I. GIPSIES…

I. GIPSIES

All hail! ye British Buccaneers! Ye English Ishmaelites, all hail! A jovial and marauding band, Against the goodliest of the land Ye go, and ye prevail.

Man’s cultured Eden casts ye forth, Where’er ye list to wander wide, Wild heaths and wilder glens to tread, The spacious earth before you spread, Your hearts your only guide.

The Gipsy King. By RICHARD HOWITT.

The picture of the Rural Life of England must be wofully defective which should omit those singular and most picturesque squatters on heaths and in lanes, the Gipsies. They make part and parcel of the landscape scenery of England. They are an essential portion of our poetry and literature. They are moulded into our memories, and all our associations of the country by the surprise of our first seeing them,--by the stories of their cunning, their petty larcenies, their fortune-tellings,--and by the writings of almost all our best poets and essayists. The poets being vividly impressed by anything picturesque, and partaking of some mystery and romance, universally talk of them with an unction of enjoyment. Romance writers have found them more profitable subjects than her Majesty does--Scott and Victor Hugo especially. But the first introduction to them, which most of us had in print, and to which the mind of every man of taste must instantly revert on seeing or hearing of them, is that most admirable and racy one in the Spectator,--that gipsy adventure of our truly beloved and honoured friend, Sir Roger de Coverley--that perfect model of an old English gentleman. Who does not think of this scene with a peculiar delight, especially since it has received so exquisite a representation from the pencil of Leslie? “As I was yesterday riding out in the fields with my friend Sir Roger, we saw at a little distance from us a troop of gipsies. Upon the first discovery of them, my friend was in some doubt whether he should not exert the Justice of the Peace upon a band of lawless vagrants; but not having his clerk with him, who is a necessary counsellor on these occasions, and fearing that his poultry might fare the worse for it, he let the thought drop, but at the same time gave me a particular account of the mischiefs they do in the country in stealing peoples’ goods, and spoiling their servants. If a stray piece of linen hangs upon a hedge, says Sir Roger, they are sure to have it; if the hog loses its way in the fields, it is ten to one but it becomes their prey. Our geese cannot live in peace for them.

“‘If a man prosecutes them with severity, his hen-roost is sure to pay for it. They generally straggle into this part of the country about this time of the year, and set the heads of our servant maids so agog for husbands, that we do not expect to have any business done as it should be while they are in the country. I have an honest dairymaid who crosses their hands with a piece of silver every summer, and never fails being promised the handsomest young fellow in the parish for her pains. Your friend the butler has been fool enough to be seduced by them; and though he is sure to lose a knife, a fork, or a spoon, every time his fortune is told him, generally shuts himself up in the pantry with an old gipsy for above half an hour once a twelvemonth. Sweethearts are the things which they live upon, which they bestow very plentifully upon all those that apply themselves to them. You see now and then some handsome young jades amongst them,--the sluts have very often white teeth and black eyes.’

“Sir Roger observing that I listened with great attention to his account of a people who were so entirely new to me, told me that if I would, they should tell us our fortunes. As I was very well pleased with the knight’s proposal, we rid up and communicated our hands to them. A Cassandra of the race, after having examined my lines very diligently, told me that I loved a pretty maid in a corner; that I was a good woman’s man; with some other particulars which I do not think proper to relate. My friend Sir Roger alighted from his horse, and exposing his palm to two or three that stood by him, they crumpled it into all shapes, and diligently scanned every wrinkle that could be made in it; when one of them, who was older and more sunburnt than the rest, told him that he had a widow in his line of life. Upon which the knight cried, ‘go, go, you are an idle baggage,’ and at the same time smiled upon me. The gipsy, finding that he was not displeased in his heart, told him, after a further inquiry into his hand, that his true-love was constant, and that he should dream of her to-night. My old friend cried, ‘Pish,’ and bid her go on. The gipsy told him that he was a bachelor, but would not be so long; and that he was dearer to somebody than he thought. The knight still repeated that she was an idle baggage, and bid her go on. ‘Ah, master,’ says the gipsy, ‘that roguish leer of yours makes a woman’s heart ache. You have not that simper about the mouth for nothing.’ The uncouth gibberish with which all this was uttered, like the darkness of an oracle, made us the more attentive to it. To be short, the knight left the money with her that he had crossed the hand with, and got up again on his horse.

“As we were riding away, Sir Roger told me, that he knew several sensible people who believed these gipsies now and then foretold very strange things; and for half an hour together appeared more jocund than ordinary. In the height of his good humour, meeting a common beggar upon the road who was no conjuror, as he went to relieve him, he found his pocket picked; that being a kind of palmistry at which this race of vermin are very dexterous.”

This is a perfect piece of gipsyism. Wordsworth, Cowper, Crabbe, and others of our poets, have given very graphic sketches of them; but in all these descriptions you have the same characteristics, those of a strange, vagabond, out-of-door, artful, and fortune-telling people. This was for a long time the only point of view in which they were regarded. That they were a thievish and uncivilizable race everybody knew, but what was their real origin, or what their real country, few cared to inquire. It, in fact, quite satisfied the public to consider them as what they pretended to be, Egyptians. In all the descriptions I have alluded to, no reference whatever is made to their origin. Addison alone hints that he could give some historical remarks on this idle people, but he does not think it worth while. But a more inquisitive age came. It began to strike the minds of intelligent men, as the love of the picturesque, the love of whatever was quiet, ancient, singular, or poetic in the features of the country grew into a strong public feeling, that there was something far more curious and mysterious about this people than merely met the eye. That they were a peculiar variety of the human species, and had hereditary causes, whether prejudices or traditions, which stamped them, as distinctly and as stubbornly, a separate portion of humanity as the Jews, became obvious enough. That which had been supposed a mere gibberish in their mouths, was found to be true Eastern language, and it was discovered that they not merely “infested all Europe,” as Addison remarked, but all the world. In every quarter of it they were found, exhibiting the same strange and unchangeable lineaments, manners, and habits; in Egypt, as separate from the Egyptians in speech and custom, as they are separate from the English in England. Great curiosity was now excited concerning them, and we get a glimpse, in the following verses of the Ettrick Shepherd, of the speculations which arose out of the consequent inquiries.

Hast thou not noted on the by-way side, Where England’s loanings stretch unsoiled and wide, Or by the brook that through the valley pours, Where mimic waves play lightly through the flowers, A noisy crew far straggling through the glade, Busied with trifles, or in slumber laid, Their children lolling round them on the grass, Or pestering with their sports the patient ass? The wrinkled grandam there you may espy, The ripe young maiden with her glossy eye; Men in their prime--the striplings dark and dun, Scathed by the storms, and freckled by the sun; O mark them well when next the group you see, In vacant barn, or resting on the lea; They are the remnant of a race of old-- Spare not the trifle for your fortune told! For there shalt thou behold with nature blent A tint of mind in every lineament, A mould of soul distinct, but hard to trace, Unknown except to Israel’s wandering race; For thence, as sages say, their line they drew-- O mark them well! the tales of old are true!

In these verses, which seem intended by Hogg as the commencement of a poem on the Gipsy history, he goes on to tell us that they were a tribe of Arabs that during the Crusades were induced to act as guides and allies of the Crusaders against Jerusalem, and were therefore compelled, on the retreat of the Christians, to flee too. It was not at all surprising that they should be regarded as the real descendants of Ishmael, for they have all the characteristics of his race,--an Eastern people, retaining all their features of mind or body in unchangeable fixedness--neither growing fairer in the temperate latitudes, nor darker in the sultry ones; perpetual wanderers and dwellers in tents; active, fond of horses, often herdsmen, artful, thievish, restrained by no principle but that of a cunning policy from laying hands on any man’s possessions; fond to enthusiasm of the chase after game, though obliged to follow it at midnight; as everlastingly isolated by their organic or moral conformation from the people amongst whom they dwell as the Jews themselves. The very prophecy seemed fulfilled in them, beyond what it could be in Araby itself, where they have been repeatedly subdued to the dominion of some conqueror, while this tribe seems in all countries to maintain its character as the genuine posterity of him who was to be a wild hunter in perpetual independence.

The Germans, however, who pursue every subject of curious inquiry with the same searching perseverance, took up this Gipsy mystery; and the result of their researches, founded principally on their language, at present leads to the adoption of the theory that they are a Hindu tribe. For a full view of the subject, I must refer my readers to the works of Grellman and Buttner, who have pursued this inquiry with great learning and zeal, or to a very able summary in Malte Brun’s Geography: my limits will compel me to take a more rapid notice of it. The sum and substance of their case is this. They find occupation in some countries as smiths and tinkers; they mend broken plates, and sell wooden ware. A class of them in Moldavia and Wallachia lead a settled life, and gain a subsistence by working and searching for gold in the beds of rivers. Those in the Bannat of Hungary are horse-dealers, and are gradually obeying the enactments of Joseph II., by which they are compelled to cultivate the land; but the great majority in Europe abhor a permanent residence and stated hours of labour. The women abuse the credulity of the German and Polish peasants, who imagine that they cure their cattle by witchcraft, and predict fortunate events by inspecting the lineaments of the hand. It is lawful for the wives of the Tchinganes in Turkey to commit adultery with impunity. Many individuals of both sexes, particularly throughout Hungary, are passionately fond of music, the only science in which they have, as yet, attained any degree of perfection. They are the favourite minstrels of the country people: some have arrived at eminence in cathedrals and the choirs of princes. Their guitar is heard in the romantic woods of Spain; and many gipsies, less indolent than the indolent Spaniards, exercise in that country the trade of publicans. They follow willingly whatever occupations most men hate and condemn. In Hungary and Transylvania, they are the flayers of dead horses, and executioners of criminals; the mass of the nation is composed of thieves and mendicants. The total number of these savages in Europe has never been considered less than 300,000; Grellman says 700,000; of these, 150,000 are in Turkey; 70,000 in Wallachia and Moldavia; 40,000 in Hungary and Transylvania; the rest are scattered through Russia, Prussia, Poland, Germany, Jutland, Spain, and other countries. Persia and Egypt are infested with them. They have appeared in Spanish America.

Who then are these people? Grellman and Buttner do not hesitate to pronounce them to be one of the low Indian castes, Soudras or Correvas, expelled from their country during one of its great revolutions, probably that of Tamerlane, about the year 1400. Their habits as tinkers, musicians, horse-dealers, etc. etc., already alluded to, are exactly in keeping with this supposition; but what is far stronger evidence is, that their language, formerly supposed to be the gibberish of thieves and pickpockets, is really Indostanée. In the tents of these wanderers is spoken the dialects of the Vedas, the Puranas, the Brachmans, and the Budahs. This, in different tribes, is in some degree dashed with words of Sclavonic, Persic, Permiac, Finnic, Wogoul, and Hungarian. The structure of the auxiliary verb is the same as others in the Indo-Pelasgic tongues, but the pronouns have a remarkable analogy with the Persic, and the declension of nouns with the Turkish. Pallas infers from their dialect that their ancient country was Moultan, and their origin the same as that of the Hindu merchants at present at Astrakhan. Bartolomeo believes they come from Guzerat, perhaps from the neighbourhood of Tatta, where a horde of pirates called Tchinganes still reside. Lastly, Richardson boasts of having found them among the Bazigurs, a wandering tribe of minstrels and dancers. No caste, however, bears so strong a resemblance to them as that of the Soudras, who have no fixed abodes, but live in tents, and sell baskets, mend kettles, and tell fortunes.

The names by which they have been, or are known in different countries are various. They call themselves Romi, Manusch, and Gadzi, each of these appellatives being connected with a different language--the Copt, the Sanscrit, and the Celtic. In Poland and Wallachia they are Zingani; in Italy and Hungary, Zingari; in Lithuania, Zigonas; Ziguene in Germany; Tchinganes in Turkey; the Atchinganes of the middle ages; in Spain they are Gitanos; in France, Bohemians, from their having passed out of Bohemia into that country. By the Persians they are called Sisech Hindou, or Black Indians. But the most ancient and general name is that of Sinte, or inhabitants of the banks of the Sinde, or Indus. The celebrated M. Hasse, has indeed proved that for the last 3000 years there have been in Europe wandering tribes bearing the name of Sigynes, or Sinte. He considers the modern gipsies as the descendants of these ancient hordes. Herodotus points out the Sigynes on the north side of the Ister. Strabo describes a people called Siginii, inhabiting the Hyrcanian mountains near the Caspian sea. Pliny speaks of the Caucasian Singi, and of the Indian Singæ. Hesychius reconciles the opinions of the ancients, and calls the Sinde an Indian people. They were noted for their cowardice; for submitting to the lash of Scythian masters, the prostitution of their women, whose name became a term of reproach. Different branches of the same people were scattered through Macedonia, in which was a Sinti district, and in Lemnos, where the Sinties were the workmen of Vulcan.

It will now be sufficiently obvious to the reader what a singular, ancient, and mysterious people are these gipsies, that haunt our lanes and commons, and form so striking and poetical a feature in our country scenery. After all the zealous and learned researches into their history and origin, nothing appears yet established beyond the fact, that they are older than Herodotus, the most ancient of profane historians; that for more than 3000 years they have been wandering through the world as they do at present; and that their language exhibits incontestable evidence of an oriental origin. The ravages of Tamerlane may perhaps help to account for the circumstance of their pressing upon Western Europe in 1400 in such unusual numbers; but they were wanderers long before Tamerlane’s days. Were they enemies of Krishna? for they boast of having formerly rejected Christ. They pretend that they were once a happy people, under kings of their own; but their traditionary knowledge seems nearly extinct. Perhaps an increasing acquaintance with the East and Eastern literature may cast some light on the origin of this peculiar variety of the human race. In the mean time we may proceed to take a close view of them as they now appear in this kingdom. From the first moment of their attracting the public attention in this part of Europe, they have always exhibited the same artful character,--a character above the trammels of either superstition or religion. They have therefore adopted the most plausible pretences to effect their purposes; and for a long time triumphed over the credulity of the christian princes, at all times over that of the common people. Their first appearance in France, as related by Pasquin, is curious enough. “On August 27th, 1427, came to Paris twelve penitents, Penanciers, as they called themselves, viz.: a duke, an earl, and ten men, all on horseback, and calling themselves good christians. They were of Lower Egypt, and gave out, that not long before, the christians had subdued their country, and obliged them to embrace christianity on pain of death. Those who were baptized were great lords in their own country, and had a king and queen there. Soon after their conversion, the Saracens overran the country, and obliged them to renounce christianity. When the emperor of Germany, the king of Poland, and the christian princes heard of this, they fell upon them, and obliged the whole of them, both great and small, to quit the country, and go to the Pope at Rome, who enjoined them seven years’ penance, to wander over the world without lying in a bed.

“They had been wandering five years when they came to Paris. First the principal people, and soon after the commonalty, about 100 or 120--reduced, according to their account, from 1000 or 1200, when they went from home; the rest, with their king and queen, being dead. They were lodged by the police at some distance from the city, at Chapel St. Denis.

“Nearly all of them had their ears bored, and wore two silver rings in each, which they said were esteemed ornaments in their country. The men were black; their hair curled; the women, remarkably black; their only clothes a large old duffle garment, tied over their shoulders with a cloth or cord, and under it a miserable rocket. In fact, they were the most poor, miserable creatures that ever had been seen in France; and, notwithstanding their poverty, there were amongst them women who, by looking into people’s hands, told their fortunes, and what was worse, they picked people’s pockets of their money, and got it into their own, by telling these things through art magic, etc.”

The subtlety of these modern Gibeonites cannot be sufficiently admired. They did not venture to alarm the country by coming at once in full strength into it, but sent a detachment, mounted on horseback as princes, to pave the way by their tale of sufferings; then came a larger troop, in true Gibeonitish condition, to excite the popular commiseration; and that being done, their numbers gradually increased; and under these and similar pretences, they rambled over France for a whole century, when their real character being sufficiently obvious, and their numbers daily increasing, they were banished by proclamation. The same policy was pursued towards them in all the countries of Europe, if we except Hungary and Wallachia. In Spain, sentence of banishment being found ineffectual, in 1492 an edict of extermination was published; but they only slunk into the mountains and woods, and reappeared in a while as numerously as before. The order of banishment not succeeding in France, in 1561 all governors of cities were commanded to drive them away with fire and sword; and in 1612 a new order for their extermination came out. In 1572, they were expelled from the territories of Milan and Parma, as they had before been driven from the Venetian boundaries. In Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, repeated enactments were made for their expulsion. In Germany, from 1500 to 1577, various similar decrees were promulgated against them. Under these laws they suffered incredible miseries. They were imprisoned; chased about like wild beasts, and put to death without mercy: but, as the European states did not act in concert, when they were driven from one they found an asylum in another; and whenever the storm blew over, they again gradually reappeared in their old haunts. The Empress Theresa, and afterwards the Emperor Joseph II., seem to have been the only sovereigns who set themselves in earnest to reclaim and civilize this singular people; and we have seen that in Hungary some of them are gradually submitting to the regulations made by these wise monarchs.

Their introduction to this kingdom, and their after-treatment were similar. At first they were received as princes and kings, and excited commiseration by the tale of their injuries. They had royal and parliamentary passes granted them, to go through the country seeking relief, as many of the parish records yet bear testimony. So late as 1647 there appears an entry in the constable’s accounts at Uttoxeter, in Staffordshire, of four shillings being given to forty-six Egyptians, travelling with a pass from parliament, to seek relief by the space of six months. But when this delusion was past, and it was seen that they had no intention of quitting the country, they became persecuted by justices of the peace and parish constables, as thieves and vagrants; and the rapid enclosures of waste lands during the war, tended greatly to break up their haunts, and put them into great straits.

About twenty years ago John Hoyland, a minister of the Society of Friends, being struck with commiseration for their condition, began to inquire into their real character; and the researches of Grellman being made known to him, he visited their encampments in various places in Northamptonshire, Hainault Forest, and Norwood, near London. He also sought them out in their winter quarters in London; and the result of his inquiries satisfied him that the English gipsies were a genuine portion of the great tribe described by Grellman; that they possessed the same oriental language, specimens of which he has given in his history. Mr. Hoyland could not ascertain what were the actual numbers of these people in England. They had been stated in parliament to be not less than 30,000, but on what authority did not appear; but it was very evident that enclosures, and the severity of the magistrates, had reduced their numbers. Probably many of them had emigrated. Norwood used to be their great resort, but its enclosure had broken up that rendezvous, yet it nevertheless appeared, that considerable numbers wintered in London, and at the earliest approach of spring set out on their summer progress through various parts of the country, especially in the counties of Surrey, Bedford, Buckingham, Hereford, Monmouth, Somerset, Wilts, Southampton, Cambridge, and Huntingdon.

Subsequent inquiries have shewn that these people retire into other large towns in winter besides London, particularly Bristol. That in town their chief haunts are in Tottenham-court-road, Banbridge-street, Bolton-street, Church-lane, Battle-bridge, Tunbridge-street, Tothill-fields, and White-street. In Bristol, they are chiefly found in St. Philips, Newfoundland-street, Bedminster, and at the March and September fairs. About London, in April, May, and June, they get work in the market-gardens. In July and August they move into Sussex and Kent for harvest-work, where they continue. Through September, great numbers of them find employment in the hop districts of those counties, and of Surrey. They constantly encamp on the commons near London. On Wimbledon Common, at Christmas 1831, there were no less than seventy of them. In the parks of Richmond, Greenwich, Windsor, and all the resorts of summer visitants from town, the gipsy women are to be found exercising their vocation of fortune-tellers. On this account many of them encamp about Blackheath, Woolwich-heath, Lordship-lane, near Deptford, and Plum-street, near Woolwich. The Archbishop’s Wall, near Canterbury; Staple and Wingham Well, near the same city, and Buckland, near Dover, and the New Forest, Hampshire, are great haunts; they also flock in great numbers to Ascot, Epsom, and other races.

Mr. Hoyland extended his researches to Scotland, and the most prompt assistance was offered him in his inquiries in that country. A circular was dispatched to the sheriff of every county, soliciting, through the medium of an official organ, all the intelligence which could be obtained on the subject. It was found that there were very few gipsies in Scotland at all. From thirteen counties the reports were--“No gipsies resident in them.” From most others the answer was, that they appeared there only as occasional passengers. The Border appeared to be their chief resort, and respecting those Sir Walter Scott, then plain Walter Scott, addressed a very characteristic letter to the author. His account of them tallies exactly with that he has given in his celebrated novels. He and Mr. Smith, the Baillie of Kelso, agree in describing them as a single colony at Yetholm, and one family removed thence to Kelso. This colony appears to have acquired a character more daring and impetuous than the gipsies of England; in fact, to have exhibited the true old Border spirit: probably partly from example and partly from intercourse with some of the Border families. Mr. Baillie Smith gives the following instance of this spirit:--“Between Yetholm and the Border farms in Northumberland, there were formerly, as in most border situations, some uncultivated lands, called the Plea Lands, or Debateable Lands, the pasturage of which was generally eaten up by the sorners and vagabonds on both sides of the marches. Many years ago, Lord Tankerville and some other of the English borderers, made their request to Sir David Bennet and the late Mr. Wauchope, of Niddry, that they would accompany them at a riding of the Plea Lands, who readily complied with their request. They were induced to this, as they understood that the gipsies had taken offence, on the supposition that they might be circumscribed in their pasture for their shelties, and asses, which they had held a long time, partly by stealth and partly by violence. Both threats and entreaties were employed to keep them away; and at last Sir David obtained a promise from some of the heads of the gang, that none of them would shew their faces on the occasion.

“They, however, got upon the hills in the neighbourhood, whence they could see every thing that passed. At first they were very quiet, but when they saw the English Court-Book spread out on a cushion before the clerk, and apparently taken in a line of direction interfering with that which they considered to be their privileged ground, it was with great difficulty that the most moderate of them could restrain the rest from running down and taking vengeance even in sight of their own lord of the manor. They only abstained for a short time, and no sooner had Sir David and the other gentlemen taken leave of each other in the most polite and friendly manner, as border chiefs are wont to do, since border feuds ceased, and had departed to a sufficient distance, than the clan, armed with bludgeons and pitchforks, and such other hostile weapons as they could find, rushed down in a body, and before the chiefs on either side had reached their homes, there was neither English tenant, horse, cow, or sheep, left upon the premises.”

