WESTGATE, SOUTHAMPTON

CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL
ENGLISH TOWNS

WITH GLIMPSES OF THE PLEASANT
COUNTRY BETWEEN
W. D. H O W E L L S
ILLUSTRATED

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1906

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH
TOWNS

I
THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH

NO American, complexly speaking, finds himself in England for the first time, unless he is one of those many Americans who are not of English extraction. It is probable, rather, that on his arrival, if he has not yet visited the country, he has that sense of having been there before which a simpler psychology than ours used to make much of without making anything of. His English ancestors who really were once there stir within him, and his American forefathers, who were nourished on the history and literature of England, and were therefore intellectually English, join forces in creating an English consciousness in him. Together, they make it very difficult for him to continue a new-comer, and it may be that only on the fourth or fifth coming shall the illusion wear away and he find himself a stranger in a strange land. But by that time custom may have done its misleading work, and he may be as much as ever the prey of his first impressions. I am sure that some such result in me will evince itself to the reader in what I shall have to say of my brief stay with the English foster-mother of our American Plymouth; and I hope he will not think it altogether to be regretted.

My first impressions of England, after a fourth or fifth visit, began even before I landed in Plymouth, for I decided that there was something very national in the behavior of a young Englishman who, as we neared his native shores, varied from day to day, almost from hour to hour, in his doubt whether a cap or a derby hat was the right wear for a passenger about landing. He seemed also perplexed whether he should or should not speak to some of his fellow-passengers in the safety of parting, but having ventured, seemed to like it. On the tender which took us from the steamer to the dock I fancied another type in the Englishman whom I asked which was the best hotel in Plymouth. At first he would not commit himself; then his humanity began to work in him, and he expressed a preference, and abruptly left me. He returned directly to give the reasons for his preference, and to excuse them, and again he left me. A second time he came back, with his conscience fully roused, and conjured me not to think of going elsewhere.

I thought that charming, and I afterwards found the hotel excellent, as I found nearly all the hotels in England. I found everything delightful on the way to it, inclusive of the cabman’s overcharge, which brought the extortion to a full third of the just fare of a New York cabman. I do not include the weather, which was hesitating a bitter little rain, but I do include the behavior of the customs officer, who would do not more than touch, with averted eyes, the contents of the single piece of baggage which he had me open. When it came to paying the two hand-cart men three shillings for bringing up the trunks, which it would have cost me three dollars to transport from the steamer to a hotel at home, I did not see why I should not save money for the rest of my life by becoming naturalized in England, and making it my home, unless it was because it takes so long to become naturalized there that I might not live to economize much.

It was with a pleasure much more distinct than any subliminal intimation that I saw again the office-ladies in our hotel. Personally, they were young strangers, but officially they were old friends, and quite as I had seen them first forty years ago, or last a brief seven; only once they wore bangs or fringes over their bright, unintelligent eyes, and now they wore Mamie loops. But they were, as always, very neatly and prettily dressed, and they had the well-remembered difficulty of functionally differencing themselves to the traveller’s needs, so that which he should ask for a room and which for letters and which for a candle and which for his bill, remains a doubt to the end. From time to time with an exchange of puzzled glances, they unite in begging him to ask the head porter, please, for whatever it is he wants to know. They all seem of equal authority, but suddenly and quite casually the real superior appears among them. She is the manageress, and I never saw a manager at an English hotel except once, and that was in Wales. But the English theory of hotel-keeping seems to be house-keeping enlarged; a manageress is therefore more logical than a manager, and practically the excellence of English hotels attests that a manager could not be more efficient.

One of the young office-ladies, you never can know which it will be, gives you a little disk of pasteboard with the number and sometimes the price of your room on it, but the key is an after-thought of your own. You apply for it on going down to dinner, but in nearly all provincial hotels it is safe to leave your door unlocked. At any rate I did so with impunity. This was all new to me, but a greater novelty which greeted us was the table d’hôte, which has nearly everywhere in England replaced the old-time dinner off the joint. You may still have that if you will, but not quite on the old imperative terms. The joint is now the roast from the table d’hôte, and you can take it with soup and vegetables and a sweet. But if you have become wonted to the superabundance of a German steamer you will not find all the courses too many for you, and you will find them very good. At least you will at first: what is it that does not pall at last? Let it be magnanimously owned at the outset then, while one has the heart, that the cooking of any English hotel is better than that of any American hotel of the same grade. At Plymouth, that first night, everything in meats and sweets, though simple, was excellent; in vegetables there were green things with no hint of the can in them, but fresh from the southerner parts of neighboring France. As yet the protean forms of the cabbage family were not so insistent as afterwards.

Though we dined in an air so cold that we vainly tried to warm our fingers on the bottoms of our plates, we saw, between intervening heads and shoulders, a fire burning blithely in a grate at the farther side of the room. It was cold there in the dining-room, but after we got into the reading-room, we thought of it as having been warm, and we hurried out for a walk under the English moon which we found diffusing a mildness over the promenade on the Hoe, in which the statue of Sir Francis Drake fairly basked on its pedestal. The old

“THE PROMENADE ... A PROMONTORY PUSHED WELL OUT INTO THE SOUND”

sea-dog had the air of having lifted himself from the game of bowls in which the approach of the Spanish Armada had surprised him, and he must have already arrived at that philosophy which we reached so much later. In England it is chiefly inclement in-doors, but even out-doors it is well to temper the air with as vigorous exercise as time and occasion will allow you to take. Another monument, less personally a record of the Armada, balanced that of Drake at the farther end of the Hoe, and on top of this we saw Britannia leading out her lion for a walk: lions become so dyspeptic if kept housed, and not allowed to stretch their legs in the open air. We had no lion to lead out; and there was no chance for us at bowls on the Hoe that night, but we walked swiftly to and fro on the promenade and began at once to choose among the mansions looking seawards over it such as we meant to buy and live in always. They were all very handsome, in a reserved, quiet sort; but we had no hesitation in fixing on one with a balcony glassed in, so that we could see the sea and shore in all weathers; and I hope we shall not incommode the actual occupants.

The truth is we were flown with the beauty of the scene, which we afterwards found as great by day as by night. The promenade, which may have other reasons for calling itself as it does besides being shaped like the blade of a hoe, is a promontory pushed well out into the sound, with many islands and peninsulas clustered before it, or jutting towards it and forming a safe roadstead for shipping of all types. Plymouth is not a chief naval station of Great Britain without the presence of war-ships in its harbor; and among the peaceful craft at anchor with their riding-lights showing in the deeps of the sea and air one could distinguish the huge kraken shapes of modern cruisers and destroyers, and what not. But like the embattled figures of the marine and land-going soldiery, flirting on the benches of the promenade with females as fearless as themselves, or jauntily strolling up and down under the moon, the ships tended to an effect of subjective peacefulness, as if invented merely for the pleasure of the appreciative stranger. We were, at any rate, very glad of them, and appreciated the municipal efforts in our behalf as gratefully as the imperial fortifications of the harbor. It must be confessed at once, if I am ever to claim any American superiority in these “trivial, fond records,” which I shall never be able to help making comparative, that in what is done by the public for the public, we are hardly in the same running with England. It is only when we reflect upon our greater municipal virtue, and consider how the economies of our civic servants in the matter of beauty enable them to spend the more in good works, that we can lift up our heads and look down on what England has everywhere wrought for the people in such unspiritual things as parks and gardens, and terraces and promenades and statues. I could have wished that first evening, before I committed myself to any wrong impression or association, that I had known something more, or even anything at all, of the history of Plymouth. But I did not even know that from the Hoe, and possibly the very spot where I stood, the brave Trojan Cirenæus hurled the giant Goemagot into the sea. I was quite as far from remembering any facts of the British civilization which has always flourished so splendidly in the fancy of the native bards, and which has mingled its relics with those of the Roman, not only in the neighborhood of Plymouth, but all over England. As for the facts that Plymouth had been harried throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the incursions of the French; that it was the foremost English port in the time of Elizabeth; that Drake sailed from it in 1585 to bring back the remnant of Raleigh’s colony from Virginia; that one hundred and twenty-seven English ships waited in its waters to meet the Spanish Armada; that it stood alone in the West of England for the Parliament in the Civil War; that Charles II. had signified his displeasure with it for this by building to overawe it the entirely useless fortress in the harbor; and that it was the first town to declare for William of Orange when he landed to urge the flight of the last Stuart: I do not suppose there is any half-educated school-boy but has the facts more about him than I had that first night in Plymouth when I might have found them so serviceable. I could only have matched him in my certainty that this was the Plymouth from which the Mayflower sailed to find, or to found, another Plymouth in the New World; but he could easily have alleged more proofs of our common conviction than I.

At sunset, which they have in Plymouth appropriately late for the spring season and the high latitude, there had been a splotch of red about six feet square in the watery west, promising the fine weather which the morning brought. It also brought more red coats and swagger-sticks in company with the large hats and glaring costumes which had not had so good a chance the night before, whether we saw them in our walk on the Hoe, or met them in the ramble through the town into which we prolonged it. Through the still Sunday morning air there came a drumming and bugling of religious note from the neighboring fortifications, and while we listened, a general officer, or perhaps only a colonel, very tight in the gold and scarlet of his uniform, passed across the Hoe, like a pillar of flame, on his way to church. But I do not know that he was a finer bit of color, after all, than the jet-black cat with a vivid red ribbon at her neck, which had chosen to crouch on the ivied stone-wall across the way from our hotel, in just the spot where the sun fell earliest and would lie longest. There was more ivy than sun in Plymouth, that is the truth, and this cat probably knew what she was about. There was ivy, ivy everywhere, and there were subtropical growths of laurel and oleander and the like, which made a pleasant confusion of earlier Italy and later Bermuda in the brain, and yet was so characteristic of that constantly self-contradictory England.

Many things of it that I had known in flying and poising visits during fifty years of the past began to steal back into my consciousness. The nine-o’clock breakfast, of sole and eggs and bacon, and heavy bread and washy coffee, was of the same moral texture as the sabbatical silence in the pale sunny air, which now I remembered so well, with some weird question whether I was not all the while in Quebec, instead of Plymouth, and the strong conviction at the same time that this was the absurdest of obsessions. The Hoe was not Durham Terrace, but it looked down on a sort of Lower Town from a height almost as great, and the spread of the harbor, with a little help, recalled the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles. But the rows of small houses that sent up the smoke of their chimney-pots were of yellow brick, not of wood or gray stone, and their red roofs were tiled in dull weather-worn tints, and not brilliantly tinned.

Why, I wonder, do we feel such a pleasure in finding different things alike? It is rather stupid, but we are always trying to do it and fatiguing ourselves with the

LOOKING DOWN FROM THE HOE

sterile effect. At Plymouth there was so much to remind me of so much else that it was a relief to be pretty promptly confronted on the Hoe with something so positive, so absolute as a Bath chair, which at the worst could only remind me of something in literature. A stubby old man was tugging it over the ground slowly, as if through a chapter of Dickens; and a wrathful-looking invalid lady sat within, just as if she had got into it from a book. There was little to recall anything else in the men strolling about in caps and knickerbockers, with short pipes in their mouths, or, equally with short pipes, wheeling back and forth on bicycles. There were a few people in top-hats, who had unmistakably the air of having got them out for Sunday; though why every one did not wear them every day in the week was the question when we presently saw a shop-window full of them at three and sixpence apiece.

This was when we had gone down into the town from the Hoe, and found its quiet streets of an exquisite Sunday neatness. They were quite empty, except for very washed-up-looking worshippers going to church, among whom a file of extremely little boys and girls, kept in line and kept moving by a black-gowned church-sister, gave us, with their tender pink cheeks and their tender blue eyes, our first delight in the wonderful West-of-England complexion. The trams do not begin running in any provincial town till afternoon on Sundays, and the loud-rattling milk-carts, bearing bright brass-topped cans as big as the ponies that drew them, seemed the only vehicles abroad. The only shops open were those for the sale of butter and eggs and fruit and flowers; but these necessaries and luxuries abounded in many windows and doorways, especially the flowers, which had already begun to arrive everywhere by tons from the Channel Islands, though it was then so early in March. It is not the least of the advantages which England enjoys that she has her Florida at her door; she has but to put out her hand and it is heaped with flowers and fruits from the Scilly Isles, while the spring is coming slowly up our way at home by fast-freight, through Georgia and the Carolinas and Virginia.

So many things were strange to me that I might have thought I had never been in Plymouth before, and so many things familiar that I might have fancied I had always been there. The long unimpressive stretches of little shops might have been in any second-class American city, which would likewise have shown the same exceptional number of large department stores. What it could not have shown were the well-kept streets, the reverently guarded heritage from the past in here and there a bit of antique architecture amid the prosperous newness; the presence of lingering state in the mansions peering over their high garden wall, or standing withdrawn from the thoroughfares in the quiet of wooded crescents or circles.

I doubt if any American city, great or small, has the same number of birds, dear to poetry, singing in early March, as Plymouth has. That morning as we walked in the town, and that afternoon as we rode on our tram-top into the country, they started from a thousand lovely lines of verse, finches and real larks, and real robins, and many a golden-billed blackbird, and piped us on our way. Overhead, in the veiled sun, circled and swam the ever-cawing rooks, as they jarred in the anxieties of the nesting then urgent with them. They were no better than our birds; I will never own such a recreant thing. If I do not quite prefer a crow to a rook, I am free to say that one oriole or redbird or

A GROUP OF PUBLIC EDIFICES, MODERN PLYMOUTH

hermit-thrush is worth all the English birds that ever sang. Only, the English birds sing with greater authority, and find an echo in the mysterious depths of our ancestral past where they and we were compatriots.

Viewed from the far vantage of some rising ground the three towns of Plymouth, Stonehouse, and Devonport, which have grown together to form one Plymouth, stretch away from the sea in huge long ridges thickly serried with the gables, and bristling with the chimney-pots of their lines of houses. They probably look denselier built than they are through the exaggerative dimness of the air which lends bulk to the features of every distant prospect in England; but for my pleasure I would not have had the houses set any closer than they were on the winding, sloping line of the tram we had taken after luncheon. It was bearing us with a leisurely gait, inconceivable of an American trolley, but quite swiftly enough, towards any point in the country it chose; and after it had carried us through rows and rows of small, low, gray stone cottages, each with its pretty bit of garden at its feet, it bore us on where their strict contiguity ceased in detached villas, and let us have time to look into the depths of their encompassing evergreenery, their ivy, their laurel, their hedges of holly, all shining with a pleasant lustre. So we came out into the familiar provisionality of half-built house-lots, and at last into the open country quite beyond the town, with green market-gardens, and brown ploughed fields, patching the sides of the gentle knolls, laced with white winding roads, that lost their heads in the haze of the horizon, and with woodlands calling themselves “Private,” and hiding the way to stately mansions withdrawn from the commonness of our course.

When the tram stopped we got down, with the other civilian persons of our tram-top company, and with the soldiers and the girls who formed their escort, and hurried beyond hearing of the loud-cackling, hard-mouthed, red-cheeked, black-eyed young woman, whom one sees everywhere in some form, and in whose English version I saw so many an American original that I was humbled with the doubt whether she might not have come out on the Mayflower. There were many other people more inoffensive coming and going, or stretching themselves on the damp new grass in a defiance of the national rheumatism which does not save them from it. At that time, though, I did not know but it might, and I enjoyed the picturesqueness of their temerity with an untroubled mind. I noted merely the kind looks which prevail in English faces of the commoner sort, and I thought the men better and the women worse dressed than Americans of the same order. Then, after I had realized the prevalence of much the same farming tradition as our own, in the spreading fields, and holloed my fancy up and away over the narrow lines climbing between them to the sky, there was nothing left to do but to go to town by a different tram-line from that which brought us. The man I asked for help in this bold enterprise had a face above the ordinary in a sort of quickness, and he seemed to find something unusual in my speech. He answered civilly and fully, as all the English do when you ask them a civil question, without the friendly irony with which Americans often like to visit the inquiring stranger. Then he stopped short, checking the little boy he was leading by the hand, and said, abruptly, “You’re not English!”

“No,” I said, “we’re Americans,” and I added, “From New York.”

“Ah, from New York!” he said, with a visible rush of interest in the fact that it never afterwards brought to another English face, so far as I could see. “From New York! Americans!” and he stood clutching the hand of the little boy, while I felt myself in the presence of a tacit drama, which I have not yet been able to render explicit. Sometimes I have thought it not well to try. It might have been the memory of sad experiences which had left a rancor for our country in his heart, and held him in doubt whether he might not fitly wreak it upon the first chance American he met. Again I fancied it might have been the stirring of some long-deferred hope, some defeated ambition, or the rapture of some ideal of us which had never had the opportunity to disappoint itself. I only know that he looked like a man above his class: an unhappy man anywhere, and probably in England most unhappy. I stupidly hurried on, and after some movement to follow me he let me leave him behind. Whoever he was or whatever his emotion, I hope he was worthy of the sympathy which here offers itself too late. If I could I would perhaps go back to him, and tell him that if he sailed for New York he might never find the America of his vision, but only a hard workaday world like the one he was leaving, where he might be differently circumstanced, but not differently conditioned. I dare say he would not believe me; I am not sure that I should believe myself, though I might well be speaking the truth.

The next day being Monday, it was quite fit that we should go to work with the rest of the world in Plymouth, and we set diligently about the business of looking up such traces of the Pilgrim Fathers as still exist in the town which was so kind to them in their great need of kindness. I will not pretend that the pathetic story recurred to me in full circumstance during our search for the exact place from which the Mayflower last sailed, when after she had come with her sister ship, the Speedwell, from Holland to Southampton, and then started on the voyage to America, she had been forced by the unseaworthiness of the Speedwell to put back as far as Plymouth. Mr. W. E. Griffin, in his very agreeable and careful little book, The Pilgrims in their Three Homes, is able only to define the period of their stay there as “some time,” but he tells us that the disappointed voyagers “were treated very kindly by the people of the Free Church, forming what is now the Grange Street Chapel, the Mayflower meanwhile lying off the Barbican.” The weather was good while the two ships stayed, but when they sailed again the Speedwell returned to London with some twenty of the homesick or heart-sick, while all her other people stowed themselves with their belongings in the little Mayflower as best they could, and she once more put out to sea: a prison where the brutal shipmen were their jailers; a lazar where the seeds of death were planted in many that were soon to fill the graves secreted under the snow of the savage shore they were seeking.

I believe it was the visiting association of American librarians who caused, a few years ago, a flag-stone in the pavement of the quay where the Mayflower lay to be inscribed with her name and the date 1620, as well as a more explicit tablet to be let into the adjacent parapet. Perhaps our driver could have found these records for us, or we could have found them for ourselves, but I am all the same grateful for the good offices of several unoccupied spectators, especially a friendly matron who had disposed of her morning’s stock of fish, and had now the leisure for indulging an interest in our search. She constituted herself the tutelary spirit of the neighborhood, which smelt of immemorial catches of fish, both from the adjacent market and from the lumpish, quaintly rigged craft crowding one another in the docks and composing in an insurpassable picturesqueness; and she directed us wherever we wanted to go.

The barbican of the citadel from which the Mayflower sailed, before there was either citadel or barbican, is no great remove from the Hoe, which may justly enough boast itself “the first promenade in England,” but it is quite in another world: a seventeenth-century world of narrow streets crooking up hill and down, and overhung by the little bulging houses which the pilgrims must have seen as they came and went on their affairs with the ship, scarcely bigger than the fishing-boats now nosing at the quay where she then lay. Whatever it was in the Mayflower’s time, it is not a proud neighborhood in ours, nor has it any reason to be proud; for it is apparently what is indefinitely called a purlieu. At one point where I climbed a steep thoroughfare to look at what no doubt unwarrantably professed to be a remnant of “Cromwell’s castle,” I met an elderly man, who was apparently looking up truant school-children, and who said, quite without prompting, “This used to be ’ell upon earth,” with something in his tone implying that it might still be a little like it. We could not get into the ruin, the solitary who tenanted its one habitable room being away on a visit, as a neighbor put her head out of a window opposite to tell us.

Probably the traveller who wishes for a just impression of the Plymouth of 1620 will get it more reliably somewhat away from the immediate scene of the Mayflower’s departure. There are old houses abundantly overhanging their first stories, after the seventeenth-century fashion, in the pleasanter streets which keep aloof from the water. If he is more bent upon a sense of modern Plymouth he will do best to visit her group of public edifices, the Guild Hall, the Law Courts, the Library, and see all that I did not see of the vast shipping which constitutes her one of the greatest English ports, and the government works which magnify her importance among the naval stations of the world.

It is always best to leave something for a later comer, and I may seem almost to have left too much by any one whom I shall have inspired to linger in Plymouth long enough after landing to get his sea-legs off. But really I was continually finding the most charming things. The very business aspects of Plymouth had their charm. I saw a great prosperity around me, but there was no sense of the hustle which is supposed alone to create prosperity with us. I dare say that below the unruffled surface of life there is sordid turmoil enough, but I did not perceive it, and I prefer still to think of Plymouth as the first of the many places in England where the home-wearied American might spend his last days in the repose of a peaceful exile, with all the comforts, which only much money can buy with us, cheaply about him. He could live like a gentleman in Plymouth for about half what the same state would cost him in his own air, unless he went as far inland as the inexpensive Middle West, and then it would be dearer in as large a town. He could keep his republican self-respect in his agreeable banishment by remembering how Plymouth had held for the Commonwealth in Cromwell’s time, and the very name of the place would bring him near to the heroic Plymouth on the other shore of the Atlantic. I speak from experience, for even in my two days’ stay with the mother Plymouth I had now and then a vision of the daughter Plymouth, on the elm-shaded slopes of

OLD HOUSES ALOOF FROM THE WATER

her landlocked bay, filially the subordinate in numbers and riches with which she began her alien life. Still of wood, as the English Plymouth is still of stone, and newer by a thousand years, she has an antiquity of her own precious to Americans, and a gentle picturesqueness which I found endearing when I first saw her in the later eighteen-sixties, and which I now recalled as worthy of her lineage. Perhaps it was because I had always thought the younger Plymouth would be a kind dwelling-place that I fancied a potential hospitality in the elder. At any rate I thought it well, while I was on the ground, to choose a good many eligible residences, not only among the proud mansions overlooking the Hoe, but in some of the streets whose gentility had decayed, but which were still keeping up appearances in their fine roomy old houses, or again in the newer and simpler suburban avenues, where I thought I could be content in one of the pretty stone cottages costing me forty pounds a year, with my holly hedge before me belting in a little garden of all but perennial bloom.

