of Coilsfield: and first spoke with her at a rustic
merrymaking, and "having the luck to win her regards from other
suitors," they speedily became intimate. At this period of life Burn's
"eternal propensity to fall into love" was unusually active, even for
him, and his passion for Mary (at this time) was one of several which
engaged his heart in the interval between the reign of Ellison
Begbie--"the lass of the twa sparkling, roguish een"--and that of
"Bonnie Jean." Mary subsequently became a servant in the house of Burn's
landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a lawyer of Mauchline, who had early
recognized the genius of the bard and admitted him to an intimate
friendship, despite his inferior condition....
Within a stone's-throw of Mary dwelt Jean Armour, and when the former
returned to Coilsfield, he promptly fell in love with Jean, and solaced
himself with her more buxom and compliant charms. It was a year or so
later, when his intercourse with Jean had burdened him with grief and
shame, that the tender and romantic affection for Mary came into his
life. She was yet at Coilsfield, and while he was in hiding--his heart
tortured by the apparent perfidy of Jean and all the countryside
condemning his misconduct--his intimacy with Mary was renewed; his
quickened vision now discerned her endearing attributes, her trust and
sympathy were precious in his distress, and awoke in him an affection
such as he never felt for any other woman. During a few brief weeks the
lovers spent their evenings and Sabbaths together, loitering amid the
"Banks and braes and streams around
The Castle of Montgomery,"
talking of the golden days that were to be theirs when present troubles
were past; then came the parting which the world will never forget, and
Mary relinquished her service and went to her parents at Campbelltown--a
port of Cantyre behind "Arran's mountain isle." Of this parting Burns
says, in a letter to Thomson, "We met by appointment on the second
Sunday of May, in a sequestered spot on the Ayr, where we spent the day
in taking farewell before she should embark for the West Highlands to
prepare for our projected change of life." Lovers of Burns linger over
this final parting, and detail the impressive ceremonials with which the
pair solemnized their betrothal: they stood on either side of a brook,
they laved their hands in the water and scattered it in the air to
symbolize the purity of their intentions; clasping hands above an open
Bible, they swore to be true to each other forever, then exchanged
Bibles, and parted never to meet more.
It is not strange that when death had left him nothing of her but her
poor little Bible, a tress of her golden hair, and a tender memory of
her love, the recollection of this farewell remained in his soul
forever. He has pictured it in the exquisite lines of "Highland Mary"
and "To Mary in Heaven." In the monument at Alloway--between the "auld
haunted kirk" and the bridge where Maggie lost her tail--we are shown a
memento of the parting; it is the Bible which Burns gave to Mary and
above which their vows were said. At Mary's death it passed to her
sister, at Ardrossan, who bequeathed it to her son William Anderson;
subsequently it was carried to America by one of the family, whence it
has been recovered to be treasured here. It is a pocket edition in two
volumes, to one of which is attached a lock of poor Mary's shining
hair....
A visit to the scenes of the brief passion of the pair is a pleasing
incident of our Burns pilgrimage. Coilsfield House is somewhat changed
since Mary dwelt beneath its roof--a great rambling edifice of gray
weather-worn stone with a row of white pillars aligned along its façade,
its massive walls embowered in foliage and environed by the grand woods
which Burns and Mary knew so well. It was then a seat of Colonel Hugh
Montgomerie, a patron of Burns. The name Coilsfield is derived from
Coila, the traditional appellation of the district. The grounds comprise
a billowy expanse of wood and sward; great reaches of turf, dotted with
trees already venerable when the lovers here had their tryst a hundred
years ago, slope away from the mansion to the Faile and border its
murmuring course to the Ayr. Here we trace with romantic interest the
wanderings of the pair during the swift hours of that last day of
parting love, their lingering way 'neath the "wild wood's thickening
green," by the pebbled shore of Ayr to the brooklet where their vows
were made, and thence along the Faile to the woodland shades of
Coilsfield, where, at the close of that winged day, "pledging oft to
meet again, they tore themselves asunder." Howitt found at Coilsfield a
thorn-tree, called by all the country "Highland Mary's thorn," and
believed to be the place of final parting; years ago the tree was
notched and broken by souvenir seekers; if it be still in existence the
present occupant of Coilsfield is unaware.....
Mary remained at Campbelltown during the summer of 1786. Coming to
Greenock in the autumn, she found her brother sick of a malignant fever
at the house of her aunt; bravely disregarding danger of contagion, she
devoted herself to nursing him, and brought him to a safe convalescense
only to be herself stricken by his malady and to rapidly sink and die, a
sacrifice to her sisterly affection. By this time the success of his
poems had determined Burns to remain in Scotland, and he returned to
Moss Giel, where tidings of Mary's death reached him. His brother
relates that when the letter was handed to him he went to the window and
read it, then his face was observed to change suddenly, and he quickly
went out without speaking. In June of the next year he made a solitary
journey to the Highlands, apparently drawn by memory of Mary. If,
indeed, he dropt a tear upon her neglected grave and visited her humble
Highland home, we may almost forgive him the excesses of that tour, if
not the renewed liaison with Jean which immediately preceded, and the
amorous correspondence with "Clarinda" (Mrs. M'Lehose) which
followed it.....
Poor Mary is laid in the burial-plot of her uncle in the west kirk-yard
of Greenock, near Crawford Street; our pilgrimage in Burns-land may
fitly end at her grave. A pathway, beaten by the feet of many reverent
visitors, leads us to the spot. It is so pathetically different from the
scenes she loved in life--the heather-clad slopes of her Highland home,
the seclusion of the wooded braes where she loitered with her
poet-lover. Scant foliage is about her; few birds sing above her here.
She lies by the wall; narrow streets hem in the enclosure; the air is
sullied by smoke from factories and from steamers passing within a
stone's throw on the busy Clyde; the clanging of many hammers and the
discordant din of machinery and traffic invade the place and sound in
our ears as we muse above the ashes of the gentle lassie.
For half a century her grave was unmarked and neglected; then, by
subscription, a monument of marble, twelve feet in height, and of
graceful proportions, was raised. It bears a sculptured medallion
representing Burns and Mary, with clasped hands, plighting their troth.
Beneath is the simple inscription, read oft by eyes dim with tears:
Erected over the grave of
Highland Mary
1842
"My Mary, dear departed shade,
Where is thy place of blissful rest?"
THROUGH THE CALEDONIA CANAL TO INVERNESS [Footnote: From "Notes on
England." Published by Henry Holt & Co.]
BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE
In the luminous morning mist, amid a line of masts and rigging, the
steamboat sailed down the Clyde to the sea. We proceeded along the
indented and rugged coast from one bay to another. These bays, being
almost entirely closed in, resemble lakes, and the large sheets of water
mirror an amphitheater of green hills. All the corners and windings of
the shore are strewn with white villas; the water is crowded with ships;
a height was pointed out to me whence three hundred sail may often be
counted at a time; a three-decker floats in the distance like a swan
among sea-mews. This vast space spread forth and full of life, dilates
the mind, one's chest expands more freely, one joyfully inhales the
fresh and keen breeze. But the effect upon the nerves and the heart does
not resemble that of the Mediterranean; this air and country, instead of
pre-disposing to pleasure, dispose to action.
We enter a small vessel drawn by three horses, which transports us along
the Crinan canal, between two banks of green turf. On the one side are
rocks covered with brushwood; on the other, steep declivities of a gray
or reddish tinge; this, indeed, is color at least, a pleasure for the
eye, well mingled, matched, and blended tints. On the bank and amid the
bushes are wild roses, and fragile plants with white tufts smile with a
delicate and charming grace.
At the outlet from the canal we go on board a large steamer, and the sea
opens out wider than ever. The sky is exceedingly clear and brilliant,
and the waves break in the sunlight, quivering with reflections of
molten tin. The vessel continues her course, leaving in her track a
bubbling and boiling path; sea gulls follow unweariedly behind her. On
both sides, islands, rocks, boldly-cut promontories stand in sharp
relief in the pale azure; the scene changes every quarter of an hour.
But on rounding every point the infinite ocean reappears, mingling its
almost flat line with the curve of the white sky.
The sun sets, we pass by Glencoe, and Ben Nevis appears sprinkled with
snow; the bay becomes narrower, and the mass of water, confined amid
barren mountains, assumes a tragic appearance. Human beings have come
hither to little purpose. Nature remains indomitable and wild; one feels
oneself upon a planet.
We disembark near Fort William; the dying twilight, the fading red rays
on the horizon enable us to get a glimpse of a desolate country; acres
of peat-bog, eminences rising from the valley between two ranges of huge
mountains. A bird of prey screams amid the stillness. Here and there we
see some wretched hovels; I am told that those on the heights are dens
without windows, and from which the smoke escapes through a hole in the
roof. Many of the old men are blind. What an unpropitious abode for man!
On the morrow we voyaged during four hours on the Caledonian canal
amidst solitudes, a monotonous row of treeless mountains, enormous green
eminences, dotted here and there with fallen stones. A few sheep of a
dwarf breed crop the scanty herbage on the slopes; sometimes the winter
is so severe that they die; in the distance we perceive a shaggy ox,
with savage eyes, the size of a small ass. Both plants and animals
perish, or are stunted. In order to make such a land yield anything it
must first be replanted with trees, as has been done in Sutherlandshire;
a tree renews the soil; it also shelters crops, flocks and herds, and
human beings.
The canal terminates in a series of lakes. Nothing is more noble than
their aspect, nothing more touching. The water, embrowned by the peat,
forms a vast shining plain, surrounded by a circle of mountains. In
proportion as we advance each mountain slowly grows upon us, becomes
more conspicuous, stands forth with its form and physiognomy; the
farther blue peaks melt the one behind the other, diminishing toward the
horizon, which they enclose. Thus they stand in position like an
assemblage of huge, mournful beings around the black water wherein they
are mirrored, while above them and the lake, from time to time, the sun
flashes through the shroud of clouds.
At last the solitude becomes less marked. The mountains are half-wooded
at first, and then wholly so; they dwindle down; the widening valleys
are covered with harvest; the fresh and green verdure of the herbage
which supplies forage begins to clothe the hollows and the slopes. We
enter Inverness, and we are surprised to find at almost the extreme
north of Scotland, on the border of the Highlands, a pretty and lively
modern town. It stretches along the two banks of a clear and rapid
river. Many houses are newly-built; we note a church, a castle, an iron
bridge. In every part are marks of cleanliness, forethought, and special
care. The window-panes shine, the frames have been painted; the
bell-handles are of copper; there are flowers in the windows; the
poorest nouses are freshly whitewashed. Well-drest ladies and carefully
drest gentlemen walk along the streets. Even a desire to possess works
of art is shown by Ionian pillars, specimens of pure Gothic, and other
architectural gimcrackery, and these prove at least the search after
improvement. The land itself is clearly of inferior quality; industry,
order, economy and labor have done everything. How great the contrast
between all this and the aspect of a small town on the shores of the
Mediterranean, so neglected and filthy, where the lower middle class
exist like worms in a worm-eaten beam!
THE SCOTCH HIGHLANDS [Footnote: From "Notes on England." Published by
Henry Holt & Co.]
BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE
On the slopes the violet heaths are spread like a silken carpet under
the scanty firs. Higher still are large patches of evergreen wood, and,
as soon as the mountain is approached, a brown circle of barren
eminences may be discerned toward the horizon. At the end of an hour the
desert begins; the climate is inimical to life, even to that of plants.
