II.Cheshire

"God's spice I was, and pounding was my due;In fading breath my incense savored best;Death was the meane, my kyrnell to renewe;By loppynge shott I upp to heavenly rest."Rue not my death, rejoice at my repose;It was no death to me, but to my woe;The budd was opened to lett out the rose,The cheynes unloos'd to let the captive goe."

"God's spice I was, and pounding was my due;In fading breath my incense savored best;Death was the meane, my kyrnell to renewe;By loppynge shott I upp to heavenly rest.

"Rue not my death, rejoice at my repose;It was no death to me, but to my woe;The budd was opened to lett out the rose,The cheynes unloos'd to let the captive goe."

As we were driving on to Whalley, to pay our tribute of honour to yet one shining memory more, the summit of Pendle Hill suddenly wrapped itself in sable cloud, and its haunting vixens let loose upon us the most vehement pelt of rain, diversified with lightning-jags and thunder-crashes, that it was ever my fortune to be drenched withal. One of the Lancashire witches is buried in Whalley churchyard under a massive slab which is said to heave occasionally. I think I saw it shaking with malicious glee as we came spattering up the flooded path, looking as if we had ourselves been "swum" in the Calder.

Whalley church, one of the most curious and venerable parish churches of England, shelters the ashes of John Paslew, last Abbot of Whalley. Upon the simple stone are cut a floriated cross and chalice, with the words "Jesu fili dei miserere mei." Only the fewest traces, chief of which is a beautiful gateway with groined roof, remain of this great abbey, one of the richest in the north of England, charitable, hospitable, with an especially warm welcome for wandering minstrels. Its walls have been literally levelled to the ground, like those of the rival Cistercian foundation atSawley, a few miles above. But the "White Church under the Leigh," believed to have been originally established by the missionary Paulinus in the seventh century, preserves the abbey choir stalls, whose crocketed pinnacles tower to the top of the chancel. Theirmisereresare full of humour and spirit. An old woman beating her husband with a ladle is one of the domestic scenes that tickled the merry monks of Whalley. We could have lingered long in this ancient church for its wealth of fine oak carving, its pew fashioned like a cage, its heraldic glass, and, in the churchyard, the three old, old crosses with their interlacing Runic scrolls, one of which, when a witch read it backward, would do her the often very convenient service of making her invisible. But we had time only for the thought of Abbot Paslew, who, refusing to bow to the storm like the Abbot of Furness, had raised a large body of men and gone to arms for the defence of the English monasteries against the royal robber. He was a leader in the revolt of 1537, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. The Abbot of Sawley, William Trafford, old jealousies forgotten, took the field with him. But monks wereno match for Henry VIII's generals, the rebellion was promptly crushed, the Abbot of Sawley was hanged at Lancaster, and Abbot Paslew was taken, with a refinement of vengeance, back to Whalley and gibbeted there, in view of the beautiful abbey over which he had borne sway for thirty years. The country folk had depended upon it for alms, for medical aid, for practical counsel, for spiritual direction, and we may well believe that, as they looked on at the execution, their hearts were hot against the murderers of him who, when he grasped the sword, had assumed the title of Earl of Poverty. The mound where he suffered is well remembered to this day.

The flying hours had been crowded with impressions, tragic, uncanny, pitiful, and we had yet, in going to the station, to run the gantlet of a tipsy town, for it was a holiday. We had found Clitheroe drinking, earlier in the afternoon, and now we found Whalley drunk. One unsteady individual, wagging his head from side to side and stretching out a pair of wavering arms, tried to bar my progress.

"Wh-where be g-goin'?" he asked.

"To the train," I answered curtly, dodging by.

He sat down on the wall and wept aloud.

"T-to the tr-train! Oh, the L-Lord bl-bless you! The g-good L-Lord bl-bless you all the w-way!"

And the last we saw and heard of him, he was still feebly shaking his hands after us and sobbing maudlin benedictions.

Drayton the poet once took it upon him to assure Cheshire that what was true of Lancashire was true also of her:

"Thy natural sister shee—and linkt unto thee soThat Lancashire along with Cheshire still doth goe."

