VI. ANNESLEY HALL AND HUCKNALL
Early in the spring of 1834, I walked over with Charles Pemberton from Nottingham, to see Annesley Hall, the birth-place and patrimony of Mary Chaworth; a place made of immortal interest by the early attachment of Lord Byron to this lady, and by the graphic strength and deep passion with which he has recorded in his poems this most influential circumstance of his youth.
Annesley lies about nine miles north of Nottingham, itself--the scene of his first and most lasting attachment--Newstead, his patrimonial abode--and Hucknall, his burial-place; forming the three points of a triangle, each of whose sides may be about two miles in length. Yet, although Newstead and Hucknall have been visited by shoals of admirers, this place, perhaps altogether the most interesting of the three, has been wholly neglected. Few, or none of them, have thought it worth while to go so little out of their way to see it; perhaps not one in a hundred has known that it was so near; probably to those who inquired about it, it might be replied, “you see that wooded ridge--there lies Annesley. You see all that is worth seeing; it is a poor tumble-down place:” and so they have been satisfied, and have returned in their wisdom to their own place, at a hundred, or a thousand, miles distance. But what is still more remarkable, while Mr. Murray has sent down an artist into this neighbourhood to make drawings of Hucknall church and Newstead for his Life and Poems of Lord Byron; and while others have encompassed sea and land to give us thrice reiterated landscapes illustrative of his biography and writings, and have even presented us with fictitious portraits of the most interesting characters connected with his fortunes,--they have totally passed over Annesley as altogether unworthy of their notice, though it is a spot, at once, full of a melancholy charm; of a sad, yet old English beauty; a spot, where every sod, and stone, and tree, and hearth, is rife with the most strange and touching memories in human existence; and where the genuine likeness of Mary Chaworth, in the most lovely and happy moments of her life, is to be found.
Need I pause a moment to account for this? Does not the discerning public always tread in one track? As sheep follow one leader, and traverse the heath in a long extended line, so does the public follow the first trumpeter of the praises of one place. It has been fashionable to visit Newstead, and it has been visited;--but as Annesley was not at first thought of, it has not been visited at all. Well! we have visited it; and if there be any power in the most melancholy of mortal fortunes--in the retracing the day-dreams of an illustrious spirit--in the gathering of all English feelings round the strongest combination of the glories of nature, with the aspect of decay in the fortunes and habitation of an ancient race, we shall visit it again and again.[13]
[13] Since this was published in the Athenæum in the autumn of 1834, Washington Irving has published his interesting visit to Newstead and Annesley.
That wooded ridge was our landmark from the first step of our journey, and we soon reached Hucknall. The approach to Hucknall is pleasant; the place itself is a long and unpicturesque village. Count Gamba is said to have been struck with its resemblance to Missolonghi. Sixteen years have now passed since the funeral of Lord Byron took place here, and yet it seems to me but as yesterday. His admirers, in after ages, will naturally picture to themselves the church, on that occasion, overflowing with the intelligent and poetical part of the population of the neighbourhood. A poet who had spent a good deal of his boyhood and youth in it--whose patrimonial estate lay here--who had gone hence, and won so splendid a renown--whose life had been a series of circumstances and events as striking and romantic as his poetry--who had finally been cut down in his prime, in so brilliant an attempt to restore the freedom and ancient glory of Greece--would naturally be supposed to come back to the tomb of his ancestors, amidst the confluence of a thousand strongly-excited hearts. But it was not so. There was a considerable number of persons present, but the church was by no means crowded, and the spectators were, with very few exceptions, of that class which is collected, by idle curiosity on the approach of any not very wonderful procession; who would have collected to gaze as much at the funeral of his lordship’s grandfather, or his own, though he had not written a line of poetry, or lifted the sword of freedom;--probably, with threefold eagerness at that of a wealthy cit, because there would have been more of bustle and assuming blazonry about it. With the exception of the undertaker’s hired company; of Sir John Cam Hobhouse, and his lordship’s attorney, Mr. Hanson; his Greek servant Tita, and his old follower Fletcher, the rest of the attendants were the villagers, and a certain number of people from Nottingham, of a similar class, and led by similar motives. There was not a score of those who are called “the respectable” from Nottingham; scarcely one of the gentry of the county. This strange fact can only be accounted for by the circumstance that Nottingham and its vicinity are famous for the manufacture of lace and stockings, but, like many other manufacturing districts, possess no such decided attachment to literature. Many readers there are, undoubtedly, in both town and country, but readers chiefly for pastime--for the filling up of a certain space between and after business--and a laudable way too of so filling it; but not readers from any unconquerable passion for, or attachment to, literature for its own sake. A few literary persons have lived in or about the neighbourhood, but these are the exception; the character of the district is manufacturing and political, but by no means literary, nor ever was; therefore, the strongest feeling with which Lord Byron was regarded there, was a political one. Though an aristocrat in birth and bearing, he was a very thorough radical in principle. Hence, he had only the sympathy of the radicals with him, those consisting chiefly of the working classes. The whigs of the town and the gentry of the county, chiefly tories, regarded him only in a political light, and paid him not the respect of their presence.
The religious world had a high prejudice against him for his manifold sins of speech, opinion, and life; they of course were not there. No party had so much more admiration of genius--conception of the lofty, intellectual achievements of the noble poet, discernment of the abundant qualifying, and, in fact, overbalancing grace and beauty, and even religious sentiment, which breathed through many of his writings--for no man had more ennobling and truly religious feelings rooted in his soul by the contemplation of the magnificence of God’s handiworks in creation; or felt occasionally, more deeply the spiritualizing influence that pervades nature;--no party had so much more of this tone of mind, than of their political or sectarian bias, as to forget all those minor things in his wonderful talent--his early death--his redeeming qualities, and last deeds--and the honour he had conferred, as an everlasting heritage, on this country.
In the evening, after the people who had attended the funeral were dispersed, I went down to the church and entered the vault. There was a reporter from one of the London newspapers copying the inscriptions on the coffins by the light of a lamp; and a great hobble-de-hoy of a farmer’s lad was kneeling on the case that contained the poet’s heart, and lolling on the coffin with his elbows, as he watched the reporter, in a manner that indicated the most perfect absence of all thought of the place where he was, or the person on whose remains he was perched.
In the churchyard, a group of the villagers were eagerly discussing the particulars of the funeral, and the character of the deceased. One man attempted to account for the apparently indifferent manner in which the clergyman performed the burial service, by his having understood that he felt himself disgraced by having to bury an atheist. “An atheist!” exclaimed an old woman, “tell me that he was an atheist! D’ ye think an atheist would be beloved by his servants as this man was? Why, they fret themselves almost to death about him. And d’ ye think they would have made so much of him in foreign parts? Why, they almost worshipped him as a god in Grecia!” giving the final a a sound almost as long as one’s finger. This was conclusive--the wondering auditors had nothing to reply--they quietly withdrew their several ways, and I mine.
The church was broken into soon after the funeral, and the black cloth with which the pulpit was hung on this occasion, carried away: and this is not the only forcible entry that has been made through Lord Byron’s being buried there; for the clerk told me, that when Moore came to see it with Colonel Wildman, being impatient of the clerk’s arrival, who lives at some distance, the poet had contrived to climb up to a window, open it, and get in, where the worthy bearer of the keys found him, to his great astonishment.
The indifference shewn by the people of Nottingham towards the great poet, would not seem to have abated, if we are to judge by the entries in an album kept by the clerk, and which was presented for that purpose about twelve years ago by Dr. Bowring. The signatures of visiters in 1834 amounted to upwards of eight hundred, amongst which appear the names of people from North and South America, Russia, the Indies, and various other distant places and countries, but few from Nottingham or its shire, who might be supposed to be amongst the best read and best informed portion of its population. This, however, must be allowed, that the names entered in the clerk’s book afford no just criterion of the number or quality of the visiters to the poet’s tomb, as many of the most poetical and refined minds might naturally feel reluctant to place their signatures in such a medley of mawkish sentiment as is always found in such albums. A few clergymen, we, however, were pleased to see, had there placed their names; and some dissenting ministers had ventured so far as to do likewise, and to preach some pretty little sermons over him in the book, which opens thus:
TO THE Immortal and Illustrious Fame OF LORD BYRON, THE FIRST POET OF THE AGE IN WHICH HE LIVED, THESE TRIBUTES, WEAK AND UNWORTHY OF HIM, BUT IN THEMSELVES SINCERE, Are Inscribed, WITH THE DEEPEST REVERENCE.
July, 1825.
At this period no monument--not even so simple a slab as records the death of the humblest villager in the neighbourhood--had been erected to mark the spot in which all that is mortal of the greatest man of our day reposes; and he has been buried more than twelve months.--July, 1825.
So should it be: let o’er this grave No monumental banners wave; Let no word speak--no trophy tell Aught that may break the charming spell, By which, as on this sacred ground He kneels, the pilgrim’s heart is bound. A still, resistless influence, Unseen, but felt, binds up the sense; While every whisper seems to breathe Of the mighty dead who sleeps beneath. --And though the master-hand is cold, And though the lyre it once controlled Rests mute in death; yet from the gloom Which dwells about this holy tomb, Silence breathes out more eloquent, Than epitaph or monument. One laurel wreath--the poet’s crown-- Is here by hand unworthy thrown; One tear that so much worth should die, Fills, as I kneel, my sorrowing eye; This is the simple offering, Poor, but earnest, which I bring. The tear has dried; the wreath shall fade, The hand that twined it soon be laid In cold obstruction--but the fame Of him who tears and wreath shall claim From most remote posterity, While Britain lives, can never die!--J. B.
The following list contains almost all the names that are known to the public, or are distinguished by rank or peculiarity of circumstance:--
The Count Pietro Gamba, Jan. 31st, 1825. The Duke of Sussex visited Lord Byron’s tomb, October 1824. Lieut.-Colonel Wildman. Lieut.-Colonel Charles Lallemand. The Count de Blankensee, Chamberlain to the King of Prussia, Sept. 7th, 1825. 1825, Sept. 23. William Fletcher visited his ever-to-be-lamented lord and master’s tomb. 10th month. Jeremiah Wiffen, Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire. 1826, July 30. C. R. Pemberton, a wanderer. 1828, Jan. 21. Thomas Moore. Sept. 12. Sir Francis S. Darwin, and party. Nov. 21. Lieut.-Colonel D’Aguilar. ------ Eliza D’Aguilar. Dec. 1. Lieut.-Colonel James Hughes of Llysdulles. 1829, Sept. 3. Lord Byron’s Sister, the Honourable Augusta Mary Leigh, visited this church. 1831, May 17. Rev. Joseph Gilbert, Nottingham. ------ Ann Gilbert (formerly Ann Taylor of Ongar). Aug. 22. Lieut.-Gen. and Mrs. Need, Fountain Dale. 1832, Jan. 8. M. Van Buren, Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States. ------ Washington Irving. ------ John Van Buren, New York, U. S. America. Dec. 27. Lady Lammine, Salendale. 1834, Feb. 15. Domingo Maria Ruiz de la Vega, Ex-Deputy of the Spanish Cortes, from Granada. Feb. 23. J. Bellairs, Esq., visited Newstead Abbey, and Lord Byron’s tomb, such as it is--one of his greatest admirers of the day! ------ W. Arundale, of London, accompanied the said J. B.! March 8. J. Murray, Jun. Albemarle-street, London.
Although we did not, at this time, enter even the churchyard, thoughts and feelings which had presented themselves in this very spot, on the day of Lord Byron’s funeral, again returned.
His birth, his death, dark fortunes, and brief life, Wondrous and wild as his impetuous lay, Passed through my mind; his wanderings, loves, and strife; I saw him marching on from day to day: The kilted boy, roaming mid mountains grey; The noble youth, whose life-blood was a flame, In the bright land of demi-gods astray; The monarch of the lyre, whose haughty name Spread on from shore to shore, the watchword of all fame;
And then, a lifeless form! The spell was broke; The wizard’s wild enchantment was destroyed; He who at will did dreadful forms invoke, And called up beautiful spirits from the void, Back to the scenes in which he early joyed, He came but knew it not. In vain earth’s bloom-- In vain the sky’s clear beauty, which oft buoyed His spirit to delight; an early doom Brought him in glory’s arms to the awaiting tomb.
He lies--how quietly that heart which yet Never could slumber, slumbers now for aye! He lies--where first, love, fame, his young soul set With passionate power on flame; where gleam the grey Turrets of Newstead, through the solemn sway Of verdurous woods; and where that hoary crown Of lofty trees, “in circular array,” Shroud Mary’s Hall, who thither may look down, And think how he loved her, ay, more than his renown.
ANNESLEY HALL.
From Hucknall we ascended chiefly through open, wild lands:--to our right the wooded valley of Newstead, every moment spreading itself out more broadly; and before us the forest heights of Annesley, growing more bold and attractive. A wild gusty breeze, and dark flying clouds, added sensibly to the deep solitude and picturesque character of the scene. We soon passed a cottage, having beside it an old brick pillar surmounted with a stone ball, and before it an avenue of lime trees, which appeared some time to have formed the boundary or place of entrance to the park; then a new lodge, and found ourselves at the foot of the steep hill, styled in Byron’s Dream--
A gentle hill, Green, and of mild declivity.
The greenness and mildness of declivity, however, we afterwards found were on the side by which Byron and Mary Chaworth had ascended it from her house; on this side it is a remarkably barren and extremely steep hill. However, up we went, and on the summit discovered the strict accuracy of his delineation of it.
I saw two beings in the hues of youth, Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill, Green, and of mild declivity; the last, As ’t were the cape of a long ridge of such, Save that there was no sea to lave its base, But a most living landscape, and the wave Of woods and corn-fields, and the abodes of men Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke Arising from such rustic roofs:--the hill Was crowned with a peculiar diadem Of trees in circular array, so fixed, Not by the sport of Nature, but of man.
A most living landscape it is indeed, including all the objects so vividly here given; amongst them, the most conspicuous, the house of his living ancestors, and the house where he has joined them in death; and extending from the woody skirts of Sherwood Forest to the mill-crowned heights of Nottingham. By the way, a strange mistake of Moore’s here presented itself. Immediately after the passage just quoted, Byron proceeds to speak further of this young pair, and says:--
Even now she loved another, And on the summit of that hill she stood, Looking afar, if yet her lover’s steed Kept pace with her expectancy, and flew.
Moore, commenting on this, tells us that the image of the lover’s steed was suggested by the Nottingham race-ground,--a race-ground actually nine miles off, and moreover lying in a hollow and totally hidden from view; had the lady’s eyes, indeed, been so marvellously good as to discern a horse nine miles off! Mary Chaworth, in fact, was looking for her lover’s steed along the road as it winds up the common from Hucknall.
But a stranger discovery soon made us forget this Irish bull. We had no sooner reached the summit of the hill, than to our inexpressible astonishment we found the very trees so strikingly pointed out in this most interesting poem, “the trees in circular array”--cut down! These trees, and none else, cut down! There were the trees crowning the whole length of the “long ridge” standing in their greyness; and there were the stumps of “the trees in circular array” in the earth at our feet! An immediate and irresistible conviction forced itself on our minds; but we write it not; we merely state the fact, that that memorable landmark of love, made interesting to every age by the poetry of passion, had been removed. Our indignation may be imagined when we found that not only had the trees been cut down, but there was an actual attempt to cut down the hill itself, by making a gravel-pit there;--of all places in the world, to think of making a gravel-pit on the top of that steep hill, when it might be got from the bottom of any hill in the neighbourhood. We have since been told that it was the intention of its present proprietor, the husband of Mary Chaworth, to have cut down all the trees upon that hill; but that his design was prevented by the interference of his eldest son, to whom the estate descends by entail; and that he was compelled by the spirited conduct of the son, to plant the hill afresh; but he has complied with the letter, overlooking the spirit of the agreement, in the most perfect style, having planted the sides of the hill all over with fir-trees, so that it will in a short time shroud the place, and smother it completely from the view.[14]
[14] Mentioning the felling of these trees to a mechanic soon afterwards,--“Trees,” I added, “that might be seen so far.” “Seen, sir!” he exclaimed, “those trees were seen all over the world!” He meant through the medium of Byron’s poetry. It was an expression, and accompanied by an energy of feeling, that would have done honour to any man.
The indignation we felt on this occasion, perhaps, made us more sensibly alive to the character of the place. Byron, in some juvenile verses, exclaims--
Hills of Annesley, bleak and barren, Where my thoughtless childhood strayed, How the northern tempests warring, How! above thy tufted shade.
So strongly did the wind drive over this ridge, that we could scarcely make head against it; and remembering to have heard of a temple which formerly crowned this hill, but had been blown down either by tempest or war, we looked amongst the broken ground, and perceived considerable remains of masonry, probably the foundations of the temple: nor can a finer situation for such an erection be imagined.
The trees which crowned “the ridge,” and which, at a distance, appeared large, we soon saw, were of stunted growth, with tops curled, and sturdy, as if accustomed to wrestle with the tempests. An avenue of them stretched away into distant woods. Large decayed branches lay here and there beneath, indicating a solitude and neglect of the place pleasing to the imagination. Before us, across a descending slope--the hill of mild and green declivity--extended, right and left, noble woods; and in the midst of them, in the midst of a smaller crescent of wood, we descried the tall grey chimneys and ivy-covered walls and gables of the old Hall, and the top of the church-tower. We hastened down,--observing on our left, in an old forest-slope, a large herd of deer, which had a good effect,--and struck into a footpath that led directly up towards the house. As we drew nearer, the old building, hung with luxuriant ivy and shrouded among tall trees, far overtopping its tall chimneys; amid shrubberies of wondrous growth of evergreens, among which are conspicuous, three remarkable ilexes, with black-green foliage crowning their short thick black trunks, and with grassy openings sloping down to the warm south; struck us forcibly with its picturesque and silent beauty. We found ourselves now, apparently at the back of a high garden-wall, by the side of which ran a row of lime trees, which seemed at one time to have been pollarded and trained espalier-wise, but had now sent up heads of a luxuriant and fantastic growth. On our other hand, lay a wood, from which the thickets being cleared away, left us ample view of its ivy-mantled trees, and the ground beneath them one green expanse of dog’s-mercury and fresh leaves of the blue-bell. Tufts of primroses were scattered all about, and the wood-anemonies trembled in the wind. But over all, such a mantle of deep silence seemed cast, that it reminded us of some enchanted place in the fairy and forest-stories of Tieck.
At the top of this road, turning suddenly to the left, we found ourselves before
The massy gate of that old hall,
from which Byron declares that,
Mounting his steed he went his way, And ne’er repassed that hoary threshold more.
But all was silent and lifeless. No person was to be discerned in the court to which it opened; there were no signs of life except in the cooing of some pigeons and the cawing of certain jackdaws. We went round the outbuildings into the churchyard, which is level with the top of the court-wall, and looks directly into it. We leaned over a massy parapet, and looked down into this court; the spell of an invincible silence seemed to cover the whole place. In the gravel walks which ran round the court, there were traces of carriage wheels; but you felt as if no carriage with the bustle and vivacity of active life could ever more enter there. In the centre of the grass-plot, a basin surrounded by a hedge of honeysuckle, and which had doubtless once possessed the life and beauty of a fountain, now shewed only water, black, stagnant, and covered with masses of yellow moss. We were close to the house; its curtained windows gave it an air of habitation; but no sound nor visible indication of the presence of man was about it. We walked along the green and picturesque churchyard: the back of the buildings on this side of the court bounded part of it; they were in the last state of decay; wide gaps in the roof gave us a view into dark and dreary stables. We came to the farm-yard, also joining the churchyard: it had the same aspect of desertion. There was neither cattle nor ricks in it, but the brandreth, or frame on which a rick once stood, littered with decaying straw, and its air of desolation made more striking by a piece of old wooden balustrade cast upon it. There were barn-doors standing wide open; and the litter of the yard even appeared dusty and grey with age. You felt sure no human foot could have disturbed it for years. We descended from the churchyard, and went round the farm-buildings once more towards the old “massy gate.” At the back of these buildings were nailed the trophies of the gamekeeper by hundreds, we might, we think, say thousands; wild cats, dried to blackness, stretched their downward heads and legs from the wall; hawks, magpies, and jays, hung in tattered remnants; but all grey and even green with age; and the heads of birds in plenteous rows, nailed beak upward, were dried and shrivelled by the sun, and winds, and frosts, of many summers and winters, till their distinctive characters were lost. They all seemed to speak the same silent language:--to say, Ay, this was once the abode of a prosperous old family; here were abundance of friends, and dependents going to and fro; horses and hounds going forth in vociferous joy; abroad was the chase and the sound of the gun,--within were spits turning, and good fellowship; but all this is long since over--a blight and a sorrow have fallen here.
