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Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches

by Nathaniel Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #8090 · 694,541 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne


        
Release date: May 1, 2005 [eBook #8090]
                Most recently updated: December 17, 2011

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR OLD HOME: A SERIES OF ENGLISH SKETCHES ***




Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger







OUR OLD HOME

A Series of English Sketches

by

Nathaniel Hawthorne


To Franklin Pierce,

As a Slight Memorial of a College Friendship, prolonged through Manhood,
and retaining all its Vitality in our Autumnal Years,

This Volume is inscribed by  NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.



TO A FRIEND.


I have not asked your consent, my dear General, to the foregoing
inscription, because it would have been no inconsiderable disappointment
to me had you withheld it; for I have long desired to connect your name
with some book of mine, in commemoration of an early friendship that has
grown old between two individuals of widely dissimilar pursuits and
fortunes.  I only wish that the offering were a worthier one than this
volume of sketches, which certainly are not of a kind likely to prove
interesting to a statesman in retirement, inasmuch as they meddle with no
matters of policy or government, and have very little to say about the
deeper traits of national character.  In their humble way, they belong
entirely to aesthetic literature, and can achieve no higher success than
to represent to the American reader a few of the external aspects of
English scenery and life, especially those that are touched with the
antique charm to which our countrymen are more susceptible than are the
people among whom it is of native growth.

I once hoped, indeed, that so slight a volume would not be all that I
might write.  These and other sketches, with which, in a somewhat rougher
form than I have given them here, my journal was copiously filled, were
intended for the side-scenes and backgrounds and exterior adornment of a
work of fiction of which the plan had imperfectly developed itself in my
mind, and into which I ambitiously proposed to convey more of various
modes of truth than I could have grasped by a direct effort.  Of course,
I should not mention this abortive project, only that it has been utterly
thrown aside and will never now be accomplished.  The Present, the
Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me.  It takes away not
only my scanty faculty, but even my desire for imaginative composition,
and leaves me sadly content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon
the hurricane that is sweeping us all along with it, possibly, into a
Limbo where our nation and its polity may be as literally the fragments
of a shattered dream as my unwritten Romance.  But I have far better
hopes for our dear country; and for my individual share of the
catastrophe, I afflict myself little, or not at all, and shall easily
find room for the abortive work on a certain ideal shelf, where are
reposited many other shadowy volumes of mine, more in number, and very
much superior in quality, to those which I have succeeded in rendering
actual.

To return to these poor Sketches; some of my friends have told me that
they evince an asperity of sentiment towards the English people which I
ought not to feel, and which it is highly inexpedient to express.  The
charge surprises me, because, if it be true, I have written from a
shallower mood than I supposed.  I seldom came into personal relations
with an Englishman without beginning to like him, and feeling my
favorable impression wax stronger with the progress of the acquaintance.
I never stood in an English crowd without being conscious of hereditary
sympathies.  Nevertheless, it is undeniable that an American is
continually thrown upon his national antagonism by some acrid quality in
the moral atmosphere of England.  These people think so loftily of
themselves, and so contemptuously of everybody else, that it requires
more generosity than I possess to keep always in perfectly good-humor
with them.  Jotting down the little acrimonies of the moment in my
journal, and transferring them thence (when they happened to be tolerably
well expressed) to these pages, it is very possible that I may have said
things which a profound observer of national character would hesitate to
sanction, though never any, I verily believe, that had not more or less
of truth.  If they be true, there is no reason in the world why they
should not be said.  Not an Englishman of them all ever spared America
for courtesy's sake or kindness; nor, in my opinion, would it contribute
in the least to our mutual advantage and comfort if we were to besmear
one another all over with butter and honey.  At any rate, we must not
judge of an Englishman's susceptibilities by our own, which, likewise, I
trust, are of a far less sensitive texture than formerly.

And now farewell, my dear friend; and excuse (if you think it needs any
excuse) the freedom with which I thus publicly assert a personal
friendship between a private individual and a statesman who has filled
what was then the most august position in the world.  But I dedicate my
book to the Friend, and shall defer a colloquy with the Statesman till
some calmer and sunnier hour.  Only this let me say, that, with the
record of your life in my memory, and with a sense of your character in
my deeper consciousness as among the few things that time has left as it
found them, I need no assurance that you continue faithful forever to
that grand idea of an irrevocable Union, which, as you once told me, was
the earliest that your brave father taught you.  For other men there may
be a choice of paths,--for you, but one; and it rests among my
certainties that no man's loyalty is more steadfast, no man's hopes or
apprehensions on behalf of our national existence more deeply heartfelt,
or more closely intertwined with his possibilities of personal happiness,
than those of FRANKLIN PIERCE.

THE WAYSIDE, July 2, 1863.



CONTENTS.

Consular Experiences
Leamington Spa
About Warwick
Recollections of a Gifted Woman
Lichfield and Uttoxeter
Pilgrimage to Old Boston
Near Oxford
Some of the Haunts of Burns
A London Suburb
Up the Thames
Outside Glimpses of English Poverty
Civic Banquets.





OUR OLD HOME.




CONSULAR EXPERIENCES.


The Consulate of the United States, in my day, was located in Washington
Buildings (a shabby and smoke-stained edifice of four stories high, thus
illustriously named in honor of our national establishment), at the lower
corner of Brunswick Street, contiguous to the Gorec Arcade, and in the
neighborhood of scone of the oldest docks.  This was by no means a polite
or elegant portion of England's great commercial city, nor were the
apartments of the American official so splendid as to indicate the
assumption of much consular pomp on his part.  A narrow and ill-lighted
staircase gave access to an equally narrow and ill-lighted passageway on
the first floor, at the extremity of which, surmounting a door-frame,
appeared an exceedingly stiff pictorial representation of the Goose and
Gridiron, according to the English idea of those ever-to-be-honored
symbols.  The staircase and passageway were often thronged, of a morning,
with a set of beggarly and piratical-looking scoundrels (I do no wrong to
our own countrymen in styling them so, for not one in twenty was a
genuine American), purporting to belong to our mercantile marine, and
chiefly composed of Liverpool Blackballers and the scum of every maritime
nation on earth; such being the seamen by whose assistance we then
disputed the navigation of the world with England.  These specimens of a
most unfortunate class of people were shipwrecked crews in quest of bed,
board, and clothing, invalids asking permits for the hospital, bruised
and bloody wretches complaining of ill-treatment by their officers,
drunkards, desperadoes, vagabonds, and cheats, perplexingly intermingled
with an uncertain proportion of reasonably honest men.  All of them (save
here and there a poor devil of a kidnapped landsman in his shore-going
rags) wore red flannel shirts, in which they had sweltered or shivered
throughout the voyage, and all required consular assistance in one form
or another.

Any respectable visitor, if he could make up his mind to elbow a passage
among these sea-monsters, was admitted into an outer office, where he
found more of the same species, explaining their respective wants or
grievances to the Vice-Consul and clerks, while their shipmates awaited
their turn outside the door.  Passing through this exterior court, the
stranger was ushered into an inner privacy, where sat the Consul himself,
ready to give personal attention to such peculiarly difficult and more
important cases as might demand the exercise of (what we will courteously
suppose to be) his own higher judicial or administrative sagacity.

It was an apartment of very moderate size, painted in imitation of oak,
and duskily lighted by two windows looking across a by-street at the
rough brick-side of an immense cotton warehouse, a plainer and uglier
structure than ever was built in America.  On the walls of the room hung
a large map of the United States (as they were, twenty years ago, but
seem little likely to be, twenty years hence), and a similar one of Great
Britain, with its territory so provokingly compact, that we may expect it
to sink sooner than sunder.  Farther adornments were some rude engravings
of our naval victories in the War of 1812, together with the Tennessee
State House, and a Hudson River steamer, and a colored, life-size
lithograph of General Taylor, with an honest hideousness of aspect,
occupying the place of honor above the mantel-piece.  On the top of a
bookcase stood a fierce and terrible bust of General Jackson, pilloried
in a military collar which rose above his ears, and frowning forth
immitigably at any Englishman who might happen to cross the threshold.  I
am afraid, however, that the truculence of the old General's expression
was utterly thrown away on this stolid and obdurate race of men; for,
when they occasionally inquired whom this work of art represented, I was
mortified to find that the younger ones had never heard of the battle of
New Orleans, and that their elders had either forgotten it altogether, or
contrived to misremember, and twist it wrong end foremost into something
like an English victory.  They have caught from the old Romans (whom they
resemble in so many other characteristics) this excellent method of
keeping the national glory intact by sweeping all defeats and
humiliations clean out of their memory.  Nevertheless, my patriotism
forbade me to take down either the bust, or the pictures, both because it
seemed no more than right that an American Consulate (being a little
patch of our nationality imbedded into the soil and institutions of
England) should fairly represent the American taste in the fine arts, and
because these decorations reminded me so delightfully of an old-fashioned
American barber's shop.

One truly English object was a barometer hanging on the wall, generally
indicating one or another degree of disagreeable weather, and so seldom
pointing to Fair, that I began to consider that portion of its circle as
made superfluously.  The deep chimney, with its grate of bituminous coal,
was English too, as was also the chill temperature that sometimes called
for a fire at midsummer, and the foggy or smoky atmosphere which often,
between November and March, compelled me to set the gas aflame at
noonday.  I am not aware of omitting anything important in the above
descriptive inventory, unless it be some book-shelves filled with octavo
volumes of the American Statutes, and a good many pigeon-holes stuffed
with dusty communications from former Secretaries of State, and other
official documents of similar value, constituting part of the archives of
the Consulate, which I might have done my successor a favor by flinging
into the coal-grate.  Yes; there was one other article demanding
prominent notice: the consular copy of the New Testament, bound in black
morocco, and greasy, I fear, with a daily succession of perjured kisses;
at least, I can hardly hope that all the ten thousand oaths, administered
by me between two breaths, to all sorts of people and on all manner of
worldly business, were reckoned by the swearer as if taken at his soul's
peril.

Such, in short, was the dusky and stifled chamber in which I spent
wearily a considerable portion of more than four good years of my
existence.  At first, to be quite frank with the reader, I looked upon it
as not altogether fit to be tenanted by the commercial representative of
so great and prosperous a country as the United States then were; and I
should speedily have transferred my headquarters to airier and loftier
apartments, except for the prudent consideration that my government would
have left me thus to support its dignity at my own personal expense.
Besides, a long line of distinguished predecessors, of whom the latest is
now a gallant general under the Union banner, had found the locality good
enough for them; it might certainly be tolerated, therefore, by an
individual so little ambitious of external magnificence as myself.  So I
settled quietly down, striking some of my roots into such soil as I could
find, adapting myself to circumstances, and with so much success, that,
though from first to last I hated the very sight of the little room, I
should yet have felt a singular kind of reluctance in changing it for a
better.

Hither, in the course of my incumbency, came a great variety of visitors,
principally Americans, but including almost every other nationality on
earth, especially the distressed and downfallen ones like those of Poland
and Hungary.  Italian bandits (for so they looked), proscribed
conspirators from Old Spain, Spanish-Americans, Cubans who processed to
have stood by Lopez and narrowly escaped his fate, scarred French
soldiers of the Second Republic,--in a word, all sufferers, or pretended
ones, in the cause of Liberty, all people homeless in the widest sense,
those who never had a country or had lost it, those whom their native
land had impatiently flung off for planning a better system of things
than they were born to,--a multitude of these and, doubtless, an equal
number of jail-birds, outwardly of the same feather, sought the American
Consulate, in hopes of at least a bit of bread, and, perhaps, to beg a
passage to the blessed shores of Freedom.  In most cases there was
nothing, and in any case distressingly little, to be done for them;
neither was I of a proselyting disposition, nor desired to make my
Consulate a nucleus for the vagrant discontents of other lands.  And yet
it was a proud thought, a forcible appeal to the sympathies of an
American, that these unfortunates claimed the privileges of citizenship
in our Republic on the strength of the very same noble misdemeanors that
had rendered them outlaws to their native despotisms.  So I gave them
what small help I could.  Methinks the true patriots and martyr-spirits
of the whole world should have been conscious of a pang near the heart,
when a deadly blow was aimed at the vitality of a country which they have
felt to be their own in the last resort.

As for my countrymen, I grew better acquainted with many of our national
characteristics during those four years than in all my preceding life.
Whether brought more strikingly out by the contrast with English manners,
or that my Yankee friends assumed an extra peculiarity from a sense of
defiant patriotism, so it was that their tones, sentiments, and behavior,
even their figures and cast of countenance, all seemed chiselled in
sharper angles than ever I had imagined them to be at home.  It impressed
me with an odd idea of having somehow lost the property of my own person,
when I occasionally heard one of them speaking of me as "my Consul"!
They often came to the Consulate in parties of half a dozen or more, on
no business whatever, but merely to subject their public servant to a
rigid examination, and see how he was getting on with his duties.  These
interviews were rather formidable, being characterized by a certain
stiffness which I felt to be sufficiently irksome at the moment, though
it looks laughable enough in the retrospect.  It is my firm belief that
these fellow-citizens, possessing a native tendency to organization,
generally halted outside of the door to elect a speaker, chairman, or
moderator, and thus approached me with all the formalities of a
deputation from the American people.  After salutations on both sides,--
abrupt, awful, and severe on their part, and deprecatory on mine,--and
the national ceremony of shaking hands being duly gone through with, the
interview proceeded by a series of calm and well-considered questions or
remarks from the spokesman (no other of the guests vouchsafing to utter a
word), and diplomatic responses from the Consul, who sometimes found the
investigation a little more searching than he liked.  I flatter myself,
however, that, by much practice, I attained considerable skill in this
kind of intercourse, the art of which lies in passing off commonplaces
for new and valuable truths, and talking trash and emptiness in such a
way that a pretty acute auditor might mistake it for something solid.  If
there be any better method of dealing with such junctures,--when talk is
to be created out of nothing, and within the scope of several minds at
once, so that you cannot apply yourself to your interlocutor's
individuality,--I have not learned it.

Sitting, as it were, in the gateway between the Old World and the New,
where the steamers and packets landed the greater part of our wandering
countrymen, and received them again when their wanderings were done, I
saw that no people on earth have such vagabond habits as ourselves.  The
Continental races never travel at all if they can help it; nor does an
Englishman ever think of stirring abroad, unless he has the money to
spare, or proposes to himself some definite advantage from the journey;
but it seemed to me that nothing was more common than for a young
American deliberately to spend all his resources in an aesthetic
peregrination about Europe, returning with pockets nearly empty to begin
the world in earnest.  It happened, indeed, much oftener than was at all
agreeable to myself, that their funds held out just long enough to bring
them to the door of my Consulate, where they entered as if with an
undeniable right to its shelter and protection, and required at my hands
to be sent home again.  In my first simplicity,--finding them gentlemanly
in manners, passably educated, and only tempted a little beyond their
means by a laudable desire of improving and refining themselves, or,
perhaps for the sake of getting better artistic instruction in music,
painting, or sculpture than our country could supply,--I sometimes took
charge of them on my private responsibility, since our government gives
itself no trouble about its stray children, except the seafaring class.
But, after a few such experiments, discovering that none of these
estimable and ingenuous young men, however trustworthy they might appear,
ever dreamed of reimbursing the Consul, I deemed it expedient to take
another course with them.  Applying myself to some friendly shipmaster, I
engaged homeward passages on their behalf, with the understanding that
they were to make themselves serviceable on shipboard; and I remember
several very pathetic appeals from painters and musicians, touching the
damage which their artistic fingers were likely to incur from handling
the ropes.  But my observation of so many heavier troubles left me very
little tenderness for their finger-ends.  In time I grew to be reasonably
hard-hearted, though it never was quite possible to leave a countryman
with no shelter save an English poorhouse, when, as he invariably
averred, he had only to set foot on his native soil to be possessed of
ample funds.  It was my ultimate conclusion, however, that American
ingenuity may be pretty safely left to itself, and that, one way or
another, a Yankee vagabond is certain to turn up at his own threshold, if
he has any, without help of a Consul, and perhaps be taught a lesson of
foresight that may profit him hereafter.

Among these stray Americans, I met with no other case so remarkable as
that of an old man, who was in the habit of visiting me once in a few
months, and soberly affirmed that he had been wandering about England
more than a quarter of a century (precisely twenty-seven years, I think),
and all the while doing his utmost to get home again.  Herman Melville,
in his excellent novel or biography of "Israel Potter," has an idea
somewhat similar to this.  The individual now in question was a mild and
patient, but very ragged and pitiable old fellow, shabby beyond
description, lean and hungry-looking, but with a large and somewhat red
nose.  He made no complaint of his ill-fortune, but only repeated in a
quiet voice, with a pathos of which he was himself evidently unconscious,
"I want to get home to Ninety-second Street, Philadelphia."  He described
himself as a printer by trade, and said that he had come over when he was
a younger man, in the hope of bettering himself, and for the sake of
seeing the Old Country, but had never since been rich enough to pay his
homeward passage.  His manner and accent did not quite convince me that
he was an American, and I told him so; but he steadfastly affirmed, "Sir,
I was born and have lived in Ninety-second Street, Philadelphia," and
then went on to describe some public edifices and other local objects
with which he used to be familiar, adding, with a simplicity that touched
me very closely, "Sir, I had rather be there than here!"  Though I still
manifested a lingering doubt, he took no offence, replying with the
same mild depression as at first, and insisting again and again on
Ninety-second Street.  Up to the time when I saw him, he still got a
little occasional job-work at his trade, but subsisted mainly on such
charity as he met with in his wanderings, shifting from place to place
continually, and asking assistance to convey him to his native land.
Possibly he was an impostor, one of the multitudinous shapes of English
vagabondism, and told his falsehood with such powerful simplicity,
because, by many repetitions, he had convinced himself of its truth.  But
if, as I believe, the tale was fact, how very strange and sad was this
old man's fate!  Homeless on a foreign shore, looking always towards his
country, coming again and again to the point whence so many were setting
sail for it,--so many who would soon tread in Ninety-second Street,--
losing, in this long series of years, some of the distinctive
characteristics of an American, and at last dying and surrendering his
clay to be a portion of the soil whence he could not escape in his
lifetime.

He appeared to see that he had moved me, but did not attempt to press his
advantage with any new argument, or any varied form of entreaty.  He had
but scanty and scattered thoughts in his gray head, and in the intervals
of those, like the refrain of an old ballad, came in the monotonous
burden of his appeal, "If I could only find myself in Ninety-second
Street, Philadelphia!"  But even his desire of getting home had ceased to
be an ardent one (if, indeed, it had not always partaken of the dreamy
sluggishness of his character), although it remained his only locomotive
impulse, and perhaps the sole principle of life that kept his blood from
actual torpor.

The poor old fellow's story seemed to me almost as worthy of being
chanted in immortal song as that of Odysseus or Evangeline.  I took his
case into deep consideration, but dared not incur the moral
responsibility of sending him across the sea, at his age, after so many
years of exile, when the very tradition of him had passed away, to find
his friends dead, or forgetful, or irretrievably vanished, and the whole
country become more truly a foreign land to him than England was now,--
and even Ninety-second Street, in the weedlike decay and growth of our
localities, made over anew and grown unrecognizable by his old eyes.
That street, so patiently longed for, had transferred itself to the New
Jerusalem, and he must seek it there, contenting his slow heart,
meanwhile, with the smoke-begrimed thoroughfares of English towns,
or the green country lanes and by-paths with which his wanderings had
made him familiar; for doubtless he had a beaten track and was the
"long-remembered beggar" now, with food and a roughly hospitable greeting
ready for him at many a farm-house door, and his choice of lodging under
a score of haystacks.  In America, nothing awaited him but that worst
form of disappointment which comes under the guise of a long-cherished
and late-accomplished purpose, and then a year or two of dry and barren
sojourn in an almshouse, and death among strangers at last, where he had
imagined a circle of familiar faces.  So I contented myself with giving
him alms, which he thankfully accepted, and went away with bent shoulders
and an aspect of gentle forlornness; returning upon his orbit, however,
after a few months, to tell the same sad and quiet story of his abode in
England for more than twenty-seven years, in all which time he had been
endeavoring, and still endeavored as patiently as ever, to find his way
home to Ninety-second Street, Philadelphia.

