1877
There is no better way for the stranger who wishes to know something of
England, to plunge in _medias res_, than to spend a fortnight in
Warwickshire. It is the core and centre of the English world; midmost
England, unmitigated England. The place has taught me a great many
English secrets; I have interviewed the genius of pastoral Britain. From
a charming lawn--a lawn delicious to one's sentient boot-sole--I looked
without obstruction at a sombre, soft, romantic mass, whose outline was
blurred by mantling ivy. It made a perfect picture; and in the
foreground the great trees overarched their boughs from right and left,
so as to give it a majestic frame. This interesting object was the
castle of Kenilworth. It was within distance of an easy walk, but one
hardly thought of walking to it, any more than one would have thought of
walking to a purple-shadowed tower in the background of a Berghem or a
Claude. Here there were purple shadows, and slowly-shifting lights, and
a soft-hued, bosky country in the middle distance.
Of course, however, I did walk over to the castle; and of course the
walk led me through leafy lanes, and beside the hedgerows that make a
tangled screen for lawn-like meadows. Of course too, I am bound to add,
there was a row of ancient pedlars outside the castle-wall, hawking
twopenny pamphlets and photographs. Of course, equally, at the foot of
the grassy mound on which the ruin stands, there were half a dozen
public houses; and, always of course, there were half a dozen beery
vagrants sprawling on the grass in the moist sunshine. There was the
usual respectable young woman to open the castle-gate and to receive the
usual sixpenny fee. And there were the usual squares of printed
cardboard, suspended upon venerable surfaces, with further enumeration
of twopence, threepence, fourpence. I do not allude to these things
querulously, for Kenilworth is a very tame lion--a lion that, in former
years, I had stroked more than once. I remember perfectly my first visit
to this romantic spot; how I chanced upon a picnic; how I stumbled over
beer-bottles; how the very echoes of the beautiful ruin seemed to have
dropped all their _h_'s. That was a sultry afternoon; I allowed my
spirits to sink, and I came away hanging my head. This was a beautiful
fresh morning, and in the interval I had grown philosophic. I had
learned that, with regard to most romantic sites in England, there is a
sort of average cockneyfication with which you must make your account.
There are always people on the field before you, and there is generally
something being drunk on the premises.
I hoped, on the occasion of which I am now speaking, that the average
would be low; and indeed, for the first five minutes I flattered myself
that this was the case. In the beautiful grassy court of the castle, on
my entrance, there were not more than eight or ten fellow-intruders.
There were a couple of old ladies on a bench, eating something out of a
newspaper; there was a dissenting minister, also on a bench, reading the
guide-book aloud to his wife and sister-in-law; there were three or four
children pushing each other up and down the turfy hillocks. This was
sweet seclusion indeed; and I got a capital start with the various noble
square-windowed fragments of the stately pile. They are extremely
majestic, with their even, pale-red colour, their deep-green drapery,
their princely vastness of scale. But presently the tranquil ruin began
to swarm like a startled hive. There were plenty of people, if they
chose to show themselves. They emerged from crumbling doorways and
gaping chambers, with the best conscience in the world; but I know not,
after all, why I should bear them a grudge, for they gave me a pretext
for wandering about in search of a quiet point of view. I cannot say
that I found my point of view, but in looking for it I saw the castle,
which is certainly an admirable ruin. And when the respectable young
woman had let me out of the gate again, and I had shaken my head at the
civil-spoken pedlars who form a little avenue for the arriving and
departing visitor, I found it in my good-nature to linger a moment on
the trodden, grassy slope, and to think that in spite of the hawkers,
the paupers, and the beer-shops, there was still a good deal of old
England in the scene. I say in spite of these things, but it may have
been, in some degree, because of them. Who shall resolve into its
component parts any impression of this richly complex English world,
where the present is always seen, as it were, in profile, and the past
presents a full face? At all events the solid red castle rose behind me,
towering above its small old ladies and its investigating parsons;
before me, across the patch of common, was a row of ancient cottages,
black-timbered, red-gabled, pictorial, which evidently had a memory of
the castle in its better days. A quaintish village straggled away on the
right, and on the left the dark, fat meadows were lighted up with misty
sun-spots and browsing sheep. I looked about for the village stocks; I
was ready to take the modern vagrants for Shakespearean clowns; and I
was on the point of going into one of the ale-houses to ask Mrs. Quickly
for a cup of sack.