From that great backbone of England, the Pennine Range, both these counties fall away to the west, but Cheshire quickly opens into the Shropshire plain. At the northeast it has its share in the treasures of the deep coal-field rent across by the Pennines, and here, too, are valuable beds of copper. In this section of the county cluster the silk towns, among them Macclesfield, the chief seat inEngland of this manufacture, and Congleton, whose character we will trust has grown more spiritual with time. For in 1617 one of the village wags tugged a bear into the pulpit at the hour of service, and it was a full twelvemonth before the church was reconsecrated and worship resumed. Indeed, the Congleton folk had such a liking for bear-baiting or bear-dancing, or whatever sport it was their town bear afforded them, that when a few years later this poor beast died, it is told that

"living far from Godly fearThey sold the Church Bible to buy a bear."

The old Cheshire, everywhere in evidence with its timber-and-plaster houses, distracts the mind from this new industrial Cheshire. We visited Macclesfield, but I forgot its factories, its ribbons and sarcenets, silks and satins and velvets, because of the valiant Leghs. Two of them sleep in the old Church of St. Michael, under a brass that states in a stanza ending as abruptly as human life itself:

"Here lyeth the body of Perkin a LeghThat for King Richard the death did die,Betray'd for righteousness;And the bones of Sir Peers his sone,That with King Henrie the fift did wonneIn Paris."

I have read that Sir Perkin was knighted at Crecy and Sir Peers at Agincourt, and that they were kinsmen of Sir Uryan Legh of Adlington, the Spanish Lady's Love.

"Will ye hear a Spanish Lady,How she wooed an Englishman?Garments gay and rich as may be,Decked with jewels, she had on."

This Sir Uryan was knighted by Essex at the siege of Calais, and it was then, apparently, that the poor Spanish lady, beautiful and of high degree, lost her heart. The Elizabethan ballad, whose wood-cut shows a voluminously skirted dame entreating an offish personage in a severely starched ruff, tells us that she had fallen, by some chance of war, into his custody.

"As his prisoner there he kept her;In his hands her life did lie;Cupid's bands did tie them fasterBy the liking of an eye."But at last there came commandmentFor to set all ladies free,With their jewels still adorned,None to do them injury."

"As his prisoner there he kept her;In his hands her life did lie;Cupid's bands did tie them fasterBy the liking of an eye.

"But at last there came commandmentFor to set all ladies free,With their jewels still adorned,None to do them injury."

But freedom was no boon to her.

"Gallant Captain, take some pityOn a woman in distress;Leave me not within this cityFor to die in heaviness."

In vain he urges that he is the enemy of her country.

"Blessed be the time and seasonThat you came on Spanish ground;If you may our foes be termed,Gentle foes we have you found."

He suggests that she would have no difficulty in getting a Spanish husband, but she replies that Spaniards are "fraught with jealousy."

"Still to serve thee day and nightMy mind is prest;The wife of every EnglishmanIs counted blest."

He objects that it is not the custom of English soldiers to be attended by women.

"I will quickly change myself,If it be so,And like a page will follow theeWhere e'er thou go."

But still he makes excuse:

"I have neither gold nor silverTo maintain thee in this case,And to travel is great charges,As you know, in every place."

She puts her fortune at his disposal, but he has hit upon a new deterrent:

"On the seas are many dangers,Many storms do there arise,Which will be to ladies dreadfulAnd force tears from watry eyes."

She implies that she would gladly die, even of seasickness, for his sake, and at that the truth breaks forth:

"Courteous lady, leave this folly;Here comes all that breeds this strife:—I in England have alreadyA sweet woman to my wife."I will not falsify my vowFor gold nor gain,Nor yet for all the fairest damesThat live in Spain."

"Courteous lady, leave this folly;Here comes all that breeds this strife:—I in England have alreadyA sweet woman to my wife.

"I will not falsify my vowFor gold nor gain,Nor yet for all the fairest damesThat live in Spain."

Her reply, with its high Spanish breeding, puts his blunt English manners to shame:

"Oh how happy is that womanThat enjoys so true a friend.Many happy days God lend her!Of my suit I'll make an end."Commend me to that gallant lady;Bear to her this chain of gold;With these bracelets for a token;Grieving that I was so bold."I will spend my days in prayer,Love and all her laws defy;In a nunnery I will shroud me,Far from any company."But e'er my prayer have an end,Be sure of this,—To pray for thee and for thy LoveI will not miss."Joy and true prosperityRemain with thee!""The like fall unto thy share,Most fair lady!"

"Oh how happy is that womanThat enjoys so true a friend.Many happy days God lend her!Of my suit I'll make an end.

