STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE
Returningto Stockbridge,en routefor Salisbury, eight miles more of roads of the same unchanging characteristics, but growing more plentifully carpeted with crushed flints as we advance, bring us to Wiltshire and to a junction with the Exeter Road from Andover at Lobcombe Corner. In the neighbourhood are “the Wallops,” as local parlance refers to a group of three villages, Over and Nether Wallop, with the wayside settlement of Little (or Middle) Wallop in between. It is this last-named to which Mr. Hardy refers when he tells how the ruined and broken-hearted Mayor of Casterbridge, fleeing from the scene of his vanished greatness and resuming his early occupation of hay-trusser, became employed at a “pastoral farm near the old western highway. . . . He had chosen the neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that, situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he would be at a roadless spot only half as remote.” Dorchester, otherwise Casterbridge, is in fact just forty-nine and a half miles distant, down this old Exeter Road.
In less than another mile on our westward waythe sight of a solitary house in all this apparently uninhabited wilderness arouses speculations in the pilgrim’s mind—speculations resolved on approach, when the sight of the recently restored picture-sign of the “Pheasant,” reared up on its posts on the short grass of the open down, opposite its door, proclaims this to be the old coaching inn once famed as “Winterslow Hut.” None ever spoke of the inn in those days as the “Pheasant,” although that was the sign of it, plainly to be seen; as “Winterslow Hut” it was always known, and a more lonely, forbidding place of seclusion from the haunts of man it would be difficult to find. It was once, appropriately enough, the retreat of a lonely, forbidding person—the self-selected place of exile from society of Hazlitt, the essayist, who, parting from his wife at the village of West Winterslow (whence the inn takes its name of “Winterslow Hut”) two miles away, lived here from 1819 to 1828. Here he wrote the essays on “Persons one would wish to have seen,” and the much less sociable essay, “On Living to One’s Self”—an art he practised here to his own satisfaction and the cheerful resignation of the many persons with whom he quarrelled. And here he saw the Exeter Mail and the stage-coaches go by, and must have found the place even lonelier, in the intervals after their passing, than it seems now that the Road, as an institution, is dead and the Rail conveys the traffic to and from Salisbury and the west, some two miles distant, across country hidden from view from this point beneath the swelling shoulders of the unchanging downs.
Salisbury spire is soon seen, when the long dropinto the valley of the Wiltshire Avon, down Three Mile Hill, begins; its slender spire, the tallest in England, thrusting its long needle-point 404 feet into the blue, and oddly peering out from the swooping sides of the downs, long before any suspicion of Sarum itself—as the milestones style it—has occupied the mind of the literary pilgrim.
Salisbury, like some bland and contented elderly spinster, does not look its age. When you are told how Old Sarum was abandoned, New Sarum founded, and everything recreatedad hocat the command of Bishop Poore, impelled thereto by a vision, in the then customary way, you are so impressed with what we are used to regard as such thoroughly “American” proceedings that you forget, in the apparent modernity of such a method, how very long ago all this was done. This great change of site took place about 1220, and sixty years later the great cathedral, remarkable and indeed unique among all our cathedrals for being designed and built, from the laying of the foundation stone to the roofing-in of the building, in one—the Early English—style, was completed. It was actually a century later that the spire itself was finished.
Much of this seeming youthfulness of Salisbury is due to the regularity of plan upon which the city is laid out, and to the comparative breadth of its streets. To that phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch, whose like certainly could never have been met with outside the pages ofMartin Chuzzlewit, Salisbury seemed “a very desperate sort of place; an exceedingly wild and dissipated city.” Here we smile superior, although it is truethat in his short story,On the Western Circuit, Mr. Hardy presents Melchester, as he names this fair city, as given over to blazing orgies in the progress of Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting merry-go-rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better than they ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he should have been. Granting the truth of this picture of Melchester Fair, it is to be observed that this is but an interlude in a twelvemonth’s programme of polished, decorous, and well-ordered urbanity. Its character is more truly portrayed inJude the Obscure, where Sue Bridehead having gone to the city, to enter the Training College in the Close, her cousin Jude follows her. He found it “a quiet and soothing place, almost entirely ecclesiastical in its tone; a spot where worldly learning and intellectual smartness had no establishment.” It was here he obtained work at his trade of stonemason, labouring on the restoration of the cathedral; here that Sue shocked his ecclesiastical and mediæval bent, meeting his suggestion that they should sit for a talk in the cathedral by the proposal that she would rather wait in the railway station: “That’s the centre of town life now—the cathedral has had its day!” To his shocked interjection, “How modern you are!” she replied defensively, “I am not modern, either. I am more ancient than mediævalism, if you only knew”; meaning thereby that she was enamoured of classicism and the old pagans.
To Sue the cathedral was not unsympathetic merely by force of that clear-cut regularity which impresses most beholders with a sense of a splendid,but cold, perfection. There are those who compare this great fane with Tennyson’s Lady Clara Vere de Vere:
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,Dead perfection, no more;
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,Dead perfection, no more;
but while those critics are critics only of design and carved stones, who would welcome something in its regular features paralleled by a tip-tilted nose in a human face, Sue was obviously preoccupied by the sense that it, not alone among cathedrals, has outlived the devotional needs that produced it, and is little more than a magnificent museum of architectural antiquities. That magnificence would be even more complete and pronounced had not the egregious James Wyatt been let loose upon the “restoration” of it, towards the close of the eighteenth century, when he cast out and destroyed most of its internal adornments, and pulled down and utterly obliterated the beautiful detached bell tower, coeval with the cathedral itself, which stood, away from it, on the north side.
It is perhaps worthy of remark that there may be noticed in the cathedral the tomb, with somewhat bombastic inscription, of Dr. D’Albigny Turberville, the seventeenth-century oculist, who died, aged 85, in 1696. The flagrant Latin, which tells us that his fame shall perish no sooner than this marble, does not allow for human forgetfulness, nor for the advances of science.
The Normal School in the Close, whence Sue escaped, after being confined to her room as a punishment for her night’s escapade with Jude, is a prominent building, described as “an ancientedifice of the fifteenth century, once a palace . . . with mullioned and transomed windows, and a courtyard in front shut in from the road by a wall.”
Salisbury Cathedral
From the ever-impending tragedy of Jude’s ambitions it is a relief to turn to the pure comedy of Betty Dornell, the first Countess of Wessex, in that collection of diverting short stories,A Group of Noble Dames. Looking upon those two old inns, the “Red Lion” in the High Street and the “White Hart,” we are reminded that it was to the first-named that Betty resorted with that husband with whom, although married at an early age, she had not lived.