I began these remarks, however, with no intention of talking about the
celebrated curiosities in which this region abounds, but with a design,
rather, of noting a few impressions of some of the shyer and more
elusive ornaments of the show. Stratford, of course, is a very sacred
place, but I prefer to say a word, for instance, about a charming old
rectory, a good many miles distant, and to mention the pleasant picture
it made of a summer afternoon, during a domestic festival. These are the
happiest of a stranger's memories of English life, and he feels that he
need make no apology for lifting the corner of the curtain. I drove
through the leafy lanes I spoke of just now, and peeped over the hedges
into fields where the yellow harvest stood waiting. In some places they
were already shorn, and while the light began to redden in the west and
to make a horizontal glow behind the dense wayside foliage, the
gleaners, here and there, came brushing through gaps in the hedges with
enormous sheaves upon their shoulders. The rectory was an ancient,
gabled building, of pale red brick, with facings of white stone and
creepers that wrapped it up. It dates, I imagine, from the early
Hanoverian time; and as it stood there upon its cushiony lawn, among its
ordered gardens, cheek to cheek with its little Norman church, it seemed
to me the model of a quiet, spacious, easy English home. The cushiony
lawn, as I have called it, stretched away to the edge of a brook, and
afforded to a number of very amiable people an opportunity of playing
lawn-tennis. There were half a dozen games going forward at once, and at
each of them a great many "nice girls," as they say in England, were
distinguishing themselves. These young ladies kept the ball going with
an agility worthy of the sisters and sweethearts of a race of
cricketers, and gave me a chance to admire their flexibility of figure
and their freedom of action. When they came back to the house, after the
games, flushed a little and a little dishevelled, they might have passed
for the attendant nymphs of Diana, flocking in from the chase. There
had, indeed, been a chance for them to wear the quiver, a target for
archery being erected on the lawn. I remembered George Eliot's
Gwendolen, and waited to see her step out of the muslin groups; but she
was not forthcoming, and it was plain that if lawn-tennis had been
invented in Gwendolen's day, this young lady would have captivated Mr.
Grandcourt by her exploits with the racket. She certainly would have
been a mistress of the game; and, if the suggestion is not too gross,
the alertness that she would have learned from it might have proved an
inducement to her boxing the ears of the insupportable Deronda.
After a while it grew too dark for lawn-tennis; but while the twilight
was still mildly brilliant I wandered away, out of the grounds of the
charming parsonage, and turned into the little churchyard beside it. The
small weather-worn, rust-coloured church had an appearance of high
antiquity; there were some curious Norman windows in the apse.
Unfortunately I could not get inside; I could only glance into the open
door across the interval of an old-timbered, heavy-hooded, padlocked
porch. But the sweetest evening stillness hung over the place, and the
sunset was red behind a dark row of rook-haunted elms. The stillness
seemed the greater because three or four rustic children were playing,
with little soft cries, among the crooked, deep-buried grave-stones. One
poor little girl, who seemed deformed, had climbed some steps that
served as a pedestal for a tall, mediæval-looking cross. She sat
perched there, staring at me through the gloaming. This was the heart of
England, unmistakably; it might have been the very pivot of the wheel on
which her fortune revolves. One need not be a rabid Anglican to be
extremely sensible of the charm of an English country church--and indeed
of some of the features of an English rural Sunday. In London there is a
certain flatness in the observance of this festival; but in the country
some of the ceremonies that accompany it have an indefinable harmony
with an ancient, pastoral landscape. I made this reflection on an
occasion that is still very fresh in my memory. I said to myself that
the walk to church from a beautiful country-house, of a lovely summer
afternoon, may be the prettiest possible adventure. The house stands
perched upon a pedestal of rock, and looks down from its windows and
terraces upon a shadier spot in the wooded meadows, of which the blunted
tip of a spire explains the character. A little company of people, whose
costume denotes the highest pitch of civilisation, winds down through
the blooming gardens, passes out of a couple of small gates, and reaches
the footpath in the fields. This is especially what takes the fancy of
the sympathetic stranger; the level, deep-green meadows, studded here
and there with a sturdy oak; the denser grassiness of the footpath, the
lily-sheeted pool beside which it passes, the rustic stiles, where he
stops and looks back at the great house and its wooded background. It is
in the highest degree probable that he has the privilege of walking with
a very pretty girl, and it is morally certain that he thinks a pretty
English girl the prettiest creature in the world. He knows that she
doesn't know how lovely is this walk of theirs; she has been taking
it--or taking another quite as good--any time these twenty years. But
her quiet-eyed unsuspectingness only makes her the more a part of his
delicate entertainment. The latter continues unbroken while they reach
the little churchyard, and pass up to the ancient porch, round which the
rosy rustics are standing decently and deferentially, to watch the
arrival of the smarter contingent. This party takes its place in a great
square pew, as large as a small room, and with seats all round, and
while he listens to the respectable intonings the sympathetic stranger
reads over the inscriptions on the mural tablets before him, all to the
honour of the earlier bearers of a name which is, for himself, a symbol
of hospitality.
