and become there, not only wiser, but more charitable; for the oftener

one sees, the better one knows; and the better one knows, the more one

loves.

It is an easy philosophy; especially in the case of the horse, where a

man cannot afford more than one, as I cannot. To own a stud of horses,

after all, is not to own horses at all, but riding-machines. Your rich

man who rides Crimæa in the morning, Sir Guy in the afternoon, and Sultan

to-morrow, and something else the next day, may be a very gallant rider:

but it is a question whether he enjoys the pleasure which one horse gives

to the poor man who rides him day after day; one horse, who is not a

slave, but a friend; who has learnt all his tricks of voice, hand, heel,

and knows what his master wants, even without being told; who will bear

with his master’s infirmities, and feels secure that his master will bear

with his in turn.

Possibly, after all, the grapes are sour; and were one rich, one would do

even as the rich are wont to do: but still, I am a minute philosopher.

And therefore, this afternoon, after I have done the same work, visited

the same people, and said the same words to them, which I have done for

years past, and shall, I trust, for many a year to come, I shall go

wandering out into the same winter-garden on the same old mare; and think

the same thoughts, and see the same fir-trees, and meet perhaps the same

good fellows hunting of their fox, as I have done with full content this

many a year; and rejoice, as I said before, in my own boundless wealth,

who have the whole universe to look at, without being charged one penny

for the show.

As I have said, the grapes may be sour, and I enjoy the want of luxuries

only because I cannot get them; but if my self-deception be useful to me,

leave it alone.

No one is less inclined to depreciate that magnificent winter-garden at

the Crystal Palace: yet let me, if I choose, prefer my own; I argue that,

in the first place, it is far larger. You may drive, I hear, through the

grand one at Chatsworth for a quarter of a mile. You may ride through

mine for fifteen miles on end. I prefer, too, to any glass roof which

Sir Joseph Paxton ever planned, that dome above my head some three miles

high, of soft dappled grey and yellow cloud, through the vast

lattice-work whereof the blue sky peeps, and sheds down tender gleams on

yellow bogs, and softly rounded heather knolls, and pale chalk ranges

gleaming far away. But, above all, I glory in my evergreens. What

winter-garden can compare for them with mine? True, I have but four

kinds—Scotch fir, holly, furze, and the heath; and by way of relief to

them, only brows of brown fern, sheets of yellow bog-grass, and here and

there a leafless birch, whose purple tresses are even more lovely to my

eye than those fragrant green ones which she puts on in spring. Well: in

painting as in music, what effects are more grand than those produced by

the scientific combination, in endless new variety, of a few simple

elements? Enough for me is the one purple birch; the bright hollies

round its stem sparkling with scarlet beads; the furze-patch, rich with

its lacework of interwoven light and shade, tipped here and there with a

golden bud; the deep soft heather carpet, which invites you to lie down

and dream for hours; and behind all, the wall of red fir-stems, and the

dark fir-roof with its jagged edges a mile long, against the soft grey

sky.

An ugly, straight-edged, monotonous fir-plantation? Well, I like it,

outside and inside. I need no saw-edge of mountain peaks to stir up my

imagination with the sense of the sublime, while I can watch the saw-edge

of those fir peaks against the red sunset. They are my Alps; little ones

it may be: but after all, as I asked before, what is size? A phantom of

our brain; an optical delusion. Grandeur, if you will consider wisely,

consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the

curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as

symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in the span

of some cathedral roof. Have you eyes to see? Then lie down on the

grass, and look near enough to see something more of what is to be seen;

and you will find tropic jungles in every square foot of turf; mountain

cliffs and debacles at the mouth of every rabbit burrow: dark strids,

tremendous cataracts, ‘deep glooms and sudden glories,’ in every

foot-broad rill which wanders through the turf. All is there for you to

see, if you will but rid yourself of ‘that idol of space;’ and Nature, as

everyone will tell you who has seen dissected an insect under the

microscope, is as grand and graceful in her smallest as in her hugest

forms.

The March breeze is chilly: but I can be always warm if I like in my

winter-garden. I turn my horse’s head to the red wall of fir-stems, and

leap over the furze-grown bank into my cathedral, wherein if there be no

saints, there are likewise no priestcraft and no idols; but endless

vistas of smooth red green-veined shafts holding up the warm dark roof,

lessening away into endless gloom, paved with rich brown fir-needle—a

carpet at which Nature has been at work for forty years. Red shafts,

green roof, and here and there a pane of blue sky—neither Owen Jones nor

Willement can improve upon that ecclesiastical ornamentation,—while for

incense I have the fresh healthy turpentine fragrance, far sweeter to my

nostrils than the stifling narcotic odour which fills a Roman Catholic

cathedral. There is not a breath of air within: but the breeze sighs

over the roof above in a soft whisper. I shut my eyes and listen.

Surely that is the murmur of the summer sea upon the summer sands in

Devon far away. I hear the innumerable wavelets spend themselves gently

upon the shore, and die away to rise again. And with the innumerable

wave-sighs come innumerable memories, and faces which I shall never see

again upon this earth. I will not tell even you of that, old friend.

It has two notes, two keys rather, that Eolian-harp of fir-needles above

my head; according as the wind is east or west, the needles dry or wet.

This easterly key of to-day is shriller, more cheerful, warmer in sound,

though the day itself be colder: but grander still, as well as softer, is

the sad soughing key in which the south-west wind roars on, rain-laden,

over the forest, and calls me forth—being a minute philosopher—to catch

trout in the nearest chalk-stream.

The breeze is gone a while; and I am in perfect silence—a silence which

may be heard. Not a sound; and not a moving object; absolutely none.

The absence of animal life is solemn, startling. That ringdove, who was

cooing half a mile away, has hushed his moan; that flock of long-tailed

titmice, which were twinging and pecking about the fir-cones a few

minutes since, are gone: and now there is not even a gnat to quiver in

the slant sun-rays. Did a spider run over these dead leaves, I almost

fancy I could hear his footfall. The creaking of the saddle, the soft

step of the mare upon the fir-needles, jar my ears. I seem alone in a

dead world. A dead world: and yet so full of life, if I had eyes to see!

Above my head every fir-needle is breathing—breathing for ever; currents

unnumbered circulate in every bough, quickened by some undiscovered

miracle; around me every fir-stem is distilling strange juices, which no

laboratory of man can make; and where my dull eye sees only death, the

eye of God sees boundless life and motion, health and use.

Slowly I wander on beneath the warm roof of the winter-garden, and

meditate upon that one word—Life; and specially on all that Mr. Lewes has

written so well thereon—for instance—

‘We may consider Life itself as an ever-increasing identification

with Nature. The simple cell, from which the plant or animal arises,

must draw light and heat from the sun, nutriment from the surrounding

world, or else it will remain quiescent, not alive, though latent

with life; as the grains in the Egyptian tombs, which after lying

thousands of years in those sepulchres, are placed in the earth, and

smile forth as golden wheat. What we call growth, is it not a

perpetual absorption of Nature, the identification of the individual

with the universal? And may we not, in speculative moods, consider

Death as the grand impatience of the soul to free itself from the

circle of individual activity—the yearning of the creature to be

united with the Creator?

‘As with Life, so with knowledge, which is intellectual life. In the

early days of man’s history, Nature and her marvellous ongoings were

regarded with but a casual and careless eye, or else with the merest

wonder. It was late before profound and reverent study of her laws

could wean man from impatient speculations; and now, what is our

intellectual activity based on, except on the more thorough mental

absorption of Nature? When that absorption is completed, the mystic

drama will be sunny clear, and all Nature’s processes be visible to

man, as a Divine Effluence and Life.’

True: yet not all the truth. But who knows all the truth?

Not I. ‘We see through a glass darkly,’ said St. Paul of old; and what

is more, dazzle and weary our eyes, like clumsy microscopists, by looking

too long and earnestly through the imperfect and by no means achromatic

lens. Enough. I will think of something else. I will think of nothing

at all—

Stay. There was a sound at last; a light footfall.

A hare races towards us through the ferns, her great bright eyes full of

terror, her ears aloft to catch some sound behind. She sees us, turns

short, and vanishes into the gloom. The mare pricks up her ears too,

listens, and looks: but not the way the hare has gone. There is

something more coming; I can trust the finer sense of the horse, to which

(and no wonder) the Middle Age attributed the power of seeing ghosts and

fairies impalpable to man’s gross eyes. Beside, that hare was not

travelling in search of food. She was not loping along, looking around

her right and left; but galloping steadily. She has been frightened; she

has been put up: but what has put her up? And there, far away among the

fir-stems, rings the shriek of a startled blackbird. What has put him

up?

That, old mare, at sight whereof your wise eyes widen till they are ready

to burst, and your ears are first shot forward towards your nose, and

then laid back with vicious intent. Stand still, old woman! Do you

think still, after fifteen winters, that you can catch a fox?

A fox it is indeed; a great dog-fox, as red as the fir-stems between

which he glides. And yet his legs are black with fresh peat-stains. He

is a hunted fox: but he has not been up long.

The mare stands like a statue: but I can feel her trembling between my

knees. Positively he does not see us. He sits down in the middle of a

ride, turns his great ears right and left, and then scratches one of them

with his hind foot, seemingly to make it hear the better. Now he is up

again and on.

Beneath yon firs, some hundred yards away, standeth, or rather lieth, for

it is on dead flat ground, the famous castle of Malepartus, which beheld

the base murder of Lampe the hare, and many a seely soul beside. I know

it well; a patch of sand-heaps, mingled with great holes, amid the

twining fir-roots; ancient home of the last of the wild beasts. And

thither, unto Malepartus safe and strong, trots Reinecke, where he hopes

to be snug among the labyrinthine windings, and innumerable

starting-holes, as the old apologue has it, of his ballium, covert-way,

and donjon keep. Full blown in self-satisfaction he trots, lifting his

toes delicately, and carrying his brush aloft, as full of cunning and

conceit as that world-famous ancestor of his, whose deeds of unchivalry

were the delight, if not the model, of knight and kaiser, lady and

burgher, in the Middle Age.

Suddenly he halts at the great gate of Malepartus; examines it with his

nose; goes on to a postern; examines that also, and then another, and

another; while I perceive afar, projecting from every cave’s mouth, the

red and green end of a new fir-faggot. Ah, Reinecke! fallen is thy

conceit, and fallen thy tail therewith. Thou hast worse foes to deal

with than Bruin the bear, or Isegrim the wolf, or any foolish brute whom

thy great ancestor outwitted. Man the many-counselled has been

beforehand with thee; and the earths are stopped.

One moment he sits down to meditate, and scratches those trusty

counsellors, his ears, as if he would tear them off, ‘revolving swift

thoughts in a crafty mind.’

He has settled it now. He is up and off—and at what a pace! Out of the

way, Fauns and Hamadryads, if any be left in the forest. What a pace!

And with what a grace beside!