I recollect another case, of a more ridiculous order, but still with a
foolish kind of pathos entangled in it, which impresses me now more
forcibly than it did at the moment.  One day, a queer, stupid,
good-natured, fat-faced individual came into my private room, dressed in
a sky-blue, cut-away coat and mixed trousers, both garments worn and
shabby, and rather too small for his overgrown bulk.  After a little
preliminary talk, he turned out to be a country shopkeeper (from
Connecticut, I think), who had left a flourishing business, and come over
to England purposely and solely to have an interview with the Queen.
Some years before he had named his two children, one for her Majesty and
the other for Prince Albert, and had transmitted photographs of the
little people, as well as of his wife and himself, to the illustrious
godmother.  The Queen had gratefully acknowledged the favor in a letter
under the hand of her private secretary.  Now, the shopkeeper, like a
great many other Americans, had long cherished a fantastic notion that he
was one of the rightful heirs of a rich English estate; and on the
strength of her Majesty's letter and the hopes of royal patronage which
it inspired, he had shut up his little country-store and come over to
claim his inheritance.  On the voyage, a German fellow-passenger had
relieved him of his money on pretence of getting it favorably exchanged,
and had disappeared immediately on the ship's arrival; so that the poor
fellow was compelled to pawn all his clothes, except the remarkably
shabby ones in which I beheld him, and in which (as he himself hinted,
with a melancholy, yet good-natured smile) he did not look altogether fit
to see the Queen.  I agreed with him that the bobtailed coat and mixed
trousers constituted a very odd-looking court-dress, and suggested that
it was doubtless his present purpose to get back to Connecticut as fast
as possible.  But no!  The resolve to see the Queen was as strong in him
as ever; and it was marvellous the pertinacity with which he clung to it
amid raggedness and starvation, and the earnestness of his supplication
that I would supply him with funds for a suitable appearance at Windsor
Castle.

I never had so satisfactory a perception of a complete booby before in my
life; and it caused me to feel kindly towards him, and yet impatient and
exasperated on behalf of common-sense, which could not possibly tolerate
that such an unimaginable donkey should exist.  I laid his absurdity
before him in the very plainest terms, but without either exciting his
anger or shaking his resolution.  "O my dear man," quoth he, with
good-natured, placid, simple, and tearful stubbornness, "if you could but
enter into my feelings and see the matter from beginning to end as I see
it!"  To confess the truth, I have since felt that I was hard-hearted to
the poor simpleton, and that there was more weight in his remonstrance
than I chose to be sensible of, at the time; for, like many men who have
been in the habit of making playthings or tools of their imagination and
sensibility, I was too rigidly tenacious of what was reasonable in the
affairs of real life.  And even absurdity has its rights, when, as in
this case, it has absorbed a human being's entire nature and purposes.  I
ought to have transmitted him to Mr. Buchanan, in London, who, being a
good-natured old gentleman, and anxious, just then, to gratify the
universal Yankee nation, might, for the joke's sake, have got him
admittance to the Queen, who had fairly laid herself open to his visit,
and has received hundreds of our countrymen on infinitely slighter
grounds.  But I was inexorable, being turned to flint by the insufferable
proximity of a fool, and refused to interfere with his business in any
way except to procure him a passage home.  I can see his face of mild,
ridiculous despair, at this moment, and appreciate, better than I could
then, how awfully cruel he must have felt my obduracy to be.  For years
and years, the idea of an interview with Queen Victoria had haunted his
poor foolish mind; and now, when he really stood on English ground, and
the palace-door was hanging ajar for him, he was expected to turn brick,
a penniless and bamboozled simpleton, merely because an iron-hearted
consul refused to lend him thirty shillings (so low had his demand
ultimately sunk) to buy a second-class ticket on the rail for London!

He visited the Consulate several times afterwards, subsisting on a
pittance that I allowed him in the hope of gradually starving him back to
Connecticut, assailing me with the old petition at every opportunity,
looking shabbier at every visit, but still thoroughly good-tempered,
mildly stubborn, and smiling through his tears, not without a perception
of the ludicrousness of his own position.  Finally, he disappeared
altogether, and whither he had wandered, and whether he ever saw the
Queen, or wasted quite away in the endeavor, I never knew; but I remember
unfolding the "Times," about that period, with a daily dread of reading
an account of a ragged Yankee's attempt to steal into Buckingham Palace,
and how he smiled tearfully at his captors and besought them to introduce
him to her Majesty.  I submit to Mr. Secretary Seward that he ought to
make diplomatic remonstrances to the British Ministry, and require them
to take such order that the Queen shall not any longer bewilder the wits
of our poor compatriots by responding to their epistles and thanking them
for their photographs.

One circumstance in the foregoing incident--I mean the unhappy
storekeeper's notion of establishing his claim to an English estate--was
common to a great many other applications, personal or by letter, with
which I was favored by my countrymen.  The cause of this peculiar
insanity lies deep in the Anglo-American heart.  After all these bloody
wars and vindictive animosities, we have still an unspeakable yearning
towards England.  When our forefathers left the old home, they pulled up
many of their roots, but trailed along with them others, which were never
snapt asunder by the tug of such a lengthening distance, nor have been
torn out of the original soil by the violence of subsequent struggles,
nor severed by the edge of the sword.  Even so late as these days, they
remain entangled with our heart-strings, and might often have influenced
our national cause like the tiller-ropes of a ship, if the rough gripe of
England had been capable of managing so sensitive a kind of machinery.
It has required nothing less than the boorishness, the stolidity, the
self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jealousy, the half-sagacity,
invariably blind of one eye and often distorted of the other, that
characterize this strange people, to compel us to be a great nation in
our own right, instead of continuing virtually, if not in name, a
province of their small island.  What pains did they take to shake us
off, and have ever since taken to keep us wide apart from them!  It might
seem their folly, but was really their fate, or, rather, the Providence
of God, who has doubtless a work for us to do, in which the massive
materiality of the English character would have been too ponderous a
dead-weight upon our progress.  And, besides, if England had been wise
enough to twine our new vigor round about her ancient strength, her power
would have been too firmly established ever to yield, in its due season,
to the otherwise immutable law of imperial vicissitude.  The earth might
then have beheld the intolerable spectacle of a sovereignty and
institutions, imperfect, but indestructible.

Nationally, there has ceased to be any peril of so inauspicious and yet
outwardly attractive an amalgamation.  But as an individual, the American
is often conscious of the deep-rooted sympathies that belong more fitly
to times gone by, and feels a blind pathetic tendency to wander back
again, which makes itself evident in such wild dreams as I have alluded
to above, about English inheritances.  A mere coincidence of names (the
Yankee one, perhaps, having been assumed by legislative permission), a
supposititious pedigree, a silver mug on which an anciently engraved
coat-of-arms has been half scrubbed out, a seal with an uncertain crest,
an old yellow letter or document in faded ink, the more scantily legible
the better,--rubbish of this kind, found in a neglected drawer, has been
potent enough to turn the brain of many an honest Republican, especially
if assisted by an advertisement for lost heirs, cut out of a British
newspaper.  There is no estimating or believing, till we come into a
position to know it, what foolery lurks latent in the breasts of very
sensible people.  Remembering such sober extravagances, I should not be
at all surprised to find that I am myself guilty of some unsuspected
absurdity, that may appear to me the most substantial trait in my
character.

I might fill many pages with instances of this diseased American appetite
for English soil.  A respectable-looking woman, well advanced in life, of
sour aspect, exceedingly homely, but decidedly New-Englandish in figure
and manners, came to my office with a great bundle of documents, at the
very first glimpse of which I apprehended something terrible.  Nor was I
mistaken.  The bundle contained evidences of her indubitable claim to the
site on which Castle Street, the Town Hall, the Exchange, and all the
principal business part of Liverpool have long been situated; and with
considerable peremptoriness, the good lady signified her expectation that
I should take charge of her suit, and prosecute it to judgment; not,
however, on the equitable condition of receiving half the value of the
property recovered (which, in case of complete success, would have made
both of us ten or twenty fold millionaires), but without recompense or
reimbursement of legal expenses, solely as an incident of my official
duty.  Another time came two ladies, bearing a letter of emphatic
introduction from his Excellency the Governor of their native State, who
testified in most satisfactory terms to their social respectability.
They were claimants of a great estate in Cheshire, and announced
themselves as blood-relatives of Queen Victoria,--a point, however, which
they deemed it expedient to keep in the background until their
territorial rights should be established, apprehending that the Lord High
Chancellor might otherwise be less likely to come to a fair decision in
respect to them, from a probable disinclination to admit new members into
the royal kin.  Upon my honor, I imagine that they had an eye to the
possibility of the eventual succession of one or both of them to the
crown of Great Britain through superiority of title over the Brunswick
line; although, being maiden ladies, like their predecessor Elizabeth,
they could hardly have hoped to establish a lasting dynasty upon the
throne.  It proves, I trust, a certain disinterestedness on my part,
that, encountering them thus in the dawn of their fortunes, I forbore to
put in a plea for a future dukedom.

Another visitor of the same class was a gentleman of refined manners,
handsome figure, and remarkably intellectual aspect.  Like many men of an
adventurous cast, he had so quiet a deportment, and such an apparent
disinclination to general sociability, that you would have fancied him
moving always along some peaceful and secluded walk of life.  Yet,
literally from his first hour, he had been tossed upon the surges of a
most varied and tumultuous existence, having been born at sea, of
American parentage, but on board of a Spanish vessel, and spending many
of the subsequent years in voyages, travels, and outlandish incidents and
vicissitudes, which, methought, had hardly been paralleled since the days
of Gulliver or De Foe.  When his dignified reserve was overcome, he had
the faculty of narrating these adventures with wonderful eloquence,
working up his descriptive sketches with such intuitive perception of the
picturesque points that the whole was thrown forward with a positively
illusive effect, like matters of your own visual experience.  In fact,
they were so admirably done that I could never more than half believe
them, because the genuine affairs of life are not apt to transact
themselves so artistically.  Many of his scenes were laid in the East,
and among those seldom-visited archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean, so that
there was an Oriental fragrance breathing through his talk and an odor of
the Spice Islands still lingering in his garments.  He had much to say of
the delightful qualities of the Malay pirates, who, indeed, carry on a
predatory warfare against the ships of all civilized nations, and cut
every Christian throat among their prisoners; but (except for deeds of
that character, which are the rule and habit of their life, and matter of
religion and conscience with them) they are a gentle-natured people, of
primitive innocence and integrity.

But his best story was about a race of men (if men they were) who seemed
so fully to realize Swift's wicked fable of the Yahoos, that my friend
was much exercised with psychological speculations whether or no they had
any souls.  They dwelt in the wilds of Ceylon, like other savage beasts,
hairy, and spotted with tufts of fur, filthy, shameless, weaponless
(though warlike in their individual bent), tool-less, houseless,
language-less, except for a few guttural sounds, hideously dissonant,
whereby they held some rudest kind of communication among themselves.
They lacked both memory and foresight, and were wholly destitute of
government, social institutions, or law or rulership of any description,
except the immediate tyranny of the strongest; radically untamable,
moreover, save that the people of the country managed to subject a few of
the less ferocious and stupid ones to outdoor servitude among their other
cattle.  They were beastly in almost all their attributes, and that to
such a degree that the observer, losing sight of any link betwixt them
and manhood, could generally witness their brutalities without greater
horror than at those of some disagreeable quadruped in a menagerie.  And
yet, at times, comparing what were the lowest general traits in his own
race with what was highest in these abominable monsters, he found a
ghastly similitude that half compelled him to recognize them as human
brethren.

After these Gulliverian researches, my agreeable acquaintance had fallen
under the ban of the Dutch government, and had suffered (this, at least,
being matter of fact) nearly two years' imprisonment, with confiscation
of a large amount of property, for which Mr. Belmont, our minister at the
Hague, had just made a peremptory demand of reimbursement and damages.
Meanwhile, since arriving in England on his way to the United States, he
had been providentially led to inquire into the circumstances of his
birth on shipboard, and had discovered that not himself alone, but
another baby, had come into the world during the same voyage of the
prolific vessel, and that there were almost irrefragable reasons for
believing that these two children had been assigned to the wrong mothers.
Many reminiscences of his early days confirmed him in the idea that his
nominal parents were aware of the exchange.  The family to which he felt
authorized to attribute his lineage was that of a nobleman, in the
picture-gallery of whose country-seat (whence, if I mistake not, our
adventurous friend had just returned) he had discovered a portrait
bearing a striking resemblance to himself.  As soon as he should have
reported the outrageous action of the Dutch government to President
Pierce and the Secretary of State, and recovered the confiscated
property, he purposed to return to England and establish his claim to the
nobleman's title and estate.

I had accepted his Oriental fantasies (which, indeed, to do him justice,
have been recorded by scientific societies among the genuine phenomena of
natural history), not as matters of indubitable credence, but as
allowable specimens of an imaginative traveller's vivid coloring and rich
embroidery on the coarse texture and dull neutral tints of truth.  The
English romance was among the latest communications that he intrusted to
my private ear; and as soon as I heard the first chapter,--so wonderfully
akin to what I might have wrought out of my own head, not unpractised in
such figments,--I began to repent having made myself responsible for the
future nobleman's passage homeward in the next Collins steamer.
Nevertheless, should his English rent-roll fall a little behindhand, his
Dutch claim for a hundred thousand dollars was certainly in the hands of
our government, and might at least be valuable to the extent of thirty
pounds, which I had engaged to pay on his behalf.  But I have reason to
fear that his Dutch riches turned out to be Dutch gilt, or fairy gold,
and his English country-seat a mere castle in the air,--which I
exceedingly regret, for he was a delightful companion and a very
gentlemanly man.

A Consul, in his position of universal responsibility, the general
adviser and helper, sometimes finds himself compelled to assume the
guardianship of personages who, in their own sphere, are supposed capable
of superintending the highest interests of whole communities.  An elderly
Irishman, a naturalized citizen, once put the desire and expectation of
all our penniless vagabonds into a very suitable phrase, by pathetically
entreating me to be a "father to him"; and, simple as I sit scribbling
here, I have acted a father's part, not only by scores of such unthrifty
old children as himself, but by a progeny of far loftier pretensions.  It
may be well for persons who are conscious of any radical weakness in
their character, any besetting sin, any unlawful propensity, any
unhallowed impulse, which (while surrounded with the manifold restraints
that protect a man from that treacherous and lifelong enemy, his lower
self, in the circle of society where he is at home) they may have
succeeded in keeping under the lock and key of strictest propriety,--it
may be well for them, before seeking the perilous freedom of a distant
land, released from the watchful eyes of neighborhoods and coteries,
lightened of that wearisome burden, an immaculate name, and blissfully
obscure after years of local prominence,--it may be well for such
individuals to know that when they set foot on a foreign shore, the
long-imprisoned Evil, scenting a wild license in the unaccustomed
atmosphere, is apt to grow riotous in its iron cage.  It rattles the
rusty barriers with gigantic turbulence, and if there be an infirm joint
anywhere in the framework, it breaks madly forth, compressing the
mischief of a lifetime into a little space.

A parcel of letters had been accumulating at the Consulate for two or
three weeks, directed to a certain Doctor of Divinity, who had left
America by a sailing-packet and was still upon the sea.  In due time, the
vessel arrived, and the reverend Doctor paid me a visit.  He was a
fine-looking middle-aged gentleman, a perfect model of clerical
propriety, scholar-like, yet with the air of a man of the world rather
than a student, though overspread with the graceful sanctity of a popular
metropolitan divine, a part of whose duty it might be to exemplify the
natural accordance between Christianity and good-breeding.  He seemed a
little excited, as an American is apt to be on first arriving in England,
but conversed with intelligence as well as animation, making himself so
agreeable that his visit stood out in considerable relief from the
monotony of my daily commonplace.  As I learned from authentic sources,
he was somewhat distinguished in his own region for fervor and eloquence
in the pulpit, but was now compelled to relinquish it temporarily for the
purpose of renovating his impaired health by an extensive tour in Europe.
Promising to dine with me, he took up his bundle of letters and went
away.

The Doctor, however, failed to make his appearance at dinner-time, or to
apologize the next day for his absence; and in the course of a day or two
more, I forgot all about him, concluding that he must have set forth on
his Continental travels, the plan of which he had sketched out at our
interview.  But, by and by, I received a call from the master of the
vessel in which he had arrived.  He was in some alarm about his
passenger, whose luggage remained on shipboard, but of whom nothing had
been heard or seen since the moment of his departure from the Consulate.
We conferred together, the captain and I, about the expediency of setting
the police on the traces (if any were to be found) of our vanished
friend; but it struck me that the good captain was singularly reticent,
and that there was something a little mysterious in a few points that he
hinted at rather than expressed; so that, scrutinizing the affair
carefully, I surmised that the intimacy of life on shipboard might have
taught him more about the reverend gentleman than, for some reason or
other, he deemed it prudent to reveal.  At home, in our native country, I
would have looked to the Doctor's personal safety and left his reputation
to take care of itself, knowing that the good fame of a thousand saintly
clergymen would amply dazzle out any lamentable spot on a single
brother's character.  But in scornful and invidious England, on the idea
that the credit of the sacred office was measurably intrusted to my
discretion, I could not endure, for the sake of American Doctors of
Divinity generally, that this particular Doctor should cut an ignoble
figure in the police reports of the English newspapers, except at the
last necessity.  The clerical body, I flatter myself, will acknowledge
that I acted on their own principle.  Besides, it was now too late; the
mischief and violence, if any had been impending, were not of a kind
which it requires the better part of a week to perpetrate; and to sum up
the entire matter, I felt certain, from a good deal of somewhat similar
experience, that, if the missing Doctor still breathed this vital air, he
would turn up at the Consulate as soon as his money should be stolen or
spent.

Precisely a week after this reverend person's disappearance, there came
to my office a tall, middle-aged gentleman in a blue military surtout,
braided at the seams, but out at elbows, and as shabby as if the wearer
had been bivouacking in it throughout a Crimean campaign.  It was
buttoned up to the very chin, except where three or four of the buttons
were lost; nor was there any glimpse of a white shirt-collar illuminating
the rusty black cravat.  A grisly mustache was just beginning to roughen
the stranger's upper lip.  He looked disreputable to the last degree, but
still had a ruined air of good society glimmering about him, like a few
specks of polish on a sword-blade that has lain corroding in a mud-puddle.
I took him to be some American marine officer, of dissipated habits, or
perhaps a cashiered British major, stumbling into the wrong quarters
through the unrectified bewilderment of last night's debauch.  He greeted
me, however, with polite familiarity, as though we had been previously
acquainted; whereupon I drew coldly back (as sensible people naturally
do, whether from strangers or former friends, when too evidently at odds
with fortune) and requested to know who my visitor might be, and what was
his business at the Consulate.  "Am I then so changed?" he exclaimed with
a vast depth of tragic intonation; and after a little blind and
bewildered talk, behold! the truth flashed upon me.  It was the Doctor of
Divinity!  If I had meditated a scene or a coup de theatre, I could not
have contrived a more effectual one than by this simple and genuine
difficulty of recognition.  The poor Divine must have felt that he had
lost his personal identity through the misadventures of one little week.
And, to say the truth, he did look as if, like Job, on account of his
especial sanctity, he had been delivered over to the direst temptations
of Satan, and proving weaker than the man of Uz, the Arch Enemy had been
empowered to drag him through Tophet, transforming him, in the process,
from the most decorous of metropolitan clergymen into the rowdiest and
dirtiest of disbanded officers.  I never fathomed the mystery of his
military costume, but conjectured that a lurking sense of fitness had
induced him to exchange his clerical garments for this habit of a sinner;
nor can I tell precisely into what pitfall, not more of vice than
terrible calamity, he had precipitated himself,--being more than
satisfied to know that the outcasts of society can sink no lower than
this poor, desecrated wretch had sunk.