This account of their descent on the Plea Lands is like one of Sir Walter Scott’s own vivid sketches of border life; and the following anecdote, also related by Mr. Baillie Smith, shews how truly they had imbibed the border spirit of clanship. “When I first knew any thing about the colony, old Will Faa was their king, or leader, and had held the sovereignty for many years. Meeting at Kelso with Mr. Walter Scott, whose discriminating habits and just observations I had occasion to know from his youth, and at the same time seeing one of my Yetholm friends in the horse-market, I merely said to Mr. Scott, ‘Try to get before that man with the long drab coat; look at him on your return, and tell me whether you ever saw him, and what you think of him.’ He was so good as to indulge me; and rejoining me said without hesitation, ‘I never saw the man that I know of, but he is one of the gipsies of Yetholm that you told me of several years ago.’ I need scarcely say that he was perfectly right.

“The descendants of Faa, now take the name of Fall, from the Messrs. Fall of Dunbar, who, they pride themselves in saying, are of the same stock and lineage. When old Will Faa was upwards of eighty years of age, he called on me at Kelso, in his way to Edinburgh, telling me that he was going to see the laird, the late Mr. Nisbett of Dirleton, as he understood that he was very unwell, and himself now being old, and not so stout as he had been, he wished to see him once more before he died. The old man set out by the nearest road, which was by no means his common practice. Next market-day some of the farmers informed me that they had been in Edinburgh, and seen Will Faa upon the bridge (the south bridge was not built then), that he was tossing about his old brown hat, and huzzaing with great vociferation, that he had seen the laird before he died. Indeed Will himself had no time to lose, for having set his face homewards, by the way of the sea-coast, to vary his route, as is the general custom with the gang, he only got the length of Coldingham when he was taken ill and died.”

No one can fail to recognise in these border gipsies the Faas and Gordons of Guy Mannering, the desperate clan of Meg Merrilies and Derncleugh. Scott, indeed, informs us that his prototype of Meg Merrilies was Jean Gordon, an inhabitant of Kirk-Yetholm in the Cheviot hills, adjoining to the English border. The Faas, of which family her mother was, were the lineal descendants of John Faa, who styled himself Lord and King of Little Egypt, and with a numerous retinue entered Scotland, in the reign of Queen Mary.

The difference between the English and Scotch gipsies was singularly exemplified in Jean Gordon’s own family. The English gipsies have generally had the policy to commit no capital offences; but Jean’s sons were all hanged one day. Scott, in the eighth chapter of Guy Mannering, says, their mixture with the Border people gave them a peculiar ferocity, quite alien to their original character. “They understood all out-of-door sports, especially otter-hunting, fishing, and finding game. They had the best and boldest terriers, and sometimes had good pointers for sale. In winter the women told fortunes, the men shewed tricks of legerdemain; and these accomplishments helped to wile away a weary or stormy evening in the circle of the ‘farmer’s ha’.’ The wildness of their character, and the indomitable pride with which they despised all regular labour, commanded a certain awe, which was not diminished by the consideration that these strollers were a vindictive race, and were restrained by no check either of fear or conscience, from taking desperate vengeance upon those who had offended them. These tribes were, in short, the Parias of Scotland, living like wild Indians among European settlements; and like them, judged of rather by their own customs, habits, and opinions, than as if they had been members of the civilized part of the community. Some hordes of them yet remain, chiefly in such situations as afford a ready escape into a waste country, or into another jurisdiction. Nor are the features of their character much softened. Their numbers are, however, so greatly diminished, that instead of one hundred thousand, as calculated by Fletcher of Saltoun, it would now perhaps be impossible to collect above five hundred throughout all Scotland.”

Since writing so far, I have visited Kirk-Yetholm, and can testify to the correctness of these details. It was in June, 1836, that I was at this remarkable haunt of this singular class of gipsies. The tribe was then, according to their regular custom, encamping, probably far off on the heaths of Scotland, or in the green lanes of England; and their houses, to the number of about a score, stood along one side of the village, all tenantless, with closed shutters, and doors barricadoed with boards, or locked or nailed up. We asked to whom they belonged, and were told that they were the Trayvelers, Anglice, Traveller’s houses. They had a strange look of desertion amid the peopled village. Along the lane side leading to the neighbouring hills extended a strip of land, divided into as many allotments as there were houses, in which were growing their crops of corn and potatoes, left till their return to providence and the forbearance of their neighbours; and we were assured that the tribe would not make their appearance here till the crops were ready to house, when they would come and get them in, and then away again till the setting in of winter. We found the feud between them and the shepherds still kept up as hotly as ever, and likely to continue so, from the peculiar location of the land above spoken of, on which they claim to pasture their horses. About a mile from the village lies a region of pastoral hills, most beautiful in their greenness and loftiness. They are covered from vale to summit with the softest and finest turf, and their loftiest steeps are dotted with flocks. In the very midst of these hills, loftier and more naked than the rest, rises the one which the gipsies and other inhabitants of Yetholm claim. Nothing could be more ingeniously contrived, if by contrivance it had been done, to effect a constant bickering between the shepherds and the Yetholmers. The gipsies of course drive their horses up to their own hill, and nothing is more natural than that seeing better pasture all around them, and no fence to prevent them, they should go down and enjoy it. It is equally natural that the shepherds should be on the look-out, and the moment they find the horses trespassing, should drive them out into the lane leading to the village, and close the gates behind them. This also is expected by the gipsies, and the moment the horses make their appearance at the village, they are driven back again to the hills. Here is perpetual food for resentment and hostility, and to such a height does it sometimes rise, that a gentleman of Kelso informed me that he has seen at Yetholm wool-fair such affrays between the gipsies and the shepherds as would outdo Donnybrook.

We found a Will Faa still the reputed king of the tribe. He was an old man, having none of the common features of the gipsy--his Border blood having done away with the black eyes and swarthy skin; but Will had all the propensities of the gipsy, except that of encamping; smuggling, fishing, and shooting appeared to have been the business of his life. We were told that in an affray with the revenue officers he had defended a narrow bridge somewhere near Bamborough Castle, while his party made their escape, and had stood fighting singly with his cudgel, till it was cut down by the cutlasses of the officers to “twa nieves lang,” and till he finally got a cut across the arm which disabled him. When we asked him of the truth of this story, his grey eyes kindled up into a wild fire, and stretching out his two arms together, he shewed us, with a significant gesture, that one was still at least two inches longer than the other. Old Will Faa had risen into great importance through the writings of Sir Walter Scott. He told us that Sir Martin Archer Shee had been down to take his likeness. He was in daily request at the houses of the neighbouring nobility and gentry to catch trout for them, being intimately acquainted with all the streams of the country round, and all the arts of filling his creel out of them. Will, therefore, is sure to be found either by the side of one of the trout streams, or in the kitchen of some of the neighbouring halls, telling his exploits and drinking his toddy. His niece, who was absent with the tribe, was said to be the belle of the camp; a true gipsy beauty, dark and “weel fa’ured.”

Such is the present state of the gipsies of England and Scotland. Their numbers are evidently everywhere on the decrease; yet what do remain in England retain all their ancient characteristics. These characteristics have never been more accurately delineated than by Richard Howitt, in his poem of the “Gipsy King,” in the Metropolitan Magazine for June 1836. The groups proceeding to the coronation of their king are living.

Now come in groups the gipsy tribes, From northern hills, from southern plains; And many a panniered ass is swinging The child that to itself is singing Along the flowery lanes.

Stout men are loud in wrangling talk, Where older tongues are gruff and tame; Keen maiden laughter rings aloft, Whilst many an undervoice is soft From many a talking dame.

Their beaver hats are weather stained,-- The one black plume is sadly gay; Their squalid brats are slung behind, In cloaks that flutter to the wind, Of scarlet, brown, and grey.

The king himself is distinguished by some touches that are the life itself, but which I never recollect seeing elsewhere introduced.

The slouching hat our hero wore, The crown wherewith he king was crowned; Wherein a pipe and a crow’s feather Were stuck in fellowship together, Was by a hundred winters browned.

His sceptre was a stout oak sapling, Round which a snake well-carved was wreathed; Cunning and strength that well bespoke, Whilst from his frame, as from an oak, “Deliberate valour breathed.”

His footstool was the solid earth; His court spread out in pomp before him, The heath arrayed in summer’s smiles; His empire broad the British isles; His dome the heaven’s arched o’er him.

Antique and flowing was his dress; And from his temples, bold and bare, Fell back in many a dusky tress, As liberal as the wilderness, His ample growth of hair.

Like Cromwell’s was his hardy front, Where thought but feeling none was shewn; Where underneath a flitting grace, Was firmly built up in his face, A hardness as of stone.

They are not to be confounded with a tribe of wandering potters, who live in tents like them. The true gipsies are readily distinguished by their invariable jet-black hair, black sparkling eyes, Indian complexions, and their genuine oriental language. On the extensive heaths of Surrey, since my residence in that county, I have met with frequent camps of them. In the midland counties, although there is less waste land, they are not unfrequently to be seen. They are there chiefly the Lovell, Boswell, and Kemp gangs. They are great people still for kings and chiefs. Every district has its king. One of these died in the summer of 1835, in their camp in Bestwood Park, in Nottinghamshire; and thousands of people went to see him lie in state. They conveyed his body in a cart to Eastwood, a distance of nine miles, and would fain have stipulated with the clergyman for his interment in the church; not on account of any notion of the sanctity of the place, but for its security. This being refused, they chose a place in the churchyard, for which they paid a handsome sum, and ordered it to be fenced off with iron railings. An old beldame of the tribe said to me, that it was hard that he could not be buried in a church, as most of his ancestors had been before him.

This gang had no less than nine horses, which in the day time grazed in the bare lanes; but if they were not turned into the fields at night, they throve wonderfully on bad commons. The farmers complained dreadfully of their pulling up their hedges for fuel. The whole race seems to have no fear of man; they are troubled with no mauvaise honte. The men seldom condescend to solicit you, but the women are always anxious to lay hold of your money under pretence of telling your fortune; and the moment you approach their encampment, out comes a troop of little impudent, though not insolent, rogues, to beg every thing and any thing they can. The women, many of them, in their youth, are fine strapping figures, with handsome brown faces and most brilliant and speaking eyes,--they have a peculiar poco-curante air and jaunty gait, and are extremely fond of finery. Their costume is unique, and pretty uniform,--scarlet cloaks, black beaver hats with broad slouching brims, or black velvet bonnets with large wide pokes trimmed with lace; a handkerchief thrown over the head under the bonnet, and tied beneath the chin; long pendant ear-rings, black stockings, and ankle-boots. So far from shunning any intercourse or inquiries, they approach you with a ready smile and a style of flattery peculiar to them. “A good day to you, sir; your honour is born to fortune. I see that by the cast of your countenance. It was a right luckly planet that shone on your honour’s birth!” If you know any thing of their language, they are only too glad to talk to you in it. Accost a gipsy with “Shaushan, Palla?” “how do you do, brother?” and you will see the effect.

This singular race of people, of whom Grellman calculates there are not less than 700,000 in Europe, seemed to demand a more comprehensive account in the Rural Life of England, than has hitherto been given in any one work. Many of my readers, I am persuaded, will regard them for their antiquity, the mystery of their origin, the strangeness of their history and life, with deeper feelings than they have hitherto done; and it may be well for such as live in those parts of the country which the gipsies haunt, to ask themselves whether something may not be done by education, and other means, to reclaim those wild denizens of heaths and lanes, or to give them some greater portion of the knowledge and benefits of civilized life. A considerable number have sent their children to schools during the winters in London; and these children, though compared by one of their schoolmasters, at their first entrance, to wild birds suddenly put into a cage, and ready to beat themselves against the bars, having no sense of restraint, soon became not only perfectly orderly, amongst the very first for quickness and avidity in learning, but expressed the utmost regret when obliged to leave at spring. I once saw a woman in a gipsy tent, reading the Bible to a circle of nine children, all her own! and though, on coming near, her blue eyes and light hair shewed her to be an English woman, the daughter, as I found, of a gamekeeper, who had married one of the Boswell gang, yet the interest which the children took in her reading of the Bible, and the interest which she assured me the whole camp took in it, were sufficient evidence that it is only for want of being taught that they still remain in ignorance of the best knowledge. They have been so long treated with contempt and severity, that they naturally look on all men as their enemies. For my part, when I see a horde of them coming on some solitary way, with their dark Indian faces, their scarlet-cloaked women, their troops of little vivacious savages, their asses and horses laden with beds and tents, and, trudging after them, their guardian dogs,--I cannot help looking on them as an Eastern tribe, as fugitives of a most ancient family, as a living enigma in human history--and feeling that, with all their Arab-like propensities, they have great claims on our sympathies, and on the splendid privileges of a christian land.

GIPSIES OF NEW FOREST.

Since the former edition went to press, I have learned that the New Forest has long been a great haunt of gipsies, particularly of one remarkable family--the Stanleys. I hear with pleasure that the Home Missionary Society has likewise taken up the cause of the gipsies in various parts of the country with a good deal of spirit, and a volume has been put into my hands, entitled “The Gipsies’ Advocate.” This is edited by the Rev. James Crabbe, a worthy dissenting minister of Southampton, and has run into a third edition. Mr. Crabbe seems a most earnest and indefatigable apostle of this neglected people. Hoyland’s “Survey of the Gipsies,” together with some painfully interesting circumstances connected with the execution of one of them, turned his attention to their case so early as 1827. He soon fell in with one of the New Forest clan, William Stanley, who, having in his youth been a soldier, had become acquainted with the Bible through attending church, and eventually became so anxious to christianize his gipsy kinsmen, that he went to travel about amongst them, reading the Bible in their tents. Mr. Crabbe soon formed a committee in Southampton for the reclamation of the gipsies, visiting them in their camps, and persuading them to allow their children to be put to school, and to learn trades. He visited the camps in various places, and sought them out, and preached to them at Epsom Races, and in the hop-grounds at Farnham. Stanley served as his messenger and assistant. The committee seems to have met with great success. At the date of the edition which I quote, 1832, there were twenty-three reformed gipsies living in Southampton, and upwards of forty attending divine service there. The gipsies in almost all instances had evinced the most lively sense of the attention shewn them, and a desire to avail themselves of the privileges of learning to read and of hearing preaching. This little volume contains also some interesting accounts of the attempts to civilize the gipsies in Russia and Germany, and particularly of the zealous endeavours of the Countess von Reden of Buchwald in Silesia.

But from the gipsies of the continent we must return to those of the New Forest of England; of whom Miss Bowles, now Mrs. Southey, was kind enough to send me the following curious particulars:--

“The gipsies who mostly frequent this neighbourhood,--or did frequent it, for their visits are now ‘few and far between,’--are Lees and Stanleys; I should have said Stanleys and Lees--for the former tribe hold up their heads very high above the Lees, and call themselves ‘the better sort of travellers.’ Some years ago a party of these Stanleys came from a distant part of the country to attend a wedding at Newport, in the Isle of Wight. They stopped at the turnpike-gate near my house, being on friendly terms with the tollman and his family, who had often done them kind offices, and to the daughter who is now in my service (1838) they entrusted the important office of making up grey silk spencers and smart flowered chintz petticoats for each of the women; encamping in the neighbourhood while the work was in hand, and ‘very particular’ the ladies were about ‘good fits,’ etc. Then they went to the best hatters in the town, and ordered hats on purpose for them--of the long felt, wide-brimmed sort for the women. The tradesmen hesitated about giving credit, as they required, till their return from the island, at which they were highly indignant. ‘What!’ stormed one, whom they called Brother John--‘What! refuse credit to a gentleman ratcatcher!’ But they obtained it, and paid honourably on their return, and as honestly remunerated the sempstress for making their gay dresses.

“This same party often camped at a spot in the forest called Marl-pit Oak--and nearer to my residence on a hill near the road, called Gally Hill, and were not ill thought of by the farmers and poor people, and one or two forest girls would sometimes steal to their tents, sure of a savoury regale. The wonder is, how they lived so well--for their kettles were not filled with the produce of poaching or of thefts in the hen-roost--still less with meat ‘that had died of its own accord,’ as the people say. No; they used frequently to go back from the town laden with good joints honestly purchased and paid for at the butchers.

“On one occasion, a day or two before Easter Sunday, Brother John and two of the ladies of the tribe displayed their marketing to my neighbours at the turnpike-gate--a fine breast, loin, and leg of veal. ‘To-morrow’s Easter Sunday;’ said they, ‘and we always have a feast of veal on that day.’ (Singular! is it not?) ‘How can you contrive to roast it at your fires?’ inquired the woman who is now my servant. ‘Better a deal than you can at your poor pinched in grates,’ was the answer; ‘and then we shall have rice-puddings, capital rice-puddings.’ ‘But you can’t bake, if you can roast?’ ‘Can’t we? come and taste if you ever knowed better baking in your life.’ (I should have accepted the invitation if it had been made to me). And then they described their culinary process. Having mixed their ingredients--all of the best--in a large brown pan of that sort of ware which is fireproof, they covered it with another of the same sort, set it deep in a bed of glowing peat-ashes, and heaped it over to a foot depth with the same. I have no doubt of the excellency of the method,--not very unlike that in use by many of the savage tribes. There were seven daughters of this particular family of the Stanleys, all splendid beauties;--one but too celebrated, ‘the beautiful Caroline Stanley.’ She fell into worse company than that of her own people, and on two or three occasions was absent from them for a year and more at a time, living in splendour as ‘maitresse en titre,’ to more than one officer of high rank; dashed about in elegant carriages, clothed in ‘silken sheen,’ and all sorts of bravery, and carried it with a high hand (poor Caroline!) through her seasons of ‘bad eminence.’ But all the while she was out of her element; the free creature of the woods pined to be there again; and some fine morning she would be off without leave taking, and leaving behind her every atom of the dear-bought finery, that had become fetters to her. I knew her well by sight, and such a Cleopatra of regal beauty I never could have imaged to myself.

“A short time before her first initiation in civilization and corruption, I saw her showing off in high style. I called to give some order to my milliner, but sat quietly down to await her leisure, finding her engaged in high disputation with the gipsy beauty, who was rating her in no measured terms for some deviation from orders in the making of a bonnet which Caroline was in the act of trying on before the glass. And such airs and graces she gave herself! I never was more diverted.

“‘Woman!’ she called the poor milliner, at every sentence. ‘Did you think, because I’m a gipsy, I’d wear such a thing as this,’ said she, and dashed off the bonnet--an expensive one of black velvet, with a deep lace flounce--to the farther end of the room. When I last heard of her, a few years back, she was wandering--withered and haggard--with her diminished tribe. It has been much diminished of late years by the conviction and transportation of many of the men for horse-stealing; of their proficiency in which I have had sad experience. Some years ago, I lost a very beautiful and favourite pony, at the same time that a rather valuable mare was stolen from a neighbour of mine (a farrier), and a young galloway from another man, named Edward Pierce. Having done every thing in our power to regain our lost steeds, we at last gave up the pursuit as useless.

“Nearly two years afterwards, my neighbour, the farrier, came to ask me if I would join him and Pierce in some further endeavours to recover the stolen horses, which we had a fair chance of doing, he thought, according to the letter he presented for my perusal, a curious one it was, dated, ‘The Hulks, Portsmouth.’ The writer (one of the Stanleys) stated, that having been condemned to seven years’ transportation, for a recent offence, he wished to stock himself with a few comforts for his voyage, and, therefore, if we, the losers of such and such horses, stolen at such a time, would make it ‘worth his while,’ he would put us in a way to have them back again. He began his letter (it was addressed to Pierce), ‘Dear friend,’ and said at the conclusion, that not liking to go by his own name in such a place, and in his present circumstances, he had taken the liberty to use his, and begged to be addressed as Edward Pierce. One of the girl Stanleys married a Blake, and prosperous vagabonds they were,--kept a chaise-cart, and a fine horse, with expensive plated harness. On the occasion of the christening of their first child, which took place at Beaulieu, they invited all the farmers and respectable country folk for miles round to a feast on the heath, and a sumptuous feast it was, and every thing ‘done decently and in order.’ Abundance of good things, eatables and drinkables.

“The tables, borrowed for the occasion, almost elegantly spread. Liquor in abundance, good ale and strong, but no abuse of it. Fiddling and dancing afterwards till the long summer day closed in, and then the wild hosts and their civilized guests parted with mutual good-will; the most respectable of the latter (good substantial farmers, their wives and families) protesting they had never been so well treated, or in company more decently conducted.

“Mr. Crabbe alludes at p. 29 of the ‘Gipsies’ Advocate,’ to a circumstance connected with gipsy burials, as having occurred in the neighbouring county of Wilts. I suspect it to be the same which was related to me two years ago, by the vicar of a parish in the New Forest, who had it from his intimate friend the curate of a Wiltshire parish, the name of which I forget. A small party of gipsies had remained stationary in the neighbourhood for an unusual length of time, detained by the illness of one of them, a very young woman and beautiful--lately married to a man as comely as herself. ‘One of the finest young men,’ the curate said, ‘he ever set eyes on.’ The woman died, and soon after the husband came, almost in a state of distraction, to apply for leave to bury her in the church. The permission could not be granted, though the man pleaded with passionate earnestness, saying, any required sum, however large, should be forthcoming, might he but lay her in the church. Finding that to be impossible, he bought a piece of ground in the churchyard, made a deep vault, where she was interred, and over it caused a monument to be erected, which was not only costly but in good taste, as was the simple record inscribed on it. This occurred several years ago, and not once has he omitted an annual visit to the grave since the day of his wife’s interment.

“The magistrates, country gentlemen, and farmers, in the neighbourhood of Mr. Crabbe’s gipsy colony, complain bitterly of the effects of his benevolent scheme--affirming that it subjects them to the perpetual depredations of swarms of vagrants of all sorts, and that the good man himself is the dupe of nine-tenths of these persons, who allow him for a time to reckon them among his reformed gipsies. Be it as it may that this well meaning man is or is not imposed on, certain it is, that as a nation we are chargeable with culpable neglect towards these wild denizens. We ‘compass sea and land to make one proselyte,’ and at home, we suffer fellow beings to live and die among us, as unheeded and uncared for (far more so) as ‘the beasts that perish.’”

We may illustrate this just remark of Mrs. Southey’s, and at the same time, the occasional scenes of wild life in England, by quoting from Mr. Crabbe’s volume the following extraordinary anecdote.

