I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will
over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The
traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy: and
contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession
to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible
with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present
aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us
between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is
chance but some present human frailty--an act of inattention on the
part of some of the auditory--or a trait of affectation, or worse,
vain-glory, on that of the preacher--puts us by our best thoughts,
disharmonising the place and the occasion. But would'st thou know the
beauty of holiness?--go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of
good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church:
think of the piety that has kneeled there--the congregations, old
and young, that have found consolation there--the meek pastor--the
docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting
comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself
become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and
weep around thee.
Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles
out of my road to look upon the remains of an old great house with
which I had been impressed in this way in infancy. I was apprised that
the owner of it had lately pulled it down; still I had a vague notion
that it could not all have perished, that so much solidity with
magnificence could not have been crushed all at once into the mere
dust and rubbish which I found it.
The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the
demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to--an antiquity.
I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where had stood
the great gates? What bounded the court-yard? Whereabout did the
out-houses commence? a few bricks only lay as representatives of that
which was so stately and so spacious.
Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt
ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion.
Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of
destruction, at the plucking of every pannel I should have felt the
varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a plank
at least out of the cheerful store-room, in whose hot window-seat I
used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plat before, and the hum
and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it about
me--it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns; or a pannel of
the yellow room.
Why, every plank and pannel of that house for me had magic in it.
The tapestried bed-rooms--tapestry so much better than painting--not
adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots--at which childhood ever
and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as
quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter
with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally--all Ovid on the
walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. Actæon in mid sprout,
with the unappeasable prudery of Diana; and the still more provoking,
and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately
divesting of Marsyas.
Then, that haunted room--in which old Mrs. Battle died--whereinto I
have crept, but always in the day-time, with a passion of fear; and
a sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold communication with the
past.--_How shall they build it up again?_
It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that
traces of the splendour of past inmates were everywhere apparent.
Its furniture was still standing--even to the tarnished gilt leather
battledores, and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery,
which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely
child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew every nook
and corner, wondered and worshipped everywhere.
The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as
it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration, So strange a
passion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though there
lay--I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion--half hid
by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which
bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict
and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me; and
not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I
found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus
Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive prospects--and
those at no great distance from the house--I was told of such--what
were they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden?--So far from
a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences
of my chosen prison; and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture
of those excluding garden walls. I could have exclaimed with that
garden-loving poet--
Bind me, ye woodbines, in your 'twines,
Curl me about, ye gadding vines;
And oh so close your circles lace,
That I may never leave this place;
But, lest your fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
And, courteous briars, nail me through!
I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides--the low-built
roof--parlours ten feet by ten--frugal boards, and all the homeliness
of home--these were the condition of my birth--the wholesome soil
which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest
lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond;
and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting
accidents of a great fortune.
To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been
born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than
to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors; and the coatless
antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a
Mowbray's or De Clifford's pedigree, at those sounding names may warm
himself into as gay a vanity as those who do inherit them. The claims
of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to strip me
of an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords? can it be hacked off as a
spur can? or torn away like a tarnished garter?
What, else, were the families of the great to us? what pleasure should
we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass
monuments? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods,
if our own did not answer within us to a cognate and correspondent
elevation?
Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon that hung
upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, BLAKESMOOR! have
I in childhood so oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters--thy
emblematic supporters, with their prophetic "Resurgam"--till, every
dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility?
Thou wert first in my morning eyes; and of nights, hast detained my
steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to
dreaming on thee.
This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of
blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion.
Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I know not,
I inquired not; but its fading rags, and colours cobweb-stained, told
that its subject was of two centuries back.
And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas--feeding
flocks, not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln--did I in less
earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once proud
Ægon?--repaying by a backward triumph the insults he might possibly
have heaped in his life-time upon my poor pastoral progenitor.
If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the
mansion had least reason to complain. They had long forsaken the
old house of their fathers for a newer trifle; and I was left to
appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy,
or to soothe my vanity.
I was the true descendant of those old W----s; and not the present
family of that name, who had fled the old waste places.
Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have
gone over, giving them in fancy my own family name, one--and then
another--would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to
recognise the new relationship; while the rest looked grave, as
it seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled
posterity.
That Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb--that hung
next the great bay window--with the bright yellow H----shire hair, and
eye of watchet hue--so like my Alice!--I am persuaded she was a true
Elia--Mildred Elia, I take it.
Mine too, BLAKESMOOR, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic
pavements, and its Twelve Cæsars--stately busts in marble--ranged
round: of whose countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the
frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder; but the
mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet
freshness of immortality.
Mine too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority,
high-backed and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, or
self-forgetful maiden--so common since, that bats have roosted in it.
Mine too--whose else?--thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun-baked
southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from the
house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save
that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespeak their
pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters
backwarder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old formality,
thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long
murmuring woodpigeon, with that antique image in the centre, God or
Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a
sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I
to that fragmental mystery.
Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your
idol worship, walks and windings of BLAKESMOOR! for this, or what sin
of mine, has the plough passed over your pleasant places? I sometimes
think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their
extinguished habitations there may be a hope--a germ to be revivified.