CHAPTER VII.

WINDSOR TO HAMPTON COURT.

Leaving Windsor--Eton, its History and its Worthies--The College

Buildings--Windsor Park--The Long Walk--The Albert Bridge--Datchet

and Falstaff--Old Windsor--"Perdita's" Grave--The Tapestry

Works--The "Bells of Ouseley"--Riverside Inns--The Loves of

Harry and Anne Boleyn--Magna Charter Island--Runnymede--The

Poet of Cooper's Hill--Fish at Bell Weir--A Neglected

Dainty--Egham and Staines--John Emery--Penton Hook--Laleham--Dr.

Arnold--Chertsey--The Lock and Bridge--Albert Smith and his

Brother--Chertsey Abbey--Black Cherry Fair--Cowley the Poet--A

Scene from "Oliver Twist"--St. Ann's Hill--Weybridge--Oaklands

and the Grotto--Shepperton Lock and Ferry--Halliford--Walton--The

Scold's Bridle--Sunbury--Hampton--Moulsey Hurst and its Sporting

Associations--Hampton Court Bridge.

The course of the beautiful river as it glides onward from Windsor

to Hampton might provoke many a quaint historical conceit, as other

rivers have done less aptly. We drift on the tide of Thames, as on

the tide of Time, away from the Norman to the Plantagenet, from

the Plantagenet to the Tudor; and it is the life of England that

we can scan as the waters flow past scenes which, through all the

mutations of the ages, through all the seasons' difference, year after

year, are ever freshly, strongly, characteristically English. From

the Conqueror's steep-throned stronghold; past the ait and meadow

associated deathlessly with the solemn declaration that "no freeman

shall be seized, or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any

way destroyed"--"nor condemned, nor committed, to prison excepting by

the legal judgment of his peers or by the laws of the land;" past more

than one memorial of the mild king whose piety and love of learning

founded Eton College; and still onward, far onward, along the fluvial

current of history, till we reach the stately and substantial record

of another and a later Henry, last of that royal name, and opposite in

all respects of character, temperament, and will to the weak and gentle

Plantagenet. From Windsor, then, and from Eton's distant spires; from

the playing-fields, the bathing-places, the Brocas, and Firework Eyot;

from the fisheries, too, which exist on the same spots they occupied

eight hundred years ago--for wherever a fishery or a mill is named in

Domesday Book, there it will generally be found, as of yore--we turn

reluctantly, and not until a lingering look has been cast back on the

old familiar scenes. Our way is on the river, or by its side, the

towing-path being a track which pedestrians may follow with pleasant

ease. But here and there the land may win us astray; and at the very

commencement of our jaunt there is more to interest us ashore than

afloat. Not that the river hereabout lessens in charm. On the contrary,

its winding beauty is almost at its height. But that very beauty half

depends on prospects which lead our thoughts inland; and inland we must

consent, therefore, to be led.

Eton is a well-worn theme--but can never be outworn! The Royal College

of the Blessed Virgin, whose assumption is depicted in the centre

of the collegiate seal, was founded in the year 1440, after Henry's

visit to Winchester, whence came Eton's first head-master, William of

Waynflete. "It was high time," says Fuller, "some school should be

founded, considering how low grammar-learning then ran in the land."

The original endowments were for "ten sad priests, four lay clerks,

six choristers, twenty-five poor grammar-scholars, and twenty-five

poor men to pray for the king." There are now on the foundation a

provost, vice-provost, six fellows, three conducts, seventy king's

scholars, ten clerks, and twelve choristers. Beside these, there are

above seven hundred scholars--Oppidans--who are not on the foundation.

One of the masters of Eton College is illustrious through all time in

which the English language is studied, as the writer of our earliest

comedy, or the earliest which has come down intact to modern days.

Not later than 1551, as critics and scholars are mostly agreed, did

Nicholas Udall write his "Ralph Roister-Doister," which, in plot and

dialogue, is immensely superior to John Still's "Gammer Gurton's

Needle," supposed to have been written a few years--perhaps as many

as fourteen--afterwards. The greatest of literary rarities in the

library of Eton College is a copy of Master Nicholas Udall's right

merry conceit, which is divided, in what would be considered as

modern orthodox form, into five acts; is constructed with comic art

of uncommon excellence; contains thirteen characters, some of them

powerfully and distinctly marked; and exhibits the manners of the

middle order of people at that day, the scene being laid in London. All

that we can reasonably guess concerning Nicholas Udall as a teacher

of youth is, that he was one to help in setting that early example

of severity which was long afterwards followed as a sacred tradition

of public-school custom and discipline. Perhaps he had, according to

custom of his time, a whipping-boy, or puerile scapegoat, to take on

his back the sins of happier pupils. But it is more likely that Master

Udall swished without favour all round. Thomas Tusser, who wrote the

didactic poem, "Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandrie," was one of

Udall's scholars, and gives hard report of him as a most exacting

master. It is somewhat remarkable that the first two writers of comic

drama in the language should both have been schoolmasters. John Still,

author of the piece of low rustic humour before mentioned, of which

the dramatic point is that of the needle itself, found by Gammer

Gurton's man, Hodge, in a manner equally startling and climacteric, was

master of St. John's and Trinity Colleges, Cambridge, and afterwards

Chancellor of the University, and Bishop of Bath and Wells. One of the

best things in "Gammer Gurton's Needle" is a song, the well-known--

"I cannot eat but little meat."

Professor Craik was inclined to opinion that "Ralph Roister-Doister"

was the later of the two "farcical comedies," as they would now be

called.

Men of the world, active in social affairs, as well as clerkly and

diligent in the conduct of the school, were some of the earlier

provosts and masters. Roger Lupton, whose rebus, the uncouth syllable,

LUP, surmounting a tun, is carved over the door of the little chantry

which contains his tomb, built the great tower and gateway, when he

was provost in Henry VII.'s time and later. Sir Thomas Smith was a

Secretary of State and a well-known diplomatist in the reigns of

Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth. Sir Henry Wotton was

conspicuous both as a writer and a statesman, having been an ambassador

of James I.; nor is it necessary to say that as an angler he was

the companion of Izaak Walton, by whom he was beloved and praised,

notably as an "undervaluer of money." Francis Rouse, Speaker of the

Barebones Parliament, saved Eton from confiscation, and founded three

scholarships. All these men might have been famed in other paths than

those of learning had they never seen the college they influenced and

benefited. Other illustrious provosts and head-masters, though not so

versatile as to have influenced worldly affairs and the state of the

nation in any direct way, or to have written freely and jovially for

the "inglorious stage," have left a mark on their time which is more

than merely scholastic. Such were Sir Henry Savile, reader to Queen

Elizabeth, and one of the greatest scholars of her learned reign;

Thomas Murray, tutor and secretary to Prince Charles; Dr. Steward,

clerk of the closet to that prince after his accession to the throne;

Nicholas Monk, brother of the Duke of Albemarle, and sometime Bishop of

Hereford; Richard Allestree, Canon of Christchurch, who built the Upper

School; and the late Dr. Hawtrey, famed for his elegant scholarship

as well as for his success as head-master. The "ever memorable" John

Hales (whose name, brilliant at one time as that of a keen theological

controversialist, might in this age be forgotten but for Milton's

well-known sonnet), Bishop Pearson, Bishop Fleetwood, Earl Camden,

Dean Stanhope, Sir Robert Walpole, Sir William Draper, and Archbishop

Longley were all, as boys, on the foundation of Eton College; and

other celebrities educated there--some of their names carved on the

old wainscoting--were Edmund Waller, Harley, Earl of Oxford, Lord

Bolingbroke, the great Earl of Chatham, Lord Lyttelton, Thomas Gray,

Horace Walpole, Wyndham, Fox, Canning, Henry Fielding, Admiral Lord

Howe, the Marquis Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, and Henry Hallam.

[Illustration: ETON, FROM THE PLAYING-FIELDS.]