“George III. being out one day hunting, the chase lay through the skirts of the forest. The stag had been hard run, and to escape the dogs, had crossed the river in a deep part. The dogs could not be brought to follow; and it became necessary, in order to come up with it, to make a circuitous route along the banks of the river, through some thick and troublesome underwood. The roughness of the ground, the long grass, and frequent thickets, obliged the sportsmen to separate from each other; each one endeavouring to make the best and speediest route he could. Before they had reached the end of the forest, the king’s horse manifested signs of fatigue and uneasiness, so much so, that his Majesty resolved upon yielding the pleasures of the chase to those of compassion for his horse. With this view he turned down the first avenue of the forest, and determined on riding quietly to the oaks, there to wait for some of his attendants. The king had only proceeded a few yards, when, instead of the cry of the hounds he fancied he heard the cry of human distress. As he rode forward, he heard it more distinctly:--‘Oh, my mother! my mother! God pity and bless my poor mother!’ The curiosity and kindness of the sovereign led him instantly to the spot. It was a little green plot on one side of the forest, where was spread on the grass, under a branching oak, a little pallet, half covered with a kind of tent; and a basket or two with some packs, lay on the ground at a few paces distant from the tent. Near to the root of the tree he observed a little swarthy girl about eight years of age, on her knees praying, while her little black eyes ran down with tears. Distress of any kind was always relieved by his Majesty, for he had a heart which melted at human woe. ‘What my child, is the cause of your weeping?’ he asked, ‘For what do you pray?’ The little creature at first started, then rose from her knees; and pointing to the tent, said,--‘Oh sir, my dying mother!’ ‘What?’ said his Majesty, dismounting, and fastening his horse up to the branches of the oak, ‘what, my child? tell me all about it.’ The little creature now led the king to the tent; where lay, partly covered, a middle-aged female gipsy in the last stages of a decline, and in the last moments of life. She turned her dying eyes expressively to the royal visiter, then looked up to heaven, but not a word did she utter; the organs of speech had ceased their office; the silver cord was loosed, and the wheel broken at the cistern. The little girl then wept aloud, and stooping down, wiped the dying sweat from her mother’s face. The king, much affected, asked the child her name, and of her family, and how long her mother had been ill. Just at that moment another gipsy girl, much older, came out of breath to the spot. She had been to the town of W------, and brought some medicine for her dying mother. Observing a stranger, she curtsied modestly, and hastening to her mother, knelt down by her side, kissed her pallid lips, and burst into tears. ‘What, my dear child,’ said his Majesty, ‘can be done for you?’ ‘O sir,’ she replied, ‘my dying mother wanted a religious person to teach her, and to pray with her before she died. I ran all the way before it was light this morning to W------, and asked for a minister, but no one could I get to come with me to pray with my dear mother!’ The dying woman seemed sensible of what her daughter was saying, and her countenance was much agitated. The air was again rent with the cries of the distressed daughters. The king, full of kindness, instantly endeavoured to comfort them. He said, ‘I am a minister, and God has sent me to instruct and comfort your mother.’ He then sate down on a pack by the side of the pallet, and taking the hand of the dying gipsy, discoursed on the demerit of sin, and the nature of redemption. He then pointed her to Christ, the all-sufficient Saviour. While doing this, the poor creature seemed to gather consolation and hope: her eyes sparkled with brightness, and her countenance became animated. She looked up--she smiled; but it was the last smile; it was the glimmering of expiring nature. As the expression of peace, however, remained strong in her countenance, it was not till some time had elapsed, that they perceived the struggling spirit had left mortality.

“It was at this moment that some of his Majesty’s attendants, who had missed him at the chase, and had been riding through the forest in search of him, rode up, and found him comforting the afflicted gipsies. It was an affecting sight, and worthy of everlasting record in the annals of kings.

“He now rose up, put some gold into the hands of the afflicted girls, promised them his protection, and bade them look to heaven. He then wiped the tears from his eyes, and mounted his horse. His attendants, greatly affected, stood in silent admiration. Lord L------ was going to speak, but his Majesty, turning to the gipsies, and pointing to the breathless corpse, and to the weeping girls, said, with strong emotion,--‘Who, my lord, who, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto these?’”

GIPSIES OF FASHION.

An incident which occurred to me in the summer of 1837, shewed me most strikingly how next to impossible it is for the peculiar manner and costume of the English gipsies to be personated. In an evening drive on the 27th of July, with a young friend staying with us, as we passed through, or by, the little rustic hamlet of Stoke D’Abernon, for it consists of houses scattered along one side of the road, I was struck with two singular female figures at a little distance before us. They were both young--the one about the middle size, the other rather taller. The taller one was dressed in a dark cotton bedgown, dark petticoat, grey stockings, and shoes; on her head was tied a yellow silk handkerchief, and in her hand she held, as a walking-staff, a long stout hazel wand, recently cut from the hedge. The other had on also a short bedgown, but of a pink colour, striped and figured with white, a dark petticoat, and ankle-boots. On her head she wore an old straw bonnet. As my eye caught them at a distance,--the one standing with her tall stick by a pool on one side of the way, the other in the act of begging from, or addressing, a gentleman who was sitting on a stile, I could not help exclaiming,--“What have we got here!--Maria de Moulins and Madge Wildfire?” As we drew near, they came running up to us, and, one on each side of the pony-chaise, began begging most importunately: “Will you give us sixpence? Do give us sixpence! Do, dear gentleman, give us sixpence! Dear lady, do tell the gentleman to give us sixpence!” It was only necessary to give a slight glance at the faces of these beggars, and to hear one tone of their voices, to know that it was a frolic--that they were ladies of education and family, from some of the neighbouring country houses, thus dressed up. They had hair and eyes jet black as any gipsies; and after all that has been said of the beauty of some of the gipsy women--and they have a great deal--were handsomer than any gipsies I ever saw. The taller, who appeared the younger of the two, was a very lovely woman, of a slender figure, the exquisite symmetry of which was not to be disguised by the rustic dress she had assumed. The other had, or affected, a slight lisp. Irresistible as such beggars might appear, I resolved to refuse them, in order to see how they would keep up the attempt, and how they would take a refusal. I therefore said, laughing, “O! I have no sixpences for beggars like you; you certainly are very charming beggars; you have chosen a very rustic costume; you act your part very well indeed, and I hope you will enjoy your frolic.” All this time I kept driving on at a good pace; but the resolute damsels still ran on, importuning for a sixpence. One soon dropped behind--the taller one still ran on with her stick in her hand, in a voice of much softness and sweetness still begging for sixpence--as they were poor strangers, and had got nothing all day! As she ran, this sort of badinage passed:--“Where do you come from?” “O, we have come all the way from Epsom to meet our young man here, and he has deceived us.”--“Well, I hope no young man will deceive you more cruelly.” “Dear gentleman, if you won’t give us sixpence, give us a penny then to buy us a glass of ale!” “O, you are no ale drinkers--what should you think of a glass of gin?” “I should like something, for I am very tired: and what is sixpence to you?--you have a very good horse in your chaise; I have no doubt you are a gentleman of independent fortune--do give us sixpence!” “No, I wish I were half as rich as you are.” Here the Queen of Love and Beauty stopped, and turned round with an air of very beautiful disdain. As she went back to join her companion, we were again struck with the grace of her form, and the buoyancy of her carriage.

My impression was that these ladies were merely acting beggars; but we soon found that they were acting gipsies; for they offered to tell almost every body’s fortunes, and actually did tell some. As we returned, we met them coming up a hollow woody lane, near Bookham Common, about a mile from where we left them; and behold! they and the gentleman who was there sitting on the stile--a military-looking man with light mustachios--were walking familiarly on together. It was evident that they had found “their young man!” It was a group worthy of the pencil of Stothard; and on the opposite side of the lane, from a cottage above it, out were come a countrywoman, and six or seven children, of different ages, in their rustic costume, and stood to look at them--a little picture after the very heart of Collins. The moment our actresses saw us, they motioned their escort to move off to the other side of the way, and to walk on, as though he did not belong to them, and again renewed their importunity as we passed. I merely smiled, and moved my hat to them. As we proceeded, I stopped and asked of all the country people I met--who was that gentleman? and who the ladies dressed as beggars? The miller thought the gentleman was from Bookham Lodge, the seat of Captain Blackwood--he heard a large party of gentry was just come there; “but the women, sir, they are Dutch women!” Dutch women! Broom-girls, in fact! Broom-girls, with legs and arms like young elephants! and broad solid figures, as if cut out of blocks of wood--how very like those slim and elegant creatures! But it was enough for the worthy miller, whose fortune they had offered to tell, that they had on short bedgowns and dark petticoats. A grocer from Epsom, with his spring-cart, going as they do all round the country, from one gentleman’s house to another, had had his fortune told by them, and was lost in amaze at the announcement that he had had nine children, six of whom were still living--five girls and one boy; the very facts to a hair! A farmer and his wife at Stoke, never dreamt that the gentleman whom they had noticed belonged to these “young baggages of beggars,” that had been sitting on the bank by the road-side opposite their house; but his wife said one of them was the handsomest beggar she ever saw. “Ay, they were both good-looking,” said the man, “and had famous things on.” The groom at the parsonage-gate “didn’t know the gentleman in the mustachios; but the women, bless you, they were no ladies.” “Why?” “O, they carried it on too far for ladies here, I assure you.” “What did they do?” “O! they came ringing at the bell like new ’uns; six or seven times they called us out--they would take no nay.”

Little did these fair ladies, when sallying out for this frolic in the sylvan lanes of Surrey, dream, I dare say, that they should meet “a chiel takin’ notes,” that would put their exploits into print. Here they are, however; and if they should chance to see this, I must tell them, that they were very sweet nondescripts, but not very perfect beggars; and far, far indeed, from perfect Zinganies. For Madge Wildfires, they were not amiss; but beggars, impudent as they are, seldom ask for sixpences; seldom appear in new apparel; never run by the side of carriages--that is left to beggar children. Pleading looks, and a pitiful whining tone, with low genuflections, mark the young beggar-woman, as she stands fixed at one place;--her husband is dead, and she is going home to her parents or parish; or he is gone for a soldier, and she is following to the garrison. Lancashire witches they would have done for capitally--but then witches don’t tell fortunes by palmistry; their vocation is by spell and cauldron; and as for gipsies, why it is just as difficult to mistake the particular expression and cultivated voice of an English lady, as it is the features and voice of the real gipsy-woman. Black eyes and black hair these ladies had; but they had neither the olive skin, nor the bold, easy degagée air of the gipsy belle; and what do gipsies with such beautifully slender and delicate hands? They were importunate; but nothing but a life and an education in the gipsy-camp, and perhaps the blood and descent of the gipsy, can give the peculiar style of palaver--the suaviter in modo--the unique flattery--the “you are born fortunate, sir”--with which the gipsy accosts you. And the costume! The gipsy wears nothing short. She has a long gown,--a long red cloak--a handkerchief tied over her head, it is true, but upon it a large flapping bonnet with lace trimming, or black beaver hat;--instead of that fairy form, she is generally strapping, tall, and strong--and instead of those taper ankles and small feet, which could evidently dance down the four-and-twenty hours, she has her lower limbs arrayed in black stockings and stout shoes that would do for a wagoner. Young gipsy women walk with sticks! how rarely do you see an old one with one? Knowing now who these ladies were, I should, beforehand, have expected a closer personation of the gipsy; but the result only proves the difficulty of the attempt. It must, however be confessed, that this was as pretty a little rural adventure as one could desire to meet with.

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Chapter II

NOOKS OF THE WORLD;

OR, A PEEP INTO THE BACK SETTLEMENTS OF ENGLAND.

There are thousands of places in this beautiful kingdom, which if you could change their situation--if you could take some plain, monotonous, and uninteresting tracts from the neighbourhood of large cities, from positions barren and of daily observance, and place these in their stead--would acquire an incalculable value; while the common spots would serve the present inhabitants of those sweet places just as well, and often far better, for the ordinary purposes of their lives--for walking over in the day, sleeping in during the night, and raising grass, cattle, and corn upon. The dwellers of cities--the men who have made fortunes, or are making them, and yet long for the quietness and beauty of the country--but especially the literary, the nature-loving, the poetical--would, to use a common expression, jump at them; and, if it were in their power to secure them, would make heavens-upon-earth of them. Yes! they are such spots as thousands are longing for; as the day-dreaming young, and the world-weary old, are yearning after, and painting to their mind’s eye, daily in great cities; and the dull, the common-place, the unpercipient of their beauty and their glory, are dwelling in them;--paradisiacal fields and magnificent mountains; or cloudy hollows in their mottled sides; or little cleuchs and glens, hidden and green--overhung with wild wood--rocky, and resounding with dashing and splashing streams;--places, where the eye sees the distant flocks and their slowly-stalking shepherds--the climbing goat, the soaring eagle: and the ear catches their far-off cries; whence a thousand splendours and pageants, changing aspects, and kindling and dying glories, in earth and sky, are witnessed; the cheerful arising of morning--the still, crimson, violet, purple, azure, dim grey, and then dark fading away of day into night, are watched; where the high and clear grandeur and solitude of night, with its moon and stars, and wandering breezes, and soul-enwrapping freshness, are seen and felt. Such places as these, and the brown or summer-empurpled heath, with its patch of ancient forest; its blasted, shattered, yet living old trees, greeting you with feelings and fancies of long-past centuries; the clear, rushing brook; the bubbling and most crystalline spring; and the turf that springs under your feet with a delicious elasticity, and sends up to your senses a fresh and forest-born odour; or cottages perched in the sides of glades, or on eminences by the sea--the soul-inspiring sea--with its wide views of coming and going ships, its fresh gales, and its everlasting change of light and life, on its waters, and on its shores; its sailors, and its fishermen, with all their doings, families, and dependencies--every one of them thoroughly covered and saturated with the spirit of picturesque and homely beauty; or inland hollows and fields, and old hamlets, lying amid great woods and slopes of wondrous loveliness;--if we could but turn things round, and bring these near us, and unite, at once, city advantages, city society, and them! But it never can be! And there are living in them, from generation to generation, numbers of people who are not to be envied, because they know nothing at all of the enviableness of their situation.

We are continually labouring to improve society--to diffuse education--to confer higher and ampler religious knowledge; but these people know little of all this--experience little of its effect; for their abodes, and natural paradises, lie far from the great tracks of travel and commerce; far from our great roads; in the most out-of-the-world places--the very nooks of the world.

If you come by chance upon them, you are struck with their admirable beauty, their solemn repose, their fresh and basking solitude. You cannot help exclaiming, What happy people must these be! But, when you come to look closer into them, the delusion vanishes. They do not, in fact, see any beauty that you see. Their minds have never been stirred from the sluggish routine of their daily life; their mental eye has never been unsealed, and directed to survey the advantages of their situation. They have been occupied with other things. Like the farmer’s lad mentioned by Wordsworth, their souls have become encrusted in their own torpor.

A sample should I give Of what this stock produces, to enrich The tender age of life, ye would exclaim, “Is this the whistling plough-boy whose shrill notes Impart new gladness to the morning air?” Forgive me, if I venture to suspect That many, sweet to hear of in soft verse, Are of no finer frame;--his joints are stiff; Beneath a cumbrous frock that to the knees Invests the thriving churl, his legs appear, Fellows to those that lustily upheld The wooden-stools, for everlasting use, Whereon our fathers sate. And mark his brow! Under whose shaggy canopy are set Two eyes, not dim, but of a healthy stare; Wide, sluggish, blank, and ignorant and strange; Proclaiming boldly that they never drew A look or motion of intelligence, From infant conning of the Christ-cross-row, Or puzzling through a Primer, line by line, Till perfect mastery crown the pains at last.

The Excursion, B. 8.

This, however, is one of the worst specimens of the most stupified class--farm-servants. Wordsworth himself makes his good and wise Wanderer, a shepherd in his youth, and describes him, when a lad, as impressed with the deepest sense of nature’s majesty. He represents him, in one of the noblest passages of the language, as witnessing the sun rise from some bold headland, and

Rapt into still communion that transcends The imperfect offices of prayer and praise.

And, indeed, the mountaineer must be generally excepted from that torpor of mind I have alluded to. The forms of nature that perpetually surround him, are so bold and sublime, that they almost irresistibly impress, excite, and colour his spirit within him; and those legends and stirring histories which generally abound in them, co-operate with these natural influences. This unawakened intellect dwells more generally amid the humbler and quieter forms of natural beauty; in the “sleepy hollows” of more champaign regions.

It might be supposed that these nooks of the world would, in their seclusion, possess very much one moral character; but nothing can be more untrue. Universally, they may seem old-fashioned, and full of a sweet tranquillity; but their inhabitants differ widely in character in different parts of the country--widely often in a short space, and in a manner that can only be accounted for by their less or greater communion with towns, less or greater degree of education extended to them--and the kind extended. Where they are far from towns, and hold little intercourse with them, and have no manufactory in them, they may be dull, but they are seldom very vicious. If they have had little education, they lead a very mechanical sort of life; are often very boorish, and have very confined notions and contracted wishes; are rude in manner, but not bad in heart. I have been in places--ay, in this newspaper-reading age, where a newspaper never comes; where they have no public-house, no school, no church, and no doctor; and yet the district has been populous. But, in similarly situated places, where yet they had a simple, pious pastor--some primitive patriarch, like the venerable Robert Walker, of whom so admirable an account is given by Wordsworth; where they have been blest with such a man amongst them, and where they have had a school; where they knew little of what was going on in the world, and where yet you were sure to find, in some crypt-like hole in the wall, or in a little fireside window, about half a dozen books--the Bible, “Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs,” “Baxter’s Saint’s Everlasting Rest,” “Romaine’s Life of Faith,” or his “Drop of Honey from the Rock Christ,” “Macgowan’s Life of Christ,” or “Drelincourt on Death,” and such like volumes; or “Robinson Crusoe,” “Philip Quarle,” “The History of Henry the Earl of Moreland,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” or “Pamela;”--have you found a simplicity of heart and manner, a quiet prosperity, a nearer approach to the Arcadian idea of rural life, than anywhere else in this country. There are yet such places to be found in our island, notwithstanding the awful truth of what was said by Coleridge, that “Care, like a foul hag, sits on us all; one class presses with iron foot upon the wounded heads beneath, and all struggle for a worthless supremacy, and all, to rise to it, move shackled by their expenses.”

But these are now few and far between; and they are certainly “nooks of the world,” far from manufacturing towns; for my experience coincides with that of Captain Lloyd, as given in his “Field Sports of the North:”--“Manufactures, of whatever nature they may be, may certainly tend to enrich individuals, but, to my mind, they add little to the happiness of the community at large. In what parts of any country in the world, are such scenes of vice and squalid misery to be witnessed, as in manufacturing districts?” What he adds is very true--that, though it may appear singular, yet it is a fact, that the farther we retreat from great towns and manufactories, a greater degree of comfort is generally to be observed amongst the peasantry. It is, indeed, a strange relief to the spirit of one who has known something of the eager striving of the world, to come upon a spot where the inhabitants are passing through life, as it were, in a dreamlike pilgrimage, half unconscious of its trials and evils--an existence which, if it have not the merit of great and triumphant virtue, has that absence of selfish cunning, pride, sorrow, and degradation, which one would seek for in vain amid more bustling scenes. To find the young, soberly and cheerfully fulfilling their daily duties--nowhere affluence, but everywhere plenty and comfort observable--and the old, in their last tranquil days, seated in their easy chairs, or on the stone bench at their doors, glad to chat with you on all they have known on earth and hoped for in heaven--why, it would be more easy to scathe such a place with the evil spirit of the town, than to raise it in the scale of moral life. The experiment of improvement there, you feel, would be a hazardous one. It were easy and desirable to give more knowledge: but not easy to give it unaccompanied by those blighting contaminations that at present cling to it.

It is in those rural districts into which manufactories have spread--that are partly manufacturing and partly agricultural--that the population assumes its worst shape. The state of morals and manners amongst the working population of our great towns is terrible--far more so than casual observers are aware of. After all that has been done to reform and educate the working class, the torrent of corruption rolls on. The most active friends of education, the most active labourers in it, are ready to despair, and sometimes exclaim,--“What have we done, after all!” There, the spirit of man is aroused to a marvellous activity; but it is an unhealthful activity, and overpowers, in its extravagance, all attempts to direct it aright. “Evil communications corrupt good manners” faster than good communications can counteract them; and where the rural population, in its simplicity, comes in contact with this spirit, it receives the contagion in its most exaggerated form--a desolating moral pestilence; and suffers in person and in mind. There, spread all the vice and baseness of the lowest grade of the town, made hideous by still greater vulgarity and ignorance, and unawed by the higher authorities, unchecked by the better influences which there prevail, in the example and exertions of a higher caste of society.

The Methodists have done much to check the progress of demoralization in these districts. They have given vast numbers education; they have taken them away from the pot-house and the gambling-house; from low haunts and low pursuits. They have placed them in a certain circle, and invested them with a degree of moral and social importance. They have placed them where they have a character to sustain, and higher objects to strive after; where they have ceased to be operated upon by a perpetual series of evil influences, and have been brought under the regular operation of good ones. They have rescued them from brutality of mind and manners, and given them a more refined association on earth, and a warm hope of a still better existence hereafter. If they have not done all that could be desired, with such materials, they have done much, and the country owes them much. The thorough mastery of the evil requires the application of yet greater power--it requires a NATIONAL POWER. The evil lies deeper than the surface; it lies in the distorted nature of our social relations; and, before the population can be effectually reformed, its condition must be physically ameliorated!

There never was a more momentous and sure truth pronounced, than that pronounced by Christ,--“They who take the sword, shall fall by the sword.” If they do not fall by its edge, they will by its hilt. It is under this evil that we are now labouring. As a nation we have fallen, through war, into all our present misery and crime. It is impossible that the great European kingdoms, with their present wealth and cultivated surfaces, in their present artificial state of society, can carry on war without enduring evils far more extensive, tremendous, and lasting, than the mere ravaging of lands, the destruction of towns, or even of human lives. We are, as a nation, an awful proof of this at this moment. By the chances of war, at one time manufacturing and farming almost for the world; prospering, apparently, on the miseries of whole kingdoms wrapt in one wide scene of promiscuous carnage and anarchy, our tradesmen and agriculturists commanded their own terms; and hence, on the one hand, they accumulated large fortunes, while, on the other, the nation, by its enormous military preparations--its fleets and armies marching and sailing everywhere, prepared to meet emergencies at all points and in all climes; by its aids and subsidies abroad; by its wasteful expenditure at home--piled up the most astounding debt ever heard of in the annals of the world. A vast working population was not merely demanded by this unnatural state of excitement, but might be said to be forced into existence, to supply all manner of articles to realms too busy in mutual slaughter to be able to manufacture or plough for themselves. Every thing assumed a new and wonderful value. All classes, the working classes as well as the rest, with the apparent growing prosperity, advanced into habits of higher refinement and luxury. The tables of mechanics were heaped with loads of viands of the best quality, and of the highest price, as earliest in the market; their houses were crowded with furniture, till they themselves could scarcely turn round in them--clocks, sometimes two or three in one house; chests of drawers and tables thronged into the smallest rooms; looking-glasses, tea-trays, and prints, stuck on every possible space on the walls; and, from the ceiling depending hams, bags, baskets, fly-cages of many colours, and a miscellaneous congregation of other articles, that gave their abodes more the aspect of warerooms or museums, than the dwellings of the working class. Dress advanced in the same ratio; horses and gigs were in vast request; and the publicans and keepers of tea-gardens made ample fortunes.

