Our drive to Newstead lay through what was once a portion of Sherwood
Forest, tho all of it, I believe, has now become private property, and is
converted into fertile fields, except where the owners of estates have set
out plantations.... The post-boy calls the distance ten miles from
Nottingham. He also averred that it was forbidden to drive visitors within
the gates; so we left the fly at the inn, and set out to walk from the
entrance to the house. There is no porter's lodge; and the grounds, in
this outlying region, had not the appearance of being very primly kept,
but were well wooded with evergreens, and much overgrown with ferns,
serving for cover for hares, which scampered in and out of their
hiding-places. The road went winding gently along, and, at the distance of
nearly a mile, brought us to a second gate, through which we likewise
passed, and walked onward a good way farther, seeing much wood, but as yet
nothing of the Abbey.
At last, through the trees, we caught a glimpse of its battlements, and
saw, too, the gleam of water, and then appeared the Abbey's venerable
front. It comprises the western wall of the church, which is all that
remains of that fabric, a great, central window, entirely empty, without
tracery or mullions; the ivy clambering up on the inside of the wall, and
hanging over in front. The front of the inhabited part of the house
extends along on a line with this church wall, rather low, with
battlements along its top, and all in good keeping with the ruinous
remnant. We met a servant, who replied civilly to our inquiries about the
mode of gaining admittance, and bade us ring a bell at the corner of the
principal porch. We rang accordingly, and were forthwith admitted into a
low, vaulted basement, ponderously wrought with intersecting arches, dark
and rather chilly, just like what I remember to have seen at Battle Abbey;
and, after waiting here a little while, a respectable elderly gentlewoman
appeared, of whom we requested to be shown round the Abbey. She
courteously acceded, first presenting us to a book, in which to inscribe
our names.
I suppose ten thousand people, three-fourths of them Americans, have
written descriptions of Newstead Abbey; and none of them, so far as I have
read, give any true idea of the place; neither will my description, if I
write one. In fact, I forget very much that I saw, and especially in what
order the objects came. In the basement was Byron's bath--a dark and cold
and cellar-like hole, which it must have required good courage to plunge
into; in this region, too, or near it, was the chapel, which Colonel
Wildman has decorously fitted up, and where service is now regularly
performed, but which was used as a dogs' kennel in Byron's time.
After seeing this, we were led to Byron's own bed-chamber, which remains
just as when he slept in it--the furniture and all the other arrangements
being religiously preserved. It was in the plainest possible style,
homely, indeed, and almost mean--an ordinary paper-hanging, and everything
so commonplace that it was only the deep embrasure of the window that made
it look unlike a bed-chamber in a middling-class lodging-house. It would
have seemed difficult, beforehand, to fit up a room in that picturesque
old edifice so that it should be utterly void of picturesqueness; but it
was effected in this apartment, and I suppose it is a specimen of the way
in which old mansions used to be robbed of their antique character, and
adapted to modern tastes, before medieval antiquities came into fashion.
Some prints of the Cambridge colleges, and other pictures indicating
Byron's predilections at the time, and which he himself had hung there,
were on the walls. This, the housekeeper told us, had been the Abbot's
chamber, in the monastic time. Adjoining it is the haunted room, where the
ghostly monk whom Byron introduces into "Don Juan," is said to have his
lurking-place. It is fitted up in the same style as Byron's, and used to
be occupied by his valet or page. No doubt, in his lordship's day, these
were the only comfortable bedrooms in the Abbey; and by the housekeeper's
account of what Colonel Wildman has done, it is to be inferred that the
place must have been in a most wild, shaggy, tumble-down condition, inside
and out, when he bought it.
It is very different now. After showing us these two apartments of Byron
and his servant, the housekeeper led us from one to another and another
magnificent chamber, fitted up in antique style, with oak paneling, and
heavily carved bedsteads, of Queen Elizabeth's time, or of the Stuarts,
hung with rich tapestry curtains of similar date, and with beautiful old
cabinets of carved wood, sculptured in relief, or tortoise-shell and
ivory. The very pictures and realities, these rooms were, of stately
comfort; and they were called by the names of kings--King Edward's, King
Charles II.'s, King Henry VII.'s, chamber; and they were hung with
beautiful pictures, many of them portraits of these kings. The
chimney-pieces were carved and emblazoned; and all, so far as I could
judge, was in perfect keeping, so that if a prince or noble of three
centuries ago were to come to lodge at Newstead Abbey, he would hardly
know that he had strayed out of his own century. And yet he might have
known by some token, for there are volumes of poetry and light literature
on the tables in these royal bed-chambers, and in that of Henry VII. I saw
"The House of the Seven Gables," and "The Scarlet Letter," in Routledge's
edition.