We had chanced upon weather that we might easily have mistaken for climate. There was the lustre of soft sunshine in it, and there was the song of birds in the wooded and gardened pleasaunces which opened in several directions about the Hoe, and seemed to follow the vagarious lines of ancient fortifications. Whether weather or climate, it could not have been more suitable for the excursion we planned our last afternoon across that stretch of water which separates Plymouth from the seat of the lords who have their title from the great estate. The mansion is not one of the noble houses which are open to the public in England, and even to get into the grounds you must have leave from the manor-house. This will not quite answer the raw American’s expectation of a manor-house; it looks more like a kind of office in a Plymouth street; but if you get from it as guide a veteran of the navy with an agreeable cast in his eye, and an effect of involuntary humor in his rusty voice, you have not really so much to complain of. In our own case the veteran’s intelligence seemed limited to delivering us over at gates to gardeners and the like, who gave us back to his keeping after the just recognition of their vested interests, and then left him to walk us unsparingly over the whole place, which had grown as large at least as some of our smaller States, say Connecticut or New Jersey, by the time we had compassed it. We imagined afterwards that he might have led us a long way about, not from stupidity, but from a sardonic amusement in our protests; and we were sure he knew that the bird he called a nightingale was no nightingale. It was as if he had said to himself, on our asking if there were none there, “Well, if they want a nightingale, let ’em have it,” and had chosen the first songster we heard. There were already songsters enough in the trees about to choose any sort from, for we were now in Cornwall, and the spring is very early in Cornwall. There were primroses growing at the roots of the trees in the park; in the garden closes were bamboos and palms, and rhododendrons in bloom, with cork-trees and ilexes, springing from the soaked earth which the sun damply shining from the spongy heavens could never have dried. The confusion of the tropical and temperate zones in this air, which was that of neither or both, was somewhat heightened by the first we saw of those cedars of Lebanon which so abound in England that you can hardly imagine any left on Lebanon. It was a dark, spreading tree, with a biblical seriousness and an oriental poetry of aspect, under whose low shelving branches one might think to find the scripturalized childhood of our race. The gardens, whether English or French or Italian, appealed to a more sophisticated consciousness; but it had all a dim, blurred fascination which words refuse to impart, and the rooks, wheeling in their aërial orbits overhead, seemed to deepen the spell with the monotony of their mystical incantations. There were woodland spaces which had the democratic friendliness of American woods, as if not knowing themselves part of a nobleman’s estate, and which gave the foot a home welcome with the bedding of their fallen leaves. But the rabbits which had everywhere broken the close mossy turf with their burrowing and thrown out the red soil over the grass, must have been consciously a part of the English order. As for the deer, lying in herds, or posing statuesquely against the sky on some stretch of summit, they were as absolutely a part of it as if they had been in the peerage. A flag floated over the Elizabethan mansion of gray stone (rained a fine greenish in the long succession of springs and falls), to intimate that the family was at home, and invite the public to respect its privacy by keeping away from the grounds next about it; and in the impersonal touch of exclusion which could be so impersonally accepted, the sense of certain English things was perfected. You read of them all your life, till you imagine them things of actual experience, but when you come face to face with them you perceive that till then they have been as unreal as anything else in the romances where you frequented them, and that you have not known their true quality and significance. In fiction they stood for a state as gracious as it was splendid, and welcomed the reader to an equal share in it; but in fact they imply the robust survival, in commercial and industrial times, of a feudal condition so wholly obsolete in its alien admirer’s experience that none of the imitations of it which he has seen at home suggest it more than by a picturesqueness almost as provisional as that of the theatre.

What the alien has to confess in its presence is that it is an essential part of a system which seems to work, and in the simpler terms, to work admirably; so that if he has a heart to which the ideal of human equality is dear, it must shrink with certain withering doubts as he looks on the lovely landscapes everywhere in which those who till the fields and keep the woods have no ownership, in severalty or in common. He must remember how persistently and recurrently this has been the history of mankind, how, while democracies and republics have come and gone, patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, have remained, or have returned after they had passed. If he is a pilgrim reverting from the new world to which the outgoing pilgrims sailed, there to open from the primeval woods a new heaven and a new earth, his dismay will not justly be for the persistence of the old forms which they left behind, but for the question whether these forms have not somehow fixed themselves as firmly and lastingly in his native as in his ancestral country. I do not say that any such anxieties spoiled the pleasure of my afternoon. I was perhaps expecting to see much more perfect instances of the kind, and I was probably postponing the psychological effect to these. It is a fault of travel that you are always looking forward to something more typical, and you neglect immediate examples because they offer themselves at the outset, or you reject them as only approximately representative to find that they are never afterwards surpassed. That was the case with our hotel, which was quite perfect in its way: a way rather new to England, I believe, and quite new to my knowledge of England.

It is a sort of hotel where you can live for as short or as long a time as you will at an inclusive rate for the day or week, and always in greater comfort for less money than you can at home, except in the mere matter of warmth. Warm you cannot be in-doors, and why should not you go out-doors for warmth, when the subtropical growths in the well-kept garden, which never fails to enclose that kind of hotel, are flourishing in a temperature distinctly above freezing? They always had the long windows, that opened into the garden, ajar when we came into the reading-room after dinner, and the modest little fire in the grate veiled itself under a covering of cinders or coal-siftings, so that it was not certain that the first-comer who got the chair next to it was luckiest. Yet around this cold hearth the social ice was easily broken, and there bubbled up a better sort of friendly talk than always follows our diffidence in public places at home. Without knowing it, or being able to realize it at that moment, we were confronted with a social condition which is becoming more and more general in England, where in winter even more than in summer people have the habit of leaving town for a longer or a shorter time, which they spend in a hotel like ours at Plymouth. There they meet in apparent fearlessness of the consequences of being more or less agreeable to one another, and then part as informally as they meet. But as yet we did not know that there was that sort of hotel or that we were in it, and we lost the earliest occasion of realizing a typical phase of recent English civilization.

II
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER

THE weather, on the morning we left Plymouth, was at once cloudy and fair, and chilly and warm, as it can be only in England. It ended by cheering up, if not quite clearing up, and from time to time the sun shone so brightly into our railway carriage that we said it would have been absurd to supplement it with the hot-water foot-warmer which, in many trains, still embodies the English notion of car-heating. The sun shone even more brightly outside, and lay in patches much larger than our compartment floor on the varied surface of that lovely English country with which we rapturously acquainted and reacquainted ourselves, as the train bore us smoothly (but not quite so smoothly as an American train would have borne us) away from the sea and up towards the heart of the land. The trees, except the semitropical growths, were leafless yet, with no sign of budding; the grass was not so green as at Plymouth; but there were primroses (or cowslips: does it matter which?) in bloom along the railroad banks, and young lambs in the meadows where their elders nosed listlessly among the chopped turnips strewn over the turf. Whether it was in mere surfeit, or in an invincible distaste for turnips, or an instinctive repulsion from their frequent association at table, that the sheep everywhere showed this apathy, I cannot make so sure

A BIT OF COUNTRY BETWEEN PLYMOUTH AND EXETER

as I can of such characteristic features of the landscape as the gray stone cottages with thatched roofs, and the gray stone villages with tiled roofs clustering about the knees of a venerable mother-church and then thinning off into the scattered cottages again.

As yet we were not fully sensible of the sparsity of the cottages; that is something which grows upon you in England, as the reasons for it become more a part of your knowledge. Then you realize why a far older country where the land is in a few hands must be far lonelier than ours, where each farmer owns his farm, and lives on it. Mile after mile you pass through carefully tilled fields with no sign of a human habitation, but at first your eyes and your thoughts are holden from the fact in a vision of things endeared by association from the earliest moment of your intellectual nonage. The primroses, if they are primroses and not cowslips, are a pale-yellow wash in the grass; the ivy is creeping over the banks and walls, and climbing the trees, and clothing their wintry nakedness; the hedge-rows, lifted on turf-covered foundations of stone, change the pattern of the web they weave over the prospect as your train passes; the rooks are drifting high or drifting low; the little streams loiter brimful through the meadows steeped in perpetual rains; and all these material facts have a witchery from poetry and romance to transmute you to a common substance of tradition. The quick transition from the present to the past, from the industrial to the feudal, and back again as your train flies through the smoke of busy towns, and then suddenly skirts some nobleman’s park where the herds of fallow deer lie motionless on the borders of the lawn sloping up to the stately mansion, is an effect of the magic that could nowhere else bring the tenth and twentieth centuries so bewilderingly together. At times, in the open, I seemed to be traversing certain pastoral regions of southern Ohio; at other times, when the woods grew close to the railroad track, I was following the borders of Beverly Farms on the Massachusetts shore, in either case recklessly irresponsible for the illusion, which if I had been in one place or the other I could have easily reversed, and so been back in England.

The run from Plymouth to Exeter is only an hour and a half, but in that short space we stopped four or five minutes at towns where I should have been glad to have stopped as many days if I had known what I lost by hurrying on. I do not know it yet, but I know that one loses so greatly in every sort of high interest at all the towns one does not stop at in England that one departs at last a ruined, a beggared man. As it was we could only avert our faces from the pane as we drew out of each tempting station, and sigh for the certainty of Exeter’s claims upon us. There our first cathedral was waiting us, and there we knew, from the words which no guide-book fails to repeat, that we should find “a typical English city ... alike of Briton, Roman, and Englishman, the one great prize of the Christian Saxon, the city where Jupiter gave way to Christ, but where Christ never gave way to Wodin.... None other can trace up a life so unbroken to so remote a past.” Whether, when we found it, we found it equal to the unique grandeur imputed to it, I prefer to escape saying by saying that the cathedral at Exeter is more than equal to any expectation you can form of it, even if it is not your first cathedral. A city of scarcely forty thousand inhabitants may well be forgiven if it cannot look an unbroken life from so remote a past as Exeter’s.

“IN EXETER OUR FIRST CATHEDRAL WAS WAITING US”

Chicago herself, with all her mythical millions, might not be able to do as much in the like case; when it comes to certain details I doubt if even New York would be equal to it.

I will not pretend that I was intimately acquainted with her history before I came to Exeter. I will frankly own that I did not drive up to the Butt of Malmsey in the hotel omnibus quite aware that the castle of Exeter was built on an old British earthwork; or that many coins, vases, and burial-urns dug up from such streets as I passed through prove the chief town of Devonshire to have been built on an important Roman station. To me it did not at once show its Romano-British origin in the central crossing of its principal streets at right angles; but the better-informed reader will recall without an effort that the place was never wholly deserted during the darkest hours of the Saxon conquest. The great Alfred drove the Danes out of it in 877, and fortified and beautified it, and Athelstan, when he came to Exeter in 926, discovered Briton and Saxon living there on terms of perfect amity and equality. Together they must have manned the walls in resisting the Northmen, and they probably united in surrendering the city to William the Conqueror after a siege of eighteen days, which was long for an English town to hold out against him. He then built the castle of Rougemont, of which a substantial ruin yet remains for the pleasure of such travellers as do not find it closed for repairs; and the city held for Matilda in the wars of 1137, but it was finally taken by King Stephen. In 1469 it was for the Red Rose against the White when the houses of Lancaster and York disputed its possession, and for the Old Religion against the New in the time of Henry VIII.’s high-handed reforms, when the Devonshire and Cornish men fought for the ancient faith within its walls against his forces without. The pretender Perkin Warbeck (a beautiful name, I always think, like a bird-note, and worthy a truer prince) had vainly besieged it in 1549; and in the Civil War it was taken and retaken by King and Parliament. At some moment before these vicissitudes, Charles’s hapless daughter Henrietta, who became Madame of France, was born in Exeter; and in Exeter likewise was born that General Monk who brought the Stuarts back after Cromwell’s death.

The Butt of Malmsey had advertised itself as the only hotel in the cathedral close, and as we had stopped at Exeter for the cathedral’s sake we fell a willing prey to the fanciful statement. There is of course no hotel in the cathedral close, but the Butt of Malmsey is so close to the cathedral that it may have unintentionally confused the words. At any rate, it stood facing the side of the beautiful pile and getting its noble Norman towers against a sky, which we would not have had other than a broken gray, above the tops of trees where one nesting rook the less would have been an incalculable loss. One of the rooms which the managers could give us looked on this lovely sight, and if the other looked into a dim court, why, all the rooms in a cathedral close, or close to a cathedral, cannot command views of it.

We had of course seen the cathedral almost before we saw the city in our approach, but now we felt that the time spent before studying it would be time lost and we made haste to the great west front. To the first glance it is all a soft gray blur of age-worn carving, in which no point or angle seems to have failed of the touch which has blent all the archaic sanctities and royalties of the glorious screen in a dim sumptuous harmony of figures and faces. Whatever I had sceptically read,

THE CASTLE OF ROUGEMONT

and yet more impatiently heard, of the beauty of English cathedrals was attested and approved far beyond cavil, and after that first glance I asked nothing but submissively to see more and more of their gracious splendor. No wise reader will expect me to say what were the sculptured facts before me or to make the hopeless endeavor to impart a sense of the whole structure in descriptions or admeasurements. Let him take any picture of it, and then imagine something of that form vastly old and dark, richly wrought over in the stone to the last effects of tender delicacy by the miracles of Gothic art. So let him suppose the edifice set among leafless elms, in which the tattered rooks’-nests swing blackening, on a spread of close greensward, under a low welkin, where thin clouds break and close in a pallid blue, and he will have as much of Exeter Cathedral as he can hope to have without going there to see for himself; it can never otherwise be brought to him in words of mine.

Neither, without standing in that presence or another of its kind, can he realize what the ages of faith were. Till then the phrase will remain a bit of decorative rhetoric, but then he will live a meaning out of it which will die only with him. He will feel, as well as know, how men built such temples in an absolute trust and hope now extinct, but without which they could never have been built, and how they continued to grow, like living things, from the hearts rather than the hands of strongly believing men. So that of Exeter grew, while all through the tenth and eleventh centuries the monks of its immemorial beginning were flying from the heathen invasions, but still returning, till the Normans gave their monastery fixity in the twelfth century, and the long English succession of bishops maintained the cathedral in ever-increasing majesty till the rude touch of the Tudor stayed the work that had prospered under the Norman and Plantagenet and Lancastrian kings. If the age of faith shall extend itself to his perception, as he listens to the afternoon service in the taper-starred twilight, far back into the times before Christ, he may hear in the chanting and intoning the voice of the first articulate religions of the world. The sound of that imploring and beseeching, that wailing and sighing, which drifts out to him through the screen of the choir will come heavy with the pathos of the human abasing itself before the divine in whatever form men may have imagined God, and seeking the pity and the mercy of which Christianity was not the first to feel the need. Then, if he has a sense of the unbroken continuity of ceremonial, the essential unity of form, from Pagan to Roman and from Roman to Anglican, perhaps he will have more patience than he otherwise might with the fierce zeal of the fanatics who would at last away with all ceremonial and all form, and would stand in their naked souls before the eternal justice and make their appeal direct, and if need be, through their noses, to Him who desireth not the death of a sinner.

Unless the visitor to Exeter Cathedral can come into something of this patience, he will hardly tolerate the thought of the Commonwealth’s-men who deemed that they were doing God’s will when they built a brick wall through it, and listened on one side to an Independent chaplain, and on the other to a Presbyterian minister. It is said that they “had great quiet and comfort” in their worship on each side of their wall, which was of course taken down directly after the Restoration. For this no one can reasonably grieve; and one may of course rejoice that Cromwell’s troopers did not stable

“THE CATHEDRAL ... A SOFT GRAY BLUR OF AGE-WORN CARVING”

their horses in Exeter Cathedral. They forbore to do so in few other old churches in England, but we did not know how to value fully its exemption from this profanation in our first cathedral. We took the fact with an ignorant thanklessness from our guide-book, and we acquiesced, with some surprise, in the lack of any such official as a verger to instruct us in the unharmed monuments. The printed instructions which we received from the placard overhanging a box at the gate to the choir did not go beyond the elementary precept that we were each to put sixpence in it; after that we were left free to look about for ourselves, and we made the round of the tombs and altars unattended.

The disappointment which awaits one in English churches, if one’s earlier experience of churches has been in Latin countries, is of course from the want of pictures. Color there is and enough in the stained windows which Cromwell’s men sometimes spared, but the stained windows in Exeter are said to be indifferent good. In compensation for this, there are traces of the frescoing which once covered the walls, and which Cromwell’s men neglected to whitewash. They also heedlessly left unspoiled that wonderful Minstrel’s Gallery stretching across the front of the choir, with its fourteen tuneful angels playing forever on as many sculptured instruments of stone. For the rest the monuments are of the funereal cast to which the devout fancy is pretty much confined in all sacred edifices. There is abundance of bishops lying on their tombs, with their features worn away in the exposure from which those of many crusaders have been kept by their stone visors. But what was most expressive of the past, which both bishops and crusaders reported so imperfectly, was the later portrait statuary, oftenest of Elizabethan ladies and their lords, painted in the colors of life and fashion, with their ruffs and farthingales worn as they were when they put them off, to rest in the tombs on which their effigies lie. It is not easy to render the sense of a certain consciousness which seemed to deepen in these, as the twilight of the closing day deepened round them in the windows and arches. If they were waiting to hold converse after the night had fallen, one would hardly have cared to stay for a share in their sixteenth-century gossip, and I could understand the feeling of the two dear old ladies who made anxiously up to us at one point of our common progress, and asked us if we thought there was any danger of being locked in. I did my poor best to reassure them, and they took heart, and were delightfully grateful. When we had presently missed them we found them waiting at the door, to thank us again, as if we had saved them from a dreadful fate, and to shake hands and say good-bye.

If it were for them alone, I should feel sensibly richer for my afternoon in our first cathedral. But I think my satisfaction was heightened just before we left, by meeting a man with a wheelbarrow full of coal which he was trundling through “the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault” to the great iron stoves placed on either side of the nave to warm the cathedral, and contribute in their humble way to that perfect balance of parts which is the most admired effect of its architectural symmetry. As he stopped before each stove and noisily stoked it from a clangorous shovel, the simple sincerity of this bit of necessary house-keeping in the ancient fane seemed to strike a note characteristic of the English civilization, and to suggest the plain outrightness by which it has been able to save itself sound through every age and fortune. The English have reared a civic edifice more majestic than any the world has yet seen, but in the temple of their liberty and their loyalty a man with a wheelbarrow full of coal has always been frankly invited to appear when needed. It is this mingling of the poetical ideal and the practical real which has preserved them at every emergency, and but for his timely ministrations church and state would alike have fared ill in the past. He has kept both habitable, and to any one who visits cathedrals with a luminous mind the man with the wheelbarrow of coal will remain as distinctly a part of the impression as the processioning and recessioning celebrants coming and going in their white surplices, with their red and black bands; or even the singing of the angel-voiced choir-boys, who as they hurry away at the end of the service do not all look as seraphic as they have sounded. There is often indeed something in the passing regard of choir-boys less suggestive of the final state of young-eyed cherubim than of evil provisionally repressed.

I do not say that I thought all this before leaving the cathedral in Exeter, or till long afterwards. I was at the time rather bent upon seeing more of the town, in which I felt a quality different from that of Plymouth though it pleased me no better. The manageress of the Butt of Malmsey had boasted already of the numbers of nobility and gentry living in the neighborhood of the little city, where, she promised, we should see ten private carriages for every one in Plymouth. I did not keep count, but I dare say she was right. What was more to my crude pleasure was the sight of the many Tudor, and earlier than Tudor, houses in the High Street and the other streets of Exeter, with their second stories overhanging their first, to that effect of baffle in the leaded casements of their gables which we fancy in the eyes of stout gentlemen who try to catch sight of their feet over the intervening bulge of their waistcoats. They are incomparably picturesque, those Tudor houses, and as I had afterwards occasion to note from some of their interiors, they mark a beginning of domestic comfort, which, if not modern on the American terms, is quite so on the English.

To the last, I had always to make my criticisms of the provision for the inner house in England, but my conviction that the English had little to learn of us in providing for the inner man began quite as early as in my first walks about Exeter, where the most perverse American could not have helped noting the abundance and variety of the fruits and vegetables at the green-grocers’. Southern Europe had supplied these better than Florida and California supply them with us at the same season in towns the size of Exeter, or indeed in any less luxurious than our great seaboard cities. Counting in the apples and oranges from South Africa and the Pacific colonies of Great Britain, we are far out of it as to cheapness and quality. Then, no place in England is so remote from one sea or another as not always to have the best and freshest fish, which as the dealers arrange them with an artistic eye for form and color, make, it must be owned, a more appetizing show than the thronging shapes of carnage which start from the butchers’ doors and windows, and bleed upon the sidewalk, and gather microbes from every passing gust. There is something peculiarly loathsome in these displays of fresh meat carcases all over England, which does not affect the spectator from the corded and mounded ham and bacon in the grocers’ shops, though when one thinks of the myriads of eggs needed to accompany these at the forty million robust English breakfasts every morning, it is with doubt and despair for the hens. They seem equal to the demand upon them, however, like every one and everything else English, and they always lay eggs enough, as if every hen knew that England expected her to do her duty.

We sauntered through Exeter without a plan, and took it as it came in a joy which I wish I could believe was reciprocal, and which was at no moment higher than when we found at the corner of the most impressive old place in Exeter the office of a certain New York insurance company. As smiling fate would have it, this was the very company in which I was myself insured, and I paused before it with effusion, and shook hands with the actuary in the spirit. In the flesh, if he was an Englishman, he might not have known what to do with my emotion, but with Englishmen in the spirit the wandering American always finds himself cordially at home. One must not say that the longer they have been in the spirit the better; some of them who are actually still in the flesh are also in the spirit; but a certain historical remove is apt to relieve friends of that sort of stiffness which keeps them at arm’s-length when they meet as contemporaries. At the other end of Bedford Circus, where I had my glad moment with the insurance actuary, I found myself in the presence of that daughter of Charles I., the Princess Henrietta, who was born there near three hundred years ago, and whose life I had lately followed with pathos for her young exile from England, through her girlhood in France, and through her unhappy marriage with the King’s brother Monsieur, to the afternoon of her last day when she lay so long dying in the presence of the court, as some thought, of poison. I could not feel myself an intrusive witness at that strange scene, which now represented itself in Bedford Circus, with the courtiers coming and going, and the doctors joining their medical endeavors with the spiritual ministrations of the prelates, and the poor princess herself taking part in the speculations and discussions, and presently in the midst of all incontinently making her end.

I suppose it would not be good taste to boast of the intimacy I enjoyed with the clergy in the neighborhood of the cathedral, by favor of their translation into a region much remoter than the past. Without having the shadow of acquaintance with them and without removing them for an instant from their pleasant houses and gardens in the close at Exeter, I put them back a generation, and met them with familiar ease in the friendly circumstance of Trollope’s many stories of cathedral towns. I am not sure they would have liked that if they had known it, and certainly I should not have done it if they had known it; but as it was I could do it without offence. When we could rend ourselves from the delightful company of those deans, and canons, and minor canons, and prebendaries, with whom we really did not pass a word, we went a long idle walk to an old-fashioned part of the town overlooking the Exe from the crest of a hill, where certain large out-dated mansions formed themselves in a crescent. We instantly bought property there in preference to any more modern neighborhood, and there our subliminal selves remain, and stroll out into the pretty park and sit on the benches, and superintend the lading and unlading of the small craft from foreign ports in the old ship-canal below: the oldest ship-canal in the world, indeed, whose beginnings Shakespeare was born too late to see. We do not find the shipping is any the less picturesque for being much entangled in the net-work of railroad lines (for Exeter is a large junction), or feel the sticks and spars more discordant with the smoke and steam of the locomotives through which they pierce, than with the fine tracery of the trees farther away.