We now approached the “massy gateway” by a wide entrance, which a pair of great doors had once closed--one of these had fallen from its hinges, and the other swung in the wind, banging against its post with a hollow sound, whose echoes told of vacancy. Above the gateway, the vane on the cupola turned to and fro in the gusty air, with a dreary queek-quake, queek-quake: all besides was still. We stood and looked at each other with an expression that said,--Did you ever see any thing like this? At this moment an old grey dog came softly out of the court--the first living thing we had seen except the jackdaws and the pigeons; quietly he came, as if he too felt the nature of his abode. It was with no vivacity of action, or noisy bark: he stood and silently wagged his tail; and as we drew near him, as silently retreated into the court. We entered this silent place, and looked around. The house formed its western end; stables and coach-houses formed its north and eastern sides; the south was open to the shrubbery. The ivy hung in huge masses from all the walls. In the eastern end was the “massy gateway” mentioned by Byron, arched over, and surmounted by a clock and cupola. So profoundly lifeless and deserted seemed the place, that though the clock-finger pointed to the true time of the day--exactly half-past twelve o’clock--our imaginations refused for some time to believe that the clock could actually be going: we felt positive astonishment when it proved to us that it really did.
We now resolved to ascertain at the house itself, if it had any living inhabitants; and on approaching the hall-door, we heard a sound in a stable; we went in, and descried, in a dismal room adjoining it, a man sitting by a fire in a corner, and a dog lying on the hearth. The man and the place were alike forlorn. They were dirty, squalid, desolate. We had said, who could have supposed so abandoned a spot so near Nottingham? but who could have imagined so wild and banditti-like a being as that man, within so short a distance of a large town? His dress and person had every character of reckless neglect; his black hair hung about his pale face; he had no handkerchief about his neck; he sate and devoured his dinner, which he appeared to have cooked with his own hands, looking up at us with ruffian stupidity, as he answered our questions with a surly bluntness, without ceasing to help himself, with a large pocket-knife, and no fork, to his meal. He told us we could not see the house--master never let it be seen. When asked, why? he could not tell--but it was so; but we might ask the old woman in the house. Away we went, and a jewel of an old woman we found.
She was the very beau ideal of an old servant; all simplicity and fidelity, full of the history of the family; wrapped up in its fortunes and its honours--a part and parcel of the race and place, for she had been in the family above sixty years,--being taken, as she said, when she was ten years old, by Mary Chaworth’s grandfather, and put to school, and taught to read and write, to mark and to flower; for she would, he said, be a nice sharp girl to wait on him. “Oh! he was a pretty man--a very pretty, well-behaved gentleman,” said she with a sigh. Old Nanny Marsland, for such was her name, seemed a pure and unsophisticated creature; the regular influx of visiters had not spoiled her; the curious and the pert, and the idle, the insolent and the foolish, had not troubled the clear sincere current of her thoughts; had not made her heart and spirit turn inward, in self-defence, and converted her into the subtle and parrot shew-woman.
She never dreamt of any thing being blameable that had been done by any of the family. She delighted to talk of the Hall and its people; and feeling her solitude,--for she was the sole regular occupant,--some one to talk to was a luxury. Could we have hoped for a creature more to our hearts’ desire? Under her guidance we progressed through this most interesting old place; thoughts and feelings, never to be forgotten, springing up at every step.
The house is not large; and desertion had stamped within, the same characters as on all without. Damp had disfigured the walls; a fire of cheerful pine-logs blazed in the hall and in the kitchen; but everywhere else was the chill and gloom of the old neglected mansion. All the more modern furniture, and most of the paintings, had been removed, and thereby the keeping of the abode was but the better preserved. We know not how to describe the feelings with which we traversed these rooms. It was as if the hall of one of our old English families had been hidden beneath a magic cloud for ages, and suddenly revealed to our eyes, now, at a time when every thing belonging to this country is so much changed;--houses, men, manners, and opinions. When we entered the old-fashioned family hall, standing as it stood ages ago, furnished as it was ages ago, with its antique stove, its antique sofas, if so they can be called, made of wood carved, and curiously painted, and cushioned with scarlet, standing on each side of the fire; the antique French timepiece on its bracket; its various old cabinets and tables standing by walls; and its floor of large and small squares of alternating black marble and white stone--the domestic sanctuary of a race whom we regard as our progenitors, but widely different to ourselves, seemed suddenly revealed to us, and we could almost have expected to see the rough, boisterous squire, or the stately baron, issue from one of the side-doors; or to hear the rustling of the silken robe of some long-waisted dame, who could occasionally leap a five-barred gate as readily as she could dance at the Christmas festival; or one of high and solemn beauty, in whom devotion, deep, uninquiring and undoubting, was the great principle and passion of life; to whom the domestic chapel was a holy place; the chaplain her daily counsellor; and the distribution of alms her daily occupation. We saw before us the hearthstone of a race that lived in the full enjoyment of aristocratic ascendancy, when rank was old and undisputed; when neither mercantile wealth had pressed on their nobility on the one hand, nor popular knowledge and rights on the other; when the gentry lived only to be reverenced and obeyed, every one in the midst of his own forests and domains as a king, and led forth his tenants and serfs to the wars of his country, or to the chase of his own wide wilds; when field sports and jovial feastings, and love-making, were the life-employment of men and women, who took rank and power as an unquestioned heritage, and never troubled their brain with gathering knowledge: and all below them were supposed to be happy, because they were ignorant and submissive.
This hall, which occupies the centre of the building, is nearly sixty feet long by thirty wide, supported by two elliptic arches and Ionic pillars. The middle of the room is now occupied by a billiard-table, which formerly stood in an upper room, called the terrace-room, of which we shall speak presently. The great door, entering from the porch, was secured by a massy bar of wood which had been rudely let into the walls at each end, at the time of the riots of the Reform Bill, when Nottingham Castle was burnt, and when the mob were expected here, who owed the proprietor a piece of retribution, and actually attempted to burn his house at Colwick; whence his wife, Mary Chaworth, only escaped by being carried from her bed, where illness had long confined her, and hidden for some hours in the shrubbery during excessive rain, and afterwards conveyed across the Trent in a boat. At the lower end of this hall an easy flight of steps leads to the upper apartments. Near the fire, at the upper end, a few steps lead into a beautiful little breakfast-room, which looks out into the garden, and forms one of the projections of the building, the staircase at the lower end forming the other: the three large, old-fashioned windows which light the hall, lying on this side, and looking out into a little parterre, fenced off with a trellis-fence, even with the two projections we have spoken of--such a parterre as one often meets with, belonging to old houses--a little favoured sanctuary of garden-ground, where choice flowers were trained, and which was the especial care of page and gardener, before ladies took to gardening themselves. This, which is now a perfect wilderness, almost overrun with shrubs and the tall tree-like laurels which encumber wall and window, and almost exclude daylight from the hall, to the great annoyance of our good old woman, was once, as was fitting, the favourite flower-garden of Mary Chaworth.
The little breakfast-room we mentioned, looks out not only by a side window into the parterre, but also by two large low windows into the garden; a fine old garden, with a fine stately old terrace, one of the noblest it was ever our good fortune to see, and such a one as Danby or Turner would be proud to enrich their fine pictures with. In this room were a few family portraits. One a small full-length figure, which the old woman very significantly told us was Byron’s Chaworth; that is, the Chaworth killed by the poet’s grandfather in a duel. Another portrait she informed us was the last Lord Chaworth; for this estate, which had been in the family of the Annesleys from the time of the Conquest, came into that of Lord Viscount Chaworth of Armagh, in Ireland, by the marriage of one of his ancestors with the sole heiress, Alice de Annesley, in the reign of Henry VI. “And this,” she said, pointing to a female portrait, “was his lawful wife.” “What then,” we said, “there was an unlawful wife, was there?” “Yes,” she added, “she is here.” We glanced at the picture placed in the shady corner by the window, next, however, to Lord Chaworth, and exclaimed, “and a good judge was his Lordship too!” A creature of most perfect and wondrous beauty it was that we beheld. What a fine, rich, oval countenance and noble forehead slightly shaded by auburn locks! what large dark eyes of inexpressible expression! what a soft, delicate, yet beautiful and sunny complexion! what a beautiful rounding of the cheek, chin, and throat! what exquisite features! what a perfect mixture of nobility of mind, with elegance and simplicity of taste. Never did we behold a more enchanting vision of youth and beauty; and all this hidden for generations in a dark nook of this old hall, unmentioned, and unknown. It were worth a journey from London but to gaze upon. Beautiful as this portrait is, it represents a mole upon either cheek; but this, instead of detracting from the loveliness of the face, as might be imagined, only appears to give it character and individuality, and vouches for the fidelity of the likeness. The painting, too, is extremely well done; far superior to any thing else in the house, except it be the satin petticoat of a Miss Burdett in the terrace-room. “And who,” we inquired, “was this charming creature?” “She was a girl of the village, sir,” was the reply. “What! could the village produce a creature like her?” “Yes: his Lordship took her into the house as a servant; but she did not like him and went away; however, he got her afterwards, and built a house for her on the estate, and she had one child. But she died, poor thing! all was not right somehow; and all her money she put in a cupboard for her son,--they would shew you the cupboard in the house to this day; and on the very night she died, her own relations came and took away the money;--things weren’t as they should have been! and she came again.” “What, was this the lady that we have heard an old man say, came up out of a well, and sat in a tree by moonlight, combing her hair?” “No, Lord bless you! that was another; but the parson laid her, and the well is covered in; but for all that she walks yet!” We smiled at the good woman’s very orthodox belief in ghosts; but we know not whether we should not be apt to catch the contagion of superstitious feeling, if we were to dwell all alone in this old house as she does, and hear the winds howling and sighing about it at night; the long ivy rustling about the windows, and dashing against the panes; and the owls hooting about in many a wild, piercing, and melancholy tone; and feel oneself in the unparticipated solitude of those ancient rooms, with all their trains of sad memories.
Besides this portrait of the beautiful and unhappy Mrs. Milner, we bestowed a look of great interest on one of much attraction, the daughter of Viscount Chaworth--not beautiful, but full of the fascination of cultivated mind, and of a heart so living and loving, that it caused the eyelids to droop over their beamy orbs, with an expression that made you tremble for the peace of its possessor. One other picture attracted our attention from its singularity. It represents a landscape, apparently, “the hill of green and mild declivity,” the line of trees, and the trees in circular array, from among which rises the temple we spoke of before, and which our cicerone assured us had been considered “the finest in all England, but had been blown down in Oliver Cromwell’s days.” In the foreground stands, as if painted in enamel, a gentleman in a strange sort of dress-jerkin, of white satin, with a short petticoat of purple velvet bordered with gold lace. On his right hand his amazonian lady, half the head taller than himself, clad in a riding-dress of green, bordered likewise with gold-lace; and on either side of them a son, in the full dress of William and Mary’s reign; with powdered wigs, long lapped scarlet coats, waistcoats, and breeches, with white silk stockings on their neat little legs, and lace ruffles at their hands, each with his little head turned on one side;--the one caressing a fawn, the other a greyhound; and the family group completed by the groom standing a little behind, holding the lady’s palfrey ready saddled for her use. These, and a portrait of the son of Lord Chaworth, are all the family pictures which the house contains.
Leaving then this room, we re-crossed the hall, and ascending the staircase at the lower end, entered the drawing-room, which is over the hall--a handsome room, and the best furnished in the house. The most interesting piece of furniture it contains, or perhaps, which the house itself contains, is a screen covered over with a great number of cuttings in black paper, done by a Mrs. Goodchild, and representing a great variety of family incidents and character--those little passing incidents in life, which, though rarely chronicled, are most influential on its fortunes--on which often its very destiny hangs. The receipt of a letter--the first meeting--the last parting--how much do these things involve! Here we were introduced to Mary Chaworth, the lovely and graceful maiden, full of hope, and life, and gaiety; with her friends and dependents about her; at the very time when Lord Byron became attached to her. Of the accuracy of this likeness we have no doubt, from the wonderful fidelity of some of the others, with whose persons we are acquainted.
In one place she is represented as sitting in a room, her attitude one of terror. A man is before her presenting a pistol, and a little terrified page is concealing himself under a table. In another, she sits with her mother and a gentleman at tea; a foot-man behind waiting upon them. Again, she is in the gardens or grounds, walking with her cousin, Miss Radford; her rustic hat thrown back upon her shoulders; her beautiful head turned aside; and her hand put forth to receive a letter from a page, kneeling on one knee,--a letter from her lover and subsequent husband.
Again, she is playing with a little child; and in all, her figure is full of exquisite grace and vivacity, and the profile of the face remarkably fine. It is impossible to say with what intense interest we examined these memorials of private life; these passages so full of vitality and character, incidental, but important--the very essence of an autobiography.
On a small table in this room lay a rich fan belonging to Mary Chaworth, which the old woman told us had been laid down by her there on some particular occasion--perhaps the last time she used it, and, therefore, was never moved from the spot. We observed, too, another of those little incidents of family history in this house, which have something peculiarly touching in them. On the staircase stood the sea-chest of a son who died at sea. It stood as it had been sent home after his death, sealed up, and the seals still unbroken. Poor Nanny Marsland said sorrowfully--“Ah, poor fellow! he was a pious lad; he would fain have been a clergyman, but he could not be that--for the living went to his elder brother. He did not like the sea; but he used to write to the poor dear lady, his mother, and say--‘God’s will be done!’ Eh! what sweet letters he used to send, if you could but have heard them--but it’s all one--he’s gone; and his poor mother, that used to sit and cry over them--she’s gone too!”
From the drawing-room we passed to the one called the terrace-room, from its opening by a glass door upon the terrace, which runs along the top of the garden at right angles with the house, and level with this second story, descending to the garden by a double flight of broad stone steps, in the middle of its length, which is about eighty yards. This room formerly contained the billiard-table, and in it Mary Chaworth and her noble lover passed much time. He was fond of the terrace, and used to pace backwards and forwards upon it, and amuse himself with shooting with a pistol at a door. It was here that she last saw him, with the exception of a dinner-visit, after his return from his travels. It was here that he took his last leave of Mary Chaworth, when
He went his way, And ne’er repassed that hoary threshold more.
It was here, then, those ill-fated ones stood, and lingered, and conversed, for at least two hours. Mary Chaworth was here all life and spirit, full of youth, and beauty, and hope. What a change fell upon her after-life! She now stood here, the last scion of a time-honoured race, with large possessions, with the fond belief of sharing them in joy with the chosen of her life. Never did human life present a sadder contrast! There are many reasons why we should draw a veil over this mournful history, much of which will never be known; suffice it to say, that it was not without most real, deep, and agonizing causes, that years after,
In her home, her native home, She dwelt begirt with growing infancy, Daughters and sons of beauty,--but behold!
Upon her face there was the tint of grief, The settled shadow of an inward strife, And an unquiet drooping of the eye, As if its lid was charged with unshed tears.
It was not without a fearful outraging of trusting affections, the desolation of a spirit trodden and crushed by that which should have shielded it, that
She was changed As by the sickness of the soul: her mind Had wandered from its dwelling, and her eyes They had not their own lustre, but the look Which is not of the earth; she was become The queen of a fantastic realm; her thoughts Were combinations of disjointed things; And forms impalpable and unperceived Of others’ sight, familiar were to hers.
There must have come a day, a soul-prostrating day, when she must have felt the grand mistake she had made, in casting away a heart that never ceased to love her and sorrow for her, and a mind that wrapt her, even severed as it was from her, in an imperishable halo of glory.
There is nothing in all the histories of broken affections and mortal sorrows, more striking and melancholy than the idea of this lady, so bright and joyous-hearted in her youth, sitting in her latter years, for days and weeks, alone and secluded, uninterrupted by any one, in this old house, weeping over the poems which commented in burning words on the individual fortunes of herself and Lord Byron--
The one To end in madness--both in misery.
With this idea vividly impressed on our spirits, a darker shade seemed to settle down on those antiquated rooms;--we passed out into the garden, at the door at which Byron passed; we trod that stately terrace, and gazed at the old vase placed in the centre of its massy balustrade, bearing the original escutcheon of the Lord Chaworth, and standing a brave object as seen from the garden, into which we descended, and wandered amongst its high-grown evergreens. But every thing was tinged with the spirit and fate of that unhappy lady. The walks were overgrown with grass; and tufts of snowdrop leaves, now grown wild and shaggy, as they do after the flower is over, grew in them; and tufts of a beautiful and peculiar kind of fumitory, with its pink bloom, and the daffodils and primroses of early spring looked out from amongst the large forest trees that surround the garden. Every thing, even the smallest, seemed in unison with that great spirit of silence and desolation which hovered over the place; and the gusty winds that swept the long wood-walk by which we came away, gave us a most fitting adieu.
* * * * *
We only saw just in time, this interesting old place in its desolation. It is now repaired, altered, and, I understand, every historical identity as far as possible destroyed.
VII. NEWSTEAD
We left Annesley, as we have said, by that long wood-walk which leads to the Mansfield road; and advancing on that road about a mile, then turned to the right through a deep defile down into the fields. Here we found ourselves in an extensive natural amphitheatre, surrounded by bold declivities--in some places bleak and barren, in others, richly embossed with furze and broom. Before us, at the distance of another mile, lay Newstead amid its woods, across a moory flat. The wind whistled and sighed amongst the dry, white, wiry grass, of last year’s growth, as we walked along; and a solitary heron, with slow strokes of its ample wings, flew athwart--not our path, for path we had none, having been tempted into the fields by the beauty of the scene. We followed the course of a little stream, clear as crystal, and swift as human life, and soon found ourselves at the tail of the lake so often referred to by Lord Byron.
Before the mansion lay a lucid lake, Broad as transparent, deep and freshly fed By a river, which its softened way did take In currents through the calmer water spread Around; the wild fowl nestled in the brake And sedges, brooding in their liquid bed: The woods sloped downward to its brink, and stood With their green faces fixed upon the flood.
It was a scene that would have delighted Bewick for its picturesque sedgyness. The streams that fed it came down a woody valley shaggy with sedge--the lake thereabout being bordered with tall masses of it. There was a little island all overgrown with it and water-loving trees; and wild fowl in abundance were hastening to hide themselves in its covert, or arose and flew around with a varied clangour. Another moment, and we passed a green knoll, and were in front of the Abbey. John Evelyn, who once visited it, was much struck with the resemblance between its situation and that of Fontainbleau.
Here all was neat and habitable--had an air of human life and human attention about it, that formed a strong contrast to the scene of melancholy desolation we had left; and also to this same scene when I visited it years ago, at the time when it was sold, I believe, to a Mr. Claughton, who afterwards, for some cause or other, threw up the bargain. To give an idea of the impression this place made upon me, I shall merely refer to an account furnished by me many years ago to a periodical of the time, which account was partly quoted by Galt in his Life of Lord Byron, and made liberal use of by Moore, though without acknowledgment. I was a boy, rambling through the woods nutting, when suddenly, I came in front of the Abbey, which I had never seen before, and learned from a peasant who happened to be near, that I might get to see it for the value of an ounce of tobacco given to old Murray, a grey-headed old man--who had been in the family from a boy, and who now, at his own request, lies buried in Hucknall churchyard, as close to the family vault as it was possible to lay him. He and a maid-servant were then the only inmates of the place, being left to superintend the removal of the goods. I marched up to the dismal-looking porch in front, to which you ascended by a flight of steps, and gave a thundering knock, which almost startled me by the hollow sound it seemed to send through the ancient building. After waiting a good while, some one approached, and began to withdraw bars and bolts, and to let fall chains; and presently, the old grey-headed man opened the massy door cautiously, to a width just sufficient to enable him to see who was there. Finding nothing more formidable than a boy, he opened wide, and I inquired if I could see the place. The old man first looked at me, and then around, and said, “How many are there of you?” As he was evidently calculating the probable amount of profit, I gave him such evidence of sufficient reward that his doors instantly flew open, and he desired me to wander where I pleased, till he could return to me, having left some important affair in medias res. Here then was a wilderness of an old house thrown open to me, and the effect it had on my youthful imagination is indescribable.
The embellishments which the abbey had received from his lordship, had more of the brilliant conception of the poet in them than of the sober calculations of common life. I passed through many rooms which he had superbly finished, but over which he had permitted so wretched a roof to remain, that, in about half a dozen years, the rain had visited his proudest chambers; the paper had rotted on the walls, and fell in comfortless sheets upon glowing carpets and canopies; upon beds of crimson and gold; clogging the glittering wings of eagles, and dishonouring coronets. From many rooms the furniture was gone. In the entrance hall alone remained the paintings of his old friends--the dog and bear.
The mansion’s self was vast and venerable, With more of the romantic than had been Elsewhere preserved; the cloisters still were stable, The cells too and refectory I ween; An exquisite small chapel had been able Still unimpaired to decorate the scene; The rest had been reformed, replaced, or sunk, And spoke more of the baron than the monk.
Huge halls, long galleries, spacious chambers, joined By no quite lawful marriage of the arts, Might shock a connoisseur; but, when combined, Formed a whole, which, irregular in parts, Yet left a grand impression on the mind, At least, of those whose eyes are in their hearts.
The long and gloomy gallery, which, whoever views will be strongly reminded of Lara, as indeed a survey of this place will awake more than one scene in that poem,--had not yet relinquished the sombre pictures of its ancient race--
That frowned In rude, but antique portraiture around.