"Commend me to that gallant lady;Bear to her this chain of gold;With these bracelets for a token;Grieving that I was so bold.

"I will spend my days in prayer,Love and all her laws defy;In a nunnery I will shroud me,Far from any company.

"But e'er my prayer have an end,Be sure of this,—To pray for thee and for thy LoveI will not miss.

"Joy and true prosperityRemain with thee!""The like fall unto thy share,Most fair lady!"

This ballad, which Shakespeare might have bought for a penny "at the Looking-glass on London bridge" and sung to the tune of "Flying Fame," is still a favourite throughout Cheshire.

But we are driving from Macclesfield up into the Cheshire highlands,—velvety hills, green to the top, all smoothed off as trim as sofa-cushions and adorned with ruffles of foliage. Nature is a neat housekeeper even here in the wildest corner of Cheshire. What wasonce savage forest is now tranquil grazing-ground, and the walls that cross the slopes and summits, dividing the sward into separate cattle-ranges, run in tidy parallels. But most of the county is flat,—so flat that it all can be viewed from Alderly Edge, a cliff six hundred and fifty feet high, a little to the west of Macclesfield. Along the Mersey, the Lancastrian boundary, rise the clustered chimneys of Cheshire's cotton towns. Yet cotton is not the only industry of this northern strip. The neighbourhood of Manchester makes market-gardening profitable; potatoes and onions flourish amain; and Altrincham, a pleasant little place where many of the Manchester mill-owners reside, proudly contributes to their felicity its famous specialty of the "green-top carrot."

I suppose these cotton-lords only smile disdainfully at the tales of the old wizard who keeps nine hundred and ninety-nine armed steeds in the deep caverns of Alderly Edge, waiting for war. What is his wizardry to theirs! But I wonder if any of them are earning a sweeter epitaph than the one which may be read in Alderly Church to a rector, Edward Shipton, M.A.,—it might grieve hisgentle ghost, should we omit those letters,—who died in 1630:

"Here lies below an aged sheep-heard clad in heavy clay,Those stubborne weedes which come not of unto the judgment day.Whilom hee led and fed with welcome paine his careful sheepe,He did not feare the mountaines' highest tops, nor vallies deep,That he might save from hurte his fearful flocks, which were his care.To make them strong he lost his strengthe, and fasted for their fare.How they might feed, and grow, and prosper, he did daily tell,Then having shew'd them how to feed, he bade them all farewell."

Good men have come out of Cheshire. In the Rectory House of Alderly was born Dean Stanley. Bishop Heber is a Cheshire worthy, as are the old chroniclers, Higden and Holinshead. Even the phraseology of Cheshire wills I have fancied peculiarly devout, as, for instance, Matthew Legh's, in 1512:

"Imprimis, I bequeath my sole to almightie god and to his blessed moder seynt Mary, and to all the selestiall company in heaven, and my bodi to be buried in the Chappell of Seynt Anne within the parish Church of Handley or there where it shall please almightie god to call for me at his pleasure."

The men of Cheshire have on occasion, and conspicuously during the Civil War, approved themselves for valour. When the royalist garrison of Beeston Castle, the "other hill" of this pancake county, was at last forced to accept terms from the Roundhead troops, there was "neither meat nor drink found in the Castle, but only a piece of a turkey pie, two biscuits, and a live pea-cock and pea-hen."

Yet Cheshire is famed rather for the virtues of peace,—for thrift, civility, and neighbourly kindness. An early-seventeenth-century "Treatise on Cheshire" says: "The people of the country are of a nature very gentle and courteous, ready to help and further one another; and that is to be seen chiefly in the harvest time, how careful are they of one another." A few years later, in 1616, a native of the county wrote of it not only as producing "the best cheese of all Europe," but as blessed with women "very friendly and loving, painful in labour, and in all other kind of housewifery expert."

The accepted chronicler of Cheshire womanhood, however, is Mrs. Gaskell. As we lingered along the pleasant streets of Knutsford—herCranford—and went in and out of the quiet shops, we blessed her memory for having so delectably distilled the lavender essences of that sweet, old-fashioned village life. She had known it and loved it all the way from her motherless babyhood, and she wrote of it with a tender humour that has endeared it to thousands. Our first Knutsford pilgrimage was to her grave beside the old Unitarian chapel, for both her father and her husband were clergymen of that faith. We had seen in Manchester—her Drumble—the chapel where Mr. Gaskell ministered, and had read her "Mary Barton," that sympathetic presentation of the life of Lancashire mill-hands which awoke the anger and perhaps the consciences of the manufacturers. She served the poor of Manchester not with her pen alone, but when our war brought in its train the cotton famine of 1862-63, she came effectively to their relief by organizing sewing-rooms and other means of employment for women. Husband and wife, fulfilled of good works, now rest together in that sloping little churchyard which we trod with reverent feet.