I was never an enemy of the confusion of the old and new in Europe when Italy was all Europe for me, and now in England it was distinctly a pleasure. It is something we must accept, whether we like it or not, and we had better like it. The pride of the old custodian of the Exeter Guildhall in the coil of hot-water pipes heating the ancient edifice was quite as acceptable as his pride in the thirteenth-century carvings of the oaken door and the oak-panelled walls, the portraits of the Princess Henrietta and General Monk, and the swords bestowed upon the faithful city by Edward IV. and Henry VII. I warmed my chilly hands at the familiar radiator while I thawed my fancy out to play about the medieval facts, and even fly to that uttermost antiquity when the Roman Præetorium stood where the Guildhall stands now. Still, I was not so warm all over but that I was glad to shun the in-doors inclemency to which we must have returned in the hotel, and to prolong our stay in the milder air outside by going a drive beyond the city into the charming country. I do not say that the country was more charming than about Plymouth, but it had its pleasant difference, which was hardly a difference in the subtropical types of trees and shrubs. There were the same evergreens hedging and shading, too deeply shading, the stone cottages of the suburbs as we had seen nearer the sea; but when we were well out of the town, we had climbed to high, rolling fields, which looked warm even when the sun did not shine upon them; there were brown bare woods cresting the hills, and the hedge-rows ran bare and brown between the ploughed fields and the verdure of the pastures and the wheat. Behind and below us lay the town, clustering about the cathedral which dwarfed its varying tops to the illusion of one level.

We had driven out by a handsome avenue called, for reasons I did not penetrate, Pennsylvania Road. Stately houses lined the way, and the wealth and consequence of the town had imaginably transferred themselves to Pennsylvania Road from the fine old crescent where we had perhaps rashly invested; though I shall never regret it. But we came back another way, winding round by the first English lane I had ever driven through. It was all, and more, than I could have asked of it in that quality, for it was so narrow between the tall hedges, which shut everything else from sight, that if we had met another vehicle, I do not know what would have happened. There was a breathless moment when I thought we were going to meet a market-cart, but luckily it turned into an open gateway before the actual encounter. There must be tacit provision for such a chance in the British Constitution, but it is not for a semi-alien like an American to say what it is.

We were apparently the first of our nation to reach Exeter that spring, for as we came in to lunch we heard an elderly cleric, who had the air of lunching every day at the Butt of Malmsey, say to his waiter, “The Americans are coming early this year.” We had reasons of our own for thinking we had come too early; probably in midsummer the old-established cold of the venerable hostelry is quite tolerable. If I had been absolutely new to the past, I could not have complained, even in March, of its reeling floors and staggering stairways and dim passages; these were as they should be, and I am not saying anything against the table. That again was better than it would have been at a hotel in an American town of the size of Exeter, and it had a personal application at breakfast and luncheon that pleased and comforted; the table d’hôte dinner was, as in other English inns, far preferable to the indiscriminate and wasteful superabundance for which we pay too much at our own. It is of the grates in the Butt of Malmsey that I complain, and I do not know that I should have cause to complain of these if I had not rashly ordered fire in mine. To give the grate time to become glowing, as grates always should be in old inns, I passed an hour or two in the reading-room talking with an elderly Irish gentleman who had come to that part of England with his wife to buy a place and settle down for the remnant of his days, after having spent the greater part of his life in South Africa. He could not praise South Africa enough. Everything flourished there and every one prospered; his family had grown up and he had left seven children settled there; it was the most wonderful country under the sun; but the two years he had now passed in England were worth the whole thirty-five years that he had passed in South Africa. I agreed with him in extolling the English country and climate, while I accepted all that he said of South Africa as true, and then I went up to my room.

With the aid of the two candles which I lighted I discovered the grate in the wall near the head of the bed, and on examining it closely I perceived that there was a fire in it. The grate would have held quite a double-handful of coal if carefully put on; the fire which seemed to be flickering so feebly had yet had the energy to draw all the warmth of the chamber up the chimney, and I stood shivering in the temperature of a subterranean dungeon. The place instantly gave evidence of being haunted, and the testimony of my nerves on this point was corroborated by the spectral play of the firelight on the ceiling, when I blew out my candles. In the middle of the night I woke to the sense of something creeping with a rustling noise over the floor. I rejected the hypothesis of my bed-curtain falling into place, though I remembered putting it back that I might have light to read myself drowsy. I knew at once that it was a ghost walking the night there, and walking hard. Suddenly it ceased, and I knew why: it had been frozen out.

III
A FORTNIGHT IN BATH

THE American who goes to England as part of the invasion which we have lately heard so much of must constantly be vexed at finding the Romans have been pretty well everywhere before him. He might not mind the Saxons, the Danes, the Normans so much, or the transitory Phœnicians, and, of course, he could have no quarrel with the Cymri, who were there from the beginning, and formed a sort of subsoil in which conquering races successively rooted and flourished; but it is hard to have the Romans always cropping up and displacing the others. He likes well enough to meet them in southern Europe; he enjoys their ruins in Italy, in Spain, in France; but the fact of their presence in Britain forms too great a strain for his imagination. By dint of having been there such a long time ago they seem to have anticipated any novelty there is in his own coming, and by having remained four hundred years they leave him little hope of doing anything very surprising in a stay of four months. He is gnawed by a secret jealousy of the Romans, and when he lands in Liverpool, as he commonly does, and discovers them in possession of the remote antiquity of Chester, where he goes for a little comfortable mediævalism before pushing on to wreak himself on the vast modernity of London, he can hardly govern his impatience. Their vestiges are less intrusive at Plymouth and Exeter than at Chester, but still I think the sort of American I have been fancying would have been incommoded by a sense of them in the air of either place, and, if he had followed on with us to Bath, would have found no benefit from the springs which they frequented two thousand years earlier, so fevered must have been his resentment.

The very beginnings of Bath were Roman, for I suppose Prince Bladud is not to be taken as serious history, though he is poetically important as the putative prototype of King Lear (I believe he had also the personal advantage of being a giant), and he is interesting as one of the few persons who have ever profited by the example of the pigs. Men are constantly warned against that, in every way, but Prince Bladud, who went forth from his father’s house a leper, and who observed the swine under his charge wallowing in the local waters and coming out cured from his infection, immediately tried them himself, and recovered and lived to be the father of an unnatural family of daughters. By inspiring Shakespeare with the theme of his great tragedy, he was the first to impart the literary interest to Bath which afterwards increased there until it fairly rivalled its social and pathological interest. But the Romans have undoubtedly a claim to the honor of building a city on the site of the present town; under their rule it became the favorite resort of the gayety which always goes hand in hand with infirmity at medicinal springs, and if you dig anywhere in Bath, now, you come upon its vestiges. A little behind and below the actual Pump Room, these are so abundant that, if you cannot go to Herculaneum or Pompeii, you can still have a fair notion of Roman luxury from the vast tanks for bathing, the stone platforms, steps, and seats, the vaulted roofs and columns, the furnaces for heating the waters, and the system of pipes for conveying it from point to point. The plumbing, in its lavish use of material, attests the advance of the Romans in the most actual and expensive of the arts; and the American invader must recognize, with whatever of gall and bitterness, that his native plumbers would have little to teach those of the conquerors who possessed Britain two thousand years before him.

If he had been coming with us from Exeter the morning we arrived, he might, indeed, have triumphed over the Romans in the comfort of his approach, for, after all, there are few trains like the English trains to give you a sense of safety, snugness, and swiftness. I like getting into them from the level of the platform, instead of climbing several steps to reach them, as we do with ours, and I like being followed into my compartment by one of those amiable porters who abound in English stations, and save your arms from being pulled out of their sockets by your hand-baggage. They are the kindest and carefullest of that class whom Lord Chesterfield nobly called his unfortunate friends, and who in England are treated with a gentle consideration almost equal to their own, and as porters they are so grateful for the slightest recompense of their service. I have seen people give them twopence, for some slight office, or nothing when they were people who could not afford something; but I never saw an English porter’s face clouded by the angry resentment which instantly darkens the French porter’s brow if he thinks himself underpaid, as he always seems to do. It did not perceptibly matter to the English porter whether he followed me into a first-class or a third-class carriage, and it was from a mere love of luxury and not from the hope of gratifying any sense of superiority to the fellow-being with my hand-baggage that I ended by travelling first-class for short hauls in England. On the expresses, like those from London to Edinburgh, you can make the journey third-class in perfect comfort, and with no great risk of overcrowding, but not, I should say, in the way-trains.

We had come third-class from Plymouth to Exeter in a superstition preached us before leaving home, that everybody now went third-class in England, that to go first-class was sinfully extravagant, and that to go second-class was to chance travelling with valets and lady’s-maids. But in coming on from Exeter we thought we would risk this contamination, and, not realizing that the first-class rate was no greater than ours with the cost of a Pullman ticket added, I boldly “booked” second-class. But so far from finding ourselves in a compartment with valets and lady’s-maids, in whose company I hope we should have avouched our quality by promptly perishing, we were quite alone, except for the presence of a lady who sat by the window knitting, knitting, knitting. She did not look up, but from time to time she looked out, till our interchanges of joy in the landscape seemed to win upon her, and then she looked round. Her glance at the member of our party whose sex seemed to warrant her in the overture was apparently reassuring. She asked if we would like the window closed, and we pretended that we would not, but she closed it, and then she arranged her needles in her knitting, and folded her knitting up, and put it firmly away in her bag, and began to talk. Evidently she liked talking, but evidently she liked listening, too, and she let us do our share of both in confirming the tacit treaty of amity between our nations. She spoke

GREAT PULTENEY STREET

of the Americans, not as cousins, but as brothers and sisters; and I began to be sorry for all the unkind things I had said of the English, and mutely to pray that she might never see them, however just they were. She had been in America, as well as most other parts of the world, and we tried hard for some mutual acquaintance. Our failure did not matter; we were friends for that trip and train at least, and when we came to Bristol, where our own party was to change, we were fain to run away from our tea in the restaurant to take the hand held out to us from the window of her parting train.

It was very pretty, and we said, If the English were all going to be like that! I do not say that they actually were, and I do not say they were not; but no after-experience could affect the quality of that charming incident, and all the way from Bristol to Bath we turned again and again from the landscape, that lay soaking in the rains of the year before, and celebrated our good-fortune. We were still in its glamour when our train drew into Bath; and in our wish to be pleased with everything in the world to which it rapt us, we were delighted with the fitness of the fact that the largest buildings near the station should be, as their signs proclaimed, corset-manufactories. We read afterwards that corset-making was, with the quarrying of the Bath building-stone, the chief business interest of the place, as such a polite industry should be in a city which was for so long the capital of fashion. Our pleasure in it was only less than our joy in finding that our hotel was in Pulteney Street, where the Allens of “Northanger Abbey” had their apartment, and where Catherine Morland had so often come and gone with the Tilneys and the Thorpes, and round the farthest corner of which the dear, the divine, the only Jane Austen herself had lived for two years in one of the large, demure, self-respectful mansions of the neighborhood.

Our hotel scarcely distinguished, and it did not at all detach itself from the rank of these handsome dwellings; and everything in our happy circumstance began at once to breathe that air of gentle association which kept Bath for a fortnight the Bath of our dreams. There was a belief with one of us that he had come to drink the waters, but an early consultation with possibly the most lenient of the medical authorities of the place, who make the doctors of German springs seem such tyrannous martinets, disabused him. Since he had brought no rheumatism to Bath, his physician owned there was a chance of his taking some away; but in the mean time he might go once a day to the Pump Room, for a glass of the water lukewarm, and be a little careful of his diet. A little careful of his diet, he who had been furiously warned on his peril at Carlsbad that everything which was not allowed was forbidden! But he found that the Bath medical men said the same thing to the patients whom he saw around him, at the hotel, doubled up with rheumatism, and eating and drinking whatever their stiffened joints could carry to their mouths. All the greater was the miraculous virtue of the waters, for the sufferers seemed to make rapid recovery in spite of themselves and their doctors. There were no lepers among them, and since Prince Bladud’s day few are noted as having resorted to Bath; but there is rheumatism enough in England to make up the defect of leprosy, and the American, who had come with only a mild dyspepsia, found himself quite out of the running, or limping, with his fellow-invalids.

He had apparently not even brought an American accent with his malady, and that was a disappointment to one of the worst sufferers, who constantly assured him, in a Scotch burr so thick that he had to be begged to speak twice before he could be understood, that he was the only American without a twang whom he had ever met. The twangless dyspeptic wished at times to pretend that he was only twangless in British company, and that when his party went to their rooms they talked violently through their noses till they were out of breath, as a slight compensation for their self-denial in society. But, upon the whole, the Scotch gentleman was so kind and sweet a soul, and seemed, for all his disappointment, to value the American so much as a phenomenon that he forebore, and in the end he was not sorry.

He would have been sorry to have put himself at odds with any of the pleasant people at that hotel, who seemed to regard their being thrown together as a circumstance that justified their speaking to one another much more than the wont is in American hotels. They were more conversible even than those at the Plymouth hotel; the very women talked to other women without fear; and the Americans, if they had been nationally vainer than they were, might have fancied a specially hospitable consideration of their case. In hotels of that agreeable type there is, besides the more formal drawing-room, a place called the lounge, where there are writing-desks and stationery, and a large table covered with the day’s papers, and a comfortable fire (or, at least, the most comfortable in the house) burning in the grate; and here people drop in before breakfast and after dinner, and chat or read or write, as they please. It is all very amiably informal and uncommitting, and in our Bath hotel there were only two or three kept at a distance in which they were not molested. There was all the while a great nobleman in the house who was apparently never seen even by those superior people. He came, sojourned, and departed in as much secrecy as a great millionaire would at home, and I could not honestly say that he psychologically affected the others any more than the presence of a great millionaire would have affected the same number of Americans. Perhaps they were less excited, being more used to being avoided by great noblemen in the course of many generations. What I know is that they were very friendly and intelligent, and, if their talk began and ended with the weather, there was plenty of weather to talk about.

There was almost as much weather and as various as the forms of cabbage at dinner, which here first began to get in their work on the imagination, if not the digestion. Whatever else there was of vegetable fibre, there was always some form of cabbage, either cabbage in its simple and primitive shape, or in different phases of cauliflower, brussels sprouts, broccoli, or kale. It was difficult to escape it, for there was commonly nothing else but potatoes. But one night there came a dish of long, white stems, delicately tipped with red, and looking like celery that had grown near rhubarb. We recognized it as something we had admired, longingly, ignorantly, at the green-grocers’, and we eagerly helped ourselves. What was it? we had asked; and before the waiter could answer that it was sea-kale we had fallen a prey to something that of the whole cabbage family was the most intensely, the most passionately cabbage.

Apart from the prevalence of this family, the table was very good and well-imagined, as I should like to say once for all of the table at every English hotel of our experience. Occasionally the ideal was vitiated by an attempted conformity to the raw American appetite, as it arrived unassorted and ravenous from the steamers. In a moist cold that pierced to the marrow you were offered ice-water, and sometimes the “sweets” included an ice-cream of the circumference and thickness of a dollar, which had apparently been put into the English air to freeze, but had only felt its well-known relaxing effect. One drinks, of course, a great deal of the excellent tea, and, indeed, the afternoon that passes without it is an afternoon that drags a listless, alexandrine length along till dinner, and leaves one to learn by experience that a thing very essential to the local meteorology has been omitted. With us, tea is still a superfluity and in some cases a naughtiness; with the English it is a necessity and a virtue; and so apt is man to take the color of his surroundings that in the rare, very rare, occasions when he is not offered tea in an English house, the American comes away bewildered and indignant. I suppose nothing could convey the feelings of an equally defrauded Englishman, who likes his tea, and likes it good and strong; in fact, tea cannot be good without being strong. While I am about this business of noting certain facts which are so essential to the observer’s comfort, but which I really disdain as much as any reader can, I will say that the grates of the hotel in Bath were distinctly larger than those at Plymouth and were out of all comparison with those at Exeter. They did not, indeed, heat our rooms, even at Bath, but if they had been diligently tended I think they would have glowed. In the corridors there were radiators, commonly cold, but sometimes perceptibly warm to the touch. The Americanization of the house was completed by the elevator, which, being an after-thought, was crowded into the well of the staircase. It was a formidable matter to get the head porter, in full uniform, to come and open the bottom of the well with a large key, but it could be done; I saw rheumatic old ladies, who had come in from their Bath chairs, do it repeatedly.

When, however, you considered the outside of our hotel, you would have been sorry to have it in any wise Americanized. The front of it was on Pulteney Street, where it leaves that dear Laura Place which blossomed to our fancy with the fairest flowers of literary association; but at the back of it there was a real garden, and the gardens of other houses backing upon it, and the kitchen doors of these houses had pent-roofs which formed sunny exposures for cats of the finest form and color. When there was no sun there were no cats; but they could not take the rest of the prospect into the warm kitchens (I suppose that even in England the kitchens must be warm) with them, and so we had it always before our eyes. With gardens and little parks, and red-tiled house-roofs, bristling with chimney-pots and church-spires, it rose to a hemicycle of the beautiful downs, in whose deep hollows Bath lies relaxing in her faint air; and along the top the downs were softly wooded, or else they carried deep into the horizon the curve of fields and pastures, broken here and there by the stately bulk of some mansion set so high that no Bath-chairman could have been induced by love or money to push his chair to it. All round Bath these downs (a contradiction in terms to which one resigns one’s self with difficulty in the country where they abound) rise, like the walls of an immense scalloped cup, and the streets climb their slope, and can no otherwise escape in the guise of country roads, except along the bank of the lovely Avon. By day, except when a

THE RED-TILED HOUSE-ROOFS AND CHURCH SPIRES OF BATH

fog came down from the low heaven and took them up into it, the form of the downs was a perpetual pleasure to the eye from our back windows, and at night they were a fairy spectacle, with the electric lamps starring their vague, as if they were again part of the firmament.

When, later, we began to climb them, either on foot or on tram-top, we found them in command of prospects of Bath which could alone have compensated us for the change in our point of view. The city then showed large out of all proportion to its modest claim of population, which is put at thirty or forty thousand. But in the days of its prosperity it was so generously built that in its present decline it may really be no more populous than it professes; in that case each of its denizens has one of its stately mansions to himself. I never like to be extravagant, and so I will simply say that the houses of Bath are the handsomest in the world, and that if one must ever have a whole house to one’s self one could not do better than have it in Bath. There one could have it in a charming quiet square or place, or in the shallow curve of some high-set crescent, or perhaps, if one were very, very good, in that noblest round of domestic edifices in the solar system—I do not say universe—The King’s Circus. This is the triumph of the architect Wood, famous in the architectural annals of Bath, who built it in such beauty, and with such affectionate mastery of every order for its adornment, that his ghost might well (and would, if I were it) come back every night and stand glowing in a phosphorescent satisfaction till the dreaming rooks, in the tree-tops overhead, awoke and warned him to fade back to his reward in that most eligible quarter of the sky which overhangs The King’s Circus. I speak of him as if he were one, and so he is, as a double star is one; but it was Wood the elder who, in the ardor of his youth at twenty-three, imagined the Circus which his son realized. Together, or in their succession, they wrought the beautification of Bath from an amateur meanness and insufficiency to the effect for which the public spirit of their fellow-citizens supplied the unstinted means, and they left the whole city a monument of their glory, without a rival in unity of design and completeness of execution.

In the fine days when Bath was the resort of the greatness to which such greatness as the Woods’ has always bowed, every person of fashion thought he must have some sort of lodgment of his own, and, if he were a greater person than the common run of great persons, he must have a house. He might have it in some such select avenues as Milsom Street and Great Pulteney Street, or in St. James’s Square or Queen’s Square, or in Lansdowne Crescent or the Royal Crescent, but I fancy that the ambition of the very greatest could not have soared beyond a house in the Circus. As I find myself much abler to mingle with rank and fashion in the past than in the present, I was always going back to the Circus after I found the way, and making believe to ring at the portals set between pillars of the Ionic or Corinthian orders, and calling upon the disembodied dwellers within, and talking the ghostly scandal which was so abundant at Bath in the best days. In that way one may be a ghost one’s self without going to the extreme of dying, and then may walk comfortably back to dinner at one’s hotel in the flesh. In my more merely tourist moments I went and conned all the tablets let into the walls of the houses to record the memorable people who once lived in them. In my quality of patriot I lingered longest before that where

CIRCUS FROM BENNET STREET

the great Earl of Chatham had lived: he who, if he had been an American as he was an Englishman, while a foreign foe was landed on his soil would never had laid down his arms—never, never, never! The eloquent words filled my own throat to choking, and the long struggle fought itself through there on the curbstone with an obstinate valor on the American side that could result only in the independence of the revolted colonies. Then, in a high mood of impartial compassion, I went and paid the tribute of a sigh at that other house of the Circus, so piteously memorable for us Americans, where Major André had once sojourned. Was it in Bath, and perhaps while he dwelt in the Circus, that he loved Honora Sneyd? Almost anything tender or brave or fine could have been there; and I was not surprised to find that Lord Clive of India and Gainsborough of all the world were in their times neighbors of Lord Chatham and Major André. What other famous names were inscribed on those simple tablets (so modestly that it was hard to read them), I do not now recall, but when one is reminded, even by his cursory and laconic Baedeker, that not only the first but the second Pitt was a sojourner in Bath with other such sojourners as Burke, Nelson, Wolfe, Lawrence, Smollett, Fielding, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Southey, Landor, Wordsworth, Cowper, Scott, and Moore, and a whole nameless herd of titles and royalties, one perceives that many more celebrities than I have mentioned must have lived in the Circus.

Many very nice people must live there yet, but it has somewhat gone off into business of the quieter professional type, and I would not swear that behind the tracery of a transom here or there I did not find a lurking suggestion of Apartments. I am quite ready to make oath to at least one such suggestion in the very centre of Lansdowne Crescent, where I was about buying property because of its glorious site and its high, pure air. I instantly transferred my purchase to the Royal Crescent, where I now have an outlook forever over the new Victoria Park and down into the valley of the Avon, with the river running as of old between fields and pastures in a landscape of insurpassable loveliness.

But you cannot anywhere get away from the beautiful in Bath. For the temperate lover of it, the soft brownish tone of the architecture is in itself almost of a delicate sufficiency; but if one is greedier there is an inexhaustible picturesqueness in the winding and sloping streets, and the rounding and waving downs which they everywhere climb as roads when they cease to be streets. I do not know that Bath gives the effect of a very obvious antiquity; a place need not, if it begins in the age of fable, and descends from the earliest historic period with the tradition of such social splendor as hers. She has a superb mediæval abbey for her principal church which is a cathedral to all æsthetical intents and purposes; for it is not less beautiful and hardly less impressive than some cathedrals. Mostly of that perpendicular Gothic, which I suppose more mystically lifts the soul than any other form of architecture, it is in a gracious sort of harmony with itself through its lovely proportions; and from the stems of its clustered columns, the tracery of their fans spreads and delicately feels its way over the vaulted roof as if it were a living growth of something rooted in the earth beneath. The abbey began with a nunnery founded by King Osric in 676 and rose through a monastery founded later by King Offa to be an abbey in 1040, attached to the bishopric of Wells; but it waited its final grandeur and glory from Bishop Oliver King, who while visiting Bath in 1499 saw in a dream angels ascending and descending by a ladder set between the throne of God and an olive-tree, wearing a crown, and heard a voice saying, “Let an Olive establish the crown, and a King restore the church.” Moved by this vision, which was as modest as most dreams of charges delivered from on high, the bishop set vigorously about the work, but before it was perfected, the piety of Henry VIII. being alarmed by the pope’s failure to bless his divorces, the monastery was with many others suppressed, and the church stripped of everything that could be detached and sold. The lands of the abbey fell into private hands, and houses were built against the church, of which an aisle was used as a street for nearly a hundred years, even after it had been roofed in and restored, as it was early in the seventeenth century, by another bishop who had not been authorized in a dream.

