XXV

PEPYS

The guest-rooms of the “Royal Anchor” are called by regal names, and their titles of “King,” “Queen,” “Crown,” or “George” are blazoned upon the doorswith great pomp and circumstance; but as I have retired between the sweet-smelling, lavender-scented sheets in one or other of the spacious up-stair rooms and have dowsed the glim of my bedroom candle, I have considered with satisfaction not so much that “Farmer George” and his snuffy oldhausfraumay have slept here, as that the dearest of old sinners and inconsequent gossips—I name Samuel Pepys—came to Liphook and “lay here” o’ nights, in receipt of many conjugal reproaches, I doubt not, for certain gay vagaries, darkly hinted at with many “God forgive me’s,” in the pages of those confessions which men know by name as “Pepys’ Diary.”

Mr. Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Admiralty first, and amiable gossip afterwards—although I fancy we generally reverse those titles to recognition—was among those travellers who have left some sign of their travels along these miles of heaths and open commons—this wildest high-road in all England. Apart from his suburban trip to Putney, we find the diarist chronicling journeys to and from Portsmouth.

On May 4, 1661, he left Petersfield. “Up in the morning,” says he, “and took coach, and so to Gilford, where we lay at the ‘Red Lyon,’ the best inne, and lay in the room where the King lately lay in, where we had time to see the Hospital, built by Archbishop Abbott, and the free schoole, and were civilly treated by the Mayster.

“So to supper and to bed, being very merry about our discourse with the Drawers” (as who should say the Barmen) “concerning the minister of the towne, with a red face and a girdle.

“5th, Lord’s Day.Mr. Creed and I went to the red-faced Parson’s church, and heard a good sermon of him, better than I looked for. Anon we walked into the garden, and there played the fool a great while, trying who of Mr. Creed or I could go best over the edge of an old fountaine well, and I won a quart of sack of him. Then to supper in the banquet-house, and there my wife and I did talk high, she against and I for Mrs. Pierce (that she was a beauty), till we were both angry.”

Seven years later, on August 6, 1688, to wit, Mr. Samuel Pepys was called on business to Portsmouth, and Mrs. Pepys determined to go with him, at an hour’s notice. You may notice that Pepys says her readiness pleased him, but that would seem to be a shameless want of frankness altogether unusual in that Diary, wherein are set forth the secret thoughts and doings, not altogether creditable to him who set them down so fully and freely.

WAYFARING

He did not travel as an ordinary commoner, being properly mindful of his dignity as Secretary of a Government Department, a dignity, be it observed, which it had been well if he had maintained more constantly before him. Thus he was not a passenger in the Portsmouth “Machine,” which preceded the mail-coaches, but travelled in his own “coach” or “chariot,” as he variously describes his private carriage. He would probably have fared better, swifter, and more certainly if he had used the public conveyance, but in that case we should have been the poorer by his description of a journey in which his coachman lost his way for some hours in the district between Cobham and Guildford, and the party came late for dinner to the “Red Lion”:—

SAMUEL PEPYS.

“August 6th, 1688.Waked betimes, and my wife at an hour’s warning is resolved to go with me; which pleases me, her readiness.... To St. James’s to Mr. Wren, to bid him ‘God be with you!’ and so over the water to Fox Hall; and then my wife and Deb. took me up, and we away to Gilford, losing our way for three or four miles about Cobham. At Gilford we dined; and I showed them the hospitall there of Bishop Abbot’s, and his tomb in the church; which, and all the rest of the tombs there, are kept mighty clean and neat, with curtains before them. So to coach again, and got to Lippook, late over Hindhead, having an old man a guide in the coach with us; but got thither with great fear of being out of our way, it being ten at night. Here good, honest people; and after supper to bed.

“7th.To coach, and with a guide to Petersfield. And so,” he says, “took coach again back” after dinner, and “came at night to Gilford; where the ‘Red Lyon’ so full of people, and a wedding, that the master of the house did get us a lodging over the way, at a private house, his landlord’s, mighty neat and fine: and there supped; and so” (the usual formula) “to bed.”

Another celebrated (or rather, notorious) person was used to lie here frequently on his journeys between town and the Isle of Wight. “Liberty”Wilkes had an estate at Sandown (hecalls it “Sandham”), and when he was not busy agitating and be-devilling ministers in London, he was taking the sea-breezes in the Wight and writing innumerable letters to his daughter, Polly.

