At the other extremity of the park is the small and secluded village of Melbury Osmund, the “Little Hintock” ofThe Woodlanders, “one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world, where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more listlessness than meditation.” It lies among vast hills and profound hollows, whose huge convexities and corresponding concavities render this a district to be more comfortably ridden by the horseman than walked, and one to be explored by the cyclist only with great and exhausting labour.
By perspiring perseverance, however, Yeovil and Somerset, or, speaking by the card, “Ivell” and “Outer Wessex” may be reached at last, by way of the strangely-entitled village of Ryme Intrinsica, whose name, so spelled on the map, is, with considerable incertitude both as to spelling and meaning, said to be properly written “Entrenseca” or “Entrensicca.” Local theories, disregarding altogether the inexplicable “Ryme,” and expending themselves upon the preposterous Latinity of the second part of the name, have come to some sort of agreement that it denotes a dry place on a ridge placed between two watered vales; and those curious enough to look for it on a large-scale map will perceive readily enough that, whatever the comparative dryness of the ridge it does occupy, it is certainly so flanked by the low-lying lands in which flow two tributaries of the river Yeo.
Hutchins, the county historian, on the other hand, gives a wholly different explanation of the name. Spelling the “Intrinseca” with an “e,” instead of the final “i,” he says it is so called, Ryme Intrinseca, or “In Ryme,” in contradistinction to an outlying portion of the old manor, away down in the parish of Long Bredy, and styled Ryme Extrinsecus, or “Out Ryme.”
At any rate, Ryme Intrinsica looks scarcely the place to be dolled out in so classical a style. It is too Saxon, too rustic and homespun in all its circumstances of thatch, rickyards, dairies, and pigsties; and its little church is not in any way corroborative of this dignity.
Yeovil, whose name has so bucolic a sound that it would seem to be, above all other places, the home most suitable for yeomen, is the “Ivell” of the Wessex novels, but finds only scattered allusions in them, and touches far from intimate. Cope, the curate, who in the storyFor Conscience’ Sakemarried the conscience-smitten Millborne’s daughter when at last the father effaced himself, was curate at Ivell; and it was at the “Castle” inn of the same town that the brothers Halborough called for their drunken father, in the harrowing embarrassments ofA Tragedy of two Ambitions, but those are the nearest approaches to be discovered.
SHERBORNE
Muchremains in pleasant Sherborne to tell of that time when it was a cathedral city, and when, after it had lost that high dignity, it was of scarce less importance as the home of a powerful Abbey. It was the pleasing, well-watered and sheltered situation, in the vale where the little Yeo or Ivel runs—the stream which, passing through Yeovil, gives that town its name—that first attracted the religious inA.D.705, the time of that now misty and vague monarch, King Ina. The Yeo had not yet obtained that name, and was merely spoken of in descriptive and admiratory phrase as theSeir burne, an Anglo-Saxon description for a bright and clear brook which has crystallised here and at several other places in the country, into a place-name. Even in the City of London there is a Sherborne Lane, where no stream now flows, the successor, however, of a pleasant lane, where in Anglo-Saxon times a tributary of the Wall Brook flowed.
Not every one was satisfied with this choice for a cathedral site. William of Malmesbury wrote of it as “pleasant neither by multitudes of inhabitants, nor beauty of position.” But beauty is a matter of individual taste. “Wonderful, almostshameful,” he continued, “was it, that a bishop’s see should have remained here for so many years.” For three hundred and three years it so remained, the bishop’s seat being removed only in 1078, when Old Sarum, a much more inconvenient site, sterile, cramped and waterless—a place that to the Saxons was Searobyrig, the dry city—was selected, only itself to be abandoned in less than another hundred and fifty years. In the meanwhile no fewer than twenty-seven bishops ruled in succession at Sherborne and passed into the Great Beyond, leaving for the most part, very little evidence of their existence. Notable exceptions, however, were Adhelm, an early translator of the Scriptures, and Asser, whose biography of his friend and patron, Alfred the Great, is a monument to himself as well as to his subject. In the choir-aisles of the existing Abbey-church are sundry relics of those prelates, in the shape of ancient tombs with battered effigies, as near a likeness to them as possible for the sculptors to produce; and in the retro-choir are pointed out the spots where Kings Ethelbald and Ethelbert, brothers and predecessors of King Alfred, lie.
After an interval of uncertainty following the removal of the bishopric in 1078 to Old Sarum, the cathedral here was in 1139 made a Benedictine Abbey and rebuilt by Roger, Bishop of Sarum, who although he might not again remove the cathedral back to Sherborne, seems to have loved the place, and certainly lavished much care and labour upon it.
Bishop Roger was a man of energy and determination. Starting in life as a poor Norman monk,he owed his first important preferment to a curious circumstance. None could gabble through a mass more speedily than he, and he raced through a service before Henry I. so quickly, while the king was anxious to be off a-hunting, that the gratified monarch put him on the broad high road to advancement, along whose course Roger travelled far. But, if all had liked him as little as did the censorious William of Malmesbury, his journeys would have been short. To that chronicler he was “unscrupulous, fierce and avaricious,” not content to keep his own, but eager to grab the goods of others. “Was there anything contiguous to his property which might be advantageous to him, he would directly extort it, either by entreaty or purchase, or, if that failed, by force.” It must have been well, therefore, to arrange terms with this masterful personage while he was in the negotiating way, lest he took what he wanted, without so much as a “by-your-leave.” The great Norman structure he erected has largely survived, not only in its ground plan, but in the essential circumstances of its walling, for although it is outwardly a building in the Perpendicular phase of Gothic, dating from the second half of the fifteenth century, that magnificently-elaborated external show of nave and presbytery is but a later and more enriched surface, daringly grafted upon the stern and solemn Norman walls of over three hundred years’ earlier date.
The history of the great Benedictine Abbey of Sherborne very clearly retells the old tale of Bury St. Edmunds, of Norwich, and of many another great monastic centre, by which you see that theserich and powerful settlements of the religious were not generally at peace with the outside worldlings. The causes of quarrel were many. In some places the monastery was a harsh and exacting landlord; in others the imposts and hindrances placed upon the markets, whose tolls in many instances were the property of the Church, aroused bitter enmity and constant strife; and in yet more cases the maintenance of forests and game for the sport of the Lords Abbots gave rise to trouble. Poachers we have had always with us, and even in those times when to kill the stag in the Chases was a crime adjudged worthy death or mutilation, men for sport or sustenance illegally slew the game. “What shall he have who killed the deer?” Why, an ear cut off or a nose slit, at the very least of it.