The failure of Cromwell’s troopers to stable their horses in it is another of those conspicuous instances of their negligence with which I was destined to be confronted in the sacred edifices so conscientiously despoiled by Henry VIII. But among the most interesting monuments of the interior is one to that Lady Waller, wife of the Parliamentary general, Sir William Waller which more than repairs the oversight of the Puritan soldiery. Her epitaph is of so sweet and almost gay a quaintness that I will frankly transfer it to my page from that of the guide-book, though I might easily pretend I had copied it from the tomb.

“Sole issue of a matchless paire,
Both of their state and virtues heyre;
In graces great, in stature small,
As full of spirit as voyd of gall;
Cheerfully grave, bounteously close,
Holy without vain-glorious showes;
Happy, and yet from envy free,
Learn’d without pride, witty, yet wise,
Reader, this riddle read with mee,
Here the good Lady Waller lies.”

There is almost an exultant note in this, and in its rendering of a most appreciable personality is a hint of the quality of all Bath annals. These are the history less of events than characters, marked and wilful, and often passing into eccentricity; and in the abbey is the municipal monument of the chiefest of such characters, that Beau Nash—namely, who ruled the fashion of Bath for forty or fifty years with an absolute sway at a period when fashion was elsewhere a supreme anarchic force in England. The very sermon which I heard in the abbey (and it was a very good and forcible homily), was of this personal quality, for taking as his theme the divine command to give, the preacher enlarged himself to the fact that the flag of England was then flying at half-mast on the abbey, and that all the court would presently be going into mourning for the death of the Duke of Cambridge, in obedience to the King’s command; and “How strange,” the preacher reflected, “that men should be so prompt to obey an earthly sovereign, and so slow to obey the King of Kings, the lord of lords.” But he did not reflect as I did for him, though I had then been only a week in England, and was very much less fitted to do it, that in the close-knit system which he himself was essentially part of, there was such a consciousness of social unity, identity, as has never been anywhere else on earth, much less spiritually between the human and divine, since Jehovah ceased conversing with the fathers of the children of Israel. I do not report it as a message, then and there delivered to me in round terms, but I had in my cheap sympathy with the preacher, a sense of the impossibility of his ideal, for between any decently good King of England and his subjects there is such affiliation through immemorial law and custom as never was between a father and his children, any more than between a God and his creatures. When the King wills, in beautiful accordance with the laws and customs, it is health for the subjects to obey, as much as for the hands or feet of a man’s body when he wishes to move them, and it is disease, it is disorder, it is insanity for them to disobey, whereas it is merely sin to disregard the divine ordinances, and is not contrary to the social convention or the ideals of loyalty. But I could not offer this notion to the preacher in the Abbey of Bath, and I am not sure that my readers here will welcome it with entire acceptance.

From time to time, in those first days the sense of England (not the meaning, which heaven forbid I should attempt to give) sometimes came upon me overwhelmingly; and I remember how once when I sat peacefully at dinner, a feeling of the long continuity of English things suddenly rose in a tidal wave and swept me from my chair, and bore me far away from the soup that would be so cold before I could get back. There, like one

“Sole sitting by the shores of old romance,”

I visualized those mostly amiable and matter-of-fact people in their ancestral figures of a thousand years past, and foresaw them substantially the same for a thousand years to come. Briton and Phœnician and Roman and Saxon and Dane and Norman, had come to a result so final in them that they would not change, if they could, and for my pleasure I would not have had them change, though in my American consciousness I felt myself so transient, so occasional, so merely provisional beside them. Such as I then saw them, passing so serenely from fish to roast, from salad to sweets, or as I could overhear them, talking of the weather with an effect of bestowing novelty upon the theme by their attention to it, they had been coming to Bath for untold generations with the same ancestral rheumatism which their humid climate, their inclement houses, and their unwholesome diet would enable them to hand down to a posterity remote beyond any horizons of the future. In their beautiful constancy, their heroic wilfulness, their sublime veracity, they would still be, or believe themselves, the first people in the world; and as the last of the aristocracies and monarchies they would look round on the classless equalities of the rest of the world with the pity which being under or over some one else seems always to inspire in master and man alike. The very gentleness of it all, testified to the perfection of their ultimation, and the universally accepted form by which the servant thanked the served for being served, and the served thanked the servant for serving, realized a social ideal unknown to any other civilization. There was no play of passion; the passions in England mean business; no voice rose above the high chirpy level, which all the voices reached; not a laugh was heard; the continental waiters who were there to learn the English language had already learned the English manner, which is a supreme self-containment; but the result was not the gloom which Americans achieve when they mean to be very good society in public places; far less was it a Latin gayety, or a Germanic fury of debate. The manner was such indeed that in spite of my feeling of their unity of nature and their continuity of tradition, I could scarcely believe that the people I saw in these psychological seizures of mine were one with the people who had been coming to Bath from their affairs in the towns, or from their pleasures in the country, ever since the English character had evolved itself from the blend of temperaments forming the English temperament. Out of what they had been how had they come to be what they were now, and yet not essentially changed? None of the causes were sufficient for the effect; the effect was not the logic of the causes.

History is rather darkling after the day of Prince Bladud and his pigs, and the Romans testify of their resort to the healing waters by the mute monuments left of the ancient city, still mainly buried under the modern town, rather than by any written record, but after the days of Elizabeth the place begins to have a fairly coherent memory of its past. In those days the virtue of the waters was superior to such material and moral tests as the filth of streets where the inhabitants cast the sewage of their houses and the butchers slaughtered their cattle and left the offal to rot, and the kine and swine ran at large, and the bathers of both sexes wallowed together in the springs, after the manner of their earliest exemplars, and were pelted with dead cats and dogs by the humorous spectators. This remained much the condition of Bath as late as the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and it was not till well into the eighteenth that the springs were covered and enclosed. Even then they were not so covered and enclosed but that the politer public frequented them to see the bi-sexual bathing which was not finally abolished till the reign of the good Beau Nash.

If any one would read all about Nash and the customs (there were no manners) which he amended, I could not do better than commend such a one to the amusing series of sketches reprinted from the Bath Chronicle, by William Tyte, with the title of Bath in the Eighteenth Century, its Progress and Life described. It is only honest (but one is honest with so much effort in these matters) to confess my indebtedness to this most amusing and very valuable book, and to warn the reader that a great deal of the erudition which he will note in my page can be finally traced to Mr. Tyte’s. He will learn there at large why I call Beau Nash good though he was a reprobate in so many things, a libertine and gambler, and little better than a blackguard when not retrieving and polishing others. It seems to be essential to the civic and social reformer that he should more or less be of the quality of the stuff he deals with; we have seen that more than once in our municipal experience; and Nash, who reformed Bath, might in turn have asked a like favor of Bath. He was, in the English and the eighteenth century terms, that familiar phenomenon which we know as the Boss; and his incentive was not so much the love of virtue as the love of rule. By the pull on the reins he knew just how close he might draw them, and when and where he must loose the curb. He could refuse to allow the royal Princess Amelia a single dance after the clock struck eleven; he could personally take off the apron of the Duchess of Queensbury and tell her that “none but Abigails appeared in white aprons,” as he threw it aside; he could ask a country squire who wore his spurs to the ball, if he had not forgotten his horse; he could forbid ladies coming in riding-hoods; he could abolish the wearing of swords; he could cause the arrest of any one giving or accepting a challenge; but he could not put down gaming or drinking, and he did not try, either by the irony of the written rules for the government[A] of Bath Society, or by the sarcastic by-laws which he orally added on occasions. He was one of those Welshmen who, at all periods have invaded England so much less obviously than the Scotch, and have come so largely into control of the Sassenach, while seeming to merge and lose themselves in the heavy mass. He had the hot temper of his race; but he was able to cool it to a very keen edge, and he cut his way through disorder to victory. He wished to establish an etiquette as severe as that of the French or English court, and he succeeded, in a measure. But though not an easy Boss, he was a wise one and he really moulded the rebellious material to a form of propriety if not of beauty. When he passed to his account, insolvent both morally and financially, it lapsed again under the succeeding Masters of Ceremony to its elemental condition, and social anarchy followed; a strife raged between the old and new assembly rooms for primacy, and at a ball, where the partisans of two rival candidates for the mastership met in force, a free fight followed the attempt of a clergyman’s wife to take precedence of a peer’s daughter; “the gentlemen fought and swore; the ladies, screaming, tore each other’s garments and headgear; the floor was strewn with fragments of caps, lappets, millinery, coat-tails and ruffles. The non-combatants hurried to the exits, or mounted the chairs near the walls to be out of danger or to watch the foes mauling and bruising each other.” Before the fight ended the Mayor of the city had to appear and read the Riot Act three times.

Of course matters could not go on so. Both the contestants for the Master of the Ceremonies retired and a third was chosen. The office though poorly paid, and wholly unremunerative except in hands so skilled as those of Nash (who died poor by his own fault, but who lived rich), was honored in him by a statue in the Pump Room and a monument in the Abbey. This to be sure was after his death, but the place was always of such dignity that in 1785 Mr. J. King, “who had highly distinguished himself in the British army during the American war,” by no means disdained to take it. His distinction does not form any ornament of our annals as I recall them, but that is perhaps because it was achieved to our disadvantage. He had indeed the rare honor of introducing Jane Austen’s most charming hero to her sweetest and simplest heroine; but though he could fearlessly present Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland, his courage was apparently not equal to upholding his general authority with the satirical arrogance of Nash. Where Nash would have laid down the law and enforced it if need be with his own hands, King “humbly requested,” though in the matter of wearing hats “at the cotillions or concerts or dress balls,” our distinguished enemy plucked up the spirit to warn any lady who should “through inattention or any other motive infringe this regulation, that she must not take it amiss if she should be obliged to take off her hat or quit the assembly.”

From Nash’s time onward several Masters of Ceremonies were scandalized by people’s giving tickets for the entertainments to their domestics, and one of them took public notice of the evil. “Servants, hair-dressers, and the improper persons who every night occupy some of the best seats, and even presume to mix with the company, are warned to keep away, and to spare themselves the mortification of being desired to withdraw, a circumstance which will inevitably happen if they continue to intrude themselves where decency, propriety and decorum forbid their entrance.”

Apparently in spite of all the efforts of all the Masters of Ceremonies, society in Bath was not only very fast, which society never minds being, but a good deal mixed, which it professes not to like, though it was at the same time always very gay. When at last the respective nights of the New Assembly Rooms and the Old Assembly Rooms were ascertained, the fashionable week began on Monday with a Dress Ball at the New Rooms; it continued on Tuesday with Public Tea and Cards at the New Rooms; on Wednesday with a Cotillion Ball at the Old Rooms; on Thursday with a Cotillion Ball at the New Rooms, and Tea and Cards at the Old Rooms; on Friday with a Dress Ball at the Old Rooms; on Saturday with Public Tea and Cards at the Old Rooms; and it ended on Sunday with Tea and Walking, alternately at the New Rooms and the Old Rooms. The cost of all these pleasures either to the person or the pocket, was not so great as might be imagined from their abundance. The hours were early, and except for the gaming, and the drinking that slaked the dry passion of chance, the fun was over by eleven o’clock. Then the last note was sounded, the last step taken, the last sigh or the last look exchanged, so that those who loved balls might not only tread the stately measures of that time with far less fatigue than the more athletic figures of our period cost, but might be at home and in bed at the hour when the modern party is beginning. For their pleasure they paid in the proportion of a guinea for twenty-six dress balls, and half a guinea for thirty fancy balls. Two guineas supplied two tickets for twelve concerts, and sixpence admitted one to the Rooms for a promenade and a cup of tea.

It will be seen that with that “large acquaintance” which Mrs. Allen so handsomely but hopelessly desired for Catherine Morland at her first ball, where they had no acquaintance at all, one could have a very good time at Bath for a very little money, and every one apparently who had the money could have the good time. There were many public gardens, where all sorts of people went for concert-breakfasts, and for tea and for supper, at a charge of a shilling, or the classic one-and-six. Jane Austen writes in one of her charming letters that she liked going to the concerts of Sydney Gardens because, having no ear for music, she could best get away from it there; but there were besides the Villa Gardens, the Bagatelle, and the Grosvenor Gardens, which were most resorted to because they were so convenient to the Pump Rooms. Some of the lawns, if not the groves of these gardens still remains, and hard by the Avon babbles still, rushing under the walls and bridges of the town, with a busy air of knowing more than it has time to tell of the old-time picnics on its grassy shores, and the water-parties on its tumultuous bosom, as well as the fireworks and illuminations in its bowers. The river indeed is one of the chief beauties of Bath, winding into it through a valley of the downs, and curving through it with a careless grace which leaves nothing to be asked.

The highest moment of fashion in Bath seems to have been when the Princess Amelia, daughter of George II., came to drink its waters and partake its pleasures in 1728. She was rather a plain body, no longer young, very stout, and with a simple taste for gambling, fishing, riding, and beer. “Her favorite haunt,” says Mr. Tyte, “was a summer-house by the riverside in Harrison’s Walk, where she often was seen attired in a riding-habit and a black velvet postilion-cap tied under her chin.” But she also liked to wear when on horseback “a hunting-cap and a laced scarlet coat,” which must have set off her red face and portly bulk to peculiar advantage. Her particular friend was a milliner in the abbey church-yard who wrote verses in praise of the princess and of Bath, but she seems to have been friendly enough with people of every kind and she went freely to the dress balls, the fancy balls, the teas, the walks, the breakfast-concerts, the gardens, and whatever else there was of elegant or amusing in the place. One of the customs of Bath was the ringing of the abbey bells to welcome visitors of distinction, who were expected to pay the vergers in proportion to the noise made for them. This custom was afterwards abused to include any comer from whom money could reasonably or unreasonably be hoped for, as the supposed writer in the New Bath Guide records. But the custom has long been obsolete, and no American invader arriving by train need fear being honored and plundered through it.

It would be idle to catalogue the princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, and titles of all degrees who resorted to Bath both before and after the good Amelia, and if one began with the other and real celebrities, the adventurers, and authors, and artists, and players, there would be no end, and so I will not at least begin yet. We were first of all concerned in looking up the places which the divine Jane Austen had made memorable by attributing some scene or character of hers to them, or more importantly yet by having dwelt in them herself. I really suppose that it was less with the hope of being helped with the waters that I went regularly to the Pump Room and sipped my glass of lukewarm insipidity, than with the insensate expectation of encountering some of her people, or perhaps herself, a delicate elusive phantom of ironical observance, in a place they and she so much frequented. I cannot say that I ever did meet them, either the characters or the author, though it was here that Catherine Morland first met the lively but unreliable Isabel Thorpe, and vainly hoped to meet Henry Tilney after dancing with him the night before. “Every creature in Bath except himself was to be seen in the room at different periods of the fashionable hours; crowds of people were every moment passing in and out, up the steps and down.”

I reconciled myself to a disappointment numerically greater than Catherine’s for there was not only no Tilney, but no crowd. At mid-day there would be two or three score persons scattered about the stately hall, so classically Palladian in its proportions, and so fitly heavy and rich in decoration, all a dimness of dark paint and dull gold, in which the sufferers sat about at little tables where they put their glasses, and read their papers, after they became so used to coming that they no longer cared to look at the glass cases full of Roman and Saxon coins and rings and combs and bracelets. There was nothing to prevent people talking except the overwhelming tradition of the talk that used to flow and sparkle in that place a century ago. But they did not talk; and in the afternoon they listened with equal silence to the music in the concert-room. In the Pump Room there was the largest and warmest fire that I saw in England, actually lumps of coal, openly blazing in a grate holding a bushel of them; in the withdrawal of the others from it one might stand and thaw one’s back without infringing anybody’s privileges or preferences. Under the Pump Room were the old Roman Baths with the old Romans represented in their habits of luxury by the goldfish that swam about in the tepid waters, and, as I was advised by a guide who started up out of the past and accepted a gratuity, liked it.

I visited these baths as a tourist, but as a patient whose prescription did not include bathing I saw nothing of the modern baths. There the sexes no longer bathe together, and in their separation and seclusion you have no longer the pleasure enjoyed by the spectator in the days of the New Bath Guide, when—

“’Twas a glorious sight to behold the fair sex
All wading with gentlemen up to their necks.”

The modern equipment of the baths is such that the bathers are not now put into baize-lined sedan-chairs and hurried to their lodgings and sent to bed there to perspire and repose; and the chances of seeing a pair of rapacious chairmen settling the question of a disputed fare by lifting the lid of the box, and letting the cold air in upon the reeking lady or gentleman within, are reduced to nothing at all. In the ameliorated conditions, unfavorable as they are to the lover of dramatic incident, many and marvellous recoveries from rheumatism are made in Bath, and we saw people blithely getting better every day whom we had known at the beginning of the fortnight very gloomy and doubtful, and all but audibly creaking in their joints as they limped by. This was in spite of a diet which must have sent the uric acid gladly rioting through their systems, and of a capricious variety of March weather which was everything that wet and cold, and dry and raw, could be in an air notoriously relaxing to the victim whom it never released from its penetrating clutch.

I put it in this way so as to be at ease in the large freedom of the truth rather than bound in a slavish fidelity to the fact. The fact is that in the succession of days that were all and more than here suggested, there were whole hours of delicious warmth when one could walk out or drive out in a sunny mildness full of bird-song and bee-murmur, with the color of bloom in one’s eyes and the odor of flowers in one’s nostrils. It is not from having so rashly bought property right and left in every eligible and memorable quarter of Bath the very first day that I now say I should like to live there always. The reader must not suspect me of wishing to unload upon him, when I repeat that I heard people who were themselves in the enjoyment of the rich alternative say that you had better live in Bath if you could not live in London. A large contingent of retired army and navy officers and their families contribute to keep society good there, and it is a proverb that the brains which have once governed India are afterwards employed in cheapening Bath. Rents are low, but many fine large houses stand empty, nevertheless, because the people who could afford to pay the rents could not afford the state, the equipment of service and the social reciprocity so necessary in England, and must take humbler dwellings instead. Provisions are of a Sixth Avenue average in price, and in the article of butcher’s meat of a far more glaring and offensive abundance. I do not know whether it is the tradition of the Bath bun which has inspired the pastry-shops to profuse efforts in unwholesome-looking cakes and tarts, but it seemed to me that at every third or fourth window I was invited by the crude display to make way entirely with the digestion which the Bath waters were doing so little to repair. When one saw everywhere those beautiful West of England complexions, the wonder what became of that bilious superfluity of pastry was a mystery from which the mind still recoils.

But this is taking me from the social conditions of Bath, of which I know so little. I heard it said, indeed, that the wheels of life were uncommonly well-oiled there for ladies who had to direct them unaided, and it seemed to me that the widowed or the unwedded could not be more easily placed in circumstances of refinement which might be almost indefinitely simplified without ceasing to be refined. There are in fact large numbers of single ladies living at Bath in the enjoyment of that self-respectful civic independence which the just laws of Great Britain give them; for they vote at all elections which concern the municipal spending of their money, and are consequently not taxed without their consent, as our women are. Such is their control in matters which concern their comfort that it is said the consensus of feminine feeling has had force with the imperial government to prevent the placing of a garrison in Bath, on the ground that the presence of the soldiers distracted the maids, and enhanced the difficulties of the domestic situation.

The glimpse of the Bath world, which a happy and most unimagined chance afforded, revealed a charm which brought to life a Boston world now so largely of the past, and I like to think it was this rather than the possession of untold real estate which made me wish to live there always; and advise others to do so. Just what this charm was I should be slower to attempt saying than I have been to boom Bath; but perhaps I can suggest it as a feminine grace such as comes to perfection only in civilizations where the brightness and alertness of the feminine spirit is peculiarly valued. Bath could not have been so long a centre of fashion and infirmity, of pleasure and pain, without evolving in the finest sort the supremacy of woman, who is first in either. The lingering tradition of intellectual brilliancy, which spreads a soft afterglow over the literary decline of Boston, is of the same effect in the gentle city where the mere spectacle of life became penetrated with the quality of so many spritely witnesses. If the grace of their humor, the gayety of their spirit, the sweetness of their intelligence have remained to this time, when the spectacle of life has so dwindled that the observed are less than the observers, it would not be wonderful, for the essential part of what has been anywhere seems always to haunt the scene, and to become the immortal genius of the place. In a more literal sense Bath is haunted by the past, for it is the favorite resort of numbers of interesting ghosts, whose characters are well ascertained and whose stories are recounted to you, if you have so much merit, by people who have known the spectres almost from childhood. Some of them have the habit of preferably appearing to strangers; but perhaps they drew the line at Americans.

I forget whether the almond-trees were in bloom or not when we came to Bath, but I am sure they continued so throughout our stay, and I found them steadily blossoming away elsewhere for a month afterwards. There is no reason why they should not, for they have no work to do in the way of ripening their nuts, and they lead a life as idle and unfinal as the vines and fig-trees of Great Britain, which also blossom as cheerfully and set their fruit, and carry it through the seasons in a lasting immaturity. I never thought the almond in bloom as rare a sight as the peach, whose pale elder sister it is; but in the absence of the peach, I was always glad of it, in a dooryard or over a garden wall. Where the walls were low enough to lean upon, as they sometimes were round the vegetable gardens, it was pleasant to pause and contemplate the infinite variety of cabbage held in a green arrest by the mild winter air, but destined to an ultimation beyond the powers of the almond, the grape and the fig. There seemed to be a good many of these gardened spaces in the town, as well as in the outskirts where more new houses were going up, in something of the long leisure of the vegetation. The famous Bath building-stone is in fact so much employed elsewhere that there may not be enough of it for home use, and that may account for the slow growth of the place; but if I lived there I should not wish it to grow, and if I were King of Bath, in due succession from Beau Nash, I would not suffer one Bath-stone to be set upon the other within its limits. The place is large enough as it is, and I should hate to have it restored to its former greatness. There was indeed only too little decay in it, but there was at least one gratifying instance in the stately mansion at the end of our street,—falling or fallen to ruin, with its Italian style rapidly antedating the rough classic of the Roman baths, in the effect of a sorrowful superannuation,—which I could not have rescued from dilapidation without serious loss. The hollow windows and broken doors and toppled chimneys, the weather-stained walls and pillars painted green with mould, were half concealed, half betrayed, by the neglected growth of trees, and a wilding thicket had sprung up over the lawn, penetrated by wanton paths in spite of warnings against trespassing by severely worded sign-boards. Whose the house was, or why it was abandoned I never learned, and I do not know that I wished to learn; it was so satisfying as it was and for what it was. It stood on the borders of Sydney Gardens, which the authorities were slowly, too slowly for our pleasure, putting in order for some sort of phantasmal season.