“‘Twice we met by accident,’ pleaded Betty to her mother. ‘Once at Abbot’s Cernel and another time at the “Red Lion,” Melchester.’
“‘O, thou deceitful girl!’ cried Mrs. Dornell. ‘An accident took you to the “Red Lion” whilst I was staying at the “White Hart”! I remember—you came in at twelve o’clock at night and said you’d been to see the cathedral by the light o’ the moon!’
“‘My ever-honoured mamma, so I had! I only went to the “Red Lion” with him afterwards.’”
Nine miles to the north of Melchester stands Stonehenge, reached after their flight through the deserted midnight streets of the city by Tess and Angel Clare, vainly endeavouring to elude justice after the murder of the sham D’Urberville at Sandbourne. The night was “as dark as a cave,” and a stiff breeze blew as they came out upon the black solitudes of Salisbury Plain. For some miles they had proceeded thus, when “on a suddenClare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front, rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck themselves against it.
“‘What monstrous place is this?’ said Angel.
“‘It hums,’ said she. ‘Hearken!’
“The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp.” It was indeed Stonehenge, “a very Temple of the Winds.”
And here, as the night wore away, and Tess lay sleeping on the Altar Stone, and the great trilithons began to show up blackly against the coming dawn, the figure of a man advancing towards them appeared rising out of the hollows of the great plain. At the same time Clare heard the brush of feet behind him: they were surrounded. Thoughts of resistance came to him; but “‘It’s no use, sir,’ said the foremost plain-clothes man: ‘There are sixteen of us on the Plain, and the whole country is reared.’” And so they stood watching while Tess finished her sleep.
Stonehenge sadly requires such romantic passages as this to renew its interest, for, truth to tell, the first glimpse of this mysterious monument of prehistoric ages is wofully disappointing. No use to strive against that disappointment as you come up the long rises from Amesbury under the midday sun and see its every time-worn cranny displayed mercilessly in the impudent eye of day: the interval between anticipation and realisation is too wide, and the apparent smallness and insignificance of the great stone circles must, although unwillingly, be allowed. This comparative insignificance is, however, largely the effect of their almost boundlessenvironment of vast downs, tumid with the attendant circles of prehistoric tumuli, each tumulus or barrow crowned with its clump of trees, like the tufted plumes of a hearse.
Stonehenge
Mystery continues to shroud the origin of Stonehenge, which was probably standing when the Romans first overran Britain, and seems by the most reasoned theories to have really been a Temple of the Sun. Its name is only the comparatively modern one of “Stanenges,” or “the hanging stones,” given by the Saxons, who discovered it with as much astonishment as exhibited by any one of a later age, and so named it, not from any reference to the capital punishment ofsus. per coll., but from the great lintel-stones that are laid flat upon the tall rude columns, and may fancifully be said to hang in mid-air, at a height of twenty-five feet.
Those who speak of Stonehenge remaining a “monument to all time,” speak not according to knowledge, for the poor old relic is becoming sadly weatherworn and decrepit, and has aged rapidly of late years. No good has been wrought it by the fussy interferences and impertinences of “scientific” men, who, taking advantage of an alleged necessity for shoring up one the largest stones, dug about the soil and strove to wrest its secret by the method of sifting the spadesful of earth and stone chippings. Then a last indignity befell it. Sir Edward Antrobus, of Amesbury, lord of the manor, claimed Stonehenge as his manorial property, and, erecting a barbed-wire fence around it, levied a fee of a shilling a head for admission through the turnstiles that click you through, for all the world as thoughyou were entering some Earl’s Court Exhibition. The impudence that has found it possible to do these things, in defiance of undoubted public rights of way, bulks majestically—much larger than Stonehenge itself, whose grey pile it indeed belittles and vulgarises.
THE OLD COACH-ROAD: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD
Itis thirty-eight and a half miles from Salisbury to Dorchester, the “Casterbridge” of the novels, along the old coach-road to Exeter. Speaking as an exploratory cyclist, I would ten times rather go the reverse way, from west to east, for the gradients are all against the westward traveller, and westerly winds are the prevailing airs during summer and autumn. It is, indeed, a terribly difficult road, exposed, and very trying in its long rises. One charming interlude there is, three miles from Salisbury, at the beautifully situated little village of Coombe Bissett, set down in the deep valley of an affluent of the Wiltshire Avon; but it is heartbreaking work climbing out of it again, up the inclines of Crowden Down. At eight miles’ distance from Salisbury the old Woodyates Inn, long since re-christened the “Shaftesbury Arms,” stands in a lonely situation beside the road, looking regretful for bygone coaching days. Its old name, deriving from “wood-gates,” indicated its position on the south-western marches of the wooded district of Cranborne Chase. When railways disestablished coaches and the road resumed its solitude, the old inn became for a time the home of William Day’straining establishment for racehorses. He tells, in his recollections, of the drinking habits of the old Wiltshire farmers in general, and of two in particular, who used to call at Woodyates when on their way to or from Salisbury. They would talk, over the fire and their glasses of grog, somewhat in this fashion of their drunken exploits when riding home horseback: “Well, John, I fell off ten times.” “Yes, Thomas, and I fell off a dozen times: you see, I rode the old black horse, and he always jerks me about so.” It was said that there was scarcely a yard of ground over the eight miles that these worthies had not fallen on to from their horses.
Pentridge
At the distance of a mile from the coach-road at this point, where, by the way, we leave Wilts and enter Dorset, is the Hardy landmark of “Trantridge,” to be identified with the little village of Pentridge set down on the map. It was to Trantridge that Tess came early in her career, from her home at Marnhull in the Vale of Blackmore, to take service with Mrs. Stoke-D’Urberville of TheSlopes, relict of Mr. Simon Stoke, merchant or money-lender, who had unwarrantably assumed the name, the crest, and arms of the knightly D’Urbervilles—dead and gone and powerless to resent the affront. It would be useless to seek The Slopes, rising in all the glory of its new crimson brick “like a geranium bloom against the subdued colours around”; but plain to see, not far away, is the “soft azure landscape of the Chase—a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England, of undoubted primæval date.” It was in the Chase that the ruin of Tess was wrought by Alec D’Urberville.