Oh Reinecke, beautiful thou art, of a surety, in spite of thy great

naughtiness. Art thou some fallen spirit, doomed to be hunted for thy

sins in this life, and in some future life rewarded for thy swiftness,

and grace, and cunning, by being made a very messenger of the immortals?

Who knows? Not I.

I am rising fast to Pistol’s vein. Shall I ejaculate? Shall I notify?

Shall I waken the echoes? Shall I break the grand silence by that scream

which the vulgar view-halloo call?

It is needless; for louder and louder every moment swells up a sound

which makes my heart leap into my mouth, and my mare into the air.

Music? Well-beloved soul of Hullah, would that thou wert here this day,

and not in St. Martin’s Hall, to hear that chorus, as it pours round the

fir-stems, rings against the roof above, shatters up into a hundred

echoes, till the air is live with sound! You love madrigals, and

whatever Weekes, or Wilbye, or Orlando Gibbons sang of old. So do I.

Theirs is music fit for men: worthy of the age of heroes, of Drake and

Raleigh, Spenser and Shakspeare: but oh that you could hear this

madrigal! If you must have ‘four parts,’ then there they are.

Deeped-mouthed bass, rolling along the ground; rich joyful tenor; wild

wistful alto; and leaping up here and there above the throng of sounds,

delicate treble shrieks and trills of trembling joy. I know not whether

you can fit it into your laws of music, any more than you can the song of

that Ariel sprite who dwells in the Eolian harp, or the roar of the waves

on the rock, or

‘Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,

And murmur of innumerable bees.’

But music it is. A madrigal? Rather a whole opera of Der

Freischutz—dæmoniac element and all—to judge by those red lips, fierce

eyes, wild, hungry voices; and such as should make Reinecke, had he

strong æsthetic sympathies, well content to be hunted from his cradle to

his grave, that such sweet sounds might by him enrich the air. Heroes of

old were glad to die, if but some ‘vates sacer’ would sing their fame in

worthy strains: and shalt not thou too be glad, Reinecke? Content

thyself with thy fate. Music soothes care; let it soothe thine, as thou

runnest for thy life; thou shalt have enough of it in the next hour. For

as the Etruscans (says Athenæus) were so luxurious that they used to flog

their slaves to the sound of the flute, so shall luxurious Chanter and

Challenger, Sweet-lips and Melody, eat thee to the sound of rich

organ-pipes, that so thou mayest,

‘Like that old fabled swan, in music die.’

And now appear, dim at first and distant, but brightening and nearing

fast, many a right good fellow and many a right good horse. I know three

out of four of them, their private histories, the private histories of

their horses: and could tell you many a good story of them: but shall

not, being an English gentleman, and not an American littérateur. They

may not all be very clever, or very learned, or very anything except

gallant men; but they are all good enough company for me, or anyone; and

each has his own specialité, for which I like him. That huntsman I have

known for fifteen years, and sat many an hour beside his father’s

death-bed. I am godfather to that whip’s child. I have seen the

servants of the hunt, as I have the hounds, grow up round me for two

generations, and I feel for them as old friends; and like to look into

their brave, honest, weather-beaten faces. That red coat there, I knew

him when he was a schoolboy; and now he is a captain in the Guards, and

won his Victoria Cross at Inkermann: that bright green coat is the best

farmer, as well as the hardest rider, for many a mile round; one who

plays, as he works, with all his might, and might have been a beau

sabreur and colonel of dragoons. So might that black coat, who now brews

good beer, and stands up for the poor at the Board of Guardians, and

rides, like the green coat, as well as he works. That other black coat

is a county banker; but he knows more of the fox than the fox knows of

himself, and where the hounds are, there will he be this day. That red

coat has hunted kangaroo in Australia: that one, as clever and good as he

is brave and simple, has stood by Napier’s side in many an Indian fight:

that one won his Victoria at Delhi, and was cut up at Lucknow, with more

than twenty wounds: that one has—but what matter to you who each man is?

Enough that each can tell one a good story, welcome one cheerfully, and

give one out here, in the wild forest, the wholesome feeling of being at

home among friends.

There is music, again, if you will listen, in the soft tread of these

hundred horse-hoofs upon the spongy vegetable soil. They are trotting

now in ‘common time.’ You may hear the whole Croats’ March (the finest

trotting march in the world) played by those iron heels; the time, as it

does in the Croats’ March, breaking now and then, plunging, jingling,

struggling through heavy ground, bursting for a moment into a jubilant

canter as it reaches a sound spot.

The hounds feather a moment round Malepartus, puzzled by the windings of

Reinecke’s footsteps. You can hear the flap and snort of the dogs’

nostrils as they canter round; and one likes it. It is exciting: but

why—who can tell?

What beautiful creatures they are, too! Next to a Greek statue (I mean a

real old Greek one; for I am a thoroughly anti-preraphaelite benighted

pagan heathen in taste, and intend some day to get up a Cinque-Cento

Club, for the total abolition of Gothic art)—next to a Greek statue, I

say, I know few such combinations of grace and strength as in a fine

foxhound. It is the beauty of the Theseus—light and yet massive; and

light not in spite of its masses, but on account of the perfect

disposition of them. I do not care for grace in man, woman, or animal,

which is obtained (as in the old German painters) at the expense of

honest flesh and blood. It may be all very pure, and unearthly, and

saintly, and what not; but it is not healthy; and, therefore, it is not

really High Art, let it call itself such as much as it likes. The

highest art must be that in which the outward is the most perfect symbol

of the muward; and, therefore, a healthy soul can be only exprest by a

healthy body; and starved limbs and a hydrocephalous forehead must be

either taken as incorrect symbols of spiritual excellence, or as—what

they were really meant for—symbols of certain spiritual diseases which

were in the Middle Age considered as ecclesiastical graces and virtues.

Wherefore I like pagan and naturalist art; consider Titian and Correggio

as unappreciated geniuses, whose excellences the world will in some saner

mood rediscover; hold, in direct opposition to Rio, that Rafaelle

improved steadily all his life through, and that his noblest works are

not his somewhat simpering Madonnas and somewhat impish Bambinos (very

lovely though they are), but his great, coarse, naturalist, Protestant

cartoons, which (with Andrea Mantegna’s Heathen Triumph) Cromwell saved

for the British nation. Probably no one will agree with all this for the

next quarter of a century: but after that I have hopes. The world will

grow tired of pretending to admire Manichæan pictures in an age of

natural science; and Art will let the dead bury their dead, and beginning

again where Michael Angelo and Rafaelle left off work forward into a

nobler, truer, freer, and more divine school than the world has yet

seen—at least, so I hope.

And all this has grown out of those foxhounds. Why not? Theirs is the

sort of form which expresses to me what I want Art to express—Nature not

limited, but developed, by high civilization. The old savage ideal of

beauty was the lion, type of mere massive force. That was succeeded by

an over-civilized ideal, say the fawn, type of delicate grace. By

cunning breeding and choosing, through long centuries, man has combined

both, and has created the foxhound, lion and fawn in one; just as he

might create noble human beings; did he take half as much trouble about

politics (in the true old sense of the word) as he does about fowls.

Look at that old hound, who stands doubtful, looking up at his master for

advice. Look at the severity, delicacy, lightness of every curve. His

head is finer than a deer’s; his hind legs tense as steel springs; his

fore-legs straight as arrows: and yet see the depth of chest, the sweep

of loin, the breadth of paw, the mass of arm and thigh; and if you have

an eye for form, look at the absolute majesty of his attitude at this

moment. Majesty is the only word for it. If he were six feet high,

instead of twenty-three inches, with what animal on earth could you

compare him? Is it not a joy to see such a thing alive? It is to me, at

least. I should like to have one in my study all day long, as I would

have a statue or a picture; and when Mr. Morrell gave (as they say) two

hundred guineas for Hercules alone, I believe the dog was well worth the

money, only to look at. But I am a minute philosopher.

I cap them on to the spot at which Reinecke disappeared. Old Virginal’s

stern flourishes; instantly her pace quickens. One whimper, and she is

away full-mouthed through the wood, and the pack after her: but not I.

I am not going with them. My hunting days are over. Let it suffice that

I have, in the days of my vanity, ‘drank delight of battle with my peers,

far on the ringing plains’ of many a county, grass and forest, down and

vale. No, my gallant friends. You know that I could ride, if I chose;

and I am vain enough to be glad that you know it. But useless are your

coaxings, solicitations, wavings of honest right hands. ‘Life,’ as my

friend Tom Brown says, ‘is not all beer and skittles;’ it is past two

now, and I have four old women to read to at three, and an old man to

bury at four; and I think, on the whole, that you will respect me the

more for going home and doing my duty. That I should like to see this

fox fairly killed, or even fairly lost, I deny not. That I should like

it as much as I can like any earthly and outward thing, I deny not. But

sugar to one’s bread and butter is not good; and if my winter-garden

represent the bread and butter, then will fox-hunting stand to it in the

relation of superfluous and unwholesome sugar: so farewell; and long may

your noble sport prosper—‘the image of war with only half its danger,’ to

train you and your sons after, into gallant soldiers—full of

‘The reason firm, the temperate will,

Endurance, foresight, strength and skill.’

So homeward I go through a labyrinth of fir-stems and, what is worse,

fir-stumps, which need both my eyes and my horse’s at every moment; and

woe to the ‘anchorite,’ as old Bunbury names him, who carries his nose in

the air, and his fore feet well under him. Woe to the self-willed or

hard-hided horse who cannot take the slightest hint of the heel, and

wince hind legs or fore out of the way of those jagged points which lie

in wait for him. Woe, in fact, to all who are clumsy or cowardly, or in

anywise not ‘masters of the situation.’

Pleasant riding it is, though, if you dare look anywhere but over your

horse’s nose, under the dark roof between the red fir-pillars, in that

rich subdued light. Now I plunge into a gloomy dell, wherein is no

tinkling rivulet, ever pure; but instead a bog, hewn out into a

chess-board of squares, parted by deep narrow ditches some twenty feet

apart. Blundering among the stems I go, fetlock-deep in peat, and

jumping at every third stride one of the said uncanny gripes, half hidden

in long hassock grass. Oh _Aira cæspitosa_, most stately and most

variable of British grasses, why will you always grow where you are not

wanted? Through you the mare all but left her hind legs in that last

gripe. Through you a red-coat ahead of me, avoiding one of your

hassocks, jumped with his horse’s nose full butt against a fir-stem, and

stopped,

‘As one that is struck dead

By lightning, ere he falls,’

as we shall soon, in spite of the mare’s cleverness. Would we were out

of this!

Out of it we shall be soon. I see daylight ahead at last, bright between

the dark stems. Up a steep slope, and over a bank which is not very big,

but being composed of loose gravel and peat mould, gives down with me,

nearly sending me head over heels in the heather, and leaving me a sheer

gap to scramble through, and out on the open moor.