We never got into them, though we longed to make out where it was that Jane Austen need not hear the music when she went to the concerts. But it was richly consoling, in these failures to come unexpectedly upon the house in which she had lived two years with her mother, and to find it fronting the ruining mansion and the tangled shrubbery that took our souls with so sorrowful a rapture. At the moment we discovered it, there was a young girl visible through the dining-room window feeding a quiet gray cat on the floor, and a gray parrot in a cage. She looked kind and good, and as if she would not turn two pilgrims away if they asked to look in over the threshold that Jane Austen’s feet had lightly pressed, but we could not find just the words to petition her in, and we had to leave the shrine unvisited. It occurs to me now that we might have pretended to mistake the tablet in the wall for a sign of apartments, but we had not then even this cheap inspiration; and we could only note with a longing, lingering look, that the house was very simple and plain, like the other houses near.

The literary tradition of the neighborhood is supported in one of these by the presence of a famous nautical novelist, who has often shipwrecked and marooned me to my great satisfaction, on reefs and desolate islands, or water-logged me in lonely seas. He lived even nearer the corner of Pulteney Street where we were in our hotel, and where we much imagined taking one of the many lodgings to let there, but never did. We looked into some, and found them probably not very different from what they were when the Allens went into theirs with Catherine Morland. We decided that this was just across the way from our hotel, and that Mrs. Allen saw us from her window whenever we went or came. We were sure also that we met Lady Russell and Anne Elliot driving out of Persuasion through Pulteney Street, when Anne noticed Captain Wentworth coming towards them, and supposed from Lady Russell’s stare, that she was equally moved by the vision, but found she was “looking after some window curtains, which Lady Alicia and Mrs. Frankland were telling” her of as “being the handsomest and best hung of any in Bath.”

Our hotel fronted not only on Pulteney Street, but also on Laura Place, a most genteel locality indeed where we knew as soon as Sir Walter Elliot that his cousin “Lady Dalrymple had taken a house for three months and would be living in style.” I do not think we ever made out the house, and we were more engaged in observing the behavior of the wicked John Thorpe driving poor Catherine Morland through Laura Place after he had deceived her into thinking Henry Tilney, whom she had promised to walk with, had gone out of town, and whom she now saw passing with his sister. On a happier day, as the reader will remember, Catherine really went her walk with the Tilneys, and in sympathy and emulation we too climbed the steep slopes of “Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath.” You now cross the railroad to reach it, and pass through neighborhoods that were probably pleasanter a hundred years ago; but the view of the town in the bottom of its bowl must be as fine as ever, though we found no hanging coppice from which to commend it. Still, as our wont was, we bought several pieces of property that pleased us, and I still have a few suburban houses in that quarter which I could offer the reader at a sacrifice. The truth is that in spite of having the Tilneys and Catherine for company we did not like the Beechen Cliff as well as its rival acclivity, Sion Hill, which forms the opposite rim of Bath, and is not so arduous of approach. A lady who lived not quite at the top, but above the Bath chair line, declared it the third-best air in England, without indicating the first or second. The air was at least more active than we were in our climb, but with a driver who got down and helped his horses walk up with us, we could enjoy there one of the loveliest prospects in the world. The fineness of the air was attested probably by the growth of ivy, which was the richest I saw in England, where the ivy grows so richly in every place. It not only climbed all the trees on that down, and clothed their wintry nakedness with a foliage perpetually green, but it flung its shining mantles over the walls that shut in the mansions on the varying slopes, and densely aproned the laps of the little hollows of the lawns and woods. It had the air of feeling its life in every leaf, and of lustily reaching out for other conquests, like the true weed it is in Old England, and not the coddled exotic which people make it believe it is in New England. I do not know that I ever lost the surprise of it in its real character; I only know that this surprise was greatest for me on those happy heights.

The modern hand-book which was guiding our steps about Bath advised us that if we would frequent Milsom Street about four o’clock we should find the tide of fashion flowing through it; but the torrent must have been very rapid indeed, for we always missed it, and were obliged to fill the rather empty channel with the gayety of the past. There are delightful shops everywhere in Bath, and so many places to buy old family silver that it seems as if all the old families must have poured all their old silver into them, till you visit other parts of England, and find the same superabundance of second-hand plate everywhere. But it is in Milsom Street that most of the fine shops are, and I do not deny that you will see some drops of the tide of fashion clustered about their windows. Other drops have percolated to the tea-rooms, where at five o’clock there is a scene of dissipation around the innocent cups. But there was no reason why we should practise the generous self-deceit of our hand-book regarding the actual Milsom Street, when we had its former brilliancy to draw upon. Even in the time of Jane Austen’s people it was no longer “residential,” though it was not so wholly gone to shops as now. The most eligible lodgings were in it, and here General Tilney sojourned till he insisted on carrying Catherine off to Northanger Abbey with his children. “His lodgings were taken the very day after he left them, Catherine,” said Mrs. Allen, afterwards. “But no wonder; Milsom Street, you know.” Still, the finest shops prevailed there, then, and when Isabella Thorpe wished to punish the two young men who had been so impertinently admiring her, by following them, she persuaded Catherine that she was taking her to a shop-window in Milsom Street to see “the prettiest hat you can imagine ... very like yours, with coquelicot ribbons instead of green.” In Milsom Street, sweet Anne Elliot first meets Captain Wentworth after he comes to Bath, and he is much confused. But it is no wonder that so many things happen in or through Milsom Street in Bath fiction, for it leads directly, or as directly as a street in Bath can, from the New Assembly to the Old Assembly which were called, puzzlingly enough for the after-comer, the Upper Rooms and the Lower Rooms, as if they were on different floors of the same building, instead of separated a quarter of a mile by a rise of ground. The street therefore led also to the Pump Room and to the divers parades and walks and gardens, and was of prime topographical importance, as well as literary interest.

We could not visit the Lower Rooms because they were burned down a great while ago, but for the sake of certain famous heroines, and many more dear girls unknown to fame, we went to the Upper Rooms, and found them most characteristically getting ready for the Easter Ball which the County Club was to give, and which promised to relume for one night at least the vanished splendors of Bath. The Ballroom was really noble, and there were sympathetic tea-rooms and cloakrooms, and the celebrated octagonal room in the centre, where workmen were hustling the pretty and gallant ghosts of former dances with their sawing and hammering, and painting and puttying, and measuring the walls for decorations. I do not know that I should have minded all that, though I hate to have the present disturbing the past so much as it must in England; but something very tragical happened to me at the Upper Rooms which branded that visit in my mind. A young fellow civilly detached himself from the other artisans and showed us through the place, and though we could have easily found the way ourselves, it seemed fit to return his civility in silver. Sixpence would have been almost too much, but in my pocket there was a sole coin that enlarged itself to my dismay to the measure of a full moon. I appealed to my companion, but when did ever a woman have money unless she had just got it from a husband or father? The thought struck me that for once I might behave as shabbily as I should always like to do; but I had not the courage. Slowly, with inward sighs, I drew forth my hand and bestowed upon that most superfluous youth, for five minutes’ disservice, a whole undivided half-crown, received his brief “Thankyesir,” rendered as if he took half-crowns every day for that sort of thing, and tottered forth so bewildered that I quite forgot the emotion proper to the place where Catherine Morland went to her first ball, and Anne Elliot first met Captain Wentworth after coming to Bath. It was there that Catherine had to sit the whole evening through without dancing or speaking with a soul, and was only saved by overhearing two gentlemen speak of her as “a pretty girl.” Such words had their due effect; she immediately thought the evening pleasanter than she had found it before, her humble vanity was contented; she ... went to her chair in good humor with everybody, and perfectly satisfied with her share of public attention.

I should have liked immensely to look on at the County Ball which was to assemble all the quality of the neighborhood on something like the old terms, and I heard with joy the story of ten gay youths who returned from one of the last balls in Bath chairs, drawn through the gray dawn in Milsom Street by as many mettlesome chairmen. Only when one has studied the Bath chair on its own ground, and seen the sort of gloomy veteran who pulls it, commonly with a yet gloomier old lady darkling under its low buggy-top, can one realize the wild fun of such an adventure. It might not always be safe, for the chairman sometimes balks, and in case of sharp acclivities altogether refuses to go on, as I have already told.

In paying our duty to the literary memories of the town we did not fail to visit the church of St. Swithin, in the shadow of which Fanny Burney lies buried with the gentle exile who made her Madame d’Arblay, and a very happy wife after the glory of Evelina and Cecilia began to be lost a little in the less merited success of Camilla and The Wanderer. The gate was locked and we were obliged to come away without getting into the church-yard, but we saw “about where” one of the great mothers of English fiction lay; and the pew-opener, found for us with some difficulty and delay by an interested neighbor, let us into the church, and there we revered the tablets of the kindly pair. They were on the wall of the gallery, and I thought they might have been nearer together, but hers was very fitly inscribed; and one could stand before it, and indulge a pensive mood in thoughts of the brilliant girl’s first novel, which set the London world wild and kept Dr. Johnson up all night, mixed with fit reflections on her father’s ambition in urging her into the service of the “sweet Queen” Charlotte, where she was summoned with a bell like a waiting-maid, and the fire of her young genius was quenched.

If one would have a merrier memory of literary Bath, let him go visit the house, if he can find it, of the Reverend Dr. Wilson, in Alfred Street, where the famous Mrs. Macaulay, the first English historian of her name, presided as a species of tenth muse, and received the homage of whatever was academic in the rheumatic culture of Bath. She was apparently the idol of the heart as well as the head (it was thought to have been partially turned) of the good man whose permanent guest she was. He put up a marble statue to her as History in his London parish church, and had a vault made near it to receive her remains when she should have done with them. But before this happened, History fell in love with Romance in the person of a young man many years her junior, and on their marriage the reverend doctor irately removed her statue from the chancel of St. Stephen’s, and sold her vault for the use of some less lively body. Her new husband was the brother of a Dr. Graham who had formerly travelled with Lord Nelson’s beautiful Lady Hamilton and exhibited her “reclining on a celestial bed” as the Goddess of Health and Beauty. On the night of Mrs. Macaulay’s birthday the physician presented her with an address in which he claimed, by virtue of his mud baths, “the supreme blessedness of removing under God, the complicated and obstinate maladies your fair and very delicate frame was afflicted with.” The company danced, played, and talked, and went out to a supper of “syllabubs, jellies, creams, ices, wine-cakes, and a variety of dry and fresh fruits, particularly grapes and pineapples.”

The literary celebrities who visited Bath, or sojourned, or lived there were not to be outnumbered except in London alone, if in fact the political capital exceeded in them. Mr. Tyte mentions among others De Foe, who stopped at Bath in collecting materials for his Tour of Great Britain; and who met Alexander Selkirk there, and probably imagined Robinson Crusoe from him on the spot. Richard Steele came and wrote about Bath in the Spectator. Gay, Pope and Congreve, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Fielding and Mrs. Radcliffe came and went; and Sheridan dwelt there in his father’s house, and met the beautiful Miss Linley, woed, won, went off to Paris with her and wedded her, and returned to fight two duels in defence of her honor. Goldsmith and Johnson and Boswell resorted to the waters; Lord Chesterfield wrote some of his letters from a place where worldly politeness might be so well studied; Walpole some of his where gossip so abounded. De Quincey was a school-boy in Bath; Southey spent his childhood there, and Coleridge preached there, as he did in many other Unitarian pulpits in England; Cowper wrote his “Verses on finding the Heel of a Shoe at Bath” after coming to see his cousin, Lady Hesketh, there; Burke met his wife there, and so did Beckford, who wrote Vathek, meet his. Christopher Anstey, the author of that humorous, that scandalous, that amusing satire, the New Bath Guide, lived most of his life in the city he delighted to laugh at.

The list might be indefinitely prolonged, but the name which most attracts, after the names of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, is the name of Charles Dickens. He must have come to Bath when he was very young, and very probably on some newspaper errand; for when he wrote The Pickwick Papers he was still a reporter. His genius for boisterous drollery was not just the qualification for dealing with the pathetic absurdities of a centre of fashion which was no longer quite what it had been. The earlier decades of the nineteenth century found Bath in a social decline which all her miraculous waters could not medicine. But the members of the Pickwick Club went to a ball at the Upper Rooms where some noble ladies won a good deal of Mr. Pickwick’s money; and he had already visited the Pump Room. Dickens derides the company at both places with the full force of his high spirits and riots in the description of Mr. Pickwick’s introduction to the Master of the Ceremonies, Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esq. The exaggerated caricature preserves some traits of the M.C.’s, his illustrious predecessors; and perhaps some such bold handling as Dickens could best render the personal effect of a beau of the period. He “was a charming young man of not more than fifty, dressed in a very bright-blue coat with resplendent buttons, black trousers, and the thinnest possible pair of highly polished boots. A gold eyeglass was suspended from his neck by a short, broad black ribbon, a gold snuff-box was lightly clasped in his left hand ... and he carried a pliant ebony cane with a heavy gold top. His linen was of the very whitest, finest and stiffest; his wig of the glossiest, blackest and curliest.... His features were contracted into a perpetual smile. ‘Welcome to Ba-ath, sir. This is indeed an acquisition. Most welcome to Ba-ath.... Never been in Ba-ath, Mr. Pickwick?... Never in Ba-ath! He! he! Mr. Pickwick, you are a wag. Not bad, not bad. Good, good. He! he! he! Re-mark-able!’”

This might have happened, but it does not seem as if it had happened, and one sighs amid the horse-play for “the touch of a vanished hand,” like Jane Austen’s, to give delicacy and precision to the picture. The Pickwick Club first put up at the White Hart, just opposite the Pump Room, but it was while living in “the upper portion of the Royal Crescent,” that Mr. Winkle had his amusing adventure with Mrs. Dowler, whose husband had fallen asleep after promising to sit up for her return from a ball. The elderly reader will probably remember better than the younger how Mr. Winkle went down-stairs in his bed-gown and slippers to let the lady in, and then had the door blown to behind him, and was obliged to plunge into her sedan-chair to hide himself from the mockeries of a party coming into the

THE GUINEA-PIG MAN

Crescent; how he fled to escape her infuriated husband, and in Bristol found Mr. Dowler, who had also fled from Bath to escape Mr. Winkle and the consequences of his own violent threats. It was at the house of the Master of Ceremonies in Queen’s Square that “a select company of Bath footmen” entertained Sam Weller at a “friendly swarry consisting of a boiled leg of mutton and the usual trimmings,” but I am unable to give the number where Sam’s note of invitation instructed him to ring at the “airy bell.”

In fact, on going back to the Bath episode of the Pickwick Papers, one finds so much make-believe required of him that the remembrance of one’s earlier delight in it is a burden and a hindrance rather than a help. You could get on better with it if you were reading it for the first time, and even then it would not seem very like what he probably saw. You would be sensible of the elemental facts, but in the picture they are all jarred out of semblance to life. The effect is quite that of a Cruikshank illustration, abounding in impossible grotesqueness, yet related here and there to reality by an action, an expression, a figure. It is screaming farce, or it is shrieking melodrama; the mirror is held up to nature, but nature makes a face in it. Nevertheless, on an earlier visit to England, I had once seen a water-side character getting into a Thames steam-boat who seemed to me exactly like a character of Dickens; and in Bath I used often to meet a little, queer plinth of a man, whose nationality I could not make out, but every inch of whose five feet was full of the suggestion of Dickens. His face, topped by a frowzy cap, was twisted in a sort of fixed grin, and his eyes looked different ways, perhaps to prevent any attempt of mine to escape him. He carried at his side a small wicker-box which he kept his hand on; and as he drew near and halted, I heard a series of plaintive squeaks coming from it. “Make you perform the guinea-pig?” he always asked, and before I could answer, he dragged a remonstrating guinea-pig from its warm shelter, and stretched it on the cage, holding it down with both hands. “Johnny die queek!” he commanded, and lifted his hands for the instant in which Johnny was motionlessly gathering his forces for resuscitation. Then he called exultantly, “Bobby’s coming!” and before the police were upon him, Johnny was hustled back into his cosy box, woefully murmuring to its comfort of his hardship; and the queer little man smiled his triumph in every direction. The sight of this brief drama always cost me a penny; perhaps I could have had it for less; but I did not think a penny was too much.

IV
A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE

THERE were so many pleasing places within easy reach of Bath that it was hard to choose among them, and Bath itself was so constantly pleasing that it was a serious loss to leave it for a day, for an hour. I do not know, now, why we should have gone first, when we gathered force to break the charm, to Bradford-on-Avon. If we did not go first to Wells it was perhaps because we balanced the merits of an eighth-century Saxon Chapel against those of a twelfth-century Cathedral, and felt that the chapel had prior claim. Possibly, spoiled as we were by the accessibility of places in England, and relaxed as we were by the air of Bath, we shrank from spending five or six hours in the run to Wells when we could get to and from Bradford in little or no time. Wells is one of the exceptions to the rule that in England everything is within easy reach from everywhere, or else Bath is an exception among the places that Wells is within easy reach of. At any rate we were at Bradford almost before we knew it, or knew anything of its history, which there is really a good deal of.

The best of this history seems to be that when in the year 652 the Saxon King of Wessex overcame the Britons in a signal victory, he did not exterminate the survivors, but allowed them to become the fellow-subjects of their Saxon conquerors under his rule. Just how great a blessing this was it would not be easy to say at the actual distance of time, but it seems to have been thought a good deal of a blessing for a King of Wessex to bestow. To crown it, some fifty years later, a monastery was founded in Bradford, by St. Aldhelm, a nephew of the King. A chapel was built on the site of the uncle’s battle with the Britons, and such as it was then such we now saw it, the vicar of the parish having not long ago rescued it from its irreligious uses as a cottage dwelling and a free school, and restored it spiritually and materially to its original function. It is precious for being the only old church in England which is wholly unchanged in form, and though very small and very rude it is pathetically interesting. It seemed somehow much older than many monuments of my acquaintance which greatly antedated it; much older, say, than the Roman remains at Bath, for it is a relic of the remote beginning of an order of things, and not the remnant of a fading civilization. No doubt the Saxons who built it on the low hill slope where it stands, in a rude semblance of the Roman churches which were the only models of Christian architecture they could have seen, thought it an edifice of the dignity since imparted to it by the lapse of centuries. Without, the grass grew close to its foundations, in the narrow plot of ground about it, and the sturdy little fabric showed its Romanesque forms in the gray stone pierced by mere slits of windows, which gave so faint a light within that, after entering, one must wait a moment before attempting to move about in the cramped, dungeon-like space. With the simple altar, and the chairs set before it for worshippers, it gave an awful sense of that English continuity on which political and religious changes vainly

SAXON CHAPEL AT BRADFORD

Wholly unchanged in form since it was built in the eighth century

break: the parts knit themselves together again, and transmit the original consciousness from age to age. The type of beauty in the child who sold us permits to see the chapel and followed us into it was in like manner that of the Saxon maids whose hulking fathers had beaten in battle the fierce, dark little Britons on that spot twelve hundred years before: the same blazing red cheeks, the same blue, blue eyes, the same sunny hair which has always had to make up for the want of other sunniness in that dim clime, falling round the fair neck. No doubt the snuffles with which the pretty creature suffered were also of the same date and had descended from mother to daughter in the thirty generations dwelling in just such stone-cold stone cottages as that where we found her. It was one of a row of cottages near the chapel, of a red-tiled, many-gabled, leaden-sashed, diamond-paned picturesqueness that I have never seen surpassed out of the theatre, or a Kate Greenaway picture, and was damp with the immemorial dampness that inundated us from the open door when we approached. What perpetuity of colds in the head must be the lot of youths in such abodes; how rheumatism must run riot among the joints of age in the very beds and chimney-corners! Better, it sometimes seemed, the greatest ugliness ever devised by a Yankee carpenter in dry and comfortable wood than the deadly poetry of such dwellings.

But there were actually some wooden houses in Bradford, or partially wooden, which the driver of our fly took us to see when we had otherwise exhausted the place. They had the timbered gables of the Tudor times when the English seemed to build with an instinct for domestic comfort earlier unknown and later lost; but otherwise Bradford was of stone, stony. It studded the slopes of its broken uplands with warts and knots of little dwellings, and had a certain foreignness, possibly imparted by the long abode of the Flemish cloth-workers whom an enterprising manufacturer invited to the place centuries before, and whose skill established its ancient industry in a finer product and a greater prosperity. Now, one reads, the competition of the same art in Yorkshire has reduced the weavers of Bradford to a fifth of their number fifty years ago. But the presence of the Flemings was so influential in the seventeenth century that they had a quarter of their own, and altogether there were intimations in Bradford so Continental, the raw rainy day of our visit, that I thought if it could have had a little sun on it there were moments when it might have looked Italian.

Perhaps not, and I do not mean that in its own way it was not delightful. We wandered from the station into it by a bridge over the Avon that was all a bridge could be asked to be by the most exacting tourist, who could not have asked more, midway, than a guardhouse which had become a chapel, and then a lock-up, and finally an object of interest merely. When we had got well into the town, and wanted a carriage, we were taken in charge by the kindest policeman that ever befriended strangers. If not the only policeman in Bradford, he was the only one on duty, and his duty was mainly, as it seemed, to do us any pleasure he could. He told us where we could find a fly, and not content with this, he went in person with us to the stable-yard, and did not leave us till he had made a boy come out and promise us a fly immediately. Never, even when girdled by the protecting arm of a blue giant resolved to bring my gray hairs in safety to some thither side of Fifth Avenue or Broadway, have I known such sweetness in a minister of the law. We could only thank him again and again, and vainly wish that we might do something for him in return. But what can one do for a policeman except offer him a cigar? But if one does not smoke?

The stable-boy seemed a well-grown lad in that character, but when he put on a metal-buttoned coat and a top-hat, and coachman’s boots in honor of us, he shrank into the smallest-sized man. It seemed the harder, therefore, that when he proposed to bow us into the fly with fit dignity, and pulled open the door, it should come off its hinge and hang by its handle from his grasp. But we did what we could to ignore the mortifying incident, and after that we abetted him in always letting us out on the other side.

His intelligence was creditable to him as a large boy, if not as a small man, and but for him we should not have seen those timbered houses which were in a street dreadfully called, with the English frankness which never spares the sensibilities of strangers, The Shambles. With us shambles are only known in tragic poetry; in real life they veil their horror in delicate French and become abattoirs; but as that street in Bradford was probably the Shambles in 652, the year of the great Saxon victory over the Britons, it was still so called in the year of our visit, 1904. We did not complain; the houses were not so wooden as we could have wished for the sake of the rheumatism and snuffles within, but they must have been drier than houses entirely of stone. Besides we had just come warm from the Italian aspect of one of the most charming houses I saw in England, and we did not really much mind the discomfort of others. The house was that Kingston House, world-famous for having been reproduced in papier-maché at the last Universal Exposition in Paris, which a wealthy cloth-manufacturer had had built for himself about 1600 by Giovanni of Padua, and it was full of beautiful Italian feeling in an English environment. Masses of cold, cold evergreen shrubs hide it from the street, but at the moment the rain was briefly intermitting, and we surprised it, as it were, in a sort of reverie of the South under an afternoon sky, hesitating from gray to blue. At this happy instant the place was embellished by a peacock, sweeping with outspread tail the farthest green of a long velvet lawn, and lending the splendor of his color to a picture richly framed by a stretch of balustrade. The house, with English shyness (which it surely might have overcome after being shown as the most beautiful house in England), faced away from the street, towards a garden which sloped downward from it, towards a dove-cote with pigeons in red and mauve cooing about its eaves and roofs, and mingling their deep-throated sighs with the murmur of a mill somewhere beyond the Avon.