In the notes to Collier's map of Windsor, published in 1742, an

etymology is assigned to Eton which is not clearly demonstrated, if,

indeed, it be demonstrable. "Eton," we read, "is so called from its low

situation among the waters; for Eton is the same as Watertown, but,

as they are running waters, and it is a gravelly soil, it is observed

that no place is more healthy than this." Few buildings, indeed, are

more happily situated than this venerable pile of old red-brown brick

and Caen stone, marked by the characteristic architecture of three

centuries. The old part of the college, begun in 1441 and finished

in 1523, consists of two quadrangles, in one of which are the chapel

and school, with the dormitories of the foundation-scholars, while

the other contains the library, provost's house, and lodgings of

the fellows. It is, of course, the chapel--a fine example of early

Perpendicular, resembling in outline King's College Chapel, at

Cambridge--that gives dignity and distinction to all pictures of the

place, from whichsoever point you take your view. The spires of this

beautiful structure are those which "crown the watery glade," and are

conspicuous above the quaint turrets of the surrounding buildings

seen from afar. Many are the views of Eton which are commended, each

as being the best, by different persons. The curving railway-run from

Slough gives a continuous succession of changes not to be despised;

but undoubtedly the riverside is best. Gray's distant prospect was

from the north terrace of Windsor Castle. Mr. David Law chose Romney

Island for his standpoint when he made the sketch for one of his finest

etchings. But in truth the buildings group well everywhere, as they are

seen from a distance; the crowning glory being always the pinnacled

chapel. It is scarcely to be doubted that Henry VI., who laid the first

stone lovingly, and with meek emulation of the noble foundations of

William of Wykeham, at Winchester and Oxford, in his mind intended

that the structure, perfect as it now appears, should form only the

choir of a magnificent collegiate church. To the beautiful building,

as we see it, he would have added a nave and aisles, grandly vaulted,

as the strength of the buttresses sufficiently indicates the chapel

itself was meant to be. But the troublous years that closed his reign

prevented the fulfilment of those designs; and it was left for the

present century to bring the interior more worthily into accord with

so fair an outside. Bird's bronze statue of the royal founder, erected

by Provost Godolphin, in 1719, stands in the centre of one of the

quadrangles. There is a look of cheerful gravity in the brick fronts of

the college buildings. The elaborate quaintness of the chimneys, the

sedate solidity, whether of plainness or of ornament, give a pleasant

character to these quadrangles, in the larger of which, containing the

bronze statue of Henry VI., is as picturesque a clock-tower as any

architect in soul might wish to see. Here, on the opposite side, the

hand of Sir Christopher Wren is denoted in the fine arcade supporting

the Upper School. The second and smaller quadrangle, called the Green

Yard, is surrounded by a cloister, and in it is the entrance to the

Hall, a curious apartment, with a daïs, and with three fireplaces,

which were long panelled in and lost to memory.

But we must not lose ourselves too long within the College and its

precincts, lest the attractions of the library, the provost's lodgings,

the election-hall, and the new buildings erected in the Tudor style,

make us oblivious to our riverside ramble. It is on the stream itself,

and on well-known spots along its banks, that Eton manifests her

vigorous training in various traditionary ways. The river is constantly

covered with boats, and its proximity to the College has given Etonians

that proficiency in swimming and rowing of which they are justly

proud, and which they maintain by practice and prize-giving. Chief

among the bathing-places of note is Athens, with its Acropolis, famed

for "headers." On the Fourth of June, now the Speech Day, loyally

instituted in celebration of the birthday of King George III., a

procession of boats from the Brocas to Surley Hall is the event of the

afternoon; and the evening closes with a display of fireworks. There

are many old Etonians whose memory goes back to the Montem, abolished

forty years ago. It was a triennial celebration, held on Whit Tuesday,

and has been the subject of many a picturesque description, not the

least vivid and truthful of which was a dramatic sketch by Maria

Edgeworth, intended, like other of her charming essays and tales, such,

for example, as "Barring-Out," for the delectation of youth. Eton

Montem partook somewhat too strongly of the old saturnalian character

for modern tastes; and it was at the instance of a head-master that

the old custom was discontinued, not without aid from Government and

opposition from young and old Etonians. The last Montem, in 1846,

was conducted with such maimed rites as to be a mere shadow of olden

heartiness and gaiety; but in its jolliest days, which were in the

reign of "Farmer George," there was no doubt something really salient

in the mock-ceremony on Salt Hill. It was "for the honour of the

college" that the boys, handsomely and expensively dressed in various

fancy costumes, levied contributions on all and sundry passengers along

the Bath Road, past the mound, believed to be an ancient tumulus, which

bore the name already mentioned. The money called Salt was gathered for

the captain or senior boy to defray his expenses at Cambridge, whither

he was going as king's scholar. When Henry VI. resolved on founding

a college at Eton, he incorporated two small colleges or hostels at

Cambridge, one of which he had instituted two years before. Thus

originated King's College, to which, as Lambarde says, "Eton sendeth

forth her ripest fruit." The scholars are required by the statute to be

"indigentes," but of course this provision has long been a dead letter.

To take farewell of the College of Eton is usually to take farewell

of the town, in which, as guide-books say, there is little interest;

though, forsooth, interest may be wanting where we may find pleasure

of the less exciting kind, not soon to die away. At least, there is in

Eton unaffected substantiality of old-fashioned building, taking the

form of its own age, and not stealing outward conceits from any other.

Some of the houses of professional persons and private inhabitants,

tutors and others, opposite the College, with its chestnut-trees, are

staid, and even venerable. As Dickens said of the old unspoilt pier

at Broadstairs, they have "no pretensions to architecture," and are

"immensely picturesque in consequence." Hereabout is the well-stored

shop of the librarian and publisher, never lacking custom in term-time.

Eton College has its literary "organ," and lives in hope of a Canning

to immortalise pages which meanwhile are not deficient in sense and

style, as how, indeed, should they be? In this publication are duly

chronicled events which now are scarcely eventful, but which will

make history some of these days. The doings in playground and on

river, at football and cricket, rowing, swimming, and diving, are

here registered, to the satisfaction of "wet bobs" and "dry bobs,"

as the boys whose varying athletic tastes lead them in different

directions are called. There is no house of public entertainment in

Eton which is distinguished by the modernised term, hotel; but there

are some decent inns, the most comfortable of which is reported to be

the "Christopher." It is a direct continuation of Eton into Windsor

across the bridge connecting the Berkshire with the Buckinghamshire

town, the town being to all intents and purposes one. Windsor Great

Park--thus designated in distinction from the Home Park of 500 acres,

which adjoins the Castle, and is the enclosure which contained Herne's

Oak--should now be seen. It is separated from the castle precincts by

the high road, and by part of Windsor. Apportioned here and there to

farms, it still comprises a clear area little short of 2,000 acres,

forest-like in much of its scenery, and abounding in walks and drives,

from which a herd of deer is a frequent addition to the regal beauty

of the prospect. When, for purpose of ridicule and burlesque, the

title Duke of Shoreditch finds its way into modern literature, it may

be called to mind that the first man so dubbed was a Londoner named

Barlow, who, at one of the great archery meetings held by Henry VIII.

so excelled all the Buckinghamshire yeoman, that his Majesty forthwith

gave him, half in pique, half in pleasantry, the mock style and honour.

For three miles the Great Park is traversed by the elm-bordered avenue

called the Long Walk, at the far end of which, set up high on an

eminence known as Snow Hill, stands a colossal equestrian statue in

lead, by Westmacott, of George III., in classic costume.

The fine perspective, with its countless noble trees, was planned

by Charles II., and finished under William III. Only by accident,

fortunate or unfortunate we hesitate to say, was it that the quaintly

beautiful gate, built at Whitehall by Holbein, "with bricks of two

colours, glazed, and disposed in a tesselated fashion,"[6] and taken

down in 1759, did not take the place now occupied by the leaden statue

of George III. The materials of the Tudor gate, carefully preserved,

were brought hither by the Duke of Cumberland, with an intention which

was frustrated by his mortal sickness. It was as well, after all,

that a civic gate was not set up in a sylvan park, however stately.

Transplanted monuments seldom, if ever, find congenial surroundings.