Here at Sherborne the bitterest quarrel arose from other causes. It seems that the parish church was situated at the west end of the Abbey, separated from it only by a door which the monks, exclusives always, had sought gradually to narrow, with a view of eventually blocking it up altogether. A question nearly allied with this was whether the children of the townsfolk should be baptised in the Abbey or in the parish church, and the disputes at last grew so raw that the Sherborne burgesses, very wrothy and spiteful, took to ringing their church-bells so long and so loudly that on account of the clamour, the monastic offices could not be carried on. In 1437 the points at issue were by common consent laid before the Bishop of Salisbury, who, siding with his own cloth, made an award in favour of the Abbey. Regarding this decision as aninjustice, the townsfolk refused to abide by it; but there were evidently two parties in the town, for one faction, headed by a stalwart butcher, broke into the parish church with some of the monks and reduced the font to fragments. Things then, naturally grew worse, until, as Leland puts it, “The variance grew to a plain sedition, until a priest of the town church of All Hallows shot a shaft with fire into the top of that part of the Abbey Church of St. Mary that divided the east part that the monks used from that the townsmen used; and this partition happening at the time to be thatched in, the roof was set on fire, and consequently the whole church, the lead and bells melted, was defaced.”
The Choir was so seriously injured that it was taken down and rebuilt, but the rest was repaired, and still in some parts shows traces, in the reddened patches on the beautiful golden-yellow Ham Hill sandstone of the internal walls, of the conflagration.
The townsfolk were made to contribute heavily to the cost of repair and rebuilding; works resulting in a more lovely interior, both in form and colour, than owned by any other considerable church in the west. A commonplace person, one no connoisseur of churches, if asked to convey a general sense of their interiors by the medium of temperature would reply that they were cold, for coldness is the effect most often produced—irrespective of the degrees registered by the thermometer—by their stonework; but here, though the mercury shrink down from the tube into close proximity with the bulb, provocative in most places of shivers, even the most matter-of-fact, irresponsive to the call of soaring arches,painted windows and delicately poised fretted roof to “lift up your hearts, O Zion!” feel a grateful sensation of warmth pervading them, apparently radiating from these walls of richly hued stone, whose natural colouring seems to fully furnish the place and render it indifferent to the rigours of the season. It is a colour compact of all the beautiful hues of this country of a rich and bountiful Nature: of honey, of apples and pears golden and russet, of autumn leaves, and of cider and October ale, with a glint of the sun through it all. It gives a beautiful and cheerful tone, quick to purge melancholy and to make the devout happier in their hallelujahs than when in the cold, if chaste, companionship of Portland stone, the mild cream purity of the oolite of Bath, the Gregorian richness of the building stone of Mansfield, or the solemn satisfaction engendered by the deep red sandstone of Devon.
The exquisite fan-vaulting of Sherborne Abbey, the finest example of that supremest effort of the last stage of Gothic art, has no superior elsewhere. That of Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster, and that in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, are on a larger scale, and more daring, but, although generally cited as representative, are not so truly artistic.
The old Pack-Monday fair, still an annual institution at Sherborne, is a two days’ market, originating with the completion of the repairs and the vaulting of the nave, under Abbot Peter de Ramsam, or Rampisham, in 1504. Tradition has it that, the last stone well and truly laid and the great church at last again in order, the masons and theirkind were paid off and bidden depart by midnight on the Sunday after Old Michaelmas Day. Accordingly, Pack-Monday fair is opened every year at the stroke of midnight on the Sunday succeeding October 10th, to the accompaniment of a din of horn-blowing and the uncouth banging of tin cans.
Much of the beauty of the Abbey interior is due to the loving care of the restoration executed by the Digbys of Sherborne Castle, between 1848 and 1858, at a cost of over £32,000. The church of All Hallows at the west end, which caused all the trouble, was demolished after the dissolution of the monastery, when the Abbey was sold to the town for use as a parish church and All Hallows itself thereby became a redundancy. Its situation and its ground-plan can still be traced on the paths and lawns and on the ragged walls and makeshift patchwork that serve as West Front to the Abbey.
An ancestor of the restoring Digbys is commemorated by a pretentious mountain of marble in the south transept, with an epitaph, written by a bishop, setting forth with much antithetical rhodomontade his many virtues of activities and renunciations:
“Here Lyes John, Lord Digby, Baron Digby of Sherborne and Earl of Briftol. Titles to which ye merit of his Grandfather firft gave luftre And which he himfelf laid down unfully’d. He was naturally enclined to avoid the Hurry of a publick Life, Yet carefull to keep up the port of his Quality. Was willing to be at eafe, but fcorned obfcurity. And therefore never made his retirement a pretence to draw Himfelf within a narrowercompafs, or to fhun fuch expence As Charity, Hospitality and his Honour call’d for. His Religion was that which byLawis Eftablisfhed, and the Conduct of his life fhew’d the power of it in his Heart. His distinction from others never made him forget himfelf or them. He was kind and obliging to his Neighbours, generous and condefcending to his inferiours, and juft to all Mankind. Nor had the temptations of honour and pleafure in this world Strength enough to withdraw his Eyes from that great Object of his hope, which we reafonably affure ourfelves he now enjoys.
MDCICVIII.”
Sherborne Abbey Church
The surroundings of the Abbey closely resemble cathedral precincts, and lead the well-informed stranger to remember that Sherborne cherishes hopes of some day being again erected into the head of a bishop’s see, when that talked-of formation of a new diocese, carved out of the great territorial domains of Salisbury and of Bath and Wells, shall be an accomplished fact.
The usual and properest way of coming to the Abbey, after you have glimpsed the fine picture it makes looking down Long Street, is past the Conduit—usually called the Monks’ Conduit—standing on the pavement of Cheap Street, and through a time-worn archway and a narrow alley of small shops and old houses. The Conduit, built about 1360, an open octangular building greatly resembling a market-cross, was originally in the centre of the cloister-garth, to the north of the Abbey, on a part of the site now occupied by the admirable Grammar School, founded byEdward VI. from the spoils of the dissolved monastery, and grown in these days to be one of the foremost schools of the country.