Grand old moor! stretching your brown flats right away toward Windsor for

many a mile.—Far to our right is the new Wellington College, looking

stately enough here all alone in the wilderness, in spite of its two ugly

towers and pinched waist. Close over me is the long fir-fringed ride of

Easthampstead, ending suddenly in Cæsar’s camp; and hounds and huntsmen

are already far ahead, and racing up the Roman road, which the clods of

these parts, unable to give a better account of it, call the Devil’s

Highway.

Racing indeed; for as Reinecke gallops up the narrow heather-fringed

pathway, he brushes off his scent upon the twigs at every stride; and the

hounds race after him, showing no head indeed, and keeping, for

convenience, in one long line upon the track: but going heads up, sterns

down, at a pace which no horse can follow.—I only hope they may not

overrun the scent.

They have overrun it; halt, and put their heads down a moment. But with

one swift cast in fall gallop they have hit it off again, fifty yards

away in the heather, long ere the horsemen are up to them; for those

hounds can hunt a fox because they are not hunted themselves, and so have

learnt to trust themselves, and act for themselves; as boys should learn

at school, even at the risk of a mistake or two. Now they are showing

head indeed, down a half-cleared valley, and over a few ineffectual

turnips withering in the peat, a patch of growing civilization in the

heart of the wilderness; and then over the brook, while I turn slowly

away, through a green wilderness of self-sown firs.

There they stand in thousands, the sturdy Scots, colonizing the desert in

spite of frost, and gales, and barrenness; and clustering together, too,

as Scotsmen always do abroad, little and big, every one under his

neighbour’s lee, according to the good old proverb of their native land,

‘Caw me, and I’ll caw thee.’

I respect them, those Scotch firs. I delight in their forms, from James

the First’s gnarled giants up in Bramshill Park—the only place in England

where a painter can learn what Scotch firs are—down to the little green

pyramids which stand up out of the heather, triumphant over tyranny, and

the strange woes of an untoward youth. Seven years on an average have

most of them spent in ineffectual efforts to become a foot high. Nibbled

off by hares, trodden down by cattle, cut down by turf-parers, seeing

hundreds of their brethren cut up and carried off in the turf-fuel, they

are as gnarled and stubbed near the ground as an old thorn-bush in a

pasture. But they have conquered at last, and are growing away, eighteen

inches a year, with fair green brushes silvertipt, reclothing the

wilderness with a vegetation which it has not seen for—how many thousand

years?

No man can tell. For when last the Scotch fir was indigenous to England,

and, mixed with the larch, stretched in one vast forest from Norfolk into

Wales, England was not as it is now. Snowdon was, it may be, fifteen

thousand feet in height, and from the edges of its glaciers the marmot

and the musk ox, the elk and the bear, wandered down into the Lowlands,

and the hyena and the lion dwelt in those caves where fox and badger only

now abide. And how did the Scotch fir die out? Did the whole land sink

slowly from its sub-Alpine elevation into a warmer climate below? Or was

it never raised at all? Did some change of the Atlantic sea-floor turn

for the first time the warm Gulf Stream to these shores; and with its

soft sea-breezes melt away the ‘Age of Ice,’ till glaciers and pines,

marmots and musk oxen, perspired to death, and vanished for an æon? Who

knows? Not I. But of the fact there can be no doubt. Whether, as we

hold traditionally here, the Scotch fir was re-introduced by James the

First when he built Bramshill for Raleigh’s hapless pet, Henry the

Prince, or whatever may have been the date of their re-introduction, here

they are, and no one can turn them out. In countless thousands the

winged seeds float down the south-west gales from the older trees; and

every seed which falls takes root in ground which, however unable to bear

broad-leaved trees, is ready by long rest for the seeds of the

needle-leaved ones. Thousands perish yearly; but the eastward march of

the whole, up hill and down dale, is sure and steady as that of Lynceus’

Goths in Goethe’s Helena:—

‘Ein lang und breites Volkegewicht,

Der erate wusste vom letzen nicht.

Der erste fiel, der zweite stand,

Des dritten Lanze war zur Hand,

Ein jeder hundertfach gestärkt;

Erschlagene Tausend unbemerkt—

—till, as you stand upon some eminence, you see, stretching to the

eastward of each tract of older trees, a long cloud of younger ones, like

a green comet’s tail—I wish their substance was as yielding this day.

Truly beautiful—grand indeed to me it is—to see young live Nature thus

carrying on a great savage process in the heart of this old and seemingly

all-artificial English land; and reproducing here, as surely as in the

Australian bush, a native forest, careless of mankind. Still, I wish it

were easier to ride through. Stiff are those Scotchmen, and close and

stout they stand by each other, and claw at you as you twist through

them, the biggest aiming at your head, or even worse, at your knees;

while the middle-sized slip their brushes between your thigh and the

saddle, and the little babies tickle your horse’s stomach, or twine about

his fore-feet. Whish—whish; we are enveloped in what seems an atmosphere

of scrubbing-brushes. Fain would I shut my eyes: but dare not, or I

shall ride against a tree. Whish—whish; alas for the horse which cannot

wind and turn like a hare! Plunge—stagger. What is this? A broad line

of ruts; perhaps some Celtic track-way, two thousand years old, now

matted over with firs; dangerous enough out on the open moor, when only

masked by a line of higher and darker heath: but doubly dangerous now

when masked by dark undergrowth. You must find your own way here, mare.

I will positively have nothing to do with it. I disclaim all

responsibility. There are the reins on your neck; do what you will, only

do something—and if you can, get forward, and not back.

There is daylight at last, and fresh air. I trot contemptuously through

the advanced skirmishers of the Scotch invading army; and watch my

friends some mile and a half off, who have threaded a practicable

track-way through a long dreary yellow bog, too wet for firs to root in,

and are away in ‘a streamer.’ Now a streamer is produced in this wise.

There is but one possible gap in a bank, one possible ford in a brook;

one possible path in a cover; and as each man has to wait till the man

before him gets through, and them gallops on, each man loses twenty yards

or more on the man before him: wherefore, by all laws of known

arithmetic, if ten men tail through a gap, then will the last of the ten

find himself two hundred yards behind the foremost, which process several

times repeated, produces the phenomenon called a streamer, viz. twenty

men galloping absurdly as hard as they can, in a line half a mile long,

and in humours which are celestial in the few foremost, contented in the

central, and gradually becoming darker in the hindmost; till in the last

man they assume a hue altogether Tartarean. Farewell, brave gentlemen!

I watch, half sadly, half self-contented, the red coats scattered like

sparks of fire over hill and dale, and turn slowly homeward, to visit my

old women.

I pass through a gateway, out upon a village green, planted with rows of

oaks, surrounded by trim sunny cottages, a pleasant oasis in the middle

of the wilderness. Across the village cricket-ground—we are great

cricketers in these parts, and long may the good old game live among us;

and then up another hollow lane, which leads between damp shaughs and

copses toward the further moor.

Curious things to a minute philosopher are these same hollow lanes. They

set him on archæological questions, more than he can solve; and I

meditate as I go, how many centuries it took to saw through the warm

sandbanks this dyke ten feet deep, up which he trots, with the oak boughs

meeting over his head. Was it ever worth men’s while to dig out the

soil? Surely not. The old method must have been, to remove the softer

upper spit, till they got to tolerably hard ground; and then, Macadam’s

metal being as yet unknown, the rains and the wheels of generations sawed

it gradually deeper and deeper, till this road-ditch was formed. But it

must have taken centuries to do it. Many of these hollow lanes,

especially those on flat ground, must be as old or older than the

Conquest. In Devonshire I am sure that they are. But there many of

them, one suspects, were made not of malice, but of cowardice prepense.

Your indigenous Celt was, one fears, a sneaking animal, and liked to keep

when he could under cover of banks and hill-sides; while your bold Roman

made his raised roads straight over hill and dale, as ‘ridge-ways’ from

which, as from an eagle’s eyrie, he could survey the conquered lowlands

far and wide. It marks strongly the difference between the two races,

that difference between the Roman paved road with its established common

way for all passengers, its regular stations and milestones, and the

Celtic track-way winding irresolutely along in innumerable ruts, parting

to meet again, as if each savage (for they were little better) had taken

his own fresh path when he found the next line of ruts too heavy for his

cattle. Around the spurs of Dartmoor I have seen many ancient roads,

some of them long disused, which could have been hollowed out for no

other purpose but that of concealment.

So I go slowly up the hill, till the valley lies beneath me like a long

green garden between its two banks of brown moor; and on through a

cheerful little green, with red brick cottages scattered all round, each

with its large neat garden, and beehives, and pigs and geese, and

turf-stack, and clipt yews and hollies before the door, and rosy

dark-eyed children, and all the simple healthy comforts of a wild

‘heth-cropper’s’ home. When he can, the good man of the house works at

farm labour, or cuts his own turf; and when work is scarce, he cuts

copses and makes heath-brooms, and does a little poaching. True, he

seldom goes to church, save to be christened, married, or buried: but he

equally seldom gets drunk. For church and public stand together two

miles off; so that social wants sometimes bring their own compensations

with them, and there are two sides to every question.

Hark! A faint, dreary hollo off the moor above. And then another, and

another. My friends may trust it; for the clod of these parts delights

in the chase like any bare-legged Paddy, and casts away flail and fork

wildly, to run, shout, assist, and interfere in all possible ways, out of

pure love. The descendant of many generations of broom-squires and

deer-stealers, the instinct of sport is strong within him still, though

no more of the king’s deer are to be shot in the winter turnip-fields, or

worse, caught by an apple-baited hook hung from an orchard bough. He now

limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, and too probably once in

his life, ‘hits the keeper into the river,’ and reconsiders himself for a

while after over a crank in Winchester gaol. Well, he has his faults;

and I have mine. But he is a thorough good fellow nevertheless; quite as

good as I: civil, contented, industrious, and often very handsome; and a

far shrewder fellow too—owing to his dash of wild forest blood, from

gipsy, highwayman; and what not—than his bullet-headed and flaxen-polled

cousin, the pure South-Saxon of the Chalk-downs. Dark-haired he is,

ruddy, and tall of bone; swaggering in his youth; but when he grows old,

a thorough gentleman, reserved, stately, and courteous as a prince.

Sixteen years have I lived with him hail fellow well met, and never yet

had a rude word or action from him.

