in this neighbourhood by a Mr Newberry; a man of many whimsies he was
called, and whimsical indeed he must have been; for the different
buildings for his silkworms and his laboratories were so numerous that
his house looked like a village, and all his laundry and dairy work was
done by men, because he would suffer no women servants about him.
The road still lay over the downs; this is a great sheep country, above
150,000 are annually sold from Dorsetshire to other parts of England;
they are larger than ours, and I think less beautiful, the wool being
more curled and less soft in its appearance. It was once supposed that
the thyme in these pastures was so nourishing as to make the ewes
produce twins, a story which may be classed with the tale of the
Lusitanian foals of the wind; it is however true that the ewes are
purchased by the farmers near the metropolis, for the sake of fattening
their lambs for the London market, because they yean earlier than any
others. The day was very fine, and the sight of this open and naked
country, where nothing was to be seen but an extent of short green turf
under a sky of cloudless blue, was singular and beautiful. There are
upon the downs many sepulchral hillocks, here called barrows, of
antiquity beyond the reach of history. We past by a village church as
the people were assembling for service, men and women all in their clean
Sunday clothes; the men standing in groups by the church-yard stile, or
before the porch, or sitting upon the tombstones, a hale and ruddy race.
The dresses seem every where the same, without the slightest provincial
difference: all the men wear hats, the least graceful and least
convenient covering for the head that ever was devised. I have not yet
seen a cocked hat except upon the officers. They bury the dead both in
town and country round the churches, and the church-yards are full of
upright stones, on which the name and age of the deceased is inscribed,
usually with some account of his good qualities, and not unfrequently
some rude religious rhyme. I observe that the oldest churches are always
the most beautiful, here as well as every where else; for as we think
more of ourselves and less of religion, more of this world and less of
the next, we build better houses and worse churches. There are no storks
here: the jackdaw, a social and noisy bird, commonly builds in the
steeples. Little reverence is shown either to the church or the
cemetery; the boys play with a ball against the tower, and the priest’s
horse is permitted to graze upon the graves.
At Blandford we changed chaises; a wealthy and cheerful town. The
English cities have no open centre like our _plazas_; but, in amends for
this, the streets are far wider and more airy: indeed they have never
sun enough to make them desirous of shade. The prosperity of the kingdom
has been fatal to the antiquities, and consequently to the picturesque
beauty of the towns. Walls, gates, and castles have been demolished to
make room for the growth of streets. You are delighted with the
appearance of opulence in the houses, and the perfect cleanliness every
where when you are within the town; but without, there is nothing which
the painter would choose for his subject, nothing to call up the
recollections of old times, and those feelings with which we always
remember the age of the shield and the lance.
This town and Dorchester, but this in particular, has suffered much from
fire; a tremendous calamity which is every day occurring in England, and
against which daily and dreadful experience has not yet taught them to
adopt any general means of prevention. There are large plantations about
Blandford:—I do not like the English method of planting in what they
call belts about their estates; nothing can be more formal or less
beautiful, especially as the fir is the favourite tree, which precludes
all variety of shape and colour. By some absurdity which I cannot
explain, they set the young trees so thick that unless three-fourths be
weeded out, the remainder cannot grow at all; and when they are weeded,
those which are left, if they do not wither and perish in consequence of
the exposure, rarely attain to any size or strength.
Our next stage was to the episcopal city of Salisbury; here we left the
down-country, and once more entered upon cultivated fields and
inclosures. The trees in these hedge-rows, if they are at all lofty,
have all their boughs clipt to the very top; nothing can look more naked
and deplorable. When they grow by the way-side, this is enjoined by law,
because their droppings after rain injure the road, and their shade
prevents it from drying. The climate has so much rain and so little sun,
that over-hanging boughs have been found in like manner injurious to
pasture or arable lands, and the trees, therefore, are every where thus
deformed. The approach to Salisbury is very delightful;—little rivers or
rivulets are seen in every direction; houses extending into the country,
garden-trees within the city, and the spire of the cathedral
over-topping all; the highest and the most beautiful in the whole
kingdom.
We visited this magnificent building while our dinner was getting ready:
like all such buildings, it has its traditional tales of absurdity and
exaggeration—that it has as many private chapels as months in a year, as
many doors as weeks, as many pillars as days, as many windows as hours,
and as many partitions in the windows as minutes: they say also, that it
is founded upon wool-packs, because nothing else could resist the
humidity of the soil. It has lately undergone, or, I should rather say,
suffered a thorough repair in the true spirit of reformation. Every
thing has been cleared away to give it the appearance of one huge room.