Statesmen must have breathed much more freely when the demagogue had left London and they were rid for a while, however short, of “his inhuman squint and diabolic grin.” If we are to believe his contemporaries and the portrait-painters, he was the ugliest man of his time, with the countenance of a satyr, to match and typify the low cunning and the obscenity of his crooked mind. “His personal appearance,” wrote Lord Brougham, “was so revolting as to be hardly human;” and, indeed, apologists for Wilkes’ character and appearance are singularly few among historians in these days, when it is the fashion to review by-past notorieties with the whitewash brush.

IMPIOUS REVELLERS

John Wilkes was born in 1727, and married, when in his twenty-second year, a lady of considerable fortune, who afterwards separated from him, chiefly owing to the disgust and abhorrence with which she looked upon his dissolute habits and profligate acquaintances, amongst whom he counted three of the most notorious rakes of the time, a time excelled in profligacy only by the reign of Charles II. Shortly after this separation, Wilkes joined a burlesque monastery, founded, amongst others, by those three vicious creatures and notorious rakes, Lord Sandwich, Thomas Potter, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Sir Francis Dashwood. They occupied the ruins of an old Cistercian monastery that still stands on the banks of the Thames at Medmenham, and passed their time in a blasphemous travesty of religion and the monastic life. The “Medmenham Monks,” they called themselves, but were known generally as the “Hell-Fire Club.”

JOHN WILKES.

If the Earl of Sandwich was the championroué, rake, and profligate of a vicious age, certainly Wilkes almost bore away the distinction from him; as we may judge from the result of the election amongst the Medmenham revellers as to who should be chosen to take a place among the round dozen who played a leading part in their midnight orgies.

The Earl of Sandwich, as the greater reprobate of the two, was chosen, and Wilkes revenged himself upon the company by a practical joke, which admirably illustrates the nature of their proceedings. “While the profane revellers were feasting and uttering impious jests, Wilkes let loose, from a chest wherein he was confined, a baboon dressed according to the common representations of the Evil One. The moment chosen was during an invocation addressed by Lord Sandwich to his master, the devil. The consternation was indescribable. The terror communicated itself to the baboon, which bounded about the room and finally lighted on Lord Sandwich’s shoulders, who in a paroxysm of terror recanted all he had been saying, and, in an agony of cowardice, prayed to Heaven for mercy.”

Some years later, in 1757, Wilkes entered Parliament as member for Aylesbury, and became a supporter of the elder Pitt. When Pitt was in opposition and the scandalously venal, corrupt, and utterlyincompetent ministry of Lord Bute misgoverned the country, Wilkes started the “North Briton,” a periodical satire, both in its contents and its title, upon Scotchmen, who were then bitterly hated by the English, and upon the Scots in Parliament and in politics, among whom Bute was the most prominent. The persistent abuse which Wilkes showered upon the ministry had successfully damaged the Government by the time that his forty-fourth number had been published, and upon the appearance of the famous “Number 45,” in 1763, containing criticisms of the King’s Speech, it was resolved to prosecute him for seditious libel, to search his house, and to arrest himself, his printers, and publishers.

‘WILKES AND LIBERTY’

Wilkes desired nothing better than persecution. He was nothing of a patriot, but only a vulgar schemer who worked for notoriety and gain, and his craft, together with the inconceivable stupidity of the Government in making a martyr of him, assured him of both. The warrants for his arrest and for the seizure of his papers were declared illegal, and the numerous actions-at-law which he brought against members of the Cabinet and prominent officials in respect of those illegal proceedings, cost the Government which defended them no less than £100,000. Wilkes now reprinted “Number 45,” and a majority in the House of Commons ordered the paper to be burned by the common hangman, and on January 19, 1764, voted his expulsion from the House, as the author of a scandalous and seditious libel. He was convicted in the Court of King’s Bench for having re-published the obnoxious “Number 45,” but did notpresent himself to receive sentence. He fled, in fact, to France, and resided there for four years, an outlaw. Twice he returned to England and unsuccessfully petitioned an incredibly obstinate and stupid King for a pardon, which, it is scarcely necessary to add, George III. refused to grant. On the second occasion a general election was in progress, and this agitator then sought re-election to Parliament, and stood for the City of London. Defeated in the City, he issued his election address the following day as a candidate for the county of Middlesex, and was returned triumphantly at the head of the poll. “Wilkes and Liberty!” was now the popular cry, and the member for Middlesex became more than ever the darling of the mob, the idol of the populace. But the extraordinary stupidity of King, Court, and Government, that had raised so utterly worthless and degraded a fellow as Wilkes to this high pinnacle, kept him there by another expulsion from the Commons, and by fines and imprisonment inflamed the anger of the crowd to such a pitch that Benjamin Franklin said, with every appearance of conviction, “that had Wilkes been as moral a man as the King, he would have driven George III. out of his kingdom.” So strong were prejudices in favour of superficial morality in even that licentious age!