With him I have cast in my lot, to live and die, and be buried by his

side; and to him I go home contented, to look after his petty interests,

cares, sorrows—Petty, truly—seeing that they include the whole primal

mysteries of life—Food, raiment, and work to earn them withal; love and

marriage, birth and death, right doing and wrong doing, ‘Schicksal und

eigene Schuld;’ and all those commonplaces of humanity which in the eyes

of a minute philosopher are most divine, because they are most

commonplace—catholic as the sunshine and the rain which come down from

the Heavenly Father, alike upon the evil and the good. As for doing fine

things, my friend, with you, I have learnt to believe that I am not set

to do fine things, simply because I am not able to do them; and as for

seeing fine things, with you, I have learnt to see the sight—as well as

to try to do the duty—which lies nearest me; and to comfort myself with

the fancy that if I make good use of my eyes and brain in this life, I

shall see—if it be of any use to me—all the fine things, or perhaps finer

still, in the life to come. But if not—what matter? In any life, in any

state, however simple or humble, there will be always sufficient to

occupy a Minute Philosopher; and if a man be busy, and busy about his

duty, what more does he require, for time or for eternity?

V.

_FROM OCEAN TO SEA_.

THE point from which to start, in order best to appreciate the change

from ocean to sea, is perhaps Biarritz. The point at which to stop is

Cette. And the change is important. Between the two points races are

changed, climates are changed, scenery is changed, the very plants under

your feet are changed, from a Western to an Eastern type. You pass from

the wild Atlantic into the heart of the Roman Empire—from the influences

which formed the discoverers of the New World, to those which formed the

civilizers of the Old. Gascony, not only in its scenery, but in its very

legends, reminds you of Devon and Cornwall; Languedoc of Greece and

Palestine.

In the sea, as was to be expected, the change is even more complete.

From Biarritz to Cette, you pass from poor Edward Forbes’s Atlantic to

his Mediterranean centre of creation. In plain English and fact, whether

you agree with his theory or not, you pass from the region of respectable

whales, herrings, and salmon, to that of tunnies, sciænas, dorados, and

all the gorgons, hydras, and chimæras dire, which are said to grace the

fish-markets of Barcelona or Marseilles.

But to this assertion, as to most concerning nature, there are

exceptions. Mediterranean fishes slip out of the Straits of Gibraltar,

and up the coast of Portugal, and, once in the Bay of Biscay, find the

feeding good and the wind against them, and stay there.

So it befalls, that at worthy M. Gardère’s hotel at Biarritz (he has seen

service in England, and knows our English ways), you may have at dinner,

day after day, salmon, louvine, shad, sardine, dorado, tunny. The first

is unknown to the Mediterranean; for Fluellen mistook when he said that

there were salmons in Macedon, as well as Monmouth; the louvine is none

other than the nasty bass, or sea-perch of the Atlantic; the shad

(extinct in these islands, save in the Severn) is a gigantic herring

which comes up rivers to spawn; a fish common (with slight differences)

to both sides of the North Atlantic; while the sardine, the dorado, and

the tunny (whether he be the true tunny or the Alalonga) are

Mediterranean fish.

The whale fishery of these shores is long extinct. The Biscayan whale

was supposed to be extinct likewise. But like the ibex, and some other

animals which man has ceased to hunt, because he fancies that he has

killed them all, they seem inclined to reappear. For in 1854 one was

washed ashore near St. Jean de Luz, at news whereof Eschricht, the great

Danish naturalist, travelled night and day from Copenhagen, and secured

the skeleton of the new-old monster.

But during the latter part of the Middle Ages, and on—if I recollect

aright—into the seventeenth century, Bayonne, Biarritz, Guettary, and St.

Jean de Luz, sent forth their hardy whale-fishers, who slew all the

whales of the Biscayan seas, and then crossed the Atlantic, to attack

those of the frozen North.

British and American enterprise drove them from the West coast of the

Atlantic; and now their descendants are content to stay at home and take

the sardine-shoals, and send them in to Bayonne on their daughters’

heads.

Pretty enough it was, at least in outward seeming, to meet a party of

those fisher-girls, bare-legged, high-kilted, lithe as deer, trotting, at

a long loping pace, up the high road toward Bayonne, each with her basket

on her head, as she laughed and sang, and tossed her black hair, and

flashed her brown eyes, full of life and the enjoyment of life. Pretty

enough. And yet who will blame the rail, which now sends her quickly

into Bayonne—or even her fish without her; and relieves the fair young

maiden from being degraded into a beast of burden?

Handsome folk are these brown Basques. A mysterious people, who dwell

alone, and are not counted among the nations; speaking an unique

language, and keeping up unique customs, for which the curious must

consult M. Michel’s interesting book. There may be a cross of English

blood among them, too, about Biarritz and Bayonne; English features there

are, plainly to be seen. And whether or not, one accepts the story of

the country, that Anglets, near by, is an old English colony left by our

Black Prince, it is certain that Bayonne Cathedral was built in part by

English architects, and carries the royal arms of England; and every

school history will tell us how this corner of France was long in our

hands, and was indeed English long before it was properly French.

Moorish blood there may be, too, here and there, left behind by those who

built the little ‘atalaya’ or fire-beacon, over the old harbour, to

correspond, by its smoke column, with a long line of similar beacons down

the Spanish coast. The Basques resemble in look the Southern

Welsh—quick-eyed, neat in feature, neat in dress, often, both men and

women, beautiful. The men wear a flat Scotch cap of some bright colour,

and call it ‘berretta.’ The women tie a gaudy handkerchief round their

heads, and compel one corner to stand forward from behind the ear in a

triangle, in proportion to the size and stiffness whereof the lady seems

to think herself well dressed. But the pretty Basque handkerchief will

soon give place to the Parisian bonnet. For every cove among the rocks

is now filled with smart bathing-houses, from which, in summer, the gay

folk of Paris issue in ‘costume de bain,’ to float about all day on

calabashes—having literally no room for the soles of their feet on land.

Then are opened casinos, theatre, shops, which lie closed all the winter.

Then do the Basque house-owners flee into the moors, and camp out (it is

said) on the hills all night, letting their rooms for ten francs a night

as mere bed-chambers—for all eating and living is performed in public;

while the dove-coloured oxen, with brown holland pinafores over their

backs, who dawdle in pairs up and down the long street with their light

carts, have to make way for wondrous equipages from the Bois de Boulogne.

Not then, for the wise man, is Biarritz a place to see and to love: but

in the winter, when a little knot of quiet pleasant English hold the

place against all comers, and wander, undisturbed by fashion, about the

quaint little rocks and caves and natural bridges—and watch tumbling into

the sea, before the Biscayan surges, the trim walks and summer-houses,

which were erected by the municipality in honour of the Empress and her

suite. Yearly they tumble in, and yearly are renewed, as the soft

greensand strata are graven away, and what must have been once a long

promontory becomes a group of fantastic pierced rocks, exactly like those

which are immortalized upon the willow-pattern plates.

Owing to this rapid destruction, the rocks of Biarritz are very barren in

sea-beasts and sea-weeds. But there is one remarkable exception, where

the pools worn in a hard limestone are filled with what seem at first

sight beds of china-asters, of all loveliest colours—primrose, sea-green,

dove, purple, crimson, pink, ash-grey. They are all prickly sea-eggs

(presumably the _Echinus lividus_, which is found in similar places in

the west of Ireland), each buried for life in a cup-shaped hole which he

has excavated in the rock, and shut in by an overhanging lip of living

lime—seemingly a Nullipore coralline. What they do there, what they

think of, or what food is brought into their curious grinding-mills by

the Atlantic surges which thunder over them twice a day, who can tell?

However they form, without doubt, the most beautiful object which I have

ever seen in pool or cove.

But the glory of Biarritz, after all, is the moors above, and the view to

be seen therefrom. Under blazing blue skies, tempered by soft dappled

cloud, for ever sliding from the Atlantic and the Asturias mountains, in

a climate soft as milk, and exhilarating withal as wine, one sees far and

wide a panorama which, from its variety as well as its beauty, can never

weary.

To the north, the long sand-line of the Biscayan shore—the bar of the

Adour marked by a cloud of grey spray. Then the dark pine-flats of the

Landes, and the towers of Bayonne rising through rich woods. To the

eastward lies a high country, furred with woods, broken with glens; a

country exactly like Devon, through the heart of which, hidden in such a

gorge as that of Dart or Taw, runs the swift stream of the Nive, draining

the western Pyrenees. And beyond, to the south-east, in early spring,

the Pyrenean snows gleam bright, white clouds above the clouds. As one

turns southward, the mountains break down into brown heather-hills, like

Scottish grouse moors. The two nearest, and seemingly highest, are the

famous Rhune and Bayonette, where lie, to this day, amid the heath and

crags, hundreds of unburied bones. For those great hills, skilfully

fortified by Soult before the passage of the Bidassoa, were stormed, yard

by yard, by Wellington’s army in October 1813. That mighty deed must be

read in the pages of one who saw it with his own eyes, and fought there

with his own noble body, and even nobler spirit. It is not for me to

tell of victories, of which Sir William Napier has already told.

Towards that hill, and the Nivelle at its foot, the land slopes down,

still wooded and broken, bounded by a long sweep of clayey crumbling

cliff. The eye catches the fort of Secoa, at the mouth of the

Nivelle—once Wellington’s sea-base for his great French campaign. Then

Fontarabia, at the Bidassoa mouth; and far off, the cove within which

lies the fatal citadel of St. Sebastian; all backed up by the fantastic

mountains of Spain; the four-horned “Quatre Couronnes,” the pyramidal

Jaysquivel, and beyond them again, sloping headlong into the sea, peak

after peak, each one more blue and tender than the one before, leading

the eye on and on for seemingly countless leagues, till they die away

into the ocean horizon and the boundless west. Not a sail, often for

days together, passes between those mountains and the shore on which we

stand, to break the solitude, and peace, and vast expanse; and we linger,

looking and looking at we know not what, and find repose in gazing

purposeless into the utter void.

Very unlike France are these Basque uplands; very like the seaward parts

of Devon and Cornwall. Large oak-copses and boggy meadows fill the

glens; while above, the small fields, with their five-barred gates

(relics of the English occupation) and high furze and heath-grown banks,

make you fancy yourself for a moment in England. And the illusion is

strengthened, as you see that the heath of the banks is the Goonhilly

heath of the Lizard Point, and that of the bogs the orange-belled _Erica

ciliaris_, which lingers (though rare) both in Cornwall and in the south

of Ireland. But another glance undeceives you. The wild flowers are

new, saving those cosmopolitan seeds (like nettles and poppies) which the

Romans have carried all over Europe, and the British are now carrying

over the world. Every sandy bank near the sea is covered with the

creeping stems of a huge reed, which grows in summer tall enough to make

not only high fences, but fishing-rods. Poverty (though there is none of

what we call poverty in Britain) fills the little walled court before its

cottage with bay trees and standard figs; while wealth (though there is

nothing here of what we call wealth in Britain) asserts itself uniformly

by great standard magnolias, and rich trailing roses, in full bloom here

in April instead of—as with us—in July. Both on bank and in bog grow

Scorzoneras (dandelions with sword-shaped leaves) of which there are none

in these isles; and every common is ablaze with strange and lovely

flowers. Each dry spot is brilliant with the azure flowers of a

prostrate Lithospermum, so exquisite a plant, that it is a marvel why we

do not see it, as ‘spring-bedding,’ in every British garden. The heath

is almost hidden, in places, by the large white flowers and trailing

stems of the sage-leaved Cistus. Delicate purple Ixias, and yet more

delicate Hoop-petticoat Narcissus, spring from the turf. And here and

there among furze and heath, crop out great pink bunches of the _Daphne

Cneorum_ of our gardens, perfuming all the air. Yes, we are indeed in

foreign parts, in the very home of that Atlantic flora, of which only a

few species have reached the south-west of these isles; and on the limit

of another flora also—of that of Italy and Greece. For as we descend

into the glen, every lane-bank and low tree is entwined, not with ivy,

but with a still more beautiful evergreen, the Smilax of South-eastern

Europe, with its zigzag stems, and curving heart-shaped leaves, and

hooked thorns; the very oak-scrub is of species unknown to Britain. And

what are these tall lilies, which fill every glade breast-high with their

sword-like leaves, and spires of white flowers, lilac-pencilled? They

are the classic flower, the Asphodel of Greece and Grecian song; the

Asphodel through which the ghosts of Homer’s heroes strode: as heroes’

ghosts might stride even here.