When I came back to the parsonage the entertainment had been transferred
to the interior, and I had occasion to admire the maidenly vigour of
those charming young girls who, after playing lawn-tennis all the
afternoon, were modestly expecting to dance all the evening. And in
regard to this it is not impertinent to say that from almost any group
of English maidens--though preferably from such as have passed their
lives in quiet country homes--an American observer receives a delightful
impression of something that he can best describe as an intimate
salubrity. He notices face after face in which this rosy absence of a
morbid strain--this simple, natural, affectionate development--amounts
to positive beauty. If the young lady have no other beauty, the look I
speak of is a sufficient charm; but when it is united, as it so often
is, to real perfection of feature and colour, the result is the most
delightful thing in nature. It makes the highest type of English beauty,
and to my sense there is nothing so high as that. Not long since I heard
a clever foreigner indulge, in conversation with an English lady--a very
wise and liberal woman--in a little lightly restrictive criticism of her
countrywomen. "It is possible," she answered, in regard to one of his
objections; "but such as they are, they are inexpressibly dear to their
husbands." This is doubtless true of good wives all over the world; but
I felt, as I listened to these words of my friend, that there is often
something in an English girl-face which gives it an extra touch of
_justesse_. Such as the woman is, she has here, more than elsewhere, the
look of being completely and profoundly at the service of the man she
loves. This look, after one has been a while in England, comes to seem
so much a proper and indispensable part of a "nice" face, that the
absence of it appears a sign of irritability or of shallowness. Depth of
tenderness as regards a masculine counterpart--that is what it means;
and I confess that seems to me a very agreeable meaning.
As for the prettiness, I cannot forbear, in the face of a fresh
reminiscence, to give it another word. And yet in regard to prettiness,
what do words avail? This was what I asked myself the other day as I
looked at a young girl who stood in an old oaken parlour, the rugged
panels of which made a background for her lovely head, in simple
conversation with a handsome lad. I said to myself that the faces of
English young people had often a singular charm, but that this same
charm is too soft and shy a thing to talk about. The face of this fair
creature had a pure oval, and her clear brown eyes a quiet warmth. Her
complexion was as bright as a sunbeam after rain, and she smiled in a
way that made any other way of smiling than that seem a shallow
grimace--a mere creaking of the facial muscles. The young man stood
facing her, slowly scratching his thigh and shifting from one foot to
the other. He was tall and very well made, and so sun-burned that his
fair hair was lighter than his complexion. He had honest, stupid blue
eyes, and a simple smile that showed his handsome teeth. He was very
well dressed. Presently I heard what they were saying. "I suppose it's
pretty big," said the beautiful young girl. "Yes; it's pretty big," said
the handsome young man. "It's nicer when they are big," said his
interlocutress. The young man looked at her, and at everything in
general, with his slowly-apprehending blue eye, and for some time no
further remark was made. "It draws ten feet of water," he at last went
on. "How much water is there?" said the young girl. She spoke in a
charming voice. "There are thirty feet of water," said the young man.