The exceedingly rustic village of Pentridge nestles under the lee of a long, partly wooded hill, probably the “ridge” referred to in the place-name. In the little highly restored or rebuilt church with the stone spirelet is now to be seen, since August, 1902, when it was erected, the plain white marble tablet:
To the Memory ofROBERT BROWNING,of Woodyates, in this parish, who died Nov. 25th, 1746,and is the first known forefather ofRobert Browning, the poet.He was formerly footman and butler in theBankes family.“All service ranks the same with God.”Browning.This Tabletwas erected by some of the poet’s friends and admirers1902.
To the Memory ofROBERT BROWNING,
of Woodyates, in this parish, who died Nov. 25th, 1746,and is the first known forefather ofRobert Browning, the poet.
He was formerly footman and butler in theBankes family.
“All service ranks the same with God.”
Browning.
This Tabletwas erected by some of the poet’s friends and admirers1902.
Much reflected glory doubtless accrues to “the Bankes family” from this tablet, which owes its beingto the exertions of Dr. F. J. Furnivall. It seems that the poet’s ancestor, after severing his connection with the Bankes, became landlord of the Woodyates Inn, and churchwarden here.
This entrance to Dorsetshire is not so favourable an one as that, for example, from Somerset, by Templecombe and Stalbridge or Sherborne, where Dorset is indeed like unto the Land of Promise, a land flowing with milk and honey, where herds of cattle low musically in mead or byre, and the earth is alluvial—rich, deep, and sticky.
Here is the more arid, elevated country of open down; chalky, and producing only coarse grass, pine-trees, bracken, and furze—a sheep-grazing, as opposed to a cattle-rearing, district. Dorset is indeed a greatly varied county in the character of its soils. The sheep-grazing districts may be said to be this of the north-east border, and those other stretches of lofty, almost waterless chalk downs, running due east and west, parallel with the coast, with a similarly lengthy, but broader, stretch in a like direction, from where the downs rise from the Stour at Sturminster Marshall, past Milton Abbas and Cerne Abbas, on to Beaminster. In between these are the valleys of the River Frome—the “Vale of Great Dairies” ofTess of the D’Urbervilles, and the “Vale of Little Dairies” in the same story, otherwise Blackmore Vale. A glance at the map will show the River Frome flowing in its “green trough of sappiness and humidity” from the neighbourhood of Beaminster, past Chilfroom, Frome Vanchurch, and Frampton, which most obviously take their name from the stream, to Dorchester, Moreton, Wool, andWareham, whence it pours its enriching waters into Poole Harbour; and another glance will discover the Vale of Little Dairies, or Blackmore, bounded by Blandford and Minterne Magna, and the heights of High Stoy on the south, and by Shaftesbury, Wincanton, and Sherborne on the north; including within its compass Stalbridge and Sturminster Newton, together with a host of small villages. The natural outlet of this last district—which, despite the name of “Little Dairies,” given to it in the pages of the novels, is a larger area than that of the Frome valley, and of course produces in the aggregation more—is the railway junction of Templecombe, which, beyond being a mere junction, is also an exceedingly busy and bustling place for the receipt of all this dairy produce of Blackmore.
Such are, roughly, the main agricultural divisions of Dorset, which is, to the hard-working farmer who is his own bailiff, with his family to aid in the dairy-work, still a county where ends may be made to meet, with a considerable selvedge or overlapping to sweeten his industry. Despite a very general belief current in towns, there are still considerable numbers of these families. The farmer and his wife have largely grown out of the rustic speech, and their sons and daughters—the daughters especially, the adaptive dears!—have got culture for leisure moments, but they are none the less practical for that. A generation ago, perhaps, things were not so pleasing, for the then would-be up-to-date attempted the absurdity of aping the leisured classes, while seeking to carry on farming and obtain a living by it. Such as those came to grief, andwere rightly the butts of outside observers, as well as of moralists of their own class. A thorough-going farmer of that period, who saw the daughters of his neighbour going on the way to their music-lesson, reported his feelings and sayings as follows:
“While I and an’ my wife were out a-milken, they maidens went by, an’ I zaid to her, ‘Where be they maidens a-gwoin’?’ an’ she zaid, ‘Oh! they be a-gwoin’ to their music.’ An’ I zaid, ‘Oh! a-gwoin’ to their music at milken-time! That ’ull come to zom’ehat, that wull.’” And it doubtless did come to a pretty considerable deal, if—as a doctor might say—the course of the disease was normal.
Resuming the main road, which for the distance of a mile beyond Woodyates is identical with the old Roman road, the Via Iceniana, that ancient relic of a past civilisation may presently be seen parting company from the modern highway, and going off by itself, to the left, across the downs, making for the great fortified hill of Badbury Rings. It is known locally as the Achling Dyke, and is somewhat conspicuously elevated above the bracken, the gorse, and heather of these wilds.
Now, passing a few scattered cottages, we come—in fifteen miles from Coombe Bissett—to a village, the first on this lonely main road. Tarrant Hinton, this welcome village, stands on a sparkling little stream, without doubt the “tarrant,” or torrent, whence it and a small sisterhood of neighbouring settlements obtain a generic name. There are Tarrant Gunville, Tarrant Monkton, Tarrant Rawston, Tarrant Rushton, Tarrant Keynston, and Tarrant Crawford; and then, as below the last-named placethe little stream falls into the Stour, there are no more Tarrants.
Eastbury
To Tarrant Gunville belongs Eastbury Park, a place of Hardyesque and romantic aspect; but, so far, not made the vehicle of any of his stories. It has, to be sure, a story of its own—a tale of vaulting ambition which fell on t’other side. Eastbury was built, like many another ponderous and overgrown mansion of the eighteenth century, by Vanbrugh, to the commission of George Dodington, a former Lord of the Admiralty, who, growing enormously rich by long-continued peculation, blossomed out as a patron of the arts and a friend of literature. But before his huge house could be completed he was gathered to his fathers and to judgment upon his illegitimate pickings, leaving all his wealth to his grandnephew, George BubbDodington, afterwards Lord Melcombe, who lavished £140,000 on the completion of the works. Here he too became a patron, and entertained the literary men of his time until 1762, when, dying, the property went to Earl Temple, who, unable to afford the expense of maintaining the immense place, actually offered—and offered in vain—an income of £200 a year to any one who would reside at Eastbury and keep it in repair. As this bait failed, the great house was dismantled and demolished, piecemeal, in 1795, only one wing remaining to attest its former grandeur.