The war ceased. Commerce was thrown open to the competition of the world. The continental nations began to breathe, and to look round on their condition. Their poverty and their spirit of emulation, the sight of their own stripped condition, and of England apparently enriched beyond calculation at their expense, set them rapidly about helping themselves. This could not but be quickly and deeply felt here. To maintain our position, all manner of artificial means were adopted. Every class, feeling the tide of wealth changing its course, strove to keep what it had got. The working class, as individually the weakest, because they had spent their gains as they came, went to the ground. The value of every necessary of life was kept up as much as possible by legal enactments. The rate of wages fell. The manufacturers, impelled by the same necessity of struggling for the maintenance of their rank, were plunged into the most eager competition; the utmost pressure of reduction fell on the labour of the operatives, who, with their acquired habits, were ill able to bear it. They were thrust down to a condition the most pitiful and morally destructive--to excessive labour, to semi-starvation, to pauperism. They could not send their children to school--not so much from the expense of schooling--for that was made light by public contribution, and new plans of facility in teaching large numbers--but because they wanted every penny their children could earn, by any means, to aid in the common support. Hence, mere infants were crowded in pestilent mills when they should have been growing in the fresh air, and were stunted and blighted in body and in mind--a system, the evil of which became so enormous as to call loudly upon the attention of the legislature, and the indignant wonder of the nation. The parents themselves had not a moment’s time to watch over their welfare or their morals; at least sixteen hours’ unremitting daily labour being necessary to the most miserable existence. Evils accumulated on all sides. The working class considered themselves cast off from the sympathies of the upper classes, regarded and valued but as tools and machines; their children grew into ignorant depravity, in spite of all efforts of law or philanthropy to prevent them. These causes still operate wherever manufacturing extends: and till the condition of this great class, whether in towns or villages, can be amended; till time for domestic relaxation can be given to the man, and a Christian, rather than a literary, education to the boy--an inculcation of the beauty and necessity of the great Christian principles; the necessity of reverencing the laws of God; doing, in all their intercourse with their fellow men, as they would be done by; the necessity of purity of life and justice of action, rather than the cant of religious feeling, and the blind mystery of sectarian doctrine,--the law and the philanthropy must be in vain.

To the simple, and yet uncontaminated parts of the country, there is yet a different kind of education that I should rejoice to see extended. It should be, to open the eyes of the rural population to the advantages of their situation;--to awaken a taste for the enjoyment of nature;--to give them a touch of the poetical;--to teach them to see the pleasantness of their quiet lives,--of their cottages and gardens,--of the freshness of the air and country around them, especially as contrasted with the poor and squalid alleys where those of their own rank, living in towns, necessarily take up their abode,--of the advantages in point of health and purity afforded to their children by their position,--of the majestic beauty of the day, with its morning animation, its evening sunsets, and twilights almost as beautiful; its nightly blue altitude, with its moon and stars:--all this might be readily done by the conversation of intelligent people, and by the diffusion of cheap publications amongst them; and done, too, without diminishing the relish for the daily business of their lives. Airy and dreamy notions--notions of false refinement, and aspirations of soaring beyond their own sphere--are not inspired by sound and good intelligence, but by defective and bad education.

The sort of education I mean has long been realized in Scotland, and with the happiest results. There, large towns and manufactories have produced their legitimate effect, as with us; but, in the rural districts, every child, by national provision, has a sound, plain education given him. He is brought up in habits of economy, and sentiments of rational religion, and the most solemn and thorough morality. The consequence is, that almost all grow up with a sense of self-respect; a sense of the dignity of human nature; a determined resolve of depending on their own exertions: and though no people are so national, because they are made sensible of the beauty of their country and the honourable deeds of their forefathers, yet, if they cannot find means of living at home without degradation, and, indeed, without bettering their condition, they soberly march off, and find some place where they can, though it be at the very ends of the earth.

Nothing is better known than the intelligence and order that distinguish a great portion of the rural population of Scotland. No people are more diligent and persevering in their proper avocations; and yet none are more alive to the delights of literature. Amid wild mountain tracks and vast heaths, where you scarcely see a house as you pass along for miles, and where you could not have passed two generations ago without danger of robbery or the dirk, they have book societies, and send new books to and fro to one another, with an alacrity and punctuality that are most delightful. When I have been pedestrianizing in that country, I have frequently accosted men at their work, or in their working dress--perhaps with their axe or their spade in their hands, and three or four children at their heels--and found them well acquainted with the latest good publications, and entertaining the soundest notions of them, without the aid of critics. Such men in England would probably not have been able to read at all. They would have known nothing but the routine of their business, the state of the crop, and the gossip of the neighbourhood: but there, sturdy and laborious men, tanned with the sun, or smeared with the marl in which they had been delving, have not only been able to give all the knowledge of the district; its histories and traditions; the proprietorships, and other particulars of the neighbourhood; but their eyes have brightened at the mention of their great patriots, reformers, and philosophers, and their tongues have grown perfectly eloquent in discussing the works of their poets and other writers. The names of Wallace, Bruce, Knox, Fletcher of Saltoun, the Covenanters, Scott, Burns, Hogg, Campbell, Wilson, and others, have been spells that have made them march away miles with me, when they could not get me into their own houses, and find it difficult to turn back.

Now, why should not this be so in England? Why should not similar means produce similar effects? They must and would; and by imbuing the rural population with a spirit as sound and rational, we should not only raise it in the social scale to a degree of worth and happiness at present not easily imaginable, but render the most important service to the country, by attaching “a bold peasantry, the country’s pride,” to their native soil, by the most powerful of ties, and rendering them both able and more determined to live in honourable dependence on self-exertion. BOOK SOCIETIES, under local management, should do for the COUNTRY what MECHANICS’ LIBRARIES are doing for the TOWNS--building up those habits, and perfecting those healthful tastes, for which popular education is but the bare foundation.

Wordsworth gives an account of the early years of his Wanderer, which, under such a system, might be that of thousands.

Early had he learned To reverence the volume that displays The mystery, the life which cannot die:-- What wonder if his being thus became Sublime and comprehensive! Low desires, Low thoughts, there had no place; yet was his heart Lowly; for he was meek in gratitude, Oft as he called those ecstasies to mind, And whence they flowed; and from them he acquired Wisdom, which works through patience:--hence he learned In oft-recurring hours of sober thought To look on nature with a humble heart, Self-questioned, where it did not understand, And with a superstitious eye of love. So passed the time; yet to the nearest town He duly went, with what small overplus His earnings might supply, and brought away The book that most had tempted his desires, While at the stall he read. Among the hills He gazed upon that mighty orb of song, The divine Milton. Lore of different kind, The annual savings of a toilsome life, His schoolmaster supplied; books that explain The purer elements of truth, involved, In lines and numbers, and, by charm severe, (Especially perceived where nature droops, And feeling is suppressed) preserve the mind Busy in solitude and poverty.

Yet still uppermost, Nature was at his heart, as if he felt, Though yet he knew not how, a wasting power In all things that from her sweet influence Might tend to wean him. Therefore, with her hues, Her forms, and with the spirit of her forms, He clothed the nakedness of austere truth, While yet he lingered in the rudiments Of science, and among her simplest laws, His triangles--they were the stars of heaven, The silent stars! Oft did he take delight To measure th’ altitude of some tall crag That is the eagle’s birthplace, or some peak Familiar with forgotten years.---- In dreams, in study, and in ardent thought, Thus was he reared; much wanting to assist The growth of intellect, yet gaining more, And every moral feeling of his soul Strengthened and braced, by breathing in content The keen, the wholesome air of poverty, And drinking from the well of homely life.

The Excursion, B. 1.

Such a process I should rejoice to see producing such characters in England. Yes! Milton, Thomson, Cowper, the pious and tender Montgomery, and Bloomfield, one of their own kind, would be noble and enriching studies for the simplest cottage, and cottage-garden, and field-walk. Some of our condensed historians, our best essayists and divines, travellers, naturalists in a popular shape, and writers of fiction, as Scott, and Edgeworth, and De Foe, might be with vast advantage diffused amongst them. Let us hope it will one day be so. And already I know some who have reaped those blessings of an awakened heart and intellect, too long denied to the hard path of poverty, and which render them not the less sedate, industrious, and provident, but, on the contrary, more so. They have made them, in the humblest of stations, the happiest of men; quickened their sensibilities towards their wives and children; converted the fields, the places of their daily toil, into places of earnest meditative delight--schools of perpetual observation of God’s creative energy and wisdom.

It was but the other day that the farming-man of a neighbouring lady having been pointed out to me as at once remarkably fond of reading and attached to his profession, I entered into conversation with him; and it is long since I experienced such a cordial pleasure as in the contemplation of the character that opened upon me. He was a strong man; not to be distinguished by his dress and appearance from those of his class, but having a very intelligent countenance; and the vigorous, healthful feelings, and right views, that seemed to fill not only his mind but his whole frame, spoke volumes for that vast enjoyment and elevation of character which a rightly directed taste for reading would diffuse amongst our peasantry. His sound appreciation of those authors he had read--some of our best poets, historians, essayists, and travellers--was truly cheering, when contrasted with the miserable and frippery taste which distinguishes a large class of readers; where a-thousand-times-repeated novels of fashionable life, neither original in conception nor of any worth in their object--the languid offspring of a tinsel and exotic existence--are read because they can be read without the labour of thinking. While such works are poured in legions upon the public, like a host of dead leaves from the forest, driven along in mimic life by a mighty wind--and while such things are suffered to swell the Puffiads of publishers, and shoulder away, or discourage, the substantial labours of high intellect--it is truly reviving to see the awakening of mind in the common people. It is, I am persuaded, from the people that a regenerating power must come--a new infusion of better blood into our literary system. The inanities of fashion must weary the spirit of a great nation, and be thrown off; strong, native genius, from the measureless, unploughed regions of the popular mind--robust, gigantic, uneffeminated by luxury, glitter, and sloth--will rise up, and put all soulless artificialities to shame; and already mighty are the symptoms of such a change manifested, in an array of names that might be adduced. But I must not be led farther away by this seducing topic.

I found this countryman was a member of our Artisans’ Library, and every Saturday evening he walked over to the town to exchange his books. I asked him whether reading did not make him less satisfied with his daily work; his answer deserves universal attention:--“Before he read, his work was weary to him; for, in the solitary fields, an empty head measured the time out tediously, to double its length; but, now, no place was so sweet as the solitary fields: he had always something pleasant floating across his mind; and the labour was delightful, and the day only too short.” Seeing his ardent attachment to the country, I sent him the last edition of “The Book of the Seasons;” and I must here give a verbatim et literatim extract from the note in which he acknowledged its receipt, because it not only contains an experimental proof of the falsity of a common alarm on the subject of popular education, but shews at what a little cost much happiness may be conveyed to a poor man:--“Believe me, dear sir, this kind act has made an impression on my heart that time will not easily erase. There are none of your works, in my opinion, more valuable than this. The study of nature is not only the most delightful, but the most elevating. This will be true in every station of life. But how much more ought the poor man to prize this study! which if prized and pursued as it ought, will enable him to bear, with patient resignation and cheerfulness, the lot by providence assigned him. O sir! I pity the working man who possesses not a taste for reading. ’Tis true, it may sometimes lead him to neglect the other more important duties of his station; but his better and more enlightened judgment will soon correct itself in this particular, and will enable him, while he steadily and diligently pursues his private studies, and participates in intellectual enjoyment, to prize, as he ought, his character as a man in every relative duty of life.”

What a nation would this be, filled with a peasantry holding such views, and possessing such a consequent character as this!

The sources of enjoyment in nature have been too long closed to the poor. The rich can wander from side to side of the island, and explore its coasts, its fields, and forests--but the poor man is fettered to the spot. The rich can enter the galleries and exhibitions of cities, and contemplate all the great works of art; the poor ought to be taught to know that, if they cannot see the works of art--statues and paintings--they can see those of God;--if they cannot gaze on the finest forms of beauty from the chisel of the sculptor, they may be taught to distinguish the beauty of all living forms;--if they cannot behold splendid paintings of landscapes, of mountains, of sea-coasts, of sunrises and sunsets; they can see, one or other of them, all the originals of these--originals to whose magnificence and glory the copies never can approach. To the poor, but properly educated man, every walk will become a luxury, a poem, a painting--a source of the sweetest feelings and the most elevating reflections.

But there is one class in these back settlements of England to whom a liberal education is most requisite, and to whom it would be most difficult to give it--the class of smaller resident proprietors. The effect of the possession of property in such places is singular and most lamentable. It produces the most impenetrable hardness of nature--the most selfish and sordid dispositions. Everywhere, the tendency of accumulation is to generate selfishness: but, in towns, there are many counteracting influences; the emulative desire of vying, in mode of life, with equals and superiors--the greater spread of information--the various objects of pleasure and association, which keep open the avenues of expenditure, not only in the purse, but in the heart. Here there are none. Amusements and dissipations are self-gratulatingly denounced as gross follies and sins; objects of display, as pride. The consequence is, that habits of the strangest parsimony prevail--the rudest furniture, the rudest style of living. Men who, in a town or its neighbourhood, would appear as gentlemen, and, perhaps, keep a carriage, there wear often clouted shoes, threadbare and patched clothes, and a hat not worth a farthing; and all in a fashion of the most awkward rusticity. All wisdom is supposed to lie in penuriousness. They have abundance of maxims for ever in their mouths, full of that philosophy; as “Penny-wise and pound-foolish”--“A penny saved is a penny got”--“A pin a-day’s a groat a-year.” All ideas seem absorbed in the one grand idea of accumulating coin, that will never be of more value to them than so many oyster-shells. Such a thing as a noble or generous sentiment would be a surprise to their own souls. Of such men are made the hardest overseers of the poor; whose screwing, iron-handed administration of relief is the boast of the parish, and has led to the most monstrous abuses. To them all objects are alike; they have no discrimination; the old and young, the idle and industrious, the sturdy vagabond, and the helpless and dying!--they deem it a virtue to deny them all, till a higher power forces the reluctant doit from their gripe. They are surly, yet proud churls, living wrapped in a sense of their own importance; for they see nobody above them, except there be a squire or a lord in the parish; and they see little of him, and then only to make their passing obsequious bow; for they are at once

Tyrants to the weak, and cowards to the strong.

Any education, any change, would be a blessing to these men, that would bring them into collision with those of their own supposed standing, but with better education and more liberal views and habits. The excess to which these causes operate in some of these out-of-the-world places, is scarcely to be credited: they produce the strangest scenes and the strangest characters. Let us take a specimen or two from one parish, that would be easily paralleled in many others.

In one part of this secluded neighbourhood, you approach extensive woods, and behold amongst them a house of corresponding air and dimensions--a mansion befitting a large landed proprietor. If you choose to explore the outbuildings belonging to it, you will find there a regularly educated and authorized physician, living in a dovecot, and writing prescriptions for any that choose to employ him, for a crown, or even half-a-crown, which he spends in drink. Paternal example and inculcations made him what he is; unfitted him for success in his profession, and left him dependent on his elder brother, who affords him the asylum of his dovecot, yet so grudgingly that he has even attempted to dislodge him by pulling off the roof; and the poor doctor owes his retreat, not to his brother’s good-will, but to his own possession of a brace of formidable bull-dogs, that menace the destruction of any assailant. The dogs lie in his chamber when you enter, with their noses on the ground, and their dark glittering eyes fixed steadily upon you, and are ready, at a signal, to spring on you, and tear you to pieces. The doctor’s free potations have now deprived him of the power of locomotion; he cannot quit his pigeon-house; but one of his bull-dogs he has trained to act as his emissary, and with a note suspended to his neck by a tape, he goes to certain houses in the neighbouring village, and so communicates his wishes to certain cronies of his, who are in the habit of attending to them. The dog would tear any one to pieces that attempted to stop him while on his master’s errands, being a very strong and fierce creature; but, if he is not molested, he goes very civilly along to his place of destination, and, when the note is taken off his neck by the proper hands, returns with great punctuality and decorum.

It must be said of this curiosity of a physician, that he is the descendant of a very curious family; whose history for the last three generations would be a regular series of eccentricities; and the first of whom, here resident, was a celebrated piratical captain, who is said to have come hither disguised as a peasant, seeking as secluded a country as he could find, and driving before him an ass loaded with gold. It is certain that he purchased very extensive estates, and that one of his descendants was lately in Parliament, who, partaking of the family qualities, excited more surprise and more laughter in the house, than, perhaps, any man since the days of Sir Thomas Lethbridge.

Not far thence, stands another residence. At some distance it appears a goodly manor-house. It is large; with white walls and many antique gables; a stately avenue of elms in front; tall pines about it, the landmark of the whole country round: a spacious garden, with a summer-house on the wall, seeming to have been built when there was some taste there for those rural enjoyments which such a place is calculated to afford to the amiable, country-loving, and refined. As you come near, there appear signs of neglect and decay. Old timber, litter, and large stones lie about; there are broken windows, unpainted and rotting wood-work: every thing looks forlorn, as if it were the residence of poverty on the verge of utter destitution.

The fact is, the owner has landed property worth from thirty to forty thousand pounds. But see the man himself! There he goes, limping across his yard, having permanently injured one of his legs in some of his farming operations. There he goes--a tall hard-featured, weather-beaten man, dressed in the garb of the most rustic husbandman: strong clouted ankle-boots, blue or black ribbed worsted stockings; corduroy small-clothes; a yellow striped waistcoat, and a coat of coarse grey cloth, cut short, in a rude fashion, and illustrated with metal buttons; a hat that seems to have been originally made of coarse wool or dog’s hair--to have cost some four-and-sixpence some dozen years ago--brown, threadbare, and cocked up behind, by propping on his coat collar.

He has brought up a family of three sons, and never spent on their education three pounds. The consequence has been just what might be expected. They came to know, as they grew up, “for quickly comes such knowledge,” their expectations; and they turned out rude, savage, and drunken. One married a servant girl, and she dying, the son brought himself and several children to the old man’s to live. Warned by this--for, with all his clownish parsimony, he has pride--the pride of property--he has put the others on farms, and they have married farmer’s daughters: but, always living in expectation of the old man’s death, they attend to no business; always looking forward to the possession of his wealth, they have already condemned a good part of it. If any man could be punished that man is, for sparing the expense of their education, and for the example set before them; for, what he has made the sole object of all his thoughts and labours, he sees them squandering, and knows that they will squander it all. But he himself is not guilty of all this; he is but the victim of his own education, and the maxims and manners of his ancestors. If he could have seen the usefulness of education to his sons, he could not have found in his heart to spend the necessary money; but he could not see it: anything further than to be able to sign a receipt, and reckon a sum of money in their heads, he called trash and nonsense.

When his sons were growing towards men, I have chanced to pass his farm-yard, and seen him and two of them filling a manure-cart; labouring, puffing and blowing, and perspiring, as if their lives depended on their labour; and the old man was urging them on with continual curses--“Curse thy body, Dick! Curse thy body, Ben!--Ben! Dick! Ben! Dick! work, lads, work!” And these hopeful sons were repaying their father’s curses with the same horrible earnestness.

A gentleman once told me that, having to call on this man about some money transaction, he was detained till twelve o’clock, and desired to stay dinner, that being his hour. Out of curiosity he consented. Every thing about the house was in the rudest and most desolate state. I do not know whether they had a cloth spread on the sturdy oak table, which supported a set of pewter plates, a roasted fowl, and a pudding in a huge brown earthen dish. The wife, stripped to her stays and quilted petticoat, was too busy making cheese and scolding the servants to come to dinner. The pater familias and his guest sat down together. As he cut up the fowl, the two great lads, Dick and Ben, then about twelve and fourteen years of age, came with their wild eyes staring sharply out of their bushy heads of wild hair, and hung over their father’s chair, one on each side, with an eager expression of voracity; for they were not asked to sit down. The father, as if he expected them to pounce on the dinner and carry it off, kept a sharp look-out on them; and though, out of deference to his guest, he restrained his curses, he kept vociferating, as he turned first to one and then to the other, and then gave a cut at the fowl--“Ben! Dick! get away, lads! get away! get away! get away!” But the moment a leg and a wing were cut off, the lads made a sudden spring, and each seizing a joint, bounded out of the apartment, leaving the old man in wonder at the unmanageableness of his sons. From such an education who can doubt the result?--a brood of savages, the nuisance of the neighbourhood, and torment of the old man’s days. To such a height has the old man’s agony arisen at times, as he saw the wasteful conduct of his sons, that it is a pretty well established fact, that on one occasion he threw himself down in a ditch in one of his own fields, and--did not pray to die, for he never knew the beginning, middle, or end of a prayer, but he tried to die; but, after a long and weary endeavour, finding it in vain, he got up and hobbled off home again, saying--“Well, I see it is as hard to die as to live. I can’t die! I can’t die! I must even bear it, till these lads kill me by inches--and that must be a plaguy while first; for I measure two yards of bad stuff, and I think I’m as hard as a nur,[5] and as tough as whit-leather.”

[5] Nur--a hard knot of wood used by boys at bandy instead of a ball.

Ben, now upwards of forty years of age, still lives with the old man, working as a labourer on his farm, and is maintained with his children. Money he never sees: but his father allows him to sell bundles of straw; and he may be seen, in an evening, with two bundles of straw under each arm, proceeding to the alehouse in the next village, where he barters them for the evening cup. Nay, the other night, a person encountered, as he supposed, a thief, issuing from the old man’s yard, with a huge beam on his shoulder. It was Ben, going to turn it into ale; who desired his neighbour to say nothing. Nothing can more strikingly close this account than the old man’s usual description of his three sons. “My son Dick has Cain’s mark on his forehead; Ben, if ale was a guinea a-pint, and he had but one guinea in the world, would buy a pint of ale; and, as for Simon--he is a gentleman! He takes a certificate to shoot. He runs with those long legs of his over three parishes, and comes slinging home with a crow, or a pinet[6]--ay, ay, Simon is a gentleman!”

[6] Magpie.