There were other beautiful and famous houses not far from Bradford, but our afternoon was waning, and we consoled ourselves as we could with the old Barton Barn, which was built two hundred years after King Etheldred had given the manor to the abbess of Shaftesbury, and became locally known as the tithe-barn from its use in receiving the dues of the church in kind during the long simple centuries when they were so paid. It is a vast, stately structure, and is now used for the cow-barn of a dairy farmer, whose unkempt cattle stood about, knee-deep in the manure, with the caked and clotted hides which the West of England cattle seem to wear all winter. It did not look such a place as one would like to get milk from in America, but if we could have that

KINGSTON HOUSE, BRADFORD

Built by Giovanni of Padua, about 1600

old cow-barn, without the cows, at home, I think we might gainfully exchange our neatest and wholesomest dairy for it. The rich superabundance of the past in England is what always strikes one, and the piety with which the past is preserved and restored promises more and more of antiquity. I am sure the Barton Barn at Bradford is only waiting for some public-spirited magnate who will yet drive the untidy kine from its shelter, clean up, and sod and plant its yard, and with the help of some reverent architect renew it in the image of its prime, and stock it as a museum with the various kinds of tithes which in the ages of faith the neighboring churls used to pay into it for the comfort of the clergy here, and the good of their own souls hereafter.

When we got well away from the tithe-barn we felt the need of tea, and we walked back from the station where our large boy, or little man, had put us down, to the shop of a green-grocer, which is probably the most twentieth-century building in Bradford. It is altogether of wood, and behind the shop, where the vegetables vaunted themselves in all the variety of cabbage, there is a clean little room, with the walls and roof sheathed in matched and painted pine. In this cheerful place, two rustics, a man and a boy, were drinking tea at the only table, but at our coming they politely choked down all the tea that was in their cups, and in spite of our entreaties hurried out with their cheeks bulged by what was left of their bread and butter. It was too bad, we murmured, but our hostess maintained that her late guests had really done, and she welcomed us with a hospitality rendered precious by her dusting off the chairs for us with her apron: I do not know that I had ever had that done for me before, and it seemed very romantic, and very English. The tea and butter were English too, and excellent, as they almost unfailingly are in England, no matter how poor the place where they are supplied, and the bread was no worse than usual. In a morsel of garden under the window some gillyflowers were in bloom, and when we expressed our surprise, the kind woman went out and gathered some for us: they bloomed pretty well all the winter, there, she said; but let not this give the fond reader too glowing an idea of the winter’s warmth in the West of England. It only proves how sturdy the English flowers are, and how much raw cold they can stand without turning a petal.

Before our train went, we had time to go a longish walk, which we took through some pleasant, rather new, streets of small houses, each with its gardened front-yard hedged about it with holly or laurel, and looking a good, dull, peaceful home. It may really have been neither, and life may have been as wild, and bad, and fascinating in those streets as in the streets of any American town of the same population as Bradford. There was everything in the charming old place to make life easy; good shops, of all kinds, abundant provisions, stores, and not too many licensed victuallers, mostly women, privileged to sell wine and spirits. Yet, as the twilight began to fall, Bradford seemed very lonely, and we thought with terror, what if we should miss our train back to Bath! We got to the station, however, in time to cower half an hour over a grate in which the Company had munificently had a fire early in the day; and to correct by closer observation of an elderly pair an error which had flattered our national pride at the time of our arrival. In hurrying away to get the only fly at the station the lady had then fallen down and the gentleman had kept on, leaving her to pick herself up as she could, while he secured the fly. Perhaps he had not noticed her falling, but we chose to think the incident very characteristically middle-class English; for all we knew it might be a betrayal of the way all the English treated their wives. Now the same couple arrived to take the train with us for Bath, and we heard them censuring its retard in accents unmistakably American! We fell from our superiority to our English half-brothers instantly; and I think the little experience was useful in confirming me in the resolution throughout my English travels to practise that slowness in sentencing and executing offenders against one’s native ideals and standards which has always been the conspicuous ornament of English travellers among ourselves.

The day that we drove out from Bath to a certain charming old house which I wish I could impart my sense of, but which I will at once own the object of a fond despair, was apparently warm and bright, but was really dim and cold. That is, the warmth and brightness were superficial, while the cold and dimness were structural. The fields on either side of the road were mostly level, though here and there they dipped or rose, delicately green in their diaphanous garment of winter wheat, or more substantially clad in the grass which the winter’s cold had not been great enough to embrown. Here and there were spaces of woodland, withdrawn rather afar from our course, except where the trees of an avenue led up from the highway to some unseen mansion. To complete the impression you must always, under the tender blue sky, thickly archipelagoed with whity-brown clouds, have rooks sailing and dreamily scolding, except where they wake into a loud clamor among the leafless tops surrounding some infrequent roof. There are flights of starlings suddenly winging from the pastures, where the cows with their untidily caked and clotted hides are grazing, and the sheep are idling over the chopped turnips, and the young lambs are shivering with plaintive cries. Amid their lamentations the singing of birds makes itself heard; the singing of larks, or the singing of robins, Heaven knows which, but always angelically sweet. The bare hedges cross and recross the fields, and follow the hard, smooth road in lines unbroken save near some village of gray walls and red roofs, topped by an ancient church. In the background, over a stretch of embankment or along the side of a low hill, sweeps a swift train of little English cars, with a soft whirring sound, as unlike the giant roar of one of our expresses as it is unlike the harsh clatter of a French rapide. The white plumes of steam stretch after it in vain; break, and float thinner and thinner over the track behind.

There were, except in the villages, very few houses; and we met even fewer vehicles. There was one family carriage, with the family in it, and a sort of tranter’s wagon somewhere out of Hardy’s enchanted pages, with a friendly company of neighbors going to Bath inside it. At one exciting moment there was a lady in a Bath chair driving a donkey violently along the side of the road. A man slashing and wattling the lines of hedge, or trimming the turf beside the foot-path, left his place in literature, and came to life as the hedger and ditcher we had always read of. Beneath the hedges here and there very “rathe primroses” peered out intrepidly, like venturesome live things poising between further advance and retreat. The road was admirable, but it seemed strange that so few people used it. The order in which it was kept was certainly worthy of constant travel, and we noted that from point to point there was a walled space beside it for the storage of road-mending material. At home we should dump the broken stone in the gutter near the place that needed mending, or on the face of the highway, but in England, where everything is so static, and the unhurried dynamic activities are from everlasting to everlasting, a place is specially provided for broken stone, and the broken stone is kept there.

The drive from Bath to our destination was twelve miles, and the friend who was to be our host for the day had come as far on his wheel to ask us. It was the first of many surprises in the continued use of the bicycle which were destined to confound strangers from a land whose entire population seemed to go bicycle-mad a few years ago, and where now they are so wholly recovered that the wheel is almost as obsolete as the russet shoe. As both the wheel and the russet shoe are excellent things in their way, though no American could now wear the one or use the other without something like social suicide, the English continue to employ them with great comfort and entire self-respect. They fail so wholly to understand why either should have gone out with us that one becomes rather ashamed to explain that it was for the same reason that they came in, merely because everybody had them.

Our friend had given us explicit directions for our journey, and it was well that he did so, for we had two turnings to take on that lonely road, and there were few passers whom we could ask our way. We really made the driver ask it, and he did not like to do it, for he felt, as we did, that he ought to know it. I am afraid he was not a very active intelligence, and I doubt if he had ever before been required to say what so many birds and flowers were. I think he named most of them at random, and when it came at last to a very common white flower, he boldly said that he had forgotten what it was. As we drew near the end of our journey he grew more anxiously complicated in the knowledge of our destination which he acquired. But he triumphed finally in the successive parleys held to determine the site of a house which had been in its place seven or eight hundred years, and might, in that time have ceased to be a matter of doubt even among the farther neighbors. It was with pride on his part and pleasure on ours that suddenly and most unexpectedly, when within a few yards of it, he divined the true way, and drove into the court-yard of what had at times been the dower-house, where we were to find our host and guide to the greater mansion.

As this house is a type of many old dower-houses I will be so intimate as to say that you enter it from the level of the ground outside, such a thing as under-pinning to lift the floor from the earth and to make an air-space below being still vaguely known in England, and in former times apparently unheard of. But when once within you are aware of a charm which keeps such houses in the inviolate form of the past; and this one was warmed for us by a hospitality which refined itself down to the detail of a black cat basking before the grate: a black cat that promptly demanded milk after our luncheon, but politely waited to be asked to the saucer when it was brought. From the long room which looked so much a study that I will not call it differently, the windows opened on the shrubberies and lawns and gardens that surround such houses in fiction, and keep them so visionary to the comer who has known them nowhere else that it would be easy to transgress the bounds a guest must set himself, and speak as freely of the people he met there as if they were persons in a pleasant book. Two of them, kindred of the

SUTTON COURT, ONE OF ENGLAND’S HISTORIC HOUSES

manor-house and of the great house near, had come from three or four miles away on their wheels. Our host himself, the youngest son of the great house, was a painter, by passion as well as by profession, and a reviewer of books on art, such as plentifully bestrewed his table and forbade us to think of the place in the ordinary terms as a drawing-room. It seemed to me characteristic of the convenient insular distances that here, far in the West, almost on the Welsh border, he should be doing this work for a great London periodical, in as direct touch with the metropolis as if he dwelt hard by the Park, and could walk in fifteen minutes to any latest exhibition of pictures.

When he took us after luncheon almost as long a walk to his studio, I fancied that I was feeling England under my feet as I had not before. We passed through a gray hamlet of ten or a dozen stone cottages, where, behind or above their dooryard hedges, they had gradually in the long ages clustered near the great house, and a little cottage girl, who was like a verse of Wordsworth, met us, and bidding us good-day, surprised us by dropping a courtesy. It surprised even our friends, who spoke of it as if it were almost the last courtesy dropped in England, and made me wish I could pick it up, and put it in my note-book, to grace some such poor page as this: so pretty was it, so shy, so dear, with such a dip of the suddenly weakening little knees.

We were then on our way to see first the small gray church which had been in its place among the ancient graves from some such hoary eld as English churches dream of in like places all over the land, and make our very faith seem so recent a thing. It was in a manner the family chapel, but it was also the spiritual home of the lowlier lives of village and farm, and was shared with them in the reciprocal kindness common in that English world of enduring ties. There for ages the parish folk had all been christened, and all married, and all buried, and there in due time they had been or would be forgotten. The edifice was kept in fit repair by the joint piety of rich and poor, with the lion’s share of the expense rightfully falling to the rich, as in such cases it always does in England; and within and without the church the affection of the central family had made itself felt and seen, since the Christian symbols were first rudely graven in the stone of the square church-tower.

The name of the family always dwelling in that stately old house whither we were next going had not always been the same, but its nature and its spirit had been the same. An enlightened race would naturally favor the humane side in all times, and the family were Parliamentarian at the time England shook off the Stuart tyranny, and revolutionist when she finally ridded herself of her faithless Jameses and Charleses. In the archives of the house there are records of the hopes vainly cherished by a son of it who was then in New York, that our own revolt against the Georgian oppression might be composed to some peaceful solution of the quarrel. It was not his fault that this hope was from the first moment too late, but it must be one of his virtues in American eyes that he saw from the beginning the hopelessness of any accommodation without a full concession of the principles for which the colonies contended. In the negotiation of the treaty at Versailles in 1783 he loyally did his utmost for his country against ours at every point of issue, and especially where the exiled American royalists were concerned. Our own commissioners feared while they respected him, and John Adams wrote of him in his diary, “He pushes and presses every point as far as it can possibly go; he has a most eager, earnest, pointed spirit.”

This was the first baronet of his line, but the real dignity and honor of the house has been that of a race of scholars and thinkers. Their public spirit has been of the rarer sort which would find itself most at home in the literary association of the place, and it has come to literary expression in a book of singular charm. In the gentle wisdom of sympathies which can be universal without transcending English conditions, the Talk at a Country House, as the book modestly calls itself, strays to topics of poetry, and politics, and economics, and religion, yet keeps its allegiance to the old house we were about to see as a central motif. It was our first English country house, but I do not think that its claim on our interest was exaggerated by its novelty, and I would willingly chance finding its charm as potent again, if I might take my way to it as before. We came from the old church now by the high-road, now through fringes of woodland, and now over shoulders of pasturage, where the lesser celandine delicately bloomed, and the primrose started from the grass, till at last we emerged from under the sheltering boughs of the tall elms that screened the house from our approach. There was a brook that fell noisily over our way, and that we crossed on a rustic bridge, and there must have been a drive to the house, but I suppose we did not follow it. Our day of March had grown gray as it had grown old, and we had not the light of a day in June, such as favored an imaginary visitor in Talk at a Country House, but we saw the place quite so much as he did that his words will be better than any of my own in picturing it.

“The air was resonant with rooks as they filled the sky with the circles in which they wheeled to and fro, disappearing in the distance to appear again, and so gradually reach their roosting trees.... I might call them a coruscation of rooks.... On my left I saw ... the old battlemented wall, and a succession of gables on either side ... and one marked by a cross which I knew must be the chapel.... The old, battlemented wall had a flora of its own: ferns, crimson valerian, snap-dragons, and brier-roses ... and an ash and a yew growing on the battlements where they had been sown no doubt by the rooks. And as I passed through an archway of the road, the whole house came in view. It was not a castle nor a palace, but it might be called a real though small record of what men had been doing there from the time of the Doomsday Book to our own.”

As we grew more acquainted with it, we realized that at the front it was a building low for its length, rising gray on terraces that dropped from its level in green, green turf. Some of the long windows opened down to the grass, with which the ground floor was even. Above rose the Elizabethan, earlier Tudor, and Plantagenet of the main building, the wings, and the tower of the keep. The rear of the house was enclosed by a wall of Edward II.’s time, and beyond this was a wood of elms, tufted with the nests of that eternal chorus of coruscating rooks. At first we noticed their multitudinous voices, but in a little while they lost all severalty of sound, like waves breaking on the shore, and I fancied one being so lulled by them that one would miss them when out of hearing, and the sense would ache for them in the less soothing silence.

The family was away from home, and there were no reserves in the house, left in the charge of the gardener, as there must have been if it were occupied. But I do not hope to reproduce my impressions of it. I can only say that a sense of intellectual refinement and of liberal thought was what qualified for me such state as characterized the place. The whole structure within as well as without was a record of successive temperaments as well as successive tunes. Each occupant had built up or pulled down after his fancy, but the changes had left a certain physiognomy unchanged, as the mixture of different strains in the blood still leaves a family look pure. The house, for all its stateliness, was not too proud for domesticity; its grandeur was never so vast that the home circle would be lost in it. The portraits on the walls were sometimes those of people enlarged to history in their lives, but these seemed to keep with the rest their allegiance to a common life. The great Bess of Hardwicke, the “building Bess,” whose architectural impulses effected themselves in so many parts of England, had married into the line and then married out of it (to become, as Countess of Shrewsbury, one of the last jailers of Mary Queen of Scots), and she had left her touch as well as her face on its walls, but she is not a more strenuous memory in it than a certain unstoried dowager. She, when her son died, took half the house and left half to her daughter-in-law, whom she built off from herself by a partition carried straight through the mansion to the garden wall, with a separate gate for each.

In her portrait she looks all this and more; and a whole pathetic romance lives in the looks of that lady of the first Charles’s time who wears a ring pendent from her neck, and a true-lovers’ knot embroidered on the back over her heart, and who died unwedded. There were other legends enough; and where the pictures asserted nothing but lineage they were still very interesting. They were of people who had a life in common with the house, wives and mothers and daughters, sons and husbands and fathers, married into it or born into it, and all receiving from it as much as they imparted to it, as if they were of one substance with it and it shared their consciousness that it was the home of their race. We have no like terms in America, and our generations, which are each separately housed, can only guess at the feeling for the place of their succession which the generations of such an English house must feel. It would be easy to overestimate the feeling, but in view of it I began to understand the somewhat defiant tenderness with which the children of such a house must cherish the system which keeps it inalienably their common home, though only the first-born son may dwell in it. If there were no law to transmit it to the eldest brother they might well in their passion for it be a law unto themselves at any sacrifice and put it in his hands to have and hold for them all.

In my own country I had known too much graceless private ownership to care to offer the consecrated tenure of such an ancestral home the violence of unfriendly opinions of primogeniture. But if I had been minded to do so, I am not sure that this house and all its dead and living would not have heard me at least tolerantly. In England, with the rigid social and civic conformity, there has always been ample play for personal character; perhaps without this the inflexible conditions would be insufferable, and all sorts of explosions would occur. With full liberty to indulge his whim a man does not so much mind being on this level or that, or which side of the social barrier he finds himself. But it is not his whim only that he may freely indulge: he may have his way in saying the thing he thinks, and the more frankly he says it the better he is liked, even when the thing is disliked. These are the conditions, implicit in everything, by which the status, elsewhere apparently so shaky, holds itself so firmly on its legs. They reconcile to its contradictions those who suffer as well as those who enjoy, and dimly, dumbly, the dweller in the cottage is aware that his rheumatism is of one uric acid with the gout of the dweller in the great house. Every such mansion is the centre of the evenly distributed civilization which he shares, and makes each part of England as tame, and keeps it as wild, as any other. He knows that hut and hall must stand or fall together, for the present, at least; and where is it that there is any longer a future?

It seems strange to us New-Worldlings, after all the affirmation of history and fiction, to find certain facts of feudalism (mostly the kindlier facts) forming part of the status in England as they form no part of it with us. It was only upon reflection that I perceived how feudal this great house was in its relation to the lesser homes about it through many tacit ties of responsibility and allegiance. From eldest son to eldest son it had been in the family always, but it had descended with obligations which no eldest son could safely deny any more than he could refuse the privileges it conferred. To what gentlest effect the sense of both would come, the reader can best learn from the book which I have already named. This, when I had read it, had the curious retroactive power of establishing the author in a hospitable perpetuity in the place bereft of him, so that it now seems as if he had been chief of those who took leave of us that pale late afternoon of March, and warned us of the chill mists which shrouded us back to Bath. As we drove along between the meadows where the light was failing and the lambs plaintively called through the gloaming, we said how delightful it had all been, how perfectly, how satisfyingly, English. We tried again to realize the sentiment which, as well as the law, keeps such places in England in the ordered descent, and renders it part of the family faith and honor that the ancestral house should always be the home of its head. I think we failed because we conceived of the fact too objectively, and imagined conscious a thing that tradition has made part of the English nature, so that the younger brother acquiesces as subjectively in the elder brother’s primacy as the elder brother himself, for the family’s sake. We fancied that in their order one class yielded to another without grudging and without grasping, and that this, which fills England with picturesqueness and drama, was the secret of England. In the end we were not so sure. We were not sure even of our day’s experience; it was like something we had read rather than lived; and in this final unreality, I prefer to shirk the assertion of a different ideal, which all the same I devoutly hold.

V
AFTERNOONS IN WELLS AND BRISTOL

EVEN the local guide-book, which is necessarily optimistic, owns that the railroad service between Bath and Wells leaves something to be desired. The distance is twenty miles, and you can make it by the Great Western in something over two hours, but if you are pressed for time, the Somerset and Dorset line will carry you in two. As we were nationally in a hurry, though personally we had time to spare, we went and came by this line, mostly in a sort of vague rain, which favored the blossoming of the primroses along the railroad bank. Not that any part of the way needed rain; great stretches of the country lay soaking in the rainfall of the year before, which had not had sun enough to diminish its depth or breadth. In fact, on the eve of the sunniest and loveliest summer which perhaps England ever saw, the whole West looked in March as if wringing it out and hanging it up to dry in a steam-laundry could alone get the wet out of it. The water lay in wide expanses in the meadows, the plethoric streams swam chokeful; in the ditches men were at work with short scythes cutting the rank weeds out to give the flood a little course, but where it was to run was a question which did not answer itself.

We were in a third-class compartment, and we had the advantage of the simple life getting in and out of a train that seemed to stop oftener than it started. Our ever-changing fellow-passengers were mostly mothers of large little families: babies in arms, and babies slightly bigger, sisters and brothers pendent at arm’s-length from the mother-hands, all with flaring blue eyes and flaming red cheeks, and flaxen hair and mild, sweet faces. Everybody was good, and helped these helpless families to mount and dismount; the kindly porters came and went with their impracticable bundles, and the passengers handed the brothers and sisters after the baby-burdened mother, or took them from her so that she might stumble into the carriage without falling upon her detached offspring. They were beautifully polite in word and deed, so that it was a consolation to hear and see them.

Shortly after our journey began, our tram was apparently run down by an old man and his granddaughter who got in blown and panting from their chase of half a mile before overtaking us. They were of the thin blond type of some English country folks, with a milder color in their cheeks than usual, and between his age and her youth they had about a third of the natural allowance of teeth. Agriculture is apparently nowhere favorable to the preservation of teeth; the rustic theory is that when a tooth offends one should pluck it out; but in England they never expect to replace it, while with us they pluck out all the others and replace them with new ones from the dentist’s, so that when you see good teeth in a country mouth you know where they come from. Their want of teeth did not prevent the old man and the little girl from beginning to eat as soon as they could get their breath. They were going on a visit to her aunt, it seemed, and she was provisioned against the chances of famine in the hour’s journey by a plentiful supply of oranges and apples and cakes in a net bag. “Us ’ad a ’ard chase, didn’t us?” the old man asked her, with a sociable glance round the place. The little girl nodded with her mouth full, while her fingers explored the bag for more cakes to fill it when it should be empty, and the old man leaned tenderly towards her and suggested, “Couldn’t your little ’and find something for me, too?” She drew forth an orange and a cake and gave them to him. Then they munched on, he garrulously, she silently; with what teeth they had between them they must have managed to masticate their food, and there is every probability that they reached their journey’s end without famishing.

We had only two changes to make in our twenty miles, and as we were on the swift train that made the distance in two hours, we did not mind some delay at each change. It was just lunch-time when we reached Wells, and had ourselves driven in the hotel omnibus, a tremendously rackety vehicle, to The Swan. This bird’s plumage was much disarranged by some sort of Easter preparations, and there were workmen taking down and hanging up decorations. But there was quiet in the coffee-room, where over a cold, cold, luncheon we shivered in sympathy with the icy gloom of the basement entrance of the inn, where an office-lady darkled behind her office-window, apparently in winter-long question whether she would be warmer with it shut or open. It was an inn of the old type, now happily obsolescent, which if it cannot smell directly of a stable-yard, does what it can by smelling of the stable-boy in its doorway. We had not, however, come to Wells for the Swan, but for the cathedral, and as we could look out at its loveliness from the window where we ate lunch, we had really nothing to complain of. We had indeed something specially to be glad of, for we could there get our first glimpse of the cathedral through the Dean’s Eye, or if this is not quite honest, from over the Dean’s Eyebrow, so to call the top of the fifteenth-century gate, which commands the finest approach to the cathedral. When you have passed through the Dean’s Eye it may not be quite as if you had passed through the Needle’s Eye; but if I were an American millionaire who had my doubts of the way I was going I might have fancied myself achieving a feat even more difficult than the camel’s, and to be entering the Kingdom as I crossed the lawn inside the gate, and moved in my rapture towards the divine edifice. All the English cathedrals are beautiful, but among those which are most beautiful the Wells cathedral is next to the cathedral of Ely, in my memory. I am not speaking of stateliness or grandeur, but of that more refined and exquisite something which makes a supreme appeal in, say, the Church of St. Mark’s at Venice. I came away from the Wells cathedral saying to myself that there was a loveliness in it for which there was no word but feminine; and if this conveys any notion to the reader’s mind, I shall be glad to leave him for the rest to any pictures of it he can find.