But traces of that grandeur are not wanting, from the iron railings, stone piers, and decorative kerbs, carved boldly with an acanthus-leaved design, that conduct into the demesne, to the magnificent clumps of beeches and other forest trees studding the sward of what was the park; and that remaining wing itself, still disclosing in its arcade, or loggia, something of Vanbrugh’s design.
Eastbury, of course, is haunted—so much is to be expected of such a place; but those who have seen the headless coachman and his ghostly four-in-hand issuing from the park gates, or returning, are growing scarce, and times are become so sceptical that even they cannot obtain credence. So, with a sigh for the decay of belief, we will e’en on through Pimperne down to Blandford, which good town, of fine dignified classic architectural presence, the coach-road enters in a timid back-doors manner, down a narrow byway.
Blandford is further dignified by that curious pedantic Latinity very marked in many Dorsetshire place-names. In this manner it is made to figureas “Blandford Forum,” a rendering of “Blandford Market.” In Mr. Thomas Hardy’s pages it is “Shottsford Forum,” and so appears in his story ofBarbara of the House of Grebe, inFar from the Madding Crowd, and again inThe Woodlanders, wherein it is stated, from the mouth of a rustic character, that “Shottsford is Shottsford still: you can’t victual your carcass there unless you’ve got money, and you can’t buy a cup of genuine there, whether or no”; this last a sad drawback from the amenities of a delightful town. But there is a very excellent pump, and an historic, in the broad High Street, whereon, cast in enduring iron, it may be read how a certain John Bastard, a “considerable sharer” in the great calamity by which Blandford was burnt in 1731, “humbly erected this monument, in grateful Acknowledgement of the Divine Mercy, That has since raised this Town, Like the Phoenix from its Ashes, to its present flourishing and beautiful State.” That, it will be allowed, is rather a fine, curly, and romantic way of putting it. A rider to this inscription goes on to say that in 1899 the Corporation of Blandford converted the pump into a drinking-fountain, and that the Blandford Waterworks Company, not halting in good deeds, gratuitously supplies the water.
The pilgrim who, arriving in Blandford hot, dusty and thirsty, and perhaps mindful of that alleged impossibility of buying a cup of genuine, essays to drink from the fountain, is at first surprised at the keen interest taken in his proceedings by a quickly collecting group of urchins. Their curiosity appears to be in the nature of surprise at the sight of a grown man drinking water, but light is shed uponit when, pressing hard the obstinate knob that releases the fount, the thing suddenly gives way and squirts half a pint or so up his sleeve. This is a never-failing form of entertainment to the youth of Blandford, and a cheap one.
Not once, but several times has Blandford been destroyed by fire. It owed these disasters to the old Dorsetshire fashion of thatched roofs, and only in time, by dint of repeated happenings in this sort, learned wisdom. This light dawned at the time when the classic revival in architecture was flourishing, and thus, as already hinted, Blandford’s High Street is wholly of that character. Classicism does not often make for beauty in English towns, but here the general effect is admirable, and although the stone of the fine church-tower—designed in the same taste—is of a jaundiced greenish-yellow hue, it is a noble feature.
Blandford’s natives have sometimes won to a great deal more than local fame; witness Alfred Stevens, the designer of the Wellington monument in St. Paul’s Cathedral, who was born in 1817, in Salisbury Street, that back-doors coach-road entrance into the town already mentioned. Willowes, the unhappy husband of Barbara, of the House of Grebe, was a descendant of one of the old families of glass-painters of Shottsford mentioned in that story, and more particularly referred to by Aubrey, the antiquary, who says: “Before the Reformation, I believe there was no country or great town in England but had glasse painters. Old Harding of Blandford in Dorsetshire, where I went to schoole, was the only country glasse painter that ever I knew. Upon play daies I was wont to visithis shop and furnaces. He dyed about 1643, aged about 83 or more.” That craft has long since died out from the town.
Blandford Forum
A beautiful backward view of the town is obtained on leaving it, over the Town Bridge that spans the sluggish, lily-grown Stour, at the entrance to Lord Portman’s noble park of Bryanstone. Here a dense overarching canopy of trees gives a grateful shade on summer days and frames the distant prospect whence the classic tower of the church grandly rises. The entrance-gates to the domain of Bryanstone are jealously kept locked and guarded, but there be ways of circumventing this churlish exclusiveness and of seeing the astonishingly beautiful scenery of the park, as the present writer has by chance discovered for himself. You, at the cost of some effort in hill-climbing, take the defences in the rear, and entering away back by the farmstead and workshops of the estate, come down by the finest of the scenery to those selfsame locked gates at these outskirts of Blandford, to observe and hear with some secret satisfaction the expressed horror of the lodge-keeper, only too anxious to let you out and be rid of you.
But, for the unenterprising, there is a sufficiently beautiful distant view of the park and of the new mansion from the Town Bridge. A former Lord Portman in 1780 employed James Wyatt to build him a classic mansion which remained until the rule of the present owner of the title, who demolished and replaced it with the fine mansion designed by Norman Shaw, R.A., and built in red brick and Portland stone.
THE OLD COACH-ROAD: BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER
Fromthis point the old coach-road becomes astonishingly hilly, so that mere words cannot accurately portray it, and recourse must be had to the eloquent armoury of the printer’s case to set it forth in any truly convincing manner. The series of semicircular dumpling hills is not adequately to be shadowed forth by the aid of mere brackets—we must picture them thus:
Representation of Hills in Type
and, to give some notion of the quality of the surface during the heats of summer, let a glaring white surface five inches deep in dust and powdered flint be imagined, the whole stirred up into a stifling halo of floating particles by the frequent passage of a flock of sheep. Such is the Exeter Road between Blandford and Dorchester in the merry months of summer.
