From Gretna Green to Land's End Part 12

"You're too singsong, sir."

"Please give him the key, Mr. Lloyd."

Even those few world-famed scholars and statesmen on whom the University was conferring the high distinction of her D. C. L. were showered with merry impudence, as one by one they advanced to receive the honour, though there were no such lucky shots of wit as have signalised, on different occasions, at Oxford or at Cambridge, the greeting of certain popular poets. Holmes was asked from the gallery if he had come in the one-hoss shay, and Longfellow, wearing the gorgeous vestments of his new dignity, was hailed by a cry: "Behold the Red Man of the West." Even the Laureate, whose prophet locks were flung back from his inspired brow somewhat more wildly than their wont, was a.s.sailed by a stentorian inquiry:

"_Did_ your mother call you early, call you early, Alfred dear?"

The conferring of degrees upon Oxford students takes place--at irregular intervals, but not infrequently--in the Convocation House.

Into a long, narrow room, dignitaries grouped at the top and candidates at the bottom, with guests seated in rows on either side, sweeps the Vice-Chancellor in his gorgeous red and white. He is preceded by the mace-bearer and followed by two Proctors. Taking the place of honour, he reads a page or two of Latin, lifting his cap--the Proctors raising theirs in solemn unison--whenever the word _Dominus_ occurs. The lists of candidates for the various degrees are then read, and the Proctors, at the end of each list, rise simultaneously, march a few steps down the hall, wheel with military precision, and, like the King of France, march back again. These apparently wayward promenades are supposed to give opportunity for tradesmen with unpaid bills to imperil a candidate's degree by plucking the Proctor's gown.

The Oxford tradesmen have not availed themselves of this privilege for a century or so, but the term _plucked_ is only too familiar. With many bows and much Latin, even with kneeling that the Vice-Chancellor may tap the learned pates with a Testament, the higher degrees are conferred. Each brand-new doctor withdraws into the robing-room, where his waiting friends eagerly divest him of his old plumage and trick him out in gayer hood and more voluminous gown. So arrayed, he returns for a low bow to the Vice-Chancellor, who touches his own mortar-board in response. The larger company of candidates for the first degree come forward in groups, each head of a college presenting his own men, and these are speedily made into bachelors.

Out of that student mult.i.tude have come--not all, be it confessed, with degrees--many of England's greatest. Glorious phantoms haunt by moonlight the Gothic shadows of High Street. The gallant Lovelace, the resolute Pym, Admiral Blake, Sir Philip Sidney, Francis Beaumont, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Sir Thomas Browne, Dr. Johnson, Dean Swift, Wellington, Peel, Gladstone, Adam Smith, Hamilton, Locke, Hobbes, Blackstone, Newman, Manning, Stanley, Maurice, Faber, Heber, Clough, Jeremy Taylor, Whitfield, the Wesleys, the Arnolds,--and this is but the beginning of a tale that can never be told. Yet Oxford, "Adorable Dreamer" though she be,

"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,"

has not done as well by her poets as by the rest of her brood. With all her theology, she did not make a churchman out of Swinburne, nor a saint of Herrick, and as for Landor and Sh.e.l.ley, her eyes were holden and she cast them forth.

Of Shakespeare, an alien figure crossing the path of her gowned and hooded doctors, or watching her "young barbarians all at play"--for Oxford lads knew how to play before ever "Eights Week" was thought of--she seems to have remembered nothing save that he stood G.o.dfather to his landlady's baby-boy, little William Davenant, in the old Saxon church of St. Michael's. Oxford let him pay his reckoning at the Crown and go his way unnoted. He was none of hers. Even now, when his name is blazoned on rows upon rows of volumes in window after window of Broad Street, I doubt if the Oxford dons would deem Shakespeare capable of editing his own works.

"Where were you bred?

And how achieved you these endowments, which You make more rich to owe?"

One would like to fancy that Duke Humphrey's library, beautiful as a library of Paradise, made the poet welcome; but the King's Commissioners had despoiled it in 1550, and more than half a century went by before, toward the close of Shakespeare's life, Sir Thomas Bodley had refounded and refitted it as The Bodleian.