It must be confessed that Knutsford isbecoming villaized. It has even suffered the erection, in memory of Mrs. Gaskell, of an ornate Italian tower, which Deborah certainly would not have approved. It was not May-day, so we could not witness the Knutsford revival of the May-queen court, and we looked in vain for the Knutsford wedding sand. On those very rare occasions when a bridegroom can be found, the kith and kin of the happy pair make a welcoming path for Hymen by trickling coloured sands through a funnel so as to form a pavement decoration of hearts, doves, true-love knots, and the like, each artist in front of his own house. But no minor disappointments could break the Cranford spell, which still held us as we drove out into the surrounding country. How sunny and serene! With what awe we passed the timbered mansions of the county families! What green hedgerows! What golden harvest-fields! What pink roses clambering to the cottage-thatch! What gardens, and what pastures on pastures, grazed over by sleek kine that called to mind Miss Matty's whimsical old lover and his "six and twenty cows, named after the different letters of the alphabet."

Here in central Cheshire we ought not to have been intent on scenery, but on salt, for of this, as of silk, our smiling county has almost a monopoly. And only too soon the blue day was darkened by the smoke of Northwich, the principal seat of the salt trade and quite the dirtiest town in the county. The valley of the Weaver, the river that crosses Cheshire about midway between its northern boundary, the Mersey, and its southern, the Dee, has the richest salt-mines and brine-springs of England. The salt towns, whose chimneys belch blackness at intervals along the course of the stream, are seen at their best, or worst, in Northwich, though Nantwich, an ancient centre of this industry, has charming traditions of the village hymn that used to be sung about the flower-crowned pits, especially the "Old Brine," on Ascension Day, in thanksgiving for the salt. We tried to take due note of railways and canals, docks and foundries, and the queer unevenness of the soil caused by the mining and the pumping up of brine,—such an uncertain site that the houses, though bolted, screwed, and buttressed, continually sag and sink. The mines themselves are on the outskirts of the town,and we looked at the ugly sheds and scaffoldings above ground, and did our best to imagine the strange white galleries and gleaming pillars below. There was no time to go down because it had taken our leisurely Knutsford coachman till ten o'clock to get his "bit of breakfast." Dear Miss Matty would have been gentle with him, and so we strove not to glower at his unbending back, but to gather in what we could, as he drove us to the train, of the beauties by the way.

We left the salt to the care of the Weaver, which was duly bearing it on, white blocks, ruddy lumps, rock-salt and table-salt, to Runcorn and to Liverpool. We put the brine-pits out of mind, and enjoyed the lovely fresh-water meres, social resorts of the most amiable of ducks and the most dignified of geese, which dot the Cheshire landscape. We had visited Rostherne Mere on our way out, and caught a glint from the fallen church-bell which a Mermaid rings over those dim waters every Easter dawn. We paused at Lower Peover for a glimpse of its black-and-white timbered church, deeply impressive and almost unique as an architectural survival. Among its curiosities we saw a chest hollowedout of solid oak with an inscription to the effect that any girl who can raise the lid with one arm is strong enough to be a Cheshire farmer's wife. Sturdy arms they needs must have, these Cheshire women, for the valley of the Weaver, like the more southerly Vale of Dee, is largely given up to dairy farms and to the production of cheeses. A popular song betrays the county pride:

"A Cheshire man went o'er to SpainTo trade in merchandise,And when arrived across the mainA Spaniard there he spies."'Thou Cheshire man,' quoth he, 'look here,—These fruits and spices fine.Our country yields these twice a year;Thou hast not such in thine.'"The Cheshire man soon sought the hold,Then brought a Cheshire cheese.'You Spanish dog, look here!' said he.'You have not such as these.'"'Your land produces twice a yearSpices and fruits, you say,But such as in my hand I bear.Our land yields twice a day.'"

"A Cheshire man went o'er to SpainTo trade in merchandise,And when arrived across the mainA Spaniard there he spies.