"Oh, that's enough," rejoined the damsel. I had had an idea they were
flirting, and perhaps indeed that is the way it is done. It was an
ancient room and extremely delightful; everything was polished over with
the brownness of centuries. The chimney-piece was carved a foot thick,
and the windows bore, in coloured glass, the quarterings of ancestral
couples. These had stopped two hundred years before; there was nothing
newer than that date. Outside the windows was a deep, broad moat, which
washed the base of gray walls--gray walls spotted over with the most
delicate yellow lichens.
In such a region as this mellow, conservative Warwickshire an
appreciative American finds the small things quite as suggestive as the
great. Everything, indeed, is suggestive, and impressions are constantly
melting into each other and doing their work before he has had time to
ask them whence they came. He cannot go into a cottage muffled in
plants, to see a genial gentlewoman and a "nice girl," without being
reminded forsooth of "The Small House at Arlington" Why of "The Small
House at Arlington?" There is a larger house at which the ladies come up
to dine; but that is surely an insufficient reason. That the ladies are
charming--even that is not reason enough; for there have been other nice
girls in the world than lily Dale, and other mellow matrons than her
mamma. Reminded, however, he is--especially when he goes out upon the
lawn. Of course there is lawn-tennis, and it seems all ready for Mr.
Crosbie to come and play. This is a small example of the way in which in
the presence of English life the imagination must be constantly at play,
on the part of members of a race in whom it has necessarily been trained
to do extra service. In driving and walking, in looking and listening,
everything seemed to me in some degree or other characteristic of a
rich, powerful, old-fashioned society. One had no need of being told
that this is a conservative county; the fact seemed written in the
hedgerows and in the verdant acres behind them. Of course the owners of
these things were conservative; of course they were stubbornly unwilling
to see the harmonious edifice of Church and State the least bit shaken.
I had a feeling, as I went about, that I should find some very ancient
and curious opinions still comfortably domiciled in the fine old houses
whose clustered gables and chimneys appeared here and there, at a
distance, above their ornamental woods. Self-complacent British Toryism,
viewed in this vague and conjectural fashion--across the fields and
behind the oaks and beeches--is by no means a thing the irresponsible
stranger would wish away; it deepens the local colour; it may be said to
enhance the landscape. I got a sort of constructive sense of its
presence in the picturesque old towns of Coventry and Warwick, which
appear to be filled with those institutions--chiefly of an eleemosynary
order--that Toryism takes a genial comfort in. There are ancient
charities in these places--hospitals, almshouses, asylums,
infant-schools--so quaint and venerable that they almost make the
existence of poverty a delectable and satisfying thought. In Coventry in
especial, I believe, these pious foundations are so numerous as almost
to place a premium upon misery. Invidious reflections apart, however,
there are few things that speak more quaintly and suggestively of the
old England that an American loves than these clumsy little monuments of
ancient benevolence. Such an institution as Leicester's Hospital at
Warwick seems indeed to exist primarily for the sake of its spectacular
effect upon the American tourists, who, with the dozen rheumatic old
soldiers maintained in affluence there, constitute its principal
_clientèle_.
The American tourist usually comes straight to this quarter of
England--chiefly for the purpose of paying his respects to the
birthplace of Shakespeare. Being here, he comes to Warwick to see the
castle; and being at Warwick, he comes to see the odd little
theatrical-looking refuge for superannuated warriors which lurks in the
shadow of one of the old gate-towers. Every one will remember
Hawthorne's account of the place, which has left no touch of charming
taste to be added to any reference to it. The hospital struck me as a
little museum kept up for the amusement and confusion of those inquiring
Occidentals who are used to seeing charity more dryly and practically
administered. The old hospitallers--I am not sure, after all, whether
they are necessarily soldiers, but some of them happen to be--are at
once the curiosities and the keepers. They sit on benches outside of
their door, at the receipt of custom, all neatly brushed and darned, and
ready, like Mr. Cook, to conduct you personally. They are only twelve in
number, but their picturesque dwelling, perched upon the old city
rampart, and full of dusky little courts, cross-timbered gable-ends and
deeply sunken lattices, seems a wonderfully elaborate piece of machinery
for its humble purpose. Each of the old gentlemen must be provided with
a wife or "housekeeper;" each of them has a dusky parlour of his own;
and they pass their latter days in their scoured and polished little
refuge as softly and honourably as a company of retired lawgivers or
pensioned soothsayers.
