June 21st.--We left Rock Ferry and Liverpool on Monday the 18th by the
rail for this place; a very dim and rainy day, so that we had no pleasant
prospects of the country; neither would the scenery along the Great
Western Railway have been in any case very striking, though sunshine
would have made the abundant verdure and foliage warm and genial. But a
railway naturally finds its way through all the common places of a
country, and is certainly a most unsatisfactory mode of travelling, the
only object being to arrive. However, we had a whole carriage to
ourselves, and the children enjoyed the earlier part of the journey very
much. We skirted Shrewsbury, and I think I saw the old tower of a church
near the station, perhaps the same that struck Falstaff's "long hour."
As we left the town I saw the Wrekin, a round, pointed hill of regular
shape, and remembered the old toast, "To all friends round the Wrekin!"
As we approached Birmingham, the country began to look somewhat
Brummagemish, with its manufacturing chimneys, and pennons of flame
quivering out of their tops; its forges, and great heaps of mineral
refuse; its smokiness and other ugly symptoms. Of Birmingham itself we
saw little or nothing, except the mean and new brick lodging-houses, on
the outskirts of the town. Passing through Warwick, we had a glimpse of
the castle,--an ivied wall and two turrets, rising out of imbosoming
foliage; one's very idea of an old castle. We reached Leamington at a
little past six, and drove to the Clarendon Hotel,--a very spacious and
stately house, by far the most splendid hotel I have yet seen in England.
The landlady, a courteous old lady in black, showed my wife our rooms,
and we established ourselves in an immensely large and lofty parlor, with
red curtains and ponderous furniture, perhaps a very little out of date.
The waiter brought me the book of arrivals, containing the names of all
visitors for from three to five years back. During two years I estimated
that there had been about three hundred and fifty persons only, and while
we were there, I saw nobody but ourselves to support the great hotel.
Among the names were those of princes, earls, countesses, and baronets;
and when the people of the house heard from R-----'s nurse that I too was
a man of office, and held the title of Honorable in my own country, they
greatly regretted that I entered myself as plain "Mister" in the book.
We found this hotel very comfortable, and might doubtless have made it
luxurious, had we chosen to go to five times the expense of similar
luxuries in America; but we merely ordered comfortable things, and so
came off at no very extravagant rate,--and with great honor, at all
events, in the estimation of the waiter.
During the afternoon we found lodgings, and established ourselves in them
before dark.
This English custom of lodgings, of which we had some experience at Rhyl
last year, has its advantages; but is rather uncomfortable for strangers,
who, in first settling themselves down, find that they must undertake all
the responsibility of housekeeping at an instant's warming, and cannot
get even a cup of tea till they have made arrangements with the grocer.
Soon, however, there comes a sense of being at home, and by our exclusive
selves, which never can be attained at hotels nor boarding-houses. Our
house is well situated and respectably furnished, with the dinginess,
however, which is inseparable from lodging-houses,--as if others had used
these things before and would use them again after we had gone,--a
well-enough adaptation, but a lack of peculiar appropriateness; and I
think one puts off real enjoyment from a sense of not being truly fitted.
July 1st.--On Friday I took the rail with J----- for Coventry. It was a
bright and very warm day, oppressively so, indeed; though I think that
there is never in this English climate the pervading warmth of an
American summer day. The sunshine may be excessively hot, but an
overshadowing cloud or the shade of a tree or of a building at once
affords relief; and if the slightest breeze stirs, you feel the latent
freshness of the air.
Coventry is some nine or ten miles from Leamington. The approach to it
from the railway presents nothing very striking,--a few church-towers,
and one or two tall steeples; and the houses first seen are of modern and
unnoticeable aspect. Getting into the interior of the town, however, you
find the streets very crooked, and some of them very narrow. I saw one
place where it seemed possible to shake hands from one jutting storied
old house to another. There were whole streets of the same kind of
houses, one story impending over another, such as used to be familiar to
me in Salem, and in some streets of Boston. In fact, the whole aspect of
the town--its irregularity and continual indirectness--reminded me very
much of Boston, as I used to see it, in rare visits thither, when a
child.