In the study, which is a small chamber overlooking the garden, the books were packed up; but there remained a sofa, over which hung a sword in a gilt sheath; and at the end of the room opposite the window stood a pair of light fancy stands, each supporting a couple of the most perfect and finely-polished skulls I ever saw; most probably selected, along with the far-famed one converted into a drinking-cup, and inscribed with some well-known verses, from a vast number taken from the abbey cemetery, and piled up in the form of a mausoleum, but since recommitted to the ground. Between them hung a gilt crucifix.
To those skulls he evidently alludes in Lara, where he makes his servants ask one another--
Why gazed he so upon the ghastly head, Which hands profane had gathered from the dead, That still beside his open volume lay, As if to startle all save him away?
And they most probably suggested that fine passage in Childe Harold--
Remove yon skull from out those shattered heaps: Is that a temple where a God may dwell? Why, even the worm at last disdains her shattered cell!
Look on its broken arch, its ruined wall, Its chambers desolate, and portals foul; Yes, this was once ambition’s airy hall, The dome of thought, the palace of the soul; Behold through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole, The gay recess of wisdom and of wit, And passion’s host, that never brooked control: Can all, saint, sage, or sophist ever writ. People this lonely tower, this tenement refit?
In the servants’ hall, lay a stone coffin, in which were fencing gloves and foils; and on the wall of the ample but cheerless kitchen, was painted in large letters, “Waste not, want not.”
During a great part of his lordship’s minority, the abbey was in the occupation of Lord Grey de Ruthen, his hounds, and divers colonies of jackdaws, swallows, and starlings. The internal traces of this Goth were swept away; but without, all appeared as rude and unreclaimed as he could have left it. I must confess, that if I was astonished at the heterogeneous mixture of splendour and ruin within, I was more so at the perfect uniformity of wildness without. I never had been able to conceive poetic genius in its domestic bower, without figuring it, diffusing the polish of its delicate taste on every thing about it. But here the spirit of beauty seemed to have dwelt, but not to have been caressed;--it was the spirit of the wilderness. The gardens were exactly as their late owner described them in his earliest poems:--
Through thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle; Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay; In thy once smiling gardens the hemlock and thistle, Now choke up the rose, that late bloomed in the way.
With the exception of the dog’s tomb--a conspicuous and elegant object, placed on an ascent of several steps, crowned with a lambent flame, and panelled with white marble tablets, of which that containing the celebrated epitaph was at that time removed, I do not recollect the slightest trace of culture or improvement. The late lord, a stern and desperate character, who is never mentioned by the neighbouring peasants without a significant shake of the head, might have returned and recognised every thing about him, except, perchance, an additional crop of weeds. There still gloomily slept the old pond, into which he is said to have hurled his lady in one of his fits of fury, whence she was rescued by the gardener; a courageous blade, who was the lord’s master, and chastised him for his barbarity. There still, at the end of the garden, in a grove of oak, two towering satyrs--he with his club, and Mrs. Satyr, with her chubby, cloven-footed brat, placed on pedestals, at the intersections of the narrow and gloomy pathways, struck for a moment, with their grim visages, and silent, shaggy forms, the fear into your bosoms, which is felt by the neighbouring peasantry at “the old lord’s devils.”
In the lake below the abbey, the artificial rock, which he piled at a vast expense, still reared its lofty head; but the frigate which fulfilled old Mother Shipton’s prophecy, by sailing on dry land to this place from a distant port, had long vanished; and the only relics of his naval whim were this rock, and his ship-boy, the venerable old Murray, who accompanied me round the premises. The dark, haughty, impetuous, and mad deeds of this nobleman, the poet’s grandfather, no doubt, by making a vivid impression on his youthful fancy, furnished some of the principal materials for the formation of his lordship’s favourite and ever-recurring poetical hero. His manners and acts are the theme of many a winter’s evening in that neighbourhood. In one of his paroxysms of wrath, he shot his coachman, for giving, in his opinion, an improper precedence, threw the corpse into the carriage, to his lady, mounted, and drove himself. In a quarrel, which originally arose out of a dispute between their gamekeepers, he killed his neighbour, Mr. Chaworth, the lord of the adjoining manor. This rencontre took place at the Star and Garter, Pall-Mall, after a convivial meeting--a club of Nottinghamshire gentlemen. His lordship was committed to the Tower, and on April 16th, 1765, placed at the bar of the House of Lords, and without one dissentient voice, convicted of manslaughter, and discharged on paying his fees, having pleaded certain privileges under a statute of Queen Anne. The particulars may be seen in Vol. X. of State Trials, published by order of the House of Peers.
The old lord, from some cause of irritation against his son, said to be on account of his marriage, who died before coming to the title, did all he could to injure the estate. He is said to have pulled down a considerable part of the house, and sold the materials; he cut down very extensive plantations, and sold the young trees to the bakers of Nottingham to heat their ovens with, or to the nurserymen; two of which, Lombardy poplars, bought at that time, now stand at the head of a fish-pond of my father’s, grown to an immense size.
Mr. Moore has justly remarked, that Lord Byron derived the great peculiarities of his character from his ancestors. After I came away from the abbey, I asked many people in the neighbourhood what sort of a man the noble poet had been. The impression of his energetic but eccentric character was obvious in their reply. “He is the deuce of a fellow for strange fancies; he flogs the old lord to nothing: but he is a hearty good fellow for all that.”
One of these fancies, as related by the miller at the head of the lake, was, to get into a boat, with his two noble Newfoundland dogs, row into the middle of the lake, then dropping the oars, tumble into the water. The faithful animals would immediately follow, seize him by the collar, one on each side, and bear him to land. This miller told me that every month he came to be weighed, and if he found himself lighter he appeared highly delighted; but if heavier, he went away in obvious ill humour, and without saying a word. At this time even, i. e. before he came of age, he had the greatest horror of corpulency, to which he deemed himself hereditarily prone, and used to lie a certain time every day in a hot-bed, made on purpose, to reduce himself. The master-builder, who had been engaged in the restoration of the abbey, said much about a certain Kaled, who then was with him,--probably the same that accompanied him to Brighton, as his younger brother,--and of the wild life kept up, and mad pranks played off, by him and his companions. He described the mornings passing in the most profound quiet, for his lordship and his guests did not rise till about one o’clock; in the afternoon, the place was all alive with them;--they were seen careering in all directions; at midnight, the old abbey was all lit up, and resounded with their jollity. On one occasion they were called up to extricate an unfortunate wight from the old stone coffin, where, in some of their mad pranks, he had secreted himself, and fitted it so well, that it was with difficulty he was drawn out, amid the merriment of his comrades. No person, indeed, could form any correct notion of Byron from his poetry, till the publication of his Don Juan, which exhibits more of the style of his youthful conversational manner than any other of his writings, except his journal. I have heard a lady who used to see him at Mrs. Byron’s, at Nottingham, say that he was then, in his teens, a most rackety fellow; was very fond of going into the kitchen, and baking oatmeal cakes on the fireshovel; on which occasions, the cook would sometimes pin a napkin to his coat, which being discovered on his return to the parlour, he would rush out and pursue the maids in all directions, and, to use the lady’s phrase, turn the house upside down. When they went away, he always took care to ask the servants if his mother had given them any thing; and on their replying in the negative, he would say, “No, no! I knew that well enough;” when he would make them a handsome present.
Such anecdotes of his youth abound; but one is too characteristic to be omitted. An old man of the name of Kemp, of Farnsfield, was one day in Southwell, when a dog in the minster-yard fell upon his little dog. He was beating it off, when a genteel boy came up, and in a very decided tone said, “Let them fight it out--they find their own clothes, don’t they?” The old man said, clothes or no clothes, his dog should not be worried. A stander-by asked him if he knew to whom he spoke. The old man said he neither knew nor cared. “It is Lord Byron,” said the person; but the old man said he did not care whether he was a lord or a duke, they should not worry his dog; and having got his little dog under his arm, he marched off in none of the best humour. Some time afterwards, however, seeing “Hours of Idleness and other Poems, by Lord Byron,” advertised, he recollected the spirit of the lad with so much admiration, that he took his stick and set off to Newark to purchase the book, and always afterwards remained a great admirer of his works.
Such was my acquaintance with the place then; it is now a good, substantial, and very comfortable family mansion. With its external appearance the public is well acquainted through various prints; and the only objects in the interior, which can much interest strangers, as connected with the history of Lord Byron, are equally familiar. The picture of his wolf-dog, and his Newfoundland-dog--the living Newfoundland-dog which he had with him in Greece; the skull-cup kept in a cabinet in the drawing-room, and the little chapel and cloisters mentioned by him. There are also in a lumber-room the identical stone-coffin, and the foils I saw there twenty years ago, and a portrait of old Murray smoking his pipe. There is also the well-known portrait by Phillips. A full-length likeness of him as about to embark on his first travels, which was in the drawing-room at that time, is now gone, but has been engraved for Mr. Murray’s edition of his Life and Works.
It is fortunate for the public that the place has fallen into the hands of a gentleman who affords the utmost facility for the inspection of it by strangers. Nothing can exceed the easy courtesy with which it is thrown open to them; and, as an old schoolfellow of Lord Byron’s, we believe Colonel Wildman is as desirous as any man can be not to obliterate any traces of his lordship’s former life here. There are some particulars, however, in which I think this care might have been carried more thoroughly into act. In the first place, I think a style of architecture in restoring the abbey might have been adopted more abbey-like--more in keeping with the old part of it--and more consonant to the particular state of feeling with which admirers of the noble poet’s genius would be likely to approach it. To my taste it is too square and massy in its tout ensemble. I do not see why the architect, whoever he was, should have gone back in the date of his style beyond that of the ancient remains. The old western front is a specimen of what Rickman calls the early English order of Anglo-Gothic architecture; so light, so airy, so pure and beautiful, that the juxta-position of a heavy Norman style, and especially of the ponderous, square, and stunted tower at the south-west corner, is strange, and anything but pleasing. A greater variety of outline--the projection of porches and buttresses--the aspiring altitude of pointed gables--clustered chimneys, and slender, sky-seeking turrets, would certainly have given greater effect. Instead of a square mass of stone, as it appears at a distance, it would have proclaimed its own beauty to the eye from every far-off point at which it may be discovered. Any one who has seen Fonthill, Abbotsford from the Galashiel’s road, or Ilam from the entrance of Dovedale, may imagine how much more that effect would be in accordance, not only with a low situation, but with the mental impressions of a poetic visiter.
I cannot help, too, regretting that the poet’s study should now be converted into a common bed-room; and most of all, that the antique fountain which stood in front of the abbey, and makes so strong a feature in the very graphic picture of the place drawn in Don Juan, should be removed. It now adorns the inner quadrangle, or cloister court, and is certainly a very beautiful object there, as may be seen by the print in Murray’s edition of Byron’s Works. I do not wonder at Colonel Wildman desiring to grace this court with a fountain, but I wonder extremely at his gracing it with this fountain. I must for ever deplore its removal, as the breaking up of that most vivid picture of the front, given by the poet to all posterity:--
A glorious remnant of the Gothic pile, While yet the church was Rome’s, stood half apart, In a grand arch, which once screened many an aisle. These last had disappeared--a loss to art; The first yet frowned superbly o’er the soil, And kindled feelings in the roughest heart, Which mourned the power of time’s or tempest’s march, In gazing on that venerable arch.
Within a niche nigh to its pinnacle, Twelve saints had once stood sanctified in stone: And these had fallen, not when the friars fell, But in the war which struck Charles from his throne.
* * * * *
But in a higher niche, alone, but crowned, The Virgin Mother of the God-born Child, With her son in her blessed arms, looked round, Spared by some chance, when all beside was spoiled; She made the earth below seem holy ground. This may be superstition weak, or wild; But even the painted relics of a shrine Of any worship, wake some thoughts divine.
A mighty window, hollow in the centre; Shorn of its glass of thousand colourings, Through which the deepened glories once could enter, Streaming from off the sun like seraph’s wings, Now yawns all desolate: now loud, now fainter, The gale sweeps through its fretwork; and oft sings The owl his anthem, where the silenced quire Lie with their hallelujahs quenched like fire.
Amid the court a Gothic fountain played, Symmetrical, but decked with carvings quaint-- Strange faces, like to men in masquerade, And here, perhaps, a monster, there a saint: The spring gushed through grim mouths, of granite made, And sparkled into basins, where it spent Its little torrent in a thousand bubbles, Like man’s vain glory, and his vainer troubles.
It was seeing how exactly all this was a copy of the original--how there stood the mighty window, shewing through it the garden and dog’s tomb--how the Virgin there still stood aloft with her child, distinct, bold, and beautiful--but the fountain was gone, that we could not help loudly expressing our regret. When the valet who attended us came to the inner court, “There,” he said, “you see is the fountain--it is all there, quite perfect.” “Yes, yes,” we could not help replying, “that is the very thing we are sorry for--its being all there. A man might cut off his nose, and put it in his pocket, and when any one wondered at his mutilated face, cry, ‘O, it is all here; I have it in my pocket.’ The mischief would be, that it was in the wrong place, and his face spoiled for ever.” To every visiter of taste, the abbey front must be thus injured whilst it and the poet’s description of it last together.
These are things to regret; for the rest, the place is a very pleasant place. The new stone-work is very substantially and well done; there is a great deal of modern elegance about the house; a fortune must have been spent upon it. The grounds before the new front are extremely improved; and the old gardens, with very correct feeling, have been suffered to retain their ancient character. An oak planted by Lord Byron is shewn; and why should he not have a tree as well as Shakspeare, Milton, and Johnson? The initials of himself and his sister upon a tree in the satyr-grove at the end of the garden, are said to have been pointed out by his sister herself, the Honourable Mrs. Leigh, on her visit there some time ago. The tree has two boles issuing from one root, a very appropriate emblem of their consanguinity.
The scenery around presents many features that recal incidents in his life, or passages in his poems. There are the houses where Fletcher and Rushton lived--the two followers of his, who are addressed in the ballad in the first canto of Childe Harold, beginning at the third stanza--
Come hither, hither, my little page:
But in the progress of improvement, the mill, where he used to be weighed, is just now destroyed. Down the valley, in front of the abbey, is a rich prospect over woods, and around are distant slopes scattered with young plantations, that in time will add eminently to the beauty of this secluded spot; and supply the place, in some degree, of those old and magnificent woods in which the abbey was formerly embosomed.
Here ended our ramble, having gone over ground and through places that the genius of one man in a brief life has sanctified to all times; for like us--
Hither romantic pilgrims shall betake Themselves from distant lands. When we are still In centuries of sleep, his fame will wake, And his great memory with deep feelings fill These scenes that he has trod, and hallow every hill.
Here too we leave the Old Houses of England, in the words of John Evelyn:--“Other there are, sweet and delectable country-seats and villas of the noblesse, and rich and opulent gentry, built and environed with parks, paddocks, plantations, etc.: adapted to country and rural seats, dispersed through the whole nation, conspicuous, not only for the structure of their houses, built upon the best rules of architecture, but for situation, gardens, canals, walks, avenues, parks, forests, ponds, prospects, and vistas; groves, woods, and large plantations; and other the most charming and delightful recesses, natural and artificial; but to enumerate and describe what were extraordinary in these and the rest would furnish volumes, for who has not either seen, admired, or heard of--
Audley-End, Althorpe, Auckland, Aqualate-Hall, Alnwick, Allington, Ampthill, Astwell, Aldermaston, Aston, Alveston, Alton-Abbey.
Bolsover, Badminster, Breckley, Burghly-on-the-Hill, and the other Burghly, Breton, Buckhurst, Buckland, Belvoir, Blechington, Blenheim, Blythfield, Bestwood, Broomhall, Beaudesert.
Castle-Rising, Castle-Ashby, Castle-Donnington, Castle-Howard, Chatsworth, Chartley, Cornbury, Cashiobury, Cobham, Cowdrey, Caversham, Cranbourn-Park, Clumber, Charlton, Copt-Hall, Claverton, famous for Sir William Bassett’s vineyard, producing forty hogsheads of wine yearly; nor must I forget that of Deepden, planted by the Honourable Charles Howard, of Norfolk, my worthy neighbour in Surrey.
Drayton, Donnington-Park, Dean.
Eastwell, Euston, Eccleswould, Edscombe, Easton, Epping.
Falston, Flankford, Fonthill, Fountains-Abbey.
Greystock, Goodrick, Grooby, Grafton, Gayhurst, Golden-Grove.
Hardwick, Hadden, Hornby, Hatfield, Haland, Heathfield, Hinton, Holme-Pierrepont, Horstmounceaux, Houghton.
Ichinfield, Ilam, Ingestre.
Kirby, Knowsley, Keddleston.
Longleat, Latham, Lensal, Latimer, Lyne-Hall, Lawnsborough.
Morepark, Mulgrave, Marlborough, Margum, Mount Edgcombe.
Normanby, North-Hall, Norborough, Newnham, Newstead.
St. Ostlo, Oxnead.
Petworth, Penshurst, Paston-Hall.
Quorndon, Quickswood.
Ragland, Retford, Ragley, Ricot, Rockingham, Raby.
Sherbourn, Sherley, Swallowfield, Stanton-Harold, Shasford, Shaftbury, Shugborough, Sandon, Stowe, Stansted, Scots-Hall, Sands of the Vine.
Theobalds, Thornkill, Thornhill, Trentham.
Up-Park.
Wilton, Wrest, Woburn, Wollaton, Worksop-Manor, Woodstock, which, as Camden tells us, was the first park in England, Wimburn, Writtle-Park, Warwick-Castle, Wentworth.”
VIII. CHARACTERISTICS OF PARK SCENERY
How delicious is our old park scenery! How wise that such places as Richmond, Greenwich, and such old parks in the neighbourhood of the Metropolis, are kept up and kept open, that our citizens may occasionally get out of the smoke and noise of the great Babel, and breathe all their freshness, and feel all their influence! Who does not often, in the midst of brick-and-mortar regions, summon up before his imagination this old park or forest scenery? The ferny or heathy slopes, under old, stately, gnarled oaks, or thorns as old, with ivy having stems nearly as thick as their own, climbing up them, and clinging to them, and sometimes incorporating itself so completely with their heads, as to make them look entirely ivy-trees. The footpaths, with turf short and soft as velvet, running through the bracken. The sunny silence that lies on the open glades and brown uplands; the cool breezy feeling under the shade; the grashopper chithering amongst the bents; the hawk hovering and whimpering over-head; the keeper lounging along in velveteen jacket, and with his gun, at a distance, or firing at some destructive bird. The herds of deer, fallow or red, congregated beneath the shadow of the trees, or lying in the sun if not too warm, their quick ears and tails keeping up a perpetual twinkle; the belling of scattered deer, as they go bounding and mincing daintily across the openings, here and there,--the old ones hoarse and deep, the young shrill and plaintive. Cattle with whisking tails, grazing sedately; the woodpecker’s laughter from afar; the little tree-creeper running up the ancient boles, always beginning at the bottom, and going upwards with a quick, gliding, progress--the quaint cries of other birds and wild creatures, the daws and the rooks feeding together, and mingling their different voices of pert and grave accent. The squirrel running with extended tail along the ground, or flourishing it over his head, as he sits on the tree; or fixing himself, when suddenly come upon, in the attitude of an old, brown, decayed branch by the tree side, as motionless as the deadest branch in the forest. The hum of insects all around you, the low still murmur of sunny music,
Nature’s ceaseless hum, Voice of the desert, never dumb.
The pheasant’s crow; the pheasant with all her brood springing around you, one by one, from the turf where you are standing amid the bracken--here one! there one! close under your feet, with a sudden, startling whirr,--to compare nature with art, country scenes with city ones, like so many squibs and crackers fired off about you in smart succession, where you don’t look for them. That most ancient and most original of all ladders, a bough with some pegs driven through it, reared against a tree for the keeper to reach the nests of hawks or magpies, or to fetch down a brood of young jackdaws for a pie, quite as savoury a dish as one made with young rooks or pigeons; or for him to sit aloft amongst the foliage, and watch for the approach of deer, or fawn, when he is commissioned to shoot one. The profound and basking silence all around you, as you sit on some dry ferny mound, and look far and wide through the glimmering heat, or the cool shadow. The far-off sounds--rooks telling of some old Hall that stands slumberously amid the woods; or dogs, sending from their hidden kennel amongst the trees, their sonorous yelling. Forest smells, that rise up deliciously as you cross dim thickets or tread the spongy turf all fragrant with thyme, and sprinkled with the light harebell. Huge limbs of oak riven off by tempests, or the old oak itself, a vast, knotty, and decayed mass, lying on the ground, and perhaps the woodman gravely labouring upon it, lopping its boughs, riving its huge, misshapen stem, piling it in stacks of cord-wood, or binding them into billets. The keeper’s house near, in its own paled enclosure; and all about, old thorns hung with the dried and haggard remains of wild-cats, polecats, weasels, hawks, owls, jays, and other vermin, as he deems them; or the same most picturesquely displayed on the sturdy boles of the vast oaks; and lastly, the mere, the lake, in the depth of the woodlands, shrouded in screening masses of flags and reeds, the beautiful flowering-rush, the magnificent great water-dock, with leaves as huge and green as if they grew by some Indian river--the tall club-mace, the thousands of wild-ducks, teals, or wigeons, that start up at your approach with clattering wings, and cries of quick alarm.