For here we are on sacred ground. The vegetation is rank with the blood

of gallant invaders, and of no less gallant patriots. In the words of

Campbell’s ‘Hohenlinden’—

‘Every turf beneath our feet

May be a hero’s sepulchre.’

That little tarn below has ‘bubbled with crimson foam’ when the kings of

Europe arose to bring home the Bourbons, as did the Lake Regillus of old,

in the day when ‘the Thirty Cities swore to bring the Tarquins home.’

Turn to the left, above the tarn, and into the great Spanish road from

Bayonne to the frontier at what was lately ‘La Negresse,’ but is now a

gay railway station. Where that station is, was another tarn, now

drained. The road ran between the two. And that narrow space of two

hundred yards, on which we stand, was for three fearful days the gate of

France.

For on the 10th of December, 1813, Soult, driven into Bayonne by

Wellington’s advance, rushed out again in the early morn, and poured a

torrent of living men down this road, and upwards again towards the

British army which crested that long ridge in front.

The ridge slopes rapidly away at the back, toward the lowlands of the

Bidassoa; and once thrust from it, the English army would have been cut

in two—one half driven back upon their sea-base at St. Jean de Luz: the

other half left on the further side of the Adour.

And this was the gate, which had to be defended during a three days’

battle. That long copse which overhangs the road is the famous wood,

which was taken and retaken many times. You house above it, embowered in

trees, is the ‘Mayor’s house,’ in which Sir John Hope was so nearly

captured by the French. Somewhere behind the lane where we came down was

the battery which blasted off our troops as they ran up from the lowlands

behind, to support their fellows.

Of the details of the fight you must read in Napier’s ‘Peninsular War,’

and in Mr. Gleig’s ‘Subaltern.’ They are not to be described by one who

never saw a battle, great or small.

And now, if you choose to start upon your journey from the ocean to the

sea, you will take the railroad here, and run five miles through the

battle-fields into Bayonne, the quaint old fortress city, girdled with a

labyrinth of walls, and turf-dykes, and outside them meadows as rich, and

trees as stately, as if war had never swept across the land. You may

stop, if you will, to look at the tall Spanish houses, with their piazzas

and jalousies, and the motley populace, French, Basques, Spaniards, Jews;

and, most worth seeing of all, the lovely ladies of Bayonne, who swarm

out when the sun goes down, for air and military music. You may try to

find (in which you will probably fail) the arms of England in the roof of

the ugly old cathedral; you may wander the bridges over which join the

three quarters of the city (for the Adour and the Nive meet within the

walls), and probably lose your way—a slight matter among folk who, if you

will but take off your hat, call them Monsieur, apologize for the trouble

you are giving, begin the laugh at your own stupidity, and compliment

them on their city and their fair ladies, will be delighted to walk a

mile out of their own way to show you yours. You will gaze up at the

rock-rooted citadel from whence, in the small hours of April 14, 1813,

after peace was agreed on, but unhappily not declared (for Napier has

fully exculpated the French Generals), three thousand of Thouvenot’s men

burst forth against Sir John Hope’s unsuspecting besiegers, with a

furious valour which cost the English more than 800 men.

There, in the pine woods on the opposite side, is the Boucault, where our

besieging army lay. Across the reach below stretched Sir John Hope’s

famous bridge; and as you leave Bayonne by rail, you run beneath the

English cemetery, where lie the soldiers (officers of the Coldstream

Guards among them) who fell in the Frenchman’s last struggle to defend

his native land.

But enough of this. I should not have recalled to mind one of these

battles, had they not, one and all, been as glorious for the French and

their great captain—wearied with long marches, disheartened by the apathy

of their own countrymen, and, as they went on, overpowered by mere

numbers—as they were for our veterans, and Wellington himself.

And now, once through Bayonne, we are in the Pignadas and the Landes.

To form a conception of these famous Landes, it is only necessary to run

down by the South-Western Railway, through the moors of Woking or Ascot;

spread them out flat, and multiply them to seeming infinity. The same

sea of brown heather, broken only by the same dark pignadas, or fir

plantations, extends for nigh a hundred miles; and when the traveller

northward has lost sight, first of the Spanish mountains, and then of the

Pyrenean snows, he seems to be rushing along a brown ocean, without wave

or shore. Only, instead of the three heaths of Surrey and Hants (the

same species as those of Scotland), larger and richer southern heaths

cover the grey sands; and notably the delicate upright spires of the

bruyère, or _Erica scoparia_, which grows full six feet high, and

furnishes from its roots those ‘bruyère’ pipes, which British shopkeepers

have rechristened ‘briar-roots.’ Instead, again, of the Scotch firs of

Ascot, the pines are all pinasters (miscalled _P. maritima_). Each has

the same bent stem, carrying at top, long, ragged, scanty, leaf-tufts,

instead of the straight stem and dense short foliage of the sturdier

Scotchman; and down each stem runs a long, fresh scar, and at the bottom

(in spring at least), hangs a lip of tin, and a neat earthen pipkin, into

which distils turpentine as clear as glass. The trees have mostly been

planted within the last fifty years, to keep the drifting sands from

being blown away. As timber they are about as valuable as those Jersey

cow-cabbage stalks, of which the curious will at times make

walking-sticks: but as producers of turpentine they have their use, and

give employment to the sad, stunted, ill-fed folk, unhealthy for want of

water, and barbarous from utter loneliness, whose only employment, in old

times, was the keeping ragged flocks about the moors. Few and far

between the natives may be seen from the railway, seemingly hung high in

air, till on nearer approach you find them to be stalking along on

stilts, or standing knitting on the same, a sheepskin over their

shoulders, an umbrella strapped to their side, and, stuck into the small

of the back, a long crutch, which serves, when resting, as a third wooden

leg.

So run on the Landes, mile after mile, station after station, varied only

by an occasional stunted cork tree, or a starved field of barley or

maize. But the railroad is bringing to them, as elsewhere, labour,

civilization, agricultural improvement. Pretty villages, orchards,

gardens, are springing up round the lonely ‘gares.’ The late Emperor

helped forward, it is said, new pine plantations, and sundry schemes for

reclaiming the waste. Arcachon, on a pine-fringed lagoon of the

Atlantic, has great artificial ponds for oyster breeding, and is rising

into a gay watering-place, with a distinguished scientific society. Nay,

more: it saw a few years since an international exposition of fish, and

fish-culture, and fishing-tackle, and all things connected with the

fisheries, not only of Europe, but of America likewise. Heaven speed the

plan; and restore thereby oysters to our shores, and shad and salmon to

the rivers both of Western Europe and Eastern North America.

As for the cause of the Landes, it may be easily divined, by the help of

a map and of common sense.

The Gironde and the Adour carry to the sea the drainage of nearly a third

of France, including almost all the rain which falls on the north side of

the Pyrenees. What has become of all the sand and mud which has been

swept in the course of ages down their channels? What has become—a very

small part, be it recollected, of the whole amount—of all the rock which

has been removed by rain and thunder, frost and snow, in the process of

scooping out the deep valleys of the Pyrenees? Out of that one crack,

which men call the Val d’Ossau, stone has been swept enough to form a

considerable island. Where is it all? In these Landes. Carried down

year by year to the Atlantic, it has been driven back again, year by

year, by the fierce gales of the Bay of Biscay, and rolled up into banks

and dunes of loose sand, till it has filled up what was once a broad

estuary, 140 miles across and perhaps 70 miles in depth. Upheaved it may

have been also, slowly, from the sea, for recent sea-shells are found as

far inland as Dax; and thus the whole upper end of the Bay of Biscay has

transformed itself during the lapse of, it may be, countless ages, into a

desolate wilderness.

It is at Dax that we leave the main line, and instead of running north

for Bordeaux and the land of clarets, turn south-east to Orthez and Pau,

and the Gaves, and the Pyrenees.

And now we pass through ragged uplands, woody and moorish, with the long

yellow maize-stalks of last year’s crop rotting in the swampy glens. For

the ‘petite culture,’ whatever be its advantages, gives no capital or

power of combined action for draining wet lands; and the valleys of

Gascony and Bearn in the south, as well as great sheets of the Pas de

Calais in the north, are in a waterlogged state, equally shocking to the

eye of a British farmer, and injurious to the health and to the crops of

the peasants.

Soon we strike the Adour, here of the shape and size of a second-class

Scotch salmon-stream, with swirling brown pools beneath grey crags, which

make one long to try in them the virtues of ‘Jock Scott,’ ‘the Butcher,’

or the ‘Dusty Miller.’ And perhaps not without effect; for salmon are

there still; and will be more and more as French ‘pisciculture’ develops

itself under Government supervision.

Here we touch again the line of that masterly retreat of Soult’s before

the superior forces of Wellington, to which Napier has done such ample

and deserved justice.

There is Berenz, where the Sixth and Light divisions crossed the Gave,

and clambered into the high road up steep ravines; and there is Orthez

itself, with the beautiful old Gothic bridge which the French could not

blow up, as they did every other bridge on their retreat; and the ruins

of that robber den to which Gaston Phœbus, Count of Foix (of whom you may

read in Froissart), used to drag his victims; and there overhead, upon

the left of the rail and road, is the old Roman camp, and the hill of

Orthez, and St. Boes, and the High Church of Baights, the scene of the

terrible battle of Orthez.

The Roman camp, then ‘open and grassy, with a few trees,’ says Napier, is

now covered with vineyards. Everywhere the fatal slopes are rich with

cultivation, plenty, and peace. God grant they may remain so for ever.

And so, along the Gave de Pau, we run on to Pau, the ancient capital of

Bearn; the birthplace of Henri Quatre, and of Bernadotte, King of Sweden;

where, in the charming old château, restored by Louis Philippe, those who

list may see the tortoise which served as the great Henry’s cradle; and

believe, if they list also, the tale that that is the real shell.