The opportunity, I presume, does not often happen to a layman, of
administering moral and religious reproof to a Doctor of Divinity; but
finding the occasion thrust upon me, and the hereditary Puritan waxing
strong in my breast, I deemed it a matter of conscience not to let it
pass entirely unimproved.  The truth is, I was unspeakably shocked and
disgusted.  Not, however, that I was then to learn that clergymen are
made of the same flesh and blood as other people, and perhaps lack one
small safeguard which the rest of us possess, because they are aware of
their own peccability, and therefore cannot look up to the clerical class
for the proof of the possibility of a pure life on earth, with such
reverential confidence as we are prone to do.  But I remembered the
innocent faith of my boyhood, and the good old silver-headed clergyman,
who seemed to me as much a saint then on earth as he is now in heaven,
and partly for whose sake, through all these darkening years, I retain a
devout, though not intact nor unwavering respect for the entire
fraternity.  What a hideous wrong, therefore, had the backslider
inflicted on his brethren, and still more on me, who much needed whatever
fragments of broken reverence (broken, not as concerned religion, but its
earthly institutions and professors) it might yet be possible to patch
into a sacred image!  Should all pulpits and communion-tables have
thenceforth a stain upon them, and the guilty one go unrebuked for it?
So I spoke to the unhappy man as I never thought myself warranted in
speaking to any other mortal, hitting him hard, doing my utmost to find
out his vulnerable part, and prick him into the depths of it.  And not
without more effect than I had dreamed of, or desired!

No doubt, the novelty of the Doctor's reversed position, thus standing up
to receive such a fulmination as the clergy have heretofore arrogated the
exclusive right of inflicting, might give additional weight and sting to
the words which I found utterance for.  But there was another reason
(which, had I in the least suspected it, would have closed my lips at
once) for his feeling morbidly sensitive to the cruel rebuke that I
administered.  The unfortunate man had come to me, laboring under one of
the consequences of his riotous outbreak, in the shape of delirium
tremens; he bore a hell within the compass of his own breast, all the
torments of which blazed up with tenfold inveteracy when I thus took upon
myself the Devil's office of stirring up the red-hot embers.  His
emotions, as well as the external movement and expression of them by
voice, countenance, and gesture, were terribly exaggerated by the
tremendous vibration of nerves resulting from the disease.  It was the
deepest tragedy I ever witnessed.  I know sufficiently, from that one
experience, how a condemned soul would manifest its agonies; and for the
future, if I have anything to do with sinners, I mean to operate upon
them through sympathy, and not rebuke.  What had I to do with rebuking
him?  The disease, long latent in his heart, had shown itself in a
frightful eruption on the surface of his life.  That was all!  Is it a
thing to scold the sufferer for?

To conclude this wretched story, the poor Doctor of Divinity, having been
robbed of all his money in this little airing beyond the limits of
propriety, was easily persuaded to give up the intended tour and return
to his bereaved flock, who, very probably, were thereafter conscious of
an increased unction in his soul-stirring eloquence, without suspecting
the awful depths into which their pastor had dived in quest of it.  His
voice is now silent.  I leave it to members of his own profession to
decide whether it was better for him thus to sin outright, and so to be
let into the miserable secret what manner of man he was, or to have gone
through life outwardly unspotted, making the first discovery of his
latent evil at the judgment-seat.  It has occurred to me that his dire
calamity, as both he and I regarded it, might have been the only method
by which precisely such a man as himself, and so situated, could be
redeemed.  He has learned, ere now, how that matter stood.

For a man, with a natural tendency to meddle with other people's
business, there could not possibly be a more congenial sphere than the
Liverpool Consulate.  For myself, I had never been in the habit of
feeling that I could sufficiently comprehend any particular conjunction
of circumstances with human character, to justify me in thrusting in my
awkward agency among the intricate and unintelligible machinery of
Providence.  I have always hated to give advice, especially when there is
a prospect of its being taken.  It is only one-eyed people who love to
advise, or have any spontaneous promptitude of action.  When a man opens
both his eyes, he generally sees about as many reasons for acting in any
one way as in any other, and quite as many for acting in neither; and is
therefore likely to leave his friends to regulate their own conduct, and
also to remain quiet as regards his especial affairs till necessity shall
prick him onward.  Nevertheless, the world and individuals flourish upon
a constant succession of blunders.  The secret of English practical
success lies in their characteristic faculty of shutting one eye, whereby
they get so distinct and decided a view of what immediately concerns them
that they go stumbling towards it over a hundred insurmountable
obstacles, and achieve a magnificent triumph without ever being aware of
half its difficulties.  If General McClellan could but have shut his left
eye, the right one would long ago have guided us into Richmond.
Meanwhile, I have strayed far away from the Consulate, where, as I was
about to say, I was compelled, in spite of my disinclination, to impart
both advice and assistance in multifarious affairs that did not
personally concern me, and presume that I effected about as little
mischief as other men in similar contingencies.  The duties of the office
carried me to prisons, police-courts, hospitals, lunatic asylums,
coroner's inquests, death-beds, funerals, and brought me in contact with
insane people, criminals, ruined speculators, wild adventurers,
diplomatists, brother-consuls, and all manner of simpletons and
unfortunates, in greater number and variety than I had ever dreamed of as
pertaining to America; in addition to whom there was an equivalent
multitude of English rogues, dexterously counterfeiting the genuine
Yankee article.  It required great discrimination not to be taken in by
these last-mentioned scoundrels; for they knew how to imitate our
national traits, had been at great pains to instruct themselves as
regarded American localities, and were not readily to be caught by a
cross-examination as to the topographical features, public institutions,
or prominent inhabitants of the places where they pretended to belong.
The best shibboleth I ever hit upon lay in the pronunciation of the word
"been," which the English invariably make to rhyme with "green," and we
Northerners, at least (in accordance, I think, with the custom of
Shakespeare's time), universally pronounce "bin."

All the matters that I have been treating of, however, were merely
incidental, and quite distinct from the real business of the office.  A
great part of the wear and tear of mind and temper resulted from the bad
relations between the seamen and officers of American ships.  Scarcely a
morning passed, but that some sailor came to show the marks of his
ill-usage on shipboard.  Often, it was a whole crew of them, each with
his broken head or livid bruise, and all testifying with one voice to a
constant series of savage outrages during the voyage; or, it might be,
they laid an accusation of actual murder, perpetrated by the first or
second officers with many blows of steel-knuckles, a rope's end, or a
marline-spike, or by the captain, in the twinkling of an eye, with a shot
of his pistol.  Taking the seamen's view of the case, you would suppose
that the gibbet was hungry for the murderers.  Listening to the captain's
defence, you would seem to discover that he and his officers were the
humanest of mortals, but were driven to a wholesome severity by the
mutinous conduct of the crew, who, moreover, had themselves slain their
comrade in the drunken riot and confusion of the first day or two after
they were shipped.  Looked at judicially, there appeared to be no right
side to the matter, nor any right side possible in so thoroughly vicious
a system as that of the American mercantile marine.  The Consul could do
little, except to take depositions, hold forth the greasy Testament to be
profaned anew with perjured kisses, and, in a few instances of murder or
manslaughter, carry the case before an English magistrate, who generally
decided that the evidence was too contradictory to authorize the
transmission of the accused for trial in America.  The newspapers all
over England contained paragraphs, inveighing against the cruelties of
American shipmasters.  The British Parliament took up the matter (for
nobody is so humane as John Bull, when his benevolent propensities are to
be gratified by finding fault with his neighbor), and caused Lord John
Russell to remonstrate with our government on the outrages for which it
was responsible before the world, and which it failed to prevent or
punish.  The American Secretary of State, old General Cass, responded,
with perfectly astounding ignorance of the subject, to the effect that
the statements of outrages had probably been exaggerated, that the
present laws of the United States were quite adequate to deal with them,
and that the interference of the British Minister was uncalled for.

The truth is, that the state of affairs was really very horrible, and
could be met by no laws at that time (or I presume now) in existence.  I
once thought of writing a pamphlet on the subject, but quitted the
Consulate before finding time to effect my purpose; and all that phase of
my life immediately assumed so dreamlike a consistency that I despaired
of making it seem solid or tangible to the public.  And now it looks
distant and dim, like troubles of a century ago.  The origin of the evil
lay in the character of the seamen, scarcely any of whom were American,
but the offscourings and refuse of all the seaports of the world, such
stuff as piracy is made of, together with a considerable intermixture of
returning emigrants, and a sprinkling of absolutely kidnapped American
citizens.  Even with such material, the ships were very inadequately
manned.  The shipmaster found himself upon the deep, with a vast
responsibility of property and human life upon his hands, and no means of
salvation except by compelling his inefficient and demoralized crew to
heavier exertions than could reasonably be required of the same number of
able seamen.  By law he had been intrusted with no discretion of
judicious punishment, he therefore habitually left the whole matter of
discipline to his irresponsible mates, men often of scarcely a superior
quality to the crew.  Hence ensued a great mass of petty outrages,
unjustifiable assaults, shameful indignities, and nameless cruelty,
demoralizing alike to the perpetrators and the sufferers; these
enormities fell into the ocean between the two countries, and could be
punished in neither.  Many miserable stories come back upon my memory as
I write; wrongs that were immense, but for which nobody could be held
responsible, and which, indeed, the closer you looked into them, the more
they lost the aspect of wilful misdoing and assumed that of an inevitable
calamity.  It was the fault of a system, the misfortune of an individual.
Be that as it may, however, there will be no possibility of dealing
effectually with these troubles as long as we deem it inconsistent with
our national dignity or interests to allow the English courts, under such
restrictions as may seem fit, a jurisdiction over offences perpetrated on
board our vessels in mid-ocean.

In such a life as this, the American shipmaster develops himself into a
man of iron energies, dauntless courage, and inexhaustible resource, at
the expense, it must be acknowledged, of some of the higher and gentler
traits which might do him excellent service in maintaining his authority.
The class has deteriorated of late years on account of the narrower field
of selection, owing chiefly to the diminution of that excellent body of
respectably educated New England seamen, from the flower of whom the
officers used to be recruited.  Yet I found them, in many cases, very
agreeable and intelligent companions, with less nonsense about them than
landsmen usually have, eschewers of fine-spun theories, delighting in
square and tangible ideas, but occasionally infested with prejudices that
stuck to their brains like barnacles to a ship's bottom.  I never could
flatter myself that I was a general favorite with them.  One or two,
perhaps, even now, would scarcely meet me on amicable terms.  Endowed
universally with a great pertinacity of will, they especially disliked
the interference of a consul with their management on shipboard;
notwithstanding which I thrust in my very limited authority at every
available opening, and did the utmost that lay in my power, though with
lamentably small effect, towards enforcing a better kind of discipline.
They thought, no doubt (and on plausible grounds enough, but scarcely
appreciating just that one little grain of hard New England sense, oddly
thrown in among the flimsier composition of the Consul's character), that
he, a landsman, a bookman, and, as people said of him, a fanciful
recluse, could not possibly understand anything of the difficulties or
the necessities of a shipmaster's position.  But their cold regards were
rather acceptable than otherwise, for it is exceedingly awkward to assume
a judicial austerity in the morning towards a man with whom you have been
hobnobbing over night.

With the technical details of the business of that great Consulate (for
great it then was, though now, I fear, wofully fallen off, and perhaps
never to be revived in anything like its former extent), I did not much
interfere.  They could safely be left to the treatment of two as
faithful, upright, and competent subordinates, both Englishmen, as ever a
man was fortunate enough to meet with, in a line of life altogether new
and strange to him.  I had come over with instructions to supply both
their places with Americans, but, possessing a happy faculty of knowing
my own interest and the public's, I quietly kept hold of them, being
little inclined to open the consular doors to a spy of the State
Department or an intriguer for my own office.  The venerable Vice-Consul,
Mr. Pearce, had witnessed the successive arrivals of a score of newly
appointed Consuls, shadowy and short-lived dignitaries, and carried his
reminiscences back to the epoch of Consul Maury, who was appointed by
Washington, and has acquired almost the grandeur of a mythical personage
in the annals of the Consulate.  The principal clerk, Mr. Wilding, who
has since succeeded to the Vice-Consulship, was a man of English
integrity,--not that the English are more honest than ourselves, but only
there is a certain sturdy reliableness common among them, which we do not
quite so invariably manifest in just these subordinate positions,--of
English integrity, combined with American acuteness of intellect,
quick-wittedness, and diversity of talent.  It seemed an immense pity
that he should wear out his life at a desk, without a step in advance
from year's end to year's end, when, had it been his luck to be born on
our side of the water, his bright faculties and clear probity would have
insured him eminent success in whatever path he night adopt.  Meanwhile,
it would have been a sore mischance to me, had any better fortune on his
part deprived me of Mr. Wilding's services.

A fair amount of common-sense, some acquaintance with the United States
Statutes, an insight into character, a tact of management, a general
knowledge of the world, and a reasonable but not too inveterately decided
preference for his own will and judgment over those of interested
people,--these natural attributes and moderate acquirements will enable a
consul to perform many of his duties respectably, but not to dispense
with a great variety of other qualifications, only attainable by long
experience.  Yet, I think, few consuls are so well accomplished.  An
appointment of whatever grade, in the diplomatic or consular service of
America, is too often what the English call a "job"; that is to say, it
is made on private and personal grounds, without a paramount eye to the
public good or the gentleman's especial fitness for the position.  It is
not too much to say (of course allowing for a brilliant exception here
and there), that an American never is thoroughly qualified for a foreign
post, nor has time to make himself so, before the revolution of the
political wheel discards him from his office.  Our country wrongs itself
by permitting such a system of unsuitable appointments, and, still more,
of removals for no cause, just when the incumbent might be beginning to
ripen into usefulness.  Mere ignorance of official detail is of
comparatively small moment; though it is considered indispensable, I
presume, that a man in any private capacity shall be thoroughly
acquainted with the machinery and operation of his business, and shall
not necessarily lose his position on having attained such knowledge.  But
there are so many more important things to be thought of, in the
qualifications of a foreign resident, that his technical dexterity or
clumsiness is hardly worth mentioning.

One great part of a consul's duty, for example, should consist in
building up for himself a recognized position in the society where he
resides, so that his local influence might be felt in behalf of his own
country, and, so far as they are compatible (as they generally are to the
utmost extent), for the interests of both nations.  The foreign city
should know that it has a permanent inhabitant and a hearty well-wisher
in him.  There are many conjunctures (and one of them is now upon us)
where a long-established, honored, and trusted American citizen, holding
a public position under our government in such a town as Liverpool, might
go far towards swaying and directing the sympathies of the inhabitants.
He might throw his own weight into the balance against mischief makers;
he might have set his foot on the first little spark of malignant
purpose, which the next wind may blow into a national war.  But we
wilfully give up all advantages of this kind.  The position is totally
beyond the attainment of an American; there to-day, bristling all over
with the porcupine quills of our Republic, and gone to-morrow, just as he
is becoming sensible of the broader and more generous patriotism which
might almost amalgamate with that of England, without losing an atom of
its native force and flavor.  In the changes that appear to await us, and
some of which, at least, can hardly fail to be for good, let us hope for
a reform in this matter.

For myself, as the gentle reader would spare me the trouble of saying, I
was not at all the kind of man to grow into such an ideal Consul as I
have here suggested.  I never in my life desired to be burdened with
public influence.  I disliked my office from the first, and never came
into any good accordance with it.  Its dignity, so far as it had any, was
an encumbrance; the attentions it drew upon me (such as invitations to
Mayor's banquets and public celebrations of all kinds, where, to my
horror, I found myself expected to stand up and speak) were--as I may say
without incivility or ingratitude, because there is nothing personal in
that sort of hospitality--a bore.  The official business was irksome, and
often painful.  There was nothing pleasant about the whole affair, except
the emoluments; and even those, never too bountifully reaped, were
diminished by more than half in the second or third year of my
incumbency.  All this being true, I was quite prepared, in advance of the
inauguration of Mr. Buchanan, to send in my resignation.  When my
successor arrived, I drew the long, delightful breath which first made me
thoroughly sensible what an unnatural life I had been leading, and
compelled me to admire myself for having battled with it so sturdily.
The newcomer proved to be a very genial and agreeable gentleman, an
F. F. V., and, as he pleasantly acknowledged, a Southern Fire Eater,
--an announcement to which I responded, with similar good-humor and
self-complacency, by parading my descent from an ancient line of
Massachusetts Puritans.  Since our brief acquaintanceship, my fire-eating
friend has had ample opportunities to banquet on his favorite diet, hot
and hot, in the Confederate service.  For myself, as soon as I was out of
office, the retrospect began to look unreal.  I could scarcely believe
that it was I,--that figure whom they called a Consul,--but a sort of
Double Ganger, who had been permitted to assume my aspect, under which he
went through his shadowy duties with a tolerable show of efficiency,
while my real self had lain, as regarded my proper mode of being and
acting, in a state of suspended animation.

The same sense of illusion still pursues me.  There is some mistake in
this matter.  I have been writing about another man's consular
experiences, with which, through some mysterious medium of transmitted
ideas, I find myself intimately acquainted, but in which I cannot
possibly have had a personal interest.  Is it not a dream altogether?
The figure of that poor Doctor of Divinity looks wonderfully lifelike; so
do those of the Oriental adventurer with the visionary coronet above his
brow, and the moonstruck visitor of the Queen, and the poor old wanderer,
seeking his native country through English highways and by-ways for
almost thirty years; and so would a hundred others that I might summon up
with similar distinctness.  But were they more than shadows?  Surely, I
think not.  Nor are these present pages a bit of intrusive autobiography.
Let not the reader wrong me by supposing it.  I never should have written
with half such unreserve, had it been a portion of this life congenial
with my nature, which I am living now, instead of a series of incidents
and characters entirely apart from my own concerns, and on which the
qualities personally proper to me could have had no bearing.  Almost the
only real incidents, as I see them now, were the visits of a young
English friend, a scholar and a literary amateur, between whom and myself
there sprung up an affectionate, and, I trust, not transitory regard.  He
used to come and sit or stand by my fireside, talking vivaciously and
eloquently with me about literature and life, his own national
characteristics and mine, with such kindly endurance of the many rough
republicanisms wherewith I assailed him, and such frank and amiable
assertion of all sorts of English prejudices and mistakes, that I
understood his countrymen infinitely the better for him, and was almost
prepared to love the intensest Englishman of them all, for his sake.  It
would gratify my cherished remembrance of this dear friend, if I could
manage, without offending him, or letting the public know it, to
introduce his name upon my page.  Bright was the illumination of my dusky
little apartment, as often as he made his appearance there!

The English sketches which I have been offering to the public comprise a
few of the more external and therefore more readily manageable things
that I took note of, in many escapes from the imprisonment of my consular
servitude.  Liverpool, though not very delightful as a place of
residence, is a most convenient and admirable point to get away from.
London is only five hours off by the fast train.  Chester, the most
curious town in England, with its encompassing wall, its ancient rows,
and its venerable cathedral, is close at hand.  North Wales, with all its
hills and ponds, its noble sea-scenery, its multitude of gray castles and
strange old villages, may be glanced at in a summer day or two.  The
lakes and mountains of Cumberland and Westmoreland may be reached before
dinner-time.  The haunted and legendary Isle of Man, a little kingdom by
itself, lies within the scope of an afternoon's voyage.  Edinburgh or
Glasgow are attainable over night, and Loch Lomond betimes in the
morning.  Visiting these famous localities, and a great many others, I
hope that I do not compromise my American patriotism by acknowledging
that I was often conscious of a fervent hereditary attachment to the
native soil of our forefathers, and felt it to be our own Old Home.




LEAMINGTON SPA.


In the course of several visits and stays of considerable length we
acquired a homelike feeling towards Leamington, and came back thither
again and again, chiefly because we had been there before.  Wandering and
wayside people, such as we had long since become, retain a few of the
instincts that belong to a more settled way of life, and often prefer
familiar and commonplace objects (for the very reason that they are so)
to the dreary strangeness of scenes that might be thought much better
worth the seeing.  There is a small nest of a place in Leamington--at
No. 10, Lansdowne Circus--upon which, to this day, my reminiscences are
apt to settle as one of the coziest nooks in England or in the world; not
that it had any special charm of its own, but only that we stayed long
enough to know it well, and even to grow a little tired of it.  In my
opinion, the very tediousness of home and friends makes a part of what we
love them for; if it be not mixed in sufficiently with the other elements
of life, there may be mad enjoyment, but no happiness.