Of course we followed the verger through it in the usual way, but I could not make any one follow me with as much profit. It had its quaint details, and its grotesque details, from the bursting fun of the ages of faith, as well as its expressions of simple reverence, all blending to the sort of tender beauty I have tried to intimate, and it had its great wonder of an inverted arch, through which one looked at its glories as with one’s head held upside down. I do not know but the 1325 clock of Peter Lightfoot, monk of Glastonbury, is as great a wonder as the inverted arch.

WELLS CATHEDRAL, FROM SOUTHEAST

We were so fortunate as to be present when it struck the hour, and so we saw the four knights on horseback go riding round, and the seated man kick two small bells with his heels, as he has been doing every fifteen minutes for nigh six hundred years. For the ordinary lay-mind on its travels, I suppose, this active personage is one of the great attractions of the cathedral next after the toothache-man in one of the capitals who pulls his mouth open to show his aching tooth. He has been much photographed, of course, but he is to be seen in situ just above that bishop’s tomb which is sovereign, through the bishop’s merits, for the toothache. The verger, who told us this, left us to suppose that the tomb had been too difficult of application to the tooth of the sufferer above, and that this was why he was still appealing to the public sympathy.

We offered him a mute condolence after we had sated ourselves with the beauty of the most beautiful chapter-house in the world, ascending and descending by the foot-worn wide crossing sweep of the unique stairway, and then walking through into the Vicar’s Close, and the two rows of Singers’ Houses, like cottages in a particularly successful stage perspective. As we passed one of these histrionic habitations, each with its lifelike dooryard and its practicable gate, three of the clerical students, who have an immemorial right to lodge with the singers, came out gayly challenging one another which way they should walk, and deciding on Tor Hill, wherever that was, and then starting off at a good round pace in the rain. The doubting day had sorrowed and sowed to that effect, and when the verger had led us through the cloister aisle into the gardens of the bishop’s palace the grounds were so much like waters that there seemed no reason why the ducks should not have been sailing on the lawn as well as the moat. This, with the embattled wall, is said, and probably fabled, to have formed the defence of his house for a certain bishop whose life was threatened by the monks of Bath, who if they had waited five hundred years in the idea of suddenly descending upon him by our swift train, would have found him prepared to give them a warm reception. But the day of our visit there were no belligerent monks; the place was almost peacefully picturesque, with no protection needed but an umbrella against the rain heavily dripping from the ivy of the ruined cloister arches, and goloshes against the water of the sopping earth.

It was the idea of one of us who had found an ancient almshouse very amusingly characteristic on a former English journey, that we could not do better, after the cathedral, than go to one of the several time-honored charitable foundations in Wells. We had our choice of several, including one for six poor men, and one for twelve poor men and two poor women. But we must have selected the largest, where both poor men and poor women dwell. Such people do not end their days in the snugness of such places with anything of the disgrace which attaches to paupers with us. Their lot is rather a coveted honor, and on their level is felt to add dignity to the decline of life. Each old woman has her kitchen, and each old man his kitchen garden (always edged with simple flowers); and they have a stated income, generally six or seven shillings a week, with which they provision themselves as they please.

We did not find the matron of the place we chose without some difficulty, or some apologetic delay for her want of preparation. But she was really well enough, when she came, though it was charing-day, and the whole house was even better prepared, which was the essential thing. I cannot say that the inmates seemed especially glad to see their poor American relations, but there was no active opposition to our visit, and we did our best to win the favor of three old men shown as specimens in the large common room where they were smoking by the chimney, and, if I am any judge of human nature, criticising the management down to the motives of the original benefactor in the fourteenth century. We had some brief but not unfriendly parley, and after offering a modest contribution towards the general tobacco-fund, we said good-bye to these meritorious old men, who made a show of standing up, but did not really do so, I think. The matron would have left the door open, but I bethought me to ask if they would not rather have it shut, and they said with one voice that they would. I closed it with the conviction that they would instantly begin talking about us, and not to our advantage, but I could not blame them. Age is censorious, poverty is apt to be envious, infirmity is not amiable and we were not praiseworthy. Upon the whole I hope they gave it us good and strong; for I am afraid that the next pensioner whom we visited thought better of us than we deserved. I got the notion that she was in some sort a show pensioner, and that therefore we had not taken her unawares. Her room was both parlor and kitchen, and was decorated no less with her cooking apparatus than the china openly set about the wall on shelves. She was full of smiles and little polite bobs, and most willing to have her room admired, even to the bed that crowded her table towards her grate, and left a very snug fit for her easy-chair. One could see that the matron prized her, and expected us to do so, and we did so, especially when she showed us a flower in a pot which her son had given her. Perhaps we exaggerated the comforts of her room in congratulating her upon it, but this was an error in the right direction, and we did what we could to repair it by the offer of a shilling. If it is permitted to the spirits of benefactors in heaven to take pleasure in their good deeds on earth, it must have been a source of satisfaction for five hundred years (as they count time here) to the founder of this charity when he thought of how many humble fellow-creatures he had helped, and was helping. Perhaps they do not care, up there; but the chance is worth the attention of people looking about for a permanent investment. I think every one ought to earn a living, and when past it ought to be pensioned by the state, and let live in comfort after his own fancy; but failing this ideal, I wish the rich with us would multiply foundations after the good old English fashion, in which the pensioners, though they dwelt much in common, could keep a semblance of family life and personal independence.

Of course Wells, as its name says, was once a watering-place, though never of so much resort as Bath; but now its healing springs bubble or ooze forth in forgottenness, with not a leper or even a rheumatic to avail of them. It was very, very anciently a mining-town, and long afterwards a shoe-town, with an interval of being a place of weavers, but it was never an industrial centre. It has never even been very historical, though Henry VII. stopped there in his campaign against the Pretender Perkin Warbeck, and after centuries the followers of another pretender—the luckless, worthless, but otherwise harmless bastard of Charles II., the Duke of Monmouth, who was making war against his uncle, James II.—occupied the city and stripped the lead from the

MARKET-PLACE, WELLS

cathedral roof for bullets; they otherwise dishonored its edifice, Cromwell’s soldiers having failed to do so. By the beginning of this century the population of the town had dwindled to less than five thousand. But these, in their flat streets of snug little houses, we thought well supplied with good shops, and the other comforts of life, and we found them of an indefatigable civility in telling and showing us our way about. We had still some time to spare when finally their kindness got us to the station of the Somerset and Dorset line, where, as a friendly old man whom we found there before us justly remarked, “Us must wait for the train; it won’t wait for we.”

There was another old man there, in a sort of farmer’s gayety of costume, with leathern gaiters reaching well to his knees, and a jaunty, low-crowned hat, who promptly made our acquaintance and told us that he was eighty years old, and that he had lately led the singing of a Methodist revival-meeting. “And every one said my voice was as strong in the last note as the first.” He then sang us a verse from a hymn in justification of the universal opinion, and in spite of his functional piety was of an organic levity which, with his withered bloom and his lively movement on his feet, recalled the type of sage eternized by Mr. Hardy in Granfer Cantle. Upon the whole we were glad to be rid of him when he quitted the train on which we started together, and left us to the sadder society of a much younger man. He too was a countryman, and he presently surprised me by owning that he had once been a fellow-countryman. He had indeed lived two years in a part of Northern Ohio where I once lived, and the world shrank in compass through our meeting in the Somerset and Dorset line. “And didn’t you like it?” “Oh, yes; I liked it. After I came back I was the homesickest man! But my wife couldn’t get her health there.” Privately, I thought I would have preferred Glastonbury, where this kindly man got out, to Orwell, Ashtabula County, Ohio; but we all have our tastes, and I made him a due show of sympathy in his regret for my native land.

When our two hours of travel were rather more than up, we found ourselves again in Bath after a day which I felt to have been full of exciting adventure. But I ask almost as little of life as of literature in the way of incident, and perhaps the reader will not think my visit to Wells especially stirring. In that case I will throw in the fact of a calf tied at one of the stations where we changed, and lamentably bellowing in the midst of its fellow-passengers, but standing upon its rights quite as if it had booked first-class. When I add that there was a sign up at this station requiring all persons to cross the track by the bridge, and that without exception we contumaciously trooped over the line at grade, I think the cup of the wildest lover of romance must run over.

Of our subsequent afternoon in Bristol, what remains after this lapse of time except a pleasing impression? We chose a wet day because there were no dry days to choose from. But a wet day of the English spring is commonly better than it promises, and this one made several unexpected efforts to be fine, and repeatedly succeeded. Bristol is no nearer Bath than Wells is, but there are no changes, and we arrived in half an hour and drove at once through the rather uninteresting streets to the beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe. There we found the verger (or perhaps one should say the sexton) as ready to receive us, having just finished mopping the floor, as if he had been expecting us from

BRISTOL HARBOR AND DRAWBRIDGE

the foundation of the church in the thirteenth century. One has not often such a welcome, even from a verger, and I make this occasion to say that few things add more to the comfort of sight-seeing travel than an appreciative verger. He imparts a quality of his church or cathedral to the sight-seer, who feels himself Early English or at least Perpendicular Gothic under his flattering ministrations, and he supplements the dry facts of the guide-book with those agreeable touches of fable which really give life to history.

St. Mary Redcliffe is so rich in charming associations, however, as scarcely to need the play of the sacristan’s imagination for the adornment of her past. She is easily, as Queen Elizabeth so often-quotedly said, “the fairest, the goodliest, and most famous parish church in England,” and is more beautiful and interesting than the cathedral of her city, if not more graceful in form and lovely in detail than any other church in Europe. One scarcely knows which of her claims on the reader’s interest to mention first, but perhaps if the reader has a feeling heart for genius and sorrow he will care most for St. Mary Redcliffe because Chatterton lies buried in her shadow. Or, if he is not buried there, but at St. Andrews, Holborn, in London, as Peter Cunningham claims, there is at least his monument at St. Mary’s Redcliffe to give validity to the verger’s favorite story. The bishop forbade the poor suicide to be buried in the church-yard, and he was interred in a space just outside; but later the vestry bought this lot and enclosed it with the rest, and so beat the bishop on his own consecrated ground. I could not give a just sense of how much the verger triumphed in this legend, but apparently he could not have been prouder of it if he had invented it. He pointed out, at no great remove, a house in or near which Chatterton was born; and he must have taken it for granted that we knew the boy had pretended to find the MS. of his poems in an old chest in the muniment-room, over the beautiful porch of the church, for he did not mention it. He was probably so absorbed in the interest which Chatterton conferred upon St. Mary Redcliffe that he did not think to remind us that both Coleridge and Southey were married in the church. Southey was born in Bristol, and they both formed part of a little transitory provincial literary centre, which flourished there before the rise of the Lake School under the fostering faith of Joseph Cottle, the publisher, himself an epic poet of no mean area.

But St. Mary Redcliffe has peculiar claims upon the reverence of Americans from its monument of Admiral Penn, father of him who founded the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The formidable old sailor’s gauntlets, cuirass, and helmet hang upon the wall above the monument, and near by is the rib of a whale which John Cabot is said to have slain in Labrador. Less endearing associations for us, and less honorable to the city are those of the slave-trade which Bristol long carried on to her great gain and shame. Slavery was common there, not only in the Saxon and Norman days, but practically far down the centuries into the eighteenth. In the earlier times youths and maidens were roped together and offered for sale in the market; people sold their own children abroad; and in the later times, Bristol prospered so greatly in the exportation of young men and women to the colonies, that when this slavery was finally put an end to, it was found just to compensate her merchants and ship-owners in the sum of nearly a million dollars for their loss in the redemptioners whom they used to carry out and sell for their passage-money.

In the strange contemporaneity of the worst and the best things Bristol grew in grace; beautiful churches rose, and then her people fought the fight out of Romanism into Protestantism; in the civil war she held for the Parliament against the King, and was taken by Rupert and retaken by Cromwell. A hundred years after, the great religious awakening to be known as Methodism, began in and about Bristol. Whitefield preached to the miners at Kingswood, and then Wesley, whose help he had invoked, came and preached to all classes, in the town and out, moving them so powerfully to seek salvation, that many who heard him fell down in swounds and fits, and “roared for the disquietness of their hearts,” while tens of thousands were less dramatically saved from their sins. Yet another hundred years and the spirit miraculously responded to the constant prayer of George Müller for means to found the Orphanages, which witness the wonder at this day to any tourist willing to visit them. Without one specific or personal appeal, alms to the amount of three million dollars flowed in upon him, and helped him do his noble work.

Riches abounded more and more in Bristol, but the city continued almost to the nineteenth century in a mediæval inconvenience, discomfort, and squalor. A horse and cart could not pass through her tortuous streets, and trucks drawn by dogs transported her merchandise; down to 1820 heavy wagons were not permitted for fear of damaging the arches of the sewers, and sledges were used. All the same, there was from the beginning a vehement and powerful spirit of enterprise, and Bristol is connected with our own history not only by the voyages of the Cabots to our savage northern shores in the fifteenth century, but by the venture of the Great Western, which, in 1838, made the first steam passage of the Atlantic Ocean. In honor of the relations established by her mariners between the old world and the new, I over-ruled our driver’s genteel reluctance from the seafaring quarter of the town, and had him take us to as much of the port of Bristol as possible. I am not sure that I found the points from which either the Matthew sailed for America in 1497, or the Great Western in 1838, but I am sure that nothing more picturesque could have rewarded my vague search. Among the craft skirting the long quays there was every type of vessel except the Atlantic liner which had originated there; but the steamers, which looked coast-wise and river-going, contributed their full share to the busy effect. This for the moment was intensified by the interest which a vast crowd of people were taking in the raising of a sunken barge. Their multitude helped to embarrass our progress through the heaps of merchandise, and piles of fish, and coils of chain and cordage, and trucks backing and filling; but I would not have had them away, and I only wish I knew, as they must later have known, whether that barge was got up in good shape.

On one shore were ranks of warehouses, and on the other, the wild variety of taverns and haunts of crude pleasure, embracing many places for the enjoyment of strong waters, such as everywhere in the world attract the foot wandering ashore at the end of a sea-leg. Their like may have allured that Anglicized Venetian, John Cabot, when he returned from finding Newfoundland, and left his ship to enjoy the ten pounds which Henry VII. had handsomely sent him for that purpose, as an acknowledgment of his gift of a continent. It is not to be supposed that there were then so many and so

CLIFTON, FROM ASHTON MEADOWS

large shops as now intersperse the pleasure-resorts in the port of Bristol; I question whether Cabot, if he had strained his eyes over-seas by looking out for new hemispheres, could have found there a whole building lettered over with the signs of an optician, and I do not yet see just why such a semi-scientist should so abound there now. But I shall always be sorry I did not go to him to replace the eye-glasses I had broken, instead of poorly driving to the shop of an optician in one of the best city streets. It was a very handsome street full of shops, such as gave a due notion of the sufficiency of Bristol to all demands of wealth and ease, and I got an excellent pair of glasses; but if I had bought my glasses in the port, I might perhaps have seen the whole strenuous past of the famous place through them, and even “stared at the Pacific” with the earliest of her circumnavigating sons. However, we cannot do everything, and we did not even see that day the cathedral which St. Mary Redcliffe so much surpasses, for anything we know to the contrary. We could and did see the beautiful Norman gateway of the Abbey, which it is no treason to our favorite church to allow she has none to equal, and passing under its sumptuously carven arches into the cathedral we arrived at the side of the regretful verger. He bade us note that the afternoon service was going on, and how the Elder Lady Chapel with its grotesque sculptures in the mediæval taste, which used to have fun in the decoration of sacred places with all sorts of mocking fancies, was impossible to us at the moment.

But the Bristol cathedral is not one of the famous English cathedrals, and our regret was tempered by this fact, though the verger’s was not. I tried to appease him with a promise to come again, which I should like nothing better than to keep, and then we drove off. We were visiting almost without a plan this storied and noble city, which so much merited to be carefully and intelligently seen, and it was by mere grace of chance that we now happened upon one of the most interesting houses in it. In the graveyard of St. Peter’s church the hapless poet, Richard Savage, who was buried at the cost of the jailer of the debtors’ prison where he died, and we must have passed the tablet to his memory in finding our unheeding way to St. Peter’s Hospital behind the church. This is one of the most splendid survivals of the statelier moods of the past in that England which is full of its records. A noted alchemist built it, whether for his dwelling or whether for the mystic uses of his art, in the thirteen-hundreds, but it is gabled and timbered now in the fashion of the sixteenth century, and serves as the official home of the Bristol Board of Guardians. Once it belonged to a company of merchant adventurers, and their ships used to float up to its postern-gate, and show their spars through the leaden sash of its windows, still kept in their primal picturesqueness. The whole place within is a wonder of carven mantels and friezes and ceilings; and so sound that it might well hold its own for yet five hundred years longer.

It was the first of those mediæval houses which gave us a sense of English comfort hardly yet surpassed in modern English interiors; and here first we noted the devotion of the English themselves to the monuments of their past. The Americans who visit objects of interest on the continent are apt to find themselves equalling in number, if not outnumbering their fellow-Anglo-Saxons of English birth; but in England they are a most insignificant minority. The English are not merely globe-trotters, they are most incessant travellers in their own island. They are always going and coming in it, and as often for pleasure as business, apparently. At any rate the American who proposes coming into a private heritage of the past when he visits his ancestral country finds himself constantly intruded upon by the modern natives, who seem to think they have as good right to it as he. This is very trying when he does not think them half so interesting as himself, or half so intelligently appreciative. He may be the most dissident of dissenters, the most outrageously evangelical of low-churchmen, but when he is pushed by a clerical-looking family of English country folk, father, mother, sister-in-law, and elderly and younger daughters, almost out of hearing of the vergeress’s traditions of St. Peter’s Hospital, he cannot help feeling himself debarred of most of the rights established by our Revolution. It is perhaps a confusion of emotions; but it will be a generous confusion if he observes, amidst his resentment, the listless inattention of the young girl, dragged at the heels of her family, and imaginably asking herself if this is their notion of the promised holiday, the splendid gayety of the long-looked-for visit to Bristol!

Before my own visit to that city my mind was much on a young Welsh girl whose feet used to be light in its streets, more than a hundred years ago, and who used in her garb of Quaker grandmother to speak of her childhood days there. She had come an orphan from Glamorganshire, to the care of an aunt and uncle at Bristol, and there she grew up, and one day she met a young Welshman from Breconshire who had come on some affair of his father’s woollen-mills to the busy town. She was walking in the fields, and when they passed, and she looked back at him, she found he was looking back at her; and perhaps if it were not for this surprising coincidence, some other hand than mine might now be writing this page. In her Bristol days she did not wear the white kerchief crossed at her neck above the gown of Quaker drab, nor the cap hiding the gray hair, but some youthful form of the demure dress in which one could better fancy her tripping across the field and looking back, in the path where she still pauses, in a dear and gentle transmutation of girlhood and grandmotherhood.

It might have been over the very field where she walked that we drove out to the suburb of Clifton, where Bristol mostly lives. It is the more beautiful Allegheny City of a less unbeautiful Pittsburg, but otherwise it bears the same relation to Bristol as the first of these American towns bears to the last. Nobody dwells in Bristol who can dwell in Clifton, and Clifton has not only the charm of pleasant houses and gardens, with public parks and promenades, and schools and colleges, and museums and galleries, as well as almost a superabundance of attractive hotels, but it is in the midst of nature as grand as that of the Niagara River below the falls. The Avon’s currents and tides flow between cliffs, spanned by Brunel’s exquisite and awful suspension-bridge, that rise thickly and wildly wooded on one side, and on the other, built over to its stupendous verge with shapes of the stately and dignified architecture, civic and domestic, which characterizes English towns. The American invader draws a panting breath of astonishment in the presence of scenery which eclipses his native landscape in savage grandeur as much as in civilized loveliness, and meekly wonders, on his way through that mighty gorge of the Avon, how he could have come to England with the notion that she was soft and tame in her most spectacular moods. He does not call upon the

GORGE OF THE AVON, WITH ST. VINCENT’S ROCKS

hills to hide his shame, lest the cliffs that beetle dizzyingly above him should only too complaisantly comply. But he promises himself, if he gets back to Bath alive, to use the first available moment for taking a reef in his national vanity where it has flapped widest. Of course it will not do in Bath to wound the local susceptibilities by dwelling upon the surviving attractions of Clifton as a watering-place, but he may safely and modestly compare them with those of Saratoga.

VI
BY WAY OF SOUTHAMPTON TO LONDON

WE left Bath on the afternoon of a day which remained behind us in doubt whether it was sunny or rainy; but probably the night solved its doubt in favor of rain. It was the next to the last day of March, and thoughtful friends had warned us to be very careful not to travel during the impending Bank holidays, which would be worse than usual (all Bank holidays being bad for polite travellers), because they would also be Easter holidays. We were very willing to heed this counsel, but for one reason or another we were travelling pretty well all through those Easter Bank holidays, and except for a little difficulty in finding places in the train up from Southampton to London, we travelled without the slightest molestation from the holiday-makers. The truth is that the leisure classes in England are so coddled by the constitution and the by-laws that they love to lament over the slightest menace of discomfort or displeasure, and they go about with bated breath warning one another of troubles that never come.

Special trains are run on all lines at Bank holiday times, and very particularly special trains were advertised for those Easter Bank holidays in the station at Bath, but as we were taking a train for Southampton on the Saturday before the dread Monday which was to begin them, we seemed to have it pretty much to ourselves. The Midland road does not run second-class cars, and so you must go first or third, and we being as yet too proud to go third, sought a first-class non-smoking compartment. The most eligible car we could find was distinctly lettered “Smoking,” but the porter said he could paste that out, and by this simple device he changed it to non-smoking, and we took possession.

We were soon running through that English country which is always pretty, and seems prettiest wherever you happen to be, and though we did not and never can forget Bath, we could not help tricking our beams a little, in response to the fields smiling through the sunny rain, or the rainy sun. It was mostly meadowland, with the brown leafless hedges dividing pasture from pasture, but by-and-by there began to be ploughed fields, with more signs of habitation. Yet it was as lonely as it was lovely, like all the English country, to which the cheerfulness of our smaller holdings is wanting. What made it homelike, in spite of the solitude, was the occurrence in greater and greater number of wooden buildings. We conjectured stone villages somewhere out of sight, huddled about their hoary churches, but largely the gray masonry of the West of England had yielded to the gray weather-boarding of the more southeasterly region, where at first only the barns and out-buildings were of wood; but soon the dwellings themselves were frame-built.