At Coventry I went to see a couple of old charities of a similar
pattern--places with black-timbered fronts, little clean-swept courts
and Elizabethan windows. One of them was a romantic residence for a
handful of old women, who sat, each of them, in a cosy little bower, in
a sort of mediæval darkness; the other was a school for little boys of
humble origin, and this last establishment was charming. I found the
little boys playing at "top" in a gravelled court, in front of the
prettiest old building of tender-coloured stucco and painted timber,
ornamented with two delicate little galleries and a fantastic porch.
They were dressed in small blue tunics and odd caps, like those worn by
sailors, but, if I remember rightly, with little yellow tags affixed to
them. I was free, apparently, to wander all over the establishment;
there was no sign of pastor or master anywhere; nothing but the little
yellow-headed boys playing before the ancient house, and practising most
correctly the Warwickshire accent. I went indoors and looked at a fine
old oaken staircase; I even ascended it, and walked along a gallery and
peeped into a dormitory at a row of very short beds; and then I came
down and sat for five minutes on a bench hardly wider than the top rail
of a fence, in a little, cold, dim refectory, where there was not a
crumb to be seen, nor any lingering odour of bygone repasts to be
perceived. And yet I wondered how it was that the sense of many
generations of boyish feeders seemed to abide there. It came, I suppose,
from the very bareness and, if I may be allowed the expression, the
clean-licked aspect of the place, which wore the appearance of the
famous platter of Jack Sprat and his wife.
Inevitably, of course, the sentimental tourist has a great deal to say
to himself about this being Shakespeare's county--about these densely
verdant meadows and parks having been, to his musing eyes, the normal
landscape. In Shakespeare's day, doubtless, the coat of nature was far
from being so prettily trimmed as it is now; but there is one place,
nevertheless, which, as he passes it in the summer twilight, the
traveller does his best to believe unaltered. I allude, of course, to
Charlecote park, whose venerable verdure seems a survival from an
earlier England, and whose innumerable acres, stretching away, in the
early evening, to vaguely seen Tudor walls, lie there like the backward
years receding to the age of Elizabeth. It was, however, no part of my
design in these remarks to pause before so thickly besieged a shrine as
this; and if I were to allude to Stratford, it would not be in
connection with the fact that Shakespeare came into the world there. It
would be rather to speak of a delightful old house near the Avon which
struck me as the ideal home for a Shakespearean scholar, or indeed for
any passionate lover of the poet. Here, with books, and memories, and
the recurring reflection that he had taken his daily walk across the
bridge, at which you look from your windows straight down an avenue of
fine old trees, with an ever-closed gate at the end of them and a carpet
of turf stretched over the decent drive--here, I say, with old brown
wainscotted chambers to live in, old polished doorsteps to lead you from
one to the other, deep window-seats to sit in, with a play in your
lap--here a person for whom the cares of life should have resolved
themselves into a care for the greatest genius who has represented and
ornamented life, might find a very congruous asylum. Or, speaking a
little wider of the mark, the charming, rambling, low-gabled,
many-staired, much-panelled mansion would be a very agreeable home for
any person of taste who should prefer an old house to a new. I find I am
talking about it quite like an auctioneer; but what I chiefly had at
heart was to commemorate the fact that I had lunched there, and while I
lunched kept saying to myself that there is nothing in the world so
delightful as the happy accidents of old English houses.
And yet that same day, on the edge of the Avon, I found it in me to say
that a new house too may be a very charming affair. But I must add that
the new house I speak of had really such exceptional advantages that it
could not fairly be placed in the scale. Besides, was it new after all?
