 | A sketch of old England |  |
LETTER V.
In my last, I believe I forgot to inform you of a curious
fact recorded, concerning Oxford, in the very tedious, particular,
and prosing accounts of those various “Progresses”
made by Queen Elizabeth, at various times, through different
parts of England, by which she reaped such harvests of popularity,
and, what pleased her quite as well, lived at free quarters.
There is certainly something servile in the nature of
civilized man. An Indian will turn his back on any thing
which might be supposed to challenge his admiration among
civilized people, because he considers it a sort of acknowledgment
of his inferiority, to wonder. Only, however, let a great
personage come among a refined people, and they will follow,
and shout at his heels, and wonder, and be delighted beyond
measure, whenever he smiles, bows, or exhibits any of those
ordinary condescensions which gentlemen usually pay to their
inferiors. The good folks will pardon a hundred acts of oppression
in consideration of a bow and a smile.
But to my story. It is recorded that Queen Elizabeth, sometime
for a whole week. “The day after,” says the writer of the
Progress, “she took her leave, and was conducted by the
heads as far as Shotover Hill, when the Earl of Leicester gave
her notice, that they had accompanied her to the limits of their
jurisdiction. From hence, casting her eyes back upon Oxford
with all possible marks of tenderness and affection, she bade
them farewell. The Queen's countenance had such an effect
upon the diligence of this learned body, that within a few
years after, it produced more shining instances of real worth,
than had ever been sent abroad, at the same time, in any age
whatsoever.” This is one of the most marvellous effects of
the Queen's countenance I remember; it shows how complaisant
even genius and learning are, in countries where the
people are brought up with a proper notion of the “divine
right of kings.” A mere visit to Oxford awakened all the
Muses, and inspired not only learning, but “worth,” in this
ancient seminary of loyalty. Oxford, with all its beauties, is
one of the dullest places I ever visited; and had not the tailor
given it some additional interest, I should have been heartily
tired with the sameness of every thing I saw. In leaving it, I
had a view of the village of Cummor, which has lately become
noted as the scene of part of the romance of Kenilworth. I
did not visit it; the scenes described by the “Great Unknown”
are not yet classical, and I do not think they ever
will be.
From hence to Worcester, nothing particular occurred, and
I shall reserve, till a future opportunity, my observations on
what I saw, at the different places where I stopped occasionally,
and spent from one to three days, in making inquiries on
particular subjects. There were as usual several fine seats,
and one in particular at Ditchley, where I was told were some
valuable pictures; but knowing the price one must pay in
money and patience for these treats, I avoided all such places.
In general I may observe, that the country was not so pretty
as in some other parts I have seen, and that occasionally it
presented scenes of barrenness. Two spots, however, seem
worthy of some little commemoration. One is the ancient
town of Evesham; the other, the famous Malvern Hill, where
every picturesque tourist makes a point of being enraptured.
I'll not be out of fashion.
Evesham is derived, by the monkish antiquaries, from one
Eaves, swineherd to the Bishop of Worcester. As bishops in
those days were nearly all of them saints, which I am sorry to
say is not the case at present, I presume their swineherds were
men of some consequence, by their giving names to towns.
to have been the paradise of monks. At Abingdon they had a
rich and stately monastery, whose revenue, in an age when
money was probably twenty times more valuable than at present,
amounted to about two thousand sterling a year. At
Evesham they were lords of twenty-two towns and manors.
No wonder such a church abounded in saints! The principal
reason for detaining you a little at Evesham is connected, however,
with a different matter. It was here that the famous
Simon Mountford, Earl of Leicester, the champion of the
English Barons, and the great assertor of Magna Charta, after
having been virtually lord of England and its paltry king,
fought his last fight, was defeated and slain. Like many other
assertors of popular and aristocratic rights, in monarchies, his
character has come down to us covered with imputations of
ingratitude, perfidy, and ambition. But we should be cautious
how we receive the relations of characters and events from
the pens of historians, who wrote while the descendants of the
king, whom Mountford opposed, occupied the throne of England.
If historians can ever be said to be impartial, it is only
when the events they record, and the characters they discuss,
are so distant or obscure, that they are just as likely to err
through ignorance, as their predecessors were through prejudice.