The little chapels, which its pious founders and benefactors had erected
in the hope of exciting piety in others, and profiting by their prayers,
are all swept away! but you may easily conceive what wild work a
protestant architect must make with a cathedral, when he fits it to his
own notions of architecture, without the slightest feeling or knowledge
of the design with which such buildings were originally erected. The
naked monuments are now ranged in rows between the pillars, one opposite
another, like couples for a dance, so as never monuments were placed
before, and, it is to be hoped, never will be placed hereafter. Here is
the tomb of a nobleman, who, in the reign of our Philip and Mary, was
executed for murder, like a common malefactor, with this difference
only, that he had the privilege of being hanged in a silken halter; a
singularity which, instead of rendering his death less ignominious, has
made the ignominy more notorious. The cloisters and the chapter-house
have escaped alteration. I have seen more beautiful cloisters in our own
country, but never a finer chapterhouse; it is supported, as usual, by
one central pillar, whose top arches off on all sides, like the head of
a spreading palm. The bishop’s palace was bought during the reign of the
presbyterians by a rich tailor, who demolished it and sold the
materials.
The cemetery has suffered even more than the church, if more be
possible, from the abominable sacrilege, and abominable taste of the
late bishop and his chapter. They have destroyed all memorials of the
dead, for the sake of laying it down as a smooth well-shorn grass plat,
garnished with bright yellow gravel walks! This suits no feeling of the
mind connected with religious reverence, with death, or with the hope of
immortality; indeed it suits with nothing except a new painted window at
the altar, of truly English design, (for England is not the country of
the arts,) and an organ, bedecked with crocketed pinnacles, more than
ever was Gothic tower, and of stone colour, to imitate masonry! This,
however, it should be added, was given in a handsome manner by the King.
A subscription was raised through the diocese to repair the cathedral,
the King having enquired of the bishop how it succeeded, proceeded to
ask why he himself had not been applied to for a contribution. The
prelate, with courtly submission, disclaimed such presumption as highly
improper. I live at Windsor, said the King, in your diocese, and, though
I am not rich, can afford to give you an organ, which I know you want;
so order one in my name, and let it be suitable to so fine a cathedral.
The soil here abounds so much with water, that there are no vaults in
the churches, nor cellars in the city; a spring will sometimes gush up
when they are digging a grave. Little streams flow through several of
the streets, so that the city has been called the English Venice; but
whoever gave it this appellation, either had never seen Venice, or
grossly flattered Salisbury. Indeed, till the resemblance was invented,
these streamlets were rather thought inconvenient than beautiful; and
travellers complained that they made the streets not so clean and not so
easy of passage, as they would have been otherwise. The place is famous
for the manufactory of knives and scissars, which are here brought to
the greatest possible perfection. I am sorry it happened to be Sunday;
for the shops, which form so lively a feature in English towns, are all
fastened up with shutters, which give the city a melancholy and mourning
appearance. I saw, however, a priest walking in his cassock from the
church,—the only time when the priests are distinguished in their dress
from the laity.
A remarkable instance of insolent impiety occurred lately in a village
near this place. A man, in derision of religion, directed in his will,
that his horse should be caparisoned and led to his grave, and there
shot, and buried with him, that he might be ready to mount at the
resurrection, and start to advantage. To the disgrace of the country
this was actually performed; the executors and the legatees probably
thought themselves bound to obey the will; but it is unaccountable why
the clergyman did not interfere, and apply to the bishop.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LETTER V.
_Old Sarum.—Country thinly peopled,—Basingstoke.—Ruins of a Catholic
Chapel.—Waste Land near London.—Staines.—Iron Bridges.—Custom of
exposing the dead Bodies of Criminals.—Hounslow.—Brentford.—Approach
to London.—Arrival._
Monday, April 26.
Half a league from Salisbury, close on the left of the London road, is
Old Sarum, the Sorbiodunum of the Romans, famous for many reasons. It
covered the top of a round hill, which is still surrounded with a mound
of earth and a deep fosse. Under the Norman kings it was a flourishing
town, but subject to two evils; the want of water, and the oppression of
the castle soldiers. The townsmen, therefore, with one consent, removed
to New Sarum, the present Salisbury, where the first of these evils is
more than remedied; and the garrison was no longer maintained at Old
Sarum when there was nobody to be pillaged. So was the original city
deserted, except by its right of representation in parliament; not a
soul remaining there. Seven burgage tenures, in a village westward of
it, produce two burgesses to serve in parliament for Old Sarum; four of
these tenures (the majority) were sold very lately for a sum little
short of 200,000 _peso-duros_.