For in 1793, when the knights of the ‘bonnet rouge’ and ‘carmagnole

complete’ burst into the castle, to destroy every memorial of hated

royalty, the shell among the rest, there chanced—miraculous

coincidence—to be in Pau, in the collection of a naturalist, another

shell, of the same shape and size. Swiftly and deftly pious hands

substituted it for the real relic, leaving it to be battered in pieces

and trampled in the mud, while the royal cradle lay perdu for years in

the roof of a house, to reappear duly at the Restoration of the Bourbons.

Of Pau I shall say nothing. It would be real impertinence in one who

only spent three days in it, to describe a city which is known to all

Europe; which is a permanent English colony, and boasts of one, and

sometimes two, packs of English foxhounds. But this I may be allowed to

say. That of all delectable spots I have yet seen, Pau is the most

delectable. Of all the landscapes which I have beheld, that from the

Place Royale is, for variety, richness, and grandeur, the most glorious;

at least as I saw it for the first time.

Beneath the wall of the high terrace are rich meadows, vocal with frogs

rejoicing in the rain, and expressing their joy, not in the sober

monotone of our English frogs, but each according to his kind; one

bellowing, the next barking, the next cawing, and the next (probably the

little green Hylas, who has come down out of the trees to breed) quacking

in treble like a tiny drake. The bark (I suspect) is that of the

gorgeous edible frog; and so suspect the young recruits who lounge upon

the wall, and look down wistfully, longing, I presume, to eat him. And

quite right they are; for he (at least his thigh) is exceeding good to

eat, tenderer and sweeter than any spring chicken.

Beyond the meadow, among the poplars, the broad Gave murmurs on over

shingly shallows, between aspen-fringed islets, grey with the melting

snows; and beyond her again rise broken wooded hills, dotted with

handsome houses; and beyond them a veil of mist and rain.

On a sudden that veil lifts; and five-and-twenty miles away, beneath the

black edge of the cloud, against the clear blue sky, stands out the whole

snow-range of the Pyrenees; and in the midst, exactly opposite, filling

up a vast gap which is the Val d’Ossau, the huge cone, still snowy white,

of the Pic du Midi.

He who is conversant with theatres will be unable to overlook the seeming

art—and even artifice—of such an effect. The clouds lift like a

drop-scene; the mountains are so utterly unlike any natural object in the

north, that for the moment one fancies them painted and not real; the Pic

du Midi stands so exactly where it ought, and is yet so fantastic and

unexpected in its shape, that an artist seems to have put it there.

But lie who knows nothing, and cares less, about theatres and their sham

glories, and sees for the first time in his life the eternal snows of

which he has read since childhood, draws his breath deeply, and stands

astounded, whispering to himself that God is great.

One hint more, ere we pass on from Pau. Here, at least in spring time,

of all places in Europe, may a man feed his ears with song of birds. The

copses by the Gave, the public walks and woods (wherein English

prejudices have happily protected what is elsewhere shot down as game,

even to the poor little cock-robins whose corpses lie by dozens in too

many French markets), are filled with all our English birds of passage,

finding their way northwards from Morocco and Algiers; and with our

English nightingales, black-caps, willow-wrens, and whitethroats, are

other songsters which never find their way to these isles, for which you

must consult the pages of Mr. Gould or Mr. Bree—and chief among them the

dark Orpheus, and the yellow Hippolais, surpassing the black-cap, and

almost equalling the nightingale, for richness and variety of song—the

polyglot warbler which penetrates, in summer, as far north as the shores

of the British Channel, and there stops short, scared by the twenty miles

of sea, after a land journey—and by night, too, as all the warblers

journey—from Africa.

At Pau, the railroad ended when I was there; and who would go eastward

had to take carriage, and go by the excellent road (all public roads in

the south of France are excellent, and equal to our best English roads)

over the high Landes to Tarbes; and on again over fresh Landes to

Montrejeau; and thence by railway to Toulouse.

They are very dreary, these high flat uplands, from which innumerable

streams pour down to swell the Adour and the Garonne; and as one rolls

along, listening to the eternal tinkle of the horse-bells, only two

roadside objects are particularly worthy of notice. First, the

cultivation, spreading rapidly since the Revolution, over what was open

moor; and next the great natural parks which one traverses here and

there; the remnants of those forests which were once sacred to the

seigneurs and their field sports. The seigneurs are gone now, and the

game with them; and the forests are almost gone—so ruinate, indeed, by

the peasantry, that the Government (I believe) has interfered to stop a

destruction of timber, which involves the destruction both of fire-wood

and of the annual fall of rain. But the trees which remain, whether in

forest or in homestead, are sadly mangled. The winters are sharp in

these high uplands, and firing scarce; and the country method of

obtaining it is to send a woman up a tree, where she hacks off, with

feeble arms and feeble tools, boughs halfway out from the stem,

disfiguring, and in time destroying by letting the wet enter, splendid

southern oaks, chestnuts, and walnuts. Painful and hideous, to an eye

accustomed to British parks, are the forms of these once noble trees.

Suddenly we descend a brow into the Yale of Tarbes: a good land and

large; a labyrinth of clear streams, water-meadows, cherry-orchards, and

crops of every kind, and in the midst the pleasant old city, with its

once famous University. Of Tarbes, you may read in the pages of

Froissart—or, if you prefer a later authority, in those of Dumas, ‘Trois

Mousquetaires;’ for this is the native land of the immortal Ulysses of

Gascony, the Chevalier d’Artagnan.

There you may see, to your surprise, not only gentlemen, but ladies,

taking their pleasure on horseback after the English fashion; for there

is close by a great ‘haras,’ or Government establishment for

horse-breeding. You may watch the quaint dresses in the marketplace; you

may rest, as Froissart rested of old, in a ‘right pleasant inn;’ you may

eat of the delicious cookery which is to be found, even in remote towns,

throughout the south of France, and even—if you dare—of ‘Coquilles aux

Champignons.’ You may sit out after dinner in that delicious climate,

listening to the rush of the clear Adour through streets, and yards, and

culverts; for the city, like Romsey, or Salisbury, is built over many

streams. You may watch the Pyrenees changing from white to rose, from

rose to lead colour, and then dying away into the night—for twilight

there is little or none, here in the far south.

‘The sun’s rim dips, the stars rush out,

At one stride comes the dark.’

And soon from street to street you hear the ‘clarion’ of the garrison,

that singularly wild and sweet trumpet-call which sends French soldiers

to their beds. And at that the whole populace swarms out, rich and poor,

and listens entranced beneath the trees in the Place Maubourguet, as if

they had never heard it before; with an order and a sobriety, and a good

humour, and a bowing to each other, and asking and giving of cigar-lights

between men of every class—and a little quiet modest love-making on the

outskirts of the crowd, which is very pleasant to behold. And when the

music is silent, and the people go off suddenly, silently, and soberly

withal (for there are no drunkards in these parts), to their early beds,

you stand and look up into the ‘purple night,’ as Homer calls it—that

southern sky, intensely dark, and yet transparent withal, through which

you seem to look beyond the stars into the infinite itself, and recollect

that beyond all that, and through all that likewise, there is an infinite

good God who cares for all these simple kindly folk; and that by Him all

their hearts are as well known, and all their infirmities as mercifully

weighed, as are, you trust, your own.

And so you go to rest, content to say, with the wise American, ‘It takes

all sorts to make a world.’

The next morn you rise, to roll on over yet more weary uplands to

Montrejeau, over long miles of sandy heath, a magnified Aldershott, which

during certain summer months is gay, here and there, like Aldershott,

with the tents of an army at play. But in spring the desolation is

utter, and the loneliest grouse-moor, and the boggiest burn, are more

cheerful and varied than the Landes of Lannemezan, and the foul

streamlets which have sawn gorges through the sandy waste.

But all the while, on your right hand, league after league, ever fading

into blue sky behind you, and growing afresh out of blue sky in front,

hangs high in air the white saw of the Pyrenees. High, I say, in air,

for the land slopes, or seems to slope, down from you to the mountain

range, and all their roots are lost in a dim sea of purple haze. But

shut out the snow line above, and you will find that the seeming haze is

none, but really a clear and richly varied distance of hills, and woods,

and towns, which have become invisible from the contrast of their greens,

and greys, and purples, with the glare and dazzle of the spotless snows

of spring.

There they stand, one straight continuous jagged wall, of which no one

point seems higher than another. From the Pic d’Ossau, by the Mont Perdu

and the Maladetta to the Pic de Lart, are peaks past counting—hard clear

white against the hard clear blue, and blazing with keen light beneath

the high southern sun. Each peak carries its little pet cushion of

cloud, hanging motionless a few hundred yards above in the blue sky, a

row of them as far as eye can see. But, ever and anon, as afternoon

draws on, one of those little clouds, seeming tired of waiting at its

post ever since sunrise, loses its temper, boils, swells, settles down on

its own private peak, and explodes in a fierce thunderstorm down its own

private valley, without discomposing in the least its neighbour

cloud-cushions right and left. Faintly the roll of the thunder reaches

the ear. Across some great blackness of cloud and cliff, a tiny spark

darts down. A long wisp of mist sweeps rapidly toward you across the

lowlands, and a momentary brush of cold rain lays the dust. And then the

pageant is played out, and the disturbed peak is left clear again in the

blue sky for the rest of the day, to gather another cloud-cushion when

to-morrow’s sun shall rise.

To him who looks, day after day, on this astonishing natural wall,

stretching, without visible gap, for nearly three hundred miles, it is

easy to see why France not only is, but must be, a different world from

Spain. Even human thought cannot, to any useful extent, fly over that

great wall of homeless rock and snow. On the other side there must needs

be another folk, with another tongue, other manners, other polities, and

if not another creed, yet surely with other, and utterly different,

conceptions of the universe, and of man’s business therein. Railroads

may do somewhat. But what of one railroad; or even of two, one on the

ocean, one on the sea, two hundred and seventy miles apart? Before

French civilization can inform and elevate the Spanish people you must

‘plane down the Pyrenees.’

At Montrejeau, a pretty town upon a hill which overhangs the Garonne, you

find, again, verdure and a railroad; and, turning your back upon the

Pyrenees, run down the rich ugly vale of the Garonne, through crops of

exceeding richness—wheat, which is reaped in July, to be followed by

buckwheat reaped in October; then by green crops to be cut in May, and

that again by maize, to be pulled in October, and followed by wheat and

the same rotation.

Thus you reach Toulouse, a noble city, of which it ill befits a

passer-through to speak. Volumes have been written on its antiquities,

and volumes on its history; and all of either that my readers need know,

they will find in Murray’s hand-book.

