The Portsmouth Road and Its Tributaries Part 17

[Sidenote: _AN IDEAL MANOR HOUSE_]

Behind the church, in midst of rick-yards and their pleasing litter of fragrant straw, stands Buriton Manor House, a solid, staid, and comfortable four-square building of mellowed red brick, frankly unornamental, and therefore pleasing. Built in the days of Queen Anne, you can yet scarce imagine (being a Londoner, and used to the grime of the eighteenth-century houses of the capital), as you stand in front of it, these cleanly walls to be so old. Yet there are brilliant lichens upon the bricks that are not the growth of yesterday, and the c.u.mbrous sashes of the tall plain windows are not of the fashion of to-day. Some windows, too, are blank and bricked up; reminiscences, these, of the days of the window-tax, days when the light of heaven was appraised by the Inland Revenue authorities, and to be bought at a price in coin of the realm. So here, in very truth, is the Manor House of Caldecott's fancy, and of Washington Irving's picture-like prose.

[Ill.u.s.tration: E Gibbon]

[Sidenote: _GIBBON ACCORDING TO BOSWELL_]

And here lived, for a time, Edward Gibbon, the historian, whose birthplace we pa.s.sed at Putney; and it is for this personal interest, for this hero-worshipping object, that I have turned aside from the high-road to visit Buriton. Gibbon, you will say, is a quaint figure for the hero-worshipper to admire outside his stately pages of Roman History, and I have no mind to deny your contention. He was, indeed, a humorous figure of a man, the more so, doubtless, because he was so supremely unconscious of the whimsical figure he cut before his contemporaries. The difference between the majestic swing and rounded periods of his literary style, and his personal appearance and his private habits of thought, is scarce less than ludicrous. Gibbon was, in fine, exceedingly human, and his person was almost grotesque. Do you, I wonder, conceive in that luminous optic, the "mind's eye," when thinking of the man who wrote the stately prose of the "Decline and Fall," the figure of a little snub-nosed gentleman, with a square head, a prodigious development of chins, and a wagging paunch?

Surely never. Yet this was the appearance of the man, and portraits and caricatures of him all agree in showing this great literary figure of last century's close as a very whimsical-looking human figure indeed.

It cannot with certainty be said whence Gibbon derived his singular appearance. Not (one would say) from either his father or his mother, who were both, to judge from their portraits, very comely persons. But if neither his face nor his figure would have served to make Gibbon's fortune, certainly his agreeable manners stood him in good stead; and although Boswell describes him, in ferociously unfriendly terms, as "an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow," of the race of "infidel wasps and venomous insects," he seems to have been in good favour with polite society. But then Bozzy's mind had room for only one hero.

He was not (curiously enough) at all eager in the early part of his career to be recognized for his literary abilities, for, when a young man, he was solicitous to be known as a good figure in polite society. Thus when, in 1762, we find the French Amba.s.sador, the Duc de Nivernais, giving him introductions to the foremost French writers of the time, we hear him complaining that the Duke treated him "more as a man of letters than as a man of fashion." He was, indeed, _very_ human! This quality (or defect?) is seen again in a letter, still extant, in which he says, years later, upon his determination not to stand again for Parliament:--"A seat in Parliament I can only value as it is connected with some official situation of emolument." Does that not endear him to you at once, who live in these Pharisaical times, when men seek election to the House on the score of philanthropy, of patriotism, of service to mankind; on any ground, in fact, but the fundamental consideration of self-interest?

Gibbon lived and wrote in the days when the literary patron still existed, and although the historian was a man of some pretensions in his own county, and on his ancestral acres at Buriton, yet he found the powerful friendship of Holroyd, afterwards first Earl of Sheffield, most useful, not only in literature, but in his career as a Member of Parliament. The almost lifelong friendship between the two was manifested even in death, for Gibbon sleeps, not in the Abbey, nor among his fathers at Buriton, but in the Sheffield vault at Fletching, in Suss.e.x.

[Sidenote: _AN AMATEUR SOLDIER_]

The mind of this singular man was, indeed, not apt to run in the direction of ancestor-worship, and old acres represented only so much money to him when, a year after the publication of his History, he sold the estate.