Was it at otherwise immemorable Shapton we got tea, running into the cleanly, friendly station from the slopes of the shallow valleys? It must have been, for after that the sky cleared, and nature in a cooler air was gayer, as only tea can make nature. They trundled a little cart up to the side of the train, and gave us our cups and sandwiches, bidding us leave the cups in the train, as they do all over England, to be collected at some or any other station. After that we were in plain sight of the towers and spires of Salisbury, the nearest we ever came, in spite of much expectation and resolution, to the famous cathedral; and then we were in the dear, open country again, with white birches, like those of New England, growing on the railroad banks; and presently again we were in sight of houses building, and houses of pink brick already built, and then, almost without realizing it, we were in the suburbs of Southampton, and driving in a four-wheeler up through the almost American ugliness of the main business street, and out into a residence quarter to the residential hotel commended to us.

It was really very much a private house, for it was mainly formed of a stately old mansion, which with many modern additions, actual and prospective, had been turned to the uses of genteel boarding. But it had a mixed character, and was at moments everything you could ask a hotel to be; if it failed of wine or spirits, which could not be sold on the premises, these could be brought in from some neighboring bar. The transients, as our summer hotels call them, were few, and nearly all the inmates except ourselves were permanent boarders, in the scriptural and New England proportion of seven women to one man. It was a heterogeneous company of insular and colonial English, but always English, whether from the immediate neighborhood, or Canada, or South Africa, or Australia. At separate small tables in an older dining-room, cooled by the ancestral grate, or in a newer one, warmed by steam-radiators just put in, we were served abundant breakfasts of bacon and eggs and tea and toast, and table d’hôte luncheons and dinners, with afternoon tea and after-dinner coffee in the drawing-room. For all this, with rooms and lights and service, we paid ten shillings a day, and I dare say the permanents paid less. Bedroom fires were of course extra, but as they gave out no perceptible heat, they ought not to be counted, though they had a certain illuminating force, say a five candle-power, and rendered the breath distinctly visible.

We had come down to Southampton in a superstition that, being to the southward, it would be milder than Bath, where the spring was from time to time so inclement, but finding it rather colder and bleaker, we experimented a little farther to the southward, a day or two after our arrival, and went to the Isle of Wight. The sail across the Solent, or whatever water is was we crossed, was beautiful, but it was not balmy, and when we reached Cowes, after that dinner aboard which you always get so much better in England than in like conditions with us, we found it looking not so tropical as we could have liked, but doubtless as tropical as it really was. The pretty town curved round its famous yacht harborage in ranks of summer hotel-like houses, with green lattices and a convention of out-door life in their architecture, such as befitted a mild climate; but we were keeping on to the station where you take train for Ventnor, on the southern shore of the island, which has to support the reputation of being the English Riviera. We did not know then how bad the Italian Riviera could be, and doubtless we blamed the English one more than we ought. We ought, indeed, to have been warmed for it by the sort of horseback exercise we had on the roughest stretch of railway I can remember, in cars whose springs had been broken in earlier service on some mainland line of the monopoly now employing them on the Isle of Wight, and defying the public to do anything about it, as successfully as any railroad of our own republic. We had a hope and an intention of seeing flowers, which we fulfilled as we could with the unprofitable gayety of the blossomed furze by the waysides; and more and more we fancied a forwardness in the spring which was doubtless mainly of our invention. From our steamer we had a glimpse of Osborne Castle, the favorite seat of the good queen who is gone, and we wafted our thoughts afar to Carisbrooke, where the hapless Charles I. was for a time captive, playing fast and loose, in feeble bad faith, with the victorious Parliament, when it would have been willing to treat with him. But you cannot go everywhere in England, especially in one day, though home-keeping Americans think it is so small, and we had to leave Newport and its Carisbrooke castle aside in our going and coming between Ryde and Ventnor.

It was well into the afternoon when we reached Ventnor, and took a fly for the time left us, which was largely tea-time, by the reckoning of the girl in the nice pastry-shop where we stopped for refreshment. She said that the season in Ventnor was July and August, but the bathing was good into October, and we could believe the pleasant Irishman in our return train who told us that it was terribly hot in the summer at Ventnor. The lovely little town, which is like an English water-color, for the rich, soft blur of its grays, and blues and greens, has a sea at its feet of an almost Bermudian variety of rainbow tints, and a milky horizon all its own, with the sails of fishing-boats, drowning in it, like moths that had got into the milk. The streets rise in amphitheatrical terraces from the shore, and where they cease to have the liveliness of watering-place

THE SOUTH SHORE, SOUTHAMPTON

shops, they have the domesticity of residential hotels and summer boarding-houses, and private villas set in depths of myrtle and holly and oleander and laurel; some of the better-looking houses were thatched, perhaps to satisfy a sentiment for rusticity in the summer boarder or tenant. The intelligent hunchback who drove our fly, and instructed us in things of local interest far beyond our capacity, named prices at these houses which might, if I repeated them, tempt an invasion from our own resorts, if people did not mind suffering in July and August for the sake of the fine weather in November. Doubtless there are some who would not mind being shut southward by the steep and lofty downs which prevent the movement of air as much in summer as in winter at Ventnor. The acclivities are covered with a short, wiry grass, and on the day of our visit the boys of Ventnor were coasting down them on a kind of toboggans. Besides this peculiar advantage, Ventnor has the attraction, common to so many English towns and villages, of a Norman church, and of those seats and parks of the nobility and gentry which one cannot long miss in whatever direction one goes, in a land where the nobility and gentry are so much cherished.

The day had been hesitating between rain and sun as usual, but it had decided for rain when we left Ventnor, where we had already found it very cold in-doors, over the tea and bread and butter, which they gave us so good. By the time we had got back to Ryde, the frigidity of the railway waiting-room, all the colder for the fire that had died earlier in the day, was such that it seemed better to go out and walk up and down the platform, in the drive of the rain, as hard and fast as one could, than to stay within. In these conditions the boat appeared to be longer in coming than it really was, and when it came it was almost too well laden with the Bank-holiday folk whom we had been instructed to dread. At Cowes, more young men and young girls of a like sort came on board, but beyond favoring us with their loud confidences they did us no harm, and it was quite practicable to get supper. They were of the chorus-girl level of life, apparently, and there was much that suggested the stage in their looks and behavior, but they could not all have been of the theatre, and they were better company than the two German governesses who had travelled towards Ventnor with us, and filled the compartment with the harsh clashing of their native consonants. The worst that you could say of the trippers was that they were always leaving the saloon door open, and letting in the damp wind, which had now become very bitter, but English people of every degree are always leaving the door open, and these poor trippers were only like the rest of their nation in that. One young lady lay with her feet conspicuously up on the lounge which she occupied to the exclusion of four or five other persons, but by-and-by she took her feet down, and the most critical traveller could not have affirmed that it was characteristic of Easter Bank-holiday ladies to stretch themselves out with their feet permanently up on the cushions. When we landed at Southampton, and drove away in a cab, we had an experience which was then novel, but ceased to be less and less so. It seemed that the pier was a private enterprise, and you must pay toll for its use, or else not arrive or depart on that boat.

So many of our fellow-countrymen come ashore from their Atlantic liners at Southampton, and rush up to London in two hours by their steamer trains, without

“THE PIER WAS A PRIVATE ENTERPRISE”

any other sense of the place than as a port of entry, that I feel as if I were making an undue claim upon their credulity in proposing it as a city having a varied literary and historical interest. Yet Southampton is a city of no mean memories, with a history going back into the dark of the first invasions, and culminating early in the fable of King Canute’s failure to browbeat the Atlantic. The men who won Cressy, Poictiers and Agincourt set sail from it, and fifty ships and more made ready there for the Armada. In turn it was much harried by the French, but the Dutch, whom Alva drove into exile, settled in the town and helped prosper it with their industries, till the Great Plague brought it such adversity that the grass, which has served the turn of so much desolation, grew in its streets. With the continuous wars of England and France it rose again, and now it is what every American traveller fails to see as he hurries through it. I have not thought it needful to mention that in the ages when giants abounded in Britain, Southampton had one of the worst of that caitiff race, who was baptized against his will, but afterwards eloping with his liege lady, was finally slain.

The place was so attractive socially, a hundred-odd years ago, that Jane Austen’s family, when they came away from Bath, could think of no pleasanter sojourn. She wrote some of her most delightful letters from Southampton, and of course we went and looked up the neighborhood where she had lived. No trace of that precious occupancy is now left beside the stretch of the ancient city wall from which the Austens’ garden overlooked a beautiful expanse of the Solent, but we made out the place, and for the rest we gave ourselves to the pleasure of following the course of the old city wall, which, with its ivied arches, its towers and battlements all agreeably mouldering and ruinous, is better, as far as it goes, than the walls of either Chester or York, conscious of their entirety, and of their claim upon the interest of travel. Southampton is so very modern in the prosperity which has made it the rival of Liverpool as the chief port of entry from our country, that we ought rather to have devoted ourselves to its docks than its walls, and we did honestly try for them. But there is always something very disappointing about docks, and though I went more than once for a due impression of them at Southampton, I constantly failed of it. I tried coming upon them casually at first; at last I drove expressly to them, and when I dismounted from my cab, and cast about me for the sensation they should have imparted, and demanded of my cabman, “Where are the docks?” and he said, “Here they are, sir,” I could not make them out, and was forced to conclude that they had been taken in for the time.

I had no such difficulty with the prison into which Dr. Isaac Watts’s father was put for some of those opinions which in former times were always costing people their personal liberty. In my mind’s eye I could almost see his poor wife bringing their babe and suckling the infant hymnologist under the father’s prison window; and I was in such rich doubt of Dr. Watts’s birthplace in French Street, that with two houses to choose from, I ended by uncovering to both. I think it was not too much honor to that kind, brave soul, who got no little poetry into his piety, and was neither very severe about theology on earth, nor exigent of psalm-singing in heaven, where he imagined a pleasing conformity in the conditions to the tastes and habits of the several saints in this life. If the reader thinks that I overdid my reverence in the case of this poet, let him set against it my total failure to visit either the birthplace or the baptismal church of another Southampton poet, that Charles Dibdin, namely, whose songs were much on British tongues when Britain was making herself mistress of the seas, and which possibly breathe still from the lips of

“The sweet little cherub who sits up aloft,
Keeping watch o’er the life of poor Jack.”

Early in my English travels I found it well to leave something to the curiosity of after-seekers, and there is so much to see in every English city, town, village, country neighborhood, road, and lane that I could always leave unseen far more than I saw. I suppose it was largely accidental that I gave so much of my time to the traces of the Watts family, but perhaps it was also because both the prison and the house (in which, whichever it was, the mother kept a boarding-house while she nurtured her nine children, and the good doctor began his Greek and Latin at five years of age), were in the region of the old church of St. Michael’s which will form another compensation at Southampton for the American who misses the docks. Its architecture was amongst my earliest Norman, and was of the earliest Norman of any, for the church was built in 1100 by monks who came over from Normandy. It was duly burned by the French two centuries later in one of their pretty constant incursions; they burned only the nave of the church, but they left the baptismal font rather badly cracked, and with only the staple of the lock which used to fasten the lid to keep the water from being stolen. I do not know why the baptismal water should have been stolen, but perhaps in those ages of faith it was a specific against some popular malady, leprosy or the black death, or the like. The sacristan who showed me the font, showed me also the tomb of a bad baronet of the past, a very great miscreant, whose name he could not remember, but who had done something awful to his wives; and no doubt he could easily have told me why people stole the water. He was himself an excellent family man, or at least highly domesticated, if one might judge from his manner with his own wife, who came in demanding a certain key of him. Husband-like, he denied having it; then he remembered, and said, “Oh, I left it in the pocket of my black coat.” He was not at all vexed at being interrupted in telling me about the bad baronet, whose tomb, he made me observe, had not a leaf or blossom on it, though it was Easter Sunday, and the old church, which was beautifully rough and simple within, was decked with flowers for the festival.

Outside, the prevalence of Easter was so great that we had failed of a street cab, and had been obliged to send to the mews (so much better than a livery-stable, though probably not provided now with falcons) for a fly, and we felt by no means sure that we should be admitted to the beautiful old Tudor house, facing the church of St. Michael’s, which goes by the name of King Henry VIII.’s Palace. They are much stricter in England concerning the holy days of the church than the non-conforming American imagines. On Good Friday there were neither cabs nor trams at Southampton in the morning, and only Sunday trains were run on the Great Southwestern to London; though on the other hand the shops were open, and mechanics were working; perhaps they closed and stopped in the afternoon. But we summoned an unchurchly courage for the Tudor house, and when we rang at the postern-gate—it ought to have been a postern-gate, and at any rate I will call it so—it was opened to us by a very sprightly little old lady, with one tooth standing boldly up in the centre of her lower jaw, unafraid amid the surrounding desolation. She smiled at us so kindly that we apologized for our coming, and said that we did not suppose we could see the palace, and then she looked grave, and answered, “Yes, but you’ll have to pay a fee, sir,” I undertook that the fee should be paid, and then she smiled again, and led the way from her nook in it, through one of the most livable houses I was in anywhere in England. I will use the privilege of the superficial and cursory observation of the hurried tourist, to which we are so well accustomed in English travellers among ourselves, and say that the English did not know what domestic comfort was till the times of the Tudors, and were apparently forgetful of it afterwards. This palace of Henry VIII., which is rather simple for a palace, but may very well have been the sojourn of Anne Boleyn and her daughter Queen Elizabeth in their visits to Southampton, was divided above and below into large rooms, wainscotted in oak, of a noble shapeliness, and from cellar to attic was full of good air, without the draughts which the earlier and later English have found advantageous in perpetuating the racial catarrh and rheumatism. The apartments were of varying dignity from the ground floor up, and the basement was so wholesome, that before the time of the present owner, who had restored it to its former state, a family with eleven children lived there in the greatest health as long as they were allowed to stay. Even in the attic, the rooms, though rough, were pleasant, and there were so many that one of them had got lost and could never be found, though the window of it still shows plainly from the outside. This and much more the friendly dame recounted to us in our passage through a mansion, which we found so attractive that we of course tacitly proposed to buy it and live in it always. Then she led us out into her kitchen-garden, running to the top of the ancient city wall, and undermined, as she told us, by submarine passages.

But we could only find a flight of stone steps descending to the street level below, where, if the reader is of a mind to follow, he will find the wall falling wholly away at times, and at times merging itself in the modern or moderner buildings, and then reappearing in arches, topped with quaint roofs and chimneys, and here and there turned to practical uses in little workshops, much as old walls are in the dear Italian towns which we Americans know rather better than the English, though the English ruins are befriended by a softer summer, prolonging itself with its mosses and its ivy never sere deep into winters almost as mild as Italy’s. In an avenue reluctantly leaving the ancient wall and winding deviously into the High Street, are the traces, in humbler masonry, of the jambs and spandrels of far older arches in the façade of an edifice presently a cow stable, but famed to have been the palace of that King Canute who was mortified to find his power inferior to the sea’s, and sharply rebuked his courtiers when they had induced him to set his chair in reach of the tides which would not ebb at his bidding. The tides have now permanently ebbed from the scene of the king’s discomfiture, and as this royal Dane was otherwise so able and shrewd a prince as to have made himself master of England if not of her seas, we may believe as little as we like of the story. For my part, I choose to believe it every word, as I always have believed it, and I think it should still be a lesson to royalty, which is altogether too credulous of its relative importance to the rest of the universe.

In the most conspicuous niche of the beautiful old Bargate, which remains sole of the seven portals of the city, and still spans with its archway the High Street hard by where Porter’s Lane creeps into it from Canute’s cow stable, is the statue of another British prince who was to take a seat even farther back than Canute’s, under an overruling providence. In this effigy George III. naturally wears the uniform of a Roman warrior, but perhaps the artificial stone of which it is composed more aptly symbolizes the extremely friable nature of human empire. One never can look at any presentment of the poor, good, mistaken man without the softness of regret for his long sufferings, or without gratitude for what he involuntarily did for us as a people in forcing us to rid ourselves of royalty for good and all; yet with our national prejudice, it is always a surprise for the American to find him taken seriously in England. On the Bargate he seems to stand between us and the remoter English antiquity to which we willingly yield an unbroken allegiance. When I looked on the mediæval work of the Bargate, I easily felt myself, in a common romantic interest, the faithful subject of Edward III. or Richard III., but when I came down to George III. I had to draw the line; and yet he was a better and not unwiser man than either of the others. You can say of Edward III. that he was luckier in war than George III., but then he had not the Americans to fight against as the allies of the French.

We were so well advised not to fail of seeing the ruins of Netley Abbey, which is such a little way off from Southampton across the river Itchen, that I should strongly counsel, in my turn, all fellow-countrymen arriving on whatever line, to keep half a day from London, and give it to that most beautiful and pathetic place. It was our first ruin in England, but though we saw ruins afterwards of great merit, none ever surpassed it in charm, and none remains so sweet and pensive a memory. From the strenuous modern city you reach this dim, mediæval shadow by way of what they poetically call at Southampton the Floating Bridge, and which, before we came to it, we fancied some form of stately pontoon, but found simply the sort of ferry-boat common in earlier times on American rivers East and West, forced by the tide on supporting chains from one shore to the other. At our landing on the farther side we agreed with the driver of a fly, who justly refused to abate his reasonable charge, to carry us along the borders of the Itchen in a rapture which might have been greater if the wind had not been so bitter. But it was great enough, and when we dismounted at the gate of the abbey, and made our way to its venerable presence over turf that yielded perhaps too damply to the foot, we had our content so absolute, that not the sunniest day known to the English climate could have added sensibly to it. I do not believe that we could have been happier in it even if we had known all the little why and how together with the great when of its suppression by Henry VIII. Even now I cannot supplement the conjecture of the moment by anything especially dramatic from history. Netley Abbey, like the rest of the religious houses which Henry hammered down, was suppressed in the general hope of pillage, defeated by the fact that its income was rather less than a hundred and fifty pounds a year, which even in the money of the

THE OLD TOWER WALL

time was no great booty. The king had as little to envy those Cistercian monks in their life as their income, except perhaps their virtues, which he would not have wished to share. For, as our faithful guide-book told us, they slept hard on the plank of wooden boxes, and unless food were given them in alms they ate neither fish, flesh, fowl, eggs, butter nor cheese, but only a spare porridge—twice a day, and in Lent once. They never spoke except sometimes in their parlor, on religious topics, and on a journey they could only ask questions, which they must ask if possible by signs. They that transgressed the rules were whipped, or stretched upon the stone floor during mass. For their greater humiliation the heads of the order were entirely shaven, which if the wind blew from the sea in their day, as piercingly as it blew in ours, was not so comfortable as it was picturesque for the monks going about bareheaded in their white robes. Yet their hospitality was great and constant, and their guest-hall was so often full that Horace Walpole, in his much-quoted letter about their ruined house, could speak with insinuation of their “purpled abbots,” as if these perhaps led a life of luxury not shared by the humbler brethren. His picture of the abbey is so charming and so true that one may copy it once again, as still the best thing that could be said of it: “How shall I describe Netley to you? I can only tell you that it is the spot in the world which I and Mr. Chute wish. The ruins are vast and retain fragments of beautiful fretted roofs, pendent in the air, with all variety of Gothic patterns of windows topped round and round with ivy. Many trees have sprouted up among the walls, and only want to be increased by cypresses. A hill rises above the Abbey, enriched with wood. The fort in which we would build a tower for habitation, remains with two small platforms. This little castle is buried from the Abbey, in the very centre of a wood, on the edge of a wood hill. On each side breaks in the view of the Southampton Sea, deep, blue, glittering with silver and vessels. In short, they are not the ruins of Netley, but of Paradise. Oh, the purpled abbots! What a spot they had chosen to slumber in! The scene is so beautifully tranquil, yet so lively that they seem only to have retired into the world.”

What can one have to say of Netley after this, even to the romantic touch of the absent cypresses? We came suddenly upon the ruin, and with little parley at the porter’s lodge where they charge admittance and sell photographs, we stood within its densely ivied walls, the broken arches beetling overhead, and the tall trees repairing their defect with a leafless tracery showing fine against a gray sky hesitating blue, and the pale sun filtering a wet silver through the clouds. In places the architecture still kept its gracious lines of Gothic or Norman design; there were whole breadths of wall to testify of the beauty and majesty that had been, and where walls were marred or shattered, the ivy had bound up their wounds, or tufts of soft foliage distracted the eye from their wrongs. Underfoot the damp grass was starred with the earliest flowers of spring, violets, celandine, primrose; and among the flocks of pigeons that made their homes in the holes of the masonry left by the rotting joists, the golden-billed English blackbirds fluttered and sang. You could trace the whole shape of the edifice, and see it almost as it once stood, but the ivy which holds it up is also pulling it down. The decay seems mostly from the winds and rains, and the insidious malice of vegetation, but men have aided from time to time in the destruction, though not without the censure of their fellow-men. It is told, indeed, that a purchaser of the ruin, two hundred years ago, was so wrought upon by the blame of his friends when he wished to use its hallowed stone for other building, that he began to dream of his own death by a keystone falling from one of the arches he was destroying; his death actually happened, though it was a heavy timber, and not a stone that crushed him. Everything in the neighborhood of the ruin was in keeping with it: a baronial mansion among the woods of an adjoining hill, villas within their shrubbery, and when we came to drive back to the ferry, many pleasant farms and pretty cottages behind their hedges of holly and whitethorn. An unusual number of these were thatched, in the tradition of rustic roofs which is slowly, though very slowly, dying out. The machine-threshed straw is so broken that it does not make a good thatch, and the art of the thatcher is passing with the quality of his material. Still we saw some new thatches, with occasionally an old one so rotten that it must have been full of the vermin which such shelters collect, and which could have walked away with it. Now and then we met country people on our way, looking rather sallow and lean, but our driver, perhaps from his contact with town-bred luxury, had a face of the right purple, and here and there was a rustic visage of the rich, south-of-England color showing warm in the pale sunset light.

When we had seen Netley Abbey, all the rest of the Southampton region was left rather impoverished of the conventional touristic interest, but any friend of man could still find abundant pleasure in it by mounting a tram-top and riding far out towards the Itchen, along winding streets of low brick houses, each with its little garden at the front or side, and with its hedge of evergreen. Often these kindly looking homes were overhung by almond-trees, palely pink, in bloom, and sometimes when they were more pretentious, though they were never arrogant, they stood apart, all planted round with shrubs and trees, like the dwellings in Hartford. The tram’s course was largely through umbrageous avenues, or parklike spaces such as seem to abound at Southampton, with now and then a stretch of gleaming water, and here and there an open field with people playing cricket in it. Swarms of holiday-makers strolled up and down, and though it might be a Sunday, with no signs of a bad conscience in their harmless recreations. There was much evidence of church-going in the morning, but little or nothing in the afternoon. The aspect of the crowd was that of comfortable wage-earners or shopkeepers for the most part, such as the flourishing port maintains in ever-increasing multitude, with none of the squalor which seems so inseparable from prosperity in Liverpool. The crowd affirms the modern advance of Southampton in its rivalry with the commercial metropolis of the north, but we were well content in one of our walks to lose ourselves from it, and come upon a neighborhood of fine old houses, standing in wide grounds, now run wild with neglected groves, but speaking with the voices of their secular rooks of the social glory which has long departed. These mansions meant that once there was a local life of ease and splendor which could hold its own against London, as perhaps the life of no other place in England now does. If you took them at twilight, their weed-grown walks simply swarmed with ghosts of quality, in a setting transferred bodily from the pages of old novels.