In this same nook of the world might be seen, some years ago, two brothers, stout farmers--farmers of their own property--heaping curses and recriminations on each other about their possessions, in so loud a voice that they have been heard half a mile off. This enmity outlasted the elder, and burned in the breast of the younger for years after. For it was some years after, that he attended the funeral of a niece whom he left through life to the charity of another. When the funeral was over, they adjourned with the parson to the public-house; and here the person who had cared for the neglected niece, urged the uncle now to pay some part of the funeral charges. “Yes,” said he, “thou hast been at a deal of cost,” (these country people still retain the use of thou and thee), “and here is sixpence for the parson’s glass of brandy and water.” The astonished man pushed back the sixpence with contempt; but, at this moment, in came a lad to tell them that the grave being made too near that of the deceased brother, the earth had suddenly fallen in, and broken in the lid of the old man’s coffin. At this, the living brother started up in evident delight, and exclaimed--“Why, has it? Why, has it? Thou tells me summut, lad! thou tells me summut!” And he gave him the sixpence he had generously destined for the parson’s glass.

A scene, described to me by a professional land-agent, would seem to belong to the generation of Parson Adams and Squire Western, but it actually occurred but the other day, and only seven miles from one of our largest county towns. This land-agent was sent for on business by an old gentleman of large landed estate in that county. As the gentleman’s house was in a secluded situation, off the highways, and it was a fine, cool, autumnal day, he took a footpath which led the whole way across delightful fields, and after enjoying his walk through meadows and woods, arrived at the Hall with a most vigorous appetite, just as the squire and his housekeeper were sitting down to dinner. Of course, nothing less could take place than an invitation for him to join them; which he was not in the disposition by any means to decline. I need scarcely say that the fact of the squire and his housekeeper sitting at the same table indicates the ancient gentleman as one of the real old school. He was, in fact, a tall, gaunt, meagre old fellow, whose sole pleasure was putting out his rents on good security, and whose sole family consisted of his housekeeper and one old amphibious animal, who, if he had as many heads as occupations, would have carried at least four more than Janus--occupying his talents, as he did, as gardener, groom, serving-man, and three or four other personages. The whole house and every thing about it bore amplest marks of neglect and antiquity. Not a gate, or a door, or a window, or a carpet, or any other piece of furniture, but was just as his father left it fifty years before, except for the work which time, and such tying and patching as were absolutely needful to keep certain things together, had done. Our agent looked with some curiosity at the two covers on the table before them, which being removed revealed a single partridge and three potatoes. The housekeeper having cut the partridge into quarters, gave each of the gentlemen one, and took the third herself. Our worthy land-agent supposing this to be but a slight first course, was astounded to hear the squire say, he hoped Mr. Mapleton would make a dinner--for he saw what there was! On this significant hint Mr. Mapleton made haste to dispatch his quarter of bird, and cast eager looks on the remaining quarter in the dish. The housekeeper, indeed, was just proceeding to extend the knife and fork towards it, saying, perhaps Mr. Mapleton would take the other quarter, when the old gentleman said very smartly; “Don’t urge Mr. Mapleton unpleasantly--don’t overdo him--I dare say he knows when he has had enough, without so much teasing. I have made an excellent dinner indeed!”

Hereupon the housekeeper’s arms and weapons were drawn back abruptly; the old gentleman rang the bell, and the shuffling old serving-man entered and cleared all away. As the cloth and the housekeeper disappeared, the squire also opened a tall cupboard on one side of the fireplace, and Mr. Mapleton began to please his fancy with a forthcoming apparition of wine. Having sate, however, some time, and hearing from behind the tall door, which was drawn partly after the old squire so as to conceal him, certain sounds as of decanting liquor, and as of a knife coming in contact with a plate, sounds particularly familiar and exciting to hungry ears, he contrived to lean back so far in his chair as to catch a view of the tall figure of the squire standing with a large plum-cake upon the shelf before him, into which he had made a capacious incision; and a glass of wine, moreover, at a little distance. This discovery naturally making our land-agent extremely restless, he began to indicate his presence by sundry hems, shuffles, coughs, and drummings on his chair, which immediately produced this consequence. The old squire’s head protruded from behind the cupboard door with an inquiring look; and finding the eyes of Mr. Mapleton as inquiringly fixed on him, he said--“Mr. Mapleton, will you take a glass of wine?” “Certainly, sir, with the greatest pleasure.” The wine was carefully poured out, making various cluckings or sobbings in the throat of the bottle, as very loath to leave it, and was set on the table before Mr. Mapleton. No invitation, however, to a participation of the cake came; and after sitting perhaps a quarter of an hour longer, listening to the same inviting sounds of scraping plate and decantation, he was compelled again to shuffle, hem, and drum. This had a similar happy effect to the former attempt; out popped the squire’s head, with a--“Would you take another glass, Mr. Mapleton?” “Certainly, sir, with the greatest pleasure, I feel thirsty with my walk.” The bottle was produced and the glass filled, but to put an end to any further intimations of thirst, the door was instantly closed, the key dropped into the squire’s capacious pocket, and the old gentleman forthwith entered upon business, which, in fact, concerned thousands of pounds.

Before closing this gallery of country oddities, I must say that, in some instances, much goodness of heart is mixed up with this wild growth of queerness. There are very many who will know of whom I am speaking, when I say that there was in the last generation a gentleman in one of the midland counties, who was affected with this singular species of monomania: at every execution at the county-town he purchased the rope or ropes of Jack Ketch. These ropes, duly labelled with the name of the culprit, the date of his execution, and the crime for which he suffered, were hung round a particular room. On one occasion, arriving at the town, and being told that the criminal was reprieved, he exclaimed--“Gracious Heavens, then I have lost my rope!” The son of this gentleman still displays a good deal of hereditary eccentricity, but has destroyed these ropes. Nevertheless, I am told, that the carving-knife used in his kitchen is the very sword with which Lord Byron killed Chaworth. He still lives in the same house, and, old bachelor as he is, maintains the old English style and hospitality in a degree not often to be witnessed now. His personal appearance is unique. He is tall, with a ruddy countenance, with white whiskers, white waistcoat, white breeches, and white lining to his coat. He always appears most scrupulously and delicately clean. His estate is large; and whoever goes to his house on business, finds bread and cheese and ale set before him. His housekeeper is said to receive no regular wages, but every now and then a fifty-pound note is put into her hands, so that she has grown tolerably rich. It is a standing order in the house, that every poor person, come whence he may, who has lost a cow, and is seeking to get another, shall receive a sovereign. I have heard a gentleman say, who knows him well, that his benevolence, particularly to young tradesmen, is most extraordinary: and that being himself once supposed to be on his death-bed, this worthy man came, sate down by him, cried like a child, and told him if he had not provided for his children just as he wished, that he had only to tell him what he would have done, and then and there it should be done. No relationship whatever existed; and this noble offer was not accepted. The same gentleman told me that it is the regular habit of this worthy example of Old English simplicity and goodness of heart, every evening, before he retires to rest, to sit quietly for a certain time in his easy chair, endeavouring to discover whether he has done any thing wrong during the day, or has possibly hurt any one’s feelings; and if he fancies he has, he hastens the next morning to set all right. It is delightful to have to record proofs of the yet existing spirit of ancient hospitality and simple worth of character.[7]

[7] Since the first edition was published, this worthy but eccentric gentleman is dead.

In conclusion,--let me observe that some of the foregoing cases are shocking ones; but they are only too true; and such are but the events of every day in those sleepy hollows, where public opinion has no weight, and where ignorance and avarice are handed down from age to age. I have seen hundreds of such things in such places. And what mode of regeneration shall reach this class of people, who have the rust of whole ages in their souls? You cannot offer to them education, as you do to the poor. You cannot reason with them, as with the poor. They have too much pride. It can only be by educating all around them, that you can reach them. When they feel the effect of the education of the poor, their pride will compel them to educate their children. This will be one of the many good results that will flow from the education of the poor in the back settlements of England. Let us, then, direct the stream of knowledge into the remotest of these obscure places. If the penny periodicals were, by some means, made to circulate there, as they circulate in towns--the Penny Magazine, and Saturday Magazine, with their host of wood-cuts and useful facts; and Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, with its more refined and poetical spirit,--they would work a great change. Prints and cuts from good originals would awaken a better taste; higher ideas of the beauty of created forms: for I say with Rogers,

Be mine to bless the more mechanic skill That stamps, renews, and multiplies at will; And cheaply circulates through distant climes, The fairest relics of the purest times.

We blame our populace for not possessing the same refined taste as the French and Italians; for being brutal and destructive; that parks, public walks, and public buildings, cannot be thrown open to them without receiving injury. We ought not to blame them for this; for is not this the English spirit that has been praised in Parliament? for the encouragement of which, bull-baitings, dog-fightings, cock-fightings, and boxings have been pleaded for by senators, as its proper aliment? and the Romans, with their gladiatorial shows, quoted as good precedents? Forgetting that while the Romans were a growing and conquering people, they were a simple and domestic people. When they had their amphitheatres and their bloody shows of battling-men and beasts, they fell under imperial despotism, and thence into national destruction. If we will have a better spirit, we must take better means to produce it. We can never make our rural population too well informed. Ireland, with all manner of horrible outrages, England with its rick-burnings, and Scotland with its orderly peasantry, all point towards the evils of ignorance and oppression, and the national advantage and individual happiness that are to be reaped from the spread of sound knowledge through our rural districts.

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Chapter III

NOOKS OF THE WORLD:

LIFE IN THE DALES OF LANCASHIRE AND YORKSHIRE.

The nooks of the world which we visited in our last chapter lay in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire; we will now change the scene a little northward. Such secluded and original spots we might indeed readily undertake to discover in almost every county of England; but I can only give a few specimens from the great whole, and leave every one to look about him for the rest. Lancashire is famous for its immense manufactures, and consequent immense population. In ranging over its wild, bleak hills, we are presently made sensible of the vast difference between the character and habits of the working class, and the character and habits of the pastoral and agricultural districts. We have no longer those picturesque villages and cottages, half buried in their garden and orchard trees; no longer those home-crofts, with their old, tall hedges; no longer rows of beehives beneath their little thatched southern sheds; those rich fields and farm-houses, surrounded with wealth of corn-ricks, and herds and flocks. You have no longer that quiet and Arcadian-looking population; hedgers and ditchers, ploughmen and substantial farmers, who seem to keep through life the “peaceful tenor of their way,” in old English fulness and content. There may be indeed, and there are, such people scattered here and there; but they and their abodes are not of the class which gives the predominant character to the scenery. On the contrary, everywhere extend wild naked hills, in many places totally unreclaimed; in others, enclosed, but exhibiting all the signs of a neglected and spiritless husbandry; with stunted fences or stone walls; and fields sodden with wet from want of drainage, and consequently overgrown with rushes. Over these naked and desolate hills are scattered to their very tops, in all directions, the habitations of a swarming population of weavers; the people and their houses equally unparticipant of those features which delight the poet and the painter. The houses are erections of stone or brick, covered with glaring red tiles, as free from any attempt at beauty or ornament as possible. Without, where they have gardens, those gardens are as miserable and neglected as the fields; within, they are squalid and comfortless.

In some of these swarming villages, ay, and in the cottages of the large manufacturing towns too, you can scarcely see a window with whole panes of glass. In one house in the outskirts of Blackburn, and that, too, an alehouse, we counted in a window of sixty panes, eight-and-forty broken ones; and this window was of a pretty uniform character with its fellows, both in that house, and the neighbouring ones. It is not possible to conceive a more violent and melancholy contrast than that which the filth, the poverty, and forlornness of these weavers’ and spinners’ dwellings form to the neatness, comfort, and loveliness of the cottages of the peasantry in many other parts of the kingdom. Any man who had once been through this district, might again recognise the locality if he were taken thither blindfold, by the very smell of oatcake which floats about the villages, and the sound of the shuttles, with their eternal “latitat! latitat!” I ranged wide over the bleak hills in the neighbourhood of Padiham, Belthorne, Guide, and such places, and the numbers and aspect of the population filled me with astonishment. Through the long miserable streets of those villages, children and dogs were thick as motes in the sun. The boys and men with their hair shorn off, as with a pair of wool-shears, close to their heads, till it stood up staring and bristly, and yet left hanging long over their eyes, till it gave them a most villanous and hangman look. What makes those rough heads more conspicuous, is their being so frequently red; the testimony of nature to the ancient prevalence of the Dane on these hills. The men are besides long and bony; the women often of stalwart and masculine figure, and of a hardness of feature which gives them no claims to be ranked amongst the most dangerous of the “Lancashire witches.” Everywhere the rudeness of the rising generation is wonderful. Everywhere the stare of mingled ignorance and insolence meets you; everywhere a troop of lads is at your heels, with the clatter of their wooden clogs, crying--“Fellee, gies a hawpenny!”

In one village, and that too the celebrated Roman station of Ribchester, our chaise was pursued by swarms of these wooden-shod lads like swarms of flies, that were only beaten off for a moment to close in upon you again, and their sisters shewed equally the extravagance of rudeness in which they were suffered to grow up, by running out of the houses as we passed, and poking mops and brushes at the horses’ heads. No one attempted to restrain or rebuke them; and yet, what was odd enough, not one of the adult population offered you the least insult, but if you asked the way, gave you the most ready directions, and if you went into their houses, treated you with perfect civility, and shewed an affection for these wild brats that was honourable to their hearts, and wanted only directing by a better intelligence. The uncouthness of these poor people is not that of evil disposition, but of pressing poverty and continued neglect. As is generally the case, in the poorest houses were the largest families. Ten and eleven children in one small dirty hovel was no uncommon sight, actually covering the very floor till there seemed scarce room to sit down; and amid this crowd, the mother was generally busy washing, or baking oatcakes; and the father making the place resound with the “latitat, latitat” of his shuttle. One did not wonder, seeing this, that the poor creatures are glad to turn out the whole troop of children to play on the hills, the elder girls lugging the babies along with them.

The wildness into which some of these children in the more solitary parts of the country grow, is, I imagine, not to be surpassed in any of the back settlements of America. On the 5th of July, 1836, the day of that remarkable thunder-storm, which visited a great part of the kingdom with such fury, being driven into a cottage at the foot of Pendle by the coming on of this storm, and while standing at the door watching its progress, I observed the head of some human creature carefully protruded from the doorway of an adjoining shed, and as suddenly withdrawn on being observed. To ascertain what sort of person it belonged to, I went into the shed, but at first found it too dark to allow me to discover any thing. Presently, however, as objects became visible, I saw a little creature, apparently a girl of ten years old, reared very erectly against the opposite wall. On accosting her in a kind tone, and telling her to come forward, and not to be afraid, she advanced from the wall, and behold! there stood another little creature about the head shorter, whom she had been concealing. I asked the elder child whether this younger one was a girl. She answered--“Ne-a.” “Was it a boy?” “Ne-a.” “What! neither boy nor girl! was she herself a girl?” “Ne-a.” “What was it a boy that I was speaking to?” “Ne-a.” “What in the name of wonder were they then?” “We are childer.” “Childer! and was the woman in the house their mother?” “Ne-a.” “Who was she then?” “Ar Mam.” “O! your mam! and do you keep cows in this shed?” “Ne-a.” “What then?” “Bee-as.” In short, common English was quite unintelligible to these little creatures, and their appearance was as wild as their speech. They were two fine young creatures, nevertheless, especially the elder, whose form and face were full of that symmetry and free grace that are sometimes the growth of unrestrained nature, and would have delighted the sculptor or the painter. Their only clothing was a sort of little bodice with skirts, made of a reddish stuff, and rendered more picturesque by sundry patches of scarlet cloth, no doubt from their mother’s old cloak. Their heads, bosoms, and legs to the knees, were bare to all the influences of earth and heaven; and on giving them each a penny, they bounded away with the fleetness and elasticity of young roes. No doubt, the hills and the heaths, the wild flowers of summer and the swift waters of the glens, were the only live-long day companions of these children, who came home only to their oatmeal dinner, and a bed as simple as their garments. Imagine the violent change of life, by the sudden capture and confinement of these little English savages, in the night-and-day noise, labour, and foul atmosphere of the cotton purgatories!

In the immediate neighbourhood of towns, many of the swelling ranges of hills present a much more cultivated aspect, and delight the eye with their smooth, green, and flowing outlines; and the valleys almost everywhere, are woody, watered with clear rapid streams, and, in short, are beautiful. But along these rise up the tall chimneys of vast and innumerable factories, and even while looking on the palaces of the master manufacturers, with their woods and gardens, and shrubbery lawns around them, one cannot help thinking of all the horrors detailed before the Committees of the House of Commons respecting the Factory System; of the parentless and friendless little wretches, sent by wagon-loads from distant workhouses to these prisons of labour and despair; of the young frames crushed to the dust by incessant labour; of the beds into which one set of children got, as another set got out, so that they were said never to be cold the whole year round, till contagious fevers burst out and swept away by hundreds these little victims of Mammon’s ever-urging, never-ceasing wheel. Beautiful as are many of those wild glens and recesses where, before the introduction of steam, the dashing rivulet invited the cotton-spinners to erect their mills; and curious as the remains of those simple original factories are, with their one great water-wheel, which turned their spindles while there was water, but during the drought of summer quite as often stood still; yet one is haunted even there, amongst the shadows of fine old trees that throw their arms athwart streams dashing down their beds of solid rock, by the memory of little tender children who never knew pity or kindness, but laboured on and on, through noon and through midnight, till they slept and yet mechanically worked, and were often awaked only by the horrid machinery rending off their little limbs. In places like these, where now the old factories, and the large houses of the proprietors stand deserted, or are inhabited by troops of poor creatures, whose poverty makes them only appear the more desolate, we are told by such men as Mr. Fielden of Oldham, once a factory child himself, and now a great manufacturer, who dares to reveal the secrets of the prison-house, that little creatures have even committed suicide to escape from a life worse than ten deaths. And what a mighty system is this now become! What a perpetual and vast supply of human life and energy it requires, with all the facilities of improved machinery, with all the developed power of steam, and with all the growing thirst of wealth to urge it on! We are told that the state of the factories, and the children employed in them, is greatly improved; and I trust they are; but if there be any truth in the evidence given before the parliamentary committees, there is need of great amelioration yet; and it is when we recollect these things, how completely the labouring class has, in these districts, been regarded as mere machinery for the accumulation of enormous capitals, that we cease to wonder at their uncouth and degraded aspect, and at the neglect in which they are suffered to swarm over these hills,--like the very weeds of humanity, cast out into disregarded places, and left to spread and increase in rank and deleterious luxuriance. The numbers of drunken men that you meet in these districts in an evening, and the numbers of women that you see seated with their ale-pots and pipes round the alehouse fires, a sight hardly elsewhere to be witnessed, form a striking contrast to the state of things in the agricultural districts, such as Craven, where you may pass through half-a-dozen villages, and not find one pot-house.

It was necessary to take a glimpse at these Lancashire hills in reviewing the rural life of England; let us now pass into a tract of the country which borders immediately upon them, and yet is so totally unlike in its aspect and population. We shall now penetrate into perhaps the most perfect nook of the world that England holds. The Yorkshire dales are known to most by name, but to comparatively few by actual visitation. They lie amongst that wild tract of hills which stretches along the West Riding of Yorkshire, from Lancashire to Westmoreland, and forms part, in fact, of the great mountainous chain which runs from Derbyshire through these counties and Cumberland into Scotland. Some of these hills are of great bulk and considerable altitude. The old rhymes are well known of--

Ingleborough, Pendle, and Pennegent Are the highest hills betwixt Scotland and Trent;

and

Pendle, Pennegent, and Ingleborough Are the highest hills all England thorough.

The Yorkshire dales stretch from the foot of Ingleborough north-east and west, over a considerable space of country. It is a wild, and, in many parts, a dreary region. Long ridges of hills covered with black heath, or bare stone,--with stony wastes at their feet of the grimmest and most time-worn character. All round Ingleborough the whole country seems to have been so tossed, shaken, and undermined by the violence which at some period broke it up into its present character, that its whole subterranean space seems to be filled with caves and passages for winds and waters that possess a remarkable connexion one with another, and present a multitude of singular phenomena. On the Craven side lie those celebrated spots Malham Cove and Gordale Scar, well known to tourists; the one, a splendid range of precipice with a river issuing from its base; the other, Gordale Scar, one of the most solemnly impressive of nature’s works. It is the course of a river which has torn its way from the top of a mountain, through a rugged descent in the solid rock, and falls into a sort of cove surrounded by lofty precipices, which make such a gloom, that on looking up, the stars are said sometimes to be seen at noon. Amongst all the magnificent scenes which the mountainous parts of these kingdoms present, I never visited one which impressed me with so much awe and wonder as this. You approach it by no regular road; you have even to ask permission to pass through the yard of a farm-house, to get at it; and your way is then up a valley, along which come two or three streams, running on with a wild beauty and abundance that occupy and delight your attention. Suddenly, you pass round a rock, and find yourself in this solemn cove, the high grey cliffs towering above you on all sides, the water dropping from their summits in a silver rain, and before you a river descending from a cleft in the mountain, and falling, as it were, over a screen, and spreading in white foam over it in a solemn and yet riotous beauty. This screen is formed of the calcareous deposit of the water; and crossing the stream by the stones which lie in it, you may mount from the greensward which carpets the bottom of the cove, climb up this screen, and ascend along the side of the falling torrent, up one of the most wild and desolate ravines, till you issue on the mountain top, where the mountain cistus and the crimson geranium wave their lovely flowers in the breeze.