At Toulouse—or rather on leaving it to go eastward—you become aware that

you have passed into a fresh region. The change has been, of course,

gradual: but it has been concealed from you by passing over the chilly

dreary uplands of Lannemezan. Now you find yourself at once in

Languedoc. You have passed from the Atlantic region into the

Mediterranean; from the old highlands of the wild Vascones, into those

lowlands of Gallia Narbonensis, reaching from the head-waters of the

Garonne to the mouths of the Rhone, which were said to be more Italian

than Italy itself.

The peculiarity of the district is its gorgeous colouring. Everywhere,

over rich plains, you look away to low craggy banks of limestone, the

grey whereof contrasts strongly with the green of the lowland, and with

the even richer green of the mulberry orchards; and beyond them again,

southward to the now distant snows of the Pyrenees, and northward to the

orange downs and purple glens of the Cevennes, all blazing in the blazing

sun. Green, grey, orange, purple, and, in the farthest distance, blue as

of the heaven itself, make the land one vast rainbow, and fit

dwelling-place for its sunny folk, still happy and industrious—once the

most cultivated and luxurious people in Europe.

As for their industry, it is hereditary. These lands were, it may be, as

richly and carefully tilled in the days of Augustus Cæsar as they are

now; or rather, as they were at the end of the eighteenth century. For,

since then, the delver and sower—for centuries the slave of the Roman,

and, for centuries after, the slave of Teutonic or Saracenic

conquerors—has become his own master, and his own landlord; and an

impulse has been given to industry, which is shown by trim cottages, gay

gardens, and fresh olive orchards, pushed up into glens which in a state

of nature would starve a goat.

The special culture of the country—more and more special as we run

eastward—is that of the mulberry, the almond, and the olive. Along every

hill-side, down every glen, lie orchard-rows of the precious pollards.

The mulberries are of richest dark velvet green; the almonds, one glory

of rose-colour in early spring, are now of a paler and colder green; the

olives (as all the world knows) of a dusty grey, which looks all the more

desolate in the pruning time of early spring, when half the boughs of the

evergreen are cut out, leaving the trees stripped as by a tempest, and

are carried home for fire-wood in the quaint little carts, with their

solid creaking wheels, drawn by dove-coloured kine. Very ancient are

some of these olives, or rather, olive-groups. For when the tree grows

old, it splits, and falls asunder, as do often our pollard willows; the

bark heals over on the inside of each fragment, and what was one tree

becomes many, springing from a single root, and bearing such signs of

exceeding age that one can well believe the country tale, how in the

olive grounds around Nismes are still fruiting olives which have

furnished oil for the fair Roman dames who cooled themselves in the

sacred fountain of Nemausa, in the days of the twelve Cæsars.

Between the pollard rows are everywhere the rows of vines, or of what

will be vines when summer comes, but are now black knobbed and gnarled

clubs, without a sign of life save here and there one fat green shoot of

leaf and tendril bursting forth from the seemingly dead stick.

One who sees that sight may find a new meaning and beauty in the mystic

words, ‘I am the vine, ye are the branches.’ It is not merely the

connection between branch and stem, common to all trees; not merely the

exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the grape, which made

the very heathens look upon it as the sacred and miraculous fruit, the

special gift of God; not merely the pruning out of the unfruitful

branches, to be burned as fire-wood, or—after the old Roman fashion,

which I believe endures still in these parts—buried as manure at the foot

of the parent stem; not merely these, but the seeming death of the vine,

shorn of all its beauty, its fruitfulness, of every branch and twig which

it had borne the year before, and left unsightly and seemingly ruined, to

its winter’s sleep; and then bursting forth again, by an irresistible

inward life, into fresh branches spreading and trailing far and wide, and

tossing their golden tendrils to the sun.

This thought, surely—the emblem of the living Church springing from the

corpse of the dead Christ, who yet should rise and be alive for

evermore—enters into, it may be forms an integral part of, the meaning

of, that prophecy of all prophecies.

One ought to look, with something of filial reverence, on the agriculture

of the district into which we are penetrating; for it is the parent of

our own. From hence, or strictly speaking from the Mediterranean shore

beyond us, spread northward and westward through France, Belgium, and

Britain, all the tillage which we knew—at least till a hundred years

ago—beyond the primæval plan of clearing, or surface-burning, the

forests, growing miserable white crops as long as they would yield, and

then letting the land relapse, for twenty years, into miserable pasture.

This process (which lingered thirty years ago in remote parts of Devon),

and nothing better, seems to have been that change of cultivated lands

which Tacitus ascribes to the ancient Germans. Rotation of crops, in any

true sense, came to us from Provence and Languedoc; and with it,

subsoiling; irrigation; all our artificial grasses, with lucerne at the

head of the list; our peas and beans; some of our most important roots;

almost all our garden flowers, vegetables, fruits, the fig, the mulberry,

the vine—(the olive and the maize came with them from the East, but dared

go no further north)—and I know not what more; till we may say,

that—saving subsoil-draining, which their climate does not need—the

ancestors of these good folks were better farmers fifteen hundred years

ago, than too many of our countrymen are at this day.

So they toil, and thrive, and bless God, under the glorious sun; and as

for rain—they have not had rain for these two months—(I speak of April,

1864)—and, though the white limestone dust is ankle deep on every road,

say that they want none for two months more, thanks, it is to be

presumed, to their deep tillage, which puts the plant-roots out of the

reach of drought. In spring they feed their silkworms, and wind their

silk. In summer they reap their crops, and hang the maize-heads from

their rafters for their own winter food, while they sell the wheat to the

poor creatures, objects of their pity, who live in towns, and are forced

to eat white bread. From spring to autumn they have fruit, and to spare,

for themselves and for their customers; and with the autumn comes the

vintage, and all its classic revelries. A happy folk—under a happy

clime; which yet has its drawbacks, like all climes on earth. Terrible

thunderstorms sweep over it, hail-laden, killing, battering, drowning,

destroying in an hour the labours of the year; and there are ugly mistral

winds likewise, of which it may be fairly said, that he who can face an

eight days’ mistral, without finding his life a burden, must be either a

very valiant man, or have neither liver nor mucous membrane.

For on a sudden, after still and burning weather, the thermometer

suddenly falls from thirty to forty degrees; and out of the north-west

rushes a chilly hurricane, blowing fiercer and fiercer each day toward

nightfall, and lulling in the small hours, only to burst forth again at

sunrise. Parched are all lips and eyes; for the air is full of dust,

yea, even of gravel which cuts like hail. Aching are all right-sides;

for the sudden chill brings on all manner of liver complaints and

indigestions. All who can afford it, draw tight the jalousies, and sulk

in darkness; the leaves are parched, as by an Atlantic gale; the air is

filled with lurid haze, as in an English north-east wind; and no man can

breathe freely, or eat his bread with joy, until the plague is past.

What is the cause of these mistrals; why all the cold air of Central

France should be suddenly seized with madness, and rush into the sea

between the Alps and the Pyrenees; whether the great heat of the sun,

acting on the Mediterranean basin, raises up thence—as from the Gulf of

Mexico—columns of warm light air, whose place has to be supplied by

colder and heavier air from inland; whether the north-west mistral is, or

is not, a diverted north-easter; an arctic current which, in its right

road toward the tropics across the centre of France, has been called to

the eastward of the Pyrenees (instead of, as usual, to the westward), by

the sudden demand for cold air,—all this let men of science decide; and

having discovered what causes the mistral, discover also what will

prevent it. That would be indeed a triumph of science, and a boon to

tortured humanity.

But after all, man is a worse enemy to man than any of the brute forces

of nature: and a more terrible scourge than mistral or tempest swept over

this land six hundred years ago, when it was, perhaps, the happiest and

the most civilized portion of Europe. This was the scene of the

Albigense Crusade: a tragedy of which the true history will never,

perhaps, be written. It was not merely a persecution of real or supposed

heretics; it was a national war, embittered by the ancient jealousies of

race, between the Frank aristocracy of the north and the Gothic

aristocracy of the south, who had perhaps acquired, with their

half-Roman, half-Saracen civilization, mixtures both of Roman and of

Saracen blood. As “Aquitanians,” “Provençaux,”—Roman Provincials, as

they proudly called themselves, speaking the Langue d’Oc, and looking

down on the northerners who spoke the Langue d’Oil as barbarians, they

were in those days guilty of the capital crime of being foreigners; and

as foreigners they were exterminated. What their religious tenets were,

we shall never know. With the Vaudois, Waldenses, “poor men of Lyons,”

they must not be for a moment confounded. Their creed remains to us only

in the calumnies of their enemies. The confessions in the archives of

the Tolosan Inquisition, as elicited either under torture or fear of

torture, deserve no confidence whatsoever. And as for the licentiousness

of their poetry—which has been alleged as proof of their profligacy—I can

only say, that it is no more licentious than the _fabliaux_ of their

French conquerors, while it is far more delicate and refined. Humanity,

at least, has done justice to the Troubadours of the south; and

confessed, even in the Middle Age, that to them the races of the north

owed grace of expression, delicacy of sentiment, and that respect for

women which soon was named chivalry; which looks on woman, not with

suspicion and contempt, but with trust and adoration; and is not ashamed

to obey her as “mistress,” instead of treating her as a slave.

But these Albigenses must have had something in their hearts for which it

was worth while to die. At Aviguonet, that little grey town on the crag

above the railway, they burst into the place, maddened by the cruelties

of the Inquisitor (an archdeacon, if I recollect rightly, from Toulouse),

and slew him then and there. They were shut up in the town, and

withstood heroically a long and miserable siege. At last they were

starved out. The conquerors offered them their lives—so say the French

stories—if they would recant. But they would not. They were thrust

together into one of those stone-walled enclosures below the town, heaped

over with vine-twigs and maize-stalks, and burned alive; and among them a

young lady of the highest rank, who had passed through all the horrors of

the siege, and was offered life, wealth, and honour, if she would turn.

Surely profligate infidels do not so die; and these poor souls, whatever

were their sins or their confusions, must be numbered among the heroes of

the human race.

But the world has mended since then, and so has the French character.

Even before the Revolution of 1793, it was softening fast. The massacres

of 1562 were not as horrible as those of the Albigense Crusade, though

committed—which the former were not—under severe provocation. The

massacres of 1793—in spite of all that has been said—were far less

horrible than those of 1562, though they were the outpouring of centuries

of pardonable fury and indignation. The crimes of the Terreur Blanche,

at the Restoration—though ugly things were done in the south, especially

in Nismes—were far less horrible again; though they were, for the most

part, acts of direct personal retaliation on the republicans of 1793.

And since then the French heart has softened fast. The irritating sense

of hereditary wrong has passed away. The Frenchman conceives that

justice is done to him, according to his own notions thereof. He has his

share of the soil, without which no Celtic populace will ever be content.

He has fair play in the battle of life; and a ‘Carrière ouverte aux

talens.’ He has equal law and justice between man and man. And he is

content; and under the sunshine of contentment and self-respect, his

native good-nature expands; and he shows himself what he is, not merely a

valiant and capable, but an honest, kindly, charitable man.

