If you look to move through this little volume in a direct line, after
the present fashion of Railway Travelling, you will be signally
disappointed. Nothing can well be more circuitous than the route
proposed to you, nor more eccentric than your present guide. This book
aspires to the precision of neither Patterson nor Bradshaw. Let men
"bloody with spurring, fiery hot with speed," consult those oracles of
swiftness and rectitude of way: we do not belong to their manor. We
desire to beguile, by a sort of serpentine irregularity, the occasional
tedium of rapid movement. We move to our journey's end by sundry
old-fashioned circuitous routes. Grudge not, while you are whirled along
a New Road, to loiter mentally upon certain Old Roads, and to consider as
you linger along them the ways and means of transit which contented our
ancestors. Although their coaches were slow, and their pack-saddles hard
as those of the Yanguesan carriers of La Mancha, yet they reached their
inns in time, and bequeathed to you and me--Gentle Reader--if we have the
grace to use them, many pithy and profitable records of their wayfaring.
The battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift:
neither is the most rapid always the pleasantest journey. Horace
accompanied Maecenas on very urgent business, yet he loitered on the way,
and confesses his slackness without shame--
"Hoc iter ignavi divisimus, altius ac nos
Praecinctis unum: minus est gravis Appia tardis."
It was, he says, more comfortable to take his time. Is our business more
pressing than his was? It can hardly be, seeing that he wended with a
company whose errand was to prevent the two masters of the world from
coming to blows. In comparison with such a mission, who will put the
buying of a cargo of cotton, or arriving an hour before a public meeting
begins, or catching a pic-nic party just in the nick of time? St.
Bernard rode from sunrise to sunset along the Lake Leman without once
putting his mule out of a walk; so much delectation the holy man felt in
beholding the beauty of the water and the mountains, and in "chewing the
cud of his own sweet or bitter fancies." And good Michel Seigneur de
Montaigne took a week for his journey from Nice to Pisa, although his
horse was one of the smartest trotters in Gascony, merely for the
pleasure he felt in following the by-lanes. And did not Richard Hooker
receive from Bishop Jewell his blessing and his walking-staff, and yet
with such poor means of speed he thought not of the weary miles between
Exeter and Oxford, but trudged merrily with a thankful heart for the good
oak prop, and the better blessing? Much less content with his journey
was Richard when he rode to London on a hard-paced nag, that he might be
in time to preach his first sermon at St. Paul's. And was not this, the
hastier of his journeys, the most unlucky in his life, seeing that it
brought him acquainted with that foul shrew, Joan, his wife, who made his
after-days as bitter to him, patient and godly though he were, as
wormwood and coloquintida? Are not these goodly examples, Christian and
Heathen? Let the Train rush along, you and I will travel at our own
pace.
Neither shall you, if you will be ruled by your present guide, saunter
along the roads of Britain alone, or on known and extant ways only. Are
there not roads which never paid toll, roads in the waste, roads
travelled only in vision, roads once traversed by the feet of myriads,
yet now overgrown by the forest, or buried deeply in the marsh? Shall we
not for awhile be surveyors of these forgotten highways, and pause beside
the tombs of the kings, or consuls, or Incas, who first levelled them?
The world has moved westward with the daily motion of the earth. Yet, in
the far East lie the most ancient highways--whose pavements once echoed
with the hurrying feet of Nimrod's outposts or the trampling of
Agamemnon's rear-guard. It were well to mark how that ancient chivalry
sped along their causeways.
Nor, on our devious route, shall baiting-places be wanting. Drunken
Barnaby stayed not oftener to prove the ale than we will do:--
"AEgre jam relicto rure
_Securem Aldermanni_--_bury_
Primo petii, qua exosa
Sentina, HOLBURNI ROSA
Me excepit, ordine tali
Appuli GRYPHEM VETERIS BAILEY:
Ubi experrectum lecto
TRES CICONIAS indies specto,
Quo victurus, donec aestas
Rure curas tollet maestas:
Ego etiam et Sodales
Nunc _Galerum Cardinalis_
Visitantes, vi Minervae
Bibimus ad _Cornua Cervi_."
Our inns may not always be found at the roadside; and we may possibly
ever and anon seem to have missed the track altogether. Yet we will come
into the main line in the end, and, I trust, part with kindly feelings,
when the time has come for saying