The Duke of Devonshire, in quite recent years, declined the offer of

the fine water-gate of York House, built for Duke Steenie by Inigo

Jones; and there it stands to this day, elbowed into obscurity by

the Thames Embankment. No Cavendish was ever yet so wanting in a

sense of the fitness of things as not to feel that a river edifice,

designed as a point of landing and embarking, would be out of place

as a portal of a mansion in Piccadilly. Wherever Temple Bar may be

erected, it will be an incongruity and an anachronism, serving only to

turn men's minds fretfully to the incongruous pile of maimed heraldry,

portrait-sculpture, allegorical confusion, and vulgar commonplace,

in stone and bronze, built up by Mr. Jones--Horace, not Inigo--in

the middle of the road over against the Law Courts. Not as completed

according to its original plan does the Long Walk in Windsor Great

Park now appear. It was a walk, and nothing more, for Charles II.

was a pedestrian. And as a walk it remained till 1710, at which time

the carriage-road down the avenue was constructed, a new footpath

having meanwhile been made for Queen Anne, which to this day retains

its old title, the Queen's Walk. Royal residences and olden sites,

and monuments relating to royalty, distinguish Windsor Park and its

neighbourhood.

[Illustration: THE ALBERT BRIDGE.]

Our way now lies past Frogmore, and over the river again, by the

Albert Bridge, to Southley, where we set our faces up-stream, going

back a little on our course to visit Datchet. Another iron bridge,

higher up--named the Victoria Bridge--would have taken us thither more

directly; though we must then have missed the park and its scenic

associations. But if it were only to see the Datchet of Shakespeare,

the Datchet lane, and Datchet mead by which Ford's men carried Falstaff

to the river brink in the buck-basket, and there canted him into the

water with the foul linen, we could as well have remained on the

Berkshire shore. There might, indeed, have been a wooden bridge between

Windsor and Datchet in Elizabethan days; but it is most likely that

the name of Datchet, bridge or no bridge, applied to spots on both

sides the river, and that Datchet Mead was a piece of low land between

Windsor Home Park and the river. As such, it is mentioned by Mrs. S.

C. Hall, who agrees with other writers in supposing that Falstaff and

the foul linen were tilted, according to Mistress Ford's injunctions,

into the muddy ditch among the whitsters, close to Thames side. But

Falstaff, both in his soliloquy at the "Garter" Inn, and in the account

of the affair to "Master Brook," distinctly says he was thrown into

Thames, the shelving shore of which river saved him from drowning. The

real Datchet on the Buckinghamshire side could not have been intended

by Shakespeare, unless, by a poetical licence, he brought Datchet

over to Windsor. The topographers and the Shakespearean annotators

alike have been content to slur this point, leaving their readers

to reconcile the doubts concerning which all modern authorities, or

such as ought to be authorities, are silent. The nearest elucidation

is yet afar off. We find it in a note by Malone on Dennis, who had

objected to the probability of the circumstance of Falstaff's having

been carried to Datchet Mead, "which," says Dennis, "is half a mile

from Windsor." This would refer, certainly, to a mead on the Berkshire

side, and not in the parish of Datchet, in a county separated by the

Thames. Mrs. Hall was doubtless right in placing Datchet Mead between

the towing-path and Windsor Little Park; but it is a pity she was not

more explicit. The muddy ditch named by Mistress Ford in the play was

probably that which, being covered over in Queen Anne's time, was used

as a drain, and came to be called Hog Hole. It was destroyed when the

embankment was raised to form a foundation for the Windsor side of

Victoria Bridge. Both from this bridge and from its fellow, lower down,

good views are obtained of Windsor Castle. At Datchet, no longer so

pretty and picturesque as it was half a century ago, is an old church

of Early English and Decorated styles, in which Queen Elizabeth's

printer, Christopher Barber, is buried; as also Lady Katherine

Berkeley, daughter of Lord Mountjoy. Above Datchet, Izaak Walton used

to fish, sometimes with his friend, Sir Henry Wotton, the provost of

Eton before mentioned.

[Illustration: OLD WINDSOR LOCK.]

Albert Bridge, with its long, flattened, Tudor arch, spanning the river

at one bound, bears a miniature resemblance to the design of the bridge

at Westminster, and is light and elegant, though of a modern taste,

which lacks the picturesqueness and simplicity of the old objects on

the river. The span, however, adds safety to the navigation, especially

in these times of steam-launches, the most unpopular and best-hated

craft on the Thames. Like other ills, we have come to tolerate them

for a certain one-sided convenience, esteemed by the selfish, the

lazy, and the fast. All pleasant quiet on the river, as, indeed, on

the shore, is a thing of long ago. Idlesse, dreamy solitude, _could_

only be enjoyed by the few, and _can_ never be enjoyed by them. In

coupling, or rather in identifying the fast and the lazy, we may, by

hasty thinkers, be suspected of a contradiction. There is none in what

we have said. The lazy are often restless in their inert desire to

be conveyed swiftly from place to place; for they have no energy for

idling. To rush, screaming on, with their hands in their pockets, and

no motion of their own, is the height of bliss to such people, and

this is the enjoyment a steam-launch affords. Yet the unpopular vessel

has a popularity of its own. Riverside folk in the mass, from the Duke

of Westminster to the poorest toiler who profits by the Early-closing

Movement and the Bank-holidays, all join in decrying the rowdy

intruder--the "'Arry" of river craft. But "'Arry" is all-pervading, and

multiplies himself with astonishing exuberance and rapidity. There is

more of him every day; and there are more and more steam-launches, for

all the outcry against them.

Old Windsor, whatever may have been the state to which it attained

when young or middle-aged, is now only a village, and not, so far as

appearances go, a very old one. Like the schoolboy's knife, which had

first a new blade, then a new spring, then another new blade, and then

a new handle, it has been transformed by successive renewings. It is

by a new road from New Windsor that this Old Windsor, which is much

the newer of the two, is reached. We pass the Prince Consort's model

farm to get at the one bit of antiquity. This is the church. It is very

picturesque, and derives a certain venerable suggestiveness from the

yews and other old trees surrounding it. But it is not of remarkably

early date; and restorations have robbed it of more age than it could

well afford to lose. Trees are the best friends that Old Windsor can

boast. They keep it warm and green and comely. The by-road leading to

the church is not often trodden, except by those who really deserve

the name of church-goers. It is not a show-place; that is one thing in

its favour. It has a green and tranquil churchyard; that is another.

The name best known to people who have read the modern history of

Old Windsor Church is a whispered name; the tomb which bears it is a

neglected tomb; few go out of their way to pace that little cemetery;

fewer still find the grave of Mary Robinson. Hush! it is a name that

the kind will be kindest to forget. No loving care kept the tomb from

being overgrown with nettles for fifty years; and it is too late

now, even were it seemly, to vex the ghost of poor "Perdita." That

was the lady's romantic designation. She had played the character in

Shakespeare's _Winter's Tale_. There was a Prince Florizel who wore a

chestnut wig, a frogged and fur-collared frock-coat, tight breeches,

and silk stockings, and cut a very elegant figure on the throne of

England--"George the Magnificent," he is called by Mr. Thackeray. He

invented a new shoe-buckle. It was five inches broad, covering almost

the whole instep, and reaching down to the ground on either side of the

foot. "A sweet invention!" exclaims the satirist. And a pretty Prince

Florizel, truly, whose head was so full of such matters as these, and

whose heart was so choked with egregious vanity that, having "kissed

and fondled poor Perdita on Monday, he met her on Tuesday and did not

know her." She sleeps, now, peacefully in the tree-shaded churchyard

of Old Windsor--she and her daughter, Maria Elizabeth Robinson, both

of literary fame, the inscriptions tell. What did they write? Poetry,

was it? There is a tombstone also here to the memory of a shepherd,

named Thomas Pope, who died half a century ago, aged ninety-six, having

been "cheerfully laborious to an advanced age." On the same stone is

recorded the death of "Phoebe, wife of the above," aged ninety years.

Their fame was not literary, nor their work of the poetical kind. Their

bodies, nevertheless, are buried in peace, and their names, merged, it

may be, in "the long pedigree of toil," live for evermore.