Who that has wandered through our old parks and forests, is not familiar with all these sights and sounds? does not long to witness them again, ever and anon, when he has been “long in city pent,” till he is fain to mount his horse and ride off into some such ancient, quiet, and dreamy region, as Crabbe suddenly mounted his, and rode forty miles to see again the sea?
Part IV
CAUSES OF THE STRONG ATTACHMENT OF THE ENGLISH TO COUNTRY LIFE.
Chapter I
THE LOVE OF THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL IN NATURE MORE EMINENTLY DEVELOPED IN MODERN LITERATURE THAN IN THE CLASSICAL.
One of the most conspicuous features of English literature, is that intense love of the sublime and beautiful in Nature, which pervades, with a living spirit, the works of our poets; gives so peculiar a charm to the writings of our naturalists; possesses great prominence in our travellers; is mingled with the fervent breathings of our religious treatises; and even finds its way into the volumes of our philosophy. If we look into the literature of the continental nations, we find it existing there, more or less, but in a lower tone than in our own; if we look back into that of the ancients, we find it there too, but still fainter, more confined in its scope, and scattered, as it were, into distant and isolated spots. I think nothing can be more striking than the truth of this; and it is a curious matter of observation, that there should be this great distinction, and of inquiry whence it has arisen. The love of the beauty and sublimity of Nature is an inherent principle in the human soul; but like all other of our finer qualities, it is later in its development than the common ones, and requires, not repression, but fostering and cultivation. It is like the love of the fine arts; it slumbers in the bosom that passes through life in its native rudeness. It lies in the unploughed ground of the human mind,--a seed buried below the influence that alone can call it into activity.
Yes, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea; Like the man’s thoughts, dark in the infant brain; Like aught that is, which wraps what is to be;
there it lies, deep in the soil of common events and cares, and untouched by the divine atmosphere of knowledge which a more easy and advanced condition brings with it. In others, it is partially vivified, but cannot flourish; it is choked with the cares of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches; but in minds that are fed with substantial knowledge, and have their intellectual power reached, and their affections kindled by the blessedness of refined and Christian culture,--then it grows with their growth and strengthens with their strength. It daily enlarges its grasp, and its appetite; it expands perpetually the circle of its horizon. The love of the fine arts is but a modification of this great passion. Their objects are the same--the sublime and the beautiful; and the same purity and elevation of taste accompany them both. This is the original and legitimate passion. In our love of the fine arts, our attention is occupied with human imitations of what is beautiful in nature;--in this, we fix our admiration at once on the magnificent works of the Great Artist of the Universe.
We might, therefore, reasonably expect to find in the literature of the ancients, what is actually the case, a less refined, less expanded, less penetrating and absorbing existence of this affection. Everywhere the love of nature must exist. In all ages and all countries, so is the outward universe framed to influence the inward, that men must be impressed by the grandeur of creation, and attracted by its beauty, so far as the human is at all advanced beyond the limits of mere animal existence. But in the ancient world education was never popular; it extended only to a few; and of these few a majority were occupied in the pursuits of art, or the speculations of philosophy; and poetry, and especially the poetry of nature, had scanty followers. The great poets of all ages, even of those but semi-civilized, must necessarily have minds so sensitive to the influence of all kinds of beauty that they could not help being alive to that of nature; and this was the case with the great poets of Greece. We put out of the present question the dramatic and lyrical ones; for to them the passions and interests of men were the engrossing objects; but in Homer, Hesiod, and Theocritus, we may fairly expect to discover the amount of the ancients’ perception of natural beauty, and their love of it. But in these how far is it behind what it is in the moderns. They were often enraptured with the pleasantness of nature, but it was seldom with more than its pleasantness. Their Elysian Fields are composed of flowery meads, with pleasant trees and running waters, where the happy spirits led a life of luxurious repose. Their celebrated Arcadia is faithfully described in such Idyllia as those of Bion and Moschus;--youths and damsels feeding their flocks amid the charms of a pastoral country, to whose beauties they were alive in proportion as they ministered to luxurious enjoyment. Beyond this they seldom looked;--seldom describe the sublime aspects and phenomena of the universe. Homer, indeed, is the greatest exception,--his soul was cast in a mighty mould. His beautiful description of a moonlight night is known to all readers. He speaks, too, of the splendour of the starry heavens; and he describes tempests with great majesty; but this rather as they are terrible in their effects on men, than as sublime in themselves. Minds even of the noblest class had not arrived at that full comprehension of nature which sees sublimity in the gloom and terror of tempests, independent of their effects; the grandeur of beauty in desolation itself; in splintered mountains, wild wildernesses, and the awfulness of solitude. They had not become tremblingly alive to all the lesser traces and shades of beauty in the face of nature, for they had not reached either of the extremities of perception--the vast on one hand--minute perfection on the other. They did not pursue the forms of beauty into leaf and flower; into the cheerful culture of the field, or the brown tinges of the desert. They did not watch the growing or fading lights of the sky, and the colours, as they lived or died on the distant mountain tops;--the passing of light and shadow over earth and ocean. Their acquaintance with the subtle spirit of the universe had not become so intimate. They abode most in the general; they admired in the mass; for they had not arrived at the refinement of very delicate, or extensive analysis; and they did not go out to admire as the moderns; their admiration of nature was not advanced, as with us, into an art and a passion. Beauty rather fell upon their senses than was inquired after. They were pleased, and did not always seek out the operative causes of their sensations. Their mention of their delight was, therefore, generally incidental. They were in the condition and state of mind of the old man in Wordsworth’s ballad, who says--
Think you, mid all this mighty sum Of things for ever speaking, That nothing of itself will come, But we must still be seeking?
That Homer had an eye for the sublime features of earth, the nobler forms of animal life, and phenomena of nature,--his bold and beautiful similes, scattered all through the Iliad, of storms, of overflowing rivers, of forests on flame, of the lion, the horse, and others, sufficiently testify; that he had a most exquisite sense of the picturesque, is shewn in almost every page of the Odyssey; in the cave of Polypheme; in good old king Laertes occupied in his farm; and in the whole episode of Ulysses at the lodge of Eumeus, the goatherd. But yet it is, after all, only in contemplating some scene of delicious rural beauty, something akin to Arcadian sweetness, that he breaks out into anything like a rapture. The abode of Calypso, as seen by Hermes on his approach to it, is an exact instance.
Then, swift ascending from the azure wave, He took the path that winded to the cave. Large was the grot in which the nymph he found, The fair-haired nymph, with every beauty crowned. She sate and sung; the rocks resound the lays; The cave was brightened with the rising blaze; Cedar and frankincense, an odorous pile, Flamed on the hearth, and wide perfumed the isle, While she with work and song the time divides, And through the loom the golden shuttle guides. Without the grot a various sylvan scene Appeared around, and groves of living green; Poplars and alders, ever quivering, played, And nodding cypress formed a grateful shade; On whose high branches, waving with the storm, The birds of broadest wing their mansion form; The chough, the sea-mew, and loquacious crow, And scream aloft, and skim the deeps below. Depending vines the delving caverns screen, With purple clusters blushing through the green. Four limpid fountains from the clefts distil; And every fountain forms a separate rill, In mazy, winding wanderings down the hill: Where bloomy meads with vivid greens were crowned, And glowing violets threw odours round-- A scene, where if a god should cast his sight, A god might gaze and wander with delight! Joy touched the messenger of heaven; he stayed Entranced, and all the blissful haunt surveyed.
Odyssey, B. v.
In Hesiod, the perception of even the delights of the summer field were far fainter. Though he fed his flock at the foot of Mount Helicon, he has little to say in praise of its aspect; and though he gives you great insight into the state of agriculture, and the simple mode of life of the country people, a very few verses furnish almost all the praise of nature which he had to bestow. His mind seemed occupied in tracing the genealogy of the gods, and framing grave maxims for the regulation of human conduct.
Of all the Greek writers, Theocritus is the one that luxuriates most in natural beauty. His sense of the picturesque is keen, and his penciling of such subjects is most vigorous and graphic. His two fishermen remind us of Crabbe; nothing can be more exquisite.
Two ancient fishers in a straw-thatched shed-- Leaves were their walls, and sea-weed was their bed, Reclined their weary limbs; hard by were laid Baskets and all their implements of trade; Rods, hooks, and lines composed of stout horse-hairs, And nets of various sorts, and various snares, The seine, the cast-net, and the wicker maze, To waste the watery tribe a thousand ways; A crazy boat was drawn upon a plank; Mats were their pillow, wove of osiers dank; Skins, caps, and coats, a rugged covering made; This was their wealth, their labour and their trade. No pot to boil, no watch-dog to defend, Yet blessed they lived with penury their friend; None visited their shed, save, every tide, The wanton waves that washed its tottering side.
Idyl. xxi.
Then again, nothing can be more picturesque, nothing more boldly graphic and solemnly poetical, than the situation in which he makes Castor and Pollux find Anycus, the king of Bebrycia; nothing more striking than the image of that chief.
Meanwhile, the royal brothers devious strayed Far from the shore, and sought the cooling shade. Hard by, a hill with waving forests crowned, Their eyes attracted; in the dale they found A spring perennial in a rocky cave: Full to the margin flowed the lucid wave; Below small fountains gushed, and murmuring near, Sparkled like silver, and as silver clear. Above, tall pines and poplars quivering played, And planes and cypress in dark greens arrayed; Around balm-breathing flowers of every hue, The bees’ ambrosia, in the meadows grew. There sate a chief, tremendous to the eye, His couch the rock, his canopy the sky; The gauntlet’s strokes his cheeks and ears around, Had marked his face with many a desperate wound. Round as a globe, and prominent his chest, Broad was his back, but broader was his breast; Firm was his flesh, with iron sinews fraught, Like some Colossus on an anvil wrought.
Id. xxii.
His description of an ancient drinking-cup appears to me to have no rival in all the round of literature, ancient or modern, except Keats’ description of an antique vase. It is life and beauty itself. The figures stand out in bold relief, cut with an energy and precision most wonderful, and with a grace that makes itself felt to the very depths of the spirit.
A deep, two-handled cup, whose brim is crowned With ivy, joined with helichryse around; Small tendrils with close-clasping arms uphold The fruit rich speckled with the seeds of gold. Within, a woman’s well-wrought image shines, A vest her limbs, her locks a cawl confines; And near, two neat-curled youths in amorous strains, With fruitless strife communicate their pains; Smiling, by turns she views the rival pair; Grief swells their eyes, their heavy hearts despair. Hard by, a fisherman, advanced in years, On the rough margin of a rock appears; Intent he stands to enclose the fish below, Lifts a large net, and labours with the throw; Such strong expression rises on the sight, You’d swear the man exerted all his might; For his round neck with turgid veins appears-- In years he seems, yet not impaired by years. A vineyard next with intersected lines,-- And red, ripe clusters load the bending vines. To guard the fruit a boy sits idly by, In ambush near two skulking foxes lie; This, plots the branches of ripe grapes to strip, And that, more daring, meditates the scrip; Resolved, ere long, to seize the savoury prey, And send the youngster dinnerless away; Meanwhile on rushes all his art he plies, In framing traps for grashoppers and flies; And earnest only on his own designs, Forgets his satchel, and neglects his vines.
Id. i.
What a glorious subject would this be for one of our modern sculptors.
But in Theocritus, as in Homer, they are Arcadian amenities that engross almost all his passion for nature. They are flowery fields, running waters, summer shades, and the hum of bees; all the elements of voluptuous dreaming and indolent entrancement; the most delicious of all idleness, lying abroad with the blue sky above you, and the mossy turf beneath you, and the bubble of running waters, and the whisper of forest branches near, to lull you to repose. Is it not so? When is it that he invites you to out-of-door enjoyment?
Now when meridian beams inflame the day; Now when green lizards in the hedges lie; And crested larks forsake the fervid sky.
Id. vii.
And whither would he lead you at this sultry, blazing hour? Ah! hear him!
Here rest we: lo! cyperus decks the ground, Oaks lend their shade, and sweet bees murmur round Their honeyed hives; here, two cool fountains spring; Here merrily the birds on branches sing; Here pines in clusters more umbrageous grow, Wave high their heads, and scatter cones below.
Id. v.
Ah! cunning Sicilian! well didst thou know where life shed its most delicious dreams. Anacreon at his wine, and Tibullus in the rapture of one of his sweetest love-visions, was a novice in true enjoyment to thee. Hark! to the very sounds which he conjures up! There is nothing startling--nothing exciting.--No! there is enough of excitement already in the climate, in the summer heat, in the very scenes and persons from whose city revels he has just withdrawn. The true secret now is, to summon up only images of luxurious rest; of calm beauty; of refreshing coolness; that the blood, already running riot, may flow in the veins like the nectar of the gods, and send up to the brain images and trains of images of the very poetry of Elysium. Hark to the sounds about you!
Sweet low the herds along the pastured ground; Sweet is the vocal reed’s melodious sound; Sweet pipes the jocund herdsman.
But I will give one more extract from him, which seems to combine all the fascinations he loved to paint as existing in the summer woodlands.
He courteous bade us on soft beds recline, Of lentesch and young branches of the vine; Poplars and elms above their foliage spread, Lent a cool shade, and waved the breezy head. Below, a stream, from the nymphs’ sacred cave, In free meanders led its murmuring wave; In the warm sunbeams, verdant shrubs among, Shrill grashoppers renewed their plaintive song; At distance far, concealed in shades alone, The nightingale poured forth her tuneful moan: The lark, the goldfinch, warbled lays of love, And sweetly pensive cooed the turtle-dove; While honey-bees, for ever on the wing, Hummed round the flowers, and sipped the silver spring. The rich, ripe season gratified the sense With summer’s sweets and autumn’s redolence. Apples and pears lay strewed in heaps around, And the plum’s loaded branches kissed the ground.
Id. vii.
Well, we must pass over from the Greeks to the Romans, and I have found it so difficult to escape from Theocritus, that we must make short work of it here. Of Cicero, Seneca, the Plinys,--I will say nothing. We all know how they delighted in their country villas and gardens. We all know how Cicero, in his Treatise on Old Age, has declared his fondness for farming; and how, between his pleadings in the Forum, he used to seek the refreshment of a walk in a grove of plane-trees. We know how, during the best ages of the Commonwealth, their generals and dictators were brought from the plough and their country retreats--a fine feature in the Roman character, and one which may, in part, account for their so long retaining the simplicity of their tastes, and that high tone of virtue which generally accompanies a daily intercourse with the spirit of nature. All this we know; but what is still more remarkable is, that Horace and Virgil, two of the most courtly poets that ever existed, yet were both passionately fond of the country, and perpetually declare in their writings that there is nothing in the splendour and fascinations of city life, to compare with the serene felicity of a rural one. Horace is perpetually rejoicing over his Sabine farm; and Virgil has, in his Georgics, described all the rural economy of the age with a gusto that is felt in every line. His details fill us with admiration at the great resemblance of the science of these matters at that time, and at this. With scarcely an exception, in all modes of rural management, in all kinds of farming stock--sheep, cattle, and horses, he would be now pronounced a consummate judge; and his rules for the culture of fields and gardens, would serve for studies here, notwithstanding the difference of the Italian and English climates. But it is only in that celebrated passage beginning--
O fortunatos nimiùm, sua si bona nôrint, Agricolas!
in his second Georgic, so often quoted, that he seems to get into a rapture when contemplating the charms of a country life. We may take this as a sufficient example, and as very delightful in itself.
Oh happy, if he knew his happy state, The swain who free from business and debate, Receives his easy food from Nature’s hand, And just returns of cultivated land. No palace with a lofty gate he wants, To admit the tide of early visitants, With eager eyes, devouring as they pass, The breathing figures of Corinthian brass; No statues threaten from high pedestals, No Persian arras hides his homely walls With antic vests, which, through their shadowy fold, Betray the streaks of ill-dissembled gold. He boasts no wool where native white is dyed With purple poison of Assyrian pride. No costly drugs of Araby defile, With foreign scents, the sweetness of his oil: But easy quiet, a secure retreat, A harmless life that knows not how to cheat, With home-bred plenty the rich owner bless, And rural pleasures crown his happiness. Unvexed with quarrels, undisturbed by noise, The country king his peaceful realm enjoys.
* * * *
Ye sacred Muses! with whose beauty fired, My soul is ravished, and my brain inspired-- Whose priest I am, whose holy fillets wear-- Would you your poet’s first petition hear; Give me the way of wandering stars to know, The depths of heaven above, and earth below.
* * * *
But if my heavy blood restrain the flight Of my free soul, aspiring to the height Of nature, and unclouded fields of light-- My next desire is, void of care and strife, To lead a soft, secure, inglorious life-- A country cottage near a crystal flood, A winding valley, and a lofty wood. Some god conduct me to the sacred shades Where Bacchanals are sung by Spartan maids; Or lift me high to Hemus’ hilly crown, Or in the plains of Tempe lay me down, Or lead me to some solitary place, And cover my retreat from human race.
Turn now to the modern world of literature; and what a blaze of light, what a warmth, what a spirit, what a passion bursts upon us! We step, indeed, into a new world. All here is glowing, clear in view, tender in feeling; full of a new, profound, popular, and yet domestic sentiment--a sentiment befitting “the large utterance of the early gods,” and yet hallowing and making more brotherly the bosoms of men. We are, in fact, as far advanced beyond the ancients in our knowledge of nature, as we are in that of “the life and immortality brought to light by the gospel.” With all the admiration of the ancients for the loveliness of nature, with all their enjoyment of its amenities, what is there in them like the hungering and thirsting, the yearning after her, of such hearts as those of Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and a thousand other lights of modern literature? The mighty difference is, indeed, most strikingly manifested by comparing Longinus and Burke. The Palmyrian secretary, amongst his five sources of the sublime, does not even include the influence of natural objects. His treatise is, indeed, more truly a treatise on writing strongly and elegantly, than on the sublime. Like the poets, he perceives the amenities of the country; but there is only one passage in his whole work in which he speaks out plainly of the sublimity of external nature. “The impulse of nature inclines to admire not a little transparent rivulet that ministers to our necessities; but the Nile, the Ister, the Rhine, or still more, the Ocean. We are never surprised at the sight of a small fire that burns clearly, and blazes out on our private hearth; but view with amaze the celestial fires, though they are often obscured by vapours and eclipses. Nor do we reckon anything in nature more wonderful than the boiling furnaces of Etna, which cast out stones, and sometimes whole rocks from their labouring abyss, and pour out whole rivers of liquid and unmingled flame.”
See how Burke has expanded and worked out this glimpse of the true view. He is full of the mighty influence of Nature’s sublime features. Her heights and depths, her horrors and glooms, the demonstrations of her power and grandeur in storms, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Infinity and Eternity are all before him in their awful majesty, and furnish him with some of his deepest sources and most splendid illustrations of the sublime.
But the fact must be evident to every one. A single glance from the ancients to the moderns, and what a contrast! Throughout all the writings of the most enthusiastic ancients, where are the burning, passionate longings after nature that are transfused through all our modern literature? Nature is not with us a thing incidentally alluded to,--a thing to be voluptuously enjoyed when we find ourselves in the flowery lap of May; ours is a living, permeating, perpetual affection. We seek after communion with her as one of the highest enjoyments of our existence; we seek it to soothe the ruffling of our spirits; to calm our world-vexed hearts; to fill us with the divine presence and overshadowing of beauty. The love of her is with us a daily attraction; the knowledge of her a daily pursuit; we have advanced her cognizance and admiration into a science. Our naturalists feel the breathings of a celestial spirit come from her secret shrines, even while they are seeking after and arranging her lesser forms and productions. Our romance writers dip their pens in her hues to cast a fascination upon their narratives; and our travellers climb every mountain, traverse every sea, explore every distant region, to catch fresh glimpses of her beauty. True, many of these may not, and do not, feel all the attachment they profess--there are thousands who do but affect it, as they do any other fashion; but their very imitation, and their very number, do homage to the great worship of the age.
But it is through our poetry that the admiration of nature is diffused as one great soul. From Chaucer to the most recent poet, it is the universal spirit. It would seem a contradiction now, to say that a man is a poet, but that he has no ardent feeling for nature. In fact, a new language, a new kind of inspiration, distinguish the modern poets from the ancients altogether. Great as each may respectively be, their object, their vision, and their tone in this particular, are widely opposed. When do we find one of the classical writers, speaking thus of his youth?
Like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led; more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then, To me was all in all--I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms were then to me An appetite, a feeling, and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed of the eye.
Wordsworth.
We should be startled to hear an ancient exclaim, like Shelley:
Magnificent! How glorious art thou earth! And if thou be The shadow of some spirit lovelier still, Though evil stain its work, and it should be, Like its creation, weak yet beautiful, I could fall down and worship that and thee. Even now my heart adoreth. Wonderful!
