With the World's Great Travellers Volume Iii Part 7

This is the genuine, characteristic English scenery, and it is found in perfection in Warwickshire. About Leamington, thanks to the contiguity of several large estates, parts of the country are heavily wooded, and a deep rural seclusion pervades the whole neighborhood. We were there in July: the earlier flowers were gone, but in the green embowered lanes the banks were rich with purple foxgloves; pale, shadowy bramble-roses were blossoming in the hedges, over which climbed woodbine and a pure white convolvulus; the gaudy poppies still held their own, as they do, though with thinner ranks, to the end of the season; and the splendid gorse spread over the uncultivated hill-sides like yellow flame. Many birds make their home here. We came too late for the nightingales, and it was elsewhere that we heard a cuckoo once or twice in a distant thicket, for it is silent after June; but larks warbled in mid-air, and thrushes filled the lanes with their liquid notes, besides a host of little unknown birds who sang their simple song very sweetly all day.

One of the finest country-seats in the county was originally a Cistercian abbey, founded in the reign of Henry II.: a n.o.ble gate-way of that period, half shrouded in ivy, still remains, but nothing more except fragments of the cloisters embedded in the main building, which is partly Elizabethan, but chiefly in Queen Anne's style. Uninteresting and tasteless as the latter is, it produces more effect by its solid ma.s.s and unbroken facade than Tudor gables or castellated towers. Within are great lofty square rooms, a fine hall and staircase,--all on a scale which with us would be seen only in a public building,--and a whole series of family portraits, priests, knights, courtiers, and dames, by all the famous painters from Henry VIII.'s time to Queen Victoria's.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE NORTHWEST]

The gardens of this place are beautiful, but most artificial-looking, the shorn gra.s.s and geometrical flower-beds producing the effect of a worsted pattern; stone steps, bal.u.s.trades, fountains, statues, urns, vases, and clipped hedges and shrubbery giving them a formal and stately air in keeping with the house itself: not a blade of gra.s.s, not a leaf, not a pebble, is out of place. From these one pa.s.ses into the park, where for miles the undulations of the land form a succession of lovely knolls and dells shaded by magnificent oaks, imperial trees, and groves of lindens and chestnuts hardly less grand, while underfoot all is fern and soft turf. Herds of dappled deer browse beneath these lordly trees or come down to drink at the Avon, a slow little stream which winds through the sylvan glades. Since then I have seen a number of great places, some of them finer than this, but with its legends and a.s.sociations it is not a bad type of them all. It was the first I saw, and will always be first in my recollection.

Besides the beauty of that region, it is full of interest. There are the romantic ruins of Kenilworth; there are Warwick Castle (partly burnt) and Warwick town, with Leicester's Hospital, and St. Mary's Church, and the Beauchamp Chapel, one of the gems of ecclesiology, with stained-gla.s.s windows five hundred years old, and splendid tombs with effigies in bra.s.s and alabaster. There is Coventry with all its traditions, from the Lady G.o.diva to Mary Queen of Scots. The procession of the Lady G.o.diva still takes place every few years. Last summer there was a celebration: the lady engaged to perform the part of "the woman of a thousand summers old" was not forthcoming in time, and some other eligible female was caught up, clapped on horseback and sent forth: at the same moment the first one arrived, and the consequence was a lawsuit.

Stratford-on-Avon, too, belongs to this part of the country,--a little old-world town, where the bust of Shakespeare looks down upon you from every coign of vantage. Mysterious being! who sprang from impenetrable obscurity in that quiet village to light the beacon of an immortal fame, and sink back into the uncertain shades of his native place until he rests definitely in the beautiful parish church, so still among its trees, with the Avon laving the wall of the church-yard.

Anne Hathaway's cottage remains in good preservation, a picturesque object among the fields; Lucys still live at Charlecote; but too many people have written of these things,--n.o.body better than Geoffrey Crayon, whose sketch I read over as we waited for luncheon at the Red Horse Inn in the little room called Washington Irving's parlor.

Something ought to be said about that luncheon, which, when good, is the best of English meals, dinner as a rule being too heavy and monotonous.

On a table-cloth of the traditional whiteness of all napery which is written about, were set out a lordly cold round of beef, a jug of home-brewed ale, a substantial loaf of home-made bread, a smaller one of simple cake, a currant-pie, a rich country cheese, and a pitcher of thick cream. There were three of us: we ate as much as we liked, and paid seven shillings, less than two dollars, but I do not give either the bill of fare or the bill of costs as a sample of ordinary luck.