Cheap Street, the principal thoroughfare of Sherborne, is, like similar business streets in other West Country towns, composed of houses of many periods and all sizes. It is built generally of that sunny Ham Hill ferruginous sandstone, quarried for many years at Stoke-sub-Hamdon, six miles to the northwest of Yeovil. That fine old hostelry, the “New Inn,” now swept away, was built of it. This vanished house was the original of the “Earl of Wessex,” inThe Woodlanders, in whose yard Giles Winterborne is observed by his old sweetheart from the balcony, while he is engaged with the business of cider-making:
“The chief hotel at Sherton Abbas was the “Earl of Wessex”—a large stone-fronted inn with a yawning arch under which vehicles were driven by stooping coachmen to back premises of wonderful commodiousness. The windows to the street were mullioned into narrow lights, and only commanded a view of the opposite houses.”
The castle, some distance outside the town to east, adjoining the village of Castleton, was originally the combined palace and fortress of the Bishops of Sherborne. The remaining fragments, on their woody knoll overlooking the Yeo, in what is now Sherborne Park, are those of the stout keep built by that ambitious, and unscrupulous Bishop Roger, of Henry I.’s time. Despite the curse, called down by the equally ferocious and saintly Osmund, upon any who should dare to alienate the castle from the bishops of Sherborne, it was wrested from themon several occasions, perhaps sometimes in direct unbelieving challenge to thatquis separabit; at others, certainly, because, in the fashion of the times, the bishops had taken part in the political troubles, the pitched battles and weary sieges of contending factions, and, having the ill-luck to side with the defeated party, suffered with them in body and estate. For over two hundred years, from 1139 to 1355, it was thus alienated, and Osmund’s curse slept. Those who owned the castle were not executed, or imprisoned, or made to suffer beyond the usual mediæval average, perhaps because it took no account of developments arising from mitred follies and errors of judgment. At last, having been Crown property for many generations, the stronghold and its surrounding lands were granted to Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, from whom, after a futile proposal had been made to fight him for it, in gage of single combat—a fourteenth-century example of Kingsley’s “muscular Christianity”—it was purchased by the bishop for 2,500 marks; a cheap lot. Whether the earl, in Etonian phrase, “funked it,” imagining the bishop’s steel would be fellow to “the sword of the Lord and of Gideon,” and as invincible, who shall say? At any rate, Bishop Wyvil, this strenuous champion, who feared neither the ordeal of the sword nor of the purse, entered into the gates of his predecessors of old time, and died here, after a residence of twenty years. The brass to his memory, in the north-east transept of Salisbury Cathedral, displays a representation of Sherborne Castle, with a figure of the bishop’s champion armed with a battle axe, by which it will be seen that it was not scandalously, in his own proper person,that the bishop was prepared to fight, but by a deputy, skilled in arms, and supported by the ghostly terrors of that ancient curse.
And so, in the possession of the bishops of Salisbury who, to all intents and purposes, and within the meaning of old Oswald, were successors and representatives of the Bishops of Sherborne, the castle remained until 1540, when, in the dissolution of religious houses, it was seized and afterwards granted to the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset. Then the curse seems to have come into its own again, for Somerset ended, where many other good and true were cut off, on Tower Hill. Although subsequently restored to the bishop of Salisbury, it was again alienated by Bishop Cotton to Sir Walter Raleigh, as payment for favours and promotion received when that hero and courtier was in the enjoyment of royal smiles. Raleigh, as every one knows, ended tragically, after long-drawn misery, in 1618, on the same spot where Somerset had suffered sixty years earlier. And well, the superstitious may think, was it that by legal quirks and quibbles James I. succeeded in chousing Raleigh’s son out of his inheritance, for the ill-omened possession continued to work disaster. James bestowed it upon his favourite, the despicable Robert Carl, Earl of Somerset, who, convicted of being accessory to the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, was condemned to die, but was reprieved, and finally released by the timid James, to die obscurely in 1645. Something of a blundering curse, this, one may think, to miss scoring a “bull” on so admirable and easy a mark.
The king then conveyed the property to Digby,Earl of Bristol, the “Earl of Severn” of the slight story ofAnna,Lady Baxby, inA Group of Noble Dames. When the Civil War broke out, Sherborne Castle was garrisoned for the king by the Marquis of Hertford, and early besieged by the Earl of Bedford, on behalf of the Parliament. It happened here—as so often it did in their internecine strife—that there were relatives engaged on either side in this siege. The Earl of Bristol’s son, George, Lord Digby, was married to the Lady Anne Russell, sister of the Earl of Bedford. She it was, the “Anna, Lady Baxby,” of the story, who rode out secretly to her brother, and told him that if he were determined to reduce the castle, he “should find his sister’s bones buried in the ruins.” But the investment continued until, finding himself weaker than he had supposed, the marquis offered to surrender on terms. If they were not accepted he proposed, with the Lady Anne’s consent, and indeed at her wish, to station her on the battlements, and let the enemy’s marksmen do their worst. The Earl of Bedford was not proof against this, and it is said, raising the siege, retired.
But this plan would not always work. Three years later, in 1645, when Sir Lewis Dives, the Earl of Bristol’s stepson, was in command, a greater than the Earl of Bedford appeared before Sherborne Castle, and summoned it to surrender. This was Sir Thomas Fairfax, flushed with his successes, and making a clean sweep of the garrisons in the west of England. For sixteen days, his forces sat down in front of the castle, which then surrendered, with its garrison of fifty-five gentlemen and six hundred soldiers. With that surrender came the final ruin,for the castle was “slighted,” or destroyed by gunpowder, its contents and the spoils of “the lodge,” sold to the people of Sherborne. This “Lodge” was the mansion which even then had been built near by, the castle already proving too inconvenient for the ideas of those times. It is the so-called “Castle” of to-day, still the seat of Digbys, collateral and commoner descendants of the old owners. Sir Walter Raleigh built the centre portion of it in 1594, as his arms and the sculptured figures show, and Digbys the later wings. Their crest, the singular one of an ostrich holding a horse-shoe in its beak, is prominent over the entrance to the courtyard. In the park is still shown a stone seat, said to be that on which Sir Walter Raleigh was resting and smoking his first pipe of tobacco, when his pipe was dowsed and he drenched, by the pail of water thrown over him by his faithful retainer, who, not unnaturally, as tobacco was then a thing unknown, imagined his master to be on fire, and, in the expressive words of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade’s reports, “well alight.”