These Coventry houses, however, many of them, are much larger than any of
similar style that I have seen elsewhere, and they spread into greater
bulk as they ascend, by means of one story jutting over the other.
Probably the New-Englanders continued to follow this fashion of
architecture after it had been abandoned in the mother country. The old
house built, by Philip English, in Salem, dated about 1692; and it was in
this style,--many gabled, and impending. Here the edifices of such
architecture seem to be Elizabethan, and of earlier date. A woman in
Stratford told us that the rooms, very low on the ground-floor, grew
loftier from story to story to the attic. The fashion of windows, in
Coventry, is such as I have not hitherto seen. In the highest story, a
window of the ordinary height extends along the whole breadth of the
house, ten, fifteen, perhaps twenty feet, just like any other window of a
commonplace house, except for this inordinate width. One does not easily
see what the inhabitants want of so much window-light; but the fashion is
very general, and in modern houses, or houses that have been modernized,
this style of window is retained. Thus young people who grow up amidst
old people contract quaint and old-fashioned manners and aspect.
I imagine that these ancient towns--such as Chester and Stratford,
Warwick and Coventry--contain even a great deal more antiquity than meets
the eye. You see many modern fronts; but if you peep or penetrate
inside, you find an antique arrangement,--old rafters, intricate
passages, and ancient staircases, which have put on merely a new outside,
and are likely still to prove good for the usual date of a new house.
They put such an immense and stalwart ponderosity into their frameworks,
that I suppose a house of Elizabeth's time, if renewed, has at least an
equal chance of durability with one that is new in every part. All the
hotels in Coventry, so far as I noticed them, are old, with new fronts;
and they have an archway for the admission of vehicles into the
court-yard, and doors opening into the rooms of the building on each side
of the arch. Maids and waiters are seen darting across the arched
passage from door to door, and it requires a guide (in my case, at least)
to show you the way to the coffee-room or the bar. I have never been up
stairs in any of them, but can conceive of infinite bewilderment of
zigzag corridors between staircase and chamber.
It was fair-day in Coventry, and this gave what no doubt is an unusual
bustle to the streets. In fact, I have not seen such crowded and busy
streets in any English town; various kinds of merchandise being for sale
in the open air, and auctioneers disposing of miscellaneous wares, pretty
much as they do at musters and other gatherings in the United States.
The oratory of the American auctioneer, however, greatly surpasses that
of the Englishman in vivacity and fun. But this movement and throng,
together with the white glow of the sun on the pavements, make the scene,
in my recollection, assume an American aspect, and this is strange in so
antique and quaint a town as Coventry.
We rambled about without any definite aim, but found our way, I believe,
to most of the objects that are worth seeing. St. Michael's Church was
most magnificent,--so old, yet enduring; so huge, so rich; with such
intricate minuteness in its finish, that, look as long as you will at it,
you can always discover something new directly before your eyes. I
admire this in Gothic architecture,--that you cannot master it all at
once, that it is not a naked outline; but, as deep and rich as human
nature itself, always revealing new ideas. It is as if the builder had
built himself and his age up into it, and as if the edifice had life.
Grecian temples are less interesting to me, being so cold and
crystalline. I think this is the only church I have seen where there are
any statues still left standing in the niches of the exterior walls. We
did not go inside. The steeple of St. Michael's is three hundred and
three feet high, and no doubt the clouds often envelop the tip of the
spire. Trinity, another church with a tall spire, stands near St.
Michael's, but did not attract me so much; though I, perhaps, might have
admired it equally, had I seen it first or alone. We certainly know
nothing of church-building in America, and of all English things that I
have seen, methinks the churches disappoint me least. I feel, too, that
there is something much more wonderful in them than I have yet had time
to know and experience.
In the course of the forenoon, searching about everywhere in quest of
Gothic architecture, we found our way into St. Mary's Hall. The doors
were wide open; it seemed to be public,--there was a notice on the wall
desiring visitors to give nothing to attendants for showing it, and so we
walked in. I observed, in the guide-books, that we should have obtained
an order for admission from some member of the town council; but we had
none, and found no need of it. An old woman, and afterwards an old man,
both of whom seemed to be at home on the premises, told us that we might
enter, and troubled neither themselves nor us any further.