A tarn, the tint of burned topaz, lies coldly and sadly between stony
slopes whereon a few tufts of fern and heather grow here and there. Half
a league higher is a second tarn, which appears still more dismal in the
rising mist. Around, patches of snow are sprinkled on the peaks, and
these descending in rivulets produce morasses. The small country ponies,
with a sure instinct, surmount the bog, and we arrive at an elevation
whence the eye, as far as it can reach, embraces nothing but an
amphitheater of desolate, yet green summits; owing to the destruction of
timber, everything else has perished; a scene of ruined nature is far
more melancholy a spectacle than any human ruins. On our return across
the lake, a bag-piper played his instrument. The music is strange and
wild, its effects harmonizing with the aspect of the bubbling streams,
veined with striking or somber reflections. The same simple note, a kind
of dance music, runs through the whole piece in an incorrect and odd
manner, and continually recurs, but it is always harsh and rough; it
might be likened to an orange shriveled with the cold and
rendered bitter.
These are the Highlands. From Braemar to Perth we journey through them
for many long miles. It is always a solitude; sometimes five or six
valleys in succession are wholly bare, and one may travel for an hour
without seeing a tree; then for another hour it is rare merely to see in
the distance a wretched twisted birchen-tree, which is dying or dead. It
would be some compensation if the rock were naked, and exhibited its
mineral structure in all its fulness and ruggedness. But these
mountains, of no great elevation, are but bosses with flabby outlines,
they have fallen to pieces, and are stone heaps, resembling the remains
of a quarry. In winter, torrents of water uproot the heather, leaving on
the slopes a leprous, whitened scar, badly tinted by the too feeble sun.
The summits are truncated, and want boldness. Patches of miserable
verdure seam their sides and mark the oozing of springs; the remainder
is covered with brownish heather. Below, at the very bottom, a torrent
obstructed by stones, struggles along its channel, or lingers in
stagnant pools. One sometimes discerns a hovel, with a stunted cow. The
gray, low-lying sky, completes the impression of lugubrious monotony.
Our conveyance ascends the last mountain. At length we see a steep
declivity, a great rocky wall; but it is unique. We descend again, and
enter a habitable tract. Cultivation occurs first on the lower parts,
then on the slopes; the declivities are wooded, and then entire
mountains; forests of firs spread their somber mantle over the crests;
fields of oats and barley extend on all sides; we perceive pretty clumps
of trees, houses surrounded by gardens and flowers, and then culture of
all descriptions upon the lessening hills, here and there a park and a
modern mansion. The sun bursts forth and shines merrily, but without
heat; the fertile plain expands, abounding in promises of convenience
and pleasure, and we enter Perth thinking about the historical
narrations of Sir Walter Scott, and the contrast between the mountain
and the plain, the revilings and scornings interchanged between the
inhabitants of the Highlands and the Lowlands.
BEN LOMOND AND THE HIGHLAND LAKES [Footnote: From "Views Afoot."
Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.]
BY BAYARD TAYLOR
It was indeed a glorious walk from Dumbarton to Loch Lomond through this
enchanting valley. The air was mild and clear; a few light clouds
occasionally crossing the sun chequered the hills with sun and shade. I
have as yet seen nothing that in pastoral beauty can compare with its
glassy winding stream, its mossy old woods and guarding hills and the
ivy-grown, castellated towers embosomed in its forests or standing on
the banks of the Leven--the purest of rivers. At the little village
called Renton is a monument to Smollett, but the inhabitants seem to
neglect his memory, as one of the tablets on the pedestal is broken and
half fallen away. Farther up the vale a farmer showed us an old mansion
in the midst of a group of trees on the banks of the Leven which he said
belonged to Smollett--or Roderick Random, as he called him. Two or three
old pear trees were still standing where the garden had formerly been,
under which he was accustomed to play in his childhood.
At the head of Leven Vale we set off in the steamer "Watch-Witch" over
the crystal waters of Loch Lomond, passing Inch Murrin, the deer-park of
the Duke of Montrose, and Inch Caillaeh,
"where gray pines wave
Their shadows o'er Clan Alpine's grave."
Under the clear sky and golden light of the declining sun we entered the
Highlands, and heard on every side names we had learned long ago in the
lays of Scott. Here was Glen Fruin and Bannochar, Ross Dhu and the pass
of Beal-ma-na. Farther still we passed Rob Roy's rock, where the lake is
locked in by lofty mountains. The cone-like peak of Ben Lomond rises far
above on the right, Ben Voirlich stands in front, and the jagged crest
of Ben Arthur looks over the shoulder of the western hills....
When we arose in the morning, at four o'clock, to return with the boat,
the sun was already shining upon the westward hills; scarcely a cloud
was in the sky and the air was pure and cool. To our great delight, Ben
Lomond was unshrouded, and we were told that a more favorable day for
the ascent had not occurred for two months. We left the boat at
Rowardennan, an inn, at the southern base of Ben Lomond. After
breakfasting on Loch Lomond trout I stole out to the shore while my
companions were preparing for the ascent, and made a hasty sketch of
the lake.
We proposed descending on the northern side and crossing the Highlands
to Loch Katrine; tho it was represented as difficult and dangerous by
the guide who wished to accompany us, we determined to run the risk of
being enveloped in a cloud on the summit, and so set out alone, the path
appearing plain before us. We had no difficulty in following it up the
lesser heights, around the base. It wound on over rock and bog, among
the heather and broom with which the mountain is covered, sometimes
running up a steep acclivity and then winding zigzag round a rocky
ascent. The rains two days before had made the bogs damp and muddy; but,
with this exception, we had little trouble for some time.
Ben Lomond is a doubly-formed mountain. For about three-fourths of the
way there is a continued ascent, when it is suddenly terminated by a
large barren plain, from one end of which the summit shoots up abruptly,
forming at the north side a precipice five hundred feet high. As we
approached the summit of the first part of the mountain the way became
very steep and toilsome, but the prospect, which had before been only on
the south side, began to open on the east, and we saw suddenly spread
out below us the vale of Monteith, with "far Loch Ard and Aberfoil" in
the center and the huge front of Ben Venue filling up the picture.
Taking courage from this, we hurried on. The heather had become stunted
and dwarfish, and the ground was covered with short brown grass. The
mountain-sheep which we saw looking at us from the rock above had worn
so many paths along the side that we could not tell which to take, but
pushed on in the direction of the summit, till, thinking it must be near
at hand, we found a mile and a half of plain before us, with the top of
Ben Lomond at the farther end. The plain was full of wet moss crossed in
all directions by deep ravines or gullies worn in it by the
mountain-rains, and the wind swept across with a tempest-like force.
I met near the base a young gentleman from Edinburgh who had left
Rowardennan before us, and we commenced ascending together. It was hard
work, but neither liked to stop; so we climbed up to the first
resting-place, and found the path leading along the brink of a
precipice. We soon attained the summit, and, climbing up a little mound
of earth and stones, I saw the half of Scotland at a glance. The clouds
hung just above the mountain-tops, which rose all around like the waves
of a mightly sea. On every side, near and far, stood their misty
summits, but Ben Lomond was the monarch of them all. Loch Lomond lay
unrolled under my feet like a beautiful map; just opposite, Loch Long
thrust its head from between the feet of crowded hills to catch a
glimpse of the giant. We could see from Ben Nevis to Ayr--from
Edinburgh to Staffa. Stirling and Edinburgh castles would have been
visible but that the clouds hung low in the valley of the Forth and hid
them from our sight.
... At a cottage on the farm of Coman, we procured some oatcakes and
milk for dinner from an old Scotch woman who pointed out the direction
of Loch Katrine, six miles distant; there was no road, nor, indeed, a
solitary dwelling between. The hills were bare of trees, covered with
scraggy bushes and rough heath, which in some places was so thick we
could scarcely drag our feet through. Added to this, the ground was
covered with a kind of moss that retained the moisture like a sponge; so
that our boots ere long became thoroughly soaked. Several considerable
streams were rushing down the side, and many of the wild breed of black
Highland cattle were grazing around. After climbing up and down one or
two heights, occasionally startling the moorcock and ptarmigan from
their heathery coverts, we saw the valley of Loch Con, while in the
middle of the plain on the top of the mountain we had ascended was a
sheet of water which we took to be Loch Ackill. Two or three wild-fowl
swimming on its surface were the only living things in sight. The peaks
around shut it out from all view of the world; a single decayed tree
leaned over it from a mossy rock which gave the whole scene an air of
the most desolate wildness.
From the next mountain we saw Loch Ackill and Loch Katrine below, but a
wet and weary descent had yet to be made. I was about throwing off my
knapsack on a rock to take a sketch of Loch Katrine, which appeared to
be very beautiful from this point, when we discerned a cavalcade of
ponies winding along the path from Inversnaid to the head of the lake,
and hastened down to take the boat when they should arrive.... As we
drew near the eastern end of the lake the scenery became far more
beautiful. The Trosachs opened before us. Ben Ledi looked down over the
"forehead bare" of Ben An, and as we turned a rocky point Ellen's Isle
rose up in front. It is a beautiful little turquoise in the silver
setting of Loch Katrine. The northern side alone is accessible, all the
others being rocky and perpendicular and thickly grown with trees. We
rounded the island to the little bay, bordered by the silver strand,
above which is the rock from which Fitz-James wound his horn, and shot
under an ancient oak which flung its long gray arms over the water. We
here found a flight of rocky steps leading to the top, where stood the
bower erected by Lady Willoughby D'Eresby to correspond with Scott's
description. Two or three blackened beams are all that remain of it,
having been burned down some years ago by the carelessness of
a traveler.
The mountains stand all around, like giants, to "sentinel this enchanted
land." On leaving the island we saw the Goblin's Cave in the side of Ben
Venue, called by the Gaels "Coiran-Uriskin." Near it is Beal-nam-bo--the
"Pass of Cattle"--overhung with gray weeping birch-trees.
Here the boatmen stopt to let us hear the fine echo, and the names of
Rob Roy and Roderick Dhu were sent back to us apparently as loud as they
were given. The description of Scott is wonderfully exact, tho the
forest that feathered o'er the sides of Ben Venue has since been cut
down and sold by the Duke of Montrose.
When we reached the end of the lake, it commenced raining, and we
hastened on through the pass of Beal-an-Duine, scarcely taking time to
glance at the scenery, till Loch Achray appeared through the trees, and
on its banks the ivy-grown front of the inn of Ardcheancrochan--with its
unpronounceable name.
TO THE HEBRIDES [Footnote: From "A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
with Samuel Johnson, LL.D."]
BY JAMES BOSWELL.
My acquaintance, the Reverend Mr. John Macauley, one of the ministers of
Inverary, and brother to our good friend at Calder, came to us this
morning, and accompanied us to the castle, where I presented Dr. Johnson
to the Duke of Argyle. We were shown through the house; and I never
shall forget the impression made upon my fancy by some of the ladies'
maids tripping about in neat morning dresses. After seeing for a long
time little but rusticity, their lively manner, and gay, inviting
appearance, pleased me so much, that I thought for the moment, I could
have been a knight-errant for them.
We then got into a low one-horse chair, ordered for us by the duke, in
which we drove about the place. Dr. Johnson was much struck by the
grandeur and elegance of this princely seat. He thought, however, the
castle too low, and wished it had been a story higher. He said, "What I
admire here, is the total defiance of expense." I had a particular pride
in showing him a great number of fine old trees, to compensate for the
nakedness which had made such an impression on him on the eastern coast
of Scotland.
When we came in, before dinner, we found the duke and some gentlemen in
the hall. Dr. Johnson took much notice of the large collection of arms,
which are excellently disposed there. I told what he had said to Sir
Alexander Macdonald, of his ancestors not suffering their arms to rust.
