I have been at Warwick, which is a place worth seeing. The town is on
an eminence surrounded every way with a fine cultivated valley,
through which the Avon winds, and at the distance of five or six
miles, a circle of hills, well wooded, and with various objects
crowning them, that close the prospect. Out of the town on one side of
it, rises a rock that might remind one of your rocks at Durham, but
that it is not so savage, or so lofty, and that the river, which,
washes its foot, is perfectly clear, and so gentle, that its current
is hardly visible. Upon it stands the castle, the noble old residence
of the Beauchamps and Nevilles, and now of Earl Brooke. He has sash'd
the great apartment that's to be sure (I can't help these things), and
being since told, that square sash-windows were not Gothic, he has put
certain whim-whams within side the glass, which appearing through are
to look like fret-work. Then he has scooped out a little burrow in the
massy walls of the place for his little self and his children, which
is hung with paper and printed linen, and carved chimney-pieces, in
the exact manner of Berkley Square or Argyle buildings. What in short
can a lord do nowadays, that is lost in a great old solitary castle,
but skulk about, and get into the first hole he finds, as a rat would
do in like case.
A pretty long old stone bridge leads you into the town with a mill at
the end of it, over which the rock rises with the castle upon it with
all its battlements and queer ruined towers, and on your left hand the
Avon strays through the park, whose ancient elms seem to remember Sir
Philip Sidney, who often walk'd under them, and talk of him to this
day. The Beauchamp Earls of Warwick lie under stately monuments in the
choir of the great church, and in our lady's chapel adjoining to it.
There also lie Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick; and his brother, the
famous Lord Leicester, with Lettice, his countess. This chapel is
preserved entire, tho the body of the church was burned down sixty
years ago, and rebuilt by Sir C. Wren.
I had heard often of Guy-Cliff, two miles from the town; so I walked
to see it, and of all improvers commend me to Mr. Greathead, its
present owner. He shew'd it me himself, and is literally a fat young
man with a head and face much bigger than they are usually worn. It
was naturally a very agreeable rock, whose cliffs cover'd with large
trees hung beetling over the Avon, which twists twenty ways in sight
of it. There was the cell of Guy, Earl of Warwick, cut in the living
stone, where he died a hermit (as you may see in a penny history, that
hangs upon the rails in Moorfields). There were his fountains bubbling
out of the cliff; there was a chantry founded to his memory in Henry
the Sixth's time. But behold the trees are cut down to make room for
flowering shrubs; the rock is cut up, till it is as smooth and as
sleek as satin; the river has a gravel-walk by its side; the cell is a
grotto with cockle-shells and looking glass; the fountains have an
iron gate before them, and the chantry is a barn, or a little house.
Even the poorest bite of nature that remain are daily threatened, for
he says (and I am sure, when the Greatheads are once set upon a thing,
they will do it) he is determined it shall be all new. These were his
words, and they are fate.