We saw nothing in England proper prettier than the shady lanes and green foot-paths of Warwickshire. The view from Harrow Hill and the country around Malvern are greatly admired, but they are exceedingly tame, merely an extent of rather flat land seen from an insignificant height, without water, too patchy to have breadth, which is the strong point of flat scenery; there are no stretches of field or forest-land; it is all broken up like a checkerboard by hedgerows and high-roads. We thought the Fen country roads more striking: it has been reclaimed, and is now a fine agricultural district. The eye ranges over wide expanses of cultivation: great plains of pale green bean-vines and yellow grain, alternating with the rich brown of the peat soil, whose pungent odor fills the air, stretch away to the horizon, unbroken save by now and then a row of Lombardy poplars or a line of low willows; the ditches by which the land is drained and divided are marked by long lines of brighter green, and full of graceful waving marsh-gra.s.s; and at long intervals a broad, straight, shining path of water takes its way to the sea. Here and there a solitary windmill reminds one of Holland, but it is altogether finer than Holland. With all the teeming fertility there is something which recalls the original desolation: it is very spa.r.s.ely settled; one seldom sees a house, and then it is not cl.u.s.tered about with outbuildings, but stands up alone against the horizon, and makes one think of Mariana's moated grange. In the midst of these flats rises the majestic tower of Ely, seen for many a mile.

We pa.s.sed from this into a wild waste in Norfolk, whose sandy hillocks were clad in purple heath and green fern, with an occasional pine wood, dark and mysterious-looking, for in England even the pine is not the scrubby, scraggy tree of our barrens. This country has a picturesque, original character of its own, and is somewhat thinly settled too, but among the heaths and pines we saw more beautiful ruined churches than in any district south of the Tweed. The unfailing ivy is there, but it does not grow with over-luxuriance, as it does elsewhere in England, making a lovely covering for an ugly building or an unsightly stump, but sometimes m.u.f.fling and hiding the beauties of finer architecture, and disguising delicate Gothic outlines like a thick hood.

[Our traveller follows this description of scenery with an account of what she saw in the great cathedrals of England, including Westminster, Winchester, Worcester, and Gloucester.

Her description of these is too extended for our s.p.a.ce.]

Besides these, we saw Chester, Peterboro', York Minster, Wells, Ely, Canterbury: for the first three I cared less than for the others, though Peterboro' is very fine, especially the west front, which is a miracle of richness and proportion; and York is grand from its size and the harmony which reigns throughout, all the additions and restorations having been made in such perfect accordance with the original design that it looks as if it were the work of the same century. Besides the fine monuments, there are superb stained-gla.s.s windows, one very old, and called the "Five Sisters," said to have been the gift of five maiden ladies, each of whom bestowed a compartment designed from her own embroidery; for which _vide_ "Nicholas Nickleby." We went down into the crypt to see the remains of the old Norman church and some fragments of a Saxon one, most ancient of all: there, among those venerable, those sacred stones, was a steam-engine, contrived to blow the huge bellows of the organ; and there were the gas-pipes by which the cathedral is now lighted: a number of jets were flaring in the vaults; the steam-engine blew and heaved in a horrible manner; there were heaps of coal lying between the grand broken Norman pillars; the light and smell of gas pervaded the whole place. It was like the cellar of a manufactory, and we went up-stairs with outraged sensibilities. Ely is glorious within and without; Wells is the loveliest of cathedrals; Canterbury is Canterbury.

Besides cathedrals, almost every parish in England has at least one beautiful church. The most interesting of them to us was the Holy Sepulchre at Cambridge. It belonged to the Knights Templars, and is circular, like most of their churches, in imitation of our Saviour's tomb at Jerusalem. It is very small, very low, very ma.s.sive, with short round pillars, round arches, decorated only with the simple, effective zigzag moulding peculiar to the early Norman style; corbels running down from the domical vaulted roof (still recalling Moslem architecture), and ending in strange faces, military yet melancholy in expression,--probably portraits of the knights by whom it was founded in the year of our Lord 1101. The Temple Church in London is much larger and handsomer, but not nearly so curious and striking.

Almost all the old churches in England suffer exceedingly either from the defect of the stone of which they are built or the action of the atmosphere upon it: they look honeycombed, worm-eaten; their tracery is obliterated, their mullions are wasted as if by wear and tear.

The interiors, protected from the weather, fare best, but even the cloisters, which are open on one side, are often in a ruinous condition, and the stone peels and crumbles under the touch like rusty iron.