Five miles of this bring us to the village of Winterborne Whitchurch, anciently referred to as “Album Monasterium” or “Blaunch Minster,” situated in the stony bottom where the little stream called the Winterborne does not in summer flow across the road. John Wesley, grandfather of themore famous John, the founder of Methodism, was vicar of this parish in 1658, and on the Restoration was dispossessed, when he took to a life of itinerant preaching amid the hills and dales of Dorsetshire, not altogether dissimilar from that of his celebrated grandson. Here, about 1540, was born George Turberville, the poet. To this succeeds, in less than another three miles, Milborne St. Andrew, on the less dried up Mill Bourne. This, the “Millpond St. Jude’s” alluded to inFar from the Madding Crowd, is a pretty place, of an old-world coaching interest, reflected from its partly thatched “Royal Oak” inn and the post office, once the “White Hart,” with the imposing effigy of a white hart still prominent on its cornice, in company with those of two foxes and a row of miniature cannon. Up along a byroad, past the feathery poplars that lend so feminine an air of beauty to the village, is the church, and then the Manor House Farm, once the residence of the Mansell Pleydells, who since the building of Whatcombe House, near by Winterborne Whitchurch, in 1758, have left this residence to farming. The red-brick pillars of the entrance-gates remain—partly ruined and standing foolishly, without a trace of the old carriage drive that once went between them—on the grass, surmounted still with sculptured displays of military trophies surrounding a cartouche bearing the lichened arms of the Pleydells, including an inescutcheon of pretence showing that before they allied themselves with a Mansell they married money with a Morton. It is a fine house, full of character, with unusually—and somewhat foreign-looking—high-pitched roof. Grand old trees lead up to it, and in the distanceone perceives a manorial pigeon-house, against the skyline. The old drive led round to the other side of the mansion, where it is divided from the meadows by a moatlike cut in the Mill Bourne, now, however, richer in mud than in water, and crossed by a brick bridge. We can picture Lady Constantine, the susceptible young and wealthy widow of the defunct Sir Blount, stealing at night over this bridge, to visit Swithin St. Cleeve, stargazing in his lonely tower on the hilltop. In the garden, with its sundial, are pretty old-world box-edged flower-beds and shady arbours. Foundations of many demolished buildings are traceable in the meadows.
The Old Manor-House, Milborne St. Andrew
The scene ofTwo on a Toweris a selection from various places. “The tower,” Mr. Hardy writesto me, “had two or three originals—Horton, Charborough, etc.” Those other places are duly described in these pages, but the “etc.” covers the curious brick obelisk built on the summit of the earthwork-encircled hill near by this old manor-house of Milborne St. Andrew, and called Weatherbury Castle. Standing on this “fir-shrouded hilltop,” one may see, for many miles around, summer conflagrations among the furze on Bere Heath, the tall tower in Charborough Park, which, much more than this obelisk, resembles Swithin’s observatory, and, near at hand, below, this old manor-house, the “Welland House” of the story. From this eyrie, too, you perceive the old Exeter Road swooping whitely downhill, and hear the hum of threshing-machines, coming up, like the drowsy buzz of insects, from the vale.
Weatherbury Castle
It is not difficult to detect sarcasm in the description of this hill. It “was (according to someantiquaries) an old Roman camp—if it were not (as others insisted) an old British castle, or (as the rest swore) an old Saxon field of Witanagemote—with remains of an outer and an inner vallum, a winding path leading up between their overlapping ends by an easy ascent.”
The Obelisk, Weatherbury Castle
Not so easy, really—indeed, demanding a rather strenuous climb. And when you are on the crest of that ancient glacis (impregnable it might well have been when men fought hand to hand) it is with some difficulty you penetrate the dense woodland growing within thisceinture. Little can in these times be seen of the obelisk from without: only from one particular view-point can you observe its ultimate inches and the metal ball that caps it, rising mysteriously from amid the topmost branches of the fir-trees. Its situation is exactly described in the story: “The gloom and solitude which prevailed round the base were remarkable. The sob of the environing trees” (how like, by the way, to that passage in Mr. W. S. Gilbert’sRuddigore, “the sob of the breeze is heard in the trees”) “was here expressively manifest, and, moved by the light breeze, their thin straight stems rocked in seconds, like inverted pendulums, while some boughs and twigs rubbed the pillar’s sides, or occasionally clicked in catching each other. Below the level of their summits the masonry was lichen-stained and mildewed, for the sun never pierced that moaning cloud of blue-black vegetation. Pads of moss grew in the joints of the stonework, and here and there shade-loving insects had engraved on the mortar patterns of no human style or meaning, but curious and suggestive.”
E.M.P. inscription on obeliskThe why or purpose of this slight brick structure are lost. The only clue, afforded by the inscription on a stone tablet set in the lichened bricks, points to it being the handiwork of a Pleydell. It was, in fact, built by Edmund Morton Pleydell, but his purpose, if indeed he had one beyond a singular notion of ornament, has passed, with himself, beyond these voices; and the neglected condition of the monument—if indeed it be a monument—fully bears out the moral reflection inTwo on a Tower. “Here stood this aspiring piece of masonry, erected as the most conspicuous and ineffaceable reminder of a man that could be thought of; and yet the whole aspect of the memorial betokened forgetfulness. Probably not a dozen people within the district knew the name of the person commemorated, while perhaps not a soul remembered whether the column were hollow or solid, whether with or without a tablet explaining its date and purpose.”
Regaining the high road and passing uphill by where the Dewlish toll-gate once stood, and by an up-and-down course infinitely varied as to gradient, we come at length down to the valley of the Piddle, and to Piddletown, the “Weatherbury” ofFar from the Madding Crowd, where Gabriel Oak, come down in the world by the agency of Fate and his foolish young sheep-dog, took service with his distractingly elusive dear, Bathsheba Everdene, the lady-farmer. Weatherbury, as Mr. Hardy regretfully tells us, is not the Weatherbury he once knew. It has indeed been very largely rebuilt, and the rather stern and prim limestone cottages that standprominently in one of its several streets do not altogether prepossess one in favour of this village that is not quite a townlet and yet may quite possibly resent the more rustic definition. The “several” streets are, after all, rather roads, with rows of houses and cottages less integrally than incidentally there, and the several are perhaps reducible to a term less connotive of number; but they run in unexpected directions and uncovenanted angles, and so make an imposing show, comparable with the effect produced by six supers who, by judicious stage-management in passing and repassing, can be made to represent an army. But the Piddle, running sparkling and clear through Piddletown, redeems the conjoined effect of those streets and gives the place a final and definitivecachetof rurality, by no means belied by the very large, though very rustic, church—happily still unrestored, and, with its tall pews and fine Jacobean carved oak choir-gallery, a perfect picture of an ancient Wessex place of worship. Hardean village choirs and Gabriel Oak’s bass voice take, if it be possible, an even greater air of actuality to the pilgrim who enters here.