I suppose that it was, and yet one's impression there was all of a kind
of silvery antiquity. The place stood upon a decent Stratford street,
from which it looked usual enough; but when, after sitting a while in a
charming modern drawing-room, one stepped thoughtlessly through an open
window upon a verandah, one found that the horizon of the morning-call
had been wonderfully widened. I will not pretend to relate all that I
saw after I stepped off the verandah; suffice it that the spire and
chancel of the beautiful old church in which Shakespeare is buried, with
the Avon sweeping its base, were one of the elements of the vision. Then
there were the smoothest lawns in the world stretching down to the edge
of this lovely stream, and making, where the water touched them, a line
as even as the rim of a champagne-glass--a verge near which you
inevitably lingered to see the spire and the chancel--the church was
close at hand--among the well-grouped trees, and look for their
reflection in the river. The place was a garden of delight; it was a
stage set for one of Shakespeare's comedies--for _Twelfth Night_ or
_Much Ado_. Just across the river was a level meadow, which rivalled the
lawn on which I stood, and this meadow seemed only the more essentially
a part of the scene by reason of the voluminous sheep that were grazing
on it. These sheep were by no means mere edible mutton; they were
poetic, historic, romantic sheep; they were there to be picturesque, and
they knew it. And yet, knowing as they were, I doubt whether the wisest
old ram of the flock could have told me how to explain why it was that
this happy mixture of lawn and river and mirrored spire and blooming
garden seemed to me for a quarter of an hour the prettiest corner of
England.
If Warwickshire is Shakespeare's country, I found myself remembering
that it is also George Eliot's. The author of _Adam Bede_ and
_Middlemarch_ has called the rural background of those admirable
fictions by another name, but I believe it long ago ceased to be a
secret that her native Warwickshire had been in her intention. The
stranger who wanders over its velvety surface recognises at every turn
the elements of George Eliot's novels--especially when he carries
himself back in imagination to the Warwickshire of forty years ago. He
says to himself that it would be impossible to conceive anything more
conservatively bucolic, more respectably pastoral. It was in one of the
old nestling farmhouses, beyond a hundred hedgerows, that Hetty Sorrel
smiled into her milk-pans, as if she were looking for a reflection of
her pretty face; it was at the end of one of the leafy-pillared avenues
that poor Mrs. Casaubon paced up and down in fervid disappointment. The
country suggests, in especial, both the social and the natural scenery
of _Middlemarch_. There must be many a genially perverse old Mr. Brooke
there yet, and whether there are many Dorotheas or not, there must be
many a well-featured and well-acred young country gentleman, of the
pattern of Sir James Chettam, who, as he rides along the leafy lanes,
softly cudgels his brain to know why a clever girl shouldn't wish to
marry him. But I doubt whether there are many Dorotheas, and I suspect
that the Sir James Chettams of the county are not often pushed to that
intensity of meditation. You feel, however, that George Eliot could not
have placed her heroine in a local medium better fitted to throw her
fine impatience into relief--a community more likely to be startled and
perplexed by a questioning attitude on the part of a well-housed and
well-fed young gentlewoman.
Among the edifying days that I spent in these neighbourhoods there is
one in especial of which I should like to give a detailed account. But I
find on consulting my memory that the details have melted away into the
single deep impression of a perfect ripeness of civilisation. It was a
long excursion, by rail and by carriage, for the purpose of seeing three
extremely interesting old country-houses. Our errand led us, in the
first place, into Oxfordshire, through the ancient market-town of
Banbury, where of course we made a point of looking out for the Cross
referred to in the famous nursery-rhyme. It stood there in the most
natural manner--though I am afraid it has been "done up"--with various
antique gables around it, from one of whose exiguous windows the young
person appealed to in the rhyme may have looked at the old woman as she
rode and heard the music of her bells. The houses we went to see have
not a national reputation; they are simply interwoven figures in the
rich pattern of the Midlands. They have, indeed, a local renown, but
they are not thought to be very exceptionally curious or beautiful, and
the stranger has a feeling that his surprises and ecstasies are held to
betray a meagre bringing-up. Such places, to a Warwickshire mind of good
habits, must appear to be the pillars and props of a heaven-appointed
order of things; and accordingly, in a land on which heaven smiles, they
are as natural as the geology of the county or the supply of mutton. But
nothing could well give a stranger a stronger impression of the wealth
of England in such matters--of the interminable list of her territorial
homes--than this fact that the enchanting old mansions I speak of should
have but a limited fame--should not be lions of the first magnitude. Of
one of them, the finest in the group, one of my companions, who lived
but twenty miles away, had never even heard. Such a place was not
thought a matter to boast about. Its peers and its mates are scattered
all over the country; half of them are not even mentioned in the county
guide-books. You stumble upon them in a drive or a walk. You catch a
glimpse of an ivied front at the midmost point of a great estate, and
taking your way, by leave of a serious old woman at a lodge-gate, along
an overarching avenue, you find yourself introduced to an edifice so
human-looking in its beauty, that it seems for the occasion to reconcile
art and morality.