What would be our astonishment, if we were to stumble in an ancient poet, upon stanzas like these?
I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture; I can see Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, Classed among creatures, when the soul can flee, And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain Of ocean or the stars, mingle and not in vain.
And thus I am absorbed, and this is life! I look upon the peopled desert past, As on a place of agony and strife Where for some sin, to sorrow I was cast. To act and suffer, but remount at last With a fresh pinion; which I feel to spring, Though young, yet waxing vigorous, as the blast Which it would cope with, on delighted wing Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling.
And when, at length, the mind shall all be free From what it hates in this degraded form, Reft of its carnal life, save what shall be Existent happier in the fly and worm,-- When elements to elements conform, And dust is what it should be, shall I not Feel all I see, less dazzling, but more warm? The bodiless thought, the spirit of each spot, Of which, even now, I share at times the immortal lot?
Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part Of me and of my soul, as I of them? Is not the love of these deep in my heart With a pure passion? Shall I not contemn All objects, if compared with these? and stem A tide of suffering rather than forego Such feelings, for the hard and worldly phlegm Of those whose eyes are only turned below, Gazing upon the ground, with thoughts that dare not glow?
To quote all that bears evidence of this wonderful revolution in the very heart of literature would be, not to quote indeed, but to take the whole mass of modern poetry. Powerfully as the spirit of the ancients was attracted by the sublimity of mortal passion and mortal fortunes; by the strife of families and nations, by the strife of emotions in the soul, and the out-bursting of a blasting or a beneficent sublimity in the deeds of men; and magnificent as are the monuments of tragic or heroic grandeur they have erected on this foundation,--so powerfully is the spirit of the moderns drawn, excited, and inflamed by the sublimity of nature, and beautiful and endearing are the strains it has elicited. And whence is this mighty change? Ay, that is the question. Whence is it that the love of Nature has, in the latter ages, become so much more passionate, intense, engrossing, refined, elevated, etherealized? Is it because we see Nature with different eyes? Is it that we see something in it that the classics did not? It is! It is to that omnipotent principle that has so utterly changed the whole system of human philosophy, morals, politics, literature, and social life--the hopes, the fortunes, the reasonings of men, that we owe it. IT IS TO CHRISTIANITY! The veil which was rent asunder in the hour that its Divine Founder consummated his mission, was plucked away not only from the heart of man, not only from the immortality of his being, but from the face of Nature. A mystery and a doubt which had hung athwart the sky like a vast and gloomy cloud, was withdrawn, and man beheld Creation as the assured work of God: saw a parental hand guiding, sustaining, and embellishing it: and immediately felt himself brought into a near kinship with it, and into an everlasting sympathy with all that was beautiful around him,--not simply for the beauty itself, but because it was the work of the one Great Father--the one Great Fountain of all life and blessing.
The very introduction to the Hebrew literature in the Old Testament, must have produced a deep and delightful change in human feeling. The contrast between the sentiment and the very language of nature, as addressed to man in the literature of the Greeks and that of the Hebrews, was startling, warming and wonderful beyond measure. The beauty of natural objects was no longer a thing apart;--a thing to be admired on its own account; it was allied to a deep sentiment, it became linked to the life of our inner nature. Waters were beheld as the bountiful blessing of Him “who giveth rain upon the earth, and sendeth waters upon the field.” They became the emblem of that inward purity of which the noblest pagan could form no adequate conception, but which the God of the Hebrews required. They symbolized many of the evils, as well as the refreshments of life. Now they typified, “brethren that deal deceitfully as a brook, and as the stream of brooks that pass away; which are brackish by reason of the ice, and wherein the snow is hid:” now, they were as the billows of affliction,--scenes of trouble--“all thy billows have gone over me:” and now they were as the refreshment of a thirsty soul. The greenness of the grass and of the branch pointed to the beauty, the fleeting beauty of life; and now to the insecure prosperity of the unjust:--“He is green before the sun, and his branch shooteth forth in his garden; his roots are wrapped about the heap, and he seeth the place of stones. If he destroy him from his place, then it shall deny him, saying I have not seen him. Behold this is the joy of his way, and out of the earth shall others grow.”
Every thing in nature, the flower--the wind--the spider’s web--darkness and light--calm and tempest--drought and flood--the shadow and the noon-day heat--a great rock in a weary land--every thing about us, and above us, acquired in this splendid and inimitable literature, a new and touching meaning; a meaning bound up with our lives; a worth coeval with our highest hopes, or most fervent desires. Every thing became a moral and a warning. They were made to illustrate not only the operations of providence, but to cast a new light upon our intellectual being. They did not, indeed, speak out as to the exact value stamped upon man by the Deity, but they gave intimations more profound and startling than anything in the whole round of pagan philosophy. And then, there was an undertone of sorrow, a voice of plaintive regret over man--a delicacy and tenderness of phrase that wonderfully attracted and endeared. What ineffable melancholy is there in these following sentiments! What an intense longing after life, and yet, what a longing for death! What a vivid feeling of the grinding evils of mortal being; and what images of the fulness of peace in the grave!--“Why died I not from the womb? For now should I have lain still, and been quiet; I should have slept: then had I been at rest. With kings and counsellors of the earth, which had built desolate places for themselves; or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver; or, as a hidden, untimely birth, I had not been; as infants which never saw the light. There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners rest together, they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and the great is there; and the servant is free from his master. Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery; and life unto the bitter in soul? Which long for death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures? Which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave?” Job iii. 11-22.
But this new alliance with nature; this new and spiritual beauty cast upon every thing, was not all. The magnificence of Creation and its phenomena were made tenfold conspicuous; and still beyond this, men were no longer left to suppose, or even to contend that the world was the workmanship of Deity. They were no longer left to bewilder themselves amongst a host of imaginary gods,--the universe in its majesty, and God--the one sublime and eternal founder and preserver of it, were flashed upon the spiritual vision in the broadest and brightest light. Here was seen the clear and continuous history of Creation:--God, the sole and immortal, sate upon the circle of the world, and its inhabitants were as grashoppers before him. The sun, moon, and stars were of his ordaining and appointing; night and day, times and seasons, revolved before him; his were the cattle on a thousand hills; his all the swarming tribes of humanity. The prophetic writings proclaimed his deity, his power and attributes, in language unparalleled in splendour, and with imagery which embraced all that is glorious, resplendent, beautiful and soothing, or dark, desolate and withering, in nature.
Such was the effect of the Old Testament;--and then came the New!--then came Christ! The Old shewed us the Deity in unspeakable majesty;--his creation as beautiful and sublime;--Christ proclaimed him THE FATHER OF MEN; and in those words poured on earth a new light. The words which guaranteed the eternity of our spirits, chased a dimness from the sky which had hung there from the days of Adam: they rent down the curtains of death and oblivion, and let fall upon earth such a tide of sunshine as never warmed it till then. The atmosphere of heaven gushed down to earth. From that hour a new and inextinguishable interest was given us in nature. It was the work of our Father: it was the birthplace of millions of everlasting souls. Its hills and valleys then smiled in an ethereal beauty, for they were then to our eyes spread out by a mighty and tender parent for our happy abodes. The waters ran with a voice of gladness; the clouds sailed over us with a new aspect of delight; the wind blew, and the leaves fluttered in it, and whispered everywhere of life--eternal consciousness--eternal enjoyment of intellect and of love. Through all things we felt a portion of the divine, paternal Spirit diffused, and “the wilderness and the solitary place” thenceforth had a language for our hearts full of the holy peace and the revelations of eternity. Then the musing poet felt, what it has been reserved for one in our day only fully to express:--
A presence that disturbed him with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore is he still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth: of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half create And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of his purest thoughts; the nurse, The guide, the guardian of his heart, and soul Of all his moral being.
Thus, then, is dissipated the mystery of the more intense love of Nature evinced by the moderns than the ancients. It is but part of that gift of divine revelation which has endowed us with so many other advantages over those grand old philosophers of antiquity, who in the depths of their hearts, darkened and abused by many an hereditary superstition, yet found some of the unquenched embers of that fire of love and knowledge originally kindled there by the Creator, and cherished and fanned them into a noble flame. Had they heard from heaven these living words pronounced--GOD IS LOVE!--had they seen the great ladder of revelation reared from earth to heaven, and been permitted to trace every radiant step by which man is allowed to ascend from these lower regions into the blaze of God’s own paradise, their spirits would have kindled into as intense a glow as ours, and their vision have become as conscious of surrounding glories. GOD IS LOVE! These are words of miraculous power. Once assured that the very principle and source of all life is love, and that it is destined to cast its beams on our heads through eternal ages, we become filled with a felicity beyond the power of earthly evil. All those intimations that creation itself had given us, are confirmed. We feel the influence of the great principle of beneficence in the joy of our own being; in the cheerfulness of surrounding humanity; in the voices and songs of happy creatures; in the face of earth, and the lights of heaven. Seas, mountains, and forests, all become imbued with beauty as they are contemplated in love; and their aspects and their sounds fill us with sensations of happiness. When we read in the Phædon of Plato, the few and feeble grounds, as they now appear to us, on which that good old Socrates raised his arguments for the immortality of the soul; when we hear his exultation on discovering in Anaxagoras the principle laid down, that “the divine intellect was the cause of all beings,” we feel with what deep transport he would have witnessed the gates of eternity set wide by the Divine hand; and in what hues of heaven the very circumstance would have invested all about him. Yes! the only difference between modern literature and that of the ancients, lies in our grand advantage over them in this particular. It is from the literature of the Bible, and the heirship of immortality laid open to us in it, that we owe our enlarged conceptions of natural beauty, and our quickened affections towards the handiworks of God. We walk about the world as its true heirs, and heirs of far more than it has to give. We walk about in confidence, in love, and in peaceful hope; for we know that we are the rightful sons of the house; and that neither death nor distance can interrupt our progress towards the home-paradise of the Divine Father.
Chapter II
THE PRE-EMINENCE OF THE LOVE OF NATURE IN THE ENGLISH LITERATURE OVER THAT OF ALL OTHER MODERN NATIONS--THE PROMOTION OF THIS PASSION BY THE WRITINGS OF PROFESSOR WILSON, IN BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE; AND BY THE WOOD-CUTS OF BEWICK--MEANS OF STILL FURTHER ENCOURAGING IT.
In the former chapter I have endeavoured to point out the existence of a striking difference as it regards the love of nature between the classical and modern literature, and to explain, and I hope successfully, the principal causes of it. But it is not the less true, that almost as great a difference exists in this same respect between our British literature, and that of almost all other modern nations. I do not intend to go about very laboriously to attempt to prove this fact, for I think it stands sufficiently self-evident on the face of all modern literature. In science, in art, in history; philosophy, natural and moral; in theological, philological and classical inquiries, the continental nations have attained the highest honours. In biography the French are unrivalled; in autobiography the Germans are equally so. In some species of poetry the Germans contest the palm with us; in mathematical industry, and historical research, they are greatly our superiors; but with the solitary exceptions of Gesner, Sturm, and St. Pierre, where have they any writers to range with our Evelyns, Whites, and Waltons? or poets, with our Thomsons and Bloomfields? or indeed, with the whole series of our poets who do not professedly write on the country, but are irresistibly led to it; and from whom the love of it breaks out on all occasions? In the French, the social feeling is the most strongly developed; in the Italian, passion and fancy; in the German, the metaphysical. The Germans, indeed, most strongly resemble the English in their literary tastes. There seems to be a fellow-feeling between them, resulting from ancient kinship. They have a similar character of simplicity; they are alike grave, solid, and domestic, and prone to deep and melancholy thought. They have a love of nature deep as ours, for the tone of their minds makes them, in every thing they do attach themselves to, earnest and enthusiastic. In every thing relating to the affections, their literature is unrivalled; their feelings are profound, tender, and spiritual; and while a false and superficial taste has made rapid strides amongst us of late years--a taste for glitter, shew, and fashion, the natural accompaniment of wealth and luxury, a growing fondness for German literature must be hailed as a good omen; as likely to give a new infusion of heart and mind to our writings; to re-awaken our love for the simple, the domestic--the fireside love; in fact, to bring us back to what was the ancient character of the English; high-toned in morals, simple in manners, manly and affectionate in heart. Their love of nature is as deep as ours; but it is not so equally and extensively diffused. The solemn and speculative cast of their genius has tended to link it with the gloom of forests and tempests, and with the wild fictions of the supernatural, rather than to scatter it over every cheerful field, and cause it to brood over every sunny cottage-garden, amid the odour of flowers and the hum of bees. There is something wonderfully attractive in their descriptions of the old-fashioned homeliness of their rural and domestic manners; in the unbustling quietness of their lives, and in the holy strength of their family attachments. Such writings as that Idyl of Voss, describing the manner of life of the venerable pastor of Grenau, the autobiographies of Goethe and Stilling, seem to carry us back into the simple ages of our own country. That which characterised them, seems to be preserved to the present hour in Germany; and then, the affectionate intellectuality of their minds, and their very language, so homely and yet so expressive, cause them to abound in such touches of natural pathos as are nowhere else to be found. Yet, when their love of nature exhibits itself in descriptions of country life, amid all these charms, we are often tempted to exclaim with the pastor’s wife in Voss, when in a pic-nic party they discovered, while taking tea under the forest trees, that they had forgotten the tea-spoons, and had to substitute pieces of stick for them--“O, dear nature, thou art almost too natural!”
But the aspect of the different countries is sufficiently indicative of the natural feeling. Instead of the solitary chateau, or baronial castle, amid dark forests, or wide unfenced plains; instead of the great landed proprietors crowding into large towns, and the very labourers huddling themselves into villages, and going, as they do, in some parts of France, seven or eight miles on asses to their daily work in the fields, the hills and valleys of England are studded all over with the dwellings of the landed gentry, and the cottages of their husbandmen. Villas amid shrubberies and gardens; villages environed with old-fashioned crofts; farm-houses and cottages, singly or in groups--a continuous chain of cultivation and rustic residences stretches from end to end and side to side of the island. Our wealthy aristocrats have caught a fatal passion for burying themselves in the capital in a perpetual turmoil of political agitations, ostentatious rivalry, and dissipation--a passion fatal to their own happiness and to the whole character of their minds; but the love of the country is yet strong enough in large classes to maintain our pre-eminence in this respect. The testimony of foreigners, however, is stronger than our own; and foreigners are always struck with the garden-like aspect of England; and the charms of our country houses. A number of a French literary paper, “Le Panorama de Londres,” has fallen accidentally into my hands, while writing this, which contains an article--De la Poesie Anglaise et de la Poesie Allemande--from which I transcribe the following passages.
“England has produced her great epic poet, her great dramatic poet; and the last age gave her reasoning poets in abundance. The time for the one and the other is past. By a revolution, the causes of which it would be difficult to trace, her poetry has changed both its character and object; and strange enough, under the reign of a civilization the most advanced, her poetry has returned to nature. At first, the fact strikes us as an unaccountable anomaly; for what country owes so much to art as England? The very aspect of the country shews everywhere the hand of man. A scientific culture has changed its whole face. The forests have ceased to be impenetrable; the rivers to be wild torrents; the mountains themselves to be savage. Human industry has appropriated every thing; fire, air, earth, every thing is subjected, every thing is tamed. The very animals seem to submit themselves voluntarily to the service of man. The horse himself, the English horse, so swift and powerful, scarcely neighs with impatience, or capers with eagerness; his very impetuosity is docile. The Englishman is in one sense the king of the world. It is for him that every thing is in motion around him: yet he himself is bound by unchangeable customs. He fears change. He has even a religion of an established order. One would think nothing could be more prosaic than a country thus laboured; yet, nevertheless, all Europe resounds with the songs of her poets. Amid the miracles of industry, the profusion of riches, the refinement of luxury; in the face of steam-engines, suspension bridges, and railroads, imagination has lost nothing of its ancient empire; on the contrary, during the last thirty years, she has acquired more; she has been borne, as by an irresistible influence, towards the description of natural objects and simple sentiments. She has revelled in the charms of a poetry whose freshness seemed to belong to another age. The fact is, if we regard England more attentively, we shall discover her under a different aspect to what has been usually ascribed to her; and shall be less astonished to find her poetic in seeing her picturesque. That agriculture, so marvellous, is far from having given up every thing to the useful; its object seems rather to have been to embellish than to fertilize the earth. Those fields so well tilled, are green and riant; those quiet streams flow brimful through rich meadows; and, thanks to beautiful trees and living hedges, the very plains are charming. Those seats where opulence parades all its splendour, are environed by greensward pastured by abundant cattle; and the art which designs those immense parks, seems to have no object but to put into a frame a beautiful landscape. The taste is no longer to dig lakes, to cast up mounts, to plant thickets; but to inclose whole rivers, woods, and mountains. Everywhere you discover the sentiment of the beauty of nature. You find it in every class. Neither riches nor poverty have been able to extinguish it. We observe in other countries that the sentiment is unknown to the peasantry. They are the towns which they admire: to them the country is merely useful. But in England everybody loves the country; even those who cultivate it. The most humble cottage is a proof of it. The taste which rarely distinguishes the architecture of the English towns, is reserved, I think, for the country houses. The little gardens which lead to them; the orchards which surround them; even the very bushes of jessamine or of rose, which crown their porches or tapestry their walls, seem designed to delight the eye. Amid the treasures of an admirable vegetation--gothic ruins, the towers of an old manor, the arches of an abbey, the ivy which clothes the walls of a parish church; the tree scathed and decaying, which has no value but its age; all these things are respected by every one as the monuments of the past, or the ornaments of the country. The whole population interests itself in every thing which adorns its abode; and this nation, the queen of commerce and industry, seems to recollect with affection, that it is to the earth that she owes her wealth, her glory, and her greatness.
“An analogous sentiment pervades the poetry of the English. The verses of their good poets seem to have been composed in the open air; all external objects are by them faithfully portrayed; the impressions they produce are faithfully rendered. Simple sentiments, those of a domestic nature, so well protected by a country life, in them preserve all their force and all their purity. Their recitals are often the most touching and familiar; when they turn upon great adventures, they are related as they would be on a winter’s evening before the fire of an ancient castle, or of a humble cottage. Scarcely an English poet is wanting in descriptive talent, not even the least celebrated amongst them. It shines with great eclat in Burns, in Crabbe, in Walter Scott. Lord Byron, who has so many others, possesses none perhaps in a greater degree than this.”
It is to be hoped that the English poetry will always maintain this character; will always remain the powerful ally of the love of the country: one great means of preserving those features of English rural life so delightfully described in the foregoing extract. Amid the fascinations and temptations to a corruption of taste, from the mighty wealth and political influence of this country, it is to the combined effect of real, simple Christianity, the love of nature, and of that literature which is in alliance with those great conservative powers, that we must look for the maintenance of a sound national heart and intellect; and consequently, of that great moral ascendency, and genuine glory, that as a nation we have obtained. I long with a most earnest longing, for our stability in this respect; for the preservation of those pure, simple, holy tastes which have led our countrymen in all ages, since reading and civilization came upon them, to delight in the pleasant fields, in the pleasant country houses, in the profound peace of noble woods, so favourable to high and solemn musings; and in all those healthful and animating sports and pursuits that belong to such a life. It has been through the influence of these tastes, and of these home-born but exalted pleasures, by the strong human sympathies engendered by living amongst our manly and high-minded peasantry--the hardy sons and bold defenders of their natal soil,--the strong-hearted old fathers,--the fair and modest daughters of uncorrupted England; by living amongst them as their leaders, counsellors, and protectors; by musing over the inspiring annals of the past days of England; on the solid tomes of our legislators, our divines, philosophers and poets, in the calm twilight of ancient halls, or in the sunny seats of their broad bay-windows, looking out on fields purchased by the blood of patriots, and hoary forests, that have witnessed the toils of their ancestors, or perhaps received them to their dim bosoms in times of danger; it is by such aliment that the British heart has been nourished, and grown to its present greatness, when its pulsations are felt to the very ends of the earth, and by millions of confiding or submissive men, whose destinies depend upon its motions. Our arms may have been wielded in many a mighty battle for the accomplishment of this magnificent end, but it was here that the power of victory grew: our counsels may have, wearily, and stroke by stroke, worked out this ample breadth of glory; but it is here, and it was thus, that the wisdom, and the prudence, and the irresistible fortitude sprung, increased, and gave to those brave men and high measures their vigour and stability; here that they were born, and fostered to their beneficent fulness.