"Well," said the doctor, "but let us be glad we live in times when arms
may rust. We can sit to-day at his grace's table without any risk of
being attacked, and perhaps sitting down again wounded or maimed." The
duke placed Dr. Johnson next himself at the table. I was in fine
spirits, and tho sensible that I had the misfortune of not being in
favor with the duchess I was not in the least disconcerted, and offered
her grace some of the dish that was before me. It must be owned that I
was in the right to be quite unconcerned, if I could. I was the Duke of
Argyle's guest, and I had no reason to suppose that he adopted the
prejudices and resentments of the Duchess of Hamilton....
The duchess was very attentive to Dr. Johnson. I know not how a middle
state came to be mentioned. Her Grace wished to hear him on that point.
"Madam," said he, "your own relation, Mr. Archibald Campbell, can tell
you better about it than I can. He was a bishop of the Nonjuring
communion, and wrote a book upon the subject." He engaged to get it for
her grace. He afterward gave a full history of Mr. Archibald Campbell,
which I am sorry I do not recollect particularly.
He said Mr. Campbell had been bred a violent Whig, but afterward "kept
better company, and became a Tory." He said this with a smile, in
pleasant allusion, as I thought, to the opposition between his own
political principles and those of the duke's clan. He added that Mr.
Campbell, after the revolution, was thrown into jail on account of his
tenets; but, on application by letter to the old Lord Townshend, was
released; that he always spoke of his lordship with great gratitude,
saying, "tho a Whig, he had humanity."
A gentleman in company, after dinner, was desired by the duke to go into
another room, for a specimen of curious marble, which his grace wished
to show us. He brought a wrong piece, upon which the duke sent him back
again. He could not refuse, but, to avoid any appearance of servility,
he whistled as he walked out of the room, to show his independence. On
my mentioning this afterward to Dr. Johnson, he said, it was a nice
trait of character.
Dr. Johnson talked a great deal, and was so entertaining, that Lady
Betty Hamilton, after dinner, went and placed her chair close to his,
leaned upon the back of it, and listened eagerly. It would have made a
fine picture to have drawn the sage and her at this time in their
several attitudes. He did not know, all the while, how much he was
honored. I told him afterward. I never saw him so gentle and complaisant
as this day.
We went to tea. The duke and I walked up and down the drawing room,
conversing. The duchess still continued to show the same marked coldness
for me; for which, tho I suffered from it, I made every allowance,
considering the very warm part I had taken for Douglas, in the cause in
which she thought her son deeply interested. Had not her grace
discovered some displeasure toward me, I should have suspected her of
insensibility or dissimulation....
He was much pleased with our visit at the castle of Inverary. The Duke
of Argyle was exceedingly polite to him, and, upon his complaining of
the shelties which he had hitherto ridden being too small for him, his
grace told him he should be provided with a good horse to carry him
next day.
STAFFA AND IONA [Footnote: From "Visits to Remarkable Places."]
BY WILLIAM HOWITT.
We are bound for the regions of ghosts and fays, mermaids and kelpies,
of great sea-snakes, and a hundred other marvels and miracles. To
accomplish all this, we have nothing more to do than step on board the
steam-packet that lies at the Broomielaw, or great quay at Glasgow. The
volume of heavy black smoke, issuing from its nickled chimney, announces
that it means to be moving on its way speedily....
Emerging from the Crinan canal, you issue forth into the Sound of Jura,
and feel at once that you are in the stern and yet beautiful region of
your youthful admiration. There is the heavy swell and the solemn roar
of the great Atlantic. You feel the wild winds that sweep over it. You
see around you only high and craggy coasts, that are bleak and naked
with the lashings of a thousand tempests. All before you, are scattered
rocks that emerge from the restless sea, and rocky isles, with patches
of the most beautiful greensward, but with scarcely a single tree. The
waves are leaping in whiteness against the cliffs, and thousands of
sea-birds are floating in long lines on the billows, or skimming past
you singly, and diving into the clear hissing waters as they near your
vessel. One of the very first objects which arrests your senses is the
Coryvreckan, or great whirlpool of the Hebrides, an awful feature in all
the poetry and ballads belonging to these regions.
I never visited any part of Great Britain which more completely met my
anticipated ideas than this. The day was fine, but with a strong breeze.
The sea was rough; the wild-fowl were flying, scudding, and diving on
all hands; and, wherever the eye turned, were craggy islands-mountains
of dark heath or bare splintered stone, and green, solitary slopes,
where scarcely a tree or a hut was to be discovered; but now and then
black cattle might be descried grazing, or flocks of sheep dotted the
hill sides. Far as we could look, were naked rocks rising from the sea,
that were worn almost into roundness, or scooped into hollows by the
eternal action of the stormy waters. Some of them stood in huge arches,
like temples of some shaggy seagod, or haunts of sea-fowl--daylight and
the waves passing freely through them. Everywhere were waves, leaping in
snowy foam against these rocks and against the craggy shores. It was a
stern wilderness of chafing billows and of resisting stone. The rocks
were principally of dark red granite, and were cracked across and
across, as if by the action of fire or frost. Every thing spake to us of
the wild tempests that so frequently rage through these seas....
Staffa rose momently in its majesty before us! After all the
descriptions which we had read, and the views we had seen of this
singular little island, we were struck with delighted astonishment at
its aspect. It is, in fact, one great mass of basaltic columns, bearing
on their heads another huge mass of black stone, here and there covered
with green turf. We sailed past the different caves--the Boat Cave and
the Cormorant Cave, which are themselves very wonderful; but it was
Fingal's Cave that struck us with admiration and awe. To see this
magnificent cavern, with its clustered columns on each side, and pointed
arch, with the bleak precipices above it, and the sea raging at its
base, and dashing and roaring into its gloomy interior, was worth all
the voyage. There are no words that can express the sensation it
creates. We were taken in the boats on shore at the northeast point, and
landed amid a wilderness of basaltic columns thrown into almost all
forms and directions. Some were broken, and lay in heaps in the clear
green water. Others were piled up erect and abrupt; some were twisted up
into tortuous pyramids at a little distance from the shore itself, and
through the passage which they left, the sea came rushing--all foam, and
with the most tremendous roar. Others were bent like so many leaden
pipes, and turned their broken extremities toward us.
We advanced along a sort of giant's causeway, the pavement of which was
the heads of basaltic columns, all fitting together in the most
beautiful symmetry; and, turning round the precipice to our right hand,
found ourselves at the entrance of the great cave. The sea was too
stormy to allow us to enter it, as is often done in boats, we had
therefore to clamber along one of its sides, where a row of columns is
broken off, at some distance above the waves, and presents an
accessible, but certainly very formidable causeway, by which you may
reach the far end. I do not believe that any stranger, if he were there
alone, would dare to pass along that irregular and slippery causeway,
and penetrate to the obscure end of the cave; but numbers animate one
another to anything. We clambered along this causeway or corridor, now
ascending and now descending, as the broken columns required, and soon
stood--upward of seventy of us--ranged along its side from one end to
the other. Let it be remembered that this splendid sea cave is forty-two
feet wide at the entrance; sixty-six feet high from low water; and runs
into the rock two hundred and twenty-seven feet. Let it be imagined that
at eight or ten feet below us it was paved with the sea, which came
rushing and foaming along it, and dashing up against the solid rock at
its termination; while the light thrown from the flickering billows
quivered in its arched roof above us, and the whole place was filled
with the solemn sound of the ocean; and if any one can imagine to
himself any situation more sublime, I should like to know what that is.
The roof is composed of the lower ends of basaltic columns, which have
yet been so cut away by nature as to give it the aspect of the roof of
some gigantic cathedral aisle; and lichens of gold and crimson have
gilded and colored it in the richest manner.
It was difficult to forget, as we stood there, that, if any one slipt,
he would disappear forever, for the billows in their ebb would sweep him
out to the open sea, as it were in a moment. Yet the excitement of the
whole group was too evident to rest with any seriousness on such a
thought. Some one suddenly fired a gun in the place, and the concussion
and reverberated thunders were astounding.
When the first effect was gone off, one general peal of laughter rung
through the cave, and then nearly the whole company began to sing "The
Sea! the sea!" The captain found it a difficult matter to get his
company out of this strange chantry--where they and the wind and waves
seemed all going mad together--to embark them again for Iona.
Venerable Iona--how different! and with what different feelings
approached! As we drew near, we saw a low bleak shore, backed by naked
hills, and at their feet a row of miserable Highland huts, and at
separate intervals the ruins of the monastery and church of Ronad, the
church of St. Oran and its burying-ground, and lastly, the cathedral....
Nothing is more striking, in this wild and neglected spot, than to walk
among these ruins, and behold amid the rank grass those tombs of ancient
kings, chiefs, and churchmen, with their sculpture of so singular and
yet superior a style. It is said that there were formerly three hundred
and sixty stone crosses in the Island of Iona, which since the
Reformation have been reduced to two, and the fragments of two others.
The Synod of Argyle is reported to have caused no less than sixty of
them to be thrown into the sea at one time, and fragments of others,
which were knocked in pieces, are to be seen here and there, some of
them now converted into gravestones.
They lie on the margin of the stormy Atlantic; they lie among walls
which, tho they may be loosened for years, seem as tho they never could
decay, for they are of the red granite of which the rocks and islets
around are composed, and defended only by low enclosures piled up of the
same granite, rounded into great pebbles by the washing of the sea. But
perhaps the most striking scene of all was our own company of voyagers
landing amid the huge masses of rock that scatter the strand; forming
into long procession, two and two, and advancing in that order from one
ruin to another.
We chanced to linger behind for a moment; and our eye caught this
procession of upward of seventy persons thus wandering on amid those
time-worn edifices--and here and there a solitary cross lifting its head
above them. It was a picture worthy of a great painter. It looked as tho
the day of pilgrimages was come back again, and that this was a troop of
devotees thronging to this holy shrine. The day of pilgrimages is,
indeed come back again; but they are the pilgrimages of knowledge and an
enlightened curiosity. The day of that science which the saints of Iona
were said to diffuse first in Britain has now risen to a splendid noon;
and not the least of its evidences is that, every few days through every
summer, a company like this descends on this barren strand to behold
what Johnson calls "that illustrious island which was once the luminary
of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians
derived the benefit of knowledge and the blessings of religion." A more
interesting or laudable excursion the power of steam and English money
can not well enable our countrymen to make.
VII
IRELAND
A SUMMER DAY IN DUBLIN [Footnote: From "The Irish Sketch Book."]
BY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Our passage across from the Head [Holyhead] was made in a rain so
pouring and steady, that sea and coast were entirely hidden from us, and
one could see very little beyond the glowing tip of the cigar which
remained alight nobly in spite of the weather. When the gallant
exertions of that fiery spirit were over for ever, and, burning bravely
to the end, it had breathed its last in doing its master service, all
became black and cheerless around; the passengers had dropt off one by
one, preferring to be dry and ill below rather than wet and squeamish
above; even the mate, with his gold-laced cap (who is so astonishingly
like Mr. Charles Dickens, that he might pass for that gentleman)--even
the mate said he would go to his cabin and turn in. So there remained
nothing for it but to do as all the world had done....