But though Old Windsor is reduced to an insignificant suburb of New

Windsor, it was the royal dwelling-place when all was forest around,

and when the solitary chalk hill, standing up from a tree-covered clay

tract on the riverside, was uncrowned by feudal masonry. That was

before the Norman took hold upon England. At the Conquest, Old Windsor

was a manor belonging to the Saxon kings, who are conjectured to have

had a palace here from a very early period. We may fancy theirs to

have been a less splendid court than that of "George the Magnificent."

When Edward the Confessor--who afterwards presented the manor to his

newly-founded monastery of Westminster--ruled England from this spot, a

few serfs and swineherds dwelt sparsely in huts among the thick woods.

The site of the Saxon palace can only be guessed; but antiquaries have

surmised that an old farmhouse which stood west of the church, and

near the river, surrounded by a moat, probably marked the place. When

the Conqueror, having obtained the land from the monastery, by fair

bargain, as appears, built a fortress on the eminence which we now

call Castle Hill, the palace at Old Windsor remained a palace. It is

probable that the first Norman castle on the neighbouring mound was

simply a defensive work, with no convenient residence, till Henry I.

completed additional buildings. Thenceforth Windsor Castle was Windsor

Castle indeed; and little is heard in history of Old Windsor. The manor

passed from hand to hand, each tenant for a time holding from the king

by service. One man, with lance and dart, for the royal army, was

all required. Since the fourteenth century, the holding has been on

lease from the Crown. Tapestry works, which of old were maintained at

Windsor, and fell into disuse, have in late years been revived. Looms

were set up in buildings specially adapted to the industry, which was

initiated by foreign workmen, the art of tapestry-weaving in England

having quite died out. One of the artists engaged in supplying designs

was the late Mr. E. M. Ward, R.A., and the application of the modern

tapestries to household decoration was mainly encouraged by Messrs.

Gillow and Company, who have employed these hangings with great effect

in the royal pavilion, each succeeding year, at the South Kensington

exhibitions. Keen interest in the revival of this artistic and

dignified class of manufacture was taken by the late Duke of Albany,

under whose patronage an exhibition in furtherance of the scheme was

held in Windsor Town Hall. An early and munificent encourager of the

work was Mr. Christopher Sykes, M.P., whose town mansion was richly

adorned with the Windsor tapestries.

No traveller bids farewell to Old Windsor without paying his respects

to one of the best of the riverside taverns, the time-honoured "Bells

of Ouseley." Perfectly free, at present, from modern revivalism, and

from all manner of conscious style, is this genuine old inn, separated

by the high road from the river bank. Its quaint bow-windows, one on

either side of a porch entered by way of a steep flight of steps--the

wholesome dread of unsteady topers--are just of the period and fashion

to captivate an artist in search of the picturesque; nor can we

look on this unspoilt hostelry without thinking of Mr. Leslie, Mr.

Boughton, or Mr. Tissot. In France, a village cabaret or auberge,

humbler than this, would yet be far more advanced in the art of public

entertainment. "They cook very well at these places," is a remark you

frequently hear in Normandy, Picardy, or Champagne, from the lips of

culinary judges, versed in all the intricacies of Parisian gastronomy;

and if the unpretending inn be near a trout-stream, be sure you may

have a dish fit for a prince, and within the means of a woodcutter.

Were some enterprising cook to lease a cosy tavern like the "Bells of

Ouseley," and introduce a really high-class _cuisine_ on a choice but

simple scale, the place would be talked about in a month and spoiled

in a year, at the end of which time the proprietor might be either

a rich man or a bankrupt. Let us take our pretty, rustic riverside

resort, for rest and refreshment, as we find it. Fine cookery would

drive out honest companions whom old Izaak--who had a face like an

elderly pike, but was a right good fellow for all that--would have

drawn into profitable talk; for at the "Bells of Ouseley" you meet

anglers and bargemen from whom much is to be learnt, if you go the

right way to get hold of them. On the left as you enter is the tap,

often crowded; on the right a bar-parlour, in which the company is

more select. Of old the "Bells" had the reputation of being a house of

call for "minions of the moon," as Falstaff called them, or "knights

of the road," to choose a later phrase, such as the authors of "Paul

Clifford" and "Rookwood" would have applied to the same order of

gentry. But the landlord does not, in these days, give stall and

fodder to nags of suspicious character, like bonny Black Bess. The

old stone stable is oftener occupied by steeds that consume neither

oats nor hay; and the highwaymen are not such as wear crape over their

faces, or carry pistols like demi-culverins, or dance minuets with

ladies they have plundered, but are in fact only members of a bicycle

club. Under that old roof with its odd chimneys, standing against a

background of greenery, there are jolly ghosts, you may be sure; for

the grimmer goblins that have haunted the "Bells" in time when gibbets

were plentiful, and when every one of these evil trees bore its rotting

fruit, that swung and creaked in the night-wind, were laid long ago in

a red sea of steaming punch, by boon companions of those who, as the

phrase was, "suffered." The fishing at the "Bells" is good. Capital

chub and dace are taken with the fly, and gudgeon are plentiful as

blackberries.

[Illustration: THE "BELLS OF OUSELEY."]

[Illustration: MAGNA CHARTA ISLAND.]

On the Bucks shore, above the outfall of the little River Colne, which

flows into the broader Thames, below Bell Weir Lock, is Wraysbury,

a name which has been conveniently adapted to local phonetics from

"Wyrardisbury." Over the Colne there is a suspension-bridge; and the

river is crossed by the South-Western Railway, which has a station

here. Wraysbury Church is distinguishable under its restorations,

which appear to have followed in good faith the original design, as

a fair example of Early English architecture. It preserves one of

those rarities of monumental design of which so largely outnumbering

a proportion of village churches have been robbed. This is the brass

which represents, in the habit of an Eton scholar at the beginning

of the sixteenth century, John Stonor, who is not the only recorded

association of this place with the College of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

There is Ankerwyke House, a modern mansion, embowered in trees, by

the riverside. It occupies the site of a Benedictine priory, which,

in its later days of dissolution, was given as a residence, by Edward

VI., to a provost of Eton, Sir Thomas Smith. This priory, for nuns

of the above-named order, was founded in the reign of Henry II., by

Sir Gilbert Montfichet. Of the old religious buildings hardly a trace

remains. Ankerwyke House is associated by tradition with the courtship

of Anne Boleyn by Henry VIII., who used, it is said, to meet her under

a yew-tree, which has since grown to the goodly girth of twenty-eight

feet. Great trees of this kind have an exceedingly venerable look,

but as a matter of fact their age seldom comes near comparison with

that of the oak; and a yew-tree pretending to the age of three hundred

and fifty years and more may be looked upon with doubt, at least as

reasonable as the scepticism of a Thom or a Cornewall Lewis, directed

to the subject of human longevity. Wraysbury is rather a pretty

village than otherwise, and we leave it with a wish that it may be

spared any loss of its present prettiness for many years to come.

An unspoiled path leads to the ferry, by which Magna Charta Island

is reached, the lower of two islets in midstream. Topography is at

loggerheads as to whether, the barons holding the island, this was

the place of meeting between them and King John, or the field named

Runnymede was the spot on which the grant of English freedom was

signed. Anglo-Saxon authorities derive the name from Rûn, and say that

Runnymede means Council Meadow. So that the island and the field on the

Surrey shore--for we stepped across the boundary of Berks when we bade

farewell to Old Windsor--hold the great historical honour in dispute.

We should certainly incline to a decision in favour of the island. It

was on the plain level field, such as we now see it, unbroken by hedge

or wall, house or barn, that Edward the Confessor no doubt occasionally

held his "witan," during his residence at Old Windsor. The Norman

barons would have been likely to choose the island, both on account of

its association with those very rights they were met to assert, and

because it was at a convenient distance from Windsor, sufficiently

near for the king, but far enough to prevent any treacherous surprise

by his forces. It is, indeed, asserted by early historians that the

island opposite the meadow was chosen by the barons, the king having

proposed Windsor as the place of meeting. Local tradition, which may be

taken for what it is worth, accords with written history. The Charter

bears date June 15, 1215; and in that very year John had taken refuge

in Windsor Castle, as a place of security against the growing power

of the barons. On Magna Charta Island a Gothic cottage has been built

by one of the Harcourts, lords of the manor, as an altar-house for a

large rough stone, which bears an inscription setting forth that King

John signed Magna Charta on that island. Tradition or fancy goes a step

farther, and represents the stone to have been the royal writing-desk.