The Lodge, now the “Castle,” was a halting-place of the Prince of Orange on his triumphal march from Tor Bay, in 1688. He slept here a night, and from a printing-press in the house was issued his address to the people of England.
SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH
Itis twenty-six miles from stately Sherborne, the “Sherton Abbas” ofThe Woodlanders, to where Weymouth sits enthroned on the margin of her circular Bay, and, always supposing that no strong southerly gale is blowing, there is for the cyclist no easier route in all the Hardy Country. Bating the steep rise out of Sherborne and out of the Vale of Blackmore to the chalk uplands at Minterne Magna, it is a route of favourable gradients, with one interval of dead level.
The river Yeo is a small stream, but its valley is deep and wide, as he who, leaving Sherborne, climbs the hills which shut in that valley, shall find. But a reward comes with the easy descent to the long, scattered street of rustic cottages at Long Burton, whence the way lies across a dead level to where, six miles distant from this point, rise the bastions of the mid-Dorset heights, seen distinctly from here: Dogbury, with his convex clump of cresting trees, like a blue-black wig, High Stoy, where the ridge runs bare, with Nettlecomb Tout and Bulbarrow in the hazy distance.
It is a straight, and a marshy and low-lying, as well as a flat road to Holnest, where, beside theroad, is Holnest Lodge, belonging to the Erle-Drax family, and one of the seats of that eccentric person, the late J. S. W. Sawbridge Erle-Drax, of Charborough Park, long a member of Parliament for Wareham, and one of the last of the squires. The old time squires were laws to themselves, and like none others. The product of generations of other many-acred squires of great port-drinking propensities and unbounded local influence, whom all the lickings administered at Eton did not suffice to bring to a proper sense of their intrinsic unimportance, apart from the accidental circumstance that they were the lords of their manors, “old Squire Drax,” as the rustics call him now that he is dead, might from his high-handed ways haveformed an excellent model for a dramatist building up a melodrama of the old style. He was “the Squire” to the verynth degree, with so extraordinary an idea of his own importance that here, on the lawn fronting Holnest Lodge, he caused to be erected in his own lifetime a memorial to himself. An inspection of the approach to that residence will convince any one not only that he was very rich, but very mad as well. The sweeping drive is bordered at intervals with statues: Circes, Floras, Ceres, Dianas, and other classical deities, shining whitely and conspicuously against the grass, and leading the eye up to the central point where, on a tall imposing column, guarded by crouching lions, stands the bronze, frock-coated statue of Squire Drax himself. It is all very like a kind of higher-class Rosherville, and exceedingly curious.
Long Burton
One has not progressed far along the dead-level road before another evidence of the Drax swelled head comes in sight. It is a huge building in the Byzantine style, highly elaborated, and decorated in a costly way with polished stones. Its purpose puzzling at first, it is seen on closer approach to stand in a churchyard and to be a mausoleum. Away back from it stands in perspective the little church of Holnest, scarce larger than this gorgeous place prepared by the squire for his rest, and looking really smaller. The rustics dot the i’s and cross the t’s of his eccentricity, telling how he had his coffin made in his lifetime and his funeral rehearsed in front of the house. The more superstitious declare that the mausoleum was built so strongly and substantially in order to foil a certain personage whose desire is rather for the souls than for thebodies of his own; and, to support their dark beliefs, narrate how, canvassing for votes during the progress of an election the squire declared he had always been a Member of Parliament, would always be, and would rather go to the Pit with the initials of M.P. attached to his name than to Heaven without them. Unfortunately, these wonder-mongers halt a little short of the completeness desired by dramatic requirements, and do not proceed to tell us how the election was secured by the agency of a gentlemanly stranger of persuasive manners and club-feet, who, upon the declaration of the poll mysteriously disappeared amid a strong smell of Tandstickör matches.
Holnest: the Drax Mausoleum
Advancing, we come at Middlemarsh into thecountry ofThe Woodlanders, where dense woodlands now begin to cover the levels. The long ridge of the downs ahead now grows stern, steep, and threatening. To the left hand an isolated protuberance, covered with trees, the oddly named Dungeon Hill, rises, disclosing from its flanks peeps into the Vale of Blackmore, where the explorer can, with promptitude and thorough efficacy, lose himself. Believe one who has been along the sometimes devious and sometimes straight, but always lonely, roads of these levels. There, down beyond Dungeon Hill and Pulham, on a road flat as the alliterative flounder and empty as a City church, stands at King’s Stag Bridge across the river Lidden an inn with the sign of the White Hart and a verse alluding to the origin of the nameof “Vale of White Hart” given to this part of the greater Vale of Blackmore—
“When Julius Cæsar Reigned here, I was but then a little Deer.When Julius Cæsar Reigned King, around my Neck he put this Ring.Whoever doth me overtake, Oh! spare my life, for Cæsar’s sake.”
“When Julius Cæsar Reigned here, I was but then a little Deer.When Julius Cæsar Reigned King, around my Neck he put this Ring.Whoever doth me overtake, Oh! spare my life, for Cæsar’s sake.”
Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore
The classic historian of Dorsetshire tells us something of the story thus darkly reflected. According to his account, corrected in details from other sources, it seems that King Henry III. hunting in what was then a forest, rounded up, among several other deer, a particularly beautiful white hart, whose life he spared for future hunting. Somewhat later, Sir John de la Lynde, Bailiff of Blackmore Forest, a neighbouring gentleman of ancient descent and local importance, out hunting with a party, roused the same animal, and, less pitiful than the king, killed it at the end of a long pursuit, at the spot ever after called King’s Stag Bridge. The king, highly offended, not only punished Sir John de la Lynde and his companions with imprisonment and heavy fines, but taxed their lands severely and permanently, so that for many later generations the fine of White Hart Silver continued to be paid into the Exchequer. Another historian, the quaint and amusing Fuller, in giving his version, states that the whole county was laid under contribution. “Myself,” he says whimsically “hath paid a share for the sauce who never tasted the meat.” It is stated that “White Hart Silver” was levied until the reign of Henry VII.