Therefore would I have every thing which may tend to keep alive this genuine spirit of England, may keep open all the sources of its strength and its inspiration, encouraged: every taste for the sweet serenity, the animating freshness, the preserving purity of country life, promoted; every thing which can embellish or render it desirable. For this cause I delight in the every-day spreading attachment to all branches of Natural History; in the great encouragement given to all books on country affairs; and in the advancing love of landscape-painting, by which the most enchanting views of our mountains, coasts, wild lakes, forests, and pastoral downs will be brought into our cities, and spread in sunshine and in poetry along their walls. For this I am thankful, with a deep thankfulness, for the mighty strains of poetry that have been poured out in this age, brimmed and gushing over with the august spirit of nature: for Wordsworth and Coleridge; Rogers and Campbell; for Shelley and Byron and Keats, and for many another noble bard; for the Romances of Scott, which have pre-eminently piled quenchless fuel on this social flame, by sanctifying many of the most beautiful scenes in the kingdom with the highest historical remembrances; and not less, for that wonderful series of articles by Wilson, in Blackwood’s Magazine,--in their kind, as truly amazing, and as truly glorious, as the romances of Scott, or the poetry of Wordsworth. Far and wide and much as these papers have been admired, wherever the English language is read, I still question whether any one man has a just idea of them as a whole. Whatever may be our opinion of the side which this powerful journal has taken in politics, it must be admitted that while it has fought the battles of Toryism with vigour, it has fought them in a noble spirit. There was a day when a foul influence had crept into it; when it was personal, rancorous, and apt to descend to language and details below the dignity of its strength; but that day is gone by, and it has been seen with lively satisfaction by all parties that it has purged itself of this evil nature, and as it has become peerless in fame,--it has become more and more generous, forgiving, and superior to every petty nature and narrow feeling. Its politics are ultra, but they are full of intellect; and they who desire to see what can be said on the Tory side, see it there. But the great attraction to literary men has long been, that splendid series of ample, diffuse, yet overflowing papers, in which every thing relating to poetry and nature find a place. These are singly, and in themselves, specimens of transcendent power; but taken altogether, as a series, are, in the sure unity of one great and correct spirit, such a treasury of criticism as is without a parallel in the annals of literature. For, while they are full of the soundest opinions, because they are the offspring of a deeply poetical mind--a mind strong in the guiding instincts of nature; they are preserved from the dryness and technicality of ordinary criticism by this very poetic temperament. They come upon you like some abounding torrent, streaming on, amid the wildest and noblest scenes; amid mountains and forests and flowery meadows; and bringing to your senses, at once, all their freshness of odours, dews, and living sounds. They are the gorgeous outpourings of a wild, erratic eloquence, that, in its magnificent rush, throws out the most startling, and apparently conflicting dogmas, yet all bound together by a strong bond of sound sense and incorruptible feeling.
They are all poetry:--sometimes, in its weakest and most diluted form; again, gushing into the most melting pathos; and then again playing and frolicking like a happy boy, half beside himself with holiday freedom and sunshine; then vapouring, and rhodomontading, and reeling along in the very drunkenness of a luxuriant fancy, intoxicated at the ambrosia-fountains of the heart; and then, like a strong man, all at once recovering his power and self-possession--if self-possession that can be called, which, in the next moment, gives way to a new impulse, and soars up into the highest regions of eloquence, pouring forth the noblest sentiments and most fervid imaginations, as from an oracle of quenchless inspiration.
It is in this manner, and this spirit, that the writer has--reviewed shall I say? no, not reviewed, but proclaimed, trumpeted to the farthest regions, idealized, etherealized, and made almost more glorious than they are in their own solemn grandeur, the poems of Wordsworth, of Milton, of Shakspeare, of Spenser, of Homer, and of many another genuine bard. And it is thus that he has led you over the heathy mountains and along the fairy glens of the north, to many a sweet secluded loch, into many a Highland hut. It is thus that he loves to make you observe the noble peasant striding along in his prime of youth--in his sedate manhood--in his hoary age, more beautiful than youth, for then he is crowned with the wisdom of his simple experience of the trials and vanity of life, and of the feeling that he draws near to eternity. It is thus that he bids you stand, and mark the fair young maiden busied about the door of her parental hut, more graceful and happy in the engrossment of her simple duties, beneath the sun and the blue heavens, than the very daughter of the palace in the lap of her artificial enchantments. It is thus he shews you the young mother tossing her laughing infant in the open air, while her two elder children are rolling on the sunny sward, or scrambling up the heathy brae; and her mother sits silently by the door, in the basking tranquillity of age. It is thus that he fills you with the noblest sympathies, with the purest human feelings; and then astonishes you with some sudden feat of leaping, running, or wrestling; and as suddenly is gone with rod in hand, following the course of a clear rapid stream, eagerly intent upon trout or salmon. And then he is the poet again, every atom of him, meek as a bard of nineteen, or of ninety; all tenderness, purity, and holiness; the poet of the City of the Plague, or of the Children’s Dance, forcing you to forget that he ever swaggered in an article, or rollocked in a Noctes. He is now basking in the shine of a May-day, amid the sparkling dews, the waving flowers, the running waters, and all the delights of earth, air, and the blue o’erspanning sky.
These are papers that have already done infinite service to the cause of poetry and nature; and therefore do I rejoice in their existence, and addition to all that sublime accumulation of fervid poetry and prose in the praise and love of the country, with which our English literature, above all others, is enriched.
But there is one person to whom I must still give a separate mention; an individual to whom we owe a signal increase of country delight,--Thomas Bewick. Every painter of landscape is a friend to the best feelings and tastes of humanity; but Bewick has, in a manner, created a new art. He has struck out a peculiar mode of embellishing books with snatches of rural scenery, that will, if pursued in the true spirit, do more to diffuse a love of the country than all other modes of engraving put together. To see what may be done, let us only see what he has done. Through his revival of the art of wood-cutting, we have now hundreds of wood-engravers, and thousands of wood-embellished books: yet lay your hands on any one of these volumes, and, with all deference to the great talent evinced, the great beauty produced,--till you open Bewick you shall not know what wood-cutting is capable of doing for books on the country.
I have heard some wood-engravers speak with contempt of Bewick, and say--“Why he was very well for his time of day, but we have scores that can excel him now.” To such men I have only one reply--“you don’t understand the country. I grant you there are many who can produce a more showy print; but it was not show which Bewick aimed at,--it was truth: and if you will know which is most excellent, take the one and the other; and let them be both opened before some country family of taste, and you will see that your print will dazzle the eye for a moment; it will be a moment of surprise and delight; but when the moment is past, the eye will fall on Bewick, and there it will be riveted; and there, the longer it dwells the stronger will be its fascination, and it will be the beginning of an everlasting love.” And why is this? Simply because we have in one, splendour of style; in the other, Nature! pure, faithful, and picturesque Nature,--Nature in her most felicitous, or most solemn moments. I have heard those who loved the country, and loved it because they knew it, say, that the opening of Bewick was a new era in their lives. I have seen how his volumes are loved, and treasured, and reverted to, time after time, in many a country house; the more familiar, the more prized; the oftener seen, the oftener desired.
And why should it not be so? It is not so much as a triumph of art, as a triumph of genius, that they are love-worthy. Yet as specimens of art they have eminent merit. See, in what a small space he gives you a whole landscape--a whole wide heath, or stormy coast, with their appropriate objects. See, with a single line, a single touch, what a world of effect he has achieved! But it is the spirit of the conception, and the sacred fidelity to Nature, which stamp their value upon his works. They are the works of an eye which sees in a moment what in a scene advances beyond common-place; what in it has a story, a moral, a sarcasm, or touch of transcendent beauty. They are the works of a heart bound by a bond of indissoluble love to the sweetness and peace of nature; rich in recollections of all her forms and hues; and of a spirit which cherished no ambition, no hope on earth, superior to that of throwing into his transcriptions the express image of his beloved Nature.
This is the great secret of the delight in his wood-cuts. They are full of all those beauties, those fine yet impressive beauties, that arrest the gaze of the lovers of nature; and they are so faithful that they never deceive, or disappoint the experienced eye. The vignettes of his Natural History are in themselves a series of stories so clearly told that they require no explanation, and are full of the most varied human interest. He delights in the picturesque and beautiful in nature, and the grotesque in life. Whatever he introduces, its genuine characteristics are all about it; beast or bird, there it is in the very scenery, and amid the very concomitants that you see it surrounded by in nature. You miss nothing that you find in the same situation in the real scene and circumstance; and, what is of more consequence, you never see a single thing introduced which has no business there. He is the very Burns of wood-engraving. He has the same intense love of nature; his bold freedom of spirit; his flashes of indignant feeling; his love of satire; and his ridicule of human vanity and cant. In his landscapes, he gives you every thing the most poetical:--wide, wild moors; the desolation of winter; the falling fane, and the crumbling tower; wild scenes on northern shores, with their rocks and sea-fowl, their wrecks and tempests. In his village scenes you have every feature of village life given with a precision and a spirit equally admirable. He delights to seize hold on humanity even in some of its degradations, as drunkenness and gluttony, and Hogarth-like, to excite your disgust against the abuse of God’s good things and man’s high nature. He delights equally to exhibit those ragged rapscallions that abound in the streets of towns, and the purlieus of villages; uncultivated, neglected, and therefore graceless, reckless--vulgarity and wickedness stamped on their features, and even in their strong, close-cut, thick-set heads of hair; full of mischief and cruelty from top to toe. There you have them, just in the commission of those barbarities or depredations that speak volumes for the necessity of better popular education: and as for beggars, strollers with bear and monkey, lame soldiers, and all the groups of tatterdemalions that are scattered all over this country, there is no end of them. At times he is full of whim; at others half in jest, and half in solemn earnest. Again, he touches you with pity for the aged and forlorn; and often rises into a tone of deep moral warning, and into actual demonstrations of the sublime and beautiful.
The elements in their majesty are made to laugh to scorn the inflated vanity of man. A stately church has sometime been reared on a pleasant and commanding mount near the sea. You are made to call to mind the pride and the gratulation in which it was erected in the palmy days of the Catholic faith. You see it in its newness, with all its fair proportions and noble completeness--a beautiful temple to the Christian Deity. You see how the country people come in awe and wonder to behold it; into what a silence of veneration they drop as they approach; with what a prostration of astonishment of heart they enter, while the new and merry bells sound above their heads; and all abroad the glad sunshine of summer is pouring, and casts its light into the glorious interior; and the sea-breeze comes fluttering with a full delight; and every thing seems to speak of triumph, stability, and enduring joy. You know with what solemn pomp the prelate, in full canonicals, and followed by his train of clerical brethren in their becoming robes, and surrounded by the powerful and the beautiful of the neighbourhood, proceeds to perform the rites of consecration. And with what pride the great family, who have given the land to God, and expended the revenues of ample estates for many years in erecting this goodly fabric, see all, hear all, and find hard work to conceal the inward swell of gratified ambition. How they look on all the accomplished miracle of the place; the lofty, arched roof above; the stately columns along the aisles; the priest in his pulpit; the people in their seats. With what proud gratulation they hear the voices of the choristers break forth, and fill “this house which they have built.” With what a high, elating, intoxicating feeling, with what a proud joy they kneel down on the silken cushions, and open the golden clasps of their richly-painted missals! All this we see; and then the dream of strength and glory and endurance is gone;--is gone from them and you. There stands the ancient church! Ancient? Yes, it is now ancient. All that dream of delight, all that throng of wondering people, have long passed away. Yes! the very founders, whose hearts beat in pride, are now dust and ashes beneath your feet;--ay, and their children and children’s children to the sixth or seventh generation. That noble fabric, then so fair of hue; so admirable in its workmanship; so sharp in all its mouldings, and delicate in its tracery; that temple in which so many prayers were put up for the mariner tossed on that wilderness of mighty waters on which it looked--is a ruin! The winds and the tempests of ages have blown and beaten upon it. The ocean has come in fury, and rent away its western front, that so gloriously used to fling back the splendours of the setting sun; and the very mound of the dead is rifled by the billows. What is that which I read upon a fallen stone, over which the waves, at every returning tide, wash with insulting strength? “This stone is erected to perpetuate the memory of ----.” O pride! O vanity and swelling confidence of “man that is a worm”--what a rebuke! But what is this? Another stone fallen--and fallen yet lower;--“Custos Rotulorum, of the County of ----.” And have time and tide not spared even this great man? Is the very keeper of the Rolls gone, and his monument after him? Where then is human stability? The waves, and that ransacked monument, and that stately ruin of a church, all say, not on earth; not in the works of man. The very house which he had raised, the very ground which he had consecrated, are pulled down by the elements; and even the bones of himself and children are swept into the great deep. I do not know, in the catalogue of the paintings with which this country is enriched, one that speaks with a more sublime power to the imagination than this wood-cut of the littleness of human pride; and of the only sure hope of honour and endurance, in the eternity of virtue.
There is another sketch of a similar class, but of an opposite inculcation. While that strikes at the vaunting spirit of human pride, this speaks a sad consolation to the struggling and miserable. It is a moonlight view of a solitary burial-ground. It is like one of those in Scotland, distant from the place of worship; perhaps on a lonely heath. There is not a building in view to give the least feeling of proximity to human life. It is still--far off--and alone. The moon pours a melancholy light on the wild, grassy turf, and the foliage that overhangs the enclosing wall; and here and there, stoop the heavy headstones of the dead. On one in the foreground is inscribed--“GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES, AND ALL TIMES GET OVER.”
His churchyard scenes, indeed, are all full of the most beautiful and truly human sentiment. In one, you have an old man reading a headstone,--“VANITAS, VANITATUM, OMNIA VANITAS.” It is a sentiment which strikes down to the bottom of his soul, as a voice of warning from heaven, and the voice of memory from the days of his past life. The old man stands propt on his staff, and you cannot misinterpret the thoughts which throng upon him. He is carried back through all his days; his days of boyhood and buoyant youth; his days of manly ardour and triumph; his days of trial and decay--to the very hour in which he stands here. The wife of his youth lies in the dust at his feet; his very children are all gone before him, or remain to neglect him; his friends have dropped away, one after another; he alone is left, a shattered remnant of other and happier times: left in a noisy and a crowded world. Truly it is--“vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
But see, here comes a boy driving his hoop. He bounds over the very ground, past the very stone which has conjured up in the old man’s heart such a host of sad thoughts. But none of them come to him. To him all is new; the world is fair; the present is Paradise. He scarcely looks around him, and yet he enjoys all nature. The sunshine plays upon his head; the air visits his cheek; the earth is green beneath him. He thinks not of the dead under his feet; of the awful stones around him. He does not even see the old man himself,--a more striking memorial of mortality and the vanity of life than all the rest. This is true human life: age, sad and observant of every solemn memento; youth, in the reckless happiness of its own charmed existence.
There is but a slight step, and hardly that, from his satire to his humour, for one commonly partakes of the other, and in no instance are these mingled qualities more happily shewn than in the cut now engraved, for the first time, and placed at the head of this chapter. But in humorous incidents he abounds. Here is a good woman hanging out her clothes. A gipsy-like beggar-woman, with a child at her back, is going out of the garden, and in true beggar recklessness leaves the gate open. While the unconscious dame is busy at her line, in come the hens. One of them is already strutting across her clean white linen, that lies on the grass-plot, and leaving conspicuous marks of her dirty feet; and in are marching a whole drove of young pigs, with the old sow at their heels. In another place is seen the snug garden of some curious florist, with auriculas blooming in pots, and some choice plant under a large glass; and here too a mischievous sow has conducted her brood; and some of them have made their way through the paling, and are in full career towards the auriculas. Another moment, and glass, flowers, all will be one piece of destruction. The old sow, shut out by her bulk, and a yoke upon her neck, the token of her propensities, stands watching from beneath her huge slouch ears, with the utmost satisfaction, this scene of devastation.
Here again, is a country lad mounted on a shaggy pony, and doubtless sent on some important errand; but a flight of birds has captivated his attention, and so engaged is he in watching, that the pony has wandered out of the way, and has reached the precipitous brink of a river. The lad still gazing after the birds, finding the pony halt, bangs him with his cudgel; the pony hangs back, and the little dog behind with uplifted foot wonders what the lad can mean. There are two men fetching a tub of water from a water-cask, but they are so lost in gossip, that the water is running all away. A countryman to avoid paying toll at a bridge, is fording the river below, holding the tail of his cow. But his hat is blown off, and he dare not let go his hold to save it. He will get a good wetting, and suffer greater loss than the toll; while the tollman and a traveller on the bridge witness and enjoy his dilemma. Another countryman is crossing a river in a style grotesque enough. The old man is wading; on his back is his wife, on her’s a child, and on her head a loaded basket. If the old man’s foot slip, what a catastrophe! In one place is an old dame going to the village spring, and finding a whole flock of geese frolicking in it. Her looks of execration and her uplifted stick are infinitely amusing. In another, is an old dame about to mount a stile, and a tremendous bull presenting himself on the other side. Notwithstanding the bold bearing and protruded cudgel of the old dame, one knows not whether it be most dangerous to fight or flee. And here is the string of a kite caught on the hat of a countryman crossing a stream on horseback. It would be difficult to decide whether the distress of the man or that of the boys is the greater. On goes the horse, and the rider tries in vain to get rid of the string. His fate is to be pulled backward off the horse, or that of the boys to be dragged into the stream, or to lose their kite.
There is another class of vignettes, in which cruelty to animals is held up to abhorrence. There is the man with his cart, striking his horse on the head with a bludgeon; his hat has fallen off in his passion. Ragged lads are belabouring an ass with a gorse bush. A hardened lad has a cat and dog harnessed to a little cart in which is a child; the cat is nearly terrified to death at the dog, the child is crying amain; and the lad is trying to force the whole team into the water. In most of these cuts a gallows is seen in the distance, as the probable goal of the career.
Another class is that of country accidents, full of appropriate spirit; men crossing streams by means of the long boughs of trees, which are breaking and letting them fall. A blind man led by his dog, crossing a narrow foot-bridge, where the hand-rail is broken down, and his hat is blown away by the wind. Old people caught in storms on wide, open heaths; old, weary people far away from any town, as indicated by a milestone marked XI. miles on one side, and XV. on the other. But they are endless, and of endless variety. There are some, as I have said, truly sublime. A shipwrecked man on a rock in mid-ocean praying; the waves leaping and thundering around him; no single vessel in view, his only hope in God. The hull of a vessel lying stranded on a solitary coast. It is evident that it has been there for years; for its ribbed timbers are laid bare, and it speaks both of human catastrophe, and solitude, and decay. A fine contrast,--a circle of men on a village green witnessing a fight, all vulgar eagerness and tumultuous passion; the rainbow, that circle of heaven, spanning the sky beyond them in such pure beauty--in the profound calm and holiness of nature.
Through all these representations, the spirit of the picturesque is poured without measure. Such winter scenes! such summer scenes! all the occupations and figures of rustic existence; fishermen, hunters, shooters, ploughmen, all in their peculiar scenery and costume. There are anglers in such delicious places, by such clear, rapid, winding waters, with such overhanging rocks and foliage, that one longs instantaneously to be an angler. We have all the spirit of Izaak Walton’s book, in two square inches of wood-engraving: his descriptions of natural beauty, his deep feeling of country enjoyment, and his single and thankful contentment in his art. There are men and boys sleeping on sunny grass, or beneath the shade of summer trees! O! so luxuriously, that we long to be sleeping there too. There are such wild sea-shores, and caverned rocks, with boys climbing up to get at the sea-fowls’ eggs, and such stormy waters, that we are wild with desire to wander by those rocks and waves. The sedgy water-sides, such as are found on moors where the wild ducks and snipes and herons haunt, are inimitable. Nature is everywhere so gloriously, yet so unostentatiously portrayed, as none but the most ardent and devoted of her lovers can portray her. There is nothing gaudy, shewy, or ambitious; she is most simple, and therefore most beautiful.
Chapter III
THE PRESENT STATE OF WOOD-ENGRAVING AS IT REGARDS RURAL SUBJECTS.
Unmeaning glitter, unprecedented softness, unprincipled novelty, shall sometimes set aside for awhile the truth and simplicity of nature, and the approbation of ages.--Life of Ryland.
From what has been said in the last chapter, it is obvious that had Bewick been but one of a series of wood-engravers during the established period of the art, his merit would have been eminent and peculiar; but when it is recollected that, at one stride, he brought it to comparative perfection, our obligations to him are wonderfully increased.
The direct consequence of his revival of the art is, that we have now tens of thousands of volumes embellished with wood-cuts, and upwards of two hundred engravers in this department. The Penny Magazine alone is said to pay for its wood-cutting 2000_l._ per annum. This magazine and some of its cheap cotemporaries have made a peculiar application of this art, which is, in itself, a great national blessing. By stereotyping wood-engravings, they are enabled to strike off any number of copies of them with their letter-press, and by this means, prints of a large size, and of great strength of effect, are made to circulate amongst the people, even to an extent to which the only limits must be those of education. Thus are many pictorial subjects placed before the eyes of tens of thousands who could otherwise never have seen them. Subjects from the paintings of the old masters; landscapes from every country on the globe, with their peculiar characteristics; prints of ancient and modern buildings; of ancient and modern sculpture; of animals, plants; in fact, every subject of natural or human history, all brought livingly to the sight, and at such an amazingly trivial expense, that the desire of knowledge is, at once, quickened and gratified in a degree of which our fathers had not the most distant idea; nor of the effect of which have we, perhaps, any adequate conception. We feel, however, that it must be full of virtue and happiness. Throughout thousands and tens of thousands of cottages shall the eyes which, without these blessed facilities, would never have glanced on anything beyond the objects surrounding their daily life, now gaze in living delight on the magnificent scenes, the beautiful productions of every land and climate; on the stern or fantastic splendour of foreign towns and cities, domes and minarets; on the forms and costumes, the dwellings and implements of the most distant nations; on the animal natures of air, earth, and ocean; on the faces of men who have been the lights, or terrors of the world; of those who have fought for, and thought for, sung for, and died for man and his cause; the spread of knowledge and religion; in fact, for that social and illimitable happiness of which these things are the precursors; a happiness that shall be brought to every house, in city or in desert, to every fireside, however humble.
