cathedral roof for bullets; they otherwise dishonored its edifice,
Cromwell’s soldiers having failed to do so. By the beginning of this
century the population of the town had dwindled to less than five
thousand. But these, in their flat streets of snug little houses, we
thought well supplied with good shops, and the other comforts of life,
and we found them of an indefatigable civility in telling and showing us
our way about. We had still some time to spare when finally their
kindness got us to the station of the Somerset and Dorset line, where,
as a friendly old man whom we found there before us justly remarked, “Us
must wait for the train; it won’t wait for we.”
There was another old man there, in a sort of farmer’s gayety of
costume, with leathern gaiters reaching well to his knees, and a jaunty,
low-crowned hat, who promptly made our acquaintance and told us that he
was eighty years old, and that he had lately led the singing of a
Methodist revival-meeting. “And every one said my voice was as strong in
the last note as the first.” He then sang us a verse from a hymn in
justification of the universal opinion, and in spite of his functional
piety was of an organic levity which, with his withered bloom and his
lively movement on his feet, recalled the type of sage eternized by Mr.
Hardy in Granfer Cantle. Upon the whole we were glad to be rid of him
when he quitted the train on which we started together, and left us to
the sadder society of a much younger man. He too was a countryman, and
he presently surprised me by owning that he had once been a
fellow-countryman. He had indeed lived two years in a part of Northern
Ohio where I once lived, and the world shrank in compass through our
meeting in the Somerset and Dorset line. “And didn’t you like it?” “Oh,
yes; _I_ liked it. After I came back I was the homesickest man! But my
wife couldn’t get her health there.” Privately, I thought I would have
preferred Glastonbury, where this kindly man got out, to Orwell,
Ashtabula County, Ohio; but we all have our tastes, and I made him a due
show of sympathy in his regret for my native land.
When our two hours of travel were rather more than up, we found
ourselves again in Bath after a day which I felt to have been full of
exciting adventure. But I ask almost as little of life as of literature
in the way of incident, and perhaps the reader will not think my visit
to Wells especially stirring. In that case I will throw in the fact of a
calf tied at one of the stations where we changed, and lamentably
bellowing in the midst of its fellow-passengers, but standing upon its
rights quite as if it had booked first-class. When I add that there was
a sign up at this station requiring all persons to cross the track by
the bridge, and that without exception we contumaciously trooped over
the line at grade, I think the cup of the wildest lover of romance must
run over.
Of our subsequent afternoon in Bristol, what remains after this lapse of
time except a pleasing impression? We chose a wet day because there were
no dry days to choose from. But a wet day of the English spring is
commonly better than it promises, and this one made several unexpected
efforts to be fine, and repeatedly succeeded. Bristol is no nearer Bath
than Wells is, but there are no changes, and we arrived in half an hour
and drove at once through the rather uninteresting streets to the
beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe. There we found the verger
(or perhaps one should say the sexton) as ready to receive us, having
just finished mopping the floor, as if he had been expecting us from
[Illustration: BRISTOL HARBOR AND DRAWBRIDGE]
the foundation of the church in the thirteenth century. One has not
often such a welcome, even from a verger, and I make this occasion to
say that few things add more to the comfort of sight-seeing travel than
an appreciative verger. He imparts a quality of his church or cathedral
to the sight-seer, who feels himself Early English or at least
Perpendicular Gothic under his flattering ministrations, and he
supplements the dry facts of the guide-book with those agreeable touches
of fable which really give life to history.