The modest abode to which I have alluded forms one of a circular range of
pretty, moderate-sized, two-story houses, all built on nearly the same
plan, and each provided with its little grass-plot, its flowers, its
tufts of box trimmed into globes and other fantastic shapes, and its
verdant hedges shutting the house in from the common drive and dividing
it from its equally cosey neighbors.  Coming out of the door, and taking
a turn round the circle of sister-dwellings, it is difficult to find your
way back by any distinguishing individuality of your own habitation.  In
the centre of the Circus is a space fenced in with iron railing, a small
play-place and sylvan retreat for the children of the precinct, permeated
by brief paths through the fresh English grass, and shadowed by various
shrubbery; amid which, if you like, you may fancy yourself in a deep
seclusion, though probably the mark of eye-shot from the windows of all
the surrounding houses.  But, in truth, with regard to the rest of the
town and the world at large, all abode here is a genuine seclusion; for
the ordinary stream of life does not run through this little, quiet pool,
and few or none of the inhabitants seem to be troubled with any business
or outside activities.  I used to set them down as half-pay officers,
dowagers of narrow income, elderly maiden ladies, and other people of
respectability, but small account, such as hang on the world's skirts
rather than actually belong to it.  The quiet of the place was seldom
disturbed, except by the grocer and butcher, who came to receive orders,
or by the cabs, hackney-coaches, and Bath-chairs, in which the ladies
took an infrequent airing, or the livery-steed which the retired captain
sometimes bestrode for a morning ride, or by the red-coated postman who
went his rounds twice a day to deliver letters, and again in the evening,
ringing a hand-bell, to take letters for the mail.  In merely mentioning
these slight interruptions of its sluggish stillness, I seem to myself to
disturb too much the atmosphere of quiet that brooded over the spot;
whereas its impression upon me was, that the world had never found the
way hither, or had forgotten it, and that the fortunate inhabitants were
the only ones who possessed the spell-word of admittance.  Nothing could
have suited me better, at the time; for I had been holding a position of
public servitude, which imposed upon me (among a great many lighter
duties) the ponderous necessity of being universally civil and sociable.

Nevertheless, if a man were seeking the bustle of society, he might find
it more readily in Leamington than in most other English towns.  It is a
permanent watering-place, a sort of institution to which I do not know
any close parallel in American life: for such places as Saratoga bloom
only for the summer-season, and offer a thousand dissimilitudes even
then; while Leamington seems to be always in flower, and serves as a home
to the homeless all the year round.  Its original nucleus, the plausible
excuse for the town's coming into prosperous existence, lies in the
fiction of a chalybeate well, which, indeed, is so far a reality that out
of its magical depths have gushed streets, groves, gardens, mansions,
shops, and churches, and spread themselves along the banks of the little
river Leam.  This miracle accomplished, the beneficent fountain has
retired beneath a pump-room, and appears to have given up all pretensions
to the remedial virtues formerly attributed to it.  I know not whether
its waters are ever tasted nowadays; but not the less does Leamington--in
pleasant Warwickshire, at the very midmost point of England, in a good
hunting neighborhood, and surrounded by country-seats and castles--
continue to be a resort of transient visitors, and the more permanent
abode of a class of genteel, unoccupied, well-to-do, but not very wealthy
people, such as are hardly known among ourselves.  Persons who have no
country-houses, and whose fortunes are inadequate to a London
expenditure, find here, I suppose, a sort of town and country life in
one.

In its present aspect the town is of no great age.  In contrast with the
antiquity of many places in its neighborhood, it has a bright, new face,
and seems almost to smile even amid the sombreness of an English autumn.
Nevertheless, it is hundreds upon hundreds of years old, if we reckon up
that sleepy lapse of time during which it existed as a small village of
thatched houses, clustered round a priory; and it would still have been
precisely such a rural village, but for a certain Dr. Jephson, who lived
within the memory of man, and who found out the magic well, and foresaw
what fairy wealth might be made to flow from it.  A public garden has
been laid out along the margin of the Leam, and called the Jephson
Garden, in honor of him who created the prosperity of his native spot.  A
little way within the garden-gate there is a circular temple of Grecian
architecture, beneath the dome of which stands a marble statue of the
good Doctor, very well executed, and representing him with a face of
fussy activity and benevolence: just the kind of man, if luck favored
him, to build up the fortunes of those about him, or, quite as probably,
to blight his whole neighborhood by some disastrous speculation.

The Jephson Garden is very beautiful, like most other English
pleasure-grounds; for, aided by their moist climate and not too fervid
sun, the landscape-gardeners excel in converting flat or tame surfaces
into attractive scenery, chiefly through the skilful arrangement of trees
and shrubbery.  An Englishman aims at this effect even in the little
patches under the windows of a suburban villa, and achieves it on a
larger scale in a tract of many acres.  The Garden is shadowed with trees
of a fine growth, standing alone, or in dusky groves and dense
entanglements, pervaded by woodland paths; and emerging from these
pleasant glooms, we come upon a breadth of sunshine, where the
greensward--so vividly green that it has a kind of lustre in it--is
spotted with beds of gemlike flowers.  Rustic chairs and benches are
scattered about, some of them ponderously fashioned out of the stumps of
obtruncated trees, and others more artfully made with intertwining
branches, or perhaps an imitation of such frail handiwork in iron.  In a
central part of the Garden is an archery-ground, where laughing maidens
practise at the butts, generally missing their ostensible mark, but, by
the mere grace of their action, sending an unseen shaft into some young
man's heart.  There is space, moreover, within these precincts, for an
artificial lake, with a little green island in the midst of it; both lake
and island being the haunt of swans, whose aspect and movement in the
water are most beautiful and stately,--most infirm, disjointed, and
decrepit, when, unadvisedly, they see fit to emerge, and try to walk upon
dry land.  In the latter case, they look like a breed of uncommonly
ill-contrived geese; and I record the matter here for the sake of the
moral,--that we should never pass judgment on the merits of any person or
thing, unless we behold them in the sphere and circumstances to which
they are specially adapted.  In still another part of the Garden there is
a labyrinthine maze, formed of an intricacy of hedge-bordered walks,
involving himself in which, a man might wander for hours inextricably
within a circuit of only a few yards.  It seemed to me a sad emblem of
the mental and moral perplexities in which we sometimes go astray, petty
in scope, yet large enough to entangle a lifetime, and bewilder us with a
weary movement, but no genuine progress.

The Leam,--the "high complectioned Leam," as Drayton calls it,--after
drowsing across the principal street of the town beneath a handsome
bridge, skirts along the margin of the Garden without any perceptible
flow.  Heretofore I had fancied the Concord the laziest river in the
world, but now assign that amiable distinction to the little English
stream.  Its water is by no means transparent, but has a greenish,
goose-puddly hue, which, however, accords well with the other coloring
and characteristics of the scene, and is disagreeable neither to sight
nor smell.  Certainly, this river is a perfect feature of that gentle
picturesqueness in which England is so rich, sleeping, as it does,
beneath a margin of willows that droop into its bosom, and other trees,
of deeper verdure than our own country can boast, inclining lovingly over
it.  On the Garden-side it is bordered by a shadowy, secluded grove, with
winding paths among its boskiness, affording many a peep at the river's
imperceptible lapse and tranquil gleam; and on the opposite shore stands
the priory-church, with its churchyard full of shrubbery and tombstones.

The business portion of the town clusters about the banks of the Leam,
and is naturally densest around the well to which the modern settlement
owes its existence.  Here are the commercial inns, the post-office, the
furniture-dealers, the iron-mongers, and all the heavy and homely
establishments that connect themselves even with the airiest modes of
human life; while upward from the river, by a long and gentle ascent,
rises the principal street, which is very bright and cheerful in its
physiognomy, and adorned with shop-fronts almost as splendid as those of
London, though on a diminutive scale.  There are likewise side-streets
and cross-streets, many of which are bordered with the beautiful
Warwickshire elm, a most unusual kind of adornment for an English town;
and spacious avenues, wide enough to afford room for stately groves, with
foot-paths running beneath the lofty shade, and rooks cawing and
chattering so high in the tree-tops that their voices get musical before
reaching the earth.  The houses are mostly built in blocks and ranges, in
which every separate tenement is a repetition of its fellow, though the
architecture of the different ranges is sufficiently various.  Some of
them are almost palatial in size and sumptuousness of arrangement.  Then,
on the outskirts of the town, there are detached villas, enclosed within
that separate domain of high stone fence and embowered shrubbery which an
Englishman so loves to build and plant around his abode, presenting to
the public only an iron gate, with a gravelled carriage-drive winding
away towards the half-hidden mansion.  Whether in street or suburb,
Leamington may fairly be called beautiful, and, at some points,
magnificent; but by and by you become doubtfully suspicious of a somewhat
unreal finery: it is pretentious, though not glaringly so; it has been
built with malice aforethought, as a place of gentility and enjoyment.
Moreover, splendid as the houses look, and comfortable as they often are,
there is a nameless something about them, betokening that they have not
grown out of human hearts, but are the creations of a skilfully applied
human intellect: no man has reared any one of them, whether stately or
humble, to be his lifelong residence, wherein to bring up his children,
who are to inherit it as a home.  They are nicely contrived
lodging-houses, one and all,--the best as well as the shabbiest of them,
--and therefore inevitably lack some nameless property that a home should
have.  This was the case with our own little snuggery in Lansdowne
Circus, as with all the rest; it had not grown out of anybody's
individual need, but was built to let or sell, and was therefore like a
ready-made garment,--a tolerable fit, but only tolerable.

All these blocks, ranges, and detached villas are adorned with the finest
and most aristocratic manes that I have found anywhere in England,
except, perhaps, in Bath, which is the great metropolis of that
second-class gentility with which watering-places are chiefly populated.
Lansdowne Crescent, Lansdowne Circus, Lansdowne Terrace, Regent Street,
Warwick Street, Clarendon Street, the Upper and Lower Parade: such are a
few of the designations.  Parade, indeed, is a well-chosen name for the
principal street, along which the population of the idle town draws
itself out for daily review and display.  I only wish that my descriptive
powers would enable me to throw off a picture of the scene at a sunny
noontide, individualizing each character with a touch the great people
alighting from their carriages at the principal shop-doors; the elderly
ladies and infirm Indian officers drawn along in Bath-chairs; the comely,
rather than pretty, English girls, with their deep, healthy bloom, which
an American taste is apt to deem fitter for a milkmaid than for a lady;
the mustached gentlemen with frogged surtouts and a military air; the
nursemaids and chubby children, but no chubbier than our own, and
scampering on slenderer legs; the sturdy figure of John Bull in all
varieties and of all ages, but ever with the stamp of authenticity
somewhere about him.

To say the truth, I have been holding the pen over my paper, purposing to
write a descriptive paragraph or two about the throng on the principal
Parade of Leamington, so arranging it as to present a sketch of the
British out-of-door aspect on a morning walk of gentility; but I find no
personages quite sufficiently distinct and individual in my memory to
supply the materials of such a panorama.

Oddly enough, the only figure that comes fairly forth to my mind's eye is
that of a dowager, one of hundreds whom I used to marvel at, all over
England, but who have scarcely a representative among our own ladies of
autumnal life, so thin, careworn, and frail, as age usually makes the
latter.

I have heard a good deal of the tenacity with which English ladies retain
their personal beauty to a late period of life; but (not to suggest that
an American eye needs use and cultivation before it can quite appreciate
the charm of English beauty at any age) it strikes me that an English
lady of fifty is apt to become a creature less refined and delicate, so
far as her physique goes, than anything that we Western people class
under the name of woman.  She has an awful ponderosity of frame, not
pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat women, but massive with
solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though struggling manfully
against the idea) you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and
sirloins.  When she walks, her advance is elephantine.  When she sits
down, it is on a great round space of her Maker's footstool, where she
looks as if nothing could ever move her.  She imposes awe and respect by
the muchness of her personality, to such a degree that you probably
credit her with far greater moral and intellectual force than she can
fairly claim.  Her visage is usually grim and stern, seldom positively
forbidding, yet calmly terrible, not merely by its breadth and
weight of feature, but because it seems to express so much well-founded
self-reliance, such acquaintance with the world, its toils, troubles, and
dangers, and such sturdy capacity for trampling down a foe.  Without
anything positively salient, or actively offensive, or, indeed, unjustly
formidable to her neighbors, she has the effect of a seventy-four
gun-ship in time of peace; for, while you assure yourself that there is
no real danger, you cannot help thinking how tremendous would be her
onset, if pugnaciously inclined, and how futile the effort to inflict any
counter-injury.  She certainly looks tenfold--nay, a hundred-fold--better
able to take care of herself than our slender-framed and haggard
womankind; but I have not found reason to suppose that the English
dowager of fifty has actually greater courage, fortitude, and strength of
character than our women of similar age, or even a tougher physical
endurance than they.  Morally, she is strong, I suspect, only in society,
and in the common routine of social affairs, and would be found powerless
and timid in any exceptional strait that might call for energy outside of
the conventionalities amid which she has grown up.

You can meet this figure in the street, and live, and even smile at the
recollection.  But conceive of her in a ball-room, with the bare, brawny
arms that she invariably displays there, and all the other corresponding
development, such as is beautiful in the maiden blossom, but a spectacle
to howl at in such an over-blown cabbage-rose as this.

Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must be hidden the modest,
slender, violet-nature of a girl, whom an alien mass of earthliness has
unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though very
seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a
certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender
womanhood shielded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other,
our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable
moment.  It is a pity that the English violet should grow into such an
outrageously developed peony as I have attempted to describe.  I wonder
whether a middle-aged husband ought to be considered as legally married
to all the accretions that have overgrown the slenderness of his bride,
since he led her to the altar, and which make her so much more than he
ever bargained for!  Is it not a sounder view of the case, that the
matrimonial bond cannot be held to include the three fourths of the wife
that had no existence when the ceremony was performed?  And as a matter
of conscience and good morals, ought not an English married pair to
insist upon the celebration of a silver-wedding at the end of twenty-five
years, in order to legalize and mutually appropriate that corporeal
growth of which both parties have individually come into possession since
they were pronounced one flesh?

The chief enjoyment of my several visits to Leamington lay in rural walks
about the neighborhood, and in jaunts to places of note and interest,
which are particularly abundant in that region.  The high-roads are made
pleasant to the traveller by a border of trees, and often afford him the
hospitality of a wayside bench beneath a comfortable shade.  But a
fresher delight is to be found in the foot-paths, which go wandering away
from stile to stile, along hedges, and across broad fields, and through
wooded parks, leading you to little hamlets of thatched cottages,
ancient, solitary farm-houses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools,
and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet strangely familiar features
of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idyls and eclogues.
These by-paths admit the wayfarer into the very heart of rural life, and
yet do not burden him with a sense of intrusiveness.  He has a right to
go whithersoever they lead him; for, with all their shaded privacy, they
are as much the property of the public as the dusty high-road itself, and
even by an older tenure.  Their antiquity probably exceeds that of the
Roman ways; the footsteps of the aboriginal Britons first wore away the
grass, and the natural flow of intercourse between village and village
has kept the track bare ever since.  An American farmer would plough
across any such path, and obliterate it with his hills of potatoes and
Indian corn; but here it is protected by law, and still more by the
sacredness that inevitably springs up, in this soil, along the
well-defined footprints of centuries.  Old associations are sure to be
fragrant herbs in English nostrils; we pull them up as weeds.

I remember such a path, the access to which is from Lovers' Grove, a
range of tall old oaks and elms on a high hill-top, whence there is a
view of Warwick Castle, and a wide extent of landscape, beautiful, though
bedimmed with English mist.  This particular foot-path, however, is not a
remarkably good specimen of its kind, since it leads into no hollows and
seclusions, and soon terminates in a high-road.  It connects Leamington
by a short cut with the small neighboring village of Lillington, a place
which impresses an American observer with its many points of contrast to
the rural aspects of his own country.  The village consists chiefly of
one row of contiguous dwellings, separated only by party-walls, but
ill-matched among themselves, being of different heights, and apparently
of various ages, though all are of an antiquity which we should call
venerable.  Some of the windows are leaden-framed lattices, opening on
hinges.  These houses are mostly built of gray stone; but others, in the
same range, are of brick, and one or two are in a very old fashion,--
Elizabethan, or still older,--having a ponderous framework of oak,
painted black, and filled in with plastered stone or bricks.  Judging by
the patches of repair, the oak seems to be the more durable part of the
structure.  Some of the roofs are covered with earthen tiles; others
(more decayed and poverty-stricken) with thatch, out of which sprouts a
luxurious vegetation of grass, house-leeks, and yellow flowers.  What
especially strikes an American is the lack of that insulated space, the
intervening gardens, grass-plots, orchards, broad-spreading shade-trees,
which occur between our own village-houses.  These English dwellings have
no such separate surroundings; they all grow together, like the cells of
a honeycomb.

Beyond the first row of houses, and hidden from it by a turn of the road,
there was another row (or block, as we should call it) of small old
cottages, stuck one against another, with their thatched roofs forming a
single contiguity.  These, I presume, were the habitations of the poorest
order of rustic laborers; and the narrow precincts of each cottage, as
well as the close neighborhood of the whole, gave the impression of a
stifled, unhealthy atmosphere among the occupants.  It seemed impossible
that there should be a cleanly reserve, a proper self-respect among
individuals, or a wholesome unfamiliarity between families where human
life was crowded and massed into such intimate communities as these.
Nevertheless, not to look beyond the outside, I never saw a prettier
rural scene than was presented by this range of contiguous huts.  For in
front of the whole row was a luxuriant and well-trimmed hawthorn hedge,
and belonging to each cottage was a little square of garden-ground,
separated from its neighbors by a line of the same verdant fence.  The
gardens were chockfull, not of esculent vegetables, but of flowers,
familiar ones, but very bright-colored, and shrubs of box, some of which
were trimmed into artistic shapes; and I remember, before one door, a
representation of Warwick Castle, made of oyster-shells.  The cottagers
evidently loved the little nests in which they dwelt, and did their best
to make them beautiful, and succeeded more than tolerably well,--so
kindly did nature help their humble efforts with its verdure, flowers,
moss, lichens, and the green things that grew out of the thatch.  Through
some of the open doorways we saw plump children rolling about on the
stone floors, and their mothers, by no means very pretty, but as
happy-looking as mothers generally are; and while we gazed at these
domestic matters, an old woman rushed wildly out of one of the gates,
upholding a shovel, on which she clanged and clattered with a key.  At
first we fancied that she intended an onslaught against ourselves, but
soon discovered that a more dangerous enemy was abroad; for the old
lady's bees had swarmed, and the air was full of them, whizzing by our
heads like bullets.

Not far from these two rows of houses and cottages, a green lane,
overshadowed with trees, turned aside from the main road, and tended
towards a square, gray tower, the battlements of which were just high
enough to be visible above the foliage.  Wending our way thitherward, we
found the very picture and ideal of a country church and churchyard.  The
tower seemed to be of Norman architecture, low, massive, and crowned with
battlements.  The body of the church was of very modest dimensions, and
the eaves so low that I could touch them with my walking-stick.  We
looked into the windows and beheld the dim and quiet interior, a narrow
space, but venerable with the consecration of many centuries, and keeping
its sanctity as entire and inviolate as that of a vast cathedral.  The
nave was divided from the side aisles of the church by pointed arches
resting on very sturdy pillars: it was good to see how solemnly they held
themselves to their age-long task of supporting that lowly roof.  There
was a small organ, suited in size to the vaulted hollow, which it weekly
filled with religious sound.  On the opposite wall of the church, between
two windows, was a mural tablet of white marble, with an inscription in
black letters,--the only such memorial that I could discern, although
many dead people doubtless lay beneath the floor, and had paved it with
their ancient tombstones, as is customary in old English churches.  There
were no modern painted windows, flaring with raw colors, nor other
gorgeous adornments, such as the present taste for mediaeval restoration
often patches upon the decorous simplicity of the gray village-church.
It is probably the worshipping-place of no more distinguished a
congregation than the farmers and peasantry who inhabit the houses and
cottages which I have just described.  Had the lord of the manor been one
of the parishioners, there would have been an eminent pew near the
chancel, walled high about, curtained, and softly cushioned, warmed by a
fireplace of its own, and distinguished by hereditary tablets and
escutcheons on the enclosed stone pillar.