So sensible was Wilkes of the advantages conferred upon him by imprisonment, that when the savage mob rescued him from the coach that was conveying him to gaol, he escaped from them and gave himself up, rather than lose the advertisement of an incarceration. He had his reward subsequently, when,offering himself for re-election for Middlesex, he was returned with an enormous majority over Colonel Luttrell. The House of Commons, however, by a vain and impotent resolution, declared the latter to have been duly elected, and now, chiefly by the aid of folly and fortuitous circumstances, Wilkes found his fortunes identified with the cause of the Constitution and the liberty of the subject. He was elected Sheriff of London, and became in 1774 Lord Mayor, being returned as a member for Middlesex in the same year, unopposed, and for the fifth time. At this period the citizens of London conferred upon him the post of Chamberlain of the City, a position of great profit and consideration, which must have made amends for many inconveniences in the past.

And now, having attained all he could desire, Wilkes sank the patriot in the courtier. “Hush! you old fool!” said he at this period to an old woman who raised the stale cry of “Wilkes and Liberty” in the street; “that was all over long ago;” and, upon his being presented at Court during his Mayoralty, he made himself so agreeable to the King that the old Monarch declared he had never met so well-bred a Lord Mayor! Wilkes, not to be out-shone when compliments were going free, assured his Majesty that he had never been a Wilkite; and so, as in the fairy tales, “they lived happily ever afterwards.”

CORRESPONDENCE

Wilkes is seen to best advantage in his letters to his daughter. In them he dropped the turgid vehemence which characterized his public utterances, and became a quiet, mildly humorous gossip, concerned deeply about all manner of insignificantdomestic details, the incidents of his journeys, and his sojournings in town or country. But from time to time the leer of the elderly satyr is seen in this correspondence, and passages are not infrequent in which the most frank and unlooked-for things, as between father and daughter, may be read. But you shall judge for yourself.

He writes from Newport, Isle of Wight, on June 9, 1772:—

“My dearest Polly,“I arrived at Cobham on Sunday before twelve, and dined, like a sober citizen, by one; then sauntered through the elysium of Mr. Hamilton’s gardens till eight in the evening, like the first solitary man through Paradise; and afterwards went to bed before ten. Yesterday I got to Guildford by eleven, and paid my compliments to our good friend, Mrs. Waugh and her family: reached Portsmouth at five.”

“My dearest Polly,

“I arrived at Cobham on Sunday before twelve, and dined, like a sober citizen, by one; then sauntered through the elysium of Mr. Hamilton’s gardens till eight in the evening, like the first solitary man through Paradise; and afterwards went to bed before ten. Yesterday I got to Guildford by eleven, and paid my compliments to our good friend, Mrs. Waugh and her family: reached Portsmouth at five.”

At a later date he writes from “Sandham” (Sandown) Cottage, a country retreat which he occupied frequently in these latter days, and several references to the Portsmouth Road occur from time to time, as he journeyed between Sandham Cottage and Prince’s Court, London. He lay generally at the “Anchor,” Liphook, where the landlady, Mrs. Keen, “dull and sour” though she might have been, according to one of Wilkes’ letters, seems to have made the triumphant demagogue and his daughter sufficiently comfortable. Writing on September 14, 1788, he says:—

“My dearest Polly,“I arrived at Sandham yesterday afternoon at three, after a lucky passage of an hour and five minutes. There was very little wind, and that quite adverse. I therefore hired for four-and-sixpence a wherry with two oars not larger than a Thames boat, and committed myself to our English deity, Neptune, who favourably heard my prayers. The opposition of a little wind to the tide at high water made the beginning of this long voyage rather rough; but the rest was exceedingly pleasant.“The preceding day I lay at Liphook, and directed Mrs. Keen to send you this week a fine goose, and a brace of partridges....“The road from Guildford quite to Portsmouth is really enchanting. But I wanted you to enjoy with me these glorious scenes of Nature. I hope, however, that the quiet of your present situation” (Miss Wilkes was visiting the Duchess de la Vallière) “has chased away your feveret, and restored you to sweet sleep, Nature’s best nurse. Pray send me such welcome news.”

“My dearest Polly,

“I arrived at Sandham yesterday afternoon at three, after a lucky passage of an hour and five minutes. There was very little wind, and that quite adverse. I therefore hired for four-and-sixpence a wherry with two oars not larger than a Thames boat, and committed myself to our English deity, Neptune, who favourably heard my prayers. The opposition of a little wind to the tide at high water made the beginning of this long voyage rather rough; but the rest was exceedingly pleasant.