This is a great and beneficent result, from the union of two noble arts: for whatever tends to embellish human life; to give to toiling men a refining pleasure; to bring them from base excitements and public haunts to the pure and peaceful enjoyments of home; to draw them to their own ingles; to induce them to sit among their children, and delight their eyes with objects of beauty, and feed their growing spirits with those natural facts, in which the wisdom and goodness of God are made so sensible to young minds; whatever does this, does the work of love; the work of human happiness and national greatness. To enlighten the general mass, and at the same time to kindle the noblest feelings of the soul of man, are the sure means to build up the state with true citizens; to protect the people from despotism, and government from popular caprice.
This, I say, is one great result; yet even this does not seem to me the highest legitimate province of the art. It is obvious that prints of the kind described--of buildings, portraits, or historic scenes, must after all come from metal with greater perfection than from wood. To most subjects metal gives a richness and delicacy that wood can never equal. Wood can give great strength and boldness, but accompanied nevertheless with something of hardness and constraint. It is only the power of striking off prints with the letter-press which gives wood that admirable advantage over metal of which I have been speaking. It becomes, in that case, a substitute for metal, where metal could not be used without defeating the ultimate object by its expense. There it is merely a good substitute for metal. But there is one department in which it is superior even to metal; and that is in such vignette representations of rural life and scenery as Bewick has used it in. Here it triumphs over metal; for it does not here require so much brilliance, or richness, or extreme delicacy, as a certain homely beauty belonging to rustic objects. The beauty of nature does not consist in showiness and dazzling lustre, so much as in pleasing colours, a simple grace of form, and a certain roughness and opacity of surface, on which the eye can rest longer without fatigue than on more polished substances. Now it is in these qualities that Bewick’s engravings abound. He is sacredly faithful to Nature. He catches at once the spirit of the country and of its wild denizens. He is simple, beautiful, but not glaring;--Nature is never so.
Yet amongst all our wood-engravers,--and many of them are continually employed on rural subjects,--it is as true as it may seem astonishing, that there is not one of them who can bear a moment’s comparison with Bewick as a delineator of rural life. This is owing to no deficiency of talent--we have many artists of the highest talent--it is owing to other causes. If it seem surprising that no one, from the time of Bewick’s restoration of the art to the present moment, should have equalled him in the representation of nature, it is not more surprising than that from the time of Milton to that of Cowper no one wrote good blank verse; that with Milton’s free and natural majesty as a model before them, we should have had nothing better than the stilted stiffness of Akenside, and the pompous inflations and ungrammatical distortions of Thomson. The same causes in both cases have produced the same effect. Our artists, like the poets, have forsaken nature herself, to study and imitate one another. While our artists are employed to depict nature, they are living in our mighty capital, cut off from the very face of nature. They have full employ; for the eyes of those for whom they labour are not more familiar with the country than their own. Dash and meretricious show captivate the multitude, and therefore dash and show are given in abundance; the wondering lover of nature looks for her in vain. The ambitious and frippery taste of the age is stamped on all the most excellent productions of what should be the rustic burin. We now and then see a better spirit; things overflowing with talent; and on the very verge of nature. Such are some of the beautiful recent illustrations of Gray’s Elegy, Chevy-Chace, Aiken’s Calendar of the Year, Knight’s Pictorial Shakspeare, the bold sketches in Hone’s Table-Book, and the elegant ones in some of their books for the young published by Darton and Clark, Tegg, and others: but, in general, our most skilful artists are not contented with the simplicity of nature; they want better bread than can be made of wheat. Hence while they are admired in cities, Bewick reigns sole and triumphant all through the country.
But how is this to be remedied? As I have said, we have talent and manual skill equal to any thing; what we want are purer designs,--designs, in fact, from Nature! We want subjects drawn from the same source that Bewick drew them. I do not mean that our artists should imitate Bewick; no, that they should imitate Nature,--the true, the beautiful, the unambitious. Had Bewick lived a thousand years, he would every day have seen some new subject, some new features, in the everlasting changes and combinations that surround the fixed spirit of the universe. We have pupils of his--Harvey and Nesbit in particular, and why do not they, with their high talent, produce the same genuine nature? The answer is obvious. They are citizens. They have abandoned the daily cognizance of Nature; they have taken a directly opposite course to Bewick. He was an inseparable companion of Nature from his boyhood. All his life long he was watching after, and pursuing her into her most hidden retirements. To him
High mountains were a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture.
He had tried the life of London, but he could not bear it. His soul was robbed of its nourishment. He was shut up, blinded, famished in that huge wilderness of stone; dinned by that eternal chaos of confused sounds. He gasped for the free air; he pined for the dews; for the solemn roar of the ocean; for the glories of rising and setting suns. His father when he sent him from his country home at Cherryburn, to be apprenticed to Mr. Bielby at Newcastle, said to him at parting--“Now Thomas, thou art going to lead a different life to what thou hast led here: thou art going from constant fresh air and activity, to the closeness of a town and a sedentary occupation: thou must be up in a morning, and get a run.” And Thomas followed faithfully, for it chimed exactly with his own bent, his father’s injunction. Every morning, rain or shine, often without his hat, and his bushy head of black hair ruffling in the wind, he would be seen scampering up the street towards the country; and the opposite neighbours would cry--“There goes Bielby’s fond boy.” These morning excursions he kept up during his life; and they did not suffice him. After the expiration of his apprenticeship, he roamed far and wide through the glorious and soul-embuing scenery of Scotland. Year after year, and day after day, it was his delight to stroll over heaths and moors, by sedgy pools and running waters. He saw bird, beast, and fish, from his hidden places, in all the freedom of their wild life. He saw the angler casting his line; the fowler setting his net and his springes; the farmer’s boy amusing his solitude, when
He strolled, the lonely Crusoe of the fields--
prowling after water-fowl amid the reedy haunts; watching the flight of birds with greedy eyes; lighting fires under the screening hedge, and collecting sticks for fuel, and blowing them on hands and knees into a flame. Such were his loves, his studies, his perpetual occupations; and to have similar results, we must have persons of a similar passion and pursuit. We must have designers; for we have plenty of manual dexterity, capable of executing any design to the minutest shade,--we must have designers in whom Nature is, at once, an appetite, a perpetual study, and quenchless delight. Landscape painters we have of this character. Turner, with his gorgeous creations; Copley Fielding, with his heaths and downs, in which miles of space are put upon a few feet of canvass, and that soul of solitude poured upon you in a gallery, which you before encountered only in the heart of living nature; Collins, with his exquisite sea-sides and rustic pieces; Hunt, with his really rustic characters; Barrett, with his sunsets; Stanfield, Cattermole, and others. We want a designer of wood-cuts of a similar character. What scenes of peerless beauty and infinite variety might an individual give us, who would devote himself, heart and soul, to this object; who would ramble all through the varied and beautiful scenery of these glorious islands at successive intervals; who would pedestrianize in simple style; who would stroll along our wild shores; amongst our magnificent hills; prowl in fens and forests with fowlers and keepers; and seek refreshment by the fireside of the wayside inn; and take up his temporary abode in obscure and old-fashioned villages. Such a man might send into our metropolis, and thence, through the aid of the engravers, to every part of the kingdom, such snatches of natural loveliness, such portions of rural scenery and rural life, as should make themselves felt to be the genuine product of nature--for nature will be felt, and kindle a purer taste and a stronger affection for the country.
I am not insensible to all the difficulties which lie in the way of such a devotion; nor that such a scheme will be pronounced chimerical by those who, at a far slighter cost, can please a less informed taste: but till we have such a man, we shall not have a second Bewick; and till such a mode of study is, more or less, adopted, we shall never have that love of the genuine country gratified, which assuredly and extensively exists.
Since writing the foregoing remarks, it is with great pleasure that I have seen the arts of designing and wood-engraving beginning to separate themselves, and that of designing for the wood-engravers taking its place as a distinct profession.[15] Harvey, Browne, Sargent, Lambert, Gilbert, and Melville, have for some time been designers of this description. This important step has only to be followed up by designers in the manner pointed out in this chapter, to insure that complete return to nature which is so much to be desired, and where such an exhaustless field of beauty and life awaits the observant artist, as would place the present pre-eminent manual skill of our wood-engravers in its true and well-merited position.
[15] The London and Westminster Review, August, 1838, in an article on wood-engraving, very judiciously suggested that it was an art well calculated for the pursuit of ladies, and one which they might convert not only into a source of profit to themselves, but of public advantage. No doubt of it. It is an art simple and of easy acquisition. But why not ladies who are good sketchers become designers for wood-cuts at once? They have all the requisite qualifications already in their hands; and what fresh and original treasures of taste and fancy are now slumbering, lost to the world, which they might embellish, in the minds and portfolios of ladies. So vastly is the demand for wood-engravings every day growing, that nothing is more difficult than to obtain designs, or when obtained to get them cut. Ladies, therefore, who have a genius for design, would soon find their value amongst the publishers; and while the profession of a designer is both elegant and feminine, how much more independent, and much less laborious, it would be than needlework, or the duties and position of a governess.
I. THE FORESTS OF ENGLAND
Amongst the most interesting features of the country are our forests. There is nothing that we come in contact with, which conveys to our minds such vivid impressions of the progression of England in power and population; which presents such startling contrasts between the present and the past. We look back into the England which an old forest brings to our mind, and see a country one wild expanse of woodlands, heaths, and mosses. Here and there a little simple town sending up
Its fleecy smoke amongst the forest boughs. From age to age no tumult did arouse Its peaceful dwellers; there they lived and died, Passing a dreamy life, diversified By nought of novelty, save, now and then, A horn, resounding through the neighbouring glen, Woke them as from a trance, and led them out To catch a brief glimpse of the hunt’s wild route; The music of the hounds; the tramp and rush Of steeds and men;--and then a sudden hush Left round the eager listeners;--the deep mood Of awful, dead, and twilight solitude, Fallen again upon that forest vast.
We see in the distance the stately castle of the feudal lord; we hear the bell of the convent from the neighbouring dale. There are solitary hamlets and scattered cottages, with mud walls and thatched roofs, peeping from the ocean of umbrageous tree-tops, and little patches of cultivation. Born thralls are tilling the lands of the thane, or watching his flocks and herds, to defend them from the wolves and bears; foresters are going their rounds beneath hoary oaks, on the watch for trespassers on venison and vert. We meet with the pilgrim with his scallop shell, and sandal shoon; we come suddenly on the solitude of the hermit, where some spring bubbles from the forest turf, or scatters its waters down the fern-hung rocks. Perhaps the noble and his train sweep past in pursuit of the stag or boar; perhaps the outlaw and his train in the same pursuit, and setting at defiance, amid vast woods and tracks familiar to himself, all the keen officers, and bloody statutes of forest law.
It is a pleasure but to hear The bridles ringing sharp and clear Amid the forest green; To hear the rattle of the sheaves, And coursers rustling in the leaves. With merry blasts between.
Stewart Rose’s Red King.
Perhaps there is the sound of martial alarm--the clash of sudden onset in the forest glade. The dwellings of the vassals surrounding the lord’s castle are in flames, fired by the band of some hostile noble. Such is the England into which an old forest carries our imagination;--partially peopled with feudal barons and unlettered serfs; without commerce abroad; without union within; brave, yet demi-savage; aspiring, but violent; pious, yet sanguinary in all its penal enactments. When we step out of memory and imagination into the cheerful daylight and conscious present, what an England now! All those forests, with three or four exceptions, are gone!--their names alone left in the land by the powerful impressions of time and custom. One wide expanse of cultivation;--the garden of the world;--swarming towns, splendid cities, busy and populous hamlets appearing everywhere, and fenced fields interscattered with patrician dwellings; not crowned with towers, lit by mere loop-holes, defended with bastioned gateways, portcullises, and drawbridges, and moats; but standing with open aspects of peaceful beauty, amid fair gardens and fair lawns, undefended by feudal ramparts, because a thousand times more strongly fortified by the security of enlightened laws. We see a swarming people, free, and full of knowledge, even to its hinds and mechanics, in possession of the highest arts of life; the hills and dales covered with their harvests and their cattle;--the seas round the whole globe with their ships;--a people, at once the most powerful and the most civilized on the earth.
Those old feudal towers are, for the most part, crumbling into ruin, the wasting vestiges of a barbarous system, or embellished and adapted to the spirit of the present times. Those abbeys and convents, standing in similar ruins, or exhibiting still more marvellous change,--the altars pulled down, the chantries silenced, and the professors of a sacred celibacy driven out, and replaced by men of the world, with their wives and families;--no longer places of worship, but places of domestic abode. Those two mighty powers, Feudalism and Popery--gone for ever!
Here is an astounding change. A stupendous march has been going on from that time to this; and one from which, is there a man, however much he may murmur at the present times, who would be willing to recede a single step? Would the noble be willing to give up the delights of London for a feudal castle surrounded by wild woods and wastes, a troop of rude retainers, and no resources but the year’s round of hunting, or of party feuds--not of tongues in Westminster, but of swords and firebrands in the forests? Would he acquiesce in this, when the country can scarcely keep him a few months, though he can assemble round him kindred spirits, books, the elegancies and mind of social life, and the speediest news of the whole world? Would the country gentleman like to sink into a feudal retainer? The merchant follow his procession of packhorses through narrow roads, and in high peril of bandits? The farmer drop down into the born thrall? The parish priest convert his pleasant parsonage and family into the solitary bachelorship of popery? Would the man most pressed by the cares and heart-griping necessities of this populous and struggling time, be willing to accept the quiet simplicity of those days, with their monotonous solitude, ignorance, servitude, and perpetual danger of arbitrary infliction of death or mutilation?
And yet, in what colours of the rose do our imaginations clothe these times! The repose, the simplicity, the picturesque solitude, come before us with a peculiar feeling of delight. And so, no doubt, there was a wild charm about them. The old minstrels delighted to sing about them, and they did it with a feeling of nature. The green shaws, the merry green woods, especially when “the leaves were lark and long” in summer; when
The wood wele sang and would not cease, Sitting upon the spray;
the exploits of the outlaw; the hymn of the lonely anchorite; the vesper-bell of the convent; and the chivalrous adventures of knights and dames in forests and hoary holts, fired them with a genuine enthusiasm, and communicate their warmth to us. No doubt, too, that baron and esquire, forester and lawless pursuer of the deer, had all a wild delight in their life; and instinctively closing the eyes of our mind upon what was dark and unpalatable in their practice, we open them to all that was free, peaceful, and in contrast with our own situation and mode of existence. We rush from cities and social anxieties into the free world of woods and wildernesses, with hearts that feel the cool refreshments of nature. To us it is a novelty, with all its piquancy about it; and we cannot bide long enough to wear off the charm. We come, too, with the high poetry of a thousand intellectual associations to take possession of woodland freedom. We have all the power of Milton, Shakspeare, Spenser, and Ariosto, upon us; and how delicious seems the picturesque England of the feudal ages! We have, indeed, now too little of what they had too much. They, like the modern Americans, would gladly have exchanged some of their trees for cultivated lands; they had too much of a good thing; in popular phraseology, they could not see the wood for trees; but O! how delightful are those tree-lands to us, prisoners of civilization, and walkers amongst brick-walls.
Let us wander awhile now amongst those fresh woodlands. Our old chroniclers tell us, that this kingdom was once nearly overspread with forests; that they existed from time immemorial; that is, long before the Norman dynasty commenced, by which they were more perfectly defined, carefully fenced, and protected with sanguinary laws. They were that part of the country, and indeed, the greater part, which retained its original state. That which remained uninclosed, and therefore called forest, or foresta, uasi ferarum statio, because there naturally retired and made their abode the wild creatures, feræ naturæ. All this was held to belong to the king; and when the Conqueror began to reign, who had occasion to give away and divide large tracts amongst his military followers, he began to exercise more strictly his prerogative over the remainder. Not satisfied with sixty-nine forests, lying in almost every part of the kingdom, such, and so many, says Evelyn, as no other realm of Europe had, he laid waste a vast tract of country in Hampshire, and created another, thence called the New Forest, because it was the last added to the ancient ones, except that of Hampton Court, the work of Henry VIII.
Various theories respecting the origin of this New Forest have occupied the attention, and divided the opinions of antiquarians and historians. Polydore Virgil asserted that the Conqueror’s motive for afforesting so large a tract of country here, was because it enabled him to maintain it secure from the intrusion of all but his own creatures, and thereby always to have a most convenient station for the escape of his followers, in case of any revolt, to their own country, or for the secret and secure arrival of fresh forces thence. Mr. Camden, however, has satisfactorily shewn, that no such object was attributed to him by the chroniclers of his own and immediately succeeding times, who certainly were sufficiently bitter against him, for his haughty temper, and the reckless atrocities which he committed in carrying into effect his system of policy, the thorough breaking of the Saxon spirit, and the establishment of his own noblesse. No such motive, however plausible, was attributed to him for five hundred years. As Mr. Carte very reasonably suggests, if such was his intention, he would have carried it into effect within the first five years of his reign, during which time he was engaged in putting down disaffection, and strengthening his position. In the pursuance of these objects he was not in the habit of stopping short at trifles on the score of humanity. “His horrible devastation,” says William of Malmsbury, “of great part of Yorkshire, and all the counties belonging to England north of the Humber, was made that the Danes and Scots invading his kingdom that way might find no subsistence, and to punish the people for disaffection to his government; without regarding what number of innocent persons would be involved in the destruction.” We are told, even by one of the Norman historians--Ord. Vit. iv. p. 314, 515, and by Ingulph. p. 79, who speak of it with horror, that above 160,000 men, women and children, perished by famine in those ruined counties. The devastation was such that, for above sixty miles, where before there had been many large and flourishing towns, besides a great number of villages and fine country-seats, not a single hamlet was to be seen; the whole country was uncultivated, and remained so till Henry II.’s reign.
If we date the making of this forest at the same time with the publishing of the forest laws, it will follow that it was made merely for the pleasures of the chase. This was natural enough, when we reflect that he had taken up his favourite residence at Winchester; and this is the reason assigned by all the authorities nearest to his own time. The Saxon Chronicler, believed to be cotemporary with William, assigns this sole reason, and adds--“William loved great deer, as if he had been their father;” which Henry of Huntingdon copies. No trace of other motive appears in Gemeticensis, his own chaplain, Knyton, Ordericus Vitalis, Simon Dunelmensis, Brompton, William of Malmsbury, Florence of Worcester, Matthew Paris, Hemingford, or other ancient authority. In such a man the passion for the chase was cause sufficient. In all early stages of a country, where it abounds with forests, and intellectual resources hardly exist, hunting must constitute the great passion of life. The Britons, the Saxons, were passionate hunters. Harold had already restrained all forests to his own use, and William put the finishing stroke to the system. Here, however, occurs a second point of difference of opinion in the historians. Some tell us that he made this forest, others, that he merely enlarged it. It is certain that the ancient forest of Ythene existed here before; but it is probable that it had become rather a woodland than a preserve of game; and that William’s enlargement was almost, in fact, a new creation: and strictly speaking, entirely so, as a forest, having its defined boundaries, its stock of deer, its appointed officers, and its code of laws and courts:--this, the very name of New Forest clearly implies.
Others, again, attribute to his son Rufus, the enlargement and the devastations, and thence look upon his own death, in the very spot where he had pulled down a church, as a direct divine judgment. There can be little doubt but that both had a hand in it. The Conqueror probably laid waste and depopulated so as to complete the boundaries of his forest, and carry out his conceived plans, and Rufus went on, on the old royal principle, of making a solitude and calling it peace, to pull down churches, and remove what hamlets or cottages yet remained to interfere with princely ideas of forest seclusion. That William did all that is attributed to him, is declared by all the historians of that and immediately succeeding times; and Gemeticensis, his own chaplain, distinctly declares that it was the popular belief that the death of his two sons, Richard and Rufus, and his grandson, the son of Robert, were judgments of God upon him for his atrocities committed here in the making of it. These atrocities consisted in laying waste the country to the extent of thirty miles in length, or ninety in circumference, the extent still attributed to it; destroying towns, chapels, manors and mansion-houses; according to some writers, twenty-two mother-churches, to others thirty-six, and to others thirty-two. Unquestionably the number was great; two churches only being mentioned in his own Survey in Doomsday Book, between A.D. 1083 and 1086, the 17th and 20th of his reign, as standing in all that space, while in the rest of the county there were 100. This violence he completed by driving out the inhabitants, and stocking the land with deer, stags, and other game.