The road, passing a signpost weirdly directingto “Giant’s Head,” ascends a steep hill, perhaps the ‘Rubdon Hill’ ofThe Woodlanders, and the Lyon’s Gate Hill of actual fact, down which, into the vale on that autumnal day went Fitzpiers, the infatuated surgeon—a Dorsetshire Tannhäuser, thinking of the Venus who had bewitched him, and careless of the beauty of the season—when “the earth was now at the supreme moment of her bounty. In the poorest spots the hedges were bowed with haws and blackberries; acorns cracked underfoot, and the burst husks of chestnuts lay exposing their auburn contents as if arranged by anxious sellers for the market.” Steeply upward continues the hill, to the ridge of the mid-Dorset heights, whence Blackmore Vale, of which it is very truly said that “an unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather, is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways,” is seen spreading out like an unrolled map.
“This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown, and the springs never dry,” is bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. There “in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable landsare few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmore.”
The village of Minterne Magna that, with its fine trees and the seat of Lord Digby, has so handsome a presence, is the “Great Hintock” ofThe Woodlanders. Poor loyal-hearted Giles Winterbourne, “a good man, who did good things,” was buried here, beside that ivy-covered church-tower overlooking the road, and now bearing the inscription
“LE TEMPS PASSEL’AMITIE RESTE1888IN MEMORIAM H.R.D.”
“LE TEMPS PASSEL’AMITIE RESTE1888IN MEMORIAM H.R.D.”
They laid him to rest “on the top of that hill looking down into the Vale,” to whose villages he had, as autumn came round, been wont to descend with his portable cider-mill and press; and Grace rejoined her husband, and the world went on as usual. Only Marty South remembered him and treasured his memory.
At Minterne Magna, otherwise “Great Hintock,” according to a rustic character, “you do see the world and life,” whereas, at Little Hintock, to be identified with Melbury Osmund, away down at Evershot, “’tis such a small place that you’d need a candle and lantern to find it, if ye don’t know where ’tis.”
But, at the same time, outside the pages of novels Minterne Magna is not a place of stir and movement, and is great only in name.
From just before Minterne Magna there is aleft-hand turning which affords an alternative route to Dorchester, avoiding Cerne Abbas, and going exposedly over the haggard downs. The two routes are locally known as the overhill and the underhill roads. The first-named is now little travelled, and its old house of entertainment, the Revels inn, a thing of the past. This, “the forsaken coach-road running in an almost meridional line from Bristol to the south shore of England,” is the route of the escaped prisoner and the scene of “Higher Crowstairs” in the intense story ofThe Three Strangers. On that route you see better than anywhere else, those “calcareous downs” described by the novelist, where “the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and splashed, the atmosphere colourless.” It is, by the same token, of an exhausting dryness in summer, and in winter only to be undertaken by the most robust.
By the ‘underhill’ road on the other hand, the ten miles from Minterne to Dorchester are chiefly on a gentle descent. Presently, therefore, one reaches Cerne Abbas, the “Abbot’s Cernel” ofTessand other stories, situated in a fine widening of the valley through which the river Cerne flows, with the gaunt bare shoulders of the great chalk downs receding far enough to lose something of their asperity, and to gain in distance all the atmosphere and softened outlines of an impressionistic picture. From the south, half a mile beyond the decayed town of Cerne, a very beautiful view of this nature opens out, by the roadside. There the fine tower of the church stands out against the sage-greencoloration of the hills, and with the luxuriant trees and the nestling farms of the valley, presents by force of contrast with the bare uplands a striking picture of comfort, prosperity, and hospitality, not perhaps warranted in every one of those respects by a closer acquaintance. For Cerne is a place very hardly treated by heartless circumstance.
Many centuries ago, inA.D.987 to be exact, a Benedictine Abbey was founded here by Ethelmar, Earl of Devon and Cornwall, upon the site of a hermitage established by Ædwold, brother of that East Anglican saint, Edmund the King and Martyr. It does not appear what became of the hermit, whether those who established the abbey bought him out, or threw him out; but it certainly seems to demand enquiry, the more especially that hermits and abbots, pious founders and holy monks were not altogether so unbusinesslike in their worldly affairs as the uninstructed might imagine. The hermit probably received due compensation for disturbance and went off somewhere else. However that may be, the abbey grew and flourished. Canute certainly despoiled it, but more than made amends, by large gifts and endowments of other people’s property, when he had been brought to see the error of his ways and that plundering—plundering the property of the church, at least—was wrong. And so the business of the abbey progressed through the centuries, to the daily accompaniment of the monks chanting “their wonderful piff-and-paff” as the librettist ofThe Golden Legendmakes the devil say of it.
In 1471 Henry VI.’s Queen, Margaret of Anjou, striving desperately, brave heart, on her son’s behalf, fled for shelter here, up the road from Weymouth,where she had landed from France; but, indeed, little else of history belongs to this sometime rich and splendid abbey in the heart of the hills. It afforded shelter and protection to the townlet of Cerne that had sprung up outside its precincts; and great therefore was the dismay when ruin overtook it in the time of Henry VIII. The abbey disestablished, the town of course also suffered. How greatly we do not know; but it plucked up courage again and refused to die, and when England was still that exceedingly uncomfortable England of coaching times, flourished in a modest way on the needs of travellers for succour and shelter on the exhausting journeys that are so romantic to read of in Christmas numbers, but were the terror of those who could not possibly stop at home.