A well-trodden path led across the churchyard, and the gate being on the
latch, we entered, and walked round among the graves and monuments.  The
latter were chiefly head-stones, none of which were very old, so far as
was discoverable by the dates; some, indeed, in so ancient a cemetery,
were disagreeably new, with inscriptions glittering like sunshine in gold
letters.  The ground must have been dug over and over again, innumerable
times, until the soil is made up of what was once human clay, out of
which have sprung successive crops of gravestones, that flourish their
allotted time, and disappear, like the weeds and flowers in their briefer
period.  The English climate is very unfavorable to the endurance of
memorials in the open air.  Twenty years of it suffice to give as much
antiquity of aspect, whether to tombstone or edifice, as a hundred years
of our own drier atmosphere,--so soon do the drizzly rains and constant
moisture corrode the surface of marble or freestone.  Sculptured edges
loose their sharpness in a year or two; yellow lichens overspread a
beloved name, and obliterate it while it is yet fresh upon some
survivor's heart.  Time gnaws an English gravestone with wonderful
appetite; and when the inscription is quite illegible, the sexton takes
the useless slab away, and perhaps makes a hearthstone of it, and digs up
the unripe bones which it ineffectually tried to memorialize, and gives
the bed to another sleeper.  In the Charter Street burial-ground at
Salem, and in the old graveyard on the hill at Ipswich, I have seen more
ancient gravestones, with legible inscriptions on them, than in any
English churchyard.

And yet this same ungenial climate, hostile as it generally is to the
long remembrance of departed people, has sometimes a lovely way of
dealing with the records on certain monuments that lie horizontally in
the open air.  The rain falls into the deep incisions of the letters, and
has scarcely time to be dried away before another shower sprinkles the
flat stone again, and replenishes those little reservoirs.  The unseen,
mysterious seeds of mosses find their way into the lettered furrows, and
are made to germinate by the continual moisture and watery sunshine of
the English sky; and by and by, in a year, or two years, or many years,
behold the complete inscription--

     Here Lieth the body,

and all the rest of the tender falsehood--beautifully embossed in raised
letters of living green, a bas-relief of velvet moss on the marble slab!
It becomes more legible, under the skyey influences, after the world has
forgotten the deceased, than when it was fresh from the stone-cutter's
hands.  It outlives the grief of friends.  I first saw an example of this
in Bebbington churchyard, in Cheshire, and thought that Nature must needs
have had a special tenderness for the person (no noted man, however, in
the world's history) so long ago laid beneath that stone, since she took
such wonderful pains to "keep his memory green."  Perhaps the proverbial
phrase just quoted may have had its origin in the natural phenomenon here
described.

While we rested ourselves on a horizontal monument, which was elevated
just high enough to be a convenient seat, I observed that one of the
gravestones lay very close to the church,--so close that the droppings of
the eaves would fall upon it.  It seemed as if the inmate of that grave
had desired to creep under the church-wall.  On closer inspection, we
found an almost illegible epitaph on the stone, and with difficulty made
out this forlorn verse:--

    "Poorly lived,
     And poorly died,
     Poorly buried,
     And no one cried."

It would be hard to compress the story of a cold and luckless life,
death, and burial into fewer words, or more impressive ones; at least, we
found them impressive, perhaps because we had to re-create the
inscription by scraping away the lichens from the faintly traced letters.
The grave was on the shady and damp side of the church, endwise towards
it, the head-stone being within about three feet of the foundation-wall;
so that, unless the poor man was a dwarf, he must have been doubled up to
fit him into his final resting-place.  No wonder that his epitaph
murmured against so poor a burial as this!  His name, as well as I could
make it out, was Treeo,--John Treeo, I think,--and he died in 1810, at
the age of seventy-four.  The gravestone is so overgrown with grass and
weeds, so covered with unsightly lichens, and so crumbly with time and
foul weather, that it is questionable whether anybody will ever be at the
trouble of deciphering it again.  But there is a quaint and sad kind of
enjoyment in defeating (to such slight degree as my pen may do it) the
probabilities of oblivion for poor John Treeo, and asking a little
sympathy for him, half a century after his death, and making him better
and more widely known, at least, than any other slumberer in Lillington
churchyard: he having been, as appearances go, the outcast of them all.

You find similar old churches and villages in all the neighboring
country, at the distance of every two or three miles; and I describe
them, not as being rare, but because they are so common and
characteristic.  The village of Whitnash, within twenty minutes' walk of
Leamington, looks as secluded, as rural, and as little disturbed by the
fashions of to-day, as if Dr. Jephson had never developed all those
Parades and Crescents out of his magic well.  I used to wonder whether
the inhabitants had ever yet heard of railways, or, at their slow rate of
progress, had even reached the epoch of stage-coaches.  As you approach
the village, while it is yet unseen, you observe a tall, overshadowing
canopy of elm-tree tops, beneath which you almost hesitate to follow the
public road, on account of the remoteness that seems to exist between the
precincts of this old-world community and the thronged modern street out
of which you have so recently emerged.  Venturing onward, however, you
soon find yourself in the heart of Whitnash, and see an irregular ring of
ancient rustic dwellings surrounding the village-green, on one side of
which stands the church, with its square Norman tower and battlements,
while close adjoining is the vicarage, made picturesque by peaks and
gables.  At first glimpse, none of the houses appear to be less than two
or three centuries old, and they are of the ancient, wooden-framed
fashion, with thatched roofs, which give them the air of birds' nests,
thereby assimilating them closely to the simplicity of nature.

The church-tower is mossy and much gnawed by time; it has narrow
loopholes up and down its front and sides, and an arched window over the
low portal, set with small panes of glass, cracked, dim, and irregular,
through which a bygone age is peeping out into the daylight.  Some of
those old, grotesque faces, called gargoyles, are seen on the projections
of the architecture.  The churchyard is very small, and is encompassed by
a gray stone fence that looks as ancient as the church itself.  In front
of the tower, on the village-green, is a yew-tree of incalculable age,
with a vast circumference of trunk, but a very scanty head of foliage;
though its boughs still keep some of the vitality which perhaps was in
its early prime when the Saxon invaders founded Whitnash.  A thousand
years is no extraordinary antiquity in the lifetime of a yew.  We were
pleasantly startled, however, by discovering an exuberance of more
youthful life than we had thought possible in so old a tree; for the
faces of two children laughed at us out of an opening in the trunk, which
had become hollow with long decay.  On one side of the yew stood a
framework of worm-eaten timber, the use and meaning of which puzzled me
exceedingly, till I made it out to be the village-stocks; a public
institution that, in its day, had doubtless hampered many a pair of
shank-bones, now crumbling in the adjacent churchyard.  It is not to be
supposed, however, that this old-fashioned mode of punishment is still in
vogue among the good people of Whitnash.  The vicar of the parish has
antiquarian propensities, and had probably dragged the stocks out of some
dusty hiding-place, and set them up on their former site as a curiosity.

I disquiet myself in vain with the effort to hit upon some characteristic
feature, or assemblage of features, that shall convey to the reader the
influence of hoar antiquity lingering into the present daylight, as I so
often felt it in these old English scenes.  It is only an American who
can feel it; and even he begins to find himself growing insensible to its
effect, after a long residence in England.  But while you are still new
in the old country, it thrills you with strange emotion to think that
this little church of Whitnash, humble as it seems, stood for ages under
the Catholic faith, and has not materially changed since Wickcliffe's
days, and that it looked as gray as now in Bloody Mary's time, and that
Cromwell's troopers broke off the stone noses of those same gargoyles
that are now grinning in your face.  So, too, with the immemorial
yew-tree: you see its great roots grasping hold of the earth like
gigantic claws, clinging so sturdily that no effort of time can wrench
them away; and there being life in the old tree, you feel all the more as
if a contemporary witness were telling you of the things that have been.
It has lived among men, and been a familiar object to them, and seen them
brought to be christened and married and buried in the neighboring church
and churchyard, through so many centuries, that it knows all about our
race, so far as fifty generations of the Whitnash people can supply such
knowledge.

And, after all, what a weary life it must have been for the old tree!
Tedious beyond imagination!  Such, I think, is the final impression on
the mind of an American visitor, when his delight at finding something
permanent begins to yield to his Western love of change, and he becomes
sensible of the heavy air of a spot where the forefathers and foremothers
have grown up together, intermarried, and died, through a long succession
of lives, without any intermixture of new elements, till family features
and character are all run in the same inevitable mould.  Life is there
fossilized in its greenest leaf.  The man who died yesterday or ever so
long ago walks the village-street to day, and chooses the same wife that
he married a hundred years since, and must be buried again to-morrow
under the same kindred dust that has already covered him half a score of
times.  The stone threshold of his cottage is worn away with his
hobnailed footsteps, shuffling over it from the reign of the first
Plantagenet to that of Victoria.  Better than this is the lot of our
restless countrymen, whose modern instinct bids them tend always towards
"fresh woods and pastures new."  Rather than such monotony of sluggish
ages, loitering on a village-green, toiling in hereditary fields,
listening to the parson's drone lengthened through centuries in the gray
Norman church, let us welcome whatever change may come,--change of place,
social customs, political institutions, modes of worship,--trusting,
that, if all present things shall vanish, they will but make room for
better systems, and for a higher type of man to clothe his life in them,
and to fling them off in turn.

Nevertheless, while an American willingly accepts growth and change as
the law of his own national and private existence, he has a singular
tenderness for the stone-incrusted institutions of the mother-country.
The reason may be (though I should prefer a more generous explanation)
that he recognizes the tendency of these hardened forms to stiffen her
joints and fetter her ankles, in the race and rivalry of improvement.  I
hated to see so much as a twig of ivy wrenched away from an old wall in
England.  Yet change is at work, even in such a village as Whitnash.  At
a subsequent visit, looking more critically at the irregular circle of
dwellings that surround the yew-tree and confront the church, I perceived
that some of the houses must have been built within no long time,
although the thatch, the quaint gables, and the old oaken framework of
the others diffused an air of antiquity over the whole assemblage.  The
church itself was undergoing repair and restoration, which is but another
name for change.  Masons were making patchwork on the front of the tower,
and were sawing a slab of stone and piling up bricks to strengthen the
side-wall, or possibly to enlarge the ancient edifice by an additional
aisle.  Moreover, they had dug an immense pit in the churchyard, long and
broad, and fifteen feet deep, two thirds of which profundity were
discolored by human decay, and mixed up with crumbly bones.  What this
excavation was intended for I could nowise imagine, unless it were the
very pit in which Longfellow bids the "Dead Past bury its Dead," and
Whitnash, of all places in the world, were going to avail itself of our
poet's suggestion.  If so, it must needs be confessed that many
picturesque and delightful things would be thrown into the hole, and
covered out of sight forever.

The article which I am writing has taken its own course, and occupied
itself almost wholly with country churches; whereas I had purposed to
attempt a description of some of the many old towns--Warwick, Coventry,
Kenilworth, Stratford-on-Avon--which lie within an easy scope of
Leamington.  And still another church presents itself to my remembrance.
It is that of Hatton, on which I stumbled in the course of a forenoon's
ramble, and paused a little while to look at it for the sake of old Dr.
Parr, who was once its vicar.  Hatton, so far as I could discover, has no
public-house, no shop, no contiguity of roofs (as in most English
villages, however small), but is merely an ancient neighborhood of
farm-houses, spacious, and standing wide apart, each within its own
precincts, and offering a most comfortable aspect of orchards,
harvest-fields, barns, stacks, and all manner of rural plenty.  It seemed
to be a community of old settlers, among whom everything had been going
on prosperously since an epoch beyond the memory of man; and they kept a
certain privacy among themselves, and dwelt on a cross-road, at the
entrance of which was a barred gate, hospitably open, but still
impressing me with a sense of scarcely warrantable intrusion.  After all,
in some shady nook of those gentle Warwickshire slopes there may have
been a denser and more populous settlement, styled Hatton, which I never
reached.

Emerging from the by-road, and entering upon one that crossed it at right
angles and led to Warwick, I espied the church of Dr. Parr.  Like the
others which I have described, it had a low stone tower, square, and
battlemented at its summit: for all these little churches seem to have
been built on the same model, and nearly at the same measurement, and
have even a greater family-likeness than the cathedrals.  As I
approached, the bell of the tower (a remarkably deep-toned bell,
considering how small it was) flung its voice abroad, and told me that it
was noon.  The church stands among its graves, a little removed from the
wayside, quite apart from any collection of houses, and with no signs of
vicarage; it is a good deal shadowed by trees, and not wholly destitute
of ivy.  The body of the edifice, unfortunately (and it is an outrage
which the English church-wardens are fond of perpetrating), has been
newly covered with a yellowish plaster or wash, so as quite to destroy
the aspect of antiquity, except upon the tower, which wears the dark gray
hue of many centuries.  The chancel-window is painted with a
representation of Christ upon the Cross, and all the other windows are
full of painted or stained glass, but none of it ancient, nor (if it be
fair to judge from without of what ought to be seen within) possessing
any of the tender glory that should be the inheritance of this branch of
Art, revived from mediaeval times.  I stepped over the graves, and peeped
in at two or three of the windows, and saw the snug interior of the
church glimmering through the many-colored panes, like a show of
commonplace objects under the fantastic influence of a dream: for the
floor was covered with modern pews, very like what we may see in a New
England meeting-house, though, I think, a little more favorable than
those would be to the quiet slumbers of the Hatton farmers and their
families.  Those who slept under Dr. Parr's preaching now prolong their
nap, I suppose, in the churchyard round about, and can scarcely have
drawn much spiritual benefit from any truths that he contrived to tell
them in their lifetime.  It struck me as a rare example (even where
examples are numerous) of a man utterly misplaced, that this enormous
scholar, great in the classic tongues, and inevitably converting his own
simplest vernacular into a learned language, should have been set up in
this homely pulpit, and ordained to preach salvation to a rustic
audience, to whom it is difficult to imagine how he could ever have
spoken one available word.

Almost always, in visiting such scenes as I have been attempting to
describe, I had a singular sense of having been there before.  The
ivy-grown English churches (even that of Bebbington, the first that I
beheld) were quite as familiar to me, when fresh from home, as the old
wooden meeting-house in Salem, which used, on wintry Sabbaths, to be the
frozen purgatory of my childhood.  This was a bewildering, yet very
delightful emotion fluttering about me like a faint summer wind, and
filling my imagination with a thousand half-remembrances, which looked as
vivid as sunshine, at a side-glance, but faded quite away whenever I
attempted to grasp and define them.  Of course, the explanation of the
mystery was, that history, poetry, and fiction, books of travel, and the
talk of tourists, had given me pretty accurate preconceptions of the
common objects of English scenery, and these, being long ago vivified by
a youthful fancy, had insensibly taken their places among the images of
things actually seen.  Yet the illusion was often so powerful, that I
almost doubted whether such airy remembrances might not be a sort of
innate idea, the print of a recollection in some ancestral mind,
transmitted, with fainter and fainter impress through several descents,
to my own.  I felt, indeed, like the stalwart progenitor in person,
returning to the hereditary haunts after more than two hundred years, and
finding the church, the hall, the farm-house, the cottage, hardly changed
during his long absence,--the same shady by-paths and hedge-lanes, the
same veiled sky, and green lustre of the lawns and fields,--while his own
affinities for these things, a little obscured by disuse, were reviving
at every step.

An American is not very apt to love the English people, as a whole, on
whatever length of acquaintance.  I fancy that they would value our
regard, and even reciprocate it in their ungracious way, if we could give
it to them in spite of all rebuffs; but they are beset by a curious and
inevitable infelicity, which compels them, as it were, to keep up what
they seem to consider a wholesome bitterness of feeling between
themselves and all other nationalities, especially that of America.  They
will never confess it; nevertheless, it is as essential a tonic to them
as their bitter ale.  Therefore,--and possibly, too, from a similar
narrowness in his own character,--an American seldom feels quite as if he
were at home among the English people.  If he do so, he has ceased to be
an American.  But it requires no long residence to make him love their
island, and appreciate it as thoroughly as they themselves do.  For my
part, I used to wish that we could annex it, transferring their thirty
millions of inhabitants to some convenient wilderness in the great West,
and putting half or a quarter as many of ourselves into their places.
The change would be beneficial to both parties.  We, in our dry
atmosphere, are getting too nervous, haggard, dyspeptic, extenuated,
unsubstantial, theoretic, and need to be made grosser.  John Bull, on the
other hand, has grown bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged, heavy-witted,
material, and, in a word, too intensely English.  In a few more centuries
he will be the earthliest creature that ever the earth saw.  Heretofore
Providence has obviated such a result by timely intermixtures of alien
races with the old English stock; so that each successive conquest of
England has proved a victory by the revivification and improvement of its
native manhood.  Cannot America and England hit upon some scheme to
secure even greater advantages to both nations?




ABOUT WARWICK.


Between bright, new Leamington, the growth of the present century, and
rusty Warwick, founded by King Cymbeline in the twilight ages, a thousand
years before the mediaeval darkness, there are two roads, either of which
may be measured by a sober-paced pedestrian in less than half an hour.

One of these avenues flows out of the midst of the smart parades and
crescents of the former town,--along by hedges and beneath the shadow of
great elms, past stuccoed Elizabethan villas and wayside alehouses, and
through a hamlet of modern aspect,--and runs straight into the principal
thoroughfare of Warwick.  The battlemented turrets of the castle,
embowered half-way up in foliage, and the tall, slender tower of St.
Mary's Church, rising from among clustered roofs, have been visible
almost from the commencement of the walk.  Near the entrance of the town
stands St. John's School-House, a picturesque old edifice of stone, with
four peaked gables in a row, alternately plain and ornamented, and wide,
projecting windows, and a spacious and venerable porch, all overgrown
with moss and ivy, and shut in from the world by a high stone fence, not
less mossy than the gabled front.  There is an iron gate, through the
rusty open-work of which you see a grassy lawn, and almost expect to meet
the shy, curious eyes of the little boys of past generations, peeping
forth from their infantile antiquity into the strangeness of our present
life.  I find a peculiar charm in these long-established English schools,
where the school-boy of to-day sits side by side, as it were, with his
great-grandsire, on the same old benches, and often, I believe, thumbs a
later, but unimproved edition of the same old grammar or arithmetic.  The
newfangled notions of a Yankee school-committee would madden many a
pedagogue, and shake down the roof of many a time-honored seat of
learning, in the mother-country.

At this point, however, we will turn back, in order to follow up the
other road from Leamington, which was the one that I loved best to take.
It pursues a straight and level course, bordered by wide gravel-walks and
overhung by the frequent elm, with here a cottage and there a villa, on
one side a wooded plantation, and on the other a rich field of grass or
grain, until, turning at right angles, it brings you to an arched bridge
over the Avon.  Its parapet is a balustrade carved out of freestone, into
the soft substance of which a multitude of persons have engraved their
names or initials, many of them now illegible, while others, more deeply
cut, are illuminated with fresh green moss.  These tokens indicate a
famous spot; and casting our eyes along the smooth gleam and shadow of
the quiet stream, through a vista of willows that droop on either side
into the water, we behold the gray magnificence of Warwick Castle,
uplifting itself among stately trees, and rearing its turrets high above
their loftiest branches.  We can scarcely think the scene real, so
completely do those machicolated towers, the long line of battlements,
the massive buttresses, the high-windowed walls, shape out our indistinct
ideas of the antique time.  It might rather seem as if the sleepy river
(being Shakespeare's Avon, and often, no doubt, the mirror of his
gorgeous visions) were dreaming now of a lordly residence that stood here
many centuries ago; and this fantasy is strengthened, when you observe
that the image in the tranquil water has all the distinctness of the
actual structure.  Either might be the reflection of the other.  Wherever
Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as
plainly in the sunken reflection.  Each is so perfect, that the upper
vision seems a castle in the air, and the lower one an old stronghold of
feudalism, miraculously kept from decay in an enchanted river.