Yet the grey university city, "spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age,"--how could she have failed deeply to impress the sensitive spirit of that disregarded wayfarer? Although she had suffered so grievously under the flail of the Reformation, although she was destined to become the battered stronghold of Charles I, the voice within her gates was, and is, not the battle-cry, but the murmurous voice of meditation and dream and prayer. As we enter into the sanctuary of her grave beauty, personal chagrins and the despair of our own brief mortality fall away. The unending life of human thought is here, enduring, achieving, advancing, with its constant miracle of resurrection out of the old form into the new.

COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY

Of the counties occupying the Severn basin, three form, in continuation with Cheshire, the Welsh border,--Shropshire, Hereford, and Monmouth. Shropshire, together with the West Midland counties of Worcester and Gloucester, is traversed by the mother stream, but Hereford and Monmouth lie in their respective vales of the tributary Wye and Usk, and Warwickshire, already noted, in the broad basin of the Avon.

In previous summers we had explored, to some extent, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire and the picturesque Wye valley, but we were, except for glimpses from the railway, strangers to Shropshire, and so dropped off the train at Shrewsbury, in a Sat.u.r.day twilight, with but moderate expectation. Had not the judicious Baedeker instructed us that "not more than half a day need be devoted to Shrewsbury"? What happened was that we lost our hearts to the beautiful old town and lingered there nearly a week without finding time, even so, to do a third of the tourist duty laid down in what a guileless Florentine has called "the red prayer-book of the foreigners." But we would gladly have stayed months longer and listened for the moonlight talk between that lofty Norman castle, "builte in such a brave plot that it could have espyed a byrd flying in every strete," and those fine old houses of the Salop black-and-white whose "curious sculptures and carvings and quirks of architecture" gave such pleasure to Hawthorne. Surely here, in this city of many memories, "a stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer it."

Shrewsbury is but a little city,--one of the local proverbs runs: "We don't go by size, or a cow would catch a hare,"--but its architectural grace and a certain joyousness of open-air life more French than English endow it with rare charm. It won a fitting praise from its own Tudor poet, Thomas Churchyard:

"Now Shrewsbury shall be honoured (as it ought); The seate deserves a righte greate honour heere; That walled town is sure so finely wrought, It glads itself, and beautifies the sheere."

Fortunate in situation, Shrewsbury is enthroned upon twin hills almost surrounded by the Severn. As one of the warders of the Welsh border, it was stoutly fortified, and enough of the old wall remains to make a pleasant promenade. On the only land approach, an isthmus barely three hundred yards broad, stands the square red keep of the castle. The slender spire of St. Mary's is a landmark far and wide. St. Alkmund's, with a sister spire, has a tradition that reaches back to aethelfreda, daughter of Alfred the Great. Old St. Chad's, a n.o.ble church in the days of Henry III, has swayed and sunk into a fragment that serves as chapel for the cemetery where some of the first Salopian families take their select repose. The towered Abbey Church is of venerable dignity, with battered monuments of cross-legged knight and chaliced priest, and a meek, bruised, broken effigy supposed to represent that fiery founder of the abbey, first Earl of Shrewsbury and builder of the castle, Roger de Montgomery, second in command at Hastings to William the Conqueror.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SEVERN BELOW THE QUARRY, SHREWSBURY]

The first known name of Shrewsbury was The Delight, and by that name it may well be remembered of those who have wandered through Wyle Cop and Butchers' Row, past the Raven tavern where Farquhar wrote "The Recruiting Officer" and the old half-timbered house where Richmond, soon to be Henry VII, lodged on his way to Bosworth Field. There are steep streets that, as the proverb has it, go "uphill and against the heart," but carven gables and armorial bearings and mediaeval barge-boards tempt one on. There are wild and fierce a.s.sociations, as that of the b.u.t.ter Market, where at the High Cross poor Prince David of Wales--who must have had nine lives--after being dragged through the town at a horse's tail, was "hanged, burned and quartered," but in the main it is a city of gracious memories. Its Grammar School, an Edward VI foundation, which in the seventeenth century boasted four masters, six hundred scholars, and a "hansome library," counts on its roll of alumni Charles Darwin, the most famous native of Shrewsbury, the poet Faber, Philip Sidney and his _fidus Achates_, Fulke Greville, whose tomb in St. Mary's Church at Warwick bears the inscription that he was "Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Counsellour to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney." It was in 1564, that starry year in English literary annals, that the two lads entered the school.