“The preceding day I lay at Liphook, and directed Mrs. Keen to send you this week a fine goose, and a brace of partridges....

“The road from Guildford quite to Portsmouth is really enchanting. But I wanted you to enjoy with me these glorious scenes of Nature. I hope, however, that the quiet of your present situation” (Miss Wilkes was visiting the Duchess de la Vallière) “has chased away your feveret, and restored you to sweet sleep, Nature’s best nurse. Pray send me such welcome news.”

And then this agitator and sometime blasphemous member of the Medmenham Hell-Fire Club goes on to write verses appreciative of the scenery on the Portsmouth Road. In this wise:—

“Ever charming, ever new,The landscape never tires the view:The verdant meads, the river’s flow,The woody vallies warm and low;The windy summit, wild and high,Roughly rushing on the sky:The pleasant seat, the ruin’d tower,The naked rock, the shady bower;The town and village,”——

But enough, enough. This “poetry” is but journalism cut into lengths and rhymed.

WILKES AS CRITIC

We find Wilkes as aposeuron literature in one of these entertaining letters to “dearest Polly.” He indites from his cottage of Sandham a June letter wherein he says how impatient he is for “the descending showers to call forth all Nature’s sweets, and waken all her flowers, for the earth is as thirsty as Boswell, and as cracked in many places as he certainly is in one. His book, however, is that of an entertaining madman. Poor Johnson! Does a friend come and add to the gross character of such a man the unknown trait of disgusting gluttony? I shall bring his two quartos back with me, and will point out numberless mistakes; but there are many excellent things in them. I suspect, not unfrequently, a mistake in theDramatis Personæ. He has put down toBoswellwhat was undoubtedly said byJohnson; what the latter did, and what the former could not say. The motto to his book should have been the two lines of Pope,

‘Who tells whate’er you think, whate’er you say,And if he lies not, must at least betray.’”

But he has a playful and somewhat engaging style of writing, on occasion. Perpend:—

“‘Anchor,’ at Liphook,“Friday Afternoon, July 8, 1791.“My dearest Polly,“I have found the tench here so remarkably delicate, that nothing could add to their flavour on acertain Alderman’s palate but the eating them in your company. They were, indeed, exquisite, and I see a brace playing about, which seem to promise equally. I have therefore spoiled their sport in the watery element, and as they set out this evening, before ten, it is thought they will arrive in Grosvenor Square to-morrow morning, in time for you to decide, at four, if their personal merit is equal to that of their late companions. Two little feathered folks, young and tender, of the same farm, accompany them in their journey, and I hope are not unworthy of beingcroqués.“My best compliments to the nymph of the bosquets in Grosvenor Square.“Adieu!”

“‘Anchor,’ at Liphook,“Friday Afternoon, July 8, 1791.

“My dearest Polly,

“I have found the tench here so remarkably delicate, that nothing could add to their flavour on acertain Alderman’s palate but the eating them in your company. They were, indeed, exquisite, and I see a brace playing about, which seem to promise equally. I have therefore spoiled their sport in the watery element, and as they set out this evening, before ten, it is thought they will arrive in Grosvenor Square to-morrow morning, in time for you to decide, at four, if their personal merit is equal to that of their late companions. Two little feathered folks, young and tender, of the same farm, accompany them in their journey, and I hope are not unworthy of beingcroqués.

“My best compliments to the nymph of the bosquets in Grosvenor Square.

“Adieu!”

The inclemency of the merry month of May is not of modern date, for Wilkes, who had been travelling from Grosvenor Square to Sandown on the sixth of that treacherous month, in the year of grace 1792, found a fire at the hospitable “Anchor” as welcome as fires generally are in dreary autumn.

“After I left Grosvenor Square,” he says, “quite to Liphook, it rained incessantly, and I enjoyed a good fire there as much as I should have done on a raw day of the month of November. I found the spring very backward, except in the immediate environs of London; and nothing but a little purple heath and yellow broom to cheer the eye in the long dreary extent from Guildford to Liphook.”

TRAVELLING EXPERIENCES

Some few days later, he writes a gossipy letter to his daughter, full of little domestic details, moststrange and curious to find flowing from the pen of Liberty Wilkes. We find, for instance, “that the gardener’s wife increases in size almost as much as his pumpkins,” and that “there are thirteen pea-fowls at the cottage, between whom some solemn gallantries are continually passing; and the gallinis are as brisk and amorous as any Frenchpetits-maîtres. The consequences I foresee.

‘Un et un font deux,C’est le nombre heureux,En galanterie, mais quelquefois,Un et un font trois.’”