From this place Salisbury Plain stretches to the north, but little of it
is visible from the road which we were travelling: much of this wide
waste has lately been inclosed and cultivated. I regretted that I could
not visit Stonehenge, the famous druidical monument, which was only a
league and a half distant: but as J— was on his way home, after so long
an absence, I could not even express a wish to delay him.
Stockbridge and Basingstoke were our next stages: the country is mostly
down, recently enclosed, and of wonderfully thin population in
comparison of the culture. Indeed harvest here depends upon a temporary
emigration of the western clothiers, who come and work during the
harvest months. The few trees in this district grow about the villages
which are scattered in the vallies—beautiful objects in an open and
naked country. You see flints and chalk in the fields, if the soil be
not covered with corn or turnips. Basingstoke is a town which stands at
the junction of five great roads, and is of course a thriving place. At
the north side is a small but beautiful ruin of a chapel once belonging
to a brotherhood of the Holy Ghost. J— led me to see it as a beautiful
object, in which light only all Englishmen regard such monuments of the
piety of their forefathers and of their own lamentable apostasy. The
roof had once been adorned with the history of the prophets and the holy
apostles; but the more beautiful and the more celebrated these
decorations, the more zealously were they destroyed in the schism. I
felt deeply the profanation, and said a prayer in silence upon the spot
where the altar should have stood. One relic of better times is still
preserved at Basingstoke: in all parishes it is the custom, at stated
periods, to walk round the boundaries; but here, and here only, is the
procession connected with religion: they begin and conclude the ceremony
by singing a psalm under a great elm which grows before the
parsonage-house.
Two leagues and a half of wooded country reach Hertford Bridge, a place
of nothing but inns for travellers: from hence, with short and casual
interruptions, Bagshot Heath extends to Egham, not less than fourteen
miles. We were within six leagues of London, a city twice during the
late war on the very brink of famine, and twice in hourly dread of
insurrection from that dreadful cause:—and yet so near it is this tract
of country utterly waste! Nothing but wild sheep, that run as fleet as
hounds, are scattered over this dreary desert: flesh there is none on
these wretched creatures; but those who are only half-starved on the
heath produce good meat when fatted: all the flesh and all the fat being
_laid on_, as graziers speak, anew, it is equivalent in tenderness to
lamb, and in flavour to mutton, and has fame accordingly in the
metropolis.
At Staines we crost the Thames,—not by a new bridge, now for the third
time built, but over a crazy wooden one above a century old. We enquired
the reason, and heard a curious history. The river here divides the
counties of Middlesex and Surrey; and the magistrates of both counties,
having agreed upon the necessity of building a bridge, did not agree
exactly as to its situation; neither party would give way, and
accordingly each collected materials for building a half-bridge from its
respective bank, but not opposite to the other. Time at length showed
the unfitness of this, and convinced them that two half bridges would
not make a whole one: they then built three arches close to the old
bridge; when weight was laid on the middle piers, they sunk considerably
into an unremembered and untried quicksand, and all the work was to be
undone. In the meanwhile, an adventurous iron bridge had been built at
Sunderland, one arch of monstrous span over a river with high rocky
banks, so that large ships could sail under. The architect of this work,
which was much talked of, offered his services to throw a similar but
smaller bridge over the Thames. But, alas! his rocky abutments were not
there, and he did not believe enough in mathematics to know the mighty
lateral pressure of a wide flat arch. Stone abutments, however, were to
be made; but, from prudential considerations, the Middlesex abutment, of
seeming solidity, was hollow, having been intended for the wine-cellar
of a large inn; so as soon as the wooden frame-work was removed, the
flat arch took the liberty of pushing away the abutment—alias the
wine-cellar—and after carriages had passed over about a week, the fated
bridge was once more closed against passage.
I know not how these iron bridges may appear to an English eye, but to a
Spaniard’s they are utterly detestable. The colour, where it is not
black, is rusty, and the hollow, open, spider work, which they so much
praise for its lightness, has no appearance of solidity. Of all the
works of man, there is not any one which unites so well with natural
scenery, and so heightens its beauty, as a bridge, if any taste, or
rather if no bad taste, be displayed in its structure. This is
exemplified in the rude as well as in the magnificent; by the stepping
stones or crossing plank of a village brook, as well as by the immortal
works of Trajan: but to look at these iron bridges which are bespoken at
the foundries, you would actually suppose that the architect had studied
at the confectioner’s, and borrowed his ornaments from the sugar temples
of a desert. It is curious that this execrable improvement, as every
novelty is called in England, should have been introduced by the
notorious politician, Paine, who came over from America, upon this
speculation, and exhibited one as a show upon dry ground in the
metropolis.[4]
Footnote 4:
The great Sunderland bridge has lately become liable to tremendous
vibrations, and thereby established the unfitness of building any more
such.—TR.