St. Mary Redcliffe is so rich in charming associations, however, as
scarcely to need the play of the sacristan’s imagination for the
adornment of her past. She is easily, as Queen Elizabeth so
often-quotedly said, “the fairest, the goodliest, and most famous parish
church in England,” and is more beautiful and interesting than the
cathedral of her city, if not more graceful in form and lovely in detail
than any other church in Europe. One scarcely knows which of her claims
on the reader’s interest to mention first, but perhaps if the reader has
a feeling heart for genius and sorrow he will care most for St. Mary
Redcliffe because Chatterton lies buried in her shadow. Or, if he is not
buried there, but at St. Andrews, Holborn, in London, as Peter
Cunningham claims, there is at least his monument at St. Mary’s
Redcliffe to give validity to the verger’s favorite story. The bishop
forbade the poor suicide to be buried in the church-yard, and he was
interred in a space just outside; but later the vestry bought this lot
and enclosed it with the rest, and so beat the bishop on his own
consecrated ground. I could not give a just sense of how much the verger
triumphed in this legend, but apparently he could not have been prouder
of it if he had invented it. He pointed out, at no great remove, a house
in or near which Chatterton was born; and he must have taken it for
granted that we knew the boy had pretended to find the MS. of his poems
in an old chest in the muniment-room, over the beautiful porch of the
church, for he did not mention it. He was probably so absorbed in the
interest which Chatterton conferred upon St. Mary Redcliffe that he did
not think to remind us that both Coleridge and Southey were married in
the church. Southey was born in Bristol, and they both formed part of a
little transitory provincial literary centre, which flourished there
before the rise of the Lake School under the fostering faith of Joseph
Cottle, the publisher, himself an epic poet of no mean area.
But St. Mary Redcliffe has peculiar claims upon the reverence of
Americans from its monument of Admiral Penn, father of him who founded
the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The formidable old sailor’s gauntlets,
cuirass, and helmet hang upon the wall above the monument, and near by
is the rib of a whale which John Cabot is said to have slain in
Labrador. Less endearing associations for us, and less honorable to the
city are those of the slave-trade which Bristol long carried on to her
great gain and shame. Slavery was common there, not only in the Saxon
and Norman days, but practically far down the centuries into the
eighteenth. In the earlier times youths and maidens were roped together
and offered for sale in the market; people sold their own children
abroad; and in the later times, Bristol prospered so greatly in the
exportation of young men and women to the colonies, that when this
slavery was finally put an end to, it was found just to compensate her
merchants and ship-owners in the sum of nearly a million dollars for
their loss in the redemptioners whom they used to carry out and sell for
their passage-money.
In the strange contemporaneity of the worst and the best things Bristol
grew in grace; beautiful churches rose, and then her people fought the
fight out of Romanism into Protestantism; in the civil war she held for
the Parliament against the King, and was taken by Rupert and retaken by
Cromwell. A hundred years after, the great religious awakening to be
known as Methodism, began in and about Bristol. Whitefield preached to
the miners at Kingswood, and then Wesley, whose help he had invoked,
came and preached to all classes, in the town and out, moving them so
powerfully to seek salvation, that many who heard him fell down in
swounds and fits, and “roared for the disquietness of their hearts,”
while tens of thousands were less dramatically saved from their sins.
Yet another hundred years and the spirit miraculously responded to the
constant prayer of George Müller for means to found the Orphanages,
which witness the wonder at this day to any tourist willing to visit
them. Without one specific or personal appeal, alms to the amount of
three million dollars flowed in upon him, and helped him do his noble
work.
Riches abounded more and more in Bristol, but the city continued almost
to the nineteenth century in a mediæval inconvenience, discomfort, and
squalor. A horse and cart could not pass through her tortuous streets,
and trucks drawn by dogs transported her merchandise; down to 1820 heavy
wagons were not permitted for fear of damaging the arches of the sewers,
and sledges were used. All the same, there was from the beginning a
vehement and powerful spirit of enterprise, and Bristol is connected
with our own history not only by the voyages of the Cabots to our savage
northern shores in the fifteenth century, but by the venture of the
_Great Western_, which, in 1838, made the first steam passage of the
Atlantic Ocean. In honor of the relations established by her mariners
between the old world and the new, I over-ruled our driver’s genteel
reluctance from the seafaring quarter of the town, and had him take us
to as much of the port of Bristol as possible. I am not sure that I
found the points from which either the _Matthew_ sailed for America in
1497, or the _Great Western_ in 1838, but I am sure that nothing more
picturesque could have rewarded my vague search. Among the craft
skirting the long quays there was every type of vessel except the
Atlantic liner which had originated there; but the steamers, which
looked coast-wise and river-going, contributed their full share to the
busy effect. This for the moment was intensified by the interest which a
vast crowd of people were taking in the raising of a sunken barge. Their
multitude helped to embarrass our progress through the heaps of
merchandise, and piles of fish, and coils of chain and cordage, and
trucks backing and filling; but I would not have had them away, and I
only wish I knew, as they must later have known, whether that barge was
got up in good shape.