A ruinous and ivy-grown bridge, that projects from the bank a little on
the hither side of the castle, has the effect of making the scene appear
more entirely apart from the every-day world, for it ends abruptly in the
middle of the stream,--so that, if a cavalcade of the knights and ladies
of romance should issue from the old walls, they could never tread on
earthly ground, any more than we, approaching from the side of modern
realism, can overleap the gulf between our domain and theirs.  Yet, if we
seek to disenchant ourselves, it may readily be done.  Crossing the
bridge on which we stand, and passing a little farther on, we come to the
entrance of the castle, abutting on the highway, and hospitably open at
certain hours to all curious pilgrims who choose to disburse half a crown
or so toward the support of the earl's domestics.  The sight of that long
series of historic rooms, full of such splendors and rarities as a great
English family necessarily gathers about itself, in its hereditary abode,
and in the lapse of ages, is well worth the money, or ten times as much,
if indeed the value of the spectacle could be reckoned in money's-worth.
But after the attendant has hurried you from end to end of the edifice,
repeating a guide-book by rote, and exorcising each successive hall of
its poetic glamour and witchcraft by the mere tone in which he talks
about it, you will make the doleful discovery that Warwick Castle has
ceased to be a dream.  It is better, methinks, to linger on the bridge,
gazing at Caesar's Tower and Guy's Tower in the dim English sunshine
above, and in the placid Avon below, and still keep them as thoughts in
your own mind, than climb to their summits, or touch even a stone of
their actual substance.  They will have all the more reality for you, as
stalwart relics of immemorial time, if you are reverent enough to leave
them in the intangible sanctity of a poetic vision.

From the bridge over the Avon, the road passes in front of the
castle-gate, and soon enters the principal street of Warwick, a little
beyond St. John's School-House, already described.  Chester itself, most
antique of English towns, can hardly show quainter architectural shapes
than many of the buildings that border this street.  They are mostly of
the timber-and-plaster kind, with bowed and decrepit ridge-poles, and a
whole chronology of various patchwork in their walls; their low-browed
doorways open upon a sunken floor; their projecting stories peep, as it
were, over one another's shoulders, and rise into a multiplicity of
peaked gables; they have curious windows, breaking out irregularly all
over the house, some even in the roof, set in their own little peaks,
opening lattice-wise, and furnished with twenty small panes of
lozenge-shaped glass.  The architecture of these edifices (a visible
oaken framework, showing the whole skeleton of the house,--as if a man's
bones should be arranged on his outside, and his flesh seen through the
interstices) is often imitated by modern builders, and with sufficiently
picturesque effect.  The objection is, that such houses, like all
imitations of bygone styles, have an air of affectation; they do not seem
to be built in earnest; they are no better than playthings, or overgrown
baby-houses, in which nobody should be expected to encounter the serious
realities of either birth or death.  Besides, originating nothing, we
leave no fashions for another age to copy, when we ourselves shall have
grown antique.

Old as it looks, all this portion of Warwick has overbrimmed, as it were,
from the original settlement, being outside of the ancient wall.  The
street soon runs under an arched gateway, with a church or some other
venerable structure above it, and admits us into the heart of the town.
At one of my first visits, I witnessed a military display.  A regiment of
Warwickshire militia, probably commanded by the Earl, was going through
its drill in the market-place; and on the collar of one of the officers
was embroidered the Bear and Ragged Staff, which has been the cognizance
of the Warwick earldom from time immemorial.  The soldiers were sturdy
young men, with the simple, stolid, yet kindly faces of English rustics,
looking exceedingly well in a body, but slouching into a yeoman-like
carriage and appearance the moment they were dismissed from drill.
Squads of them were distributed everywhere about the streets, and
sentinels were posted at various points; and I saw a sergeant, with a
great key in his hand (big enough to have been the key of the castle's
main entrance when the gate was thickest and heaviest), apparently
setting a guard.  Thus, centuries after feudal times are past, we find
warriors still gathering under the old castle-walls, and commanded by a
feudal lord, just as in the days of the King-Maker, who, no doubt, often
mustered his retainers in the same market-place where I beheld this
modern regiment.

The interior of the town wears a less old-fashioned aspect than the
suburbs through which we approach it; and the High Street has shops with
modern plate-glass, and buildings with stuccoed fronts, exhibiting as few
projections to hang a thought or sentiment upon as if an architect of
to-day had planned them.  And, indeed, so far as their surface goes, they
are perhaps new enough to stand unabashed in an American street; but
behind these renovated faces, with their monotonous lack of expression,
there is probably the substance of the same old town that wore a Gothic
exterior in the Middle Ages.  The street is an emblem of England itself.
What seems new in it is chiefly a skilful and fortunate adaptation of
what such a people as ourselves would destroy.  The new things are based
and supported on sturdy old things, and derive a massive strength from
their deep and immemorial foundations, though with such limitations and
impediments as only an Englishman could endure.  But he likes to feel the
weight of all the past upon his back; and, moreover, the antiquity that
overburdens him has taken root in his being, and has grown to be rather a
hump than a pack, so that there is no getting rid of it without tearing
his whole structure to pieces.  In my judgment, as he appears to be
sufficiently comfortable under the mouldy accretion, he had better
stumble on with it as long as he can.  He presents a spectacle which is
by no means without its charm for a disinterested and unencumbered
observer.

When the old edifice, or the antiquated custom or institution, appears in
its pristine form, without any attempt at intermarrying it with modern
fashions, an American cannot but admire the picturesque effect produced
by the sudden cropping up of an apparently dead-and-buried state of
society into the actual present, of which he is himself a part.  We need
not go far in Warwick without encountering an instance of the kind.
Proceeding westward through the town, we find ourselves confronted by a
huge mass of natural rock, hewn into something like architectural shape,
and penetrated by a vaulted passage, which may well have been one of King
Cymbeline's original gateways; and on the top of the rock, over the
archway, sits a small old church, communicating with an ancient edifice,
or assemblage of edifices, that look down from a similar elevation on the
side of the street.  A range of trees half hides the latter establishment
from the sun.  It presents a curious and venerable specimen of the
timber-and-plaster style of building, in which some of the finest old
houses in England are constructed; the front projects into porticos and
vestibules, and rises into many gables, some in a row, and others
crowning semi-detached portions of the structure; the windows mostly open
on hinges, but show a delightful irregularity of shape and position; a
multiplicity of chimneys break through the roof at their own will, or, at
least, without any settled purpose of the architect.  The whole affair
looks very old,--so old indeed that the front bulges forth, as if the
timber framework were a little weary, at last, of standing erect so long;
but the state of repair is so perfect, and there is such an indescribable
aspect of continuous vitality within the system of this aged house, that
you feel confident that there may be safe shelter yet, and perhaps for
centuries to come, under its time-honored roof.  And on a bench,
sluggishly enjoying the sunshine, and looking into the street of Warwick
as from a life apart, a few old men are generally to be seen, wrapped in
long cloaks, on which you may detect the glistening of a silver badge
representing the Bear and Ragged Staff.  These decorated worthies are
some of the twelve brethren of Leicester's Hospital,--a community which
subsists to-day under the identical modes that were established for it in
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and of course retains many features of a
social life that has vanished almost everywhere else.

The edifice itself dates from a much older period than the charitable
institution of which it is now the home.  It was the seat of a religious
fraternity far back in the Middle Ages, and continued so till Henry VIII.
turned all the priesthood of England out of doors, and put the most
unscrupulous of his favorites into their vacant abodes.  In many
instances, the old monks had chosen the sites of their domiciles so well,
and built them on such a broad system of beauty and convenience, that
their lay-occupants found it easy to convert them into stately and
comfortable homes; and as such they still exist, with something of the
antique reverence lingering about them.  The structure now before us
seems to have been first granted to Sir Nicholas Lestrange, who perhaps
intended, like other men, to establish his household gods in the niches
whence he had thrown down the images of saints, and to lay his hearth
where an altar had stood.  But there was probably a natural reluctance in
those days (when Catholicism, so lately repudiated, must needs have
retained an influence over all but the most obdurate characters) to bring
one's hopes of domestic prosperity and a fortunate lineage into direct
hostility with the awful claims of the ancient religion.  At all events,
there is still a superstitious idea, betwixt a fantasy and a belief, that
the possession of former Church-property has drawn a curse along with it,
not only among the posterity of those to whom it was originally granted,
but wherever it has subsequently been transferred, even if honestly
bought and paid for.  There are families, now inhabiting some of the
beautiful old abbeys, who appear to indulge a species of pride in
recording the strange deaths and ugly shapes of misfortune that have
occurred among their predecessors, and may be supposed likely to dog
their own pathway down the ages of futurity.  Whether Sir Nicholas
Lestrange, in the beef-eating days of Old Harry and Elizabeth, was a
nervous man, and subject to apprehensions of this kind, I cannot tell;
but it is certain that he speedily rid himself of the spoils of the
Church, and that, within twenty years afterwards, the edifice became the
property of the famous Dudley, Earl of Leicester, brother of the Earl of
Warwick.  He devoted the ancient religious precinct to a charitable use,
endowing it with an ample revenue, and making it the perpetual home of
twelve poor, honest, and war-broken soldiers, mostly his own retainers,
and natives either of Warwickshire or Gloucestershire.  These veterans,
or others wonderfully like them, still occupy their monkish dormitories
and haunt the time-darkened corridors and galleries of the hospital,
leading a life of old-fashioned comfort, wearing the old-fashioned
cloaks, and burnishing the identical silver badges which the Earl of
Leicester gave to the original twelve.  He is said to have been a bad man
in his day; but he has succeeded in prolonging one good deed into what
was to him a distant future.

On the projecting story, over the arched entrance, there is the date,
1571, and several coats-of-arms, either the Earl's or those of his
kindred, and immediately above the doorway a stone sculpture of the Bear
and Ragged Staff.

Passing through the arch, we find ourselves in a quadrangle, or enclosed
court, such as always formed the central part of a great family residence
in Queen Elizabeth's time, and earlier.  There can hardly be a more
perfect specimen of such an establishment than Leicester's Hospital.  The
quadrangle is a sort of sky-roofed hall, to which there is convenient
access from all parts of the house.  The four inner fronts, with their
high, steep roofs and sharp gables, look into it from antique windows,
and through open corridors and galleries along the sides; and there seems
to be a richer display of architectural devices and ornaments, quainter
carvings in oak, and more fantastic shapes of the timber framework, than
on the side toward the street.  On the wall opposite the arched entrance
are the following inscriptions, comprising such moral rules, I presume,
as were deemed most essential for the daily observance of the community:
"Honor all Men"--"Fear God"--"Honor the King"--"Love the Brotherhood";
and again, as if this latter injunction needed emphasis and repetition
among a household of aged people soured with the hard fortune of their
previous lives,--"Be kindly affectioned one to another."  One sentence,
over a door communicating with the Master's side of the house, is
addressed to that dignitary,--"He that ruleth over men must be just."
All these are charactered in old English letters, and form part of the
elaborate ornamentation of the house.  Everywhere--on the walls, over
windows and doors, and at all points where there is room to place them--
appear escutcheons of arms, cognizances, and crests, emblazoned in their
proper colors, and illuminating the ancient quadrangle with their
splendor.  One of these devices is a large image of a porcupine on an
heraldic wreath, being the crest of the Lords de Lisle.  But especially
is the cognizance of the Bear and Ragged Staff repeated over and over,
and over again and again, in a great variety of attitudes, at
full-length, and half-length, in paint and in oaken sculpture, in
bas-relief and rounded image.  The founder of the hospital was certainly
disposed to reckon his own beneficence as among the hereditary glories of
his race; and had he lived and died a half-century earlier, he would have
kept up an old Catholic custom by enjoining the twelve bedesmen to pray
for the welfare of his soul.

At my first visit, some of the brethren were seated on the bench outside
of the edifice, looking down into the street; but they did not vouchsafe
me a word, and seemed so estranged from modern life, so enveloped in
antique customs and old-fashioned cloaks, that to converse with them
would have been like shouting across the gulf between our age and Queen
Elizabeth's.  So I passed into the quadrangle, and found it quite
solitary, except that a plain and neat old woman happened to be crossing
it, with an aspect of business and carefulness that bespoke her a woman
of this world, and not merely a shadow of the past.  Asking her if I
could come in, she answered very readily and civilly that I might, and
said that I was free to look about me, hinting a hope, however, that I
would not open the private doors of the brotherhood, as some visitors
were in the habit of doing.  Under her guidance, I went into what was
formerly the great hall of the establishment, where King James I. had
once been feasted by an Earl of Warwick, as is commemorated by an
inscription on the cobwebbed and dingy wall.  It is a very spacious and
barn-like apartment, with a brick floor, and a vaulted roof, the rafters
of which are oaken beams, wonderfully carved, but hardly visible in the
duskiness that broods aloft.  The hall may have made a splendid
appearance, when it was decorated with rich tapestry, and illuminated
with chandeliers, cressets, and torches glistening upon silver dishes,
where King James sat at supper among his brilliantly dressed nobles; but
it has come to base uses in these latter days,--being improved, in Yankee
phrase, as a brewery and wash-room, and as a cellar for the brethren's
separate allotments of coal.

The old lady here left me to myself, and I returned into the quadrangle.
It was very quiet, very handsome, in its own obsolete style, and must be
an exceedingly comfortable place for the old people to lounge in, when
the inclement winds render it inexpedient to walk abroad.  There are
shrubs against the wall, on one side; and on another is a cloistered
walk, adorned with stags' heads and antlers, and running beneath a
covered gallery, up to which ascends a balustraded staircase.  In the
portion of the edifice opposite the entrance-arch are the apartments of
the Master; and looking into the window (as the old woman, at no request
of mine, had specially informed me that I might), I saw a low, but vastly
comfortable parlor, very handsomely furnished, and altogether a luxurious
place.  It had a fireplace with an immense arch, the antique breadth of
which extended almost from wall to wall of the room, though now fitted up
in such a way, that the modern coal-grate looked very diminutive in the
midst.  Gazing into this pleasant interior, it seemed to me, that, among
these venerable surroundings, availing himself of whatever was good in
former things, and eking out their imperfection with the results of
modern ingenuity, the Master might lead a not unenviable life.  On the
cloistered side of the quadrangle, where the dark oak panels made the
enclosed space dusky, I beheld a curtained window reddened by a great
blaze from within, and heard the bubbling and squeaking of something--
doubtless very nice and succulent--that was being cooked at the
kitchen-fire.  I think, indeed, that a whiff or two of the savory
fragrance reached my nostrils; at all events, the impression grew upon me
that Leicester's Hospital is one of the jolliest old domiciles in
England.

I was about to depart, when another old woman, very plainly dressed, but
fat, comfortable, and with a cheerful twinkle in her eyes, came in
through the arch, and looked curiously at me.  This repeated apparition
of the gentle sex (though by no means under its loveliest guise) had
still an agreeable effect in modifying my ideas of an institution which I
had supposed to be of a stern and monastic character.  She asked whether
I wished to see the hospital, and said that the porter, whose office it
was to attend to visitors, was dead, and would be buried that very day,
so that the whole establishment could not conveniently be shown me.  She
kindly invited me, however, to visit the apartment occupied by her
husband and herself; so I followed her up the antique staircase, along
the gallery, and into a small, oak-panelled parlor, where sat an old man
in a long blue garment, who arose and saluted me with much courtesy.  He
seemed a very quiet person, and yet had a look of travel and adventure,
and gray experience, such as I could have fancied in a palmer of ancient
times, who might likewise have worn a similar costume.  The little room
was carpeted and neatly furnished; a portrait of its occupant was hanging
on the wall; and on a table were two swords crossed,--one, probably, his
own battle-weapon, and the other, which I drew half out of the scabbard,
had an inscription on the blade, purporting that it had been taken from
the field of Waterloo.  My kind old hostess was anxious to exhibit all
the particulars of their housekeeping, and led me into the bedroom, which
was in the nicest order, with a snow-white quilt upon the bed; and in a
little intervening room was a washing and bathing apparatus; a
convenience (judging from the personal aspect and atmosphere of such
parties) seldom to be met with in the humbler ranks of British life.

The old soldier and his wife both seemed glad of somebody to talk with;
but the good woman availed herself of the privilege far more copiously
than the veteran himself, insomuch that he felt it expedient to give her
an occasional nudge with his elbow in her well-padded ribs.  "Don't you
be so talkative!" quoth he; and, indeed, he could hardly find space for a
word, and quite as little after his admonition as before.  Her nimble
tongue ran over the whole system of life in the hospital.  The brethren,
she said, had a yearly stipend (the amount of which she did not mention),
and such decent lodgings as I saw, and some other advantages, free; and,
instead of being pestered with a great many rules, and made to dine
together at a great table, they could manage their little household
matters as they liked, buying their own dinners and having them cooked in
the general kitchen, and eating them snugly in their own parlors.  "And,"
added she, rightly deeming this the crowning privilege, "with the
Master's permission, they can have their wives to take care of them; and
no harm comes of it; and what more can an old man desire?"  It was
evident enough that the good dame found herself in what she considered
very rich clover, and, moreover, had plenty of small occupations to keep
her from getting rusty and dull; but the veteran impressed me as deriving
far less enjoyment from the monotonous ease, without fear of change or
hope of improvement, that had followed upon thirty years of peril and
vicissitude.  I fancied, too, that, while pleased with the novelty of a
stranger's visit, he was still a little shy of becoming a spectacle for
the stranger's curiosity; for, if he chose to be morbid about the matter,
the establishment was but an almshouse, in spite of its old-fashioned
magnificence, and his fine blue cloak only a pauper's garment, with a
silver badge on it that perhaps galled his shoulder.  In truth, the badge
and the peculiar garb, though quite in accordance with the manners of the
Earl of Leicester's age, are repugnant to modern prejudices, and might
fitly and humanely be abolished.

A year or two afterwards I paid another visit to the hospital, and found
a new porter established in office, and already capable of talking like a
guide-book about the history, antiquities, and present condition of the
charity.  He informed me that the twelve brethren are selected from among
old soldiers of good character, whose other resources must not exceed an
income of five pounds; thus excluding all commissioned officers, whose
half-pay would of course be more than that amount.  They receive from the
hospital an annuity of eighty pounds each, besides their apartments, a
garment of fine blue cloth, an annual abundance of ale, and a privilege
at the kitchen-fire; so that, considering the class from which they are
taken, they may well reckon themselves among the fortunate of the earth.
Furthermore, they are invested with political rights, acquiring a vote
for member of Parliament in virtue either of their income or brotherhood.
On the other hand, as regards their personal freedom or conduct, they are
subject to a supervision which the Master of the hospital might render
extremely annoying, were he so inclined; but the military restraint under
which they have spent the active portion of their lives makes it easier
for them to endure the domestic discipline here imposed upon their age.
The porter bore his testimony (whatever were its value) to their being as
contented and happy as such a set of old people could possibly be, and
affirmed that they spent much time in burnishing their silver badges, and
were as proud of them as a nobleman of his star.  These badges, by the
by, except one that was stolen and replaced in Queen Anne's time, are the
very same that decorated the original twelve brethren.

