we began to see copious plantations, principally of firs, larches, and
trees of that order, looking very sombre, though with some intermingling
of lighter foliage. It was after one when we reached "The Hut,"--a
small, modern wayside inn, almost directly across the road from the
entrance-gate of Newstead. 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 cellarlike 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 dog's kennel in Byron's
time.
After seeing this, we were led to Byron's own bedchamber, 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 bedchamber 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 mediaeval 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 panelling, 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 name 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
bedchambers, 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, though lounging
and luxurious. It is long, and rather low, furnished with soft couches,
and, on the whole, though 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. I should think it would hold
at least a quart,--enough to overpower any living head into which this
death's-head should transfer its contents; and a man must be either very
drunk or very thirsty, before he would taste wine out of such a goblet.
I think Byron's freak was outdone by that of a cousin of my own, who once
solemnly assured me that he had a spittoon made out of the skull of his
enemy. The ancient coffin in which the goblet-skull was found was shown
us in the basement of the Abbey.
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. There are one or two painted
windows, commemorative of the Peninsular war, and the battles in which
the Colonel and his two brothers fought,--for these Wildmen seem to
have been mighty troopers, and Colonel Wildman is represented as a
fierce-looking mustachioed hussar at two different ages. The housekeeper
spoke of him affectionately, but says that he is now getting into years,
and that they fancy him failing. He has no children. He appears to have
been on good terms with Byron, and had the latter ever returned to
England, he was under promise to make his first visit to his old home,
and it was in such an expectation that Colonel Wildman had kept Byron's
private apartments in the same condition in which he found them. Byron
was informed of all the Colonel's fittings up and restorations, and when
he introduces the Abbey in Don Juan, the poet describes it, not as he
himself left it, but as Colonel Wildman has restored it. There is a
beautiful drawing-room, and all these apartments are adorned with
pictures, the collection being especially rich in portraits by Sir Peter
Lely,--that of Nell Gwynn being one, who is one of the few beautiful
women whom I have seen on canvas.
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 centre,
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, though 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 flourishes, 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 forever famous. The names are still very
legible, although 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 "Holy Well," of which we drank. There are
several fountains, besides the large mirror in the centre of the garden;
and these are mostly inhabited by carp, the genuine descendants of those
which peopled the fish-ponds 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. I know not how this may have been, but
this inconvenience would have attended his being buried there, that, on
transfer of the estate, his mortal remains would have become the property
of some other man.
We had now come to the empty space,--a smooth green lawn, where had once
been the Abbey church. The length had been sixty-four yards, the
gardener said, and within his remembrance there had been many remains of
it, but now they are quite removed, with the exception of the one
ivy-grown western wall, which, as I mentioned, forms a picturesque part
of the present front of the Abbey. Through a door in this wall the
gardener now let us out. . . . .
In the evening our landlady, who seems to be a very intelligent woman, of
a superior class to most landladies, came into our parlor, while I was
out, and talked about the present race of Byrons and Lovelaces, who have
often been at this house. There seems to be a taint in the Byron blood
which makes those who inherit it wicked, mad, and miserable. Even
Colonel Wildman comes in for a share of this ill luck, for he has almost
ruined himself by his expenditure on the estate, and by his lavish
hospitality, especially to the Duke of Sussex, who liked the Colonel, and
used often to visit him during his lifetime, and his Royal Highness's
gentlemen ate and drank Colonel Wildman almost up. So says our good
landlady. At any rate, looking at this miserable race of Byrons, who
held the estate so long, and at Colonel Wildman, whom it has ruined in
forty years, we might see grounds for believing in the evil fate which is
supposed to attend confiscated church property. Nevertheless, I would
accept the estate, were it offered me.
. . . . Glancing back, I see that I have omitted some items that were
curious in describing the house; for instance, one of the cabinets had
been the personal property of Queen Elizabeth. It seems to me that the
fashion of modern furniture has nothing to equal these old cabinets for
beauty and convenience. In the state apartments, the floors were so
highly waxed and polished that we slid on them as if on ice, and could
only make sure of our footing by treading on strips of carpeting that
were laid down.
June 7th.--We left Nottingham a week ago, and made our first stage to
Derby, where we had to wait an hour or two at a great, bustling,
pell-mell, crowded railway station. It was much thronged with second and
third class passengers, coming and departing in continual trains; for
these were the Whitsuntide holidays, which set all the lower orders of
English people astir. This time of festival was evidently the origin of
the old "Election" holidays in Massachusetts; the latter occurring at the
same period of the year, and being celebrated (so long as they could be
so) in very much the same way, with games, idleness, merriment of set
purpose, and drunkenness. After a weary while we took the train for