Years before, in his father's time, he held the captaincy of a battalion of Hampshire Militia (a sort of bachelor Sir Dilberry Diddle), and thus he says of himself in the "Memoirs," in a manner unconsciously humorous:--"I for two and a half years endured a wandering life of military servitude." Thus seriously did he look upon the perfunctory drilling of yeomen; the pleasant field-days between Portsmouth and Petersfield, and the Sunday church-parades, in which the militia, gorgeous in sky-blue coats with red facings; in white breeches with black gaiters; with astonishing hats and careful perukes finished off daintily with pigtails and black silk ribbons, bore a gallant part, exciting the admiration of the ladies, and the scornful animosity of those sober bachelors who belonged neither to the Militia, the Fencibles, nor to that doughty body of men, the Petersfield Cavalry; all good men and true, ready to shed their last drop of blood for their country, in the unlikely event of an invasion; but, meanwhile, none the less averse from a little parade of pomp and circ.u.mstance and the showing off of fine feathers. They were gaudy and most remarkable figures, these old militia-men, and the modern "Sat.u.r.day afternoon soldier" is to them as a London sparrow is to a peac.o.c.k for comparison. Neither is there any adequate compare between the work done by these old fellows and the modern amateur soldier. Gibbon and his contemporaries may have boasted of their "military servitude," and the historian may have profoundly believed the statement, that hints more than it really expresses--"The captain of Hampshire grenadiers was not useless to the historian of the Roman Empire;" but their services were more to the eye than to practical efficiency, and they would have resented, even to the laying down of their firelocks, the hard work which a battalion of c.o.c.kney rifle volunteers endures with cheerfulness.

But Gibbon grew tired of his military exploits; and presently, when the militia were disbanded, his father sent him travelling on the Continent.

It was at Rome, amid the ruins of the Capitol, that, in 1764, he conceived the first idea of his great work, but it was not until 1788 that the final volume was issued, after years of incredible toil and research.

Whatever the popularity of Gibbon may be now, a hundred years after his death, certainly his "Decline and Fall" had an extraordinary run when it first appeared. The entire impression was exhausted in a few days; a second and third edition were scarce adequate to the demand, and it was said at the time that "the book was on every table and on almost every toilet." From that day to this there have been well-nigh twenty editions, some of them consisting of as many as fourteen volumes, and, as a sign of Gibbon's sometime popularity, it may be mentioned that the entries under his name in the British Museum catalogue number about a hundred and twenty.

Not many pilgrims make their way to Buriton for Gibbon's sake, yet were you to turn aside from the high-road, you would find the place interesting beyond expectation. Lying _perdu_ among the hills, although so near the traffic of the outer world, it is, and has ever been, but rarely visited by the stranger, and has thus come to retain a distinct and individual character.

Push open the old wrought-iron gates of the churchyard and look around.

The church itself is just a typical building, with some few special features. It has, of course, been restored, but the fury of the restorer has been wreaked with greater effect elsewhere, and he has come to Buriton in a manner comparatively mild and harmless. He has left even the fine Decorated window of the south chapel, and has not cast out all the memorials of the dead and used their shattered fragments for mending the village street--as he has been known to do elsewhere. You can, in fact, discover the names of some of Gibbon's ancestors upon the walls, and not all the original encaustic tiles have been thrown away. Prodigious!

[Sidenote: _RESTORERS' INIQUITIES_]

But others have (truth to tell) been less fortunate. Poor cadavers! laid to rest within the church, with storied ledger-stones above, decently recounting both virtues they had and had not, they have been ruthlessly removed, and as the stranger paces round the exterior of the church, he walks upon their memorials, laid end to end, to form a solid footpath for the good folks o' Sundays. The frosts of winter crack them; the nailed boots of the rustics wear down the well-cut inscriptions that date from the seventeenth century to within a few generations of ourselves; and they will presently be worn quite away.