These scenes lie on the Craven side of Ingleborough, and as you wind round his feet, though distantly, by Settle, to the dales, your way is still amongst the loftiest fells, and past continual proofs of subterranean agency, and agency of past violence. You are scarcely past Settle, when by the road-side you see a trough overflowing with the most beautifully transparent water. You stop to look at it, and it shrinks before your eyes six or seven inches, perhaps, below the edge of the trough, and then again comes gushing and flowing over. As you advance, the very names of places that lie in view speak of a wild region, and have something of the old British or Danish character in them. To your left shine the waters distantly of Lancaster Sands, and Morecombe Bay, and around you are the Great Stone of Four Stones, the Cross of Grete, Yorda’s Cave, that is, the cave of Yorda, the Danish sorceress; Weathercote Cave, and Hurtle-pot and Gingle-pot. Our progress over this ground, though early in July, was amid clouds, wind and rain. The black heights of Ingleborough were only visible at intervals through the rolling rack, and all about Weathercote Cave, Hurtle-pot and Gingle-pot were traces of the violence of outbursting waters. We found a capital inn nearly opposite the Weathercote Cave, where one of the tallest of imaginable women presented us with a luncheon of country fare,--oatcake, cheese, and porter, and laid our cloaks and great-coats to dry while we visited the Cave and the Pots. Weathercote Cave is not, as the imagination would naturally suggest to any one, a cave in the side of a hill or precipice, but a savage chasm in the ground, in which you hear the thunder of falling waters. It is just such a place as one dreams of in ancient Thessaly, haunted by Pan and the Satyrs. When you come to the brink of this fearful chasm, which is overhung with trees and bushes, you perceive a torrent falling in a column of white foam, and with a thundering din, into a deep abyss. Down to the bottom of this abyss there is a sloping descent, amongst loose and slippery stones. When you reach the bottom, a cavern opens on your left, into which you may pass, so as to avoid the mass of falling water, which is dashed upon a large black stone, and then is absorbed by some unseen channel. The huge blocks of stone which lie in this cave appear black and shining as polished ebony. I suppose this chasm is at least a hundred feet deep, and yet a few days before we were there, it had been filled to overflowing with water, which had rushed from its mouth with such violence as to rend down large trees around it. What is still more remarkable, at a few hundred yards distance is another chasm of equal depth, and of perpendicular descent, whence the torrents swallowed by the Weathercote Cave during great rains are again ejected with incredible violence. This had taken place, as we have said, a few days before our visit, and though this gulf was now dry again, the evidences of its fury were all around us. Wagon-loads of stones lay at its mouth, which had been hurled up with the torrent of water, all churned or hurtled (whence its name of Hurtle-pot) by its violence into the roundness of pebbles; and trees were laid prostrate, with their branches crushed into fragments, in the track by which the waters had escaped. This track was towards the third singular abyss--Gingle-pot. This gulf had a wider and more sloping mouth than the other, so that you could descend a considerable depth into it, but there you found a black and sullen water, which the people say has never been fathomed. It is said to contain a species of black trout, which are caught, we were told, by approaching the surface of the water with lighted torches by night, towards which they rise. Several country fellows were amusing themselves as we approached with rolling large stones into the abyss, which certainly sunk into the water with an awful sound.

Such is the region which abuts upon the Yorkshire dales. The dales themselves are the intervening spaces betwixt high fells, which run in long ranges one beyond another in a numerous succession. Some of these dales possess a considerable breadth of meadow land, as Wensley-dale, but the far greater number have scarcely more room in the bottom than is occupied by the stream and the public road. Thus every dale seems a little world in itself, being shut in by its high ranges of fell. If you ascend to the ridge of one of these, you find another dale, lying at your feet, with its own little community; were you to cross to the next ridge, you would find another, and so on, far and wide. It is a land of alternating ridge and hollow, ridge and hollow, or in the language of the district, fell and dale, without any intervention of champaign country. Wordsworth’s description in Peter Bell, shows that the poet had been there, as well as the potter.

And he had trudged through Yorkshire dales, Among the rocks and winding scars; Where deep and low the hamlets lie, Beneath their little patch of sky, And little lot of stars.

Formerly, when there were no roads into these secluded dales, except some shingly ravine, down which the pedestrian, or one of their native ponies could with considerable caution, and sundry strikings of the foot against loose stones, descend, few, except the inhabitants themselves, could visit them, and they then must have possessed a primitive character indeed. Now, however, good roads run through them, and a greater intercourse with the surrounding country must have had its effect, yet I know no other corner of England where still linger so patriarchal a character and such peculiar habits.

George Fox, in his travels far and wide through the realm to promulgate his doctrines, penetrated into these dales. From the top of Pendle-hill in Lancashire, where there is an immense prospect, he tells us in his journal, that he had a vision of the triumphs of his ministry, and of the thousands that would be converted to his peculiar faith. Descending in the strength of this revelation, he marched northward, and speedily found in these dales a primitive race, ready to adopt his opinions and practices, so congenial to a simple and earnest-hearted people. There he repeatedly came, and sojourned long; and the accounts of the extraordinary meetings held, and the effect produced, have few parallels in the histories of religious reformers. There is a little Church-of-England chapel perched on the highest point of Kendal Fells, not far from Sedburgh, which is in the outskirts of this district, called Firbank Chapel, where a thousand people are said to have been collected to hear him, and at which three hundred people were convinced of the truth, to use his own words, at one time,--Francis Howgill, the minister, being one of them. That little chapel is standing yet, perhaps the very humblest fabric in England belonging to the Established Church, old and dilapidated, and situated in one of the most singular and wild situations. There are the identical little windows, at which some of the old people stood within the chapel to listen to the preacher without, thinking it strange to worship anywhere but in a church or chapel. Near the door is a rock, on which he relates that he stood to preach. From its high site you look around over dreary moors, and a vast tract of outstretched country, and wonder whence the people gathered to his ministry. But his fame was that of an apostle all round this country. In Sedburgh churchyard stand two yew trees, under the shade of which, he, on one occasion, preached, drawing all the people out of the church to him. Within the dales themselves he planted several meetings, at Aysgarth, Counterside and Laygate. These meetings still remain, and a considerable number of Friends are scattered through the dales, of a primitive and hospitable character. We went, on the only Sunday which we passed in the dales, to his favourite meeting at Counterside, and could almost have imagined that the remarkable times of his ministry were yet remaining. We found the meeting situated amid a cluster of rustic cottages in pleasant Simmerdale, by Simmerdale Water. The house in which he usually lived during his visits to this valley adjoined the meeting; a true old-fashioned house, where the remains of his oaken bedstead were still preserved; and a very handsome one it must have been, and far too much adorned with the vanity of carving for so plain a man, and so homely a place. But the people were flocking from all sides, down the fells, along the dales, to the meeting, not only the Friends themselves, but the other dalespeople; and we found Mr. Joseph Pease, brother of the M.P., and his lady, from Darlington, addressing a crowded audience. The old times of Fox seemed indeed returned. The preacher’s discourse was one of an earnest and affectionate eloquence, and the audience was of a most simple and unworldly character. Almost every person, man or woman, had a nosegay in hand; nosegays in truth, for they very liberally and repeatedly applied them to the organ whence they are named. The herbs, for they consisted rather of herbs than flowers, were as singular as the appearance of such a host of nosegays itself. Not one of them was without a piece of southernwood, in some instances almost amounting to a bush, and evidently there entitled to its ancient name, “lads’-love and lasses’-delight.” With this was grasped in many a hardy hand, thyme, and alecost, and, in many, mint! No doubt the pungent qualities of these herbs are found very useful stimulants in close and crowded places of worship, and especially under a drowsy preacher, by those whose occupations for the other six days lie chiefly out-of-doors, in the keen air of hills and moors. That such is the object of them was sufficiently indicated by a poor woman who offered us a little bunch of these herbs as we entered the meeting-house, saying with a smile, “they are so reviving.”

Amongst the Friends, are a considerable number of substantial people, who lead here a sort of patriarchal life, with their flocks and herds on the hills around them. And their houses, placed on the slope of the hills, yet not far above the level of the valley, with their ample gardens, must be in the summer months most agreeable abodes. Old English hospitality and kindness are found here in all their strength. We called on several of the resident proprietors, and amongst others Mr. William Fothergill, at Carr-End, since deceased. The garden of this gentleman was a perfect paradise of roses. But the fine old intellectual man himself, retaining beyond his eightieth year, and in this secluded place, all the enthusiasm of youth, the love of books, and aspirations after the spread of knowledge and freedom through the world, was a still more attractive object. He was the descendant of two well-known men, Dr. Fothergill, and Samuel Fothergill, an eminent minister in this society. Talent and liberality of sentiment seem a congenial growth of these dales, for the able and noble-minded Adam Sedgwick is a native of one of them.

To that valley, the beautiful vale of Dent, we may as well betake ourselves, for in describing these retired regions, one portion may with great propriety be taken as a specimen of the whole. Descending therefore from the moors at Newby-Head, we found this southern entrance of Dent-dale steep and narrow. As we proceeded, it wound on before us for several miles, till we beheld the village of Dent lying at its northern extremity. Dent’s-Town, as they call it, has a very Swiss look, with its projecting roofs, and open galleries ascended by steps from the outside. But what strikes you with most surprise in this dale is its high state of cultivation. All the lower part of the dale is divided into small enclosures, rich with grass and summer flowers, and beautifully wooded; and amid the orchards and gardens, peep out houses of various sizes and characters. The hills nearly meet at the bottom, and ascend high, in two long ranges. The upper part, above the enclosures, appears, in some parts, black with heath, but more generally smooth and green, and dotted all over with flocks of sheep and geese. On the wilder parts of these hills graze a great number of cattle, and a shaggy race of ponies peculiar to them, with coats and manes long, and bleached by the wintry winds, till they look at a distance, more like wild bisons than horses. These dun ponies, before the progress of enclosure, used sometimes to follow the tops of the hills right away into Scotland, and have been fetched back from a distance of two hundred miles. When they have shed their wintry coats, and ceased to have such a look

As of the dwellers out of doors;

they often turn out very beautiful creatures, remarkably sure-footed, and highly prized for drawing in ladies’ pony-carriages. But we must descend into the valley: and here one of the most remarkable features is the river. It has all the character of a mountain torrent; huge stones, and masses of gravel everywhere demonstrating the occasional violence of the waters. But what has the most singular effect, its bed is one of solid stone, in some parts black or dark-grey marble, which is chafed and worn by the fury of the stream in floods, in such a manner that it looks itself like a rushing, billowy river, petrified by enchantment. A great part of this bed during the summer is dry, and therefore the more remarkable in its aspect. Here and there you may walk along it for a considerable distance; then again it descends in precipices, and amid blocks of stone of a gigantic character. One of these places is known by the name of Hell’s Cauldron, no doubt, in rainy seasons, a most appropriate name; for the river here, overhung with dark masses of trees, falls over some huge steps of the stony bed into a deep and black abyss, where the rending of the rocks and washing up of heaps of debris, shew with what fury that cauldron boils. But what are still more significant of this fury, are the hollows worn into the very mass of the ledges of rocks over which it passes, one of which, overlooking the abyss, is called the Pulpit, from its form, and in which you may stand. These hollows, which are scooped out with wonderful regularity, appear to be made by the churning and grinding of stones, which get in wherever the softer parts of the rocks give way to the action of the floods. Yet fearful as this Hell’s Cauldron must be when the stream is swollen, we were told that a boy once slipped in, and was carried through it, and washed up on the bank below, unhurt; calling out to his astounded companions--“Here am I! where are you?” The public road runs along the side of the stream, down the valley. This stream is crossed by two queer little foot-bridges, called by the odd names of Tummy and Nelly, or Tummy-Brig and Nelly-Brig, having been built by two persons of these familiar names, to accommodate the inhabitants of the opposite sides of the dale. And truly, as will be shortly evident, a great accommodation they must be, not only in cases of actual business, but in those visitings which go on in the dale.

Not only the people and their houses have an old-fashioned look, but you see continually out-of-doors lingering vestiges of long-past times and ancient usages. There are sledges with which they bring stone and peat from the tops of the fells. I have often wondered at the industry of mountain-people in building up those stone walls, or dykes, as they call them, which you often see running up the mountain sides, to very distant and often very steep places; but crossing these fells, I discovered that the labour was far less than it seemed at first sight. The material has not to be carried up these lofty ascents; it abounds on their summits, and has only to be loosened, and slid down the hill sides on sledges, as they proceed, for they begin to build at the top, and not at the bottom. So their peat for fuel is found in abundance on the wet and spongy tops of these hills, and is dug, and reared on end to dry through the summer, and in the autumn is slid down on sledges. In the Scottish Highlands you see the women bringing the peat from the mountains in large creels, or baskets, on their backs, while their husbands are perhaps angling in the loch below; but here the men generally act a less lordly part; cutting and drying the peat with the help of their boys, and sledging it into the bargain.

Besides these sledges, they have also that very ancient species of cart, the tumbrel; or, as they call it, the Tumble-Car. This is of so primitive a construction that the wheels do not revolve on a fixed axle, but the axle and wheels all revolve together. The wheels themselves are of a construction worthy of so pristine an axle; they are, in truth, wheels of the original idea; not things of the complex construction of nave, spokes, and fellies, but solid blocks of wood, into which the axle is firmly inserted; upon this axle the body of the vehicle is laid, and kept in its place by a couple of pegs. It is such a cart as you might imagine rumbling down these hills in the days of their Saxon ancestors. Since good roads have been opened through the dales, carts of modern construction have followed, and these tumbrels will in awhile be no longer seen. They have, however, this advantage; in descending the steep sides of the hills, their clumsy construction of axle and wheel prevents them from running down too fast, and this is the cause why they are still retained. And yet this difficulty of movement sometimes becomes the cause of awkward dilemmas. These tumbrels are apt to stick in the bogs as they come down the fells, and are not easily drawn out. We were assured that there was one then sticking in a bog on the hills, past all chance of recovery; and some wag of the dale had made this distich on the accident, denoting the peculiar pre-eminence of clumsiness in the unfortunate vehicle.

Willie O’Middlebrough’s tumble-car, Many were better, and none waur.

With a carriage so antique, one is not surprised to find gears of corresponding character. Consequently, as in Cornwall, so here, collars of straw and a few ropes often serve to harness out the team.

As might be supposed, the inhabitants of one dale form a little community or clan where every one is known to the rest, and where a great degree of sociality and familiarity prevails; but the whole dale sub-divides itself again into neighbourhoods, where a stronger esprit du corps exists. The dales are singularly marked by lines of ravines and streams, which run down the sides of the fells from the bogs and springs on the heights. These lines are commonly fringed on the lower slopes by alders and other water-loving trees. The smaller streams are called sikes, the larger gills, and the largest, being generally those which run along the dale, becks. The space from gill to gill generally constitutes a neighbourhood, or if that space is small, it may include two or three gills. Within this boundary they feel it a duty, established by time and immemorial usage, to perform all offices of good neighbourhood, and especially that of associating together. For instance, when a birth is about to take place, they have what is called a Shout. The nearest neighbour undertakes the office of herald. She runs from house to house, through the neighbourhood, though it be dead of night, summoning all the wives with this cry--“Run, neighbour, run, for neighbour such-a-one wants thy help--and take thy warming-pan with thee!” The consequence is, that the house is speedily filled with women and warming-pans; a scene ludicrous, and, one would imagine, inconvenient enough too; but which the women of the dale all protest is a great comfort. When the child is born, there is a great ceremony of washing its head with brandy, which is performed by the father and his male friends, who are assembled for the occasion; and who then fall to, and make merry over their glasses.

The assembled women regale themselves with a feast of their own kind, being a particular species of bread made for the occasion, and sweet-butter; that is, butter mixed with rum and sugar, and having in truth no despicable flavour. Then comes the Wife-day, generally the second Sunday after the birth, when all the women of the neighbourhood who have attended at the Shout, go dressed in their best, to take tea, and hold a regular gossip, each carrying with her a shilling and the news of the neighbourhood. The highest possible offence that can be given, is to pass over a person within the understood limits of the neighbourhood--it is the dead-cut. Sometimes there occurs a false Shout, either through the wantonness or malice of some ne’er-do-weel. In the night, the mischievous wag runs from house to house, and calls all the good wives to the dwelling whence they are hourly expecting such a summons. When they get there, they find it a hoax, and come under the name of May-goslings,--the term applied to this species of dupe. The joke, however, is no venial one, for it is perhaps played off on a severe and tempestuous night, and the good dames muffled up in their cloaks, and lantern and warming-pan in hand, have to steer their way down the sides of hills, and across becks hidden by the drifts of snow. Similar assemblages take place at deaths, called Passings; and at Christmas, when they eat yule bread and yule cheese, made after a particular formula.

But perhaps the most characteristic custom of the Dales, is what is called their Sitting, or going-a-sitting. Knitting is a great practice in the dales. Men, women, and children, all knit. Formerly you might have met the wagoners knitting as they went along with their teams; but this is now rare; for the greater influx of visiters, and their wonder expressed at this and other practices, has made them rather ashamed of some of them, and shy of strangers observing them. But the men still knit a great deal in the houses; and the women knit incessantly. They have knitting schools, where the children are taught; and where they sing in chorus knitting songs, some of which appear as childish as the nursery stories of the last generation. Yet all of them bear some reference to their employment and mode of life; and the chorus, which maintains regularity of action and keeps up the attention, is of more importance than the words. Here is a specimen.

Bell-wether o’ Barking,[8] cries baa, baa, How many sheep have we lost to-day? Nineteen have we lost, one have we fun, Run Rockie,[9] run Rockie, run, run, run.

This is sung while they knit one round of the stocking; when the second round commences they begin again--

Bell-wether o’ Barking, cries baa, baa, How many sheep have we lost to-day? Eighteen have we lost, two have we fun, Run Rockie, run Rockie, run, run, run;

and so on till they have knit twenty rounds, decreasing the numbers on the one hand, and increasing them on the other. These songs are sung not only by the children in the schools, but also by the people at their sittings, which are social assemblies of the neighbourhood, not for eating and drinking, but merely for society. As soon as it becomes dark, and the usual business of the day is over, and the young children are put to bed, they rake or put out the fire; take their cloaks and lanterns, and set out with their knitting to the house of the neighbour where the sitting falls in rotation, for it is a regularly circulating assembly from house to house through the particular neighbourhood. The whole troop of neighbours being collected, they sit and knit, sing knitting-songs, and tell knitting-stories. Here all the old stories and traditions of the dale come up, and they often get so excited that they say, “Neighbours, we’ll not part to night,” that is, till after twelve o’clock. All this time their knitting goes on with unremitting speed. They sit rocking to and fro like so many weird wizards. They burn no candle, but knit by the light of the peat fire. And this rocking motion is connected with a mode of knitting peculiar to the place, called swaving, which is difficult to describe. Ordinary knitting is performed by a variety of little motions, but this is a single uniform tossing motion of both the hands at once, and the body often accompanying it with a sort of sympathetic action. The knitting produced is just the same as by the ordinary method. They knit with crooked pins called pricks; and use a knitting-sheath consisting commonly of a hollow piece of wood, as large as the sheath of a dagger, curved to the side, and fixed in a belt called the cowband. The women of the north, in fact, often sport very curious knitting sheaths. We have seen a wisp of straw tied up pretty tightly, into which they stick their needles; and sometimes a bunch of quills of at least half-a-hundred in number. These sheaths and cowbands are often presents from their lovers to the young women. Upon the band there is a hook, upon which the long end of the knitting is suspended that it may not dangle. In this manner they knit for the Kendal market, stockings, jackets, nightcaps, and a kind of caps worn by the negroes, called bump-caps. These are made of very coarse worsted, and knit a yard in length, one half of which is turned into the other, before it has the appearance of a cap.

[8] A mountain over-looking Dent Dale.

[9] The shepherd’s dog.

The smallness of their earnings may be inferred from the price for the knitting of one of these caps being three-pence. But all knit, and knitting is not so much their sole labour as an auxiliary gain. The woman knits when her household work is done; the man when his out-of-door work is done; as they walk about their garden, or go from one village to another, the process is going on. We saw a stout rosy girl driving some cows to the field. She had all the character of a farmer’s servant. Without any thing on her head, in her short bedgown, and wooden clogs, she went on after them with a great stick in her hand. A lot of calves which were in the field, as she opened the gate, seemed determined to rush out, but the damsel laid lustily about them with her cudgel, and made them decamp. As we observed her proceedings from a house opposite, and, amused at the contest between her and the calves, said, “well done! dairymaid!” “O,” said the woman of the house, “that is no dairymaid: she is the farmer’s only daughter, and will have quite a fortune. She is the best knitter in the dale, and makes four bump-caps a day;” that is, the young lady of fortune earned a shilling a day.

The neighbouring dale, Garsdale, which is a narrower and more secluded one than Dent, is a great knitting dale. The old men sit there in companies round the fire, and so intent are they on their occupation and stories, that they pin cloths on their shins to prevent their being burnt; and sometimes they may be seen on a bench at the house-front, and where they have come out to cool themselves, sitting in a row knitting with their shin-cloths on, making the oddest appearance imaginable.

It may be supposed that eccentricity of character is the growth of such a place. A spirit of avarice is one of the most besetting evils. Many of the people are proprietors of their little homesteads; but there is no manufacturing beyond that of knitting, and money therefore is scarce. As it is not to be got very easily, the disposition to hold and save it becomes proportionably strong. They are extremely averse to suffer any money to go out of the dale; and will buy nothing, if they can avoid it, of people who travel the country with articles to sell; that would be sending money out of the dale; but they will go to a shop in the dale, and buy the same thing, not reflecting that the shopkeeper must first purchase it out of the dale, and therefore send money out of the dale to pay for it; and that what goes out of the dale for such articles comes back again by the sale of their horses, cattle, and sheep. A person who had been collector of the taxes in one of these dales, described to us the excessive difficulty he had to collect the money, even from those whom he knew always had it. They would put off payments as long as possible, and when he went and told them it was positively the last time he could call, they would sit doggedly, and declare that Samson was strong and Solomon was wise, but neither could pay money when they had not it. When they saw he would not depart, they would at length get up, go up stairs, where they always kept their cash. There he could hear them slowly open their chest, let down the lid again; open it again in awhile; then shut it again, and walk about the room as if unable to part with it. Then they would come to the top of the stairs, and shout down, saying they would not pay it. Finding him still immovable, they would come slowly down, but still persist--“I’ll nae gie it thee!” Then perhaps soon after, as if relenting, they would come towards him, open their hand with the money in it, extending it towards him; but when he offered to take it, snatch it away, saying--“Nay; tou’st niver hae it!” Finally, they would throw it to him, and with it abundance of angry words.

We met a man of a most gaunt and miserable appearance. A young man not more than thirty years of age. He had all the aspect of a penurious fellow. Dirty, unshaven, with soiled clothes and unwashed linen. He was coming along the lane with a rude tumbrel. This man was a thorough miser as ever existed. He lived totally alone. He suffered no woman to come about his house. If his clothes ever were washed they were done by himself, but he never bought an ounce of soap. He had bought a small property; a house and some adjoining crofts, where he lived. From this place he was called Tony of Todcrofts. This man was never known to part with money except to the tax-gatherer. If he wanted a board put on his cart, or a nail to keep it together, he bargained with the wheelwright or the blacksmith to pay them in peat. He baked his own oatcake, and paid the miller in peat for grinding his oats. He drank milk from his own cow, and made his own clogs, cut from his own alder. He contrived to purchase little, and what he did purchase he still paid for in peat. On the fells he cut peat all summer, making days of uncommon length; and in the autumn he drew it down with a sledge, and on one occasion, having no horse, he carried the sledge, every time he re-ascended the hills, upon his back.