To Broughton Castle, the first seen in this beautiful group, I must do
no more than allude; but this is not because I failed to think it, as I
think every house I see, the most delightful residence in England. It
lies rather low, and its woods and pastures slope down to it; it has a
deep, clear moat all around it, spanned by a bridge that passes under a
charming old gate-tower, and nothing can be prettier than to see its
clustered walls of yellow-brown stone so sharply islanded, while its
gardens bloom on the other side of the water. Like several other houses
in this part of the country, Broughton Castle played a part (on the
Parliamentary side) in the civil wars, and not the least interesting
features of its beautiful interior are the several mementoes of
Cromwell's station there. It was within a moderate drive of this place
that in 1642 the battle of Edgehill was fought--the first great battle
of the war--and gained by neither party. We went to see the battlefield,
where an ancient tower and an artificial ruin (of all things in the
world) have been erected for the entertainment of convivial visitors.
These ornaments are perched upon the edge of a slope which commands a
view of the exact scene of the contest, upwards of a mile away. I looked
in the direction indicated, and saw misty meadows, a little greener
perhaps than usual, and colonnades of elms, a trifle denser. After this
we paid our respects to another old house which is full of memories and
suggestions of that most dramatic period of English history. But of
Compton Wyniates (the name of this enchanting domicile), I despair of
giving any coherent or adequate account. It belongs to the Marquis of
Northampton, and it stands empty all the year round. It sits on the
grass at the bottom of a wooded hollow, and the glades of a superb old
park go wandering upward, away from it. When I came out in front of the
house from a short and steep but stately avenue, I said to myself that
here surely we had arrived at the farthest limits of what ivy-smothered
brickwork and weather-beaten gables, conscious old windows and
clustered mossy roofs, can accomplish for the eye. It is impossible to
imagine a more perfect picture. And its air of solitude and delicate
decay--of having been dropped into its grassy hollow as an ancient jewel
is deposited upon a cushion, and being shut in from the world and back
into the past by its circling woods--all this highly increased its
impressiveness. The house is not large, as great houses go, and it sits,
as I have said, upon the grass, without even a flagging or a footpath to
conduct you from the point where the avenue stops to the beautiful
sculptured doorway which admits you into the small, quaint, inner court.
From this court you are at liberty to pass through the crookedest series
of oaken halls and chambers, adorned with treasures of old wainscotting
and elaborate doors and chimney-pieces. Outside, you may walk all round
the house on a grassy bank, which is raised above the level on which it
stands, and find it from every point of view a more charming
composition. I should not omit to mention that Compton Wyniates is
supposed to have been in Scott's eye when he described the dwelling of
the old royalist knight in Woodstock. In this case he simply transferred
the house to the other side of the county. He has indeed given several
of the features of the place, but he has not given what one may call its
colour. I must add that if Sir Walter could not give the colour of
Compton Wyniates, it is useless for any other writer to attempt it It is
a matter for the brush and not for the pen.
And what shall I say of the colour of Wroxton Abbey, which we visited
last in order, and which in the thickening twilight, as we approached
its great ivy-muffled face, made an ineffaceable impression on my fancy?
Wroxton Abbey, as it stands, is a house of about the same period as
Compton Wyniates--the latter years, I suppose, of the sixteenth century.
But it is quite another affair. The place is inhabited, "kept up," and
full of the most interesting and most splendid detail. Its happy
occupants, however, were fortunately not actually staying there (happy
occupants, in England, are almost always absent), and the house was
exhibited with a civility worthy of its merit. Everything that in the
material line can render life noble and charming has been gathered into
it with a profusion which makes the whole place a monument to past
opportunity. As I wandered from one rich room to another, looking at
these things, that ineffaceable impression upon my fancy which I just
mentioned was delightfully deepened. But who can tell the pleasures of
fancy when fancy takes her ease in an old English country-house, while
the twilight darkens the corners of expressive rooms, and the
appreciative intruder, pausing at the window, turns his glance from the
observing portrait of a handsome ancestral face and sees the great soft
billows of the lawn melt away into the park?