Such was the origin and extent of the ancient royal forests of England, all preserved and maintained for the especial and exclusive pastime of the kings. Truly the state of a king was then kingly indeed: 69 forests, 13 chases, and upwards of 750 parks existing in England. There were, in Yorkshire alone, in Henry VIII.’s time, 275 woods, besides parks and chases, most of them containing 500 acres. Over all these the king could sport; for it was the highest honour to a subject to receive a visit from the king to hunt in his chase, or free warren, while no subject, except by special permission and favour, could hunt in the royal parks. These 69 forests of immense extent, lying in all parts of England, and occupying no small portion of its surface, all stood then for the sole gratification of the royal pleasure of the chase, and supplying the king’s household; and few persons have now any idea of the state, dignity, and systematic severity of this great hunting establishment of England, maintained through all succeeding reigns to the time of the Commonwealth, and some part of it much longer. Each forest was an imperium in imperio, having its staff of officers,--the lord warden, his deputy, a steward and bow-bearer, rangers, keepers or foresters, verdurers, agistors, regarders, bailiffs, woodwards, beadles, etc. etc., with their own courts. First the COURT of ATTACHMENT, held every forty days, in which all attachments against offenders in the forest were received, evidence heard upon them, and were enrolled to be presented at the COURT of SWAINMOTE. This swainmote was held three times every year, which all the swains, or free tenants, were bound to attend. The warder or his steward presided, and the foresters, verderers, and other ministers of the forest were the judges. Here all the attachments enrolled in the records of the Court of Attachment were received and examined, but no award or judgment was made or executed by this court; but it swore in a grand jury to examine these attachments, of which all that appeared made on sufficient grounds and evidence were reserved for the decision of the JUSTICE-SEAT, or highest court of the forest. The justice-seat, or Court of Eyre in the forest, was held once in three years. Two justices in Eyre were appointed as supreme judges in these courts: one having jurisdiction in all the forests north, and the other over those south of the Trent. Yet there appears in the early reigns to have been great irregularity in the appointment of these justices. Sometimes there were two, according to the legitimate ordinance; at others we find three going the circuit, or jornay, as it was called, in Edward I.’s reign, when in the 15th year of that reign, three are named as going the jornay of the north; viz. Sir William Vesey, Thomas Normanville, and Richard of Gryppinge, justices. This Sir William Vesey, Richard of Gryppinge, and their fellows, justices, are repeatedly mentioned in the king’s writs. This might arise from the discovery that collusion and bribery to cover peculation had been the consequence of one justice going alone; for it is complained, that it “was fonden that oure lorde the kynge had sustained grete and many folde hurte fro the jornay of Robert Neville.” Great peculation and appointment of his own creatures for his own purposes were proved against Robert Evringham, and he was “deposed from his office of chief forestershippe of fee in the Forest of Sherwood for ever.”[16]
[16] MS. documents respecting Sherwood Forest, in Bromley House Library, Nottingham.
Every officer was sworn to present to the court of attachment, every offender against the laws of the forest, for the decision of the justices, through the process already described; a system of most summary rigour, without favour or concealment; yet abuses still crept in; and the long term between the coming of the justices--three years--tended greatly to this; for as no case could be finally decided till then, it afforded vast scope for the powerful and wealthy to try the force of bribery on the justice, as well as made the case fearfully severe on those who could not find bail or give security, and must therefore be in gaol all that time; especially as a man might be taken up on presumption. This, therefore, became a gross injustice to the innocent.
You would imagine from the oaths of the different officers, that their duties were all alike, for they bound them all to seize, secure, and present for attachment all persons committing any depredations on vert or venison; vert, curiously enough Anglicized--Green Hugh, i. e. green hue, and so continually written in the Assisæ Forestæ, meaning every thing having a green leaf, and therefore extending from the forest trees to the underwood and shrubs which formed cover for the game, and also to the grass which was the food of the game. All persons seen suspiciously strolling about on the highways, especially if in cloaks, with dogs in leash, or out of it, pursuing small birds, squirrels, or vermin, cutting turf, peat, or boughs, or fallen timber, heath, or fern, without proper authority. The dwellers in the purlieus of the forest were kept a strict eye upon; and all gates, or fences, or dykes were presentable which were too high for the deer to pass from one part of the forest to another. The forests were very systematically divided into walks, or keepings, wards or regards, over which was a properly subordinate succession of officers. The ranger had surveillance over the principal keepers; they over their deputy keepers, and night-walkers. The verderers had especially to look after the vert, although sworn to watch for and bring to punishment, offenders of all kinds, and to them must all offenders be brought to give surety to appear at the attachment. Besides these, there were in every township, and every regard, woodwards and their men, who attended to the felling and accounting for all timber. There were agistors also to look after the agistment of cattle. The swainmote was empowered to inquire and to see that all officers punctually performed their forest duties, going regularly their rounds; and that they paid the wages of their deputies, so that none might be tempted to commit depredations on the game, wood, browze, peat, turf, deers’ horns, or any other product of the forest. A sharp vigilance was kept up on this head, and severe punishment awarded for such offenders. No produce of the forest might be taken out of it without a direct warrant from the justice or warden; neither cattle, timber, dead deer, vert, nor anything whatever. Those who had freeholds within the forest, as came to be the case in time, through grants from kings to favourites of one kind or another, were subject to the same restriction. And where warrant was granted for any of these purposes, or for supplying the religious houses with wood for burning, etc., the verderers were to see that no more was actually taken out than the warrant allowed, and were punished if convicted of failing in this duty.[17] Perambulations at stated periods were made throughout each forest, its enclosures, purlieus, and boundaries, to ascertain that all was kept in order, and that there was neither waste of vert nor venison, which included all game; nor encroachment within, nor without. The external boundaries of a forest, were not like those of a park, walls or pales, but metes and bounds, meres, rivers, and hills, otherwise it was not a forest.
[17] Yet a curious instance is recorded in one of the Inquisitions of Sherwood Forest, of the way in which the vigilance of these laws was evaded. The Countess of Newcastle, whose husband was probably at that time governor of Newark Castle, had procured large quantities of timber out of the forest, under a warrant to furnish such timber for the necessary repairs of that castle. The quantity delivered led to an inquiry, and it was found that the castle was not repaired at all, but that the timber had been sold, and the countess had got the cash. Yet after this it was again found, that not being able to procure another warrant for timber, she had, however, got one for the delivery of cord-wood for burning, and under the title of cord-wood, the deputy-warden had supplied her with some of the best oaks of the forest. On a second investigation it turned out that the deputy-warden was a partner in a timber trade--that timber was thus procured through the means of the countess’s plea of public service, and that she and the deputy shared the spoil.
Drifts of the forest were made at least twice in the year. “By the Assises of Pickeringe and Lancaster, the officers of the forest did use to make drifts at least twice in the year: the first, fifteen days before Midsummer, at the beginning of the fencemonth, that the forest might be avoided and emptied of all cattle during that time. And every commoner was then forced to come and challenge his beasts, and take them away, or they were taken by the officers of the forest as strays. The second drift was at Holyrood-day, when the agistors did begin to agist the king’s demesne woods, and all beasts and cattle of all sorts then found in them were driven by the officers of the forest to some convenient place, and impounded, and then warning was given that every man should come and fetch his own. Forests are driven for three causes. First, for the avoiding of surcharging; secondly, for the avoiding of forreners, who have no right; thirdly, that no beasts be commoned that are not legally commonable, as geese, goats, sheep, and swine, which are not commonable. Swine, however, were admitted to the woods of the king’s forests if their noses were duly ringed, and paid for their run there, a sum called pannage; and owners of woods in the forests might run such swine in their own woods. Upon reasonable causes the officers of the forest may make their drifts oftener if they will.”
Manwood’s Forest Laws, pp. 86-7.
Such was the general constitution of a forest, with its courts, officers, laws, and customs; and so systematic does it seem; surveillance and subdivision so regularly descending downward, till it included watch and ward over every part, and the familiar acquaintance of every forester with his own location, that one really wonders how any Robin Hood could long escape amongst them. The difficulty of the thing no doubt it was that contributed so much to raise his renown. But the vast extent of the forests, the obscurity of the wooded parts, and the immense out-boundaries laying them open to the nocturnal incursions of marauders, still account for the traditionary exploits of deer-stealers, in spite of the then forest-law, which itself gave a strong spice of interest to the adventurer.
The severity of the laws under William and his immediate successors was monstrous. “In the Saxon times,” says Blackstone, “though no man was allowed to kill or chace the king’s deer, yet he might start any game, pursue and kill it on his own estate, but the rigour of those new constitutions vested the sole property of all the game in England in the king alone; and no man was entitled to disturb any fowl of the air, or any beast of the field, of such kinds as were specifically reserved for the royal amusement of the sovereign, without express license from the king, of a chase or a free warren; and these franchises were granted as much to preserve the breed of animals as to indulge the subject. From a similar principle to which, though the forest laws are now mitigated, and by degrees grown entirely obsolete, yet from this root has sprung a bastard slip, known by the name of the GAME LAW, now arrived to and wantoning in its highest vigour; both founded upon the same notion of permanent property in wild creatures, and both productive of the same tyranny to the commons; but with this difference, that the forest laws established only one mighty hunter throughout the land; the game laws have raised a little Nimrod in every manor. And in one respect, the ancient law was much less unreasonable than the modern, for the king’s grantee of a chase or free-warren might kill game in every part of his franchise, but now, though a freeholder of less than 100_l._ a-year is forbidden to kill a partridge upon his own estate, yet nobody else, not even the lord of the manor, unless he hath a grant of free-warren, can do it without committing a trespass, and subjecting himself to an action.”--Commentaries, iv. 415, 8vo.
The full rigour of the forest laws of the Norman dynasty must be a curious subject of contemplation to an Englishman now. William decreed the eyes of any person to be pulled out, who took either a buck or a boar. Rufus made the stealing of a doe, a hanging matter. The taking a hare was fined 20_s._, and a coney 10_s._, as money was then! Eadmer adds, that fifty persons of fortune, being apprehended by the last prince for killing his bucks, were forced to purge themselves by the fire of ordeal, etc. Henry I. made no distinction between him who killed a man, and him who killed a buck; and punished them who destroyed the game, though not in the forest, either by forfeiture of their goods or loss of limbs. The monstrous severities of Geoffrey de Langley, who, in the reign of Henry II. had a patent for all benefits accruing from the expeditation of dogs, and rode through most parts of England with an armed band, committing the greatest oppressions, and extorting vast sums, especially from the northern gentry, are recorded with indignation by Matthew Paris. Richard I. enacted mutilation and pulling out of eyes for hunting in the forest, though he afterwards relaxed a little, and contented himself with banishment, imprisonment, or fine. Whoever was summoned to the chase, and refused to go, paid a fine of 50_s._ to the king.
The feeling created amongst the people by this bloody code, may be imagined by the language of John of Salisbury, who, after speaking of the higher offences, says,--“What is more extraordinary is, that it is often made by law criminal to set traps or snares for birds, to allure them by springes and pipes, or use any craft to take them; and offenders are punished by forfeiture of goods, loss of limbs, or even death. One would suppose that the birds of the air and the fish of the sea were common to all; but they belong to the crown, and are claimed by the forest laws wherever they fly. Hands off! keep clear! lest you incur the guilt of high treason, and fall into the clutch of the hunters. The swains are driven from their fields, while the beasts of the forest have a liberty of roving; and the farmer’s meadows are taken from him to increase their pasture. The new-sown grounds are taken from the farmer, the pastures from the grazier and shepherd; the beehives are turned away from the flowery bank, and the very bees are hardly allowed their natural liberty.”--Polycraticon, i. 4.
Ah! Johannes Sarisburiensis, thou wert a radical! Can any body read the indignant spirit of this passage, and say that radicalism is anything new under the sun? This is the very soul of Hampden. The inhumanity of those proceedings occasioned frequent disturbances, till the revolt of the barons extorted from Henry III. the CHARTA DE FORESTA, by which he repealed those severe laws, and enacted others more equitable. These, again, were from time to time softened by different monarchs, as civilization and popular power and influence advanced, by what are called Assises of the Forest, which were a kind of revision and re-enactment of the forest laws, by different kings; omitting or modifying any former provisions which might seem contrary to the spirit of the time; and adding such others as were deemed necessary. As, for instance, the assise of Edward I., the preamble of which was thus:--“Here followeth the Assise of Forest of our lorde the kinge E., sonne of kinge H. and his commandements of his forests in englonde, made by the assent and counsell of Archbusshoppes, busshoppes, abbots, earls, barons, knyghtes of all his realme.” This consists of twenty items; and provides principally, that any person found in the forest, or the woods of the forest, trespassing on the venison, shall be taken, and, on conviction of hunting or taking the king’s venison, he shall be imprisoned, and not delivered without the king’s especial commandment, or that of his justice of the forest.[18] That all trespassers on the vert shall be taken before the verderers, and they shall find sufficient surety to come before the next court of attachment; and such attachment shall be enrolled, to be presented to the justices of the forest when they next come into those parts to hold the pleas of the forest. That none who held woods within the forest should suffer those woods to be without a keeper, or they should be taken into the king’s hands again. Such holders of woods, or any other persons inhabiting within the forest, should not have any bows, arrows, or arbalasts; or any brach, greyhound, or any other engine “to hurte the king of his Deare.” But any dogs introduced into the forest shall be expeditated; or, according to the English phrase, lamed, so that they may not be able to seize the deer; and that the expeditation, or laming of dogs, shall be made every three years. This practice of laming is differently described by different writers. Some define it as consisting in cutting off at least one of the fore-feet; others in cutting off the claws only; and others, in cutting out the fleshy part of both fore-paws. Probably the practice differed in different forests, and different ages. At all events, the dogs were so mutilated as to be unable to seize a deer; the Latin term implies the actual lopping off the foot. Future assizes confine this laming to mastiffs; no greyhounds, brachs, or brackets being allowed entrance at all. No mower was allowed to bring “a great mastiff to drive away the deer of our lord the king, but little dogs to look after such things as lie open.”
[18] An old rhyme, full of mystery to uninitiated ears, contained the law of attachment in this case. Any person was to be seized and conveyed before a forester or verderer, who was found,--
At dog-draw, stable-stand, Back-berond, or bloody-hand.
Which mean,--at dog-draw, having a dog in a leash, following a deer by the scent, in order to come upon it and slay it; or having wounded a deer, and following the dog-draw, or guidance of the dog to overtake it. At stable-stand, standing in the forest with bow ready to discharge at the deer, or with a dog in a leash ready to slip him on its appearance. At back-bear or back-berond, actually carrying any forest property away. At bloody-hand, with hands or person bloody, as from the actual slaughter of game. Though three of these are truly called by the lawyers presumption, they were held sufficient for attachment and conviction.
The assize continues--but no holders of foreign woods in the forest shall agiste[19] before the regular time of the king’s agistment, “which begins at mychalmas and lastes to martinmasse then next followinge.” That none shall assart[20] in the forest without being taken before the verderer, and giving surety to appear at the next attachment. That no tanner or whittawer of leather dwell in the forest, out of boroughs, towns, etc. That any archbishops, bishops, barons, or knight being found hunting, the forester shall demand “a wedde and a pledge,” and if he refuse, the forester shall see “his dede,” and cause it to be enrolled to be presented before the justice of the forest. Other assizes say, that the bodies of such dignitaries, whether temporal or spiritual, shall be seized till they give security for their appearance; but that any such nobleman, or dignitary, being sent for to the king on any business, shall have the privilege of hunting one or two deer as he goes through the forest, and the same on his return, provided it be in view of the forester, otherwise he shall blow a horn, lest he seem to steal it.
[19] That is, turn in cattle to graze, at so much per head, which was done in most forests, and the money paid to the verderer,--a certain number of persons mostly having a right of common besides, by grant or charter.
[20] Root up the covert and make a clearing.
That any man going along the king’s highway, through a forest, with a bow, shall bear it without string; or with dogs, he shall have them coupled, and his greyhounds “knytted in a leash.” That if any damage be done to the king’s vert or venison, or waste, of which no rational account can be given, the foresters, or verderers, under whose care the said charges have been, shall be taken, and no satisfaction but their own bodies shall be received till the king, or his justice, have had their will of them. Yet, so early as Henry II., it was found that all these strict provisions being insufficient to prevent waste of the woods, and “extreme minishing of the deere,” the office of regarder was established. The regarders were originally to be knights, but “other good people” were afterwards admitted. They were to be chosen by the king’s writ, and there were to be twelve in each forest. The foresters and verderers were gentlemen: the former appointed by the king’s letters-patent; the latter by writ in full county, like our present members of parliament; yet were the regarders set as inspectors over them. They were to go through every part of the forest, accompanied by the foresters, verderers, woodwards, bailiffs, and beadles, and examine into the state of vert and venison; comparing them with the reports of their predecessors, and seeing that no waste, or embezzlement, or improper, or superabundant agistment was made; that no assarts, or purprestures[21] were attempted. This, however, they could not do when they pleased. They were summoned by writ, once in three years, preparatory to the coming of the justice to hold his pleas, to whom they were to deliver their roll, duly signed and sealed.
[21] Encroachments and obstructions of several kinds, such as impediments in the highways, turning dykes, building swine-cotes, mills, etc.
Queen Elizabeth, who found that, during the minority of her brother Edward and the troubled reign of her sister Mary, great waste, destruction, and embezzlement had taken place, made repeated inquests into the state of the forests by her commissioners, and had general surveys and valuations made. She descends in her assizes to the very bees, which it seems built then abundantly in our woods, as they do in the American forests now--the old, hollow oaks, being very storehouses of honey. Hawks, herons, the nests of hawks, and every species of beast that had been held the legitimate denizens of forests by her predecessors, as stags, bucks, hares, badgers, foxes, and even cats and squirrels, are enumerated.
These forest laws continued till the Commonwealth. One court of justice was held after the Restoration; but after the Revolution of 1688, they fell into desuetude, and now all offences against the forests are cognizable by the common laws of the land.
For the fullest information on this subject, see Cowel, Heskett, Coke, and Blackstone; or Manwood on Forest Laws.
The English Forests were formerly as follows:
1. Aiden, Northumberland. 2. Allerdale, Cumberland. 3. Amsty, Yorkshire. 4. Arden, Warwick. 5. Ashdown, Sussex. 6. Bere, Hants. 7. Bernwood, Bucks. 8. Beverley, York. 9. Blakemore, or Forest of Watchet, Dorset. 10. Braden, Wilts. 11. Charnwood, Leicester. 12. Cheviot, Northumberland. 13. Chute, Hants. 14. Clun. 15. Cors. 16. Dartmoor, Devon. 17. Darval, Hereford. 18. Dean, Gloucester. 19. Deeping, Lincoln. 20. Delamere, Cheshire. 21. Epping, Essex. 22. Exmore, Devon. 23. Feckenham, Worcester. 24. Gillingham, Somerset. 25. Gáltres, York. 26. Hainault, Essex. 27. Hampton Court, Middlesex. 28. Hardwicke, York. 29. Hartlebury. 30. Huckestow, Shropshire. 31. Inglewood, Cumberland. 32. Kingswood, Gloucester. 33. Knaresborough, York. 34. Langden, Durham. 35. Leonard. 36. Lee. 37. Leicester, Leicester. 38. Mendip, Somerset. 39. Malvern, Worcester. 40. Martindale, Cumberland. 41. Maxwell, Cheshire. 42. Needwood, Stafford. 43. New Forest, Hants. 44. Pamber, Hants. 45. Peak, Derbyshire. 46. Penrise. 47. Perbroke, Dorset. 48. Rath. 49. Riddlesdale, Northumberland. 50. Rockingham, Northampton. 51. Rychiche, Somerset. 52. Salcey, Northampton. 53. Savornac, Wilts. The only forest in possession of a subject. 54. Selwood, Somerset. 55. Sherwood, Nottingham. 56. Staines, Middlesex. 57. Teesdale, Durham. 58. Waltham, Essex. 59. Whittlebury, Northampton. 60. Wichwood, Oxford. 61. Wencedale. 62. Westbere. 63. Windsor, Berks. 64. Whinfield, Westmorland. 65. Wirrol, Cheshire. 66. Whitby, Yorkshire. 67. Woolmer. 68. Wyre, Worcester. 69. Wrokene, Salop.
Of these, most are now dis-afforested, and have left only their names. Those which remain are under the management of a board of commissioners; the chief of whom is, by virtue of his office, always one of the ministers of the Crown. Needwood is principally inclosed, leaving, however, a portion belonging to the crown, and one lodge. It had formerly four wards and four keepers, with each a handsome lodge, now in the hands of different private gentlemen. In Elizabeth’s reign it was about 24 miles in circumference, and in 1658 it contained 9220 acres of land. In 1684 it contained 47,150 trees, and 10,000 cord of hollies and underwood, valued at 30,710_l._ It and Bagot’s Park, formerly part of it, still contain some of the largest oaks in England. Windsor is the Royal Park, and the most complete and splendid example of a park in the world.--Of New Forest, and Sherwood, I propose to speak more particularly.