In a neighbouring dale we passed the farm called Barben-park, which we were informed had been held by the family occupying it, on a lease for three lives, now being in the last life; of which the rent is so low that the tenant has oftener, on the rent-day, to receive money, on account of taxes and rates, than to pay any away. The house struck us as one of the most wild and solitary places of abode we had ever seen. It stood on the fell side, and for many miles there appeared no other house, nor any trace of human workmanship, but a few ruinous limekilns. The inhabitants were represented as wild and rude as their location, yet rich, the hills all round being covered with their sheep, ponies, cattle, and geese, which seemed in a great measure to run wild, and increase in a state of complete nature. There were said to be bulls of great savageness amongst them--the bulls of Barben being as awfully famous here as the bulls of Bashan of old; and foxes which the farmers often turned out, and chased with all their men for miles along the hills. A gentleman who had been at this house described the people as living like ancient kings in the rude abundance of earthly plenty. In Wensleydale there is a large farmer who keeps up the primitive custom of two meals a day, from Candlemas to Martinmas, which is the depth of winter. They breakfast at ten o’clock on cold meat, ale, cheese, etc.; and do not go into the house again till six in the evening, by which time they have not only returned from the fields, but have seen all their cattle served for the night, and a hot dinner of meat, puddings, and other good things, awaits them and their servants, who sit eating and drinking till bed-time.

In such a place a man’s appearance is no indication of his actual condition as respects property. Men who have good estates will be seen in a dress not worth three farthings altogether, except it were as a curiosity. They tell a story with great glee, of an old Friend, John Wilkinson, who sate in a patched coat on a large stone by the road-side, knitting, when a gentleman riding by, stopped and fixed his eyes on him as in compassion, and then threw him half-a-crown. He picked it up, told him he was much obliged to him, but added--“May be I’se richer na tou,” and returned him the money, desiring him to give it to some one who had greater need of it. In fact, the old Friend was wealthy; and in this case his pride overcame his acquisitive propensity; but that propensity is unquestionably very powerful here, and another instance may be mentioned which occasioned a good deal of laughter in the dale. An old man of some property having a colt which he wanted breaking, instead of putting it into the hands of the horsebreaker, thought he would break it himself, and save the cost. Having brought it to carry him pretty well, he was desirous of making it proof against starting at sudden alarms. He therefore concerted with his wife that she should stand concealed behind the yard gate, with her cloak thrown over her head, and as he entered on the back of his colt, should pop out, and cry--Boh! Accordingly, in he rode, out popped the good-wife, and cried Boh! so effectually, that the horse made a desperate leap, and flung the old man with a terrible shock upon the pavement. Recovering himself, however, without any broken bones, though sorely bruised and shaken, he said, as he limped into the house--“Ah, Mally! Mally! that was too big a boh! for an old man and a young colt!”

This propensity extends too amongst the women as well as the men: one woman declared she would as lieve part with the skin off her back as with her money. And yet there are things which they will not do for money, as thousands of the poor in other districts do,--they won’t work in a factory. The experiment was tried in this dale; but the people, like the French, would only work just when they pleased, and soon would not work at all. One would have thought that the strong love of gain amongst them, and their industrious habits, would have insured success to such an experiment; but they had too much love for their own firesides, and the enjoyment of the fresh mountain air; the parents had too much love for their children to subject them to the daily incarceration amid heat, and dust, and flue from the cotton. The scheme failed; the factory stands a ruinous monument of the attempt, and these beautiful dales are yet free from the factory system. And yet, peaceful, and far removed as they are from the acts and oppressions by which the strong build their houses, and add field to field out of the toils of the weak, they are not unacquainted with occasional instances of the evils done with impunity in the nooks of the world. I do not mean to represent such spots as Arcadias of purity and perfection. In the former chapter, and in this, I have indicated the vices which flourish, and the depravity which spreads in the shade of secluded life. The worst feature of these dales is the penurious spirit which little opportunity of profit produces; but I do not know that this spirit is a more sordid one than pervades the lower streets and alleys of large towns. There is along with it a strong sense of meum and tuum; a strong and uncorrupted moral principle; and no man is in danger of either being filched of his purse, or if he chanced to lose it by accident, of not regaining it. As the pressure of poverty is not so tremendous, so the extinction of the moral sense is by no means so great as in large towns; and, on the other hand, how much more delightful a view of the social life of these people we have, than of those of similar rank in our large manufacturing towns, and especially amongst the lower classes of the metropolis, where they tread on each other from their multitudes, and yet, from the same cause, pass through life strangers to each other. Here the social sympathies are strongly called forth; a sort of kinship seems to pervade the whole neighbourhood; and they pass their lives, if in a good deal of poverty, yet in mutual confidence, and very pleasant habits of association. Every man and every spot has a name and share of distinction. Every gill and beck have their appellation, as Hacker-gill; Arten-gill; How-gill; Cow-gill; Spice-gill; Thomas O’Harbour-gill; Backstone-gill; Kale-beck; Monkey-beck. Every house has its name;--as Tinkler’s Budget; Clint; Henthwaite-Hall; Coat-Fall; The Birchen Tree; Lile-Town; Riveling; Broad Mere; Hollins; Ellen-ha; Scale-gill-foot; Clinter-Bank; Hollow-Mill,--all names in Dent. Their names for one another are the most familiar possible; and they use the christian names, and attach the christian names of their fathers and mothers in such a manner, that it is difficult to get at many people’s surnames. They themselves know very well John o’ Davits Fletcher, Kit o’ Willie, or Willie o’ Kit o’ Willie; when if the real name of these people were John Davis, Catherine Broadbent, or William Thistlethwaite, they would have to consider awhile who was meant, if asked for by these names.

The dales-people have, therefore, evidently good elements; a strong social feeling; great simplicity of life and character; great honesty;--and the extension of the facility of voting in elections by dividing the counties, and appointing local polling places, has demonstrated that they have a strong love of liberal principles. All that appears wanting is exactly what is wanting in all these nooks, the introduction of more knowledge by the diffusion of sound and cheap publications, which would at once raise the moral tone, and inspire a more adventurous disposition, as is the case with the Scotch; so that those who do not find profitable employment in these pastoral dales, should set out in quest of more promising fields of action. As to crimes of magnitude, if you hear of them here, they are perpetrated by those in a higher class. There was a story ringing through one of the dales when we were there, which if half of it were true, was bad enough; and that we might arrive at as much truth as possible, we visited and conversed with those who were apparently likeliest to know it. It was said, and this too by those who had been in daily intercourse with the parties--that a very wealthy widow lady, who seemed to have been of weak intellect, or at least so unaccustomed to the world, and matters of business, as to become an easy prey to any clever and designing fellow, had entrusted the management of her affairs to a lawyer of a neighbouring town. That this lawyer twenty years ago made her will, in which he had appointed himself one of the executors, and a gentleman of high character, living at a great distance, the other. That he had left in the will ten per cent. on the accumulations of her income to the executors, besides 500_l._ each, for the trouble of their office. That a man brought up in the house of the lady was left 5000_l._ That from the original making of the will, it appeared never to have been read over again at any time to the lady; but that she had frequently dictated or written in pencil her instructions for its alteration in many particulars, which instructions or alterations at the final reading of the will after her decease nowhere appeared. That from the time the will was made till that of her death, twenty years, her lawyer-executor had continually tormented her with the fear of poverty. He had told her that her income did not meet her expenses; and through these representations had induced her to curtail her charities, and to lay down her carriage. This, however, did not suffice, and his representations made the poor lady miserable with the constant fear of coming poverty. In an agony of feeling on this subject, she one day sent her confidential servant to the lawyer to order him to sell her West Indian property. The lawyer said, “tell your mistress from me, that her West Indian property is not worth one farthing.” This the servant, whom we took the trouble of seeing, confirmed to us. The poor woman, haunted with the fear of poverty, at length took to her bed, and a few days before her death, when, indeed, her recovery was hopeless, her lawyer appeared at her bedside, and astounded her with the news, that so far from poverty, her West Indian property was very large, and her surplus income had actually accumulated in the funds to the sum of 80,000_l._! and the hypocritical monster, with a refinement of cruelty perhaps never paralleled, humbly asked her, “how she would wish it disposed of?” The previous progress of the poor lady’s illness, and this overwhelming intelligence, rendered any present disposal impossible. She was thrown into the most fearful distress of mind,--and continually exclaiming, “O! please God that I might recover, how different things should be!” died on the third day.

When the will was read, the man who had 5000_l._ left him twenty years ago, found it left him still; and yet this man had for years lost the good opinion of the lady by his misconduct, and had not been permitted to come into her presence for two years. This was a striking proof that her will had not of late years been adapted to her altered mind. This man, who first came into the lady’s house as a shoeblack, or some such thing, and had on one occasion for his misconduct, the alternative offered him either to quit her service, or be carried up to the top of the neighbouring fell, on the back of one man and down again, while he was flogged by another, and was of so base a nature that he had chosen the flagellation, and continuance in a family where he was regarded with contempt--this man had now actually purchased the lady’s house of the executors, and lived in it! We walked past it, and naturally regarding it with a good deal of curiosity, a ludicrous scene occurred. I suppose, being strangers, and I having a moreen bag in my hand, it was inferred from our particular observation of the place, that I was a lawyer, come down on the behalf of some dissatisfied expectant, to inquire into the case. However that might be, we presently saw the man’s wife, a very common-looking person, and appearing wonderfully out of place as the mistress of such a house, peeping at us from the windows, first on one side of the house, and then on the other, and at the same time attempting to screen herself from view by partly unclosing the shutters, and placing herself behind them. Soon after, her daughter too came with stealthy steps, out of the back door, crept cautiously round the house, and posted herself behind a bush to watch us; nor had we advanced far from the place, when the man himself came hurrying along, and went past us with very black and inquisitive looks.

We were told that on the will being read, the other executor being now present, was not more amazed at the fact of his becoming, unknown to himself, so greatly benefited by it, than he was at the general details of it. He inquired of the lawyer if the will had been read to the lady from time to time, in order to see whether it might require some alteration, and being told by him that it had not, he seemed filled with the utmost astonishment and indignation, and abruptly said to him--“Why, there is nothing but damnation for you!” and with that proceeded in such piercing terms to shew to the lawyer the cruelty and wickedness of his conduct, that the man trembled through every joint. It was added that the lawyer “never looked up afterwards,” but was in the greatest distress of mind, and daily wasted away. That when the tenants of the property, some time afterwards, went to pay their rents, they found him propped up in bed with bolsters and pillows, a most pitiable object; his inkhorn stitched into the bed-quilt by him, and yet his trembling hand scarcely able to direct his pen into it. That such was the effect of fear, and the visitings of conscience on his superstitious mind, that he drank the water which dropped from the church-roof in rainy weather, in the hope it would do him good!

This is a most extraordinary story, but we found one of these quiet dales ringing with it from end to end, and this was the account given by most trustworthy people, who knew the parties well, and one of whom was the lady’s confidential servant. Amongst the stories which we heard relating to the past state of these dales, was one of the murder of a Highland drover, in its particulars bearing a striking resemblance to the story of Scott’s, told under that title. In Swale Dale is said to be a race of gipsies, a very fine set of people; and a remarkable account was given us of one of them, a singularly fine woman in her time, called Nance of Swaledale.

They have some singular customs in these dales, not yet mentioned. One is, when a sow litters, they allow her to champ oats out of a beehive to make the bees lucky; and salt is thrown into the fire, with the same object, when the bees swarm. Another of their customs arises out of their spirit of good neighbourhood, and mutual accommodation. In sheep-shearing time, instead of every one shearing his flock solitarily, they combine together in troops, and go from farm to farm, till they have completed the whole, and celebrate the end of their labours at each house, over a good supper given by the master; in which a sweet pie, that is, a huge pie of legs of mutton cut small and seasoned with currants, raisins, candied peel and sugar, and covered with a rich crust, figures on the board, accompanied by another favourite dish of fresh fried trout, and collops of ham, succeeded by gooseberry, or as they call them, berry pasties, and curd cheesecakes, and strong drink in plenty: a fiddle and a dance concluding the entertainment. The sheep-washing as well as the shearing is accompanied by this jollity.

In Deepdale, the farmers principally employ themselves at home in sorting and carding wool for knitting. They call it welding; and the fine locks, selected for the legs of the stockings, they call leggin, whilst the coarser part goes by the name of footing. Two old people, Laurence and Peggy Hodgson o’ Dockensyke, were both upwards of seventy, when Peggy died. As she lay on her death-bed, she said to her husband, “Laury, promise me ya thing,--at tou’ill not wed again when I’se gane.” “Peggy, my lass,” answered Laurence, “do not mak me promise nae sic thing; tou knaws I’se but young yet.” The old fellow did wed again, and his brother, on returning from the wedding, made this report of the bride:--“Why-a, she’s a rough ane. I’se welded her owre and owre, an’ I canna find a lock o’ leggin in her; she’s a’ footing.”

Here then I close this second chapter of the nooks of the world, bearing grateful testimony that amongst the virtues of the dales-people, hospitality and attachment to their pleasant hills and valleys are pre-eminent. Wherever we went we found them only too happy to shew us all the beauties of their country, the winding becks, the scars and waterfalls, and prospects from the loftiest fells. When they had trudged with us for many a weary mile, through moss and moor, they would hang the girdle upon the peat-fire, and in a wonderfully short time have those delicious little kettle-cakes, or as they call them, sad-cakes, made of pastry, and thickly dotted with currants, smoking on the tea-table. And when you came in at a late hour, would bring you out those rural dainties, equally delicious, gooseberry tarts, with curds and cream. Long may the simple virtues of the Dales remain, while knowledge in its growth, roots out the more earthly traits of character, and implants a bolder spirit of enterprise, with the present moral integrity of mind.

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IV. OLD ENGLISH HOUSES

Our country houses, and especially the older ones, are in themselves an inestimable national treasure. A thousand endearing associations gather about them. I cannot conceive a more deeply interesting work than a history of them which entered fully into the spirit of the times in which they were raised, and through which they have stood. Which should give us a view of the national changes which have passed over them; mighty revolutions, whether abrupt and violent, or slow and silent, in fortune, in manners, and in mind; and still more, which should, aided by family paintings, family documents and traditions, unfold their domestic annals. What an opening up of the human heart would be there! There is nothing more splendid, or surprising, or fearful, or pathetic, or happy and fanciful in romance, than would be there discovered. There is no success, no glory of life and action, no image of princely or baronial power, no strange freaks of fortune, none of the startling, or the moving incidents of humanity but have there enrolled themselves. What noble hearts; what great and pathetic spirits have dwelt at one time or other in those old places; and then what beautiful and bewitching creatures have cast through them the sunshine of their presence; have made them glad with their wit, and their gay fancies, and their strong affections; or have hallowed them with their sufferings and their tears. O for the revelation of the fair forms; of the scenes of successful or sorrowful love; of the bridals and the burials; of the poetic dreams and pious aspirations, that have warmed or saddened these old halls through the flight of ages! Much of this is gone for ever; swept into the black and fathomless gulf of oblivion; but enough might be recovered to make us wonder at what has passed upon our ancestral soil, and to make us love it with a still deeper love. There is no portion of our national history, or point of our national character, but would be brought into the sweep of such narratives, and receive illustration from them. Our warriors, statesmen, philosophers, divines, poets, beauties and heroines more admirable than beauty could make them, would all figure there.[10] In the galleries of many of these houses, hang portraits to which traditions are attached that would freeze the blood, or make it dance with ardour and delight; that would chain up the listening spirit in breathless attention, in awe and curiosity. In the very writings by which the estates are secured, in old charters, wills, and other deeds, facts are traced and changes developed of the most singular character; and in the oral annals of the families exist correlative testimonies, which have been imprinted there by the intense interest of the circumstances themselves.

[10] This was written four years ago. Since then the author has published the first volume of such a work, under the title of “Visits to Remarkable Places, Old Halls, Battle Fields, etc.”

How delightful it is to go through those hereditary abodes of ancient and distinguished families, and to see, in the very construction of them, images of the past times, and their modes of existence. Here you pass through ample courts, amid rambling and extensive offices that once were necessary to the jolly establishment of the age,--for hounds, horses, hawks, and all their attendants and dependences. Here you come into vast kitchens, with fireplaces at which three or four oxen might be roasted at once, with mantelpieces wide as the arch of a bridge, and chimneys as large as the steeple of a country church. Then you advance into great halls, where scores of rude revellers have feasted in returning from battle, or the chase, in the days of feudal running and riding, of foraying and pilgrimages; of hard knocks and hard lying: ere tea and coffee had supplanted beef and ale at breakfast; ere books had charmed away spears and targets, tennis-courts and tourneys, and political squabbles and parliamentary campaigning, the scouring of marches, and firing of neighbours’ castles. Then again, you advance into tapestried chambers, on whose walls mythological or scriptural histories wrought by the fingers of high-born dames, at once impress you with a sense of very still and leisurely and woodland times, when Crockford’s and Almack’s were not; nor the active spirit of civilization had raised up weavers, and spinners, and artificers of all kinds by thousands on thousands, by towns-full and cities-full. And now you come to the very closets and bowers of the ladies themselves--scenes of worn and faded splendour, but shewing enough of their original state to mark their wide difference from the silken boudoirs and luxurious dormitories of the fair dames of this age of swarming and busy artisans; of ample rents and city life; instead of hunting and fighting, of wars in the heart of France, or civil wars at home, to call out the heads of houses, or perhaps drive their families forth with fire and sword in their absence. Then there is the antique chapel, and the library; the one having, in most cases, been deserted by its ancient faith, the other still bearing testimony to the range of reading of our old squires and nobles, since reading became a part of their education, in a few grim folios,--a Bible, a Gwillim’s Heraldry, one or two of our Chroniclers, and a few Latin Classics or Fathers, for the enjoyment of the chaplain.

But the armoury and the great gallery--these are the places in which a flood of historic light pours in upon you, and the spirit of the past is made so palpable, that you forget your real existence in this utilitarian century; you forget reform in all its shapes--ballot, household suffrage, triennial parliaments; you forget the cry of the church and king; and the counter-cry from a million of eager voices, for liberty of hearth and faith; you forget that all around you, from the very walls that surround you to the distant sea, is nothing but fields cultivated like gardens, secured by gates and fences, and tenfold more costly and powerful parchment, to their particular owners; you forget that towns stand by hundreds, and villages by thousands, filled with a busy, an inquisitive, a reading, thinking, aspiring and irresistible population; and that all the institutions, the opinions, the loves and doings of the times when these things before you were matters of familiar life, are gone, or are going, for ever: that,

Another race has been, and other palms are won.

Yes, mighty and impressive as these things are; deeply as they visit your daily thought and nightly dreams; woven as they are with the thread of your existence, and your hopes and belief of the future ages,--yes, potent as they are, they vanish for a time. Here are swords, helmets, coats of mail, and plate-armour standing up in its own massiveness; shells from which the active bodies which moved them, have long ago disappeared. Here are buff-coats, ponderous boots, and huge spurs; broad hats, with sweeping feathers, and chains of gold, crosses and amulets, which make the past for ever in time, the past for ever in spirit, come back again with a vivid and intoxicating effect. You gaze upon arms and relics which figured in all the battles and pilgrimages, the desperate strifes and extravagant pageants of our ancestors; you behold things which link your fancies to all the romantic ages of European history. You forget the present; and exist amid forests, the stern strength of castles and the venerable quiet of convents. You are ready to listen to the distant bell of the abbey; for news of the crusaders; you expect as you ride through the woods, to stumble upon the abode of the hermit. These arms and fragments before you, were in the battles of Cressy and Poictiers; in the wars of the Roses; in the Tourney of the Field of Cloth-of-Gold; that mail, on the back of some stout knight, climbed over the ramparts of Ascalon, or of Jerusalem itself; and those, bringing you down the stream of events, are the equipments of Cavaliers and of Puritan leaders, when the spirit of feudalism and that of progression came so rudely into strife as to shake the kingdom like an earthquake. You step into the gallery, and there are the very men whose iron habiliments you have been contemplating; there are the rude portraitures of the warriors of an earlier day; and there are the Sidneys, the Howards, the Essexes and Leicesters, the Warwicks and Wiltons, of an after one; the men that set up and pulled down kings, that waded through the blood of others, or that poured out their own, for honour and liberty. You have read of some handsome and gallant knight who wrought some chivalric miracle, who perhaps died in its performance--he is there! You have glowed over the accounts of arrogant and fascinating beauties, who turned the heads of kings and nobles--they are there! worthy of all their fame, their very shadows filling you with sighs and dreams of loveliness, which will haunt you in the open sunshine, and amid all the cheerful sounds of present life.

But it is not merely these great historic characters. There are family ones that constitute a history amongst themselves, most interesting and touching. There are the founders of those families. There is the great minister, who once rose to the favour of his sovereign, and swayed the destinies of the kingdom; there is the great churchman, that climbed up from plebeian obscurity to the primacy; there is the judge, who, from a younger brother of an ancient line, became the fortunate founder of a new one; there are admirals, generals, and nobles, who have figured in the campaigns of every reign. There are stern forms that were despots in their own sphere, or calm and smiling faces that have such blots and dark passages attached to them as confound all your physiognomical acuteness; and there are beautiful and gentle-looking creatures, that are most strangely tainted with blood; noble matrons, who knew sorrows for which neither their rank and affluence, no, nor the possessions of ten kingdoms could make recompense; and lastly, there are young boys and girls, that look on you with most innocent archness or open good-nature, which perished like blossoms ere fully opened, or lived to make you shudder over their remembrance.

Such are many of our older houses, to say nothing of later and more splendid ones; nothing of all the modern attractions that have been added to their ancient ones; nothing of those sumptuous places which our nobility have raised on their estates, and filled with all the luxurious adornments of modern life, and with the wealth of art. And then those houses stand scattered over all the kingdom, in fine old parks, in gardens of quaint alleys and topiary work; or in the freer beauty of modern lawns and shrubberies; objects of pleasure and pride to thousands beside their own possessors.