A long pier, with a steamer or two at hand, and a few small vessels
lying on either side of the jetty; a town irregularly built, with
showy-looking hotels; a few people straggling on the beach; two or three
ears at the railroad station, which runs along the shore as far as
Dublin; the sea stretching interminably eastward; to the north the Hill
of Howth, lying gray behind the mist; and, directly under his feet, upon
the wet, black, shining, slippery deck, an agreeable reflection of his
own legs, disappearing seemingly in the direction of the cabin from
which he issues; are the sights which a traveler may remark on coming on
deck at Kingstown pier on a wet morning--let us say on an average
morning; for according to the statement of well-informed natives, the
Irish day is more often rainy than otherwise. A hideous obelisk, stuck
upon four fat balls, and surmounted with a crown on a cushion (the
latter were no bad emblems perhaps of the monarch in whose honor they
were raised), commemorates the sacred spot at which George IV. quitted
Ireland: you are landed here from the steamer; and a carman, who is
dawdling in the neighborhood, with a straw in his mouth, comes leisurely
up to ask whether you'll go to Dublin?
Is it natural indolence, or the effect of despair because of the
neighboring railroad, which renders him so indifferent? He does not even
take the straw out of his mouth as he proposes the question, and seems
quite careless as to the answer. He said he would take me to Dublin "in
three quarthers," as soon as we began a parley; as to the fare, he would
not hear of it--he said he would leave it to my honor; he would take me
for nothing. Was it possible to refuse such a genteel offer?
Before that day, so memorable for joy and sorrow, for rapture at
receiving its monarch and tearful grief at losing him, when George IV.
came and left the maritime resort of the citizens of Dublin, it bore a
less genteel name than that which it owns at present, and was called
Dunleary. After that glorious event Dunleary disdained to be Dunleary
any longer, and became Kingstown, henceforward and forever. Numerous
terraces and pleasure-houses have been built in the place--they stretch
row after row along the banks of the sea, and rise one above another on
the hill. The rents of these houses are said to be very high; the Dublin
citizens crowd into them in summer; and a great source of pleasure and
comfort must it be to them to have the fresh sea-breezes and prospects
so near to the metropolis.
The better sort of houses are handsome and spacious; but the fashionable
quarter is yet in an unfinished state, for enterprising architects are
always beginning new roads, rows and terraces; nor are those already
built by any means complete. [Footnote: This was written in 1842.]
Besides the aristocratic part of the town is a commercial one, and
nearer to Dublin stretch lines of low cottages which have not a
Kingstown look at all, but are evidently of the Dunleary period.... The
capabilities of the country, however, are very, very great, and in many
instances have been taken advantage of; for you see, besides the misery,
numerous handsome houses and parks along the road, having fine lawns and
woods, and the sea in our view, at a quarter of an hour's ride from
Dublin. It is the continual appearance of this sort of wealth which
makes the poverty more striking; and thus between the two (for there is
no vacant space of fields between Kingstown and Dublin) the car
reaches the city.
The entrance to the capital is very handsome. There is no bustle and
throng of carriages, as in London; but you pass by numerous rows of neat
houses, fronted with gardens, and adorned with all sorts of gay-looking
creepers. Pretty market-gardens, with trim beds of plants and shining
glass-houses, give the suburbs a riante and cheerful look; and, passing
under the arch of the railway, we are in the city itself. Hence you come
upon several old-fashioned, well-built, airy, stately streets, and
through Fitzwilliam Square, a noble place, the garden of which is full
of flowers and foliage. The leaves are green, and not black as in
similar places in London; the red-brick houses tall and handsome.
Presently the ear stops before an extremely big red house, in that
extremely large square, Stephen's Green, where Mr. O'Connell says there
is one day or other to be a Parliament. There is room enough for that,
or for any other edifice which fancy or patriotism may have a mind to
erect, for part of one of the sides of the square is not yet built, and
you see the fields and the country beyond....
The hotel to which I had been directed is a respectable old edifice,
much frequented by families from the country, and where the solitary
traveler may likewise find society. For he may either use the Shelburne
as a hotel or a boarding-house, in which latter case he is comfortably
accommodated at the very moderate daily charge. For this charge a
copious breakfast is provided for him in the coffee-room, a perpetual
luncheon is likewise there spread, a plentiful dinner is ready at six
o'clock; after which, there is a drawing-room and a rubber of whist,
with tay and coffee and cakes in plenty to satisfy the largest appetite.
The hotel is majestically conducted by clerks and other officers; the
landlord himself does not appear, after the honest comfortable English
fashion, but lives in a private mansion hard by, where his name may be
read inscribed on a brass-plate, like that of any other private
gentleman.
A woman melodiously crying "Dublin Bay herrings" passed just as we came
up to the door, and as that fish is famous throughout Europe, I seized
the earliest opportunity and ordered a broiled one for breakfast. It
merits all its reputation: and in this respect I should think the Bay of
Dublin is far superior to its rival of Naples. Are there any herrings in
Naples Bay? Dolphins there may be; and Mount Vesuvius, to be sure, is
bigger than even the Hill of Howth: but a dolphin is better in a sonnet
than at a breakfast, and what poet is there that, at certain periods of
the day, would hesitate in his choice between the two?
With this famous broiled herring the morning papers are served up; and a
great part of these, too, gives opportunity of reflection to the
newcomer, and shows him how different this country is from his own. Some
hundred years hence, when students want to inform themselves of the
history of the present day, and refer to files of "Times" and
"Chronicle" for the purpose, I think it is possible that they will
consult, not so much those luminous and philosophical leading articles
which call our attention at present both by the majesty of their
eloquence and the largeness of their type, but that they will turn to
those parts of the journals into which information is squeezed into the
smallest possible print, to the advertisements, namely, the law and
police reports, and to the instructive narratives supplied by that
ill-used body of men who transcribe knowledge at the rate of a penny
a line....
The papers being read, it became my duty to discover the town; and a
handsomer town, with fewer people in it, it is impossible to see on a
summer's day. In the whole wide square of Stephen's Green, I think there
were not more than two nursery-maids, to keep company with the statue of
George I., who rides on horseback in the middle of the garden, the horse
having his foot up to trot, as if he wanted to go out of town too. Small
troops of dirty children (too poor and dirty to have lodgings at
Kingstown) were squatting here and there upon the sunshiny steps, the
only clients at the thresholds of the professional gentlemen whose names
figure on brass-plates on the doors. A stand of lazy carmen, a policeman
or two with clinking boot-heels, a couple of moaning beggars leaning
against the rails and calling upon the Lord, and a fellow with a toy and
book stall, where the lives of St. Patrick, Robert Emmet, and Lord
Edward Fitzgerald may be bought for double their value, were all the
population of the Green.... In the courts of the College, scarce the
ghost of a gyp or the shadow of a bed-maker. In spite of the solitude,
the square of the College is a fine sight--a large ground, surrounded by
buildings of various ages and styles, but comfortable, handsome, and in
good repair; a modern row of rooms; a row that has been Elizabethan
once; a hall and senate-house, facing each other, of the style of George
I.; and a noble library, with a range of many windows, and a fine manly
simple façade of cut stone.
The bank and other public buildings of Dublin are justly famous. In the
former may still be seen the room which was the House of Lords formerly,
and where the bank directors now sit, under a clean marble image of
George III. The House of Commons has disappeared, for the accommodation
of clerks and cashiers. The interior is light, splendid, airy, well
furnished, and the outside of the building not less so. The Exchange,
hard by, is an equally magnificent structure; but the genius of commerce
has deserted it, for all its architectural beauty. There was nobody
inside when I entered, but a pert statue of George III. in a Roman toga,
simpering and turning out his toes; and two dirty children playing,
whose hoop-sticks caused great clattering echoes under the vacant
sounding dome.
Walking toward the river, you have on either side of you, at Carlisle
Bridge, a very brilliant and beautiful prospect. The four courts and
their dome to the left, the custom-house and its dome to the right; and
in this direction seaward, a considerable number of vessels are moored,
and the quays are black and busy with the cargoes discharged from ships.
Seamen cheering, herring-women bawling, coal-carts loading--the scene is
animated and lively. Yonder is the famous Corn Exchange; but the Lord
Mayor is attending to his duties in Parliament, and little of note is
going on. I had just passed his lordship's mansion in Dawson Street--a
queer old dirty brick house, with dumpy urns at each extremity, and
looking as if a story of it had been cut off--a rasée house. Close at
hand, and peering over a paling, is a statue of our blest sovereign
George II. How absurd these pompous images look, of defunct majesties,
for whom no breathing soul cares a halfpenny! It is not so with the
effigy of William III., who has done something to merit a statue. At
this minute the Lord Mayor has William's effigy under a canvas, and is
painting him of a bright green picked out with yellow--his lordship's
own livery.
The view along the quays to the four courts has no small resemblance to
a view along the quays at Paris, tho not so lively as are even those
quiet walks. The vessels do not come above-bridge, and the marine
population remains constant about them, and about numerous dirty
liquor-shops, eating-houses, and marine-store establishments, which are
kept for their accommodation along the quay. As far as you can see, the
shining Liffey flows away eastward, hastening (like the rest of the
inhabitants of Dublin) to the sea.
In front of Carlisle Bridge, and not in the least crowded, tho in the
midst of Sackville Street, stands Nelson upon a stone pillar. The post
office is on his right hand (only it is cut off); and on his left,
Gresham's and the Imperial Hotel. Of the latter let me say (from
subsequent experience) that it is ornamented by a cook who could dress a
dinner by the side of M. Borel or M. Soyéld there were more such artists
in this ill-fated country! The street is exceedingly broad and handsome;
the shops at the commencement, rich and spacious; but in Upper Sackville
Street, which closes with the pretty building and gardens of the
Rotunda, the appearance of wealth begins to fade somewhat, and the
houses look as if they had seen better days. Even in this, the great
street of the town, there is scarcely any one, and it is as vacant and
listless as Pall Mall in October.
DUBLIN CASTLE [Footnote: From "Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, Etc."]
BY MR. AND MRS. S. C. HALL
The building of Dublin "Castle"--for the residence of the Viceroys
retains the term--was commenced by Meiler FitzHenry, Lord Justice of
Ireland, in 1205; and finished, fifteen years afterward, by Henry de
Loundres, Archbishop of Dublin. The purpose of the structure is declared
by the patent by which King John commanded its erection: "You have given
us to understand that you have not a convenient place wherein our
treasure may be safely deposited; and forasmuch, as well for that use as
for many others, a fortress would be necessary for us at Dublin, we
command you to erect a castle there, in such competent place as you
shall judge most expedient, as well to curb the city as to defend it if
occasion shall so require, and that you make it as strong as you can
with good and durable walls." Accordingly it was occupied as a strong
fortress only, until the reign of Elizabeth, when it became the seat of
the Irish government--the court being held previously at various palaces
in the city or its suburbs; and in the seventeenth century, Terms and
Parliaments were both held within its walls.
The Castle, however, has undergone so many and such various changes from
time to time, as circumstances justified the withdrawal of its defenses,
that the only portion of it which nows bears a character of antiquity is
the Birmingham Tower; and even that has been almost entirely rebuilt,
altho it retains its ancient form. The records of this tower--in modern
times the "State Paper Office"--would afford materials for one of the
most singular and romantic histories ever published. It received its
name, according to Dr. Walsh, not from the De Birminghams, who were
lords justices in 1321 and 1348; but from Sir William Birmingham, who
was imprisioned there in 1331, with his son Walter; "the former was
taken out from thence and executed, the latter was pardoned as to life
because he was in holy orders." It was the ancient keep, or ballium, of
the fortress; and was for a very long period the great state prison, in
which were confined the resolute or obstinate Milesian chiefs, and the
rebellious Anglo-Norman lords. Strong and well guarded as it was,
however, its inmates contrived occasionally to escape from its durance.