On one shore were ranks of warehouses, and on the other, the wild
variety of taverns and haunts of crude pleasure, embracing many places
for the enjoyment of strong waters, such as everywhere in the world
attract the foot wandering ashore at the end of a sea-leg. Their like
may have allured that Anglicized Venetian, John Cabot, when he returned
from finding Newfoundland, and left his ship to enjoy the ten pounds
which Henry VII. had handsomely sent him for that purpose, as an
acknowledgment of his gift of a continent. It is not to be supposed that
there were then so many and so
[Illustration: CLIFTON, FROM ASHTON MEADOWS]
large shops as now intersperse the pleasure-resorts in the port of
Bristol; I question whether Cabot, if he had strained his eyes over-seas
by looking out for new hemispheres, could have found there a whole
building lettered over with the signs of an optician, and I do not yet
see just why such a semi-scientist should so abound there now. But I
shall always be sorry I did not go to him to replace the eye-glasses I
had broken, instead of poorly driving to the shop of an optician in one
of the best city streets. It was a very handsome street full of shops,
such as gave a due notion of the sufficiency of Bristol to all demands
of wealth and ease, and I got an excellent pair of glasses; but if I had
bought my glasses in the port, I might perhaps have seen the whole
strenuous past of the famous place through them, and even “stared at the
Pacific” with the earliest of her circumnavigating sons. However, we
cannot do everything, and we did not even see that day the cathedral
which St. Mary Redcliffe so much surpasses, for anything we know to the
contrary. We could and did see the beautiful Norman gateway of the
Abbey, which it is no treason to our favorite church to allow she has
none to equal, and passing under its sumptuously carven arches into the
cathedral we arrived at the side of the regretful verger. He bade us
note that the afternoon service was going on, and how the Elder Lady
Chapel with its grotesque sculptures in the mediæval taste, which used
to have fun in the decoration of sacred places with all sorts of mocking
fancies, was impossible to us at the moment.
But the Bristol cathedral is not one of the famous English cathedrals,
and our regret was tempered by this fact, though the verger’s was not. I
tried to appease him with a promise to come again, which I should like
nothing better than to keep, and then we drove off. We were visiting
almost without a plan this storied and noble city, which so much merited
to be carefully and intelligently seen, and it was by mere grace of
chance that we now happened upon one of the most interesting houses in
it. In the graveyard of St. Peter’s church the hapless poet, Richard
Savage, who was buried at the cost of the jailer of the debtors’ prison
where he died, and we must have passed the tablet to his memory in
finding our unheeding way to St. Peter’s Hospital behind the church.
This is one of the most splendid survivals of the statelier moods of the
past in that England which is full of its records. A noted alchemist
built it, whether for his dwelling or whether for the mystic uses of his
art, in the thirteen-hundreds, but it is gabled and timbered now in the
fashion of the sixteenth century, and serves as the official home of the
Bristol Board of Guardians. Once it belonged to a company of merchant
adventurers, and their ships used to float up to its postern-gate, and
show their spars through the leaden sash of its windows, still kept in
their primal picturesqueness. The whole place within is a wonder of
carven mantels and friezes and ceilings; and so sound that it might well
hold its own for yet five hundred years longer.
It was the first of those mediæval houses which gave us a sense of
English comfort hardly yet surpassed in modern English interiors; and
here first we noted the devotion of the English themselves to the
monuments of their past. The Americans who visit objects of interest on
the continent are apt to find themselves equalling in number, if not
outnumbering their fellow-Anglo-Saxons of English birth; but in England
they are a most insignificant minority. The English are not merely
globe-trotters, they are most incessant travellers in their own island.