Here--stop and look--is the epitaph of one, a considerable fellow in his day, a barrister of the Middle Temple. Here is his coat-of-arms, and here his panegyric, writ, doubtless, by loving hands, and cut, most certainly, by an artist in his mortuary craft. Ha! barrister, where are your fees, your brief-bag, your writs of escheat and _fi fa_? Would you could arise and with all your former eloquence denounce the paltry fellows who have filched your gravestone for the paving of a churchyard path, whereon the casual clodhopper thumps his ponderous way and the meditative tourist pauses to moralize, and with the ferrule of his walking-stick sc.r.a.pes away the dirt that hides your ident.i.ty.

Where this solemn paving was used to be, are spread now, over the nave of the church, coloured tiles that wear a neat and cleanly, but distressingly secular, look. You might be pacing the tiled hall of a suburban villa, rather than the House of G.o.d. "But one must live," the restoring architect will tell you. The greater the cost of his commission the larger will be the amount from his five-percentage; so, out go the old stones and in come the patent tiles, while that gentleman pockets his money and sets off to fresh fields and pastures new.

x.x.x

[Sidenote: _BUTSER HILL_]

Another country lane affords the opportunity of regaining the Portsmouth Road from Buriton, without undergoing what always is the penance of retracing one's steps. It brings the traveller out into the highway just below where the railway crosses, underneath a bridge; while away in front lies the long slope that climbs steadily and straight towards the crest of Butser Hill, that tall k.n.o.b of the South Downs rising to a height of nine hundred and twenty-seven feet above the Meonware country, and commanding views stretching to Salisbury in one direction, and in others extending to Andover, to the Isle of Wight, and to the rich lands of the Suss.e.x Weald.

Butser Hill is the highest ground in Hampshire. Here the traveller enters upon the chalk country extending to the southern slopes of Portsdown Hill, and here the character of the scenery changes suddenly with the geological strata. Beech woods, oak and fir, give place to barren downs, clothed only with a short and scanty covering of gra.s.s, or with meagre patches of gorse. In favoured nooks, sheltered from the winds and brought by the painful unremitting labour of years to a condition not altogether prohibitive of cultivation, farmsteads stand, with their surrounding barns and cow-sheds, the whole comprised within walls constructed of flints picked plentifully from the land.

Here, on the incline leading across Butser Hill, may be noticed the beginning of these things. At one point, to the left hand, turns off what was once the old road, leading across the Hill, now a secluded track-way, bringing the explorer upon excavations in the chalk, and suddenly upon lime-kilns and lime-burners, working away in a solitude where every sound re-echoes from the enclosing chalk in gruff and hollow murmurs. The old road was in course of time abandoned for the new, which marches straight ahead and is carried in a deep and precipitous cutting through the hill-top. The winds whistle shrilly through this chalky gorge, and the frosts and thaws loosen great pieces of chalk which come down into the road with tremendous leaps, and break into a thousand fragments at the bottom. It is a lonely place. A single cottage stands some distance away; the lime-burners are hidden in their resounding dell, and the only company the wayfarer has on ordinary days through the cutting are the two notice-boards that, with a fine disregard of punctuation, caution folks "against Chalk falling from the Sides by Order." These, together with a board warning cyclists that "This Hill is Dangerous," are not cheering to the spirits on a winter's day.

It was on Butser Hill that a post-boy from the "Anchor," at Liphook, was stopped by an unmounted highwayman, who took the horse he was riding and cantered off upon its back, in the direction of London. The post-boy returned, sorrowful, to Petersfield, where he procured another horse and rode back to Liphook.

On his way, riding up to the turnpike-gate at Rake, he received information of the robber's pa.s.sing through, and, upon reaching the "Anchor," told the landlord of what had happened. Immediately "mine host"

organized pursuit, and so quickly did the party take to the road that they overtook man and horse at Hindhead. When the highwayman observed his pursuers gaining upon him, he lost his nerve, and did the very worst thing possible under the circ.u.mstances. He dismounted and attempted to conceal himself amid the gorse of that wild spot. But he was soon discovered, captured, and hauled off in custody; afterwards receiving sentence of transportation at Winchester a.s.sizes.