There is something, at all events, about the renown of
this Simon Mountford, which made an impression on me early
in life; and as he took the popular side, at least the only
popular side there was at that time, I do not for my part,
exactly see, why he is not as good a martyr as Charles the
First.
Not far from hence, I passed the site of another fat rookery
of monks, who in ancient times revelled in the spoils of a score
of manors and towns. The name of this place is Pershore,
and from hence to Worcester is one of the pleasantest rides in
the whole country. This last is one of the most lively, agreeable,
not to say beautiful, cities I have ever seen out of our
own country. Though one of the most ancient in England, it
displays nothing, or almost nothing, of that gloomy aspect of
decay, which may be observed in every other old city I have
visited; where the houses look old, the people look old, and
the very air we breathe seems to come out of old cellars and
mildewed cloisters. I never get among these reliques of past
changes, without my imagination soon becoming tinged with
gloom and superstition; there is certainly something in the
very style of a Gothic building that is calculated to nourish
such impressions, and a ghost, a miracle, or a murder, is like
a fish out of water, unless connected with this species of architecture;
character of those times in which it flourished.
But there is little of this about this charming city, where
the girls trip along as if they were going a maying, and the
men actually look as if they had something to do: it lies close
by the side of the Severn, which being the largest river in England,
is, of course, entitled to be described in the superlative.
Accordingly, the poets, call it the “majestic,” the “magnificent,”
“the Father of Rivers,” &c., while tourists never mention
it without some epithet indicative of prodigious magnitude.
This prodigious river is crossed here by a bridge of five ar hes;
it rises in Plinlimmon, in Montgomeryshire, and falls into the
Bristol Channel, after an “endless course of one hundred and
thirty miles!”
As I shall have occasion, in the course of my tours, to remark
the frequent recurrence of this species of the bathos, in
describing scenes of nature, permit me to make a few observations
once for all. Every man, in speaking of whatever is
great in his estimation, refers to some standard of comparison,
formed from the result of his own individual experience. The
greatest he has seen, is, to his imagination, the greatest in the
world. Hence, the English tourist calls his rivers, his mountains,
and his lakes, the greatest, the highest, and the most
beautiful, because he knows of no other. When one of the
picturesque tourists comes to the mighty Severn, he is in raptures;
when he beholds the lake of Bala, the largest in Wales,
he calls it “this immense body of water,” although, as I am
an authentic traveller, it is but four miles long and one broad!
But, “body o'me,” when he mounts to the summit of Snowdoun,
which is of the “prodigious height” of three thousand
six hundred feet, he is unalterably convinced that he can overlook
the tops of the Andes, and that the whole world lies directly
under his nose. The painters of the picturesque also
practise this species of imposition upon foreigners, especially
us Americans, by heightening, as it is called, the effect of their
pieces; that is to say, by making the waterfalls higher, the
rocks more rugged, and the hills more perpendicular. When I
came to view the originals of those coloured landscapes, which
abound to such a degree in our parlours and print-shops at
home, I did not know them. It is inconceivable, brother, how
they are exaggerated in every feature of beauty and sublimity.
Far be it from me to flout these people for not having larger
rivers, higher mountains, finer waterfalls, and broader lakes.
They cannot help it. All I wish is to put you on your guard
against the superlative style in which they speak of things, to
which, in our country, we should apply some diminutive epithet.
Mississippi and Missouri are alone called “mighty streams,”
because they course their thousands of miles, and roll a tribute
to the sea greater than that of all the rivers of Britain combined.
Our Lake Superior, with its hundred rivers, is alone named in
the language of the superlative degree, because you could empty
all the lakes of Britain into its bosom, as a drop in the bucket,
without raising its surface the breadth of a hair. Some of our
hills too, as the white hills of New Hampshire, are twice as
high as the “mighty Snowdoun,” yet they are only called hills.
This habit of speaking in the superlative has also crept into
their modes of estimating their exploits, the beauties of their
landscapes, the excellence of their literature, and above all,
the talents of their great men. In just the same degree that they
exaggerate the dimensions of natural objects to the imagination,
by their inflated epithets, do they exaggerate the talents and
qualifications of their great men.