Some of the escapes which the historians have recorded are remarkable
and interesting.
The Castle is situated on very high ground, nearly in the center of the
city; the principal entrance is by a handsome gateway. The several
buildings, surrounding two squares, consist of the lord-lieutenant's
state apartments, guardrooms, the offices of the chief secretary, the
apartments of aides-du-camp and officers of the household, the offices
of the treasury, hanaper, register, auditor-general, constabulary, etc.,
etc. The buildings have a dull and heavy character--no effort has been
made at elegance or display--and however well calculated they may seem
for business, the whole have more the aspect of a prison than a court.
There is, indeed, one structure that contributes somewhat to redeem the
somber appearance of "the Castle"--the chapel is a fine Gothic edifice,
richly decorated both within and without. The following description of
the ancient character of "the Castle" is gathered from Dr. Walsh:
"The entrance from the city on the north side was by a drawbridge,
placed between two strong round towers from Castle Street, the westward
of which subsisted till the year 1766. A portcullis, armed with iron,
between these towers, served as a second defense, in case the bridge
should be surprised by an enemy. A high curtain extended from the
western tower to Cork Tower, so called after the great Earl of Cork,
who, in 1624, expended a considerable sum in rebuilding it. The wall was
then continued of equal height until it joined Birmingham Tower, which
was afterward used as a prison for state criminals; it was taken down in
1775, and the present building erected on the site, for preserving part
of the ancient records of the kingdom. From this another high curtain
extended to the Wardrobe Tower, which served as repository for the royal
robe, the cap of maintenance, and the other furniture of state. From,
this tower the wall was carried to the North or Storehouse Tower (now
demolished) near Dame's Gate, and from thence it was continued to the
eastern gateway tower, at the entrance of the castle. This fortress was
originally encompassed with a broad and deep moat, which has long since
been filled up. There were two sally ports in the wall, one toward Sheep
(now Ship) Street, which was closed up in 1663 by the Duke of Ormond,
after the discovery of Jephson and Blood's conspiracy."
The walls by which it was formerly surrounded, and the fortifications
for its defense, have nearly all vanished. Neither is Dublin rich in
remains of antiquity; one of the few that appertain to its ancient
history is a picturesque gateway, but not of a very remote date, called
Marsh's Gate. It stands in Kevin Street, near the cathedral of St.
Patrick, and is the entrance to a large court, now occupied by the horse
police; at one end of which is the Barrack, formerly, we believe, the
Deanery, and Marsh's library.
ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL [Footnote: From "Ireland: Its Scenery,
Character, Etc."]
BY MR. AND MRS. S. C. HALL
If few of the public structures of Dublin possess "the beauty of age,"
many of its churches may be classed with the "ancient of days." Chief
among them all is the Cathedral of St. Patrick; interesting, not alone
from its antiquity, but from its association with the several leading
events, and remarkable people, by which and by whom Ireland has been
made "famous." It is situated in a very old part of Dublin, in the midst
of low streets and alleys, the houses being close to the small open yard
by which the venerable structure is encompassed. Its condition, too, is
very wretched; and altho various suggestions have been made, from time
to time, for its repair and renovation, it continues in a state by no
means creditable either to the church or the city. It was built A.D.
1190, by John Comyn, Archbishop of Dublin, by whom it was dedicated to
the patron saint of Ireland; but it is said, the site on which it stands
was formerly occupied by a church erected by the saint himself--A.D.
448. St. Patrick's was collegiate in its first institution, and erected
into a cathedral about the year 1225, by Henry de Loundres, successor to
Archbishop Comyn, "united with the cathedral of the Holy Trinity,
Christ's Church, Dublin, into one spouse, saving unto the latter the
prerogative of honor." The question of precedence between the sees of
Dublin and Armagh was agitated for centuries with the greatest violence,
and both pleaded authority in support of their pretensions; it was at
length determined, in 1552, that each should be entitled to primatial
dignity, and erect his crozier in the diocese of the other: that the
archbishop of Dublin should be titled the "Primate of Ireland;" while
the archbishop of Armagh should be styled, with more precision, "Primate
of all Ireland"--a distinction which continues to the present day.
Above two centuries before this arrangement, however, as the diocese of
Dublin contained two cathedrals--St. Patrick's and Christ Church--an
agreement was made between the chapters of both, that each church should
be called Cathedral and Metropolitan, but that Christ Church should have
precedence, as being the elder church, and that the archbishops should
be buried alternately in the two cathedrals.
The sweeping censure of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, that "in point of good
architecture it has little to notice or commend," is not to be
questioned; ruins--and, in its present state, St. Patrick's approaches
very near to be classed among them--of far greater beauty abound in
Ireland. It is to its associations with the past that the cathedral is
mainly indebted for its interest. The choral music of St. Patrick's is
said to be "almost unrivalled for its combined powers of voice, organ,
and scientific skill."
LIMERICK [Footnote: From "Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, Etc."]
BY MR. AND MRS. S. C. HALL
Limerick is distinguished in history as "the city of the violated
treaty;" and the Shannon, on which it stands, has been aptly termed "the
King of Island Rivers." Few of the Irish counties possess so many
attractions for the antiquarian and the lover of the picturesque: and
with one exception, no city of Ireland has contributed so largely to
maintain the honor and glory of the country. The brave defenders of
Limerick and Londonderry have received--the former from the Protestant,
and the latter from the Catholic, historian--the praise that party
spirit failed to weaken; the heroic gallantry, the indomitable
perseverance, and the patient and resolute endurance under suffering, of
both, having deprived political partizans of their asperity--compelling
them, for once at least, to render justice to their opponents; all
having readily subscribed to the opinion that "Derry and Limerick will
ever grace the historic page, as rival companions and monuments of Irish
bravery, generosity, and integrity."
From a very early period Limerick has held rank among the cities of
Ireland, second only to that of the capital; and before its walls were
defeated, first, the Anglo-Norman chivalry; next, the sturdy Ironsides
of Cromwell; and last, the victorious array of William the Third. Like
most of the Irish sea-ports, it was, in the ninth and tenth centuries, a
settlement of the Danes, between whom and the native Irish many
encounters took place, until finally the race of the sea-kings was
expelled from the country.
It is certain that at this early period Limerick was a place of
considerable importance; for some time after, indeed until the conquest
by the English, it was the capital of the province, and the seat of the
kings of Thomond, or North Munster, who were hence called Kings of
Limerick. Upon the arrival of Strongbow, Donnell O'Brien swore fealty to
Henry the Second, but subsequently revolted; and Raymond Le Gros, the
bravest and noblest of all the followers of Strongbow, laid siege to his
city. Limerick was at that time "environed with a foule and deepe ditch
with running water, not to be passed over without boats, but by one
foord only;" the English soldiers were therefore discouraged, and would
have abandoned the attempt to take it, but that "a valiaunt knight,
Meyler Fitz-Henry, having found the foord, wyth a loud voyce cried 'St.
David, companions, let us corageouslie pass this foord.'" For some years
after the city was alternately in the possession of the English and the
Irish; on the death of Strongbow, it was surrendered to the keeping of
its native prince, who swore to govern it for the King of England; but
the British knights had scarcely passed the bridge, when he destroyed it
and set fire to the town.
After again repeatedly changing hands, it was finally settled by the
renowned William de Burgo, ancestor of the present Marquis of
Clanricarde, and remained an appanage to the English crown. At this
period, and for some time after, Limerick, was "next in consequence" to
Dublin. Richard the First, in the ninth year of his reign, granted it a
charter to elect a mayor--an honor which London did not then enjoy, and
which Dublin did not receive until a century later; and King John,
according to Stanihurst, was "so pleased with the agreeableness of the
city, that he caused a very fine castle and bridge to be built there."
The castle has endured for above six centuries; in all the "battles,
sieges, fortunes," that have since occurred, it has been the object most
coveted, perhaps in Ireland, by the contending parties; and it still
frowns, a dark mass, upon the waters of the mighty Shannon. The great
attraction of Limerick--altho by no means the only one--is, however, its
majestic, and beautiful river: "the king of island rivers,"--the
"principallest of all in Ireland," writes the quaint old naturalist, Dr.
Gerrard Boate. It takes its rise among the mountains of Leitrim--strange
to say, the precise spot has not been ascertained--and running for a few
miles as an inconsiderable stream, diffuses itself into a spacious lake,
called Lough Allyn. Issuing thence it pursues its course for several
miles, and forms another small lake, Lough Eike; again spreads itself
out into Lough Ree,--a lake fifteen miles in length and four in breadth;
and thence proceeds as a broad and rapid river, passing by Athlone; then
narrowing again until it reaches Shannon harbor; then widening into
far-famed Lough Derg, eighteen miles long and four broad; then
progressing until it arrives at Killaloe, where it ceases to be
navigable until it waters. Limerick city; from whence it flows in a
broad and majestic volume to the ocean for about sixty miles; running a
distance of upward of 200 miles from its source to its mouth--between
Loop Head and Kerry Head (the space between them being about eight
miles), watering ten counties in its progress, and affording facilities
for commerce and internal intercourse such as are unparalleled in any
other portion of the United Kingdom.
"The spacious Shenan spreading like a sea," thus answers to the
description of Spenser; for a long space its course is so gentle that
ancient writers supposed its name to have been derived from "Seen-awn,"
the slow river; and for many miles, between O'Brien's Bridge and
Limerick, it rolls so rapidly along as almost to be characterized as a
series of cataracts. At the falls of Killaloe, it descends twenty-one
feet in a mile; and above one hundred feet from Killaloe to Limerick....
Its banks too are, nearly all along its course, of surpassing beauty; as
it nears Limerick, the adjacent hills are crowned with villas; and upon
its sides are the ruins of many ancient castles. Castle Connell, a
village about six miles from the city, is perhaps unrivaled in the
kingdom for natural graces; and immediately below it are the Falls of
Doonas where the river rushes over huge mountain-rocks, affording a
passage which the more daring only will make; for the current--narrowed
to a boat's breadth--rushes along with such frightful rapidity, that the
deviation of a few inches would be inevitable destruction.
The immediate environs of Limerick are not picturesque; the city lies in
a spacious plain, the greater portion of which is scarcely above the
level of the water: at short distances, however, there are some of the
most interesting ruins in the kingdom, in the midst of scenery of
surpassing loveliness. Of these, the tourist should first visit
Carrig-o-gunnel, next Adare, and then Castle Connell, the most beautiful
of many beautiful places upon the banks of the noble Shannon.
FROM BELFAST TO DUBLIN [Footnote: From "Letters of a Traveler."]
BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
We left Glasgow on the morning of the 22d, and taking the railway to
Ardrossan were soon at the beach. One of those iron steamers which
navigate the British waters, far inferior to our own in commodious and
comfortable arrangements, but strong and safe, received us on board, and
at ten o'clock we were on our way to Belfast.
The coast of Ayr, with the cliff near the birthplace of Burns, continued
long in sight; we passed near the mountains of Arran, high and bare
steeps swelling out of the sea, which had a look of almost complete
solitude; and at length Ailsa Craig began faintly to show itself, high
above the horizon, through the thick atmosphere.
We passed this lonely rock, about which flocks of sea-birds, the solan
goose, and the gannet, on long white wings with jetty tips, were
continually wheeling, and with a glass we could discern them sitting by
thousands on the shelves of the rock, where they breed. The upper part
of Ailsa, above the cliffs which reach more than half-way to the summit,
appears not to be destitute of soil, for it was tinged with a
faint verdure.