From Runnymede the slopes of Cooper's Hill rise, on which Sir John

Denham conferred celebrity, if, indeed, Cooper's Hill did not the

rather confer celebrity on him. It is certain that his poem, which

disputes the palm of descriptive verse with Ben Jonson's lines on

Penshurst, is far better known than anything else he ever wrote. No one

thinks of naming Denham without quoting those four lines which Dryden

and Pope have lauded, and which remain to the taste of a changed epoch

"the exact standard of good writing." Many critics, so to speak, have

taken off their hats to the quotation, and have printed it usually in

admiring italics. Addressing Thames, the poet says:--

"O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream

My great example, as it is my theme!

Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;

Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full."

Reflective power, almost equal to Wordsworth's, characterised the

poetry of Denham; but he can hardly be compared to the modern poet in

the quality of description. If he has drawn a pretty good likeness of

the river, which does, however, occasionally overflow, and at other

times is by no means full, surely the hill is unrecognisable in such

portraiture as this:--

"But his proud head the airy mountain hides

Among the clouds; his shoulders and his sides

A shady mantle clothes; his curled brows

Frown on the gentle stream, which calmly flows,

While winds and storms his lofty forehead beat,

The common fate of all that's high or great.

Low at his foot a spacious plain is placed,

Between the mountain and the stream embraced,

Which shade and shelter from the hill derives,

While the kind river wealth and beauty gives."

Over Denham's gorgeous clouds of fancy, clothing the sides of this

Thamesian mountain, some pretty villas, with lawns and gardens, are

dotted among the trees, with which Cooper's Hill is beautifully

planted. Its gentle slopes, green and gradual, scarcely attain

steepness at any point; and the wild hyperbole which makes the airy

mountain hide his proud head in the clouds is absurdly misleading. The

view from its summit is wide and fair; and the silver windings of the

river towards Windsor Castle, which stands up in its pride of strength,

are finely shown on the face of the landscape; and if Denham lost

himself in picturing a hill, he is at home again in his representation

of a plain. Runnymede, as fair a pasture as it was seven hundred years

ago, is still unbroken, still sheltered by the hill and enriched by the

river. An army might assemble there, as in the feudal days of old.

[Illustration: RUNNYMEDE.]

Bell Weir, and the Picnic, as the island a little above Runnymede is

called, are favourite resorts of holiday-makers, anglers among others;

and no more delightful part of the river for rest and recreation, as

well as for sport, can be found than in the beautiful reaches which

succeed one another as the stream winds, now this way, now that,

between banks that never lose their charm of interest and variety.

On the Picnic, however, picnics are ceasing or have ceased. Liberty,

so cheerfully accorded, has, with too many picnic-parties, been

turned to licence, and permission to use the island for such kind of

pleasure-making had at last to be stopped. If the bold Briton can be

brought to see the gracelessness of accepting a grace, and then abusing

it, perhaps there may be a renewal, in time, of the concession. Close

to the weir, on the Surrey side of the river, is an excellent inn,

aptly, though it may be tritely, called the "Angler's Rest." Barbel,

roach, club, and gudgeon are plentiful round the Bell Weir; and trout

are often taken. Thames gudgeon run somewhat small, and anglers who

do not combine culinary taste and skill with their proficiency in

the craft are apt to regard the little fish as no more than a good

sort of live-bait. And this, indeed, he is, especially if you are

pike-fishing. Arthur Smith, the amiable brother of Albert, who thought

a pike, stuffed and baked, very good eating, knew the partiality of

this voracious fish for gudgeon. Indeed, Master Jack, who is both a

_gourmand_ and a _gourmet_--the characters being oftener united than

is commonly supposed--will pass by any other prey to get at the silver

morsel, which has been called by some human epicures the freshwater

smelt. So, by-the-by, will a perch, the only fish that can live with

pike on terms of armed neutrality or amicable defiance. Freshwater

smelt, indeed! Why, the despised gudgeon, properly cleansed and

treated with salt, is, when freshly caught and delicately fried, the

smelt's decided superior; and it is perfectly surprising that the

former is not more in request--is never asked for, in fact--at London

restaurants. Yet, in Paris, at Bignon's, Champeaux', the Café Anglais,

the Café de la Paix, the Maison Doré, or at the Cascade in the Bois de

Boulogne, or at the Tête Noir at St. Cloud, no judicious diner misses

_goujon_, when that fish is to be had, as it generally is. Why must

we wait till we go abroad before we think of asking for gudgeon? Why

should we pooh-pooh the dainty little fellow? Is it because it is so

easy to catch him that his very name has passed into a proverb? Depend

upon it, in spite of the ridicule which follows gudgeon-fishing as the

facile entertainment of "a young angler," we make a great mistake,

and lose many a dainty dish, in this scornful, or at least jocular,

disregard of so sweet and delicate a fish.

[Illustration: WINDSOR TO HAMPTON COURT.]

Gudgeons swim in shoals, are always greedy biters, and, in fact, hook

themselves with so charming and ready a will, that ladies and boys

have no greater trouble than pulling them out of the water as soon

as the hook, baited with a red worm, is dropped into it. No other

labour, and no skill or activity beyond, is needed. The hook must be

small, and the worm must be small also; and the gravelly bottom should

be raked, to stir up the aquatic insects and larvæ, and so to summon

the confiding fish together. Angling and rowing are not the only

pursuits on the river or by its banks. The student of natural history

and the landscape-painter, by which, in these days, is mostly meant

the same, may botanise to their hearts' content; and, if they care

more for popular and poetic than for scientific botany, may be glad

to find there are still such beings as country folk, and still such

names for flowering plants as codlings-and-cream, which the vulgar

call _Epilobium hirsutum_. Call it what you will, this same plant,

which is in truth the large-flowered willow-herb, and has a wholesome,

but not very distinct or pungent odour, supposed to resemble the

scent of apples with cream, as above named, is liked by cattle, and

was at one time recommended for cultivation as fodder in wet places

where other useful plants will not grow. The true forget-me-not--the

_Vergiss-mein-nicht_ of the German tale--grows in extraordinary

luxuriance and beauty in these fresh grassy places. An amphibious

little weed, with red-shaded green leaves floating on the water, and

with pink spike-blossoms, called the persicaria, is beautiful and

harmless when dancing on the rippled recesses of the river, but a bane

to farming when it takes to a life on shore. We are close to Egham now,

and may either put up at the "Angler's Rest" or enter the town and seek

bed and board at the "Catherine Wheel."

Egham is a small town surrounded by some very pretty country, which,

having been, bit by bit, blemished by taste, has received the final

blow from the conspicuous benevolence of a millionaire. This gentleman

has built a gorgeous palace, nay, two gorgeous palaces, for imbeciles

of the superior class. The buildings, taken together, may be about

as big as Windsor Castle, and they are as visibly prominent in the

landscape, though not precisely with the same effect. A white granite

bridge, designed by Rennie, and opened in 1832, by William IV. and

Queen Adelaide, connects Egham with Staines, and in these iron times

is a positive relief to the eye afflicted by such viaducts, railway

and other, as are rapidly spoiling the Thames. Altogether there is a

comfortable modern look about both places, their comeliness, such as

it is, being entirely due to natural surroundings. Egham is mainly one

long street. The church is a plain structure of the negative style

of 1820, the tower being a landmark seen from far. There is likewise

a chapel of ease; and there are places of worship for different

denominations. What more of Egham? Strode's almshouses are in its

High Street, and a cottage hospital is healthily placed on Egham

Hill. The Elizabethan house of Great Fosters is in the neighbourhood.