Yes. France has grown better, and has been growing better, I believe,

for centuries past. And the difference between the France of the middle

age and the France of the present day, is fitly typified by the

difference between the new Carcassone below and the old Carcassone above,

where every traveller, even if he be no antiquarian, should stop and gaze

about a while.

The contrast is complete; and one for which a man who loves his

fellow-men should surely return devout thanks to Almighty God. Below, on

the west bank of the river, is the new town, spreading and growing,

unwalled, for its fortifications are now replaced by boulevards and

avenues; full of handsome houses; squares where, beneath the plane-tree

shade, marble fountains pour out perpetual health and coolness;

manufactories of gay woollens; healthy, cheerful, market folk;

comfortable burghers; industry and peace. We pass outside to the great

basin of the Canal de Languedoc, and get more avenues of stately trees,

and among them the red marble statue of Riquet, whose genius planned and

carried out the mighty canal which joins the ocean to the sea; the wonder

of its day, which proved the French to be, at least in the eighteenth

century, the master-engineers of the world; the only people who still

inherited the mechanical skill and daring of their Roman civilizers.

Riquet bore the labour of that canal—and the calumny and obstructiveness,

too, which tried to prevent its formation; France bore the expense; Louis

Quatorze, of course, the glory; and no one, it is to be feared, the

profit: for the navigation of the Garonne at the one extremity, and of

the Mediterranean shallows at the other, were left unimproved till of

late years, and the canal has become practically useful only just in time

to be superseded by the railroads.

Now cross the Aude. Look down upon the willow and aspen copses, where

over the heads of busy washerwomen, the nightingale and the hippolais

crowded together away from the dusty plains and downs, shake the copses

with their song; and then toil upward to the grey fortress tower on the

grey limestone knoll; and pass, out of nature and her pure sunshine, into

the black shadow of the unnatural Middle Age; into the region of dirt and

darkness, cruelty and fear; grim fortresses, crowded houses, narrow

streets, and pestilence. Pass through the outer circle of walls, of the

latter part of the thirteenth century, to examine—for their architecture

is a whole history engraved in stones—the ancient walls of the inner

enceinte; massive Roman below, patched with striped Visigothic work, with

mean and hasty Moorish, with graceful, though heavy, Romanesque of the

times of the Troubadours; a whole museum of ancient fortifications, which

has been restored, stone by stone, through the learning of M. Viollet le

Duc and the public spirit of the late Emperor. Pass in under the gateway

and give yourself up to legends. There grins down on you the broad image

of the mythic Dame Carcas, who defended the town single-handed against

Charlemagne, till this tower fell down by miracle, and let in the

Christian host. But do not believe that she gave to the place its name

of Carcassone; for the first syllable of the word is hint enough that it

was, long ere her days, a Celtic caer, or hill-fortress. Pause at the

inner gate; you need not exactly believe that when the English Crusader,

Simon de Montfort, burst it open, and behold, the town within was empty

and desolate, he cried: ‘Did I not tell you that those heretics were

devils; and behold, being devils, they have vanished into air.’ You must

believe, I fear, that of the great multitude who had been crowded,

starving, and fever-stricken within, he found four hundred poor wretches

who had lingered behind, and burnt them all alive. You need not believe

that that is the mouth of the underground passage which runs all the way

from the distant hills, through which the Vicomte de Beziers, after

telling Simon de Montfort and the Abbot of Citeaux that he would sooner

be flayed alive than betray the poor folk who had taken refuge with him,

got them all safe away, men, women, and children. You need not believe

that that great vaulted chamber was the ‘Chamber of the Inquisition.’

But you must believe that those two ugly rings let into the roof were put

there for the torture of the cord; and that many a naked wretch has

dangled from them ere now, confessing anything and everything that he—or,

alas she—was bidden. But these and their like are the usual furniture of

every mediæval court of justice; and torture was not altogether abolished

in France till the latter part of the eighteenth century. You need not

believe, again, that that circular tower on the opposite side of the town

was really the ‘Tower of the Inquisition;’ for many a feudal lord,

besides the Inquisitors, had their dens of cruelty in those old times.

You need not even believe—though it is too likely to be true—that that

great fireplace in the little first-floor room served for the torture of

the scarpines. But you must believe that in that little round den

beneath it, only approached by a trap in the floor, two skeletons were

found fastened by those chains to that central pillar, having died and

rotted forgotten in that horrid oubliette—how many centuries ago?

‘Plusieurs ont gemis là bas,’ said M. Viollet le Duc’s foreman of the

works, as he led us out of that evil hole, to look, with eyes and hearts

refreshed by the change, at a curious Visigothic tower, in which the good

bishop Sidonius Apollinaris may have told of the last Burgundian invasion

of his Auvergne to the good king Theodoric of the West Goths.

If anyone wishes to learn what the Middle Ages were like, let him go to

Carcassone and see.

And now onward to Narbonne—or rather, to what was once Narbonne; one of

the earliest colonies ever founded by the Romans; then the capital of the

Visigothic kingdom; then of an Arab kingdom: now a dull fortified town—of

a filth unspeakable, and not to be forgotten or forgiven. Stay not

therein an hour, lest you take fever, or worse: but come out of the gate

over the drawbridge, and stroll down the canal. Look back a moment,

though, across the ditch. The whole face of the wall is a museum of

Roman gods, tombs, inscriptions, bas-reliefs: the wreck of Martial’s

‘Pulcherrima Narbo,’ the old Roman city, which was demolished by Louis

XIII., to build the ugly fortifications of the then new fashion, now

antiquated and useless. Take one glance, and walk on, to look at live

Nature—far more interesting than dead Art.

Everything fattens in the close damp air of the canal. The great flat,

with its heavy crops, puts you in mind of the richest English

lowland—save for the total want of old meadows. The weeds on the bank

are English in type, only larger and richer—as becomes the climate. But

as you look among them, you see forms utterly new and strange, whose

kinship you cannot fancy, but which remind you that you are nearing

Italy, and Greece, and Africa. And in the hedges are great bay-trees;

and inside them, orchards of standard fig and white mulberry, with its

long yearling shoots of glorious green—soon to be stripped bare for the

silkworms; and here and there long lines of cypresses, black against the

bright green plain and bright blue sky. No; you are not in Britain.

Certainly not; for there is a drake (not a duck) quacking with feeble

treble in that cypress, six feet over your head; and in Britain drakes do

not live in trees. You look for the climbing palmipede, and see nothing:

nor will you see; for the quacker is a tiny green tree-frog, who holds on

by the suckers at the ends of his toes (with which he can climb a pane of

glass, like a fly), and has learnt the squirrel’s art of going invisible,

without ‘the receipt of fern-seed,’ by simply keeping always on the

further side of the branch.

But come back; for the air even here is suggestive of cholera and fever.

The uncleanliness of these Narbonnois is shameless and shocking; and

‘immondices’ of every kind lie festering in the rainless heat. The

sickened botanist retreats, and buys a bottle of Eau Bully—_alias_

aromatic vinegar.

* * * * *

There, crowding yon hill, with handsome houses and churches, is

Beziers—the blood-stained city. Beneath the pavement of that church, it

is said, lie heaped together the remains of thousands of men, women, and

children, slaughtered around their own altars, on that fatal day, when

the Legate Amalric, asked by the knights how they should tell Catholics

from heretics, cried, “Kill them all—the Lord will know his own.”

We will pass on. We have had enough of horrors. And, beside, we are

longing to hurry onward; for we are nearing the Mediterranean now. There

are small skiffs lying under the dark tower of Agde, another place of

blood, fitly built of black lava blocks, the offspring of the nether pit.

The railway cuts through rolling banks of dark lava; and now, ahead of

us, is the conical lava-hill of Cette, and the mouth of the Canal du

Midi.

* * * * *

There it is, at last. The long line of heavenly blue; and over it, far

away, the white-peaked lateen sails, which we have seen in pictures since

our childhood; and there, close to the rail, beyond the sand-hills,

delicate wavelets are breaking for ever on a yellow beach, each in

exactly the same place as the one which fell before. One glance shows us

children of the Atlantic, that we are on a tideless sea.

There it is,—the sacred sea. The sea of all civilization, and almost all

history, girdled by the fairest countries in the world; set there that

human beings from all its shores might mingle with each other, and become

humane—the sea of Egypt, of Palestine, of Greece, of Italy, of Byzant, of

Marseilles, and this Narbonnaise, ‘more Roman than Rome herself,’ to

which we owe the greater part of our own progress; the sea, too, Algeria

and Carthage, and Cyrene, and fair lands now desolate, surely not to be

desolate for ever;—the sea of civilization. Not only to the Christian,

nor to the classic scholar, but to every man to whom the progress of his

race from barbarism toward humanity is dear, should the Mediterranean Sea

be one of the most august and precious objects on this globe; and the

first sight of it should inspire reverence and delight, as of coming

home—home to a rich inheritance in which he has long believed by hearsay,

but which he sees at last with his own mortal corporal eyes.

Exceedingly beautiful is that first view of the sea from Cette, though

altogether different in character from the views of the Mediterranean

which are common in every gallery of pictures. There is nothing to

remind one of Claude, or Vernet, or Stanfield. No mountain-ranges far

aloft, no cliffs toppling into the water, with convents and bastides

perched on their crags; and seaports, with their land-locked harbours,

and quaint lighthouses, nestling on the brink. That scenery begins on

the other side of the Rhone mouth, and continues, I believe, almost

without interruption, to the shores of Southern Palestine, one girdle of

perpetual beauty.

But here, the rail runs along a narrow strip of sand, covered with

straggling vines, and tall white iris, between the sea and the great

Etang de Thau, a long narrow salt-lake, beyond which the wide lowlands of

the Herault slide gently down, There is not a mountain, hardly a hill,

visible for miles: but all around is the great sheet of blue glassy

water: while the air is as glassy clear as the water, and through it, at

seemingly immense distances, the land shows purple and orange, blue and

grey, till the landscape is one great rainbow. White ships slide to and

from far-off towns; fishermen lounge on the marshes, drying long lines of

net. Everywhere is vastness, freedom, repose gentle and yet not

melancholy; because with all, under the burning blue, there is that fresh

wholesome heat, which in itself is life, and youth, and joy.

Beyond, nearer the mouths of the Rhone, there are, so men say, desolate

marshes, tenanted by herds of half-wild horses; foul mud-banks, haunted

by the pelican and the flamingo, and waders from the African shore; a

region half land, half water, where dwell savage folk, decimated by fever

and ague. But short of those Bouches du Rhône, the railway turns to the

north, toward Montpellier and

‘Arli, dove il Rhodano stagna.’

And at Cette ends this little tour from Ocean to Sea, with the wish that

he who next travels that way may have as glorious weather, and as

agreeable a companion, as the writer of these lines had in 1864.

VI.

_NORTH DEVON_. {225a}