On another occasion we learn that “the farmers are swearing, the parsons praying, for rain; neither hopeful of any result until the weather changes.” About this time—on July 7, 1793—Mr. Wilkes has been returning along the Portsmouth Road from London to the Isle of Wight. He found the dust and heat almost overpowering, and the highway crowded with recruits, both for army and navy, who were no small inconvenience to his progress. Portsmouth was full of warlike preparations, Lord Howe expecting to sail the same day with a fleet of twenty sail, perfectly well-conditioned, and the men in high spirits at the prospect of coming to blows with the French.

Similarly, the next year, he found the July heat almost beyond endurance. “I almost melted away,” he tells Polly, “from the extreme of a suffocating heat before I arrived at Cobham, and a large bowl of lemonade was scarcely sufficient to wash away the dust, which I had been champing for above threehours.” A Mr. Hervey, “brother-in-law to Mr. Lambe, a silversmith, and Common Councilman of my ward,” was at that time landlord of the “White Hart,” at Cobham. “I was well used by him,” says Wilkes, “and the house has a very decent appearance, but the poor fellow had tears in his eyes when he told me of thirty-five horse quartered on him.” When he reached Liphook, what with two hounds, chained together in the outhouses of the “Anchor,” yelping all night, and the intolerable heat, the patriot had no sleep the livelong night, and so resorted to his post-chaise and departed for Portsmouth at an early hour of the morning.

Those were busy days in the history of the “Anchor,” and the constant stream of poorer wayfarers added to the bustle. Poor folk took a shake-down, with what grace they might summon up, in some clean straw on the floor of outhouses and barns, and in this manner slept the sailor-men who were continually tramping up the road or down. Not that sailors were necessarily poor, but the bedrooms that held royalty were judged to be above the tastes and circumstances of poor Jack, to whom, certainly, clean straw in a barn would seem at any rate infinitely better than the gloomy forecastle which he had just left.

DECADENCE

But if the sailors a hundred years ago, or thereby, were denied the luxuries of sheets and coverlets, they were free to drink as much as they pleased at the public bar, so long as they had the wherewithal to settle the score. Rowlandson, who travelled this very road, has left a sketch of “Sailors Carousing,” by which you can see that Jack was, at any rate, not one of Luther’s fools, for the picture shows that he loved “women, wine, and song” to a riotous extent. And Jack come home from a long cruise, with prize-money in his pockets, was as ostentatious as anynouveau riche. He would damn expense with any lord, and has been known to call for sandwiches at the “Anchor” to place five-pound notes between, and to eat the whole with an insane bravado.

SAILORS CAROUSING.From a Sketch by Rowlandson.

Those brave days were done when the railway came and left the roads silent and deserted. Old inns sank into obscurity and neglect, and for many years afterwards the sight of a solitary stranger wanting a bed for the night would have aroused excitement in a place where, in the old days, one more or less was a matter of little import. The “Anchor” for a time shared the fate of its fellows, and its condition in 1865 is eloquently pictured by the Hon. Grantley Berkeley. He says—

“I was travelling about the country, and it so happened that railway time, as well as inevitable time, chose to make me

‘The sport of circumstances, whenCircumstances seemed most the sport of men,’

and I found myself belated and tired in the vicinity of the little rural village of Liphook, on the borders of Hampshire and Surrey, and forced by time and circumstances to put up at a well-known inn.

“Now, time was when no traveller would have found fault with this, for the inn I thus allude to was then the great posting and coaching house of ‘the road,’and the roar of wheels and the cries of ‘first and second turn out,’ either ‘up or down,’ rang through the merry air, and kept the locality in loud and continuous bustle, night and day. Now, however, the glory of the roadside inn was gone; its site seemed changed to grief, and the great elm tree[4]that had formerly during the heat of summer shed a cooling shade over panting steeds and thirsty, dusty-booted men, luxuriously grasping a fresh-drawn tankard of ale, stood sorrowing over the grave of the posting and coaching trade, a tearful mourner on every rainy day.

“There were the long ranges of stables, once filled by steeds of every step and temper, curious specimens of every blemish under the sun. Some that ran away the whole way, others that would be run away with by the rest of the team; some that kept the whip in action to send them to the collar, and others that kept the whip still, lest its touch should shut them up to stopping, and give them no collar at all.

“These stables were a melancholy sight to me. They reminded me of my own. Where, in my full stalls, twenty goodly steeds used to feed, little else than a mouse stirs now; and that mouse may be a ghost for all I know, haunting the grave of the last oat eaten a quarter of a century ago. In this long line of disused stabling I paused. There was a thin cat there, deceived to expectation by the long-deserted hole of a rat. A broken broom, covered with very ancient cobwebs, lay under one manger, and the remnants of a stable-bucket under another. Farmers came in and farmers went out occasionally and tied up their horsesanywhere; so that all the tumbling-down stalls were dirty, and the whole thing given up to dreary desolation.

