Cambridgeshire is one of the so-called ugly counties; which means
that it is observably flat. It is for this reason that the absence of
terrestrial accent which culminates at Newmarket constitutes so perfect
a means to an end. The country is like a board of green cloth; the turf
presents itself as a friendly provision of nature. Nature offers her
gentle bosom as a gaming-table; card-tables, billiard-tables are but
a humble imitation of Newmarket Heath. It was odd to think that amid
so much of the appearance of the humility of real virtue, there is
more profane betting than anywhere else in the world. The large, neat
English meadows roll away to a humid-looking sky, the young partridges
jump about in the hedges, and nature looks not in the least as if she
were offering you odds. The gentlemen look it, though, the gentlemen
whom you meet on the roads and in the railway carriage; they have that
marked air—it pervades a man from the cut of his whisker to the shape
of his boot-toe—as of the sublimated stable. It is brought home to
you that to an immense number of people in England the events in the
“Racing Calendar” constitute the most important portion of contemporary
history. The very breeze has an equine snort, if it doesn’t breathe
as hard as a hostler; the blue and white of the sky, dappled and
spotty, recalls the figure of the necktie of “spring meetings;” and the
landscape is coloured as a sporting-print is coloured—with the same
gloss, the same that seems to say a thousand grooms have rubbed it
down.
The destruction of partridges is, if an equally classical, a less
licentious pursuit, for which, I believe, Cambridgeshire offers
peculiar facilities. Among these is a particular shooting-box which
is a triumph of the familiar, the accidental style and a temple of
clear hospitality. The shooting belongs to the autumn, not to this
vernal period; but as I have spoken of echoes I suppose that if I had
listened attentively I might have heard the ghostly crack of some of
the famous shots that have been discharged there. The air, notedly, had
vibrated to several august rifles, but all that I happened to hear by
listening was some excellent talk. In England, at any rate, as I said
just now, a couple of places may be very near together and yet have
what the philosophers call a connotation strangely different. Only a
few miles beyond Newmarket lies Bury St. Edmunds, a town whose tranquil
antiquity turns its broad grey back straight upon the sporting papers.
I confess that I went to Bury simply on the strength of its name, which
I had often encountered and which had always seemed to me to have a
high value for the picture-seeker. I knew that St. Edmund had been an
Anglo-Saxon worthy, but my conviction that the little town that bore
his name would move me to rapture between trains had nothing definite
to rest upon. The event, however, rewarded my faith—rewarded it with
the sight of a magnificent old gate-house of the thirteenth century,
the most substantial of many relics of the great abbey which once
flourished there. There are many others; they are scattered about the
old precinct of the abbey, a large portion of which has been converted
into a rambling botanic garden, the resort at Whitsuntide of a thousand
very modern merry-makers. The monument I speak of has the proportions
of a triumphal arch; it is at once a gateway and a fortress; it is
covered with beautiful ornament and is altogether the lion of Bury.
1879.
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