Sidney's father was then Lord President of Wales--one of the best she ever had--and resident at Ludlow Castle, from whose splendid halls Sir Henry and Lady Mary wrote most wise and tender letters to their "little Philip." He must have profited by these, for in after years Fulke Greville extolled him as the paragon of schoolboys:

"Of his youth I will report no other wonder than this, though I lived with him and knew him from a child, yet I never knew him other than a man, with such staidness of mind, lovely and familiar gravity, as carried grace and reverence above great years; his talk ever of knowledge and his very play tending to enrich his mind so that even his teachers found something in him to observe and learn above that which they had usually read or taught."

The school, still flourishing, is now housed in new buildings across the Severn, opposite the Quarry, a s.p.a.cious park with

"Broad ambrosial aisles of lofty limes."

Here we used to sit on shaded benches and watch the bright-eyed urchins fishing in the river, for Shropshire, as the saying goes, is "full of trouts and tories." Here we would repeat Milton's invocation to the G.o.ddess of the Severn:

"Sabrina fair, Listen where thou art sitting Under the gla.s.sy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair,"

and when her "sliding chariot" declined to stay for us

"By the rushy-fringed bank,"

we would ign.o.bly console ourselves with "a Shrewsbury cake of Palin's own make,"--such a delicious, melting-on-the-tongue concoction as Queen Bess was regaled withal and as suggested to Congreve, in his "Way of the World," the retort: "Why, brother Wilful of Salop, you may be as short as a Shrewsbury cake, if you please." The Simnel cake of which Herrick sings,--

"I'll to thee a Simnel bring, 'Gainst thou goest a mothering,"

is made only in the days approaching Christmas and Easter. It consists of minced fruit in a saffron-coloured crust, said to be exceeding tough, and on Mothering Sunday, in Mid-Lent, is taken as a gift to their mothers by children out at service, who, on this local festival, come home to be welcomed at the cost of the fatted calf, veal and rice-pudding being the regulation dinner. The ancient refrain: "A soule-cake, a soule-cake! Have mercy on all Christen soules for a soule-cake!" refers to yet another specialty of Shropshire ovens. On All Souls' Eve it used to be the custom to set out on the table a tower of these round flat cakes, every visitor reducing the pile by one. The residue, if residue there were, fell to the share of the poor ghosts.

The Quarry, in the bad old times, was often the scene of bull-baitings and bear-baitings and c.o.c.k-fights. It is better to remember that the Whitsun Plays were performed here, for these were comely and edifying spectacles. In 1568, when Sir Henry Sidney favoured the Grammar School with a visit, there was "a n.o.ble stage playe played at Shrewsbury, the which was praysed greately, and the chyffe actor thereof was one Master Aston," being no less a personage than the head master.

A Quarry holiday that, by the grace of Sabrina, fell within the brief limits of our sojourn, was the Shrewsbury Floral Fete, vaunted on the pink program as "The Grandest Fete in the United Kingdom." Our landlady earnestly vouched for the truth of this description. "There is them who would have it as York Gala be the greatest, but York Gala, grand however, ben't so grand as this."

On Wednesday, August twenty-second, we took aristocratic tickets at two and six, for Wednesday is the day of the county families. Thursday is the shilling day, when, by train, by coach, by barge, by wagonette, by farmer's gig and carrier's cart, all the countryside comes streaming in. The weather had been watched with keen anxiety. "Rain spells ruin," the saying went; but it was clear and hot. Men, women, and children lay on the gra.s.s around their luncheon baskets--we had hardly expected this of the county families--all through the wide enclosure, making the most of every disk of shade. From the central bandstand and from the encircling tents--refreshment tents, flower tents, fruit tents, vegetable tents, bee-and-honey tents--drooped rows of languid pennons. The fountain in The Dingle sent up a silvery tree of spray, while the white and yellow water-lilies in its little pool blinked like sleepy children. Within the tents the heat was stifling, but a continuous flow of flushed humanity, as whist as in the County Store where even the awed shop girls are instructed to speak with bated breath, pa.s.sed in admiring review the sumptuous ma.s.ses of heavily fragrant flowers, the great black grapes almost bursting with wine, the luscious plums and cherries, the amazing platoons of plethoric onions, exaggerated potatoes, and preposterously elongated turnips and carrots, the model beehives and the jars of amber honey.