Cerne Abbas
And at last the coaches ceased and railways came to the country in general, but not to Cerne. It is still, to-day, remote from railways and is thus hit several severe, separate, and distinct blows by Fate, which, when travellers no longer needed its shelter, took away its chief reason for existence, refused it the reinvigorating boon of a railway, and then, in the general depression of agriculture, has dealt a final and staggering buffet. Cerne is dead. There is (assuming for the moment positive, comparative, and superlative degrees of deadness) no deader townlet in England, and it has all the interest, and commands all the respect due to the departed.De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and if there were hard things to be said of Cerne, they should not here be uttered. But there are no such things for utterance. It has all the romance of the bygone that appeals to the artist, and I love to dwell upon and in it. It is a place where commercialism has, or should have, no part, and therefore, when I pass a noble-looking farmhouse and a somewhat stately landlady comes out with a key, asking me—with an eye upon the perquisite of the fee exacted—if I would like to see the Abbey Gatehouse, I refuse; earning thereby the keen contempt shown on her expressive face. Soulless Goth, to wander about Cerne and not see the Gatehouse! Ah! my dear lady, your contempt is misplaced. I love these things better than you imagine, but I hate commercialism—and in such unexpected places—the more. The abbey ruins, wholly summed up in that Gatehouse, are at the extremity of this dead town, but there is a fine parish church in the centre of its streets. A noble, highly decorated tower is thatbelonging to it, one of the finest productions of the Perpendicular period, with bold gargoyles, whose gaping mouths are for the most part stopped with birds’ nests. Decay and ruin squat next door, in the shape of one of Cerne’s wrecked and unroofed houses, so long in that condition as to have become a terrace on which wild flowers luxuriantly grow and display themselves to passing admiration. It will be observed that there are shops—or things in the specious and illusory shape of shops—in this town of Yester-year. They indeed were so once, but the shopkeepers have long ceased from their shopkeeping. The windows, perhaps retained over against that time when Cerne shall be resurrected—for Fortune’s wheel still spins, and will come full circle some day—are meanwhile excellent for displaying geraniums.
The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey
The Cerne GiantProminent in most views of Cerne Abbas is that weird figure of a man on the hillside which gives an alternative name to Trendle or Giant’s Hill. The “Giant of Cerne” is a big fellow, well deserving his name, for he is 180 feet high. No one knows who cut him on the chalk of the hillside, but local tradition has long told how the figure commemorated the destruction of a giant who, feasting on the sheep of Blackmore, laid himself down here, in the sleep of repletion, and was then, like another Gulliver, pinioned where he lay by the enragedpeasantry, who killed him and immediately traced his dimensions for the information of posterity. The prominence of his ribs, however, says little for the result of his feeding.
A more instructed opinion is that the figure represents Heil, a god of the pagan Saxons, and that it was cut beforeA.D.600. Fearful legends belong to it: tales of horror narrating how the border enclosing the effigy is the ground plan of a stout wicker-work cage in which the pagan priests imprisoned many victims, whom they offered up as burnt sacrifices to their god.
Looked upon with awe and wonder by the peasantry of old, who cleaned him once every seven years, the Giant is now regarded by them with indifference and left alone, and it is only the stranger who finds himself obsessed with a strange awe as he gazes upon this mystic relic of a prehistoric age. His minatory and uncouth appearance—for the relation of his head to his body is that of a pea to a melon—perhaps even more than his size, impresses the beholder. It should be said that he is merely traced in outline on the turf, in lines two feet broad and one foot deep, and not laid bare, a huge white shape, to the sky. The club he wields is 120 feet long, and from seven to twenty-four feet broad.
SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH(continued)
PastNether Cerne and Godmanstone, the road leads, consistently straight and on a down gradient, to Charminster, where, in consonance with the place-name, a minster-like church stands. It is rich in monuments of the Trenchards—bearing their motto,Nosce Teipsum, Know Thyself—of the neighbouring historic mansion of Wolveton, one of whom—a Sir Thomas—built the tower, in or about the year 1500, as duly attested on the building itself, which displays his cypher of two T’s.
Wolveton, standing in the rich level water-meadows where the rivers Cerne and Frome come to a confluence, is, as the Man of Family narrates in the story ofThe Lady Penelope, inA Group of Noble Dames, “an ivied manor-house, flanked by battlemented towers, and more than usually distinguished by the size of its mullioned windows. Though still of good capacity, the building is much reduced from its original grand proportions; it has, moreover, been shorn of the fair estate which once appertained to its lord, with the exception of a few acres of park-land immediately around the mansion.This was formerly the seat of the ancient and knightly Drenghards, or Drenkhards, now extinct in the male line, whose name, according to the local chronicles, was interpreted to meanStrenuus Miles,vel Potator, though certain members of the family were averse to the latter signification, and a duel was fought by one of them on that account, as is well known.”
Cerne Abbas
The Lady Penelope, who jestingly promised to marry all three of her lovers in turn, and by that jest earned such misery when Fate ordained that her words should come true, was an actual living character. A daughter of Lord Darcy, she in turn married George Trenchard, Sir John Gage, and Sir William Hervey. As the story truly tells, the Drenghards, or rather Trenchards, are extinct in the male line.
Passing by Poundbury, the “Pummery” of Dorset speech, we enter Dorchester, already described atconsiderable length, and, passing down South Street and by the Amphitheatre, of gloomy associations, come out upon the Weymouth—or, as Mr. Hardy would say the “Budmouth”—road.
Wolveton House
For the distance of close upon a mile this Roman road, the chief means of communication between their seaport station of Clavinium, near Weymouth, and their inland town of Durnovaria, runs on the level, bordered by the fine full-grown elms of one of Dorchester’s many avenues. Then it sets out with a grim straightness to climb to the summit of that geological spine, the Ridgeway, which places so stubborn an obstacle on these nine miles of road that many a faint-hearted pilgrim from Dorchester fails to reach Weymouth, and many another from Weymouth gives up the task at less than half-way.
Climbing here, the vast mass of Maiden Castle rises on the right, conferring a solemnity upon the scene, due not so much to the bulk given it by nature as to the amazing ditches, mounds, scarps, and counterscarps terraced along its mighty bosom by—ay, by whom? Many peoples had a hand in the making of this great fortification. The British Durotriges are said to have styled it “Mai-Dun,” the “Castle of the great Hill,” and to have established their capital here; and at a later date the Romans camped upon it and must have cursed the Imperialism which brought them here to wilt and wither in face of the bitter blasts of an inclement land.
It was the Dunium of Ptolemy, and has been the wonder of many ages, not easily able to understand by what enormous expenditure of effort all these great mounds were heaped up and what enemies they feared who delved the ditches so deeply and ramped the ridges so steeply and so high.
Maiden Castle is still occupied, although the last defender left it perhaps a thousand years ago; for as the curious traveller to these prehistoric earthworks climbs exhaustedly up the steep rises, over the short grass, he may see the rabbits mounting guard by thousands against the skyline, or fleeing panic-stricken, in admirable open order, showing myriads of white flags formed by their tails as they go loping away over the field.