Egham has an annual race-meeting, the course being no other than

Runnymede. Staines, new and manufactural as it now appears for the most

part--the "linoleum" works having largely contributed to its industrial

aspect--is as old as any place in true English history. Ancient records

give the name as Stanes. Modernised though it be, Staines is by no

means bereft of all antiquity. The church is venerable; and near it is

Winicroft House, a Tudor building which some of the good folk, innocent

of architecture and chronology, soberly assign to the reign of King

John, who sure enough had a palace at Staines, somewhere or other, and

not impossibly on this particular site. One of the earliest bridges in

England, preceding the Roman, as may be inferred from the Itinerary

of Antoninus, crossed the river here. When the Roman road to the west

was made, and a military station formed at Staines, it is probable

that a stronger bridge was built; and, as most of the Roman bridges

in England seem to have been of wood, supported by stone piers, the

guess that Staines, or more properly Stanes, took its name from those

relics of Roman occupancy, is perhaps pardonable. Just above the town,

at the mouth of one of the entrances of the Colne into the Thames,

where an ait is formed, stands a monument worth careful attention.

It is a square stone shaft on a pedestal, which again is raised on a

base formed of three gradations. This is the ancient London stone, or

boundary stone, as it is alternatively called, for it has served during

many ages to mark the beginning of Middlesex out of Buckinghamshire,

and the termination of the city's jurisdiction over the waters of

Thames.

[Illustration: LONDON STONE.]

The Conservancy of the river, by long prescription, confirmed by

various Charters and Acts of Parliament, was vested in the Lord Mayor

and Corporation. Apart from the courts, which were held by the Lord

Mayor in person, and with much state, most of the administrative

duties have long been performed by a committee of the Corporation,

aided by four harbour-masters, an engineer, water-bailiff, and

subordinate officers. Till recent times, the Navigation and Port of

London Committee, as it was called, held jurisdiction from Staines in

Middlesex to Gantlet in Kent, and exerted a strong hand in preventing

encroachments on "the bed and soil of the river," or any injury to

its banks. The duties also extended to the regulation of the moorings

of vessels in the port, the deepening of channels, the erection

and maintenance of public stairs, the repair of locks, weirs, and

towing-paths, the control of fisheries, and the seizure of unlawful

nets. Tolls and tonnage-dues contributed to the revenue on which the

Corporation depended for means of executing all these obligations. They

had, as one of their public advocates tersely put it, "a surplus below

bridge which they were unable to appropriate, and a deficiency above

bridge which they had no power of making good." Still, no hesitation

or serious shortcoming appeared in their fulfilment of duties. But

some years ago, a claim to "the bed and soil of the river" was set up

by the Crown. Thirteen years' litigation ended in a compromise. The

City consented to acknowledge the title of the Crown, and the Crown

consented to grant a title to the Corporation, stipulating, however,

that a Government scheme should be embodied in an Act of Parliament.

Hence, the Thames Conservancy Act of 1857, which vested the rights

and duties in a Board composed of the Lord Mayor, two Aldermen,

four Common Councilmen, the Deputy-Master of the Trinity House, two

persons chosen by the Admiralty, another person chosen by the Board

of Trade, and another by the Trinity House, making twelve in all. By

a later enactment these rights and duties were abrogated, and now the

jurisdiction of the City over the Upper Thames has altogether ceased.

[Illustration: STAINES BRIDGE.]

This is certainly not the place for any argument for or against

the deprivation of almost regal authority which the City of London

has long swayed. But up-river men, especially anglers, have cause

to be grateful for the protection afforded them in the past by the

conservators. Staines Deep is a good instance. All the "deeps" on the

river are formed for the especial behoof of the angler, who is indebted

to their peculiar construction for the abundance of fish that reward

his patience, trouble, and skill. A deep is so staked or otherwise

protected that no net or coarse process of any description can remove

the fish that collect there. Old boats are not unfrequently sunk to

prevent the use of nets. All the deeps between Staines and Richmond

have been formed on this or some such system at the expense of the

London Corporation; and at Staines the never-failing abundance of

large roach is due, no doubt, to the careful plan on which the deep is

formed. The accessibility of Staines from London makes it exceedingly

popular, as is evidenced by the number of boat-houses, and constantly

increasing trade of boat-building. The hotels and inns are not spoilt

by custom. The little "Swan," one of the prettiest of old-fashioned

houses on the river, is just below the bridge on the Surrey side, and

really in Egham parish, though boating men generally speak of it as the

"Swan" at Staines. Then there is the "Pack-horse," on the Middlesex

shore, with a good landing-stage. The "Angel and Crown," which is

traditionally associated with the Emery family, having been kept by

one of that name in the days when John Emery was the recognised and

unapproached stage Yorkshireman, is in the High Street. He played Tyke

as probably no other man ever played that character; nor was he less

effective in the monstrosities of the stage, Caliban being one of

his pet parts, and Pan another. He had a fair range of Shakespearean

repertory, being a terribly truthful Barnardine, in _Measure for

Measure_, and a capital Sir Toby Belch. In some panegyric memorial

verses which appeared soon after his death was the line--

"And Farmer Ashfield with John Emery died."

This praise was exaggerated and indiscriminate. The present writer was

sitting many years ago at the "Angel and Crown," in a mixed company of

oarsmen, anglers, and residents, when he heard the performance of John

Emery as Farmer Ashfield called in question. Somebody had extolled it

for its rich Yorkshire dialect. Thereupon a grey-headed old man broke

in with a quotation from "Speed the Plough." In the scene supposed to

follow a ploughing-match, when Sir Abel Handy's patent invention has

been kicked to pieces, and carried off at the heels of the frightened

horses, Bob Handy answers his father's question, "Where's my plough?"

by turning to the farmer and inquiring the name of the next county.

"We ca's it Wilzhire, sur," is the reply. The scene, in fact, is laid

in Hants. The grey-haired man was an old actor, and he finished his

pertinent reference to Morton's play with the quiet remark that he too

remembered Emery, and admired him in Yorkshire parts, but that Farmer

Ashfield was _not_ a Yorkshire part. With a London audience in Emery's

reign all countrymen were Yorkshiremen, just as all foreigners were

Frenchmen. We must not leave Staines, where barge-life and riverside

character generally may be studied better than at any other spot

by the Thames, and the boundary stone without mentioning that this

ancient monument bears the traces of its original inscription, dated

/A.D./ 1280, "God preserve the City of London."

Penton Hook, on the Middlesex side, is a horseshoe-shaped piece of

water, where the river shoals out a great deal, so that boats going

down the rapid shallow run of half a mile will do well to keep in mid

stream, so as to avoid grounding on that shore. If you pronounce Penton

Hook as you see it written, you may chance to miss being understood.

Penty Hook is the common pronunciation, and if without the aspirate,

so much the nearer local correctness. Penty Hook Lock has an average

fall of two feet and a half. There is a ferry here, by which you may

avoid the Hook and its long pull. The bend at Penty Hook is the natural

course of the river, and its horseshoe form, enclosing a large meadow,

has the lock for a base. For general fishing, Penty Hook has been famed

time out of mind; and, though disappointed men are sometimes heard to

lament the growing signs that this fishery has begun to be worked out,

every season yields many a well-filled creel. The lock is a good thing

for those who voyage for pleasure; not that they go through it, but

that it leaves them the undisturbed solitude of the ancient passage,

by drawing away the hurriers, who think of nothing but of "getting

there," wherever "there" may be. This retired and tranquil bend is the

haunt of water-fowl, and is a very wilderness of butterflies. One of

the countless tributary streams that feed the Thames, the Abbey River,

babbles of days when the monks of Chertsey kept their preserves well

filled from these productive fisheries. Fine trout are taken here

still; the strong barbel gives excellent play; a number-twelve hook,

mounted on a single hair, and baited with a gentle, will take roach and

dace in any quantity, though a heavy float is necessitated by the force

and depth of the stream; he who seeks the big chub should cast his line

under any of the overhanging willows; and he who scrapes for gudgeon

may choose from twenty pitches, any one of which will give him a day's

quick work. Down stream now to Laleham is a short row, or walk, along

the Middlesex shore, on which side is the towing-path from Staines as

far as Shepperton.