In about nine hours we had crossed the channel, over smooth water, and
were making our way, between green shores almost without a tree, up the
bay, at the bottom of which stands, or rather lies, for its site is low,
the town of Belfast. We had yet enough of daylight left to explore a
part at least of the city. "It looks like Albany," said my companion,
and really the place bears some resemblance to the streets of Albany
which are situated near the river, nor is it without an appearance of
commercial activity.
The people of Belfast, you know, are of Scotch origin, with some
infusion of the original race of Ireland. I heard English spoken with a
Scotch accent, but I was obliged to own that the severity of the Scotch
physiognomy had been softened by the migration and the mingling of
breed.... At an early hour the next day we were in our seats on the
outside of the mail-coach. We passed through a well-cultivated country,
interspersed with towns which had an appearance of activity and thrift.
The dwellings of the cottagers looked more comfortable than those of the
same class in Scotland, and we were struck with the good looks of the
people, men and women, whom we passed in great numbers going to
their work.
At length, having traversed the county of Down, we entered Louth....
Close on the confines of Armagh, perhaps partly within it, we traversed,
near the village of Jonesborough, a valley full of the habitations of
peat-diggers. Its aspect was most remarkable, the barren hills that
inclose it were dark with heath and gorse and with ledges of brown rock,
and their lower declivities, as well as the level of the valley, black
with peat, which had been cut from the ground and laid in rows.
The men were at work with spades cutting it from the soil, and the women
were pressing the water from the portions thus separated, and exposing
it to the air to dry.... It is the property of peat earth to absorb a
large quantity of water, and to part with it slowly. The springs,
therefore, in a region abounding with peat make no brooks; the water
passes into spongy soil and remains there, forming morasses even on the
slopes of the hills.
As we passed out of this black valley we entered a kind of glen, and the
guard, a man in a laced hat and scarlet coat, pointed to the left, and
said, "There is a pretty place." It was a beautiful park along a
hillside, groves and lawns, a broad domain, jealously inclosed by a
thick and high wall, beyond which we had, through the trees, a glimpse
of a stately mansion.
Our guard was a genuine Irishman, strongly resembling the late actor
Power in physiognomy, with the very brogue which Power sometimes gave to
his personages. He was a man of pithy speech, communicative, and
acquainted apparently with everybody of every class, whom we passed on
the road. Besides him we had for fellow-passengers three very
intelligent Irishmen, on their way to Dublin. One of them was a tall,
handsome gentleman, with dark hair and hazel eyes, and a rich
South-Irish brogue. He was fond of his joke, but next to him sat a
graver personage, in spectacles, equally tall, with fair hair and
light-blue eyes, speaking with a decided Scotch accent. By my side was a
square-built, fresh-colored personage, who had traveled in America, and
whose accent was almost English. I thought I could not be mistaken in
supposing them to be samples of the three different races by which
Ireland is peopled.
We now entered a fertile district, meadows heavy with grass, in which
the haymakers were at work, and fields of wheat and barley as fine as I
had ever seen.... One or two green mounds stood close to the road, and
we saw others at a distance.
"They are Danish forts," said the guard.
"Every thing we do not know the history of, we put upon the Danes,"
added the South of Ireland man.
These grassy mounds, which are from ten to twenty feet in height, are
now supposed to have been the burial places of the ancient Celts. The
peasantry can with difficulty be persuaded to open any of them, on
account of a prevalent superstition that it will bring bad luck.
A little before we arrived at Drogheda, I saw a tower to the right,
apparently a hundred feet in height, with a doorway at a great distance
from the ground, and a summit somewhat dilapidated.
"That is one of the round towers of Ireland, concerning which there is
so much discussion," said my English-looking fellow-traveler.
These round towers, as the Dublin antiquarians tell me, were probably
built by the early Christian missionaries from Italy, about the seventh
century, and were used as places of retreat and defense against
the pagans.
Not far from Drogheda, I saw at a distance a quiet-looking valley.
"That," said the English-looking passenger, "is the valley of the Boyne,
and in that spot was fought the famous battle of the Boyne."
"Which the Irish are fighting about yet, in America," added the South of
Ireland man.
They pointed out near the spot, a cluster of trees on an eminence, where
James beheld the defeat of his followers. We crossed the Boyne, entered
Drogheda, dismounted among a crowd of beggars, took our places in the
most elegant railway wagon we had ever seen, and in an hour were set
down in Dublin.... I have seen no loftier nor more spacious dwellings
than those which overlook St. Stephen's Green, a noble park, planted
with trees, under which this showery sky and mild temperature maintain a
verdure all the year, even in mid-winter. About Merrion square, another
park, the houses have scarcely a less stately appearance, and one of
these with a strong broad balcony, from which to address the people in
the street, is inhabited by O'Connell. The park of the University, in
the midst of the city, is of great extent, and the beautiful public
grounds called Phenix Park, have a circumference of eight miles.
THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY [Footnote: From "Views Afoot." Published by G. P.
Putnam's Sons.]
BY BAYARD TAYLOR
We passed the Giant's Causeway after dark, and about eleven o'clock
reached the harbor of Port Rush, where, after stumbling up a strange old
street in the dark, we found a little inn, and soon forgot the Irish
coast and everything else.
In the morning, when we arose, it was raining, with little prospect of
fair weather, but having expected nothing better, we set out on foot for
the Causeway. The rain, however, soon came down in torrents, and we were
obliged to take shelter in a cabin by the roadside. The whole house
consisted of one room with bare walls and roof and earthen floor, while
a window of three or four panes supplied the light. A fire of peat was
burning on the hearth, and their breakfast, of potatoes alone, stood on
the table. The occupants received us with rude but genuine hospitality,
giving us the only seats in the room to sit upon; except a rickety
bedstead that stood in one corner and a small table, there was no other
furniture in the house. The man appeared rather intelligent, and, altho
he complained of the hardness of their lot, had no sympathy with
O'Connell or the Repeal movement.
We left this miserable hut as soon as it ceased raining, and, tho there
were many cabins along the road, few were better than this. At length,
after passing the walls of an old church in the midst of older tombs, we
saw the roofless towers of Dunluce Castle on the seashore. It stands on
an isolated rock, rising perpendicularly two hundred feet above the sea,
and connected with the cliffs of the mainland by a narrow arch.
We left the road near Dunluce and walked along the smooth beach to the
cliffs that surround the Causeway. Here we obtained a guide, and
descended to one of the caves which can be entered from the shore.
Opposite the entrance a bare rock called Sea Gull Isle rises out of the
sea like a church-steeple. The roof at first was low, but we shortly
came to a branch that opened on the sea, where the arch was forty-six
feet in height. The breakers dashed far into the cave, and flocks of
sea-birds circled round its mouth. The sound of a gun was like a
deafening peal of thunder, crashing from arch to arch till it rolled out
of the cavern.
On the top of the hill a splendid hotel is erected for visitors to the
Causeway; after passing this we descended to the base of the cliffs,
which are here upward of four hundred feet high, and soon began to find
in the columnar formation of the rocks indications of our approach. The
guide pointed out some columns which appeared to have been melted and
run together, from which Sir Humphrey Davy attributed the formation of
the Causeway to the action of fire. Near this is the Giant's Well, a
spring of the purest water, the bottom formed by three perfect hexagons
and the sides of regular columns. One of us observing that no giant had
ever drunk from it, the old man answered. "Perhaps not, but it was made
by a giant--God Almighty!"
From the well the Causeway commences--a mass of columns from triangular
to octagonal, lying in compact forms and extending into the sea. I was
somewhat disappointed at first, having supposed the Causeway to be of
great height, but I found the Giant's Loom, which is the highest part of
it, to be but about fifty feet from the water. The singular appearance
of the columns and the many strange forms which they assume render it,
nevertheless, an object of the greatest interest. Walking out on the
rocks, we came to the Ladies' Chair, the seat, back sides and foot-stool
being all regularly formed by the broken columns. The guide said that
any lady who would take three drinks from the Giant's Well, then sit in
this chair and think of any gentleman for whom she had a preference,
would be married before a twelvemonth. I asked him if it would answer as
well for gentlemen, for by a wonderful coincidence we had each drank
three times at the well. He said it would, and thought he was confirming
his statement.
A cluster of columns about half-way up the cliff is called the Giant's
Organ from its very striking resemblance to that instrument, and a
single rock worn by the waves into the shape of a rude seat is his
chair. A mile or two farther along the coast two cliffs project from the
range, leaving a vast semicircular space between, which from its
resemblance to the old Roman theaters was appropriated for that purpose
by the giant. Halfway down the crags are two or three pinnacles of rock
called the Chimneys, and the stumps of several others can be seen,
which, it is said, were shot off by a vessel belonging to the Spanish
Armada in mistake for the towers of Dunluce Castle. The vessel was
afterward wrecked in the bay below, which has ever since been called
Spanish Bay, and in calm weather the wreck may be still seen. Many of
the columns of the Causeway have been carried off and sold as pillars
for mantels, and tho a notice is put up threatening any one with the
rigor of the law, depredations are occasionally made.
Returning, we left the road at Dunluce and took a path which led along
the summit of the cliffs. The twilight was gathering and the wind blew
with perfect fury, which, combined with the black and stormy sky, gave
the coast an air of extreme wildness. All at once, as we followed the
winding path, the crags, appeared to open before us, disclosing a
yawning chasm down which a large stream falling in an unbroken sheet was
lost in the gloom below. Witnessed in a calm day, there may perhaps be
nothing striking about it, but coming upon us at once through the gloom
of twilight, with the sea thundering below and a scowling sky above, it
was absolutely startling.
The path at last wound with many a steep and slippery bend down the
almost perpendicular crags to the shore at the foot of a giant isolated
rock having a natural arch through it, eighty feet in height. We
followed the narrow strip of beach, having the bare crags on one side
and a line of foaming breakers on the other. It soon grew dark; a
furious storm came up and swept like a hurricane along the shore. I then
understood what Horne means by "the lengthening javelins of the blast,"
for every drop seemed to strike with the force of an arrow, and our
clothes were soon pierced in every part.
Then we went up among the sand-hills and lost each other in the
darkness, when, after stumbling about among the gullies for half an hour
shouting for my companions, I found the road and heard my call answered;
but it happened to be two Irishmen, who came up and said, "And is it
another gintleman ye're callin' for? We heard some one cryin' and didn't
know but somebody might be kilt."
Finally, about eleven o'clock, we all arrived at the inn dripping with
rain, and before a warm fire concluded the adventures of our day
in Ireland.
CORK [Footnote: From "The Irish Sketch Book."]
BY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.
One sees in this country many a grand and tall iron gate leading into a
very shabby field covered with thistles; and the simile of the gate will
in some degree apply to this famous city of Cork--which is certainly not
a city of palaces, but of which the outlets are magnificent. That toward
Killarney leads by the Lee, the old Avenue of Mardyke, and the rich
green pastures stretching down to the river; and as you pass by the
portico of the country jail, as fine and as glancing as a palace, you
see the wooded heights on the other side of the fair stream, crowded
with a thousand pretty villas and terraces, presenting every image of
comfort and prosperity.
Along the quays up to St. Patrick's Bridge there is a certain bustle.
Some forty ships may be lying at anchor along the walls of the quay;
and its pavements are covered with goods of various merchandise; here a
cargo of hides; yonder a company of soldiers, their kits, and their
dollies, who are taking leave of the redcoats at the steamer's side.