Weymouth and Portland, from the Ridgeway
As one progresses, more and more slowly with the acuter gradient, up the roadway, the church-tower of Winterborne Monkton, among its encircling barns, ricks, and cow-byres, comes into view,the observer’s eye on a higher level than the rooftop. Village there is none, and the clergyman who on Sundays conducts services here must do so—between the peals of the organ, and in midst of the quieter-spoken passages of morning and evening prayers—to the commentatory lowing of cattle or the grunts of pigs, sounding like the observations of grudging critics. There was once a saint who, like a broody hen that will nurse strange things, preached to the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field, and the spiritual shepherd of Winterborne Monkton not infrequently has among his congregation a barn owl, and a cheerful concourse of sparrows in the roof, much given to brawling in church.
Roman directness was all very well, but later races found it much too trying for their horses, and thus we find, nearing the summit, that the straight ancient road across the ridgeway has long been abandoned, except by the telegraph-poles, for a cutting through the crest and an S curve down the southern and much steeper side. This expedient certainly eases both ascent and descent, but it does not suffice to render the way less than extremely fatiguing to climb and nerve-shaking to descend.
As a view-point it has remarkable features, for the whole expanse of Portland Roads, the Isle of Portland, and the site on which Weymouth and Melcombe Regis are built are exposed to gaze, very much as though the spectator looking down upon them were bending in an examination of some modelled map of physical geography. White spires at Weymouth and equally white groups of houses at Portland gain striking effects from backgrounds of grey rock or the dark green of trees, massed bydistance to the likeness of dense forests; and the mile-lengths of harbour walls and breakwaters, punctuated with forts, out in the roadstead are shrunken by distance to the likeness of a cast seine-net supported by cork floats. On a ridge inland a row of circular ricks with peaked roofs showing against the sea looks absurdly like beehives, and down there in the middle distance is the curving line of embankment where the railway from Dorchester goes, after piercing the hill on which we stand by the Bincombe Tunnel.
The Wishing Well, Upwey
Descending the hill, we come to the valley of the Wey. The older part of the village of Upwey marks the source of that little stream to the right, and the newer part, with the village of Broadwey, are scarcely to be distinguished from one another, ahead. The original Upwey, the Upwey of the “Wishing Well,” lies under the flanks of a great down, where, if you climb and climb and continue climbing, you will presently discover the poppy-like scarlet buildings of the Weymouth waterworks. But there is no need to seek them while the Wishing Well, nearer to hand, calls.
The “Wishing Well” is a pretty spot, overhung with trees and still a place resorted to by tourists, who either shamefacedly, with an implied half-belief in its virtues, drink its waters, or else with the quip and jest of unbelief, defer the slaking of their thirst until the nearest inn is reached, where liquors more palatable to the sophisticated taste—or what Mr. Hardy’s rustics would term “a cup of genuine”—are obtainable. Once the haunt of gipsies, who used the well as a convenient pitch, and, when you crossed their palms with silver in the approved style, prophesied fulfilment of the nicest things you could possibly wish yourself—and a good many other things that would never occur to you at all—it is now quite unexploited, save perhaps by a little village girl, who, with a glass tumbler, will save the devotee from stooping on hands and knees and lapping up the magic water, like a dog. The gipsies have been all frightened away by the Vagrants Act, and no great loss to the community in general. The inquisitive stranger, curious to know whether the villagers themselvesresort to their famous Fount of Heart’s Desire, receives a rude shock when he is told by one of them that, “Bless ’ee, there baint a varden’s wuth o’ good in ’en, at arl. Mebbe ’tis good ver a whist (a stye) but all them ’ere magicky tales be done away wi’.” The Age of Faith is dead.
And so into Weymouth, down a road lined with long rows of suburbs. Radipole is come to this complexion at last, and its spa is, like a service rendered and a benefit conferred, a thing clean forgot.
WEYMOUTH
Well, then, here, reaching a Modern church with a tall spire, surrounded by suburban villas, is the beginning of Weymouth. The sea in these miles has dropped gradually down, out of sight as the road comes to the level, and at this point you might, to all intents and purposes, be at North Kensington, which the spot greatly resembles. But turning sharply with the road to the right the derogatory illusion is at once dispelled, for the sea is out there, sparkling, to the left; and, in the perfect segment of a circle, the Esplanade of Weymouth goes sweeping round to the harbour, with the Nothe Point fort above, and, away out in the distance, that towering knob of limestone, the Isle of Portland. It is a stimulating view, and has generally other and even more stimulating constituents than those of nature, for Weymouth and Portland are places of arms, and the ships of the Navy are usually represented by a squadron of cruisers well in shore, with a brace or two of battleships coming, going, or anchored easily in sight, and numbers of those ugly, imp-like craft, torpedo-boats, flying hither and thither.
Weymouth styles itself—or others style it—“the Naples of England,” but no one has ever yet found Naples returning the compliment and calling itself “the Weymouth of Italy.” There is really no reason why Weymouth, instead of seeking some fanciful resemblance based solely, it may be supposed on the configuration of its widely curving bay, should not stand or fall by the sufficing attractions of its own charming self. For one thing, it would be impossible to persuade the public that Weymouth owns a Vesuvius somewhere away in itshinterland, and, although the country is rich in Roman camps, no antiquary has yet discovered a Pompeii midway between Melcombe Regis and Dorchester.
The town is still in essentials the Weymouth of George III., the “Budmouth” of Thomas Hardy. They are, it is true, the battleships of Edward VII. wallowing out there, like fat pigs, where of yore the wooden men-o’-war swam the waters like swans; but the houses at least, that face the Esplanade in one almost unbroken row, each one like its neighbour and all absolutely innocent either of taste or pretension, are characteristically Georgian. Taken individually and examined, one might go greater lengths, and say such a house was more than insipid and commonplace—was, indeed, downright ugly—but in a long curving row the effect is a comprehensive one of dignified restraint. At any rate, they are constructed of good honest dull red brick, and not plastered and made to look like stone. This bluff honesty in these days of shams and of restless, worried-looking designs, when every new building must have its own ready-made picturesqueness, and this total absence ofanything and everything that by remotest chance could be thought an ornament, is grateful.