[Illustration: LALEHAM FERRY.]

Such charm as may be found in a flat landscape--and it is not small

when there are trees and water, red roofs and quaint chimneys, sheep,

cows, and an old church--we find at Laleham Ferry, one of the quietest

and prettiest spots on the Thames. The nearest railway stations,

neither of which is too near, are Staines and Shepperton. This little

village was for nine years of work, study, and wedded happiness, the

residence of Dr. Arnold, the mild but firm Erastian in most of his

ecclesiastical views, the parental educator, the Liberal in politics

but not in party, the Church reformer who clung to the Church not as a

priesthood but as a body of believers, the man of thought and man of

action. To Laleham, Thomas Arnold went at twenty-four years of age;

took pupils, as, since he was twenty, and elected a Fellow of Oriel

College, he had done at Oxford; married, and worked on, with the grand

idea before him of bringing new life and spirit into our public-school

system. It was at the end of his nine years' sojourn at Laleham that

he took priest's orders, and turned a corner in his life whence his

useful fame began. He was appointed to the headmastership of Rugby

School. In those nine years at Laleham, peaceful and happy as they

were, sorrows were not "too strictly kept" from Arnold's home. Four of

his family are buried here; his infant child, his mother, his aunt,

and his sister. It is no matter of mere opinion or dispute that Dr.

Arnold and Rugby are associated as no person and place, no school and

master, ever were before or since. Illustrious men have indeed raised

the high standard of tuition higher than they found it, at other public

schools. Their names add lustre to a shining roll. But Dr. Arnold,

of Rugby, whose constant longing from his youth had been to "try

whether our public school system has not in it some noble elements

which may produce fruit even to life eternal," justified his belief

and his mission so well, that he not only raised Rugby School to its

highest fame, but introduced a great change and improvement into all

school-life in England. He trusted much to his Sixth form, his elder

boys, whom he inspired with love, veneration, and confidence, so that

their recognised authority over the junior pupils was exercised as

with a reflected light. He would have no "unpromising subjects," no

pupils likely to taint others. "It is not necessary," he said, "that

this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty

boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian

gentlemen." All good hearts in time were bound to the firm, manly,

sympathetic master, whose devotion to duty was contagious, and whose

unceasing interest in his scholars was repaid by their reverence for

him. Dr. Arnold's writings are earnest, clear, and independent. The

six volumes of sermons, chiefly delivered to the Rugby boys, should

be read by all boys, all parents, and all masters. Dean Stanley, his

pupil and biographer, collected and republished his tracts on social

and political subjects; and in the striking picturesqueness of his

"Roman History," in which he adopts the "ballad-theory" of the Prussian

historian, Niebuhr, he forestalled a mode of animated illustration, and

contrast of ancient and modern events, which is so popular in the hands

of Macaulay and Grote.

Nine years of such a life as Arnold's would be enough to confer

perpetual dignity on a more important place than Laleham, which

contains a population of not more than six or seven hundred souls,

and is not honoured and spoilt by a "surrounding neighbourhood" of

new wealth, refinement, and education. Not that the village is more

rustic--in the depreciative sense--than a village inhabited by people

who "have known some nurture" ought to be. There are a few good

old-fashioned houses about it, Arnold's being one of them; a solid

red-brick house with a large garden. The occupant came to regard the

country as "very beautiful." He had always a resource at hand, he

tells us, in the bank of the river up to Staines; "which, though it

be perfectly flat, has yet a great charm from its entire loneliness,

there being not a house anywhere near it; and the river here has none

of that stir of boats and barges upon it, which makes it in many places

as public as the high road." Laleham House, the seat of the Earl of

Lucan, is a plain square modern mansion with a Tuscan portico. The

grounds of forty acres are noted for the noble elms, shrubs, lawns, and

flower-gardens.

"One spot for flowers, the rest all turf and trees,"

as Leigh Hunt sang, though not of so large and fine a domain.

[Illustration: LALEHAM CHURCH.]

[Illustration: CHERTSEY BRIDGE.]

Some years ago a galvanised monkish movement, led by an Anglican

clergyman, who went about town with sandalled feet, a girdle of

knotted cord, and a cowl over his tonsured head, made a descent on

Laleham, where the poor enthusiast tried to found a monastery, with

what temporary noise of local wonderment is now a subject of much

forgetfulness. The church at Laleham is small, old, and patched with

modern brickwork; and the church across the river, at Chertsey, a

mile lower down on the Surrey shore, is square-towered, part ancient

and part new. Nothing very old, or noticeable as old, will be seen

if we go inside; but we may do this reverence to modern art if not

to antique religion, for there is a memorial bas-relief of simple

beauty, carved in a Christian spirit by the Greek-souled sculptor,

Flaxman, the subject being the raising of Jairus' daughter. Cattle

are feeding on the grass of Chertsey Mead, or cooling themselves

in the shallow stream. How different are they from the droves of

builders and architects who try to improve the banks of the river!

The cattle positively decline all effort at picturesqueness; but they

are picturesque, which the new houses or villas, and stuck-up towers

and turrets, with all their ornamental pretence, decidedly are not. A

hundred years ago was built, by James Payne, the bridge of stone, with

seven arches, the high middle arch being beneath a pointed summit of

the parapet. This bridge, though steep, seems right under the lock,

which is built of wood, and has a fall that averages three feet.

Ancient and modern both are the intimate associations of Chertsey.

Among the modern are reminiscences of Albert Smith, whom even James

Hannay, a contemner of comic authorship, allowed to be a writer who

was easy to read. He rattled on, with too little thought, it may

be, but with a shrewd common-sense and an almost feminine justness

of view, that won him friends among his enemies, even if a careless

witticism now and then made an enemy of a friend. This was never for

long; while it is certain that Albert Smith lived down a great deal

of hard and even scornful criticism. He brought round all his old

_Punch_ companions from whom he had cut adrift; and even the high-toned

_Examiner_, seldom merciful to "light writers," pronounced one of his

books of travel to be, "frank, genial, and manly." He practised in

his early career as a dentist, but soon drifted into magazine work,

and amused the laughter-loving public with his "Adventures of Mr.

Ledbury, and his friend, Jack Johnson." The man-about-town style of

writing was more amusingly and inoffensively exemplified in Albert

Smith than in any of his rivals; for with him it was spontaneous--a

hearty emanation from personal habit, which had grown into nature.

Student-life--medical-student-life, that is to say--in Paris and

London gave both incident and tone to his tales and sketches--the

incident being of a practically jocular kind; and the tone, that

of rollicking levity. He went a little out of his way to take up

historical romancing in his novel on the subject of the venomous

Marguerite d'Aubray, Marchioness of Brinvilliers; and Douglas Jerrold

went a good deal out of _his_ way to assail his "former crony" Albert's

dabbling in "arsenicated literature." More congenial, certainly, to

his powers of lively common-place were the stories of "Christopher

Tadpole" and "The Scattergood Family." He had some dramatic faculty,

which took now and then the proper dramatic form of theatric art; and,

beside the stage-burlesques collaborated by him with Shirley Brooks,

Charles Kenny, Stoqueler, and others, he wrote a few pieces, whereof

one was suggested by the famous Chertsey bell, and a romantic legend

in connection with that relic of Saxon days. Albert Smith's brother

Arthur, a man of singular gentleness, was devoted to him, and spared

no pains to please and serve him in a multitude of ways, little and

great. The affection which existed between the two was never shaded

by difference of any kind. Here is a little story which now sees, for

the first time, the light of print:--When Albert Smith was giving his

long-lived entertainment of "Mont Blanc," Arthur, his right-hand man

in the business of management, took a holiday, and, visiting some

glass-works in the north, was so struck with the resemblance of certain

waste products to icicles, that he brought a number of specimens

away with him, had them mounted like pendants, and, on his return to

Piccadilly, hung them in triumph round the eaves of the little _chalet_

which formed a prominent part of the set scene. Albert, who would not

have damped his brother's delight for all the world, was "charmed"

with the effect, and thanked the good Arthur again and again. "I

_can't_ tell him," said he, secretly, to the present writer, "that the

flowering plants, the Alpine heaths, and all, are in full summer-bloom.

