It was a pleasure, which I should be glad to share with the reader, to
lose one’s self in the streets of York. They were all kinds of streets
except straight, and they seemed not to go anywhere except for the
joke of bringing the wayfarer unexpectedly back to, or near, his
starting-point and far from his goal. The blame of their vagariousness,
if it was a fault, is put upon the Danes, who found York when they
captured it very rectangular, for so the Romans built it, and so the
Angles kept it; but nothing would serve the Danes but to crook its
streets and call them gates, so that the real gates of the city have to
be called bars, or else the stranger might take them for streets. If he
asked another wayfarer, he could sometimes baffle the streets, and get
to the point he aimed at, but, whether he did or not, he could always
amuse himself in them; they would take a friendly interest in him,
and show him the old houses and churches which the American stranger
prefers. They abound in the poorer sorts of buildings, of course, just
as they do in the poorer sorts of people, but in their simpler courts
and squares and expanses they have often dignified mansions of that
Georgian architecture which seems the last word in its way, and which is
known here in our older edifices as there in their newer. Some of them
are said to have “richly carved ceilings, wainscoted, panelled rooms,
chimneypieces with paintings framed in the over-mantel, dentilled
cornices, and pedimented doors,” and I could well believe it, as I
passed them with an envious heart. There were gardens behind these
mansions which hung their trees over the spiked coping of their
high-shouldered walls and gates, and sequestered I know not what damp
social events in their flowery and leafy bounds.
[Illustration: WALMGATE BAR HAS A BARBICAN]
At times I distinctly wished to know something of the life of York, but
I was not in the way of it. The nearest to an acquaintance I had there,
besides my critical fruiterer, was the actor whose name I recognized on
his bills as that of a brave youth who had once dramatized a novel of
mine, and all too briefly played the piece, and who was now to come
to York for a week of Shakespeare. Perhaps I could not forgive him the
recrudescence; at any rate, I did not try to see him, and there was no
other social chance for me, except as I could buy in for a few glimpses
at the tidy confectioners’, where persons of civil condition resorted
for afternoon tea. Even to these one could not speak, and I could only
do my best in a little mercenary conversation with the bookseller about
York histories. The bookstores were not on our scale, and generally the
shops in York were not of the modern department type, but were perhaps
the pleasanter for that reason.
In my earlier wanderings I made the acquaintance of a most agreeable
market-place, stretching the length of two squares, which on a Saturday
afternoon I found filled with every manner of bank and booth and
canopied counter, three deep, and humming pleasantly with traffic in
everything one could eat, drink, wear, or read; there seemed as many
book-stalls as fruit-stalls. What I noted equally with the prettiness
of the abounding flowers was the mild kindness of the market-people’s
manners and their extreme anxiety to state exactly the quality of the
things they had for sale. They seemed incapable of deceit, but I do
not say they really were so. My own transactions were confined to the
purchase of some golden-gage plums, and I advise the reader rather to
buy greengages; the other plums practised the deception in their looks
which their venders abhorred.