RUSTIC CATERING

“A musing and a melancholy man, I left the stables, went into the house, and called for dinner and a bed. No smart waiter, with a white napkin twisted round his thumb, came forth to my summons; the few people in the house looked like broken-down farming-men and women, and seemed to be occupied in the selfish discussion of their own tap.

“‘Yes,’ they said, as if astonished by the unwonted desire for such refreshment, ‘Icouldhave a bed; and what would I like for dinner?’

“Now, that question was very well for them to ask, when they knew its meaning to be very wide; but the real dilemma was, what could they get to set before me? a point on which I at once desired information. ‘A fowl.’ ‘What, ready for dressing?’ ‘Oh yes, quite.’ Spirit of Ude—that King of Cooks (when he chose it)—if you still delight in heat, then grill these people; or when you ‘cook their goose,’ teach them to know the difference between a fowl hung for a time and picked for the spit, and a poor dear old chuckie, seated at roost in all her feathers, and ‘ready’ certainly; for her owner has only to clutch her legs and pull her screaming from her perch, to roast or boil, and send her, tough, to table.

“Well, up came my hen at last, flanked by some curious compound, dignified by the name of sherry, which I exchanged for some very nearly as bad spirits and water; when, having gone through the manual—notthe mastication—of a meal, I walked forth, and mused on the deserted garden and paddock in the rear of all; and in the dusky hue of night fancied that I saw the shadows of galled and broken-kneed posters limping over the grass to graze, as no doubt they had done in former times. In short, dear reader, from this last retrospection, hallucination, or what you will, I regained mine inn, and, calling for a candle, went to bed.”

There is a sad picture of decadence for you! But in two years’ time all this was changed, for in 1867 the present landlord, Mr. Peake, took the fortunes of the old house in hand, and restored, as far as possible, the old-time dignity of the place. He has brought back many of the glories of the past, and still reigns. I have met many sorts of hosts, but none of them approach so nearly the ideal as he, to whom the history and the care of this fine old inn are as much a religion as the maintenance of their religious houses was to the old monks of pre-Reformation days. And no post more delightful than this, which gives one fresh air, leisure for recreation, and nearly all the advantages of the country gentleman, to whom, indeed, mine host of the “Anchor” most closely approximates in look and speech. Long may the pleasant white face of the “Anchor” be turned towards the village street, and, friend Peake, may your shadow, with the grateful shade of the glorious chestnut tree that fronts your hostelry, never grow less!

MILLAND

Leaving Liphook, where, in the coaching revival of the ’70’s, Captain Hargreaves’ “Rocket” coach between London and Portsmouth stopped forty minutes for lunch, we take to the road again, and come presently to Milland Common. This is splendid galloping ground, and coaches always made good time here, both in the old times and the new. Half-way across the Common (being, not coach-passengers, but merely pedestrians whose time is their own) we will step aside to investigate the two ecclesiastical-looking buildings that are seen between and beyond the trees on the left hand. Here, then, are the two chapels of Milland, with the adjoining “habitable parsonage,” to quote the somewhat vague description of the “Clergy List.” The new chapel, opened in 1880, although a fair specimen of modern work and the design of the late architect of the Royal Palace of Justice in London, is uninteresting; but the old, barn-like building that served the scattered inhabitants of Milland so many years and yet remains beside its modern successor, is worthy a glance, if only for its extremely small and simple (not to say primitive) design. It is so small that it could not conveniently contain a congregation of more than fifty people; its plan, shaped like the letter L, is surely unique, and altogether, the interior, with its plain high pews and meagre pulpit, and its plastered, whitewashed walls, is of the most unusual and secular appearance. Yet this diminutive building served the needs of the placefrom the days of Edward VI. until recently, and to it trudged on Sundays those of the Liphook folk who did not care to tramp to their own distant church of Bramshott; and even some pious souls from Rake (who, perhaps, valued public worship overmuch) performed a six-miles journey hither and home again.

MILLAND CHAPEL.

SELBORNE

But here let us leave the Portsmouth Road awhile for an expedition of some five miles into the still wild and rarely-travelled tract of country in whose midst lies the village of Selborne, memorable as the home,during his long life, of that most amiable and placid student of Nature and her works, the Rev. Gilbert White, D.D. When you have passed through the village of Liss, you come at once into a broad expanse of country whose characteristics resemble the typical scenes of Devonshire rather than those of Hants. Swelling hills and fertile vales, still intersected by the deeply-rutted lanes of which Gilbert White speaks, lead on to the sequestered village of Selborne, as remote now from the rumours and alarums of the outer world as when the naturalist penned his “Natural History of Selborne,” over a hundred years ago.