We speak of this as “Weymouth,” but it is rather, to speak by the card, Melcombe Regis, and although the interests of both this and of Weymouth proper, on the other side of the narrow neck of harbour, are now pooled, it was once a sign of ignorance and a certain offence not to carefully distinguish between the two. Their rivalries and jealousies were of old so bitter that the river-mouth and harbour, long since bridged to make a continuous street, was like a stream set between two alien states. The passage was then “by a bote and a rope bent over ye haven, so ytin ye fery bote they use no ores.”
These disputes and contentions had risen almost to the condition of a smouldering petty local warfare in the time of Queen Elizabeth, when means were taken to put an end to it. Thus in 1571 they were compelled to unite, and in the familiar phrase of fairy tales have “lived happily ever after.” Says Camden: “These stood both some time proudlie upon their owne severall priviledges, and were in emulation one of the other, but now, tho’ (God turne it to the good of both!) many, they are, by authoritie of Parliament, incorporated into one bodie, conjoyned by late by a bridge, and growne very much greater and goodlier in buildings and by sea adventures than heretofore.”
But things widely different from trade have in later times made the fortune of the conjoined towns of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis. I suppose the one or the other of them was bound in the course of time to be “discovered” as a bathing-resort,but it is to George III. that Weymouth owes a deep debt of gratitude. His son had already “discovered” Brighthelmstone, or rather, had placed the seal of his approval upon Dr. Russel’s earlier discovery of it; and likewise Weymouth was already on the road to recognition when George III. came here first, in 1789. Thirty years or so earlier, when people had begun as a strange new experience, to bathe, the sands of Weymouth—or to adopt an attitude of strict correctitude, the sands of Melcombe Regis—were on the way to appreciation. Then greater folks lending their august patronage where that of meaner people had little weight, the place was resorted to by the famous Ralph Allen of Bath, for whom in 1763 the first bathing-machine was constructed, and by a stream of visitors gradually ascending in the social scale. The place long found favour with the Duke of Gloucester, by whose recommendation the king was induced to make a visit and then a lengthy stay, placing the apex at last upon this imposing pyramid of good fortune. It was no fleeting glimpse of royal favour thus accorded, for with the coming of summer the king for many years resided here at Gloucester Lodge, the mansion facing the sea built by his brother the Duke of Gloucester, and now the staid and grave Gloucester Hotel. Weymouth basked happily in the splendours of that time. They were splendours of the respectable domestic sort generally associated with that homely monarch, who bathed from his machine in full view of his loyal lieges and then went home to boiled mutton and turnips. He made sober holiday on the Dorset coast while his graceless son was on the coast of Sussex rearing afantastical palace and playing pranks fully matching it in extravagance of design and purse.
Weymouth’s return for all these favours is still to be seen, in the bronze group erected by the townsfolk in 1809, to celebrate the generally joyful occasion of his Jubilee, to perpetuate the especial gratitude of the people for favours received, and in hopes of more to come.
Weymouth very closely reflects the prosperity of that great era, in the Georgian streets, the quaintly bowed windows of private houses and the now old-world shop-fronts, many of them exquisite examples of the restrained taste and aptitude for just proportion in design characteristic of that age, and only now beginning to be appreciated at their true worth. It was the age of the Adams brothers, of Chippendale and Sheraton; an age rightly come to be regarded in our time as classic in all things in the domain of architecture and decoration. In its unaltered purlieus Weymouth is thus singularly like the older parts of Brighton, but now richer in vestiges of the Georgian period than the larger and more changeful town.
That, doubtless, was a period of inflated prices in Weymouth. King, queen, and princesses, fashionables and many soldiers sent up the ideas of tradesfolk just as the sun expands the mercury of a thermometer. Uncle Benjy, inThe Trumpet Major, found Budmouth a place where money flew away doubly as quick as it did when the famous Scot visited London and “hadna’ been there a day when bang went saxpence.” At Budmouth in the time of Farmer George, it was a “shilling for this and a shilling for that; if you only eat one egg or even a poor windfall of an apple, you’ve got to pay; anda bunch o’ radishes is a halfpenny, and a quart o’ cider a good tuppence three-farthings at lowest reckoning. Nothing without paying!” Ay! but if prices were no higher than these, ’twas no such ruinous place, after all. Poor Uncle Benjy!
Weymouth Harbour
The most striking differences in physical geography between the constituent parts of Weymouth are that Melcombe Regis, here on the shore is flat as a pancake, and Weymouth, there on t’other side of the harbour, is as hilly as a house-roof. You could have no greater dissimilarity than that between the prudish formality which stands for the Melcombe front and the heaped-up terraces of houses of every description at Weymouth, which has no front at all; unless indeed the lowest tier of houses skirting the harbour and its quays, and looking into the back alleys and quays of Melcombe may so be styled. In those old days, to which Weymouth dates back, no seaside town could afford so assailable a luxury as a “front,” and the older quarters of nearly all such are generally found, as here, folded away under the lee of a bluff, or thinly lining the shores of an estuarial harbour. Here the Nothe Point, with its fort mounted with heavy guns, is the rocky bluff behind which the old town cowered from elemental and human foes, and that estuary, both by reason of its narrow entrance, and those great forts of the Nothe and Portland, has never been one sought by an enemy’s ship.
The harbour is not uninteresting: what harbour ever is? The comings and goings of ships have their own romance, and bring rumours of all kinds of outer worlds and strange peoples. You look across from the quays of Weymouth to the quaysof Melcombe, and there, beside the walls and the old warehouses, lie the ships from many home and foreign ports, their names duly to be read under their counters. Whence they individually come, I do not greatly care to know. This one may only have come from the Channel Islands with a consignment of early potatoes: and, on the other hand, it may have won home again after who knows what romantic doings at the Equator or within the Arctic Zone. It may have brought treasure-trove, or on the other hand be merely carrying ordinary commercial freights, at so low a figure that the owners are dissatisfied and the skipper gloomy. It is well, you see, to leave a little margin for fancy when the good ship has come to port once more and within sight and the easiest reach of those two great features of a Christian and a civilised land: the Church and the Public House.
In these days the town is recovering at last from the undeserved neglect into which it fell after the illness and death of George III. and from later disasters and indifferences; and, what with improved railway travelling, and the added interest it obtains from being selected as the site of a new great national harbour where more than ever the ships of the Navy will come and go, has a great future before it.