"'Thou Cheshire man,' quoth he, 'look here,—These fruits and spices fine.Our country yields these twice a year;Thou hast not such in thine.'

"The Cheshire man soon sought the hold,Then brought a Cheshire cheese.'You Spanish dog, look here!' said he.'You have not such as these.'

"'Your land produces twice a yearSpices and fruits, you say,But such as in my hand I bear.Our land yields twice a day.'"

But the best songs of Cheshire go to the music of the river Dee. We have all had our moments of envying its heart-free Miller.

"There was a jolly Miller onceLived on the river Dee;He worked and sang from morn till night,No lark more blithe than he;And this the burden of his songForever used to be:I care for nobody, no, not I,And nobody cares for me."

Kingsley's tragic lyric of

"Mary, go and call the cattle homeAcross the sands of Dee,"

reports too truly the perils of that wide estuary where Lycidas was lost. On the corresponding estuary of the Mersey stands Birkenhead, the bustling modern port of Cheshire; but it was at Chester that Milton's college mate had embarked for another haven than the one he reached.

Chester itself is to many an American tourist the old-world city first seen and best remembered. Liverpool and Birkenhead are of to-day, but Chester, walled, turreted, with its arched gateways, its timber-and-plaster houses, its gables and lattices, its quaint Rows, its cathedral, is the mediæval made actual. The city abounds in memories of Romans, Britons, Saxons, of King Alfred who droveout the Danes, of King Edgar who, "toucht with imperious affection of glory," compelled six subject kings to row him up the Dee to St. John's Church, of King Charles who stood with the Mayor on the leads of the wall-tower now called by his name and beheld the defeat of the royal army on Rowton Moor. As we walked around the walls,—where, as everywhere in the county, the camera sought in vain for a Cheshire cat,—we talked of the brave old city's "strange, eventful history," but if it had been in the power of a wish to recall any one hour of all its past, I would have chosen mine out of some long-faded Whitsuntide, that I might see a Miracle pageant in its mediæval sincerity,—the tanners playing the tragedy of Lucifer's fall, perhaps, or the water-carriers the comedy of Noah's flood.

This is the Black Countrypar excellence,—a county whose heraldic blazon should be the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. It belongs to the central plain of England, save on the northeast, where thelower end of the Pennine chain breaks into picturesque highlands. Its gently undulating reaches are still largely given over to agriculture, but the bulk of its population, the most of its energy and wealth, are concentrated in the manufacturing towns that so thickly stud the surface over its two coal-fields. The northern is the last of that long line of coal-measures running down from Lancashire; the southern is much larger, though not so workable, and extends across all South Staffordshire. Both north and south, iron in rich quantities is found with the coal, so that for many years Staffordshire controlled the iron trade of the world. Of late, South Wales and other regions are successfully disputing its supremacy.

We had, in previous visits to England, crossed Staffordshire several times by train, and memory retained an unattractive impression of netted railways, forests of factory chimneys, and grimy miners sweethearting with rough pitgirls under smoke and cinders. If we must enter it now, the occasion seemed propitious for a trial of the automobile,—a mode of conveyance which we had deemed too sacrilegious for the Border and the Lake Country.

Toward ten o'clock on an August morning—for the chauffeur, like our Cheshire coachman, could not be hurried over his "bit of breakfast"—we tucked ourselves and a confiding Shrewsbury lady into a snug motor-car, and away we sped through northeastern Shropshire across the county line. In a gasp or two the name Eccleshall glimmered through the dust that flew against our goggles. This little town has one of the finest churches in the county, but the frenzy of speed was on us, and we tore by. Suddenly we came upon the Trent, winding along, at what struck us as a contemptibly sluggish pace, down Staffordshire on its circuitous route to the Humber. We tooted our horn and honked up its western side to the Potteries. Here the machine suffered an attack of cramps, and while it was groaning and running around in a circle and pawing the air, we had our first opportunity to look about us.