Chester Cathedral is an extreme instance: its dilapidation amounts to disfigurement. It is one of the least imposing and interesting, yet for an American just landed it is a profound revelation; and as Chester is close to Liverpool, one cannot do better than stop there for a day.

The old city is full of quaint characteristics, too well known to need description here. One of the gates is called by the odd t.i.tle of the Pepper-gate. In the sixteenth century there was a mayor named Pepper, who had a young daughter in her middle teens. One evening, as she was playing ball with her companions near this gate, an impetuous youth rushed in, s.n.a.t.c.hed her up, and carried her off through it. The mayor caused the gate to be closed, which gave rise to the saying, "When the daughter is stolen shut the Pepper-gate." Chester is the only city in England which has preserved the entire circuit of its walls: the town has spread far beyond them in every direction, except where they are washed by the Dee, but they form an unbroken round, and are used as a public walk, from which one looks into many a queer corner. Following its course, one comes upon a small turret rising from the battlements, on which is the inscription, "From this tower, on September 27, 1645, King Charles saw his army defeated at Rowton Moor." How much of anguish and doom lies in those few words! No doubt Sir Walter Scott is much to blame, but he can hardly be held answerable for all the sentiment with which we trace the footsteps of the Stuarts, dogged by fanatical hatred and murderous revenge, upheld by adventurous, daring, romantic loyalty and chivalrous self-devotion.

THE "OLD TOWN" OF EDINBURGH.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

[From one of the most notable of Scotland's literary sons we extract the following attractive description of the famous capital city of that land, the source of our selection being Stevenson's "Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes." The "Old Town"

section of the city is particularly limned for us in the selection here given.]

The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy estuary from the slope and summit of three hills. No situation could be more commanding for the head city of a kingdom, none better chosen for n.o.ble prospects. From her tall precipice and terraced gardens she looks far and wide on the sea and broad champaigns. To the east you may catch at sunset the spark of the May light-house, where the Firth expands into the German Ocean; and away to the west, over all the ca.r.s.e of Stirling, you can see the first snows upon Ben Ledi.

But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with snow as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate.

For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate dark weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be found a more unhomely and hara.s.sing place of residence. Many such aspire angrily after that Somewhere-else of the imagination, where all troubles are supposed to end. They lean over the great bridge which joins the New Town with the Old--that windiest spot or high altar in this northern temple of the winds--and watch the trains smoking out from under them and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies. Happy the pa.s.sengers who shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard for the last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-tops! And yet the place establishes an interest in people's hearts; go where they will, they find no city of the same distinction; go where they will, they take a pride in their old home.

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 pre-eminently Gothic, and all the more so since she has set herself off with some Greek airs, and erected cla.s.sic 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 workmen'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 amba.s.sadors, 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 phantom levees, 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 reawakening 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 marshalled 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PRINCES STREET AND SIR WALTER SCOTT'S MONUMENT, EDINBURGH]

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 by-standers. 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 twoscore 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 spring time--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 Ba.s.s Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden, shaken by pa.s.sing 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 most admired disorder, while, above all, the brute ma.s.s 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 also 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 theatre, but a city in the world of every-day 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. By all the canons of romance, the place demands to be half deserted and leaning towards decay; birds we might admit in profusion, the play of the sun and winds, and a few gypsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare; but these citizens, with their cabs and tramways, their trains and posters, are altogether out of key. Chartered tourists, they make free with historical localities, and rear their young among the most picturesque sites with a grand human indifference. To see them thronging by, in their neat clothes and conscious moral rect.i.tude, and with a little air of possession that verges on the absurd, is not the least striking feature of the place.

And the story of the town is as eccentric as its appearance. For centuries it was a capital thatched with heather, and more than once, in the evil days of English invasion, it has gone up in flame to heaven, a beacon to ships at sea. It was the jousting-ground of jealous n.o.bles, not only on Greenside or by the king's stables, where set tournaments were fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the royal presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords, and in the main street, where popular tumult under the Blue Blanket alternated with the brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers.