At present, I must not forget this “boundless” city of Worcester,
and its “magnificent” river. It is spread, as I before
stated, along the Severn, which is really a pretty little river,
or rather, as we should call it at home, a creek. They go so
far as to say, that Worcester owes its foundation to Constantine
Chlorus. It was burnt by Hardicanute the Dane; set fire to
by Roger de Montgomery; afterwards burnt by accident;
again burnt in the wars of king Stephen and Maud; in the
time of Henry the Second it again underwent the same fate.
From out of all these burnings Worcester rose a gay, a beautiful
city; the seat of the graces in this part of England, and
the town residence in winter, of many of the country gentry
of these parts, who prefer it to the noise, smoke, and corruption
of London. It is just large enough for all the real purposes
of social enjoyment, containing, I should imagine, between
fifteen and eighteen thousand persons. From these is
formed one of the most agreeable, polite, and intelligent circles
to be found any where; equal in polish, and superior in real
politeness to the London Beau Monde, which is, in fact, a
fantastic assemblage of coxcombs and coquettes, with now
and then a fashionable poet or chemist to give it a literary or
scientific air.
From Worcester I proceeded towards Hereford, it being my
intention to visit some of the picturesque scenery of the Wye,
and thence take the mighty Snowdoun by the hair of his head.
The road was one of the roughest I had yet travelled, but the
country on either side abounded in fruit trees and flowers.
The man who drove my vehicle assured me I might gather a
rose, without being transported to Botany Bay, that paradise
the fence, and would you believe it, brother, was neither shot
by a spring gun, caught in a man-trap, nor prosecuted afterwards
for trespass! This I record as the first miracle which
has happened to me in this country. I confess, however, a
stout, square, roughfaced damsel did start out upon me, and
bawl out something, which luckily I could not understand;
for I do assure you, that notwithstanding the vulgar opinion
on our side of the water, the English is not the national tongue
of this country. In the various counties, particularly Somerset,
Yorkshire, Cumberland, and elsewhere, I give you my
honour, not one in a hundred can speak the English language.
Were not my servant a sort of booby, who speaks all the languages
of this island, except the English, I should be quite at
a loss to understand or be understood. I am often reminded
by such little incidents as this of the rose, of the difference between
this country and our liberal and plentiful land, in which
a country gentleman or common farmer would be disgraced
as a miser or a brute, who should refuse to a stranger or his
neighbours his flowers or his fruit. Of the latter, indeed, no
one scruples to pluck what he likes from the road side, without
ever asking. Soon I came to the foot of Malvern Hill, where
I halted at a neat inn at its foot, with the determined purpose
of going to the uttermost top, where, as I have read in all the
picturesque tours, was to be seen one of the finest prospects in
England.
In my opinion, brother, the very first excellence of this fine
view is, that the ascent to it is not fatiguing. Fatigue destroys
the very essence and being of delight. I have often, in my
own country, climbed a rugged precipice to see a fine prospect,
and when I got to the top, felt as if I could lie down and die,
I was so tired. But the ascent of Malvern Hill is all an easy
slope, covered with velvet grass. Were it more laborious,
however, it would pay well, for it is indeed a noble throne for
the very king of the picturesque. The evening was a little
hazy, and the atmosphere presented that soft sleepiness of hue,
on which the soul, at least mine, reposes with such measureless
luxury. The fields just beneath, were some of them in the sun,
some in the shade, and their different tints were like the first
and second of two well-tuned instruments, producing variety
and harmony. Farther off, landscape faded by imperceptible
gradations into less of the bright green, and more of the sky
blue. The white houses were sprinkled among villages and
lawns, and woody groves, whose foliage was all in soft fleeces.
Among these, through the vale of Evesham, I saw two little
rivers, like white ribands, waving and meandering along; and
hardly be distinguished from the blue sky. On inquiring the
names of these streams, I was made to comprehend by my
guide, that one of them, the smallest, was the Avon. The
very name of this river conjured up visions and recollections
of Shakspeare, to whom it is for ever consecrated, and mingled
what was alone wanting in my impressions, the charm of moral
association, with all that is beautiful to the eye.
The next day I proceeded on towards Hereford, through an
exuberant hop country, rich also in every other production of
English husbandry, as well as in pastoral beauty and fine
houses, to a tolerably miserable town, the name of which I
think is Ledbury, for it is so equivocally written in my memorandum
book, that I will not swear to it. The next day I arrived
at a place noted in days of yore.
| A sketch of old England | |