The interest of Piddletown church is added to by the fine and curious bowl font, diapered in an unusual pattern, and by the tombs of the Martins of Athelhampton, who lie mediævally recumbent in effigy in their own chapel, quite unconcerned, although scored over with the initials of the undistinguished, and although their old manor-house of Athelhampton, near by, on the road to Bere Regis, has since the time they became extinct passed through several alien hands. Poor old fellows! Their somewhat threatening motto, under their oldmonkey crest, of “He who looks at Martin’s ape Martin’s ape shall look at him!” has lost any point it ever had.
Piddletown
A touching epitaph desires your prayers for two of the family:
Here lyeth the body of Xpofer Martyn Esquyer,Sone and heyre unto Syr Willym Martyn, knyght,Pray for there Soules with harty desyreThat bothe may be sure of Eternall lyght;Calling to Remembraunce that ev’ry wyhgtMost nedys dye, and therefor lett us prayAs other for us may do Another day.
Here lyeth the body of Xpofer Martyn Esquyer,Sone and heyre unto Syr Willym Martyn, knyght,Pray for there Soules with harty desyreThat bothe may be sure of Eternall lyght;Calling to Remembraunce that ev’ry wyhgtMost nedys dye, and therefor lett us prayAs other for us may do Another day.
This church of Piddletown, or “Weatherbury,” is the scene of Sergeant Troy’s belated remorse and of the acute misery of that incident where, coming by the light of a lantern and planting flowers on Fanny Robin’s grave, he sleeps in the porch while the rain-storm breaks and the storm-water from the gurgoyles of the tower spouts furiously over the spot.
“The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle’s jaws directed all its vengeance into the grave. The rich tawny mould was stirred into motion, and boiled like chocolate. The water accumulated and washed deeper down, and the roar of the pool thus formed spread into the night. . . . The flowers so carefully planted by Fanny’s repentant lover began to move and writhe in their bed. The winter-violets turned slowly upside down, and became a mere mat of mud. Soon the snowdrops and other bulbs danced in the boiling mass like ingredients in a cauldron. Plants of the tufted species were loosened, rose to the surface, and floated off.”
The street beside the church retains a good deal of its quaint features of thatch and plaster, with deep eaves where the house-martins build. A pretty corner including an old thatched house with architectonic windows closely resembling those of a Queen Anne bureau, and supported on pillars having a cousinship with classic art, is especially noticeable.
A quaint corner in Piddletown
If we wish to see the old mansion that served as model for Bathsheba’s farm, we shall not find it in Piddletown, but must turn aside and proceed up the valley of the Piddle, in the direction of Piddlehinton and Piddletrenthide—usually termed “Longpiddle.” Before reaching these, at the distance of rather over a mile, we come to Lower Walterstone, where, behind noble groups of beeches, horse-chestnuts, and sycamores growing on raisedgrassy banks, it will be found, in the shape of a Jacobean mansion eloquently portrayed by the novelist:
“By daylight, the bower of Oak’s new-found mistress, Bathsheba Everdene, presented itself as a hoary building, of the Jacobean stage of Classic Renaissance as regards its architecture, and of a proportion which told at a glance that, as is so frequently the case, it had once been the manorial hall upon a small estate around it, now altogether effaced as a distinct property, and merged in the vast tract of a non-resident landlord which comprised several such modest demesnes. Fluted pilasters, worked from the solid stone, decorated its front, and above the roof pairs of chimneys were here and there linked by an arch, some gables and other unmanageable features still retaining traces of their Gothic extraction. Soft brown mosses, like faded velveteen, formed cushions upon the stone tiling, and tufts of the houseleek or sengreen sprouted from the eaves of the low surrounding buildings. A gravel walk leading from the door to the road in front was incrusted at the sides with more moss—here it was a silver-green variety, the nut-brown of the gravel being visible to the width of only a foot or two in the centre. This circumstance, and the generally sleepy air of the whole prospect here, together with the animated and contrasting state of the reverse façade, suggested to the imagination that, on the adaptation of the building for farming purposes, the vital principle of the house had turned round inside its body, to face the other way.”
The way from Piddletown to Dorchester, passingthe hamlet singularly and interestingly named “Troy Town,” which, although itself intrinsically without visible interest, invites speculation, presently passes over Yellowham Hill, clothed in luxuriant woods. This spot, the “Yalbury Hill” of Troy’s excruciatingly pitiful meeting with Fanny Robin, figures, together with the woodlands—the “Yalbury Great Wood” ofUnder the Greenwood Tree—in several others among the Wessex stories. Coming to it in old times, the coaches changed horses at the “Buck’s Head” inn, now quite disestablished and forgot, save for the humorous description of it to be found in the pages ofFar from the Madding Crowd. Unswervingly the highway passes over its crest and down on the other side, the wayfarer alongit watched by bright-eyed squirrels and the other lesser fauna of this dense covert, while he thinks himself unobserved. It is a lovely road, but you should see it and its encompassing woods in autumn, when the October sunshine, with that characteristic golden sheen peculiar to the time of year, falls between the rich red trunks of the firs on to the golden-brown of the dried bracken; when the acorns are ripe on the dwarf oaks and fall with startling little crashes into the sere leaves of the undergrowth; when the nuts are ripe on the hazels and the squirrels—too busy now to follow the wayfarer’s movements—are industriously all day long gathering store of them over against winter. Then Yellowham Woods are at their finest.
Lower Walterstone Farm: Original of Bathsheba’s farm
Where the descent from this eminence reaches an intermediate level, preparatory to diving again downwards, the road takes a curve through the park-lands of Kingston House, a stately but cold-looking mansion of stone, figuring in that first novel,Desperate Remedies, as “Knapwater House.” The bias of the architect, as he then was, is prominently displayed in Mr. Hardy’s description of it: “The house was regularly and substantially built of clean grey freestone throughout, in that plainer fashion of Greek classicism which prevailed at the latter end of the last century, when the copyists called designers had grown weary of fantastic variations in the Roman orders. The main block approximated to a square on the ground plan, having a projection in the centre of each side, surmounted by a pediment. From each angle of the north side ran a line of buildings lower than the rest, turning inwards again at their farthest end, andforming within them a spacious open court, within which resounded an echo of astounding clearness. These erections were in their turn backed by ivy-covered ice-houses, laundries, and stables, the whole mass of subsidiary buildings being half buried beneath close-set shrubs and trees.”
Leaving aside, for the present, an exploration of Stinsford, down the next turning, to come later to a particular and intimate discussion of it, we proceed to Dorchester, whose houses, and those of its allied suburb of Fordington, are now seen, crowning the ridge on which the old county town stands.