Horace Walpole wished that they were all collected in London, and then should we have had such a capital as the world could not boast. Heaven forgive him for the wish! A splendid capital no doubt we should have had, but we should not have had such a country, such a people, such a national strength and character as we have. It is by living scattered through the realm, amid their own people, their own lands and woods, that our gentry have retained such high independence of principle, and such healthy tastes as they have done. It is by this means that agriculture, and horticulture, and rural architecture, have been promoted to the extent they have reached; that the whole kingdom has become a paradise, and that the people have been linked to the interests of their superiors. We have only too many temptations already to a crowding into our capital. A city life to a wealthy aristocracy must become a life of luxury and splendour, a life of dissipation and rivalry. The enjoyments of society, of music, and of public spectacles, at intervals, might refine the taste; but when this species of life becomes almost perpetual, its certain consequence must be to deteriorate and effeminate character; to weaken the domestic attachments; to divert from, or disincline for that sober thought and those studies which lead to greatness, or leave behind solid satisfaction. We have already too much of this, and its effect will daily become more and more conspicuous, as it is of more and more vital importance. Now, while the people are struggling to acquire possession of rights that they long knew not their claim to; now that they are growing informed, and therefore quick to see and to feel--those on whom they look as their natural and powerful rivals, are living at a distance from them; taking no means to conciliate their good-will, or to retain their esteem. Their humble neighbours feel no effect from their estates except the withdrawal of their rents; and they ask themselves what claim these people, who are living in our great Babylon,

Minions of splendour, shrinking from distress,--

have upon their veneration or regard. Is it not in these noble ancestral houses, amid their ancestral woods and lands, that the spirit of our gentry is most likely to acquire a right tone? Here, where they are surrounded by objects and memories of worth, of greatness and renown, that the fire of a generous and glorious emulation is most likely to be kindled; and that all the best feelings of their nature are likely to be touched, and their best affections quickened? Even Horace Walpole himself furnishes an instance in proof. Little as he had of the pensive and poetical in him, his visit to the family place at Houghton called up such thoughts and emotions as, if encouraged instead of avoided, might have made him aware of higher qualities in himself than he was habitually accustomed to display. “Here am I,” says he in one of his letters, “at Houghton! and alone; in this spot where, except two hours last month, I have not been in sixteen years! Think what a crowd of reflections! No!--Gray and forty churchyards could not furnish so many; nay, I know one must feel them with greater indifference than I possess, to have patience to put them into verse. Here I am, probably for the last time in my life, though not for the last time; every clock that strikes tells me that I am one hour nearer to yonder church,--that church into which I have not yet had courage to enter; where lies the mother on whom I doated, and who doated on me! There are the two rival mistresses of Houghton, neither of whom ever wished to enjoy it. There too lies he who founded its greatness; to contribute to whose fall, Europe was embroiled. There he sleeps in quiet and dignity, while his friend and his foe, rather his false ally and real enemy, Newcastle and Bath, are exhausting the dregs of their pitiful lives in squabbles and pamphlets.

“The surprise the pictures gave me is again renewed. Accustomed for many years to see wretched daubs and varnished copies at auctions, I look at these as enchantment.... A party arrived just as I did, to see the house: a man and three women, in riding dresses, and they rode fast through the apartments. I could not hurry before them fast enough; they were not so long in seeing for the first time, as I could have been in one room, to examine what I knew by heart. I remember formerly being often diverted by this kind of seers; they come, ask what such a room is called, in which Sir Robert lay: admire a lobster, or a cottage in a market-piece; dispute whether the last room was green or purple; and then hurry to the inn, for fear the fish should be overdressed. How different my situation! Not a picture here but recals a history; not one but I remember in Downing-street, or Chelsea, where queens and crowds admired them, though seeing them as little as these travellers.

“When I had drank tea I strolled into the garden. They told me it was now called the pleasure-ground. What a dissonant idea of pleasure! Those groves, those alleys, where I have passed so many charming moments, are now stripped up, or overgrown; many fond paths I could not unravel, though with a very exact clue in my memory. I met two gamekeepers, and a thousand hares! In the days when all my soul was tuned to pleasure and vivacity, I hated Houghton and its solitude; yet I loved this garden; as now, with many regrets, I love Houghton;--Houghton, I know not what to call it: a monument of grandeur or ruin! How I wished this evening for Lord Bute! How I could preach to him!--The servants wanted to lay me in the great apartment--what! to make me pass the night as I had done my evening! It were like proposing to Margaret Roper to be a duchess in the court which cut off her father’s head, and imagining it could please her. I have chosen to sit in my father’s little dressing-room, and am now in his escritoire, where, in the height of his fortune, he used to receive the accounts of his farmers, and deceive himself, or us, with the thoughts of his economy. How wise a man, at once, and how weak! For what has he built Houghton? For his grandson to annihilate, or his son to mourn over.”

Horace Walpole’s Letters, vol. ii. pp. 227-8.

Having made these preliminary observations, I will now give a specimen or two from my native neighbourhood, because necessarily more familiar with them; let every reader throughout England look round him in his, and he will find others as interesting there.

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V. HARDWICK HALL

Mrs. Jameson has lately given a very vivid and charming account of this fine old place. I am not going to tread in her steps, but to describe the impression it made upon myself at different times, in my own way, and with reference to my own object.

My first visit to it was when I was a youth of about seventeen. I had heard nothing at all of it, and had no idea that it was an object of any particular interest. I was at Mansfield, and casually heard that the present Duke of Devonshire, its proprietor, was come of age, and that there, as at his other houses, his birth-day was to be kept by his tenants and the neighbouring peasantry in the old English style. The house lies about five miles to the north of Mansfield, not far from the Chesterfield road. I set off, and learning that there was a footway, I passed through one or two quiet, old-fashioned villages, through solitary fields and deep woody valleys, a road that for its beauty and out-of-the-world air delighted me exceedingly. I at length found myself at the entrance of a large old park. The tall towers of the hall had been my landmarks all the way, and now that unique building, standing on the broad, level plain, surrounded at a distance by the old oaks of the park, burst upon me with an unexpected effect. It was unlike anything I had seen; but there were solemn halls in the regions of poetry and romance, that my imagination immediately classed it amongst. I advanced toward it with indescribable feelings of wonder and delight. I could have wished that it had been standing in its ordinary solitude, for that seemed to my mind its true and natural state; but it was not so: around it swarmed crowds of rustic revellers, and I determined to take things as I found them; to consider this very scene as a feature of the olden time; and to see how it went, about the baronial dwellings in the feudal ages, on occasions like that.

It was not long before I came upon a man lying on his face under the trees,--he was dead drunk. Soon I passed another, and another, and another: a little farther, and they lay about like the slain on the outskirts of a battle. When I came into the open plain before the hall, the sound of a band of music which had probably been some time silent through the musicians themselves dining, reached me; I heard drunken songs and wild outcries mingling with it. All about the lawn were scattered clustered throngs. I saw barrels standing; spigots running; men catching their hats full, and running here and there, while others were snatching at their prize, and often spilling the ale on the ground. Sometimes there were two or three trying to drink out of a hat at once; others were stooping down to drink at the spigots; there were fighting, scuffling, clamour, and confusion. All round the hall people swarmed like bees. At the doors and gates dense masses were trying to force their way in; while stout fellows were thumping away at their sculls with huge staves, with an energy that one would have thought enough to kill them by dozens, but which seemed to make little impression.

While this was going on, being a slim youth, I slipped beneath the uplifted arm of a stout yeoman, and made a safe ingress. I stood astonished at the place into which I had entered. Those ample and lofty rooms, in which stood huge pieces of roast-beef on huge pewter dishes, and great leathern jacks, tankards, and modern jugs of ale, at which scores of people were eating and drinking as voraciously as if they had been fasting all the one-and-twenty years to do due honour to this great birth-day; while the servants were running to and fro, filling up foaming measures, which were emptied again with wonderful rapidity. Those vast kitchens too, with their mighty fireplaces, and tongs, and pokers, and spits fit for the kitchen of Polyphemus; with broiling cooks and hurrying menials, called on by twenty voices at once. I made my way to the front court, where, under canvass awnings, long tables were set out for the tenantry and yeomanry of the neighbourhood, admitted by ticket. O what a company of jolly, rosy, full-grown, well-fed fellows, was there, making no sham onset on the plum-pudding and roast-beef of Old England! The band kept up a triumphant din; but when it ceased for a moment, what a rattle of knives and forks, and a clatter of ale-cups, what a clamour of tongues and hearty laughter became perceptible! And all round the court, the walls were covered with swarms of men, that climbed up no trivial height to get a view of the jovial banquet, and many a cry was raised to throw up thither some of those good things. And sure enough, here went a piece of beef, and here a lump of pudding; and a score of hands caught at them; and a hundred voices joined in the roar of laughter as they were caught, or fell back again into the court, or flew over the wall amongst the scrambling crowd.

But suddenly there was in the midst of all this noise and jollity, a cry of horror; and it was soon seen that one of the pointed stones that stand at intervals on the top of the high wall all round the court, had disappeared. It had given way with a man who clung to it, had fallen upon him, and killed him on the spot. There was a momentary pause in the festivity; a great running together to the spot of the catastrophe; but the body was soon conveyed away to an outbuilding, and the tide of riot rolled on. It was doomed, however, to receive a second check; for another man, in the wild excitement of the time, and of the strong ale, sprang at one bound over a wall that stood on the edge of a precipice, and fell a shattered corpse into the hollow below. These were awful events, and cast over some of the revellers a gloom that would not disperse; but far the greater part were now too highly charged with birth-day ale to be capable of reflection. All around was Bacchanalian chaos. Singing, shouting, attempts at dancing, reeling, and tumbling. Bodies lay thickly strewn through court and hall, and far around on the lawn. Some gay sparks were, with mock respect, carried with much struggling and laughter, and laid in sheds and stables and under trees, and one especial dandy was deposited in a heap of soot. For myself, perhaps the only sober person there, I hastened away, resolving to revisit that fairy mansion in the time of its restored quiet.

And in what a far different aspect did it present itself when I next saw it; and with what a far different company did I witness it! It was on one of the most glorious days of a splendid summer that we passed under the shadow of its oaks, as happy and attached a company as ever met on earth. Ah! they are all dispersed now! Out of a dozen glad hearts, not more than three are living now. But let me forget that. We were a joyful band of tried friends then. All, except myself and a young Yorkshire damsel, light as a sylph, and lovely and frolic as a fairy, were in carriages; we were on horseback; and scarcely had we entered the park, when, as if the sight of its fine wide level had filled her with an irresistible desire to scour across it, the madcap gave her horse the rein, and darted away. Under the boughs of the oaks she stooped, and flew along with arrowy swiftness. Every moment I expected to see her caught by one of them, and dashed to the ground; but she was too practised a horsewoman for that: she cleared the trees; the deer bounded away as she came galloping towards them, and turned and gazed at her from a distance; the rooks and daws, and lapwings feeding on the turf, soared up and raised wild cries; but she sped on, and there was nothing for me to do but to follow. I spurred forwards, but it was only to see her rush, at the same reckless speed, down a deep descent, where one trip of her horse--and nothing was more likely--and she would have flown far over his head to certain death. Yet down she went, and down I followed; but ere I reached the bottom, she was urging her horse up as steep an ascent, on whose summit, as I approached it, I found her seated on her panting steed, laughing at her exploit and my face of wonder.

When we reached the Hall, there were all our friends in the court, and the kind-hearted old gentleman, the head of the party, standing at the great hall door, laughing heartily at the attempts of each of the youngsters in succession to walk blindfold up a single row of the flags that lead from the court-gates to the house. Every one began full of confidence; but the laughter and cries of the rest soon proclaimed the failure of the enterprise. When it came to the turn of our merry madcap, up she walked with a bold step, and course as strait as if guided by a clue, from gate to door. All at once exclaimed that she could see, and busy hands were soon at work to fasten the handkerchief so artfully round her head, that she could not possibly get a glimpse of daylight. Again she was led to the gate, and again she marched up to the door as quickly and directly as before. The wonder was great; but still it was asserted that she must see;--it was that fine Grecian nose of hers that permitted a glance down beside it, enough for the guidance of the spirited damsel; so handkerchief was bound on handkerchief, aslant and athwart, to exclude every possibility of seeing; and again she was set at the gate; and again went gaily and confidently to the door without one erring footstep. There was a general murmur of applause and wonder. I see that light and buoyant figure still advancing up the line of flags; I see those golden locks dancing in the sunshine as she went; I see that lovely countenance, those blue and laughing eyes, full of a merry triumph, as her friends unbound her beautiful head. I see the same glad creature, all vivacity and happiness, now sitting on the warm turf, now bounding up long flights of stairs; now standing, to the terror of her companions, on the jutting edge of a ruinous tower;--and can it be true, that that fairy creature has long been dead! the light of those lovely eyes extinguished! those lovely locks soiled with the damp churchyard earth! Alas! we know too well how readily such things come to pass. But no black presage came before us then. All around was summer sunshine; we explored every nook in that old ivied ruin, the older house of Hardwick, in which the Queen of Scots was confined; paced the celebrated banqueting-room, adorned with the figures of Gog and Magog, with an angel flying between them with a drawn sword. We rambled over the leaden roof, and in the happy folly of youth, marked each other’s foot upon it, with duly inscribed names and date. We went all through the present house; through its tapestried rooms, along its gallery, into its ancient chapel, and up to its armoury, a tower on the roof; and finally adjourned to the neat little inn at Glapwell, to a merry tea, and thence home.

My next visit to Hardwick was in the autumn of 1834. My companions now were, my true associate for the last seventeen years, and one little boy and girl, who, as we advanced up the park, rambled on before us in eager delight. Twenty years had passed since that youthful party I have just mentioned was there;--twenty years to me of many sober experiences; of naturally extended knowledge; of observation of our old English houses in various parts of the kingdom: but as I once more approached Hardwick, I felt that it had lost none of its effect,--nay, that that effect was actually increased: it was more unworldly, more unlike any thing else, or any thing belonging to common life; more poetical, more crowned and overshadowed with beautiful and solemn associations, than it was when I first beheld it in my youth. The distance you have to advance, from the moment you emerge from amongst the trees of the park into a full view of the Hall, until you reach it, tends greatly to heighten its effect. There it stands, bold and alone, on a wide unobstructed plain.

No trees crowd upon it, or break, for a moment, the view; it lifts itself up in all its solemn and unique grandeur to the blue heavens, like a fairy palace, in the days of old romance. It is a thing expressly of by-gone times--darkened indeed by age, but not injured. Unlike modern mansions, you see no bustle of human life about it; no gardens and shrubberies; but wings of grey, and not very high walls, extending to a considerable distance over the plain, from each end of the house, inclosing what gardens there are, and paddocks. You see no offices appended,--it seems a place freed from all mortal necessities,--inhabited by beings above them. All offices, in fact, that are not included within the regular walls of the house, are removed to a considerable distance with the farm-yard. As you draw near, its grave aspect strikes you more strongly; you become more sensible of its loftiness, of the vast size of its windows, and of that singular parapet which surmounts it. It is an oblong building, with three square towers at each end, both projecting from, and rising much higher than, the body of the building. The parapet surmounting these towers is a singular piece of open-work of sweeping lines of stone, displaying the initials of the builder, E. S.--Elizabeth Shrewsbury,--surmounted with the coronet of an earl. On all sides of the house these letters and crown strike your eye, and the whole parapet appears so unlike what is usually wrought in stone, that you cannot help thinking that its singular builder, old Bess of Hardwick, must have cut out the pattern in paper with her scissars. It is difficult to say, whether this remarkable woman had a greater genius for architecture or matrimony. She was the daughter of John Hardwick of Hardwick, and sole heiress of this estate. She married four times, always contriving to get the power over her husband’s estates, by direct demise, or by intermarrying the children of their former marriages with those of former husbands, so that she brought into the family immense estates, and laid the foundation of four dukedoms. Her genius for architecture is sufficiently conspicuous in this unique pile, and in the engraving of Worksop Manor in Thoroton’s Nottinghamshire, as erected by her, though since destroyed by fire,--a building full of the same peculiar character. It is said that it having been foretold her by some astrologer, that the moment she ceased to build would be the moment of her death, she was perpetually engaged in building. At length, as she was raising a set of almshouses at Derby, a severe frost set in. All measures were resorted to necessary to enable the men to continue their work: their mortar was dissolved with hot water, and when that failed, with hot ale; but the frost triumphed--the work ceased, and Bess of Hardwick expired! This noble building I trust will long continue to perpetuate her memory, lifting aloft on its parapet her conspicuous E. S.

All the lower walls surrounding the courts and paddocks, are finished with similar open-work of bands of curved and knotted stone. A colonnade runs along each side of the house between the projecting towers, and the entrance-front is enclosed by that court of which I have already spoken; having its walls mounted, at intervals, with quaint pyramidal stones. On this side of the house a fine valley opens itself, filled with noble woods, a large water, and displaying beyond a hilly and pleasant country.

At about a hundred yards from the Hall stand the remains of the old one. The progress of dilapidation upon this building, since my last visit, was striking. Then you could ascend to the leaden roof; but now means were adopted to prevent that, on account of its unsafe state; in fact, the stairs themselves have partly fallen in; many of the floors of the rooms have fallen through; the ceiling of the celebrated banqueting-room itself has given way by places, and in others is propped up by stout pieces of timber. The glory of Gog and Magog will soon be annihilated, or they will be left on the walls, exposed to the astonished gaze of the passer-by, as are some stucco alto-relievoes of stags under forest trees on the chamber walls, with ivy drooping over them from the top of the walls above, and tall trees that have sprung on the hearths of destroyed rooms below, waving before them. This is the outward aspect of those old halls where Mary Stuart, and the almost equally unfortunate Arabella Stuart, once dwelt. Within, the present hall is as perfect a specimen of an Elizabethan house, as can be wished. “The state apartments are lofty and spacious, with numerous transom windows admitting a profusion of light. The hall is hung with very curious tapestry, which appears to be as ancient as the fifteenth century. On one part of it, is a representation of boar-hunting, and on another of otter-hunting. In the chapel, which is on the first floor, is a very rich and curious altar-cloth, thirty feet long, hung round the rails of the altar, with figures of saints under canopies wrought in needlework. The great dining-room is on the same floor, over the chimney-piece of which are the arms of the Countess of Shrewsbury, with the date of 1597. The most remarkable apartments in this interesting edifice are the state room, or room of audience, as it is called, and the gallery. The former is sixty-four feet nine inches, by thirty-three feet, and twenty-six feet four inches high. At one end of it is a canopy of state, and in another part a bed, the hangings of which are very ancient. This room is hung with tapestry, in which is represented the story of Ulysses; over this are figures, rudely executed in plaster, in bas-relief, amongst which is a representation of Diana and her nymphs. The gallery is about 170 feet long and 26 wide, extending the whole length of the eastern side of the house; and hung with tapestry, on a part of which is the date of 1478.”[11] The house has not only been kept in repair, but exactly in the state in which its builder left it, as to furniture and fitting up, with a very few exceptions, and these in the most accordant taste. For instance, the Duke of Devonshire has brought hither his family pictures from Chatsworth, so as to make this fine gallery the family picture gallery. Not another painting has been suffered to enter. He has also now added a most appropriate feature to the entrance hall, a statue of the Queen of Scots, of the size of life, by Westmacott. It stands on a pedestal of the same stone, bearing an armorial escutcheon.

[11] Lyson’s Magna Britannia.

Mrs. Jameson expresses strongly the effect of the huge escutcheons, the carved arms thrust out from the wall, intended to hold lights, and the great antlers, as she first entered this hall by night; but what would have been the effect of seeing Mary Stuart herself standing full opposite, as if to receive her to this place of her former captivity.[12] To her, and to every imaginative person, the effect must have been powerful, and solemnly impressive. Gray the poet, instead of thinking that the Queen of Scots had but just walked down into the park for half an hour, would have seen her visibly here. I have seen the portraits of Queen Mary, both here and in Holyrood, but none of them give me a thousandth part of the idea of what she must have been, compared with this statue.

[12] I do not mean literally that this house was the place of her captivity, it was the old one.

With these two exceptions, both of which tend to strengthen the legitimate influence of the place, all besides is exactly as it was. You ascend the broad, easy oak stairs; you see the chapel by their side, with all its brocaded seats and cushions; you advance along vast passages, where stand huge chests filled with coals, and having ample crypts in the walls for chips and firewood. Here are none of the modern contrivances to conceal these things; but they stand there before you, with an air of rude abundance, according well with the ancient mixture of baronial state and simplicity. You go on and on, through rooms all hung with rich old tapestry, glowing with pictorial scenes from scriptural or mythological history; all furnished with antique cabinets, massy tables, high chairs covered with crimson velvet or ornamental satin. You behold the very furniture used by Queen Mary; the very bed she worked with her own fingers. But perhaps that spacious gallery, extending along the whole front of the house, gives the imagination a more feudal feeling than all. Its length, nearly two hundred feet; its great height; its stupendous windows, composing nearly the whole front, rattling and wailing as the wind sweeps along them. What a magnificent sough, and even thunder of sound, must fill that wild old place in stormy weather. There you see arranged, high and low, portraits of most of the characters belonging to the family or history of the place, of all degrees of execution. It is not my intention to give any details, either of those or of the furniture; that having been done by Mrs. Jameson with the accuracy and feeling that particularly distinguish her. I aim only at imparting the general effect. It is enough therefore to say that there are “many beautiful women and brave men:” portraits of bluff Harry VIII.; those of the rival queens, Mary and Elizabeth; her keeper, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and his masculine wife, Elizabeth of Hardwick; and the philosophers, Boyle and Hobbs. One interesting particular of Mrs. Jameson’s statement, however, we could not verify:--the tradition of the nocturnal meeting of the rival queens in the gallery. We never heard of it before; nor could we now find, by the most particular inquiries, even among the domestics, any knowledge of such a tradition. It was as new to them as to us; and we therefore set it down as a pleasant poetical tradition of the fair author’s own planting.

The Duke was come hither from Chatsworth, to spend a week, and he seemed to have come in the spirit befitting the place; for there was scarcely more than its usual establishment; scarcely less than its usual quietness perceptible. The Duke himself we had met on the road, and in his absence were shewn through the apartments which he uses on these occasions; and it had a curious effect amid all this staid and sombre antiquity, to find, on a plain oak table in the library, the newspapers of the day; the Athenæum, Court Journal, the Spectator, and Edinburgh Review; the works of Dr. Channing; and Hood’s Tylney Hall, just then published. What an antithesis! what a mighty contrast between the spirit of the past and the present!--the life and stir of the politics and the passing literature of the day, in a place belonging in history, character, and all its appointments, to an age so different, and so long gone by, with all its people and concerns.

Nothing, perhaps, could mark more vividly the vast changes in the manners and circumstances of different ages in England; the wonderful advance in luxury and refinement of the modern ones, than by passing from Hardwick to the old Hall of Haddon, built in 1427, when the feudal system was in its strength; when the manor-house was but one remove from the castle; to visit this with its rude halls, its massive tables, its floors made from the planks of one mighty oak, its ancient arras and quaint stucco-work; and then pass over to Chatsworth, only a few miles distant, where to the past all the splendour of the present has been added; modern architecture, and all its contrivances for domestic convenience, comfort, and elegance; pictures, statuary, books, magnificent furniture, glowing carpets; every thing that the art, wealth, and ingenuity of this great nation can bring together into one princely mansion. But as my limits will not admit of this, I shall content myself with a survey of a more domestic kind, yet connected with the poetical history of our own day--Annesley and Newstead.

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