St. Mary's Hall is now the property of the Corporation of Coventry, and
seems to be the place where the Mayor and Council hold their meetings.
It was built by one of the old guilds or fraternities of merchants and
tradesmen The woman shut the kitchen door when I approached, so that I
did not see the great fireplaces and huge cooking-utensils which are said
to be there. Whether these are ever used nowadays, and whether the Mayor
of Coventry gives such hospitable banquets as the Mayor of Liverpool, I
do not know.
We went to the Red Lion, and had a luncheon of cold lamb and cold
pigeon-pie. This is the best way of dining at English hotels,--to call
the meal a luncheon, in which case you will get as good or better a
variety than if it were a dinner, and at less than half the cost. Having
lunched, we again wandered about town, and entered a quadrangle of gabled
houses, with a church, and its churchyard on one side. This proved to be
St. John's Church, and a part of the houses were the locality of Bond's
Hospital, for the reception of ten poor men, and the remainder was
devoted to the Bablake School. Into this latter I peered, with a real
American intrusiveness, which I never found in myself before, but which I
must now assume, or miss a great many things which I am anxious to see.
Running along the front of the house, under the jut of the impending
story, there was a cloistered walk, with windows opening on the
quadrangle. An arched oaken door, with long iron hinges, admitted us
into a school-room about twenty feet square, paved with brick tiles, blue
and red. Adjoining this there is a larger school-room which we did not
enter, but peeped at, through one of the inner windows, from the
cloistered walk. In the room which we entered, there were seven
scholars' desks, and an immense arched fireplace, with seats on each
side, under the chimney, on a stone slab resting on a brick pedestal.
The opening of the fireplace was at least twelve feet in width. On one
side of the room were pegs for fifty-two boys' hats and clothes, and
there was a boy's coat, of peculiar cut, hanging on a peg, with the
number "50" in brass upon it. The coat looked ragged and shabby. An old
school-book was lying on one of the desks, much tattered, and without a
title; but it seemed to treat wholly of Saints' days and festivals of the
Church. A flight of stairs, with a heavy balustrade of carved oak,
ascended to a gallery, about eight or nine feet from the lower floor,
which runs along two sides of the room, looking down upon it. The room
is without a ceiling, and rises into a peaked gable, about twenty feet
high. There is a large clock in it, and it is lighted by two windows,
each about ten feet wide,--one in the gallery, and the other beneath it.
Two benches or settles, with backs, stood one on each side of the
fireplace. An old woman in black passed through the room while I was
making my observations, and looked at me, but said nothing. The school
was founded in 1563, by Thomas Whealby, Mayor of Coventry; the revenue is
about 900 pounds, and admits children of the working-classes at eleven
years old, clothes and provides for them, and finally apprentices them
for seven years. We saw some of the boys playing in the quadrangle,
dressed in long blue coats or gowns, with cloth caps on their heads. I
know not how the atmosphere of antiquity, and massive continuance
from age to age, which was the charm to me in this scene of a
charityschool-room, can be thrown over it in description. After noting
down these matters, I looked into the quiet precincts of Bond's Hospital,
which, no doubt, was more than equally interesting; but the old men were
lounging about or lolling at length, looking very drowsy, and I had not
the heart nor the face to intrude among them. There is something
altogether strange to an American in these charitable institutions,--in
the preservation of antique modes and customs which is effected by them,
insomuch that, doubtless, without at all intending it, the founders have
succeeded in preserving a model of their own long-past age down into the
midst of ours, and how much later nobody can know.
We were now rather tired, and went to the railroad, intending to go home;
but we got into the wrong train, and were carried by express, with
hurricane speed, to Bradon, where we alighted, and waited a good while
for the return train to Coventry. At Coventry again we had more than an
hour to wait, and therefore wandered wearily up into the city, and took
another look at its bustling streets, in which there seems to be a good
emblem of what England itself really is,--with a great deal of antiquity
in it, and which is now chiefly a modification of the old. The new
things are based and supported on the sturdy old things, and often
limited and impeded by them; but this antiquity is so massive that there
seems to be no means of getting rid of it without tearing society to
pieces.
July 2d.--To-day I shall set out on my return to Liverpool, leaving my
family here.