The Wakes, Selborne

The village occupies, with its few cottages, its church and vicarage, and Gilbert White’s home, “The Wakes,” a long and narrow valley. The Hanger, covered now as in White’s time with his favouritetree, the beech, rises at the back of the village street, and trees indeed abound everywhere, coming even to aid the simple architecture of the place.

The butcher’s shop at Selborne rests its front on three polled limes which form living pillars to the roof, and give, apart from their rustic appearance, a welcome shade and grateful coolness to that country shop in the heats of summer. But the most remarkable tree in Selborne, as indeed anywhere in Hampshire, is the noble churchyard yew, mentioned by the naturalist, and still standing to the south-west of the church. This remarkable tree has a circumference of twenty-five feet two inches at a height of four and a half feet from the ground; it rises to a total height of sixty-two feet, and its great branches spread a distance of twenty-two yards from north to south. It is still in the perfection of good health, and its foliage wears the dark and lustrous appearance characteristic of the yew when in a thriving state. It must have been a remarkable tree even in Gilbert White’s time, and its age can only be counted by centuries.

GILBERT WHITE

The Wakes, where this simple soul lived so long, stands in the village street, by the open grass-plot, familiar to readers of the “Natural History” as the Plestor. Additions have been made to the house since White’s time, but so judiciously that its appearance is little altered. His summer-house is gone to wreck, but the sunny garden, with its narrow red-brick path, remains, and so does the American juniper tree, together with the sculptured sun-dial, both set up by this quiet curate-in-charge.

His life in this quiet and isolated parish, wherein his observation of and delight in the living things of garden and lane, hanger and pond, were mingled with the duties of a country clergyman and the contemplative recreations of the book-lover, was suave and untroubled. Of the events—so to call them—of this calm and kindly life there is but a slender outline to record. He was born here, at the Wakes, the residence of his father and his grandfather before him, on July 18, 1720. Educated first at Basingstoke, under the care of the Rev. Thomas Warton, father of Warton the Poet Laureate, he was entered at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1739; took his B.A. in 1743; obtained a Fellowship in the succeeding year, and the degree of M.A. in 1746. He was ordained as a priest in 1747, and subsequently served, it is said, as curate to his uncle, the Vicar of Swarraton. He soon removed to Selborne, where he lived the remainder of his days, dying here on June 26, 1793. It has been said that he accepted the College living of Moreton Pinkney in Northamptonshire, but he certainly never went into residence there, and refused other offers of preferment. A Fellow of his College, he never forfeited his fellowship by marriage, and he was never Vicar of Selborne, but only curate-in-charge.

His only regret seems to have been that he had no neighbours whose pursuits resembled his own in any way. Thus, one of his letters records the regret that it had been his misfortune “never to have had any neighbours whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge”: to which he attributeshis “slender progress in a kind of information to which I have been tenderly attached from my childhood.”

But it was owing to this seclusion and want of companionship that we are become the richer, by his letters to Thomas Pennant and the Hon. Daines Barrington, which have delighted successive generations. Little has come down to us concerning the personal attributes of Gilbert White. No portrait of him is known. We are told that he was a little man—some say but five feet three inches in height—who wore a wig and rode on a pony to Farringdon Church, where he officiated for a quarter of a century, or ambled benignantly about the lanes and by-ways of the neighbourhood. In one of his letters to a friend in Norfolk, he speaks of himself as riding or walking about the parish “attended daily (for although not a sportsman I still love a dog) by a beautiful spaniel with long ears, and a spotted nose and legs,” and watching the village folk “as they sit in grave debate while the children frolic and dance before them.” All that remains of his memory in village traditions and recollections indicates the modest, kindly nature of a courteous gentleman, such as peeps out from the pages of the “Natural History of Selborne.”

Selborne Church is a roomy and handsome building in the Transitional Norman and Early English styles. It consists of a nave of four bays, a south aisle, chancel, and massive western embattled tower. It has, however, a somewhat unfortunate effect of newness, owing to the restoration of 1883, when the south aisle was almost completely rebuilt, under thedirection of a grand-nephew of the naturalist—Mr. William White, architect.

A memorial slab to the memory of Gilbert White is placed within the altar-rails, on the south wall of the chancel, and records that he was the son of John White, of Selborne, and Anne, daughter of Thomas Holt, Rector of Streatham. Another tablet, on the north wall, records the death, in 1759, of John White, barrister-at-law; and an earlier Gilbert White, Vicar of Selborne and grandfather of the more famous naturalist, lies in the chancel, beneath a ledger-stone bearing the date 1727.