[Sidenote: _NICHOLAS NICKLEBY_]

Pa.s.sing through the precipitous cutting of Butser Hill, the road now comes upon the bare and windy expanse of Oxenbourne Downs, where, at a distance of fifty-eight miles from London, stands beside the road the "Coach and Horses" Inn, marked on the Ordnance maps "Bottom" Inn, and known in coaching days as "Gravel Hill" Inn, from the hill in the Downs rising at some distance to the rear, covered in patches with scrub and gorse. This is the roadside inn referred to by d.i.c.kens in "Nicholas Nickleby."

We left Nicholas and Smike looking down into the Devil's Punch Bowl, and now take up their journey over Rake Hill and the heights of Butser to this lonely roadside inn, which d.i.c.kens, using the lat.i.tude allowed to novelists, describes as twelve miles from Portsmouth. It is, in fact, thirteen miles, but its ident.i.ty is una.s.sailable, because there is no other house beside the road for miles on either hand.

"Onward they kept with steady purpose, and entered at length upon a wide and s.p.a.cious tract of downs, with every variety of little hill and plain to change their verdant surface. Here, there shot up almost perpendicularly into the sky a height so steep, as to be hardly accessible to any but the sheep and goats that fed upon its sides, and there stood a huge mound of green, sloping and tapering off so delicately, and merging so gently into the level ground, that you could scarce define its limits.

Hills swelling above each other, and undulations shapely and uncouth, smooth and rugged, graceful and grotesque, thrown negligently side by side, bounded the view in each direction; while frequently, with unexpected noise, there uprose from the ground a flight of crows, who, cawing and wheeling round the nearest hills as if uncertain of their course, suddenly poised themselves upon the wing and skimmed down the long vista of some opening valley with the speed of very light itself.

"By degrees the prospect receded more and more on either hand, and as they had been shut out from rich and extensive scenery, so they emerged once again upon the open country. The knowledge that they were drawing near their place of destination gave them fresh courage to proceed; but the way had been difficult, and they had loitered on the road, and Smike was tired.

"Thus twilight had already closed in, when they turned off the path to the door of a roadside inn, yet twelve miles short of Portsmouth.

"'Twelve miles,' said Nicholas, leaning with both hands on his stick, and looking doubtfully at Smike.

"'Twelve long miles,' repeated the landlord.

"'Is it a good road?' inquired Nicholas.

"'Very bad,' said the landlord. As, of course, being a landlord, he would say.

"'I want to get on,' observed Nicholas, hesitating. 'I scarcely know what to do.'

"'Don't let me influence you,' rejoined the landlord. '_I_ wouldn't go on if it was me.'"

And so here they stayed the night, much to their advantage, in a manner familiar to the readers of d.i.c.kens. Of their progress to Portsmouth the next day, with Mr. Vincent Crummles and his troupe, we will say nothing, for no other outstanding features of the road are described between this and Hilsea Lines.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "COACH AND HORSES" INN.]

[Sidenote: _CHALTON DOWNS_]

Oxenbourne Downs are succeeded, on the map, by Chalton (originally "Chalkton") Downs; but they are all one to the eye that ranges over their almost trackless hills and hollows.

x.x.xI

It was in the neighbourhood of Chalton Downs that a terrific, if, in some of its details, a somewhat farcical, encounter took place between two highwaymen and a mail-coach in the winter of 1791. The coach had set out from the "Blue Posts" at Portsmouth in the afternoon, and the coachman drove up through Purbrook and on, past Horndean, with the greatest difficulty, in face of a blinding snowstorm. But when he had come, as daylight faded away, to these bleak and open downs, he found it utterly impossible to lash his tired horses a step farther. The situation probably reads a great deal more interesting than those who experienced it had any idea of. To be snowed up on an open down, miles away from anywhere, reads prettily enough in Christmas numbers, but, as an experience, it does not bear repet.i.tion. There were, on this occasion, four "insides" and two "outsides"; and the lot of these last two, together with that of the coachman and guard, must have been simply Dantesque in its chilly horrors.

The coachman was a humane creature, and determined, at any rate, not to expose his shivering horses to the storm; so he unharnessed them and was proposing to lead them into Petersfield, when two fellows, well mounted, and apparently furnished with a perfect armoury of pistols, rode up through the falling snow and the gathering gloom, and demanded the pa.s.sengers' money, or the usual alternative.