Down in the palace John Knox reproved his queen in the accents of modern democracy. In the town, in one of those little shops plastered like so many swallows' nests among the b.u.t.tresses of the old Cathedral, that familiar autocrat, James VI., would gladly share a bottle of wine with George Heriot the goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly look down on the Castle with the city lying in waves around it, those mad and dismal fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure on the moors, sat day and night with tearful psalms to see Edinburgh consumed with fire from heaven, like another Sodom or Gomorrah. There, in the Gra.s.s-market, stiff-necked, covenanting heroes offered up the often unnecessary, but not less honorable, sacrifice of their lives, and bade eloquent farewell to sun, moon, and stars, and earthly friendships, or died silent to the roll of drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind their horses' tails,--a sorry handful thus riding for their lives, but with a man at the head who was to return in a different temper, make a dash that staggered Scotland to the heart, and die happily in the thick of fight. There Aikenhead was hanged for a piece of boyish incredulity; there a few years afterwards, David Hume ruined Philosophy and Faith, an undisturbed and well-reputed citizen; and thither, in yet a few years more, Burns came from the plough-tail, as to an academy of gilt unbelief and artificial letters...

The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter, protected, in some subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs which fortify it to the west. On the one side of it and the other the new towns of the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader, and more gentle hilltops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle overtops the whole city and keeps an open view to sea and land. It dominates for miles on every side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on the Castle battlements, and the smoke of the old town blowing abroad over the subjacent country. A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose, from this distant aspect that she got her nickname of _Auld Reekie_.

Perhaps it was given her by people who had never crossed her doors: day after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, they had seen the pile of building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain; so it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the same field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all expressed in these two words.

Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is properly smoked; and though it is well washed with rain all the year round, it has a grim and sooty aspect among its younger suburbs. It grew, under the law that regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious situations, not in extent, but in height and density. Public buildings were forced, wherever there was room for them, into the midst of thoroughfares; thoroughfares were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after story, neighbor mounting upon neighbor's shoulder, as in some Black Hole of Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen feet deep in a vertical direction.

The tallest of these _lands_, as they are locally termed, have long since been burnt out; but to this day it is not uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a flight; and the cliff of building which hangs imminent over Waverley Bridge would still put many natural precipices to shame.

The cellars are already high above the gazer's head, planted on the steep hill-side; as for the garret, all the furniture may be in the p.a.w.n-shop, but it commands a famous prospect to the Highland hills. The poor man may roost up there in the centre of Edinburgh, and yet have a peep of the green country from his window; he shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with their broad squares and gardens; he shall have nothing overhead but a few spires, the stone top-gallants of the city; and perhaps the wind may reach him with a rustic pureness, and bring a smack of the sea, or of flowering lilacs in the spring....

One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was abed but the policeman, and stopped by hazard before a tall _land_. The moon touched upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on the upper windows; there was no light anywhere in the great bulk of the building; but as I stood there it seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from the interior; doubtless there were many clocks ticking, and people snoring on their backs. And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within made itself faintly audible in my ears, family after family contributing its quota to the general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to its time-pieces, like a great disordered heart. Perhaps it was little more than a fancy altogether, but it was strangely impressive at the time, and gave me an imaginative measure of the disproportion between the quant.i.ty of living flesh and the trifling walls that separated and contained it.

There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every circ.u.mstance of terror and reality, in the fall of the _land_ in High Street. The building had grown rotten to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed up, so that the scavenger's barrow could not pa.s.s; cracks and reverberations sounded through the house at night; the inhabitants of the huge old human bee-hive discussed their peril when they encountered on the stair; some had even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-respect; when, in the black hours of a Sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a hideous uproar and tumbled story upon story to the ground. The physical shock was felt far and near, and the moral shock travelled with the morning milkmaid into all the suburbs.

The church-bells never sounded more dismally over Edinburgh than that gray forenoon. Death had made a brave harvest, and, like Samson, by pulling down one roof destroyed many a home. None who saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable: here it was plastered, there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle still stood on the hob, high overhead; and there a cheap picture of the Queen was pasted over the chimney. So, by this disaster, you had a glimpse into the life of thirty families, all suddenly cut off from the revolving years. The _land_ had fallen; and with the _land_ how much! Far in the country, people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun looked through between the chimneys in an unwonted place. And all over the world, in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a mult.i.tude of people could exclaim with truth, "The house that I was born in fell last night!"

IN THE LAND OF ROB ROY.

NATHANIEL P. WILLIS.

[From Willis's "Famous Persons and Places" we select an interesting description of some Scottish scenes which the works of Scott have rendered famous, including the home of Rob Roy and the lakes Lomond and Katrine, the latter the scene of the "Lady of the Lake." Pa.s.sing many famous places on his way north, the traveller at length reached the "far-famed and much-boasted valley of Glencoe," which he describes in the chapter following.]