Gilbert White is buried in the churchyard, among the tall grasses and waving wild-flowers, in a manner peculiarly fitting for that simple soul; and his grave—one of a row of five belonging to the White family—has a plain headstone, grey and lichened now, with the simple inscription, “G. W., 26th June, 1793.”

THE ‘NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE’

It seems strange that so simple and uneventful a chronicle of the lives and habits of familiar birds and “wee sma’ beasties,” together with the plain records of sunshine and storm, rains and frosts, the blossoming of flowers and the fall of the leaf, which the “Natural History of Selborne” presents, should have attained so great and lasting a popularity. This book is become as sure a classic as the “Pilgrim’s Progress” or the “Compleat Angler,” and no one would have been more surprised at this result of his patient labours, undertaken simply for the joy they gave him, than old Gilbert himself. You see, in every page, nay, in every line, that he wrote for himself and his friends alone, and not with an observant eye upon thebooksellers and their clients. Nay, more! Had he written thus, we should have missed the better part of his book; the observation of years, which thought nothing of profit for labour and time expended; the just language, written without any cudgelling of the brain for effect, and the homely incidents that make him live more surely than aught else. You can claim Timothy the tortoise as a personal friend, and are thrilled with the curious annals of the idiot boy whose strange appetite for honey-bees excited the naturalist’s sympathies, both for the bees and the boy. Colonies might revolt and become the “United States”; French Revolutions and other dreadful portents shake thrones and set the world in arms, but Gilbert was a great deal more interested in the butcher birds, and in predatory rats, than in soldiers or blood-boltered human tyrants. The mid-day snoring of sleepy owls in the dusky rafters of some capacious barn, the hum of the bees, the scream of the peewits, and the clattering cabals of noisy starlings were more to him than instrumental music or the disputes of parliaments. And so he lived an uninterrupted round for forty years and died peacefully at last, happy and contented always, while dwellers in towns, then as now, beat their hearts out in unavailing ambitions and fruitless hatreds.

BADGE OF THESELBORNE SOCIETY.

Ornithology owes much to Gilbert White’s patient observations, and his “Natural History” bids fair to become a possession for all time. Numberless editions of it have been issued, annotated by men of science, who have found little of import to add to his work; and other editions are constantly in the making.But best monument of all is that association of friends to birds and beasts, the Selborne Society, that, taking its name from Gilbert White’s old home, owns him as master in many branches and local centres throughout England. When the centenary of the simple naturalist’s death was celebrated in 1893, the large attendance at Selborne of members of the Society showed that here lies one whose memory the lovers of nature and wild life will not willingly let die.

TOLL-HOUSES

Returning from this sentimental excursion to Selborne to the road at Rake, the pedestrian will notice a singular old cottage with many angles, fronting the highway. This is one of the old toll-houses left after the abolition of turnpike trusts, and of the vexatious taxes upon road-travel that only finally disappeared within comparatively recent years. Sixty, nay fifty, years ago, there were six toll-houses and turnpike bars between London and Portsmouth. They commenced with one at Newington, followed closely by another at Vauxhall, and one more at the “Robin Hood,” in Kingston Vale. The next was situated at Cobham Street, and neither Cary nor Paterson, the two great rival road-guides of coaching days, mention another until just before Liphook. The next was atRake, but, singularly enough, neither of those usually unimpeachable authorities mention this particular gate, which would appear to have been the last along this route.

Just beyond the old toll-house, visible down the road in the illustration of the “Flying Bull,” comes the rustic public-house bearing that most unusual, if not unique, sign. Here stands a grand wayside oak beside a steep lane leading down into Harting Coombe, and the bare branches of this giant tree make a most effective natural composition with the tiled front of the inn and its curious swinging sign. The present writer inquired the origin of the “Flying Bull” of a countryman, lounging along the road, and obtained for answer the story that is current in these parts; which, having no competing legend, may be given here for what it is worth.

“The ‘Flying Bull,’” said the countryman. “Oh, aye, itisa curious sign, sure-ly. How did it ’riginate? Well, theydosay as how, years ago, beforemytime, they useter turn cattle out to graze in them meadows down there;” and he pointed down the lane. “There wur a lot o’ flies in those meadows in summer at that time, and so there is now, for the matter o’ that. Howsomedever, when they turned them there cattle into these here meadows, the flies made ’em smart and set ’em racing about half mad. Theywurflying bulls; but ’tismybelief it useter be the ‘FlyandBull’ public-house.... Thankee, sir; yer health, I’m sure!”

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