It would break his heart to be reminded of the little contradiction in

the seasons."

As the first religious house founded in Surrey, the abbey, of which

there are now few vestiges, gave Chertsey a name of imperishable renown

in English annals. We are carried back by the sound to Saxon days, to

King Egbert and the sainted Erkenwald, who founded the great monastery

at Barking as well as that of Chertsey. Abbot Erkenwald received his

first Charter from Frithwald, sub-regulus of Surrey, nine years after

the foundation of this abbey of Cerotæsai, Cerotesege, or Certesyg, as

the name last given appears in "Domesday Book." The etymology, then,

of our familiar Chertsey is "Cerota's ey," or island. Erkenwald's

monastery and church were erected on a grassy ait, formed by the

Thames and the little stream now called the Abbey River, or Bourne.

When was there ever monastery or abbey built in England, France, or

other part of Christendom, but it was near a river, teeming with fish?

In nine out of ten cases, the ground has been an island, whatever it

may be now. Take Westminster, for instance. It is not, you will say,

insulated; but it was, and its name was the Isle of Thorns; and the

very first angelical promise in relation to the Saxon abbey was made

to the fisherman, Edric, who was told by a supernatural visitant, sent

by St. Peter, that a plentiful supply of fish would never fail him so

long as he duly carried his tithe to the monks. From that time, quite

early in the seventh century, till near the end of the fourteenth, the

Thames fishermen religiously paid their tithe of salmon to the abbey;

and it is a singular fact that the first violation of the custom was

by a priest, the vicar of Rotherhithe, who denied his tithe until the

monks of Westminster enforced it by law, protesting that the right had

been granted to them by St. Peter, when their abbey was founded. As

an instance of the primitive state of society, in the England of the

Middle Ages, every bearer of fish to the Abbey of Westminster sat by

prescriptive right at the prior's table that day, and could demand ale

and bread at the buttery-hatch to be brought him by the cellarman.

Fish, not on fast days alone, but as a constant staple of diet,

was one of the needs of monastic life. Nor did the monks and their

lay brothers generally wait for tithings from secular piscatory

sources, as the fraternity at Westminster seems to have done. Mr.

Dendy Sadler has no doubt hit with main truth of history, if with

some exuberance of playful humour, the monkish habit of angling.

At Chertsey the Benedictine friars of the tenth century left such

evidence of perfection in fish-culture as is pleasingly apparent to

every Thames angler of the present day; and the salmon-trout nurseries

of Mr. Forbes, on the Surrey shore, revive a goodly tradition of the

olden time. Pike, perch, chub, bream, and barbel abound near Chertsey

and Shepperton, as of yore; but the good monks, let us remember, had

the lordly salmon always at hand, as well as the trout, which was too

plentiful to suggest any thought of artificial hatching. The once

stately abbey, of which all the remains now are the fragments of an

arched gateway, part of a wall, and a bit of encaustic tile pavement,

occupied an area of four acres, and looked like a town. The Danes

pillaged and burnt the place two hundred years after its foundation,

murdering the abbot, Beocca, with all his monks, to the number of

ninety. It is scarcely possible, even now, to dig deep on the ground

without unearthing bones and fragments of masonry, relics either of

the ancient Saxon foundation, or of the second and still Saxon convent

re-established by King Edgar, in the tenth century.

During successive periods many great men were interred here; but the

abbey is chiefly remarkable, as a place of sepulture, for having been

the brief resting-place of Henry VI., whose remains were brought

thither from Blackfriars by water. It was on her way "toward Chertsey

with her holy load" that the Lady Anne encountered crook-backed Richard

of Gloucester, as the scene in Shakespeare's play of _Richard III._

vividly represents. Having been interred there with much solemnity,

the corse of the murdered king was only suffered to remain undisturbed

till the second year of his successor's reign, when Richard caused the

coffin to be removed to Windsor. The weak but well-meaning king, whose

piety and love of learning may be said to have been too strong for

his mental sinew, held Chertsey in high regard and favour, following,

indeed, other sovereigns by whom in long succession from Saxon times

the abbey was often strengthened and endowed. To benefit a religious

institution and the town pertaining thereto was formerly one and

the same act, a state of things now hardly comprehended in its full

significance. It was to the abbot, in kingly piety, that Henry VI.

granted the right of holding a fair on St. Ann's Hill, on St. Ann's

Day. The "Black Cherry Fair," as it is called, is now held in the

town, and the date is changed from the 26th July to the 6th August.

Another great fair, for cattle, horses, and poultry, is also held

there on the 26th September, in view of Michaelmas Day, which ancient

feast is generally honoured with the goose as a standing dish; for by

that time of the year this bird, hatched in the spring, has attained a

goodly form and condition, while preserving some of its tender youth.

So notably do these considerations affect the fair in September, at

Chertsey, that it is popularly designated the Goose and Onion Fair,

the sale of geese and onions eclipsing all other traffic, not only as

regards poultry, but horses and cattle to boot. As before observed,

mills and fisheries survive the changes of epochs with extraordinary

vitality. We have seen that Chertsey is still a head-quarters of

angling, as it was a thousand years ago; and the abbey mills flourish

in modern fashion to this day. More remarkable far is the survival of

the curfew bell; for there are fisheries and mills of ancient origin

all over England, but the curfew is heard at few other places than

Chertsey. Here exists a curious old custom of tolling the day of the

month, after a brief pause, at the close of the "knell of parting day."

In the tower of the rebuilt parish church, with a peal of six bells,

is one that is believed to have belonged to the ancient abbey. There

is warrant for the tradition which assigns so venerable an age to this

bell; for the Latin inscription

ORA : MENTE : PIA : PRO : NOBIS : VIRGO : MARIA

is in Anglo-Saxon characters.

For a little more than two years, Abraham Cowley, the poet, intending

to husband his small fortune, lived at Chertsey, or, rather, continued

to exist for a short time. His desire for solitude provoked from

Johnson, the lover of city life, a biographical sneer. It is true that

the first night Cowley came to his half-timber house at Chertsey--he

had desiderated a brick house, by-the-by--he caught a severe cold, and

kept his room for ten days; but it is also true that he was an invalid

when he came from Barn Elms, whence he was driven by illness. A series

of mishaps befell him, which he recounted in a half ludicrous light,

in a letter to his friend Sprat; and this letter it is that Johnson

recommends "to the consideration of all that may hereafter pant for

solitude." Cowley's house, which he only left in funereal pomp and

state to be conveyed by water to Westminster Abbey, and there buried,

is still sometimes called by its old name, Porch House, from a porch

that once projected into the highway, but was pulled down a hundred

years ago. In the garden is a fine group of trees, one of which, a

horse-chestnut of great size and beauty, sheltered the poet in the

short term of his life at Chertsey.

A memorable episode of Dickens's early work of fiction, "Oliver

Twist," is graphically connected with this agricultural town, the most

commercial establishment in which is a brewery. There were no railways

to speak of when Fagin, the Jew that Dickens drew, was redrawn by

Cruikshank, and when Bill Sikes, and Nancy, and Toby Crackit, and the

Artful Dodger, and Charley Bates, and the bad people generally, seemed

as real as, on the other and supernaturally amiable side, Rose Maylie

and the rest were creatures of angelic imagination. There is nothing

more real in this story, nor in all the stories that Dickens ever

wrote, than the expedition by Sikes and Oliver, from Bethnal Green,

through Finsbury and Barbican, to the West-end--past Hyde Park Corner,

Kensington, Hammersmith, Chiswick, Kew, and Brentford--past Hampton

and Halliford, Shepperton and Sunbury--till Chertsey was reached; and,

joined now by Toby Crackit, they made their way through the silent

town to the scene of the projected burglary. Boating-men know well

the landing-stage at the "Bridge House," one of those inns where the

comfort is not diminished either by negligence or false pretence.

This is the recognised "hotel