The gold-medal exhibitors, perspiring but beaming, stood by their red-ticketed products, while the silver-medal folk viewed their blue tickets with a pleasant sense of superiority to the subdued white-ticket battalion and the invisible yellow-ticketers who were only "commended."

All the while successive bands--the Shropshire Imperial Yeomanry, His Majesty's Coldstream Guards, and His Majesty's Scots Guards--were merrily playing away, and presently the clamorous ringing of what might have been a st.u.r.dy dinner-bell called us to the Acrobatic Stand, about which the crowd soon became so dense, while the somersault artists converted their bodies into giddy playthings, that one rustic philosopher was heard to remark: "Well, we ain't seeing owt, but we're in t' show." Then came the horse-leaping, which was such a favourite feature that not even the miraculous performances of the King of the High Wire, and the ether-dancing feats of the Cee Mee Troupe availed to divide the mult.i.tude. When Rufus, to the deep but decorous delight of the Cheshire visitors, had outleaped all the rest, we swarmed across the Quarry and sat down on the gra.s.s to wait for the ascent of the monster balloons, those gigantic golden-brown puffs of gas that had been softly tugging at their bonds all the morning. The Shrewsbury had already made a number of captive ascents and finally achieved its "right away" in good order, rising majestically into the upper air until it hung like an orange on our furthest reach of vision, but the wayward Wulfruna broke her ropes on a captive trip and feloniously made off with several astonished pa.s.sengers, among whose vanishing heads peered out the scared, ecstatic face of a small boy.

As dusk grew on, our ever-greatening host still comported itself with well-bred English quietude. We never forgot what was due to the presence of the county families. Even the lads in Eton jackets tripped one another up softly and engagingly. Bath chairs and baby wagons traversed the thick of the press. The King of the High Wire, who seemed to be made of air and india-rubber, appeared again and performed such impossible antics on his dizzy line that the setting sun rested its chin on the horizon to stare at him, and from a slit in the gaudy trapeze tent half-chalked visages peered out and paid him the professional tribute of envy. The tumblers tumbled more incredibly than before. The Handcuff King shuffled off one mortal coil after another. The Lady Cyclists cycled in an extremely unladylike manner,--a performance punctuated by the impatient yelping of little dogs beneath the stage, eager to show off their own accomplishments.

On they came at last, bounding, barking, wagging, tumultuous, all striving to take part in every trick. They quite refused to stop when their respective turns were over, but went on all together excitedly jumping rope and hitting ball long after ropes and b.a.l.l.s had disappeared, until they were unceremoniously picked up and bundled down a trap-door, an exit of wagging tail-tips.

As darkness fell, the Severn was all astir with pleasure-boats, while happy ragam.u.f.fins, getting their fireworks for nothing, thronged the further bank. Rockets went skittering over our heads, fire-wheels spluttered and whizzed, and as the first of the fire-balloons flashed up, a baby voice behind us piped:

"O mummy, mummy! See! There's a somebody died and going up to heaven."

Altogether the Floral Fete was as sweet-natured and pleasurable a festival as ever we chanced upon and completed our subjugation to this old town that the Severn so lovingly embraces. To quote from a black-letter ballad treasured in the Bodleian:

"The merry Town of Shrowsbury G.o.d bless it still, For it stands most gallantly Upon a high hill.

It standeth most bravely For all men to see.

Then every man to his mind, Shrowsbury for me!"