I have seldom met with a better guide than my friend the porter.  He
appeared to take a genuine interest in the peculiarities of the
establishment, and yet had an existence apart from them, so that he could
the better estimate what those peculiarities were.  To be sure, his
knowledge and observation were confined to external things, but, so far,
had a sufficiently extensive scope.  He led me up the staircase and
exhibited portions of the timber framework of the edifice that are
reckoned to be eight or nine hundred years old, and are still neither
worm-eaten nor decayed; and traced out what had been a great hall in the
days of the Catholic fraternity, though its area is now filled up with
the apartments of the twelve brethren; and pointed to ornaments of
sculptured oak, done in an ancient religious style of art, but hardly
visible amid the vaulted dimness of the roof.  Thence we went to the
chapel--the Gothic church which I noted several pages back--surmounting
the gateway that stretches half across the street.  Here the brethren
attend daily prayer, and have each a prayer-book of the finest paper,
with a fair, large type for their old eyes.  The interior of the chapel
is very plain, with a picture of no merit for an altar-piece, and a
single old pane of painted glass in the great eastern window,
representing,--no saint, nor angel, as is customary in such cases,--but
that grim sinner, the Earl of Leicester.  Nevertheless, amid so many
tangible proofs of his human sympathy, one comes to doubt whether the
Earl could have been such a hardened reprobate, after all.

We ascended the tower of the chapel, and looked down between its
battlements into the street, a hundred feet below us; while clambering
half-way up were foxglove-flowers, weeds, small shrubs, and tufts of
grass, that had rooted themselves into the roughnesses of the stone
foundation.  Far around us lay a rich and lovely English landscape, with
many a church-spire and noble country-seat, and several objects of high
historic interest.  Edge Hill, where the Puritans defeated Charles I., is
in sight on the edge of the horizon, and much nearer stands the house
where Cromwell lodged on the night before the battle.  Right under our
eyes, and half enveloping the town with its high-shouldering wall, so
that all the closely compacted streets seemed but a precinct of the
estate, was the Earl of Warwick's delightful park, a wide extent of sunny
lawns, interspersed with broad contiguities of forest-shade.  Some of the
cedars of Lebanon were there,--a growth of trees in which the Warwick
family take an hereditary pride.  The two highest towers of the castle
heave themselves up out of a mass of foliage, and look down in a lordly
manner upon the plebeian roofs of the town, a part of which are
slate-covered (these are the modern houses), and a part are coated with
old red tiles, denoting the more ancient edifices.  A hundred and sixty
or seventy years ago, a great fire destroyed a considerable portion of
the town, and doubtless annihilated many structures of a remote
antiquity; at least, there was a possibility of very old houses in the
long past of Warwick, which King Cymbeline is said to have founded in the
year ONE of the Christian era!

And this historic fact or poetic fiction, whichever it may be, brings to
mind a more indestructible reality than anything else that has occurred
within the present field of our vision; though this includes the scene of
Guy of Warwick's legendary exploits, and some of those of the Round
Table, to say nothing of the Battle of Edge Hill.  For perhaps it was in
the landscape now under our eyes that Posthumus wandered with the King's
daughter, the sweet, chaste, faithful, and courageous Imogen, the
tenderest and womanliest woman that Shakespeare ever made immortal in the
world.  The silver Avon, which we see flowing so quietly by the gray
castle, may have held their images in its bosom.

The day, though it began brightly, had long been overcast, and the clouds
now spat down a few spiteful drops upon us, besides that the east-wind
was very chill; so we descended the winding tower-stair, and went next
into the garden, one side of which is shut in by almost the only
remaining portion of the old city-wall.  A part of the garden-ground is
devoted to grass and shrubbery, and permeated by gravel-walks, in the
centre of one of which is a beautiful stone vase of Egyptian sculpture,
that formerly stood on the top of a Nilometer, or graduated pillar for
measuring the rise and fall of the river Nile.  On the pedestal is a
Latin inscription by Dr. Parr, who (his vicarage of Hatton being so close
at hand) was probably often the Master's guest, and smoked his
interminable pipe along these garden-walks.  Of the vegetable-garden,
which lies adjacent, the lion's share is appropriated to the Master, and
twelve small, separate patches to the individual brethren, who cultivate
them at their own judgment and by their own labor; and their beans and
cauliflowers have a better flavor, I doubt not, than if they had received
them directly from the dead hand of the Earl of Leicester, like the rest
of their food.  In the farther part of the garden is an arbor for the old
men's pleasure and convenience, and I should like well to sit down among
them there, and find out what is really the bitter and the sweet of such
a sort of life.  As for the old gentlemen themselves, they put me queerly
in mind of the Salem Custom-House, and the venerable personages whom I
found so quietly at anchor there.

The Master's residence, forming one entire side of the quadrangle, fronts
on the garden, and wears an aspect at once stately and homely.  It can
hardly have undergone any perceptible change within three centuries; but
the garden, into which its old windows look, has probably put off a great
many eccentricities and quaintnesses, in the way of cunningly clipped
shrubbery, since the gardener of Queen Elizabeth's reign threw down his
rusty shears and took his departure.  The present Master's name is
Harris; he is a descendant of the founder's family, a gentleman of
independent fortune, and a clergyman of the Established Church, as the
regulations of the hospital require him to be.  I know not what are his
official emoluments; but, according to an English precedent, an ancient
charitable fund is certain to be held directly for the behoof of those
who administer it, and perhaps incidentally, in a moderate way, for the
nominal beneficiaries; and, in the case before us, the twelve brethren
being so comfortably provided for, the Master is likely to be at least as
comfortable as all the twelve together.  Yet I ought not, even in a
distant land, to fling an idle gibe against a gentleman of whom I really
know nothing, except that the people under his charge bear all possible
tokens of being tended and cared for as sedulously as if each of them sat
by a warm fireside of his own, with a daughter bustling round the hearth
to make ready his porridge and his titbits.  It is delightful to think of
the good life which a suitable man, in the Master's position, has an
opportunity to lead,--linked to time-honored customs, welded in with an
ancient system, never dreaming of radical change, and bringing all the
mellowness and richness of the past down into these railway-days, which
do not compel him or his community to move a whit quicker than of yore.
Everybody can appreciate the advantages of going ahead; it might be well,
sometimes, to think whether there is not a word or two to be said in
favor of standing still or going to sleep.

From the garden we went into the kitchen, where the fire was burning
hospitably, and diffused a genial warmth far and wide, together with the
fragrance of some old English roast-beef, which, I think, must at that
moment have been done nearly to a turn.  The kitchen is a lofty,
spacious, and noble room, partitioned off round the fireplace, by a sort
of semicircular oaken screen, or rather, an arrangement of heavy and
high-backed settles, with an ever-open entrance between them, on either
side of which is the omnipresent image of the Bear and Ragged Staff,
three feet high, and excellently carved in oak, now black with time and
unctuous kitchen-smoke.  The ponderous mantel-piece, likewise of carved
oak, towers high towards the dusky ceiling, and extends its mighty
breadth to take in a vast area of hearth, the arch of the fireplace being
positively so immense that I could compare it to nothing but the city
gateway.  Above its cavernous opening were crossed two ancient halberds,
the weapons, possibly, of soldiers who had fought under Leicester in the
Low Countries; and elsewhere on the walls were displayed several muskets,
which some of the present inmates of the hospital may have levelled
against the French.  Another ornament of the mantel-piece was a square of
silken needlework or embroidery, faded nearly white, but dimly
representing that wearisome Bear and Ragged Staff, which we should hardly
look twice at, only that it was wrought by the fair fingers of poor Amy
Robsart, and beautifully framed in oak from Kenilworth Castle, at the
expense of a Mr. Conner, a countryman of our own.  Certainly, no
Englishman would be capable of this little bit of enthusiasm.  Finally,
the kitchen-firelight glistens on a splendid display of copper flagons,
all of generous capacity, and one of them about as big as a half-barrel;
the smaller vessels contain the customary allowance of ale, and the
larger one is filled with that foaming liquor on four festive occasions
of the year, and emptied amain by the jolly brotherhood.  I should be
glad to see them do it; but it would be an exploit fitter for Queen
Elizabeth's age than these degenerate times.

The kitchen is the social hall of the twelve brethren.  In the daytime,
they bring their little messes to be cooked here, and eat them in their
own parlors; but after a certain hour, the great hearth is cleared and
swept, and the old men assemble round its blaze, each with his tankard
and his pipe, and hold high converse through the evening.  If the Master
be a fit man for his office, methinks he will sometimes sit down sociably
among them; for there is an elbow-chair by the fireside which it would
not demean his dignity to fill, since it was occupied by King James at
the great festival of nearly three centuries ago.  A sip of the ale and a
whiff of the tobacco-pipe would put him in friendly relations with his
venerable household; and then we can fancy him instructing them by pithy
apothegms and religious texts which were first uttered here by some
Catholic priest and have impregnated the atmosphere ever since.  If a
joke goes round, it shall be of an elder coinage than Joe Miller's, as
old as Lord Bacon's collection, or as the jest-book that Master Slender
asked for when he lacked small-talk for sweet Anne Page.  No news shall
be spoken of later than the drifting ashore, on the northern coast, of
some stern-post or figure-head, a barnacled fragment of one of the great
galleons of the Spanish Armada.  What a tremor would pass through the
antique group, if a damp newspaper should suddenly be spread to dry
before the fire!  They would feel as if either that printed sheet or they
themselves must be an unreality.  What a mysterious awe, if the shriek of
the railway-train, as it reaches the Warwick station, should ever so
faintly invade their ears!  Movement of any kind seems inconsistent with
the stability of such an institution.  Nevertheless, I trust that the
ages will carry it along with them; because it is such a pleasant kind of
dream for an American to find his way thither, and behold a piece of the
sixteenth century set into our prosaic times, and then to depart, and
think of its arched doorway as a spell-guarded entrance which will never
be accessible or visible to him any more.

Not far from the market-place of Warwick stands the great church of St.
Mary's: a vast edifice, indeed, and almost worthy to be a cathedral.
People who pretend to skill in such matters say that it is in a poor
style of architecture, though designed (or, at least, extensively
restored) by Sir Christopher Wren; but I thought it very striking, with
its wide, high, and elaborate windows, its tall towers, its immense
length, and (for it was long before I outgrew this Americanism, the love
of an old thing merely for the sake of its age) the tinge of gray
antiquity over the whole.  Once, while I stood gazing up at the tower,
the clock struck twelve with a very deep intonation, and immediately some
chivies began to play, and kept up their resounding music for five
minutes, as measured by the hand upon the dial.  It was a very delightful
harmony, as airy as the notes of birds, and seemed, a not unbecoming
freak of half-sportive fancy in the huge, ancient, and solemn church;
although I have seen an old-fashioned parlor-clock that did precisely the
same thing, in its small way.

The great attraction of this edifice is the Beauchamp (or, as the
English, who delight in vulgarizing their fine old Norman names, call it,
the Beechum) Chapel, where the Earls of Warwick and their kindred have
been buried, from four hundred years back till within a recent period.
It is a stately and very elaborate chapel, with a large window of ancient
painted glass, as perfectly preserved as any that I remember seeing in
England, and remarkably vivid in its colors.  Here are several monuments
with marble figures recumbent upon them, representing the Earls in their
knightly armor, and their dames in the ruffs and court-finery of their
day, looking hardly stiffer in stone than they must needs have been in
their starched linen and embroidery.  The renowned Earl of Leicester of
Queen Elizabeth's time, the benefactor of the hospital, reclines at full
length on the tablet of one of these tombs, side by side with his
Countess,--not Amy Robsart, but a lady who (unless I have confused the
story with some other mouldy scandal) is said to have avenged poor
Amy's murder by poisoning the Earl himself.  Be that as it may, both
figures, and especially the Earl, look like the very types of ancient
Honor and Conjugal Faith.  In consideration of his long-enduring
kindness to the twelve brethren, I cannot consent to believe him as
wicked as he is usually depicted; and it seems a marvel, now that so many
well-established historical verdicts have been reversed, why some
enterprising writer does not make out Leicester to have been the pattern
nobleman of his age.

In the centre of the chapel is the magnificent memorial of its founder,
Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick in the time of Henry VI.  On a richly
ornamented altar-tomb of gray marble lies the bronze figure of a knight
in gilded armor, most admirably executed: for the sculptors of those days
had wonderful skill in their own style, and could make so lifelike an
image of a warrior, in brass or marble, that, if a trumpet were sounded
over his tomb, you would expect him to start up and handle his sword.
The Earl whom we now speak of, however, has slept soundly in spite of a
more serious disturbance than any blast of a trumpet, unless it were the
final one.  Some centuries after his death, the floor of the chapel fell
down and broke open the stone coffin in which he was buried; and among
the fragments appeared the anciently entombed Earl of Warwick, with the
color scarcely faded out of his cheeks, his eyes a little sunken, but in
other respects looking as natural as if he had died yesterday.  But
exposure to the atmosphere appeared to begin and finish the long-delayed
process of decay in a moment, causing him to vanish like a bubble; so,
that, almost before there had been time to wonder at him, there was
nothing left of the stalwart Earl save his hair.  This sole relic the
ladies of Warwick made prize of, and braided it into rings and brooches
for their own adornment; and thus, with a chapel and a ponderous tomb
built on purpose to protect his remains, this great nobleman could not
help being brought untimely to the light of day, nor even keep his
lovelocks on his skull after he had so long done with love.  There seems
to be a fatality that disturbs people in their sepulchres, when they have
been over-careful to render them magnificent and impregnable,--as witness
the builders of the Pyramids, and Hadrian, Augustus, and the Scipios, and
most other personages whose mausoleums have been conspicuous enough to
attract the violator; and as for dead men's hair, I have seen a lock of
King Edward the Fourth's, of a reddish-brown color, which perhaps was
once twisted round the delicate forefinger of Mistress Shore.

The direct lineage of the renowned characters that lie buried in this
splendid chapel has long been extinct.  The earldom is now held by the
Grevilles, descendants of the Lord Brooke who was slain in the
Parliamentary War; and they have recently (that is to say, within a
century) built a burial-vault on the other side of the church, calculated
(as the sexton assured me, with a nod as if he were pleased) to afford
suitable and respectful accommodation to as many as fourscore coffins.
Thank Heaven, the old man did not call them "CASKETS"!--a vile modern
phrase, which compels a person of sense and good taste to shrink more
disgustfully than ever before from the idea of being buried at all.  But
as regards those eighty coffins, only sixteen have as yet been
contributed; and it may be a question with some minds, not merely whether
the Grevilles will hold the earldom of Warwick until the full number
shall be made up, but whether earldoms and all manner of lordships will
not have faded out of England long before those many generations shall
have passed from the castle to the vault.  I hope not.  A titled and
landed aristocracy, if anywise an evil and an encumbrance, is so only to
the nation which is doomed to bear it on its shoulders; and an American,
whose sole relation to it is to admire its picturesque effect upon
society, ought to be the last man to quarrel with what affords him so
much gratuitous enjoyment.  Nevertheless, conservative as England is, and
though I scarce ever found an Englishman who seemed really to desire
change, there was continually a dull sound in my ears as if the old
foundations of things were crumbling away.  Some time or other,--by no
irreverent effort of violence, but, rather, in spite of all pious efforts
to uphold a heterogeneous pile of institutions that will have outlasted
their vitality,--at some unexpected moment, there must come a terrible
crash.  The sole reason why I should desire it to happen in my day is,
that I might be there to see!  But the ruin of my own country is,
perhaps, all that I am destined to witness; and that immense catastrophe
(though I am strong in the faith that there is a national lifetime of a
thousand years in us yet) would serve any man well enough as his final
spectacle on earth.

If the visitor is inclined to carry away any little memorial of Warwick,
he had better go to an Old Curiosity Shop in the High Street, where there
is a vast quantity of obsolete gewgaws, great and small, and many of them
so pretty and ingenious that you wonder how they came to be thrown aside
and forgotten.  As regards its minor tastes, the world changes, but does
not improve; it appears to me, indeed, that there have been epochs of far
more exquisite fancy than the present one, in matters of personal
ornament, and such delicate trifles as we put upon a drawing-room table,
a mantel-piece, or a whatnot.  The shop in question is near the East
Gate, but is hardly to be found without careful search, being denoted
only by the name of "REDFERN," painted not very conspicuously in the
top-light of the door.  Immediately on entering, we find ourselves among
a confusion of old rubbish and valuables, ancient armor, historic
portraits, ebony cabinets inlaid with pearl, tall, ghostly clocks,
hideous old china, dim looking-glasses in frames of tarnished
magnificence,--a thousand objects of strange aspect, and others that
almost frighten you by their likeness in unlikeness to things now in use.
It is impossible to give an idea of the variety of articles, so thickly
strewn about that we can scarcely move without overthrowing some great
curiosity with a crash, or sweeping away some small one hitched to our
sleeves.  Three stories of the entire house are crowded in like manner.
The collection, even as we see it exposed to view, must have been got
together at great cost; but the real treasures of the establishment lie
in secret repositories, whence they are not likely to be drawn forth at
an ordinary summons; though, if a gentleman with a competently long purse
should call for them, I doubt not that the signet-ring of Joseph's
friend Pharaoh, or the Duke of Alva's leading-staff, or the dagger that
killed the Duke of Buckingham (all of which I have seen), or any other
almost incredible thing, might make its appearance.  Gold snuff-boxes,
antique gems, jewelled goblets, Venetian wine-glasses (which burst when
poison is poured into them, and therefore must not be used for modern
wine-drinking), jasper-handled knives, painted Sevres teacups,--in short,
there are all sorts of things that a virtuoso ransacks the world to
discover.

It would be easier to spend a hundred pounds in Mr. Redfern's shop than
to keep the money in one's pocket; but, for my part, I contented myself
with buying a little old spoon of silver-gilt, and fantastically shaped,
and got it at all the more reasonable rate because there happened to be
no legend attached to it.  I could supply any deficiency of that kind at
much less expense than regilding the spoon!




RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN.


From Leamington to Stratford-on-Avon the distance is eight or nine miles,
over a road that seemed to me most beautiful.  Not that I can recall any
memorable peculiarities; for the country, most of the way, is a
succession of the gentlest swells and subsidences, affording wide and far
glimpses of champaign scenery here and there, and sinking almost to a
dead level as we draw near Stratford.  Any landscape in New England, even
the tamest, has a more striking outline, and besides would have its blue
eyes open in those lakelets that we encounter almost from mile to mile at
home, but of which the Old Country is utterly destitute; or it would
smile in our faces through the medium of the wayside brooks that vanish
under a low stone arch on one side of the road, and sparkle out again on
the other.  Neither of these pretty features is often to be found in an
English scene.  The charm of the latter consists in the rich verdure of
the fields, in the stately wayside trees and carefully kept plantations
of wood, and in the old and high cultivation that has humanized the very
sods by mingling so much of man's toil and care among them.  To an
American there is a kind of sanctity even in an English turnip-field,
when he thinks how long that small square of ground has been known and
recognized as a possession, transmitted from father to son, trodden often
by memorable feet, and utterly redeemed from savagery by old
acquaintanceship with civilized eyes.  The wildest things in England are
more than half tame.  The trees, for instance, whether in hedge-row,
park, or what they call forest, have nothing wild about them.  They are
never ragged; there is a certain decorous restraint in the freest
outspread of their branches, though they spread wider than any
self-nurturing tree; they are tall, vigorous, bulky, with a look of
age-long life, and a promise of more years to come, all of which will
bring them into closer kindred with the race of man.  Somebody or other
has known them from the sapling upward; and if they endure long enough,
they grow to be traditionally observed and honored, and connected with
the fortunes of old families, till, like Tennyson's Talking Oak, they
babble with a thousand leafy tongues to ears that can understand them.