DORCHESTER
Dorchester, the “Casterbridge” of the novels, stands upon or, more correctly, above, the River Frome, and from that circumstance derived its ancient Roman name of Durnovaria, whose Latinity Mr. Hardy has exploited in the name of “Durnover” he confers upon Fordington. The Romans themselves did by no means invent their name for the station they founded here, but just adapted the title given by the native tribe of Durotriges to their settlement. Those natives, who were of Welsh stock, styled their habitation by the sufficiently Welsh name of Dwrinwyr, which, like all Cymric place-names, was descriptive and alluded to its watery situation.
The approach to Dorchester has suffered in late years, in the pictorial point of view, from the decay and destruction of many of those magnificent old elms that once formed a noble introduction along this, the “London Road”; but it is not wholly to be bankrupted of beauty, for, although Dorchester may continue to grow, it is not in this direction that its suburbs will be thrown out. The flat water-meadows of the Frome forbid building operations here, and in effect say, at the bridgeimmediately below where Fordington on its ridge stands on the thitherward bank of the stream—“thus far and no farther!” From this approach, looking to where Fordington’s houses die away on the left hand, and to where the chalky downs begin to rise, you may obtain a distant view of the novelist’s residence, a house he himself designed, standing beside the Wareham Road near where an old turnpike-gate stood, and called from it “Max Gate.” Looking, however, straight ahead, the road into Dorchester is seen becoming a street and going with inflexible Roman directness through the town, with the ancient church tower of Fordington slightly to the left, and the equally ancient church of St. Peter’s immediately in front, in the centre of the town, where the two main streets cross. Attendant modern churches and chapels, and the Town Hall, with spires, act as satellites. To the right hand, rising bulky from the huddled mass of houses, is a grey building which but a little experience of touring in England identifies without need of inquiry as the gaol.
Dorchester, figuring as the “Casterbridge” of that mayor whose surprising history is set forth in that powerful story, bulks large in the whole series of Wessex novels—as how could it fail of doing, seeing that the novelist himself was born at Upper Bockhampton, only three miles away? In masterly fashion he has described its salient points, as they were before modernity had come to obliterate them, or at least to take off the sharp edge of their singularity. He has expended much thought upon Roman Dorchester, and speculated upon what manner of place it was fifteen hundred years ago.“Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street, alley, and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome. It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier or other of the Empire, who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest for a space of fifteen hundred years.” Nay, even within the precincts of his own garden, on the edge of the rotund upland that looks so wanly down upon the railway, relics of the legionaries have been discovered. Three of those stout warriors were there found. “Each body was fitted with, one may almost say, perfect accuracy into the oval hole, the crown of the head touching the maiden chalk at one end and the toes at the other, the tight-fitting situation being strongly suggestive of the chicken in the egg-shell.”
More attuned to modern times is that description of Dorchester as it appeared when Susan, Henchard’s wife, with Elizabeth-Jane, entered it from the London Road that evening. Wonderfully observed and true is that passage where the light of the street lamps, glimmering through those engirdling trees that were then, even more than now, the great feature of the town, is made a snug and comforting contrast with the outside country, seeming “strangely solitary and vacant in aspect, considering its nearness to life.” Then the agricultural and pastoral pursuits of the people, as reflected in the character of the goods displayed in shop windows, is neatly shown, in a list of those objects: the hay-rakes, the seed-lips, butter-firkins, hoes and spades and mattocks; the horse-embrocations,scythes, reaping-hooks, and hedger’s and ditcher’s gloves, articles all of everyday requirement.
The “grizzled church” to which they came was St. Peter’s, whose tower showed “how completely the mortar from the joints of the stonework had been nibbled out by time and weather, which had planted in the crevices thus made little tufts of stone-crop and grass, almost as far up as the very battlements.” Yes, and so one vividly remembers it; but restoration has recently made away with all these evidences of age, and cleaned the stonework and renewed and pointed it, greatly to the aid of the tower’s structural stability, ’tis true, but the very death of picturesque effect. There is a pleasing thing here, at the foot of this tower, where High East Street and High West Street join. It is the bronze life-sized statue, in his habit as he lived, of “Pa’son Barnes,” otherwise the Reverend William Barnes, the Dorset poet, described by Thomas Hardy as he is represented here—“an aged clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak, knee-breeches and buckled shoes, with a leather satchel slung over his shoulders and a stout staff in his hand.” This quaint figure, whose life and thoughts and writings were racy of the soil whence he sprang—he was born in the Vale of Blackmore—was for many years a quite inadequately rewarded schoolmaster, and only late in life was given, first the living of Whitcomb, and then that of Winterborne Came, near Dorchester. His poems in the Dorsetshire vernacular, long known and admired, were not pecuniarily successful. “What a mockery is life!” said he. “They praise me, and take away my bread! They may be putting up a statue to mesome day, when I am dead, while all I want now is leave to live. I asked for bread, and they gave me a stone!”
Prophetic indeed! for here is the statue, with beneath it the inscription:
WILLIAM BARNES1801–1886
WILLIAM BARNES1801–1886
and the quotation from one of his own folk-poems:
Zoo now I hope his kindly fëaceIs gone to vind a better plëace,But still wi’ vo’k a’ left behindHe’ll always be a kept in mind.
Zoo now I hope his kindly fëaceIs gone to vind a better plëace,But still wi’ vo’k a’ left behindHe’ll always be a kept in mind.
The mural monument of a sixteenth-century Thomas Hardy, within the church, attracts attention. The inscription states him to have been “esquire” and of Melcombe Regis, and goes on to describe his benefactions to the town and the gratitude of the “Baylives and Burgisses” therefor. To “commend to posterity an example soe worthy of imitation,” they erected this tablet. He is said to be the common ancestor of Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy, the friend and comrade of Nelson, and of Thomas Hardy, the novelist.
Still from this tower of St. Peter’s sounds the curfew chime, with the stroke of eight o’clock every evening, as described in the story; its “peremptory clang” the signal for shop-shutting throughout the town. “Other clocks struck eight from time to time—one gloomily from the gaol, another from the gable of an alms-house, with a preparative creak of machinery more audible than the note of the bell.”
In High East Street stands, just as described, the principal inn—I suppose in these times one should, for fear of disrespect say “hotel”—of Dorchester, the “King’s Arms,” white-faced, with the selfsame “spacious bow-window projected into the street over the main portico,” the whole not too imposing for comfort, and not too homely for dignity. It was a coaching house in days gone by. From a step above the pavement on the opposite side of the street Susan and Elizabeth-Jane, amid the crowd, witnessed the dinner given to the mayor, and through the archway Boldwood carried Bathsheba, fainting at the news of her husband’s death.