The county of Shropshire smooths away on the east into a level pasture-land belonging to the central plain of England, but its western portion is roughened by the spurs of the Welsh mountains. Its own mountain is the Wrekin, a solitary height a few miles to the east of Shrewsbury. The summit commands so wide a view that the toast of Salopians everywhere is "All round the Wrekin." South of the Severn run several ranges of hills down toward the hop-gardens and apple-orchards of Hereford and Worcester. Of these, "Clee Hills," the highest of the ranges, "be holy in Shropshire."[7] North Salop has a coal-field, with its accompanying prosperity and disfigurement,--busy factories, belching furnaces, houses that tip and tumble from the hollowing out of the ground beneath. We rioted in our memorable motor car through several of these grimy towns, Wellington among them, and Newport, where the runaway Shrewsbury balloon came safely down.

Wellington cherishes a legend relating to a bad old giant of Wales, who, having a spite against the Mayor of Shrewsbury, purposed to choke up the Severn and drown out the town. So he started off with a heavy sack of earth over his shoulder, but lost his way, like the stupid giant he was, and met, near Wellington, a cobbler carrying home a bag of boots and shoes to mend. The giant asked him how far it was to Shrewsbury, and the cobbler, emptying his sack of ragged footwear, declared he had worn out all those boots and shoes on the road. This so discouraged the giant that he flung down his burden of earth, forming the Wrekin, and trudged meekly home again.

Far more delightful than automobiling were the leisurely drives we took in the neighbourhood of Shrewsbury. One fair afternoon we drove five miles southeast to Wroxeter to view the tragic ruins of the Roman city of Uriconium. Here, at the junction of Watling Street with the western Roman road, guarding these communications and the pa.s.ses of the Severn, stood "The White Town in the Woodland." After the Roman armies were withdrawn, it was stormed and burned by the Saxons. The lapse of fourteen hundred years has not obliterated the traces of that anguish. Only a little below the surface lies earth still black from the heats of the tremendous conflagration; charred bones crackle beneath the tread; in an under-chamber of one of the baths has been found the skeleton of an old man crouched between the pillars, as if seeking refuge from the rage of fire and sword. The skeletons of two women were beside him and, close to his bony hand, his little h.o.a.rd of coins. There still stands a rugged ma.s.s of wall some seventy feet in length, its Roman string-courses of flat red bricks showing bright against the prevailing grey of that jagged, gaping structure. Now birds nest in it, and from the lower heaps and ranges of broken masonry all about springs the wild rose as well as the thistle.

Uriconium was larger than Pompeii, and its ruins, said to be the most extensive of their kind in England, smite one with heartache. We roamed about its gra.s.sy hollows and thicketed mounds, its bone-strewn forum, and its baths with their patches of mosaic flooring, their groups of little brick columns, and other fragments of a perished luxury. We wondered that the sky above this city left so desolate, a sky of softest azure flecked with cloudlets dazzling white, did not wear perpetual shadow for its sake. But those heavens were as serene as if the dying wail of Uriconium had never pierced them, and the cleft summit of Milton's "blue-topped Wrekin"--a deep, intense, gleaming blue it was that afternoon--kept no memory of the day when the Severn ran red with blood and its own head was veiled with smoke and ashes.

The n.o.ble Norman church of Wroxeter, near by, has set at its churchyard gate two Roman pillars with finely sculptured capitals that have been recovered from the river-bed. Its font is hollowed out of another Roman capital and looks only half converted. The church is remarkable for its Easter sepulchre, an arched niche in the north wall of the chancel, and for its altar-tombs. This Easter sepulchre, where the crucifix would have been placed on Good Friday to be raised again with rejoicing on Easter morning, is of creamy stone with ball-flower ornament. Within the niche are reddish traces of a Resurrection fresco. The effigies on the altar-tombs have been singularly preserved from mutilation. Even the rings upon those comely hands that clasp their prayer-books in the centuried trance of their devotions remain intact. Here sleeps a Jacobean baronet splendid in scarlet alabaster robes and broad gilt chain. A peac.o.c.k is at his head and a lion's claw at his feet. His lady, from gold head-dress to dainty shoon, is no less immaculate. May their rest on their stone pillows be forever unprofaned! In that hushed and almost forgotten sanctuary slumber also Elizabethan knights and ladies whose tombs, wrought about with quaint figures, are peculiarly individual and tempted us to closer study than the waning light allowed.