They are always going and coming in it, and as often for pleasure as
business, apparently. At any rate the American who proposes coming into
a private heritage of the past when he visits his ancestral country
finds himself constantly intruded upon by the modern natives, who seem
to think they have as good right to it as he. This is very trying when
he does not think them half so interesting as himself, or half so
intelligently appreciative. He may be the most dissident of dissenters,
the most outrageously evangelical of low-churchmen, but when he is
pushed by a clerical-looking family of English country folk, father,
mother, sister-in-law, and elderly and younger daughters, almost out of
hearing of the vergeress’s traditions of St. Peter’s Hospital, he cannot
help feeling himself debarred of most of the rights established by our
Revolution. It is perhaps a confusion of emotions; but it will be a
generous confusion if he observes, amidst his resentment, the listless
inattention of the young girl, dragged at the heels of her family, and
imaginably asking herself if _this_ is their notion of the promised
holiday, the splendid gayety of the long-looked-for visit to Bristol!
Before my own visit to that city my mind was much on a young Welsh girl
whose feet used to be light in its streets, more than a hundred years
ago, and who used in her garb of Quaker grandmother to speak of her
childhood days there. She had come an orphan from Glamorganshire, to the
care of an aunt and uncle at Bristol, and there she grew up, and one day
she met a young Welshman from Breconshire who had come on some affair of
his father’s woollen-mills to the busy town. She was walking in the
fields, and when they passed, and she looked back at him, she found he
was looking back at her; and perhaps if it were not for this surprising
coincidence, some other hand than mine might now be writing this page.
In her Bristol days she did not wear the white kerchief crossed at her
neck above the gown of Quaker drab, nor the cap hiding the gray hair,
but some youthful form of the demure dress in which one could better
fancy her tripping across the field and looking back, in the path where
she still pauses, in a dear and gentle transmutation of girlhood and
grandmotherhood.
It might have been over the very field where she walked that we drove
out to the suburb of Clifton, where Bristol mostly lives. It is the more
beautiful Allegheny City of a less unbeautiful Pittsburg, but otherwise
it bears the same relation to Bristol as the first of these American
towns bears to the last. Nobody dwells in Bristol who can dwell in
Clifton, and Clifton has not only the charm of pleasant houses and
gardens, with public parks and promenades, and schools and colleges, and
museums and galleries, as well as almost a superabundance of attractive
hotels, but it is in the midst of nature as grand as that of the Niagara
River below the falls. The Avon’s currents and tides flow between
cliffs, spanned by Brunel’s exquisite and awful suspension-bridge, that
rise thickly and wildly wooded on one side, and on the other, built over
to its stupendous verge with shapes of the stately and dignified
architecture, civic and domestic, which characterizes English towns. The
American invader draws a panting breath of astonishment in the presence
of scenery which eclipses his native landscape in savage grandeur as
much as in civilized loveliness, and meekly wonders, on his way through
that mighty gorge of the Avon, how he could have come to England with
the notion that she was soft and tame in her most spectacular moods. He
does not call upon the
[Illustration: GORGE OF THE AVON, WITH ST. VINCENT’S ROCKS]
hills to hide his shame, lest the cliffs that beetle dizzyingly above
him should only too complaisantly comply. But he promises himself, if he
gets back to Bath alive, to use the first available moment for taking a
reef in his national vanity where it has flapped widest. Of course it
will not do in Bath to wound the local susceptibilities by dwelling upon
the surviving attractions of Clifton as a watering-place, but he may
safely and modestly compare them with those of Saratoga.