The region known as the Potteries, the chief seat of the earthenware manufactures of England, consists of a strip of densely populated land in this upper basin of the Trent, a strip some ten miles long by two miles broad, whose serried towns and villagesgive the aspect of one continuous street. Within this narrow district are over three hundred potteries, whose employees number nearly forty thousand, apart from the accessory industries of clay-grinding, bone-grinding, flint-grinding, and the like. It draws on its own beds of coal and iron, but the china-clay comes from Cornwall by way of Runcorn and the Grand Trunk Canal, while for flints it depends on the south coast of England and on France. Genius here is named Josiah Wedgwood. This inventor of fine porcelains, whose "Queen's ware" gained him the title of "Queen's Potter," was born in 1759 at Burslem, which had been making brown butter-pots as far back as the days of Charles I. When Burslem grew too small for his enterprise, Wedgwood established the pottery village of Etruria, to which the automobile passionately refused to take us. It dashed us into Newcastle-under-Lyme, where we did not particularly want to go, and rushed barking by Stoke-under-Trent, the capital of the Potteries and also—though we had not breath to mention it—the birthplace of Dinah Mulock Craik. In the last town of the line, Longtown, our machine fairly balked,and the chauffeur with dignity retired under it. A crowd of keen-faced men and children gathered about us, while we ungoggled to observe the endless ranks of house-doors opening into baby-peopled passages,—and, looming through the murky air, the bulging ovens of the china factories. At last our monster snorted on again, wiggling up the hill sideways with a grace peculiar to itself and exciting vain hopes of a wreck in the hearts of our attendant urchins. It must have been the Potteries that disagreed with it, for no sooner were their files of chimneys left behind than it set off at a mad pace for Uttoxeter, on whose outskirts we "alighted," like Royalty, for a wayside luncheon of sandwiches, ale, and dust.

IN THE POTTERIES—A CHILD-MOTHERIN THE POTTERIES—A CHILD-MOTHER

Uttoxeter is no longer the idle little town that Hawthorne found it, when he made pilgrimage thither in honour of Dr. Johnson's penance, for the good Doctor, heart-troubled for fifty years because in boyhood he once refused to serve in his father's stead at the market bookstall, had doomed himself to stand, the whole day long, in the staring market-place, wind and rain beating against his bared grey head, "a central imageof Memory and Remorse." Lichfield, Dr. Johnson's native city, commemorates this characteristic act by a bas-relief on the pedestal of the statue standing opposite the three-pillared house where the greatest of her sons was born.

While our chauffeur, resting from his labours under the hedge, genially entertained the abuse of a drunken tramp who was accusing us all of luxury, laziness, and a longing to run down our fellowmen, my thoughts turned wistfully to Lichfield, lying due south, to whose "Queen of English Minsters" we were ashamed to present our modern hippogriff. I remembered waking there one autumnal morning, years ago, at the famous old inn of the Swan, and peering from my window to see that wooden bird, directly beneath it, flapping in a rainy gale. The cathedral rose before the mental vision,—the grace of its three spires; its wonderful west front with tiers of saints and prophets and archangels, "a very Te Deum in stone"; the delicate harmonies of colour and line within; the glowing windows of the Lady Chapel; the "heaven-loved innocence" of the two little sisters sculptured by Chantrey, and his kneelingeffigy of a bishop so benignant even in marble that a passing child slipped from her mother's hand and knelt beside him to say her baby prayers. What books had been shown me there in that quiet library above the chapter-house! I could still recall the richly illuminated manuscript of the "Canterbury Tales," a volume of Dr. South's sermons with Dr. Johnson's rough, vigorous pencil-marks all up and down the margins, and, treasure of treasures, an eighth-century manuscript of St. Chad's Gospels. For this is St. Chad's cathedral, still his, though the successive churches erected on this site have passed like human generations, each building itself into the next.

St. Chad, hermit and bishop, came from Ireland as an apostle to Mercia in the seventh century. Among his first converts were the king's two sons, martyred for their faith. Even in these far distant days his tradition is revered, and on Holy Thursday the choristers of the cathedral yet go in procession to St. Chad's Well, bearing green boughs and chanting. A century or so ago, the well was adorned with bright garlands for this festival. The boy Addison, whose father was Dean ofLichfield, may have gathered daffodils and primroses to give to good St. Chad.

The ancient city has other memories. Farquhar set the scene of his "Beaux' Stratagem" there. Major André knew those shaded walks. In the south transept of the cathedral is the sepulchre of Garrick, whose death, the inscription tells us, "eclipsed the gaiety of nations and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure." It may be recalled that Hawthorne found it "really pleasant" to meet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's tomb in the minster, and that Scott asserts there used to be, in "moated Lichfield's lofty pile," a monument to Marmion, whose castle stood a few miles to the southeast, at Tamworth.