Then you shall see a fine, squeaking, shrieking drove of pigs embarking
by the same conveyance, and insinuated into the steamer by all sorts of
coaxing, threatening, and wheedling. Seamen are singing and yeehoing on
board; grimy colliers smoking at the liquor-shops along the quay; and as
for the bridge-there is a crowd of idlers on that, you may be sure,
sprawling over the balustrade for ever and ever, with long ragged coats,
steeple-hats, and stumpy doodeens.
At the other extremity of the town, if it be assize time, you will see
some five hundred persons squatting in the Court-house, or buzzing and
talking within; the rest of the respectable quarter of the city is
pretty free from anything like bustle. There is no more life in Patrick
Street than in Russell Square of a sunshiny day; and as for the Mall, it
is as lonely as the chief street of a German Residenz.... That the city
contains much wealth is evidenced by the number of handsome, villas
round about it, where the rich merchants dwell; but the warehouses of
the wealthy provision-merchants make no show to the stranger walking the
streets; and of the retail shops, if some are spacious and handsome,
most look as if too big for the business carried on within. The want of
ready money was quite curious. In three of the principal shops I
purchased articles, and tendered a pound in exchange--not one of them
had silver enough; and as for a five-pound note, which I presented at
one of the topping booksellers, his boy went round to various places in
vain, and finally set forth to the bank, where change was got. In
another small shop I offered half-a-crown to pay for a sixpenny
article--it was all the same.
Half a dozen of the public buildings I saw were spacious and shabby
beyond all cockney belief. Adjoining the Imperial Hotel is a great,
large, handsome, desolate reading-room, which was founded by a body of
Cork merchants and tradesmen, and is the very picture of decay. Not
Palmyra--not the Russell Institution in Great Coram Street--present more
melancholy appearances of faded greatness. Opposite this is another
institution, called the Cork Library, where there are plenty of books
and plenty of kindness to the stranger; but the shabbiness and faded
splendor of the place are quite painful.... I have said something in
praise of the manners of the Cork ladies; in regard of the gentlemen, a
stranger must remark the extraordinary degree of literary taste and
talent among them, and the wit and vivacity of their conversation. The
love for literature seems to an Englishman doubly curious. What,
generally speaking, do a company of grave gentlemen and ladies in Baker
Street know about it? Who ever reads books in the City, or how often
does one hear them talked about at a Club? The Cork citizens are the
most book-loving men I ever met. The town has sent to England a number
of literary men, of reputation too, and is not a little proud of their
fame. Everybody seemed to know what Maginn was doing, and that Father
Prout had a third volume ready, and what was Mr. Croker's last article
in the Quarterly. The clerks and shopmen seemed as much "au fait" as
their employers, and many is the conversation I heard about the merits
of this writer or that--Dickens, Ainsworth, Lover, Lever.
I think, in walking the streets, and looking at the ragged urchins
crowding there, every Englishman must remark that the superiority of
intelligence is here, and not with us. I never saw such a collection of
bright-eyed, wild, clever, eager faces. Mr. Maclise has carried away a
number of them in his memory; and the lovers of his admirable pictures
will find more than one Munster countenance under a helmet in company of
Macbeth, or in a slashed doublet alongside of Prince Hamlet, or in the
very midst of Spain in company with Signor Gil Blas. Gil Blas himself
came from Cork, and not from Oviedo.
I listened to two boys almost in rags: they were lolling over the quay
balustrade, and talking about one of the Ptolemys! and talking very well
too. One of them had been reading in Rollin, and was detailing his
information with a great deal of eloquence and fire. Another day,
walking in the Mardyke, I followed three boys, not half so well drest as
London errand-boys: one was telling the other about Captain Ross's
voyages, and spoke with as much brightness and intelligence as the
best-read gentleman's son in England could do. He was as much of a
gentleman, too, the ragged young student; his manner as good, tho
perhaps more eager and emphatic; his language was extremely rich, too,
and eloquent. Does the reader remember his school-days, when half a
dozen lads in the bedrooms took it by turns to tell stories? How poor
the language generally was, and how exceedingly poor the imagination!
Both of those ragged Irish lads had the making of gentlemen, scholars,
orators, in them.
I have just been strolling up a pretty little height called Grattan's
Hill, that overlooks the town and the river, and where the artist that
comes Corkward may find many subjects for his pencil. There is a kind of
pleasure-ground at the top of this eminence--a broad walk that draggles
up to a ruined wall, with a ruined niche in it, and a battered stone
bench. On the side that shelves down to the water are some beeches, and
opposite them a row of houses from which you see one of the prettiest
prospects possible--the shining river with the craft along the quays,
and the busy city in the distance, the active little steamers puffing
away toward Cove, the farther bank crowned with rich woods, and
pleasant-looking country-houses--perhaps they are tumbling, rickety, and
ruinous, as those houses close by us, but you can't see the ruin
from here.
What a strange air of forlorn gaiety there is about the place!--the sky
itself seems as if it did not know whether to laugh or cry, so full is
it of clouds and sunshine. Little fat, ragged, smiling children are
clambering about the rocks, and sitting on mossy doorsteps, tending
other children yet smaller, fatter, and more dirty. "Stop till I get you
a posy" (pronounced pawawawsee), cries one urchin to another. "Tell me
who is it ye love, Jooly," exclaims another, cuddling a red-faced infant
with a very dirty nose. More of the same race are perched about the
summerhouse, and two wenches with large purple feet are flapping some
carpets in the air. It is a wonder the carpets will bear this kind of
treatment at all, and do not be off at once to mingle with the elements;
I never saw things that hung to life by such a frail thread.
This dismal pleasant place is a suburb of the second city in Ireland,
and one of the most beautiful spots about the town. What a prim,
bustling, active, green-railinged, tea-gardened, gravel-walked place
would it have been in the five-hundredth town in England!--but you see
the people can be quite as happy in the rags and without the paint, and
I hear a great deal more heartiness and affection from these children
than from their fat little brethren across the Channel.
BLARNEY CASTLE [Footnote: From "Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, Etc."]
BY ME. AND MRS. S. C. HALL
Few places in Ireland are more familiar to English ears than Blarney;
the notoriety is attributable, first, to the marvelous qualities of its
famous "stone," and next, to the extensive popularity of the song,--
"The groves of Blarney, they are so charming."
When or how the stone obtained its singular reputation, it is difficult
to determine; the exact position among the ruins of the castle is also a
matter of doubt; the peasant-guides humor the visitor according to his
capacity for climbing, and direct, either to the summit or the base, the
attention of him who desires to "greet it with a holy kiss." He who has
been dipt in the Shannon is presumed to have obtained, in abundance, the
gift of that "civil courage" which makes an Irishman at ease and
unconstrained in all places and under all circumstances; and he who has
kissed the Blarney stone is assumed to be endowed with a fluent and
persuasive tongue, altho it may be associated with insincerity; the term
"Blarney" being generally used to characterize words that are meant
neither to be "honest nor true."
It is conjectured that the comparatively modern application of the term
"Blarney" first had existence when the possessor, Lord Clancarty, was a
prisoner to Sir George Carew, by whom he was subjected to several
examinations touching his loyalty, which he was required to prove by
surrendering his strong castle to the soldiers of the Queen; this act he
always endeavored to evade by some plausible excuse, but as invariably
professing his willingness to do so. The particulars are fully detailed
in the "Pacata Hibernia."
It is certain that to no particular stone of the ancient structure is
the marvelous quality exclusively attributed; but in order to make it as
difficult as possible to attain the enviable gift, it had long been the
custom to point out a stone, a few feet below the battlements, which the
very daring only would run the hazard of touching with their lips. The
attempt to do so was, indeed, so dangerous, that a few years ago Mr.
Jeffreys had it removed from the wall and placed on the highest point of
the building; where the visitor may now greet it with little risk. It is
about two feet square, and contains the date 1703, with a portion of the
arms of the Jeffreys family, but the date, at once, negatives its claim
to be considered the true marvel of Blarney. A few days before our visit
a madman made his way to the top of the castle, and after dancing round
it for some hours, his escape from death being almost miraculous, he
flung this stone from the tower; it was broken in the fall, and now, as
the guide stated to us, the "three halves" must receive three distinct
kisses to be in any degree effective.
The stronghold of Blarney was erected about the middle of the fifteenth
century by Cormac Mac Carthy, surnamed "Laider," or the Strong; whose
ancestors had been chieftains in Munster from a period long antecedent
to the English invasion, and whose descendants, as Lords of Muskerry and
Clancarty, retained no inconsiderable portion of their power and estates
until the year 1689, when their immense possessions were confiscated,
and the last earl became an exile, like the monarch whose cause he had
supported. The castle, village, mills, fairs, and customs of Blarney,
with the land and park thereunto belonging, containing 1400 acres, were
"set up by cant" in the year 1702, purchased by Sir Richard Pyne, Lord
Chief Justice, for £3000, and by him disposed of, the following year, to
General Sir James Jeffreys, in whose family the property continues.
Altho the walls of this castle are still strong, many of the outworks
have long since been leveled; the plow has passed over their
foundations, and "the stones of which they were built have been used in
repairing the turnpike-roads."
MUCROSS ABBEY [Footnote: From "Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, Etc."]
BY MR. AND MRS. S. C. HALL
The abbey of Mucross adjoins the pretty village of Cloghreen, [in Kerry]
and is in the demesne of Henry Arthur Herbert, Esq., which includes the
whole of the peninsula. The site was chosen with the usual judgment and
taste of "the monks of old," who invariably selected the pleasantest of
all pleasant places. The original name was Irelough--and it appears that
long prior to the erection of this, now ruined structure, a church
existed in the same spot, which was consumed by fire in 1191. The abbey
was built for Franciscan monks, according to Arehdall, in 1440; but the
annals of the Four Masters give its date a century earlier: both,
however, ascribe its foundation to one of the Mac Carthys, princes of
Desmond. It was several times repaired, and once subsequently to the
Reformation, as we learn from the inscription on a stone let into the
north wall of the choir.
The building consists of two principal parts--the convent and the
church. The church is about one hundred feet in length and twenty-four
in breadth; the steeple, which stands between the nave and the chancel,
rests on four high and slender pointed arches. The principal entrance is
by a handsome pointed doorway, luxuriantly overgrown with ivy, through
which is seen the great eastern window. The intermediate space, as
indeed every part of the ruined edifice, is filled with tombs, the
greater number distinguished only by a slight elevation from the mold
around them; but some containing inscriptions to direct the stranger
where especial honor should be paid. A large modern tomb, in the center
of the choir, covers the vault, in which in ancient times were interred
the Mac Carthys Mor, and more recently the O'Donoghue Mor of the Glens,
whose descendants were buried here so late as the year 1833.
Close to this tomb, but on a level with the earth, is the slab which
formerly covered the vault. It is without inscription, but bears the
arms of the Earl of Clancarty. The convent as well as the church is in
very tolerable preservation; and Mr. Herbert has taken especial care, as
far as he can, to balk the consumer, time, of the remnants of his
glorious feast. He has repaired the foundations in some parts and the
parapets in others, and so judiciously that the eye is never annoyed by
the intrusion of the new among the old; the ivy furnishing him with a
ready means for hiding the unhallowed brick and mortar from the sight.
In his "caretaker," too, he has a valuable auxiliary; and a watch is
set, first to discover tokens of decay, then to prevent their spread,
and then to twist and twine the young shoots of the aged trees over and
around them.