An American tree, however, if it could grow in fair competition with an
English one of similar species, would probably be the more picturesque
object of the two.  The Warwickshire elm has not so beautiful a shape as
those that overhang our village street; and as for the redoubtable
English oak, there is a certain John Bullism in its figure, a compact
rotundity of foliage, a lack of irregular and various outline, that make
it look wonderfully like a gigantic cauliflower.  Its leaf, too, is much
smaller than that of most varieties of American oak; nor do I mean to
doubt that the latter, with free leave to grow, reverent care and
cultivation, and immunity from the axe, would live out its centuries as
sturdily as its English brother, and prove far the nobler and more
majestic specimen of a tree at the end of them.  Still, however one's
Yankee patriotism may struggle against the admission, it must be owned
that the trees and other objects of an English landscape take hold of the
observer by numberless minute tendrils, as it were, which, look as
closely as we choose, we never find in an American scene.  The parasitic
growth is so luxuriant, that the trunk of the tree, so gray and dry in
our climate, is better worth observing than the boughs and foliage; a
verdant messiness coats it all over; so that it looks almost as green as
the leaves; and often, moreover, the stately stem is clustered about,
high upward, with creeping and twining shrubs, the ivy, and sometimes the
mistletoe, close-clinging friends, nurtured by the moisture and never too
fervid sunshine, and supporting themselves by the old tree's abundant
strength.  We call it a parasitical vegetation; but, if the phrase imply
any reproach, it is unkind to bestow it on this beautiful affection and
relationship which exist in England between one order of plants and
another: the strong tree being always ready to give support to the
trailing shrub, lift it to the sun, and feed it out of its own heart,
if it crave such food; and the shrub, on its part, repaying its
foster-father with an ample luxuriance of beauty, and adding Corinthian
grace to the tree's lofty strength.  No bitter winter nips these tender
little sympathies, no hot sun burns the life out of them; and therefore
they outlast the longevity of the oak, and, if the woodman permitted,
would bury it in a green grave, when all is over.

Should there be nothing else along the road to look at, an English hedge
might well suffice to occupy the eyes, and, to a depth beyond what he
would suppose, the heart of an American.  We often set out hedges in our
own soil, but might as well set out figs or pineapples and expect to
gather fruit of them.  Something grows, to be sure, which we choose to
call a hedge; but it lacks the dense, luxuriant variety of vegetation
that is accumulated into the English original, in which a botanist would
find a thousand shrubs and gracious herbs that the hedgemaker never
thought of planting there.  Among them, growing wild, are many of the
kindred blossoms of the very flowers which our pilgrim fathers brought
from England, for the sake of their simple beauty and homelike
associations, and which we have ever since been cultivating in gardens.
There is not a softer trait to be found in the character of those stern
men than that they should have been sensible of these flower-roots
clinging among the fibres of their rugged hearts, and have felt the
necessity of bringing them over sea and making them hereditary in the new
land, instead of trusting to what rarer beauty the wilderness might have
in store for them.

Or, if the roadside has no hedge, the ugliest stone fence (such as, in
America, would keep itself bare and unsympathizing till the end of time)
is sure to be covered with the small handiwork of Nature; that careful
mother lets nothing go naked there, and if she cannot provide clothing,
gives at least embroidery.  No sooner is the fence built than she adopts
and adorns it as a part of her original plan, treating the hard, uncomely
construction as if it had all along been a favorite idea of her own.  A
little sprig of ivy may be seen creeping up the side of the low wall and
clinging fast with its many feet to the rough surface; a tuft of grass
roots itself between two of the stones, where a pinch or two of wayside
dust has been moistened into nutritious soil for it; a small bunch of
fern grows in another crevice; a deep, soft, verdant moss spreads itself
along the top and over all the available inequalities of the fence; and
where nothing else will grow, lichens stick tenaciously to the bare
stones and variegate the monotonous gray with hues of yellow and red.
Finally, a great deal of shrubbery clusters along the base of the stone
wall, and takes away the hardness of its outline; and in due time, as the
upshot of these apparently aimless or sportive touches, we recognize that
the beneficent Creator of all things, working through his handmaiden whom
we call Nature, has deigned to mingle a charm of divine gracefulness even
with so earthly an institution as a boundary fence.  The clown who
wrought at it little dreamed what fellow-laborer he had.

The English should send us photographs of portions of the trunks of
trees, the tangled and various products of a hedge, and a square foot of
an old wall.  They can hardly send anything else so characteristic.
Their artists, especially of the later school, sometimes toil to depict
such subjects, but are apt to stiffen the lithe tendrils in the process.
The poets succeed better, with Tennyson at their head, and often produce
ravishing effects by dint of a tender minuteness of touch, to which the
genius of the soil and climate artfully impels them: for, as regards
grandeur, there are loftier scenes in many countries than the best that
England can show; but, for the picturesqueness of the smallest object
that lies under its gentle gloom and sunshine, there is no scenery like
it anywhere.

In the foregoing paragraphs I have strayed away to a long distance from
the road to Stratford-on-Avon; for I remember no such stone fences as I
have been speaking of in Warwickshire, nor elsewhere in England, except
among the Lakes, or in Yorkshire, and the rough and hilly countries to
the north of it.  Hedges there were along my road, however, and broad,
level fields, rustic hamlets, and cottages of ancient date,--from the
roof of one of which the occupant was tearing away the thatch, and
showing what an accumulation of dust, dirt, mouldiness, roots of weeds,
families of mice, swallows' nests, and hordes of insects had been
deposited there since that old straw was new.  Estimating its antiquity
from these tokens, Shakespeare himself, in one of his morning rambles out
of his native town, might have seen the thatch laid on; at all events,
the cottage-walls were old enough to have known him as a guest.  A few
modern villas were also to be seen, and perhaps there were mansions of
old gentility at no great distance, but hidden among trees; for it is a
point of English pride that such houses seldom allow themselves to be
visible from the high-road.  In short, I recollect nothing specially
remarkable along the way, nor in the immediate approach to Stratford; and
yet the picture of that June morning has a glory in my memory, owing
chiefly, I believe, to the charm of the English summer-weather, the
really good days of which are the most delightful that mortal man can
ever hope to be favored with.  Such a genial warmth!  A little too warm,
it might be, yet only to such a degree as to assure an American (a
certainty to which he seldom attains till attempered to the customary
austerity of an English summer-day) that he was quite warm enough.  And
after all, there was an unconquerable freshness in the atmosphere, which
every little movement of a breeze shook over me like a dash of the
ocean-spray.  Such days need bring us no other happiness than their own
light and temperature.  No doubt, I could not have enjoyed it so
exquisitely, except that there must be still latent in us Western
wanderers (even after an absence of two centuries and more), an
adaptation to the English climate which makes us sensible of a motherly
kindness in its scantiest sunshine, and overflows us with delight at its
more lavish smiles.

The spire of Shakespeare's church--the Church of the Holy Trinity--begins
to show itself among the trees at a little distance from Stratford.  Next
we see the shabby old dwellings, intermixed with mean-looking houses of
modern date; and the streets being quite level, you are struck and
surprised by nothing so much as the tameness of the general scene, as if
Shakespeare's genius were vivid enough to have wrought pictorial
splendors in the town where he was born.  Here and there, however, a
queer edifice meets your eye, endowed with the individuality that belongs
only to the domestic architecture of times gone by; the house seems to
have grown out of some odd quality in its inhabitant, as a sea-shell is
moulded from within by the character of its innate; and having been built
in a strange fashion, generations ago, it has ever since been growing
stranger and quainter, as old humorists are apt to do.  Here, too (as so
often impressed me in decayed English towns), there appeared to be a
greater abundance of aged people wearing small-clothes and leaning on
sticks than you could assemble on our side of the water by sounding a
trumpet and proclaiming a reward for the most venerable.  I tried to
account for this phenomenon by several theories: as, for example, that
our new towns are unwholesome for age and kill it off unseasonably; or
that our old men have a subtile sense of fitness, and die of their own
accord rather than live in an unseemly contrast with youth and novelty
but the secret may be, after all, that hair-dyes, false teeth, modern
arts of dress, and other contrivances of a skin-deep youthfulness, have
not crept into these antiquated English towns, and so people grow old
without the weary necessity of seeming younger than they are.

After wandering through two or three streets, I found my way to
Shakespeare's birthplace, which is almost a smaller and humbler house
than any description can prepare the visitor to expect; so inevitably
does an august inhabitant make his abode palatial to our imaginations,
receiving his guests, indeed, in a castle in the air, until we unwisely
insist on meeting him among the sordid lanes and alleys of lower earth.
The portion of the edifice with which Shakespeare had anything to do is
hardly large enough, in the basement, to contain the butcher's stall that
one of his descendants kept, and that still remains there, windowless,
with the cleaver-cuts in its hacked counter, which projects into the
street under a little penthouse-roof, as if waiting for a new occupant.

The upper half of the door was open, and, on my rapping at it, a young
person in black made her appearance and admitted me; she was not a
menial, but remarkably genteel (an American characteristic) for an
English girl, and was probably the daughter of the old gentlewoman who
takes care of the house.  This lower room has a pavement of gray slabs of
stone, which may have been rudely squared when the house was new, but are
now all cracked, broken, and disarranged in a most unaccountable way.
One does not see how any ordinary usage, for whatever length of time,
should have so smashed these heavy stones; it is as if an earthquake had
burst up through the floor, which afterwards had been imperfectly trodden
down again.  The room is whitewashed and very clean, but wofully shabby
and dingy, coarsely built, and such as the most poetical imagination
would find it difficult to idealize.  In the rear of this apartment is
the kitchen, a still smaller room, of a similar rude aspect; it has a
great, rough fireplace, with space for a large family under the blackened
opening of the chimney, and an immense passageway for the smoke, through
which Shakespeare may have seen the blue sky by day and the stars
glimmering down at him by night.  It is now a dreary spot where the
long-extinguished embers used to be.  A glowing fire, even if it covered
only a quarter part of the hearth, might still do much towards making the
old kitchen cheerful.  But we get a depressing idea of the stifled, poor,
sombre kind of life that could have been lived in such a dwelling, where
this room seems to have been the gathering-place of the family, with no
breadth or scope, no good retirement, but old and young huddling together
cheek by jowl.  What a hardy plant was Shakespeare's genius, how fatal
its development, since it could not be blighted in such an atmosphere!
It only brought human nature the closer to him, and put more unctuous
earth about his roots.

Thence I was ushered up stairs to the room in which Shakespeare is
supposed to have been born: though, if you peep too curiously into the
matter, you may find the shadow of an ugly doubt on this, as well as most
other points of his mysterious life.  It is the chamber over the
butcher's shop, and is lighted by one broad window containing a great
many small, irregular panes of glass.  The floor is made of planks, very
rudely hewn, and fitting together with little neatness; the naked beams
and rafters, at the sides of the room and overhead, bear the original
marks of the builder's broad-axe, with no evidence of an attempt to
smooth off the job.  Again we have to reconcile ourselves to the
smallness of the space enclosed by these illustrious walls,--a
circumstance more difficult to accept, as regards places that we have
heard, read, thought, and dreamed much about, than any other
disenchanting particular of a mistaken ideal.  A few paces--perhaps
seven or eight--take us from end to end of it.  So low it is, that I
could easily touch the ceiling, and might have done so without a
tiptoe-stretch, had it been a good deal higher; and this humility of
the chamber has tempted a vast multitude of people to write their names
overhead in pencil.  Every inch of the sidewalls, even into the
obscurest nooks and corners, is covered with a similar record; all the
window-panes, moreover, are scrawled with diamond signatures, among which
is said to be that of Walter Scott; but so many persons have sought to
immortalize themselves in close vicinity to his name, that I really could
not trace him out.  Methinks it is strange that people do not strive to
forget their forlorn little identities, in such situations, instead of
thrusting them forward into the dazzle of a great renown, where, if
noticed, they cannot but be deemed impertinent.

This room, and the entire house, so far as I saw it, are whitewashed and
exceedingly clean; nor is there the aged, musty smell with which old
Chester first made me acquainted, and which goes far to cure an American
of his excessive predilection for antique residences.  An old lady, who
took charge of me up stairs, had the manners and aspect of a gentlewoman,
and talked with somewhat formidable knowledge and appreciative
intelligence about Shakespeare.  Arranged on a table and in chairs were
various prints, views of houses and scenes connected with Shakespeare's
memory, together with editions of his works and local publications about
his home and haunts, from the sale of which this respectable lady perhaps
realizes a handsome profit.  At any rate, I bought a good many of them,
conceiving that it might be the civillest way of requiting her for her
instructive conversation and the trouble she took in showing me the
house.  It cost me a pang (not a curmudgeonly, but a gentlemanly one) to
offer a downright fee to the lady-like girl who had admitted me; but I
swallowed my delicate scruples with some little difficulty, and she
digested hers, so far as I could observe, with no difficulty at all.  In
fact, nobody need fear to hold out half a crown to any person with whom
he has occasion to speak a word in England.

I should consider it unfair to quit Shakespeare's house without the frank
acknowledgment that I was conscious of not the slightest emotion while
viewing it, nor any quickening of the imagination.  This has often
happened to me in my visits to memorable places.  Whatever pretty and
apposite reflections I may have made upon the subject had either occurred
to me before I ever saw Stratford, or have been elaborated since.  It is
pleasant, nevertheless, to think that I have seen the place; and I
believe that I can form a more sensible and vivid idea of Shakespeare as
a flesh-and-blood individual now that I have stood on the kitchen-hearth
and in the birth-chamber; but I am not quite certain that this power of
realization is altogether desirable in reference to a great poet.  The
Shakespeare whom I met there took various guises, but had not his laurel
on.  He was successively the roguish boy,--the youthful deer-stealer,--
the comrade of players,--the too familiar friend of Davenant's mother,--
the careful, thrifty, thriven man of property who came back from London
to lend money on bond, and occupy the best house in Stratford,--the
mellow, red-nosed, autumnal boon-companion of John a' Combe,--and finally
(or else the Stratford gossips belied him), the victim of convivial
habits, who met his death by tumbling into a ditch on his way home from a
drinking-bout, and left his second-best bed to his poor wife.

I feel, as sensibly as the reader can, what horrible impiety it is to
remember these things, be they true or false.  In either case, they ought
to vanish out of sight on the distant ocean-line of the past, leaving a
pure, white memory, even as a sail, though perhaps darkened with many
stains, looks snowy white on the far horizon.  But I draw a moral from
these unworthy reminiscences and this embodiment of the poet, as
suggested by some of the grimy actualities of his life.  It is for the
high interests of the world not to insist upon finding out that its
greatest men are, in a certain lower sense, very much the same kind of
men as the rest of us, and often a little worse; because a common mind
cannot properly digest such a discovery, nor ever know the true
proportion of the great man's good and evil, nor how small a part of him
it was that touched our muddy or dusty earth.  Thence comes moral
bewilderment, and even intellectual loss, in regard to what is best of
him.  When Shakespeare invoked a curse on the man who should stir his
bones, he perhaps meant the larger share of it for him or them who should
pry into his perishing earthliness, the defects or even the merits of the
character that he wore in Stratford, when he had left mankind so much to
muse upon that was imperishable and divine.  Heaven keep me from
incurring any part of the anathema in requital for the irreverent
sentences above written!

From Shakespeare's house, the next step, of course, is to visit his
burial-place.  The appearance of the church is most venerable and
beautiful, standing amid a great green shadow of lime-trees, above which
rises the spire, while the Gothic battlements and buttresses and vast
arched windows are obscurely seen through the boughs.  The Avon loiters
past the churchyard, an exceedingly sluggish river, which might seem to
have been considering which way it should flow ever since Shakespeare
left off paddling in it and gathering the large forget-me-nots that grow
among its flags and water-weeds.

An old man in small-clothes was waiting at the gate; and inquiring
whether I wished to go in, he preceded me to the church-porch, and
rapped.  I could have done it quite as effectually for myself; but it
seems, the old people of the neighborhood haunt about the churchyard, in
spite of the frowns and remonstrances of the sexton, who grudges them the
half-eleemosynary sixpence which they sometimes get from visitors.  I was
admitted into the church by a respectable-looking and intelligent man in
black, the parish-clerk, I suppose, and probably holding a richer
incumbency than his vicar, if all the fees which he handles remain in his
own pocket.  He was already exhibiting the Shakespeare monuments to two
or three visitors, and several other parties came in while I was there.

The poet and his family are in possession of what may be considered the
very best burial-places that the church affords.  They lie in a row,
right across the breadth of the chancel, the foot of each gravestone
being close to the elevated floor on which the altar stands.  Nearest to
the side-wall, beneath Shakespeare's bust, is a slab bearing a Latin
inscription addressed to his wife, and covering her remains; then his own
slab, with the old anathematizing stanza upon it; then that of Thomas
Nash, who married his granddaughter; then that of Dr. Hall, the husband
of his daughter Susannah; and, lastly, Susannah's own.  Shakespeare's is
the commonest-looking slab of all, being just such a flag-stone as Essex
Street in Salem used to be paved with, when I was a boy.  Moreover,
unless my eyes or recollection deceive me, there is a crack across it, as
if it had already undergone some such violence as the inscription
deprecates.  Unlike the other monuments of the family, it bears no name,
nor am I acquainted with the grounds or authority on which it is
absolutely determined to be Shakespeare's; although, being in a range
with those of his wife and children, it might naturally be attributed to
him.  But, then, why does his wife, who died afterwards, take precedence
of him and occupy the place next his bust?  And where are the graves of
another daughter and a son, who have a better right in the family row
than Thomas Nash, his grandson-in-law?  Might not one or both of them
have been laid under the nameless stone?  But it is dangerous trifling
with Shakespeare's dust; so I forbear to meddle further with the grave
(though the prohibition makes it tempting), and shall let whatever bones
be in it rest in peace.  Yet I must needs add that the inscription on the
bust seems to imply that Shakespeare's grave was directly underneath it.

The poet's bust is affixed to the northern wall of the church, the base
of it being about a man's height, or rather more, above the floor of the
chancel.  The features of this piece of sculpture are entirely unlike any
portrait of Shakespeare that I have ever seen, and compel me to take down
the beautiful, lofty-browed, and noble picture of him which has hitherto
hung in my mental portrait-gallery.  The bust cannot be said to represent
a beautiful face or an eminently noble head; but it clutches firmly hold
of one's sense of reality and insists upon your accepting it, if not as
Shakespeare the poet, yet as the wealthy burgher of Stratford, the friend
of John a' Combe, who lies yonder in the corner.  I know not what the
phrenologists say to the bust.  The forehead is but moderately developed,
and retreats somewhat, the upper part of the skull rising pyramidally;
the eyes are prominent almost beyond the penthouse of the brow; the upper
lip is so long that it must have been almost a deformity, unless the
sculptor artistically exaggerated its length, in consideration, that, on
the pedestal, it must be foreshortened by being looked at from below.  On
the whole, Shakespeare must have had a singular rather than a
prepossessing face; and it is wonderful how, with this bust before its
eyes, the world has persisted in maintaining an erroneous notion of his
appearance, allowing painters and sculptors to foist their idealized
nonsense on its all, instead of the genuine man.  For my part, the
Shakespeare of my mind's eye is henceforth to be a personage of a ruddy
English complexion, with a reasonably capacious brow, intelligent and
quickly observant eyes, a nose curved slightly outward, a long, queer
upper lip, with the mouth a little unclosed beneath it, and cheeks
considerably developed in the lower part and beneath the chin.  But when
Shakespeare was himself (for nine tenths of the time, according to all
appearances, he was but the burgher of Stratford), he doubtless shone
through this dull mask and transfigured it into the face of an angel.

Fifteen or twenty feet behind the row of Shakespeare gravestones is the
great east-window of the church, now brilliant with stained glass of
recent manufacture.  On one side of this window, under a sculptured arch
of marble, lies a full-length marble figure of John a' Combe, clad in
what I take to be a robe of municipal dignity, and holding its hands
devoutly clasped.  It is a sturdy English figure, with coarse features, a
type of ordinary man whom we smile to see immortalized in the
sculpturesque material of poets and heroes; but the prayerful attitude
encourages us to believe that the old usurer may not, after all, have had
that grim reception in the other world which Shakespeare's squib
foreboded for him.  By the by, till I grew somewhat familiar with
Warwickshire pronunciation, I never understood that the point of those
ill-natured lines was a pun.  "'Oho!' quoth the Devil, ''t is my John a'
Combe'"--that is, "My John has come!"

Close to the poet's bust is a nameless, oblong, cubic tomb, supposed to
be that of a clerical dignitary of the fourteenth century.  The church
has other mural monuments and altar-tombs, one or two of the latter
upholding the recumbent figures of knights in armor and their dames, very
eminent and worshipful personages in their day, no doubt, but doomed to
appear forever intrusive and impertinent within the precincts which
Shakespeare has made his own.  His renown is tyrannous, 

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