VI
BY WAY OF SOUTHAMPTON TO LONDON
We left Bath on the afternoon of a day which remained behind us in doubt
whether it was sunny or rainy; but probably the night solved its doubt
in favor of rain. It was the next to the last day of March, and
thoughtful friends had warned us to be very careful not to travel during
the impending Bank holidays, which would be worse than usual (all Bank
holidays being bad for polite travellers), because they would also be
Easter holidays. We were very willing to heed this counsel, but for one
reason or another we were travelling pretty well all through those
Easter Bank holidays, and except for a little difficulty in finding
places in the train up from Southampton to London, we travelled without
the slightest molestation from the holiday-makers. The truth is that the
leisure classes in England are so coddled by the constitution and the
by-laws that they love to lament over the slightest menace of discomfort
or displeasure, and they go about with bated breath warning one another
of troubles that never come.
Special trains are run on all lines at Bank holiday times, and very
particularly special trains were advertised for those Easter Bank
holidays in the station at Bath, but as we were taking a train for
Southampton on the Saturday before the dread Monday which was to begin
them, we seemed to have it pretty much to ourselves. The Midland road
does not run second-class cars, and so you must go first or third, and
we being as yet too proud to go third, sought a first-class non-smoking
compartment. The most eligible car we could find was distinctly lettered
“Smoking,” but the porter said he could paste that out, and by this
simple device he changed it to non-smoking, and we took possession.
We were soon running through that English country which is always
pretty, and seems prettiest wherever you happen to be, and though we did
not and never can forget Bath, we could not help tricking our beams a
little, in response to the fields smiling through the sunny rain, or the
rainy sun. It was mostly meadowland, with the brown leafless hedges
dividing pasture from pasture, but by-and-by there began to be ploughed
fields, with more signs of habitation. Yet it was as lonely as it was
lovely, like all the English country, to which the cheerfulness of our
smaller holdings is wanting. What made it homelike, in spite of the
solitude, was the occurrence in greater and greater number of wooden
buildings. We conjectured stone villages somewhere out of sight, huddled
about their hoary churches, but largely the gray masonry of the West of
England had yielded to the gray weather-boarding of the more
southeasterly region, where at first only the barns and out-buildings
were of wood; but soon the dwellings themselves were frame-built.
Was it at otherwise immemorable Shapton we got tea, running into the
cleanly, friendly station from the slopes of the shallow valleys? It
must have been, for after that the sky cleared, and nature in a cooler
air was gayer, as only tea can make nature. They trundled a little cart
up to the side of the train, and gave us our cups and sandwiches,
bidding us leave the cups in the train, as they do all over England, to
be collected at some or any other station. After that we were in plain
sight of the towers and spires of Salisbury, the nearest we ever came,
in spite of much expectation and resolution, to the famous cathedral;
and then we were in the dear, open country again, with white birches,
like those of New England, growing on the railroad banks; and presently
again we were in sight of houses building, and houses of pink brick
already built, and then, almost without realizing it, we were in the
suburbs of Southampton, and driving in a four-wheeler up through the
almost American ugliness of the main business street, and out into a
residence quarter to the residential hotel commended to us.
It was really very much a private house, for it was mainly formed of a
stately old mansion, which with many modern additions, actual and
prospective, had been turned to the uses of genteel boarding. But it had
a mixed character, and was at moments everything you could ask a hotel
to be; if it failed of wine or spirits, which could not be sold on the
premises, these could be brought in from some neighboring bar. The
transients, as our summer hotels call them, were few, and nearly all the
inmates except ourselves were permanent boarders, in the scriptural and
New England proportion of seven women to one man. It was a heterogeneous
company of insular and colonial English, but always English, whether
from the immediate neighborhood, or Canada, or South Africa, or
Australia. At separate small tables in an older dining-room, cooled by
the ancestral grate, or in a newer one, warmed by steam-radiators just
put in, we were served abundant breakfasts of bacon and eggs and tea and
toast, and table d’hôte luncheons and dinners, with afternoon tea and
after-dinner coffee in the drawing-room. For all this, with rooms and
lights and service, we paid ten shillings a day, and I dare say the
permanents paid less. Bedroom fires were of course extra, but as they
gave out no perceptible heat, they ought not to be counted, though they
had a certain illuminating force, say a five candle-power, and rendered
the breath distinctly visible.