But the motor-car, full-fed with gasoline, would brook no further pause. As self-important as John Hobs, the famous Tanner of Tamworth whom "not to know was to know nobody," it stormed through Uttoxeter and on, outsmelling the breweries of Burton-on-Trent. Ducks, hens, cats, dogs, babies, the aged and infirm, the halt and the blind, scuttled to left and right. Policemen glared out at it from their "motor-traps" in the hedges. A group of small boys sent a rattleof stones against it. Rocester! Only three miles away were the ruins of the Cistercian Abbey of Croxden. We would have liked to see them, if only to investigate the story that the heart of King John is buried there, for we had never before heard that he had a heart; but while we were voicing our desire we had already crossed the Dove and whizzed into Derbyshire.

Dovedale was our goal. This beautiful border district of Derby and Staffordshire abounds in literary associations. Near Ilam Hall, whose grounds are said to have suggested to Dr. Johnson the "happy valley" in "Rasselas," and in whose grotto Congreve wrote his "Old Bachelor," stands the famous Isaak Walton Inn. The patron saint of the region is the Gentle Angler, who in these "flowery meads" and by these "crystal streams" loved to

"see a black-bird feed her young,Or a laverock build her nest."

Here he would raise his

"low-pitched thoughts aboveEarth, or what poor mortals love."

On a stone at the source of the Dove, and again on the Fishing-House which has stoodsince 1674 "Piscatoribus sacrum," his initials are interlaced with those of his friend and fellow-fisherman Charles Cotton, the patron sinner of the locality. In Beresford Dale may be found the little cave where this gay and thriftless gentleman, author of the second part of "The Complete Angler," used to hide from his creditors. At Wootton Hall Jean Jacques Rousseau once resided for over a year, writing on his "Confessions" and amusing himself scattering through Dovedale the seeds of many of the mountain plants of France. In a cottage at Church Mayfield, Moore wrote his "Lalla Rookh," and near Colwich Abbey once stood the house in which Handel composed much of the "Messiah."

We did not see any of these spots. The automobile would none of them. It whisked about giddily half an hour, ramping into the wrong shrines and out again, disconcerting a herd of deer and a pack of young fox-hounds, and then impetuously bolted back to Uttoxeter. There were antiquities all along the way,—British barrows, Roman camps, mediæval churches, Elizabethan mansions,—but the dusty and odoriferous trail of our car was flung impartially over them all.

We shot through Uttoxeter and went whirring on. A glimpse of the hillside ruins of Chartley Castle brought a fleeting sorrow for Mary Queen of Scots. It was one of those many prisons that she knew in the bitter years between Cockermouth and Fotheringay,—the years that whitened her bright hair and twisted her with cruel rheumatism. She was harried from Carlisle in Cumberland to Bolton Castle in Yorkshire, and thence sent to Tutbury, on the Derby side of the Dove, in custody of the unlucky Earl of Shrewsbury and his keen-eyed, shrewish-tongued dame, Bess of Hardwick. But still the poor queen was shifted from one stronghold to another. Yorkshire meted out to her Elizabeth's harsh hospitality at Sheffield, Warwickshire at Coventry, Leicestershire at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Derbyshire at Wingfield Manor and Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall, even at Buxton, where she was occasionally allowed to go for the baths, and Staffordshire at Tixall and here at Chartley. It was while she was at Chartley, with Sir Amyas Paulet for her jailer, that the famous Babington conspiracy was hatched, and anything but an automobile would have stopped and searched for thatstone wall in which a brewer's boy deposited the incriminating letters, read and copied every one by Walsingham before they reached the captive.

At Weston we jumped the Trent again and pounded on to Stafford, the shoemakers' town, where we came near knocking two bicyclists into a ditch. They were plain-spoken young men, and, addressing themselves to the chauffeur, they expressed an unfavourable opinion of his character. Stafford lies half-way between the two coal-fields of the county. Directly south some fifteen miles is Wolverhampton, the capital of the iron-manufacturing district. We remembered that Stafford was the birthplace of Isaak Walton, but it was too late to gain access to the old Church of St. Mary's, which has his bust in marble and, to boot, the strangest font in England. We climbed the toilsome heights of Stafford Castle for the view it was too dark to see, and then once more delivered ourselves over to the champing monster, which spun us back to Shrewsbury through a weird, infernal world flaring with tongues of fire.