Equally white-faced, but a good deal more picturesque, is the “White Hart,” down at the end, or the beginning if you will, of the sloping street, as you enter the town. By it runs the Frome, and in its courtyard on market-days may be seen such a concourse of carriers’ carts as rarely witnessed nowadays. Dorchester is a busy carrying centre, by no means spoiled in that respect by railways, which yet fail to reach many of its surrounding villages.
The brick bridge that here spans the Frome, and the stone bridge some distance farther away, spanning a branch of the same stream out away in the meads, have their parts in theMayor of Casterbridge. “These bridges had speaking countenances. Every projection in each was worn down to obtuseness, partly by weather, more by friction from generations of loungers, whose toes and heels had from year to year made restless movements against these parapets, as they had stood there, meditating on the aspect of affairs. In the caseof the more pliable bricks and stones, even the flat faces were worn into hollows by the same mixed mechanism. The masonry of the top was clamped with iron at each joint; since it had been no uncommon thing for desperate men to wrench the coping off and throw it down into the river, in reckless defiance of the magistrates. For to this pair of bridges gravitated all the failures of the town—those who had failed in business, in love, in sobriety, in crime. Why the unhappy hereabout usually chose the bridges for their meditations in preference to a railing, a gate, or a stile, was not so clear.” He goes on to tell how there was a marked difference in quality between the frequenters of the near bridge of brick and the far one of stone. The more thoroughgoing failures and those with the most threadbare characters, or with no characters at all, save bad ones, preferred the near bridge: to reach it entailed less trouble, and it was not for such as them to mind the glare of publicity.
“Themisérableswho would pause on the remoter bridge were of a politer stamp. They included bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who were what is called ‘out of a situation’ from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient of the professional class—shabby-genteel men, who did not know how to get rid of the weary time between breakfast and dinner, and the yet more weary time between dinner and dark.” These unfortunates gazed steadily into the river, never turning to notice passers-by, and indeed shrinking from observation. And so day by day they looked and looked in the stream, until at last their bodies were sometimes found in it.
Ten Hatches, Dorchester
When Henchard’s ruin was complete, he too began to frequent the stone bridge, and would have ended in the same way, not at the bridge itself, but over in the meadows where the many branches of the Frome are regulated and controlled by a number of sluices known as Ten Hatches. “To the east of Casterbridge lay moors and meadows, through which much water flowed. The wanderer in this direction, who should stand still for a few moments on a quiet night, might hear singular symphonies from these waters, as from a lampless orchestra, all playing in their sundry tones, from near and far parts of the moor. At a hole in a rotten weir they executed a recitative; where a tributary brook fell over a stone breastwork they trilled cheerily; under an arch they performed a metallic cymballing; and at Durnover Weir they hissed. The spot at which their instrumentation rose loudest was a place called Ten Hatches, whence during high springs there proceeded a very fugue of sounds.”
The ruined mayor, to whom, and not the cold, successful Donald Farfrae, the reader’s sympathies go out, would have ended all his troubles here with a plunge in the waters, had it not been for the ghastly floating Skimmington effigy of himself he saw floating down the current as he was about to drop in.
“Gray’s Bridge,” as the stone structure on the London Road is known, is that toward which Bob Loveday, in theTrumpet Major, gazed anxiously, awaiting the coach bearing his Matilda, and across it, of course, on their way to Longpiddle, went those “Crusted Characters,” telling stories in the carrier’scart jogging along with them so comfortably from the “White Hart.”
The fateful, almost sentient, character many natural objects are made to assume in the march of Mr. Hardy’s tragic stories is expressly shown in his description of the Roman amphitheatre of Maumbury, at the farther or western extremity of Dorchester, beside the road to Weymouth. He styles it “the Ring, on the Budmouth Road,” and explains how “it was to Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly of the same magnitude.” It is not, as might be gathered from this passage, a building, like the Coliseum, but a vast amphitheatre formed by earthworks. Used by the Romans as the scene of their gladiatorial displays, it has doubtless witnessed many an act of savage cruelty, but is now a solitude. A sinister place it has been always, for, when executions were public affairs, the gallows stood within the old arena; and until well into the eighteenth century the populace came to it in thousands to witness the execution of felons where, before the dawn of the Christian era, fighting men had struggled to the death: where perhaps, in early Christian times, in the days of the Diocletian persecution, Christians had been sacrificed. It was here, in 1705, that Mary Channing was executed, under the most fearful circumstances of barbarity belonging to the penalties prescribed forpetit treason. The crimes known by that name included several forms of rebellion against authority, among them the murder of a husband by a wife. A husband being then, much more than now, in the eyes of the law in a position of authority over his wife, to murderhim was not merely murder—it waspetit treasonas well, and therefore deserving of exceptional punishment. Mary Brookes, married by the wish of her parents, against her own inclination, to one Richard Channing of Dorchester, a grocer, almost ruined him by her extravagance, and then poisoned him by giving him white mercury, first in rice-milk, and twice afterwards in a glass of wine. At the Summer Assizes, 1704, she was found guilty and condemned to death. On March 21st, 1705, accordingly, she was strangled here, in this arena, and then burned, the horrible spectacle being witnessed by ten thousand persons. She was but nineteen years of age. This Golgotha was disestablished in 1767, when the gallows was removed to the decent solitudes of Bradford Down, a mile and a half along the Exeter Road, on the way to Bridport. It was to this spot that a mayor of Dorchester desired to escort a distinguished traveller leaving the town, after being presented with the customary address. “May I be allowed to accompany your Highness as far as the gallows?” he asked, greatly to the dismay of that departing Serenity, to whom the allusion seemed more ill-omened than really it was. It is a tale told of many places and many mayors, and he would be a clever commentator who should distinguish the real original.
The lone amphitheatre of Maumbury has thus, it will be seen, real tragical associations fitting it for the novelist’s more sombre humours. He tells how intrigues were there carried forward, how furtive and sinister meetings happened within the rim of these ancient earthworks, and how, althoughthe patching up of long-standing feuds might be attempted on this spot, seldom had it been the place of meeting of happy lovers. In this ring, then, the reconciliation of Susan and Henchard took place, after eighteen years, and was but the prelude to miseries and disasters.