The dormitories, the kitchen, the refectory, the cellars, the infirmary,
and other chambers, are still in a state of comparative preservation;
the upper rooms are unroofed; and the coarse grass grows abundantly
among them. The great fireplace of the refectory is curious and
interesting--affording evidence that the good monks were not forgetful
of the duty they owed themselves, or of the bond they had entered into,
to act upon the advice of St. Paul, and be "given to hospitality." This
recess is pointed out as the bed of John Drake--a pilgrim who, about a
century ago, took up his abode in the Abbey, and continued its inmate
during a period of several years. As will be supposed, his singular
choice of residence has given rise to abundant stories, and the mention
of his name to any of the guides or boatmen will at once produce a
volume of the marvelous.
The cloister, which consists of twenty-two arches, ten of them
semicircular and twelve pointed, is the best preserved portion of the
abbey. In the center grows a magnificent yew-tree, which covers, as a
roof, the whole area; its circumference is thirteen feet, and its height
in proportion. It is more than probable that the tree is coeval with the
abbey; that it was planted by the hands of the monks who built the
sacred edifice centuries ago. The yew, it is known, lives to a
prodigious age; and in England, there are many of a date considerably
earlier than that which may be safely assigned to this.
FROM GLENGARIFF TO KILLARNEY [Footnote: From "The Irish Sketch Book."]
BY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The journey from Glengariff to Kenmare is one of astonishing beauty; and
I have seen Killarney since, and am sure that Glengariff loses nothing
by comparison with this most famous of lakes. Rock, wood, and sea
stretch around the traveler--a thousand delightful pictures; the
landscape is at first wild without being fierce, immense woods and
plantations enriching the valleys--beautiful streams to be seen
everywhere.
Here again I was surprized at the great population along the road; for
one saw but few cabins, and there is no village between Glengariff and
Kenmare. But men and women were on banks and in fields; children, as
usual, came trooping up to the car; and the jovial men of the yacht had
great conversations with most of the persons whom we met on the road. A
merrier set of fellows it were hard to meet.
After much mountain-work of ascending and descending (in which latter
operation, and by the side of precipices that make passing cockneys
rather squeamish, the carman drove like mad to the hooping and
screeching of the red rovers), we at length came to Kenmare, of which
all that I know is that it lies prettily in a bay or arm of the sea;
that it is approached by a little hanging-bridge, which seems to be a
wonder in these parts; that it is a miserable little place when you
enter it; and that, finally, a splendid luncheon of all sorts of meat
and excellent cold salmon may sometimes be had for a shilling at the
hotel of the place.... For almost half the way from Kenmare, this wild,
beautiful road commands views of the famous lake and vast blue mountains
about Killarney. Turk, Tomies, and Mangerton were clothed in purple like
kings in mourning; great heavy clouds were gathered round their noble
features bare. The lake lay for some time underneath us, dark and blue,
with dark misty islands in the midst. On the right-hand side of the road
would be a precipice covered with a thousand trees, or a green rocky
flat, with a reedy mere in the midst, and other mountains rising as far
as we could see.... And so it was that we rode by dark old Mangerton,
then presently past Mucross, and then through two miles of avenues of
lime-trees, by numerous lodges and gentlemen's seats, across an old
bridge, where you see the mountains again and the lake, until, by Lord
Kenmare's house, a hideous row of houses informed us that we were in
Killarney.
We rattled up to the Kenmare Arms; and so ended, not without a sigh on
my part, one of the merriest six-hour rides that five yachtsmen, one
cockney, five women and a child, the carman, and a countryman with an
alpeen, ever took in their lives. The town of Killarney was in a violent
state of excitement with a series of horse-races, hurdle-races,
boat-races, and stag-hunts by land and water, which were taking place,
and attracted a vast crowd from all parts of the kingdom. All the inns
were full, and lodgings cost five shillings a day, nay, more in some
places; for tho my landlady, Mrs. Macgillicuddy, charges but that sum, a
leisurely old gentleman whom I never saw in my life before made my
acquaintance by stopping me in the street yesterday, and said he paid a
pound a day for his two bedrooms.... Mrs. Macgillicuddy's house is at
the corner of the two principal streets in Killarney town, and the
drawing-room windows command each a street. A sort of market is held
there, and the place is swarming with blue cloaks and groups of men
talking; here and there is a stall with coarse linens, crockery, a
cheese; and crowds of egg-and milk-women are squatted on the pavement,
with their ragged customers or gossips. Carts, cars, jingles, barouches,
horses, and vehicles of all descriptions rattle presently through the
streets; for the town is crowded with company for the races and other
sports, and all the world is bent to see the stag-hunt on the lake.
The morning had been bright enough, but for fear of accidents we took
our macintoshes, and at about a mile from the town found it necessary to
assume those garments and wear them for the greater part of the day.
Passing by the Victoria, with its beautiful walks, park, and lodge, we
came to a little creek where the boats were moored; and there was the
wonderful lake before us, with its mountains, and islands, and trees.
Unluckily, however, the mountains happened to be invisible; the islands
looked like gray masses in the fog, and all that we could see for some
time was the gray silhouette of the boat ahead of us, in which a
passenger was engaged in a witty conversation with some boat still
farther in the mist.
Drumming and trumpeting was heard at a little distance, and presently we
found ourselves in the midst of a fleet of boats upon the rocky shores
of the beautiful little Innisfallen. Here we landed for a while, and the
weather clearing up, allowed us to see this charming spot. Rocks,
shrubs, and little abrupt rises and falls of ground, covered with the
brightest emerald grass; a beautiful little ruin of a Saxon chapel,
lying gentle, delicate, and plaintive on the shore; some noble trees
round about it, and beyond, presently, the tower of Ross Castle, island
after island appearing in the clearing sunshine, and the huge hills
throwing their misty veils off, and wearing their noble robes of purple.
The boats' crews were grouped about the place, and one large barge
especially had landed some sixty people, being the Temperance band, with
its drums, trumpets, and wives. They were marshaled by a grave old
gentleman with a white waistcoat and queue, a silver medal decorating
one side of his coat, and a brass heart reposing on the other flap. The
horns performed some Irish airs prettily; and, at length, at the
instigation of a fellow who went swaggering about with a pair of
whirling drumsticks, all formed together, and played "Garryowen"--the
active drum of course most dreadfully out of time.
Having strolled about the island for a quarter of an hour, it became
time to take to the boats again, and we were rowed over to the wood
opposite Sullivan's cascade, where the hounds had been laid in in the
morning, and the stag was expected to take water. Fifty or sixty men are
employed on the mountain to drive the stag lakeward, should he be
inclined to break away; and the sport generally ends by the stag, a wild
one, making for the water with the pack swimming afterward; and here he
is taken and disposed of, how I know not. It is rather a parade than a
stag-hunt; but, with all the boats around and the noble view, must be a
fine thing to see.
Some scores more boats were there, darting up and down in the pretty,
busy waters. Here came a Cambridge boat; and where, indeed, will not the
gentlemen of that renowned University be found? Yonder were the dandy
dragoons, stiff, silent, slim, faultlessly appointed, solemnly puffing
cigars. Every now and then a hound would he heard in the wood, whereon
numbers of voices, right and left, would begin to yell in
chorus--Hurroo! Hoop! Yow--yow--yow! in accents the most shrill or the
most melancholious. Meanwhile the sun had had enough of the sport, the
mountains put on their veils again, the islands retreated into the mist,
the word went through the fleet to spread all umbrellas, and ladies took
shares of mackintoshes and disappeared under the flaps of silk cloaks.
The wood comes down to the very edge of the water, and many of the crews
thought fit to land and seek this green shelter. To behold these moist
dandies the natives of the country came eagerly. Strange, savage faces
might be seen peering from out of the trees; long-haired, bare-legged
girls came down the hill, some with green apples and very sickly-looking
plums; some with whisky and goat's milk; a ragged boy had a pair of
stag's-horns to sell: the place swarmed with people. We went up the hill
to see the noble cascade, and when you say that it comes rushing down
over rocks and through tangled woods, alas! one has said all the
dictionary can help you to, and not enough to distinguish this
particular cataract from any other. This seen and admired, we came back
to the harbor where the boats lay, and from which spot the reader might
have seen the following view of the lake--that is, you would see the
lake, if the mist would only clear away.
But this for hours it did not seem inclined to do. We rowed up and down
industriously for a period of time which seemed to me atrociously long.
The bugles of the Erin had long since sounded "Home, sweet home!" and
the greater part of the fleet had dispersed. As for the stag-hunt, all I
saw of it was four dogs that appeared on the shore at different
intervals, and a huntsman in a scarlet coat, who similarly came and
went: once or twice we were gratified by hearing the hounds; but at last
it was agreed that there was no chance for the day, and we rowed off to
Kenmare Cottage--where, on the lovely lawn, or in a cottage adjoining,
the gentry picnic, and where, with a handkerchief full of potatoes, we
made as pleasant a meal as ever I recollect.
What is to be said about Turk Lake? When there, we agreed that it was
more beautiful than the larger lake, of which it is not one-fourth the
size; then, when we came back, we said, "No, the large lake is the most
beautiful." And so, at every point we stopped at, we determined that
that particular spot was the prettiest in the whole lake. The fact is,
and I don't care to own it, they are too handsome. As for a man coming
from his desk in London or Dublin and seeing "the whole lakes in a day,"
he is an ass for his pains; a child doing sums in addition might as well
read the whole multiplication table, and fancy he had it by heart. We
should look at these wonderful things leisurely and thoughtfully; and
even then, blessed is he who understands them.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Seeing Europe with Famous Authors
by Francis W. Halsey
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEEING EUROPE WITH FAMOUS AUTHORS ***
This file should be named 9503-8.txt or 9503-8.zip
Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Emily Ratliff
and PG Distributed Proofreaders
Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we usually do not
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
even years after the official publication date.
Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month. A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.
Most people start at our Web sites at:
https://gutenberg.org or
http://promo.net/pg
These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
can get to them as follows, and just download by date. This is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.
Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. Our
projected audience is one hundred million readers. If the value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
files per month: 1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
eBooks Year Month
1 1971 July
10 1991 January
100 1994 January
1000 1997 August
1500 1998 October
2000 1999 December
2500 2000 December
3000 2001 November
4000 2001 October/November
6000 2002 December*
9000 2003 November*
10000 2004 January*
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
We need your donations more than ever!
As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
that have responded.
As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
In answer to various questions we have received on this:
We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
request donations in all 50 states. If your state is not listed and
you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
just ask.
While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
donate.
International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
ways.
Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109
Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
method other than by check or money order.
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154. Donations are
tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law. As fund-raising
requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
We need your donations more than ever!
You can get up to date donation information online at:
https://www.gutenberg.org/donation.html
***
If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
you can always email directly to:
Michael S. Hart
Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
We would prefer to send you information by email.
**The Legal Small Print**
(Three Pages)
***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.
To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.
THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.
INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause: [1] distribution of this eBook,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
or [3] any Defect.
DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:
[1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this
requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
eBook or this "small print!" statement. You may however,
if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
including any form resulting from conversion by word
processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
*EITHER*:
[*] The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
does *not* contain characters other than those
intended by the author of the work, although tilde
(~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
be used to convey punctuation intended by the
author, and additional characters may be used to
indicate hypertext links; OR
[*] The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
the case, for instance, with most word processors);
OR
[*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
or other equivalent proprietary form).
[2] Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
"Small Print!" statement.
[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you
don't derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are
payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
periodic) tax return. Please contact us beforehand to
let us know your plans and to work out the details.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.
The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
Money should be paid to the:
"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
[email protected]
[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
when distributed free of all fees. Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
Michael S. Hart. Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
they hardware or software or any other related product without
express permission.]
*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