A few miles to the northwest of Coventry lies the village of Meriden, which is called the centre of England. There on a tableland is a little pool from which the water flows both west and east, on the one side reaching the Severn and the British Channel, on the other the Trent and the North Sea. "Leafy Warwickshire" is watered, as all the world knows, by the Avon. The county, though its borders show here and there a hilly fringe, and though the spurs of the Cotswolds invade it on the south, is in the main a fertile river-basin, given over to agriculture and to pasturage. The forest of Arden, that once covered the Midlands, is still suggested by rich-timbered parks and giant trees of ancient memory. On the north, Warwickshire tapers up into the Staffordshire coal-fields and puts on a manufacturing character. The great town of this district is Birmingham, capital of the hardware industries.

It was from Birmingham that we started out on our Warwickshire trip. We had but a hasty impression of a well-built, prosperous, purposeful town, but if we had known at the time what masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were to be seen in the Art Gallery we would have taken a later train than we did for Nuneaton. Here we bade farewell to railways, having decided to "post" through the county. Our automobile scamper across Staffordshire had left us with a conviction that this mode of travel was neither democratic nor becoming,—least of all adapted to a literary pilgrimage. We preferred to drive ourselves, but the English hostlers, shaking their stolid heads, preferred that we should be driven. It was only by a lucky chance that we had found, in the Lake Country, a broad-minded butcher who would trust us on short expeditions with "Toby" and a pony-cart. After all, it is easier to adapt yourself to foreign ways than to adapt them to you, and the old, traditional, respectable method of travel in England is by post. The regular rate for a victoria—which carries light luggage—and a single horse is a shilling a mile, with no charge for return, but with a considerabletip to the driver. In out-of-the-way places the rate was sometimes only ninepence a mile, but in the regions most affected by tourists it might run up to eighteenpence. So at Nuneaton we took a carriage for Coventry, a distance, with the digressions we proposed, of about twelve miles, and set out, on a fair August afternoon, to explore the George Eliot country.

Our driver looked blank at the mention of George Eliot, but brightened at the name of Mary Anne Evans. He could not locate for us, however, the school which she had attended in Nuneaton, but assured us that "Mr. Jones 'ud know." To consult this oracle we drove through a prosaic little town, dodging the flocks of sheep that were coming in for the fair, to a stationer's shop. Mr. Jones, the photographer of the neighbourhood, proved to be as well versed in George Eliot literature and George Eliot localities as he was generous in imparting his knowledge. He mapped out our course with all the concern and kindliness of a host, and practically conferred upon us the freedom of the city.

Nuneaton was as placidly engaged in makinghats and ribbons as if the foot of genius had never hallowed its soil, and went its ways, regardless while we peered out at inns and residences mirrored in George Eliot's writings. The school to which Robert Evans' "little lass" used to ride in on donkeyback every morning, as the farmers' daughters ride still, is The Elms on Vicarage Street,—a plain bit of a place, with its bare walls and hard forms, to have been the scene of the awakening of that keen intelligence. We were duly shown the cloak-closet, to reach whose hooks a girl of eight or nine must have had to stand on tiptoe, the small classrooms, and the backyard that served as a playground. The educational equipment was of the simplest,—but what of that? Hamlet could have been "bounded in a nutshell," and here there was space enough for thought. A Nuneaton lady, lodging with the caretaker during the vacation, told us with a touch of quiet pride that her husband had known "Marian Evans" well in their young days, and had often walked home with her of an evening from the rectory.

As we drove away toward that rectory in Chilvers Coton, the parish adjoining Nuneatonon the south, we could almost see the little schoolgirl riding homeward on her donkey. It is Maggie Tulliver, of "The Mill on the Floss," who reveals the nature of that tragic child, "a creature full of eager and passionate longing for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away, and would not come near to her; with a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it."

Chilvers Coton, like Nuneaton, has no memories of its famous woman of letters. The only time we saw her name that afternoon was as we drove, two hours later, through a grimy colliery town where a row of posters flaunted the legend:

ASK FOR GEORGE ELIOT SAUCE.

But in the Chilvers Coton church, familiar to readers of "Scenes from Clerical Life," is a window given by Mr. Isaac Evans in memory of his wife, not of his sister, with an inscription so like Tom Tulliver's way ofadmonishing Maggie over the shoulder that we came near resenting it:

Back to Index Next