Staines was so called, because the boundary stone which marked the
extent of the city of London’s jurisdiction up the river formerly stood
here. The country on the London side had once been a forest; but has now
no other wood remaining than a few gibbets; on one of which, according
to the barbarous custom of this country, a criminal was hanging in
chains. Some five-and-twenty years ago, about a hundred such were
exposed upon the heath; so that from whatever quarter the wind blew, it
brought with it a cadaverous and pestilential odour. The nation is
becoming more civilized; they now take the bodies down after reasonable
exposure; and it will probably not be long before a practice so
offensive to public feeling, and public decency, will be altogether
discontinued. This heath is infamous for the robberies which are
committed upon it, at all hours of the day and night, though travellers
and stage-coaches are continually passing: the banditti are chiefly
horsemen, who strike across with their booty into one of the roads,
which intersect it in every direction, and easily escape pursuit; an
additional reason for inclosing the waste. We passed close to some
powder-mills, which are either so ill-contrived, or so carelessly
managed, that they are blown up about once a-year: then we entered the
great Western road at Hounslow; from thence to the metropolis is only
two leagues and a half.
Three miles further is Brentford, the county town of Middlesex, and of
all places the most famous in the electioneering history of England. It
was now almost one continued street to London. The number of travellers
perfectly astonished me, prepared as I had been by the gradual increase
along the road; horsemen and footmen, carriages of every description and
every shape, waggons and carts and covered carts, stage-coaches, long,
square, and double, coaches, chariots, chaises, gigs, buggies,
curricles, and phaetons; the sound of their wheels ploughing through the
wet gravel was as continuous and incessant as the roar of the waves on
the sea beach. Evening was now setting in, and it was dark before we
reached Hyde Park Corner, the entrance of the capital. We had travelled
for some time in silence; J—’s thoughts were upon his family, and I was
as naturally led to think on mine, from whom I was now separated by so
wide a tract of sea and land, among heretics and strangers, a people
notoriously inhospitable to foreigners, without a single friend or
acquaintance, except my companion. You will not wonder if my spirits
were depressed; in truth, I never felt more deeply dejected; and the
more I was surprised at the length of the streets, the lines of lamps,
and of illuminated shops, and the stream of population to which there
seemed to be no end,—the more I felt the solitariness of my own
situation.
The chaise at last stopped at J—’s door in ——. I was welcomed as kindly
as I could wish: my apartment had been made ready: I pleaded fatigue,
and soon retired.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LETTER VI.
_Watchmen.—Noise in London Night and Morning.—An English Family.—Advice
to Travellers._
Tuesday, April 27, 1802.
The first night in a strange bed is seldom a night of sound rest;—one is
not intimate enough with the pillow to be quite at ease upon it. A
traveller, like myself, indeed, might be supposed to sleep soundly any
where; but the very feeling that my journey was over was a disquieting
one, and I should have lain awake thinking of the friends and parents
whom I had left, and the strangers with whom I was now domesticated, had
there been nothing else to disturb me. To sleep in London, however, is
an art which a foreigner must acquire by time and habit. Here was the
watchman, whose business it is, not merely to guard the streets and take
charge of the public security, but to inform the good people of London
every half hour of the state of the weather. For the three first hours I
was told it was a moonlight night, then it became cloudy, and at half
past three o’clock was a rainy morning; so that I was as well acquainted
with every variation of the atmosphere as if I had been looking from the
window all night long. A strange custom this, to pay men for telling
them what the weather is, every hour during the night, till they get so
accustomed to the noise, that they sleep on and cannot hear what is
said.
Besides this regular annoyance, there is another cause of disturbance.
The inhabitants of this great city seem to be divided into two distinct
casts,—the Solar and the Lunar races,—those who live by day, and those
who live by night, antipodes to each other, the one rising just as the
others go to bed. The clatter of the night coaches had scarcely ceased,
before that of the morning carts began. The dustman with his bell, and
his chaunt of dust ho! succeeded to the watchman; then came the
porter-house boy for the pewter-pots which had been sent out for supper
the preceding night; the milkman next, and so on, a succession of cries,
each in a different tune, so numerous, that I could no longer follow
them in my enquiries.
As the watchman had told me of the rain, I was neither surprised nor
sorry at finding it a wet morning: a day of rest after the voyage and so
long a journey is acceptable, and the leisure it allows for clearing my
memory, and settling accounts with my journal, is what I should have
chosen. More novelties will crowd upon me now than it will be easy to
keep pace with. Here I am in London, the most wonderful spot upon this
habitable earth.