Certainly the house is admirably fitted up; and there must have been
something very excellent and comprehensive in the domestic arrangements of
the monks, since they adapt themselves so well to a state of society
entirely different from that in which they originated. The library is a
very comfortable room, and provocative of studious ideas, tho lounging and
luxurious. It is long, and rather low, furnished with soft couches, and,
on the whole, tho a man might dream of study, I think he would be most
likely to read nothing but novels there. I know not what the room was in
monkish times, but it was waste and ruinous in Lord Byron's. Here, I
think, the housekeeper unlocked a beautiful cabinet, and took out the
famous skull which Lord Byron transformed into a drinking-goblet. It has a
silver rim and stand, but still the ugly skull is bare and evident, and
the naked inner bone receives the wine.
There was much more to see in the house than I had any previous notion of;
but except the two chambers already noticed, nothing remained the least as
Byron left it. Yes, another place there was--his own small dining-room,
with a table of moderate size, where, no doubt, the skull-goblet has often
gone its rounds. Colonel Wildman's dining-room was once Byron's
shooting-gallery, and the original refectory of the monks. It is now
magnificently arranged, with a vaulted roof, a music-gallery at one end,
suits of armor and weapons on the walls, and mailed arms extended, holding
candelabras.
We parted with the housekeeper, and I with a good many shillings, at the
door by which we entered; and our next business was to see the private
grounds and gardens. A little boy attended us through the first part of
our progress, but soon appeared the veritable gardener--a shrewd and
sensible old man, who has been very many years on the place. There was
nothing of special interest as concerning Byron until we entered the
original old monkish garden, which is still laid out in the same fashion
as the monks left it, with a large oblong piece of water in the center,
and terraced banks rising at two or three different stages with perfect
regularity around it; so that the sheet of water looks like the plate of
an immense looking-glass, of which the terraces form the frame. It seems
as if, were there any giant large enough, he might raise up this mirror
and set it on end.
In the monks' garden, there is a marble statue of Pan, which the gardener
told us, was brought by the "Wicked Lord" (great-uncle of Byron) from
Italy, and was supposed by the country people to represent the devil, and
to be the object of his worship--a natural idea enough, in view of his
horns and cloven feet and tail, tho this indicates at all events, a very
jolly devil. There is also a female statue, beautiful from the waist
upward, but shaggy and cloven-footed below, and holding a little
cloven-footed child by the hand. This, the old gardener assured us was
Pandora, wife of the above-mentioned Pan, with her son. Not far from this
spot, we came to the tree on which Byron carved his own name and that of
his sister Augusta. It is a tree of twin stems,--a birch-tree, I
think--growing up side by side. One of the stems still lives and
flourished, but that on which he carved the two names is quite dead, as if
there had been something fatal in the inscription that has made it for
ever famous. The names are still very legible, altho the letters had been
closed up by the growth of the bark before the tree died. They must have
been deeply cut at first.
There are old yew-trees of unknown antiquity in this garden, and many
other interesting things; and among them may be reckoned a fountain of
very pure water, called the "Holly Well," of which we drank. There are
several fountains, besides the large mirror in the center of the garden;
and these are mostly inhabited by carp, the genuine descendants of those
which peopled the fishponds in the days of the monks. Coming in front of
the Abbey, the gardener showed us the oak that Byron planted, now a
vigorous young tree; and the monument which he erected to his Newfoundland
dog, and which is larger than most Christians get, being composed of a
marble, altar-shaped tomb, surrounded by a circular area of steps, as much
as twenty feet in diameter. The gardener said, however, that Byron
intended this, not merely as the burial-place of his dog, but for himself,
too, and his sister.
HUCKNALL-TORKARD CHURCH [Footnote: From "Gray Days and Gold." By
permission of, and by arrangement with, the publishers, Moffat, Yard & Co.
Copyright by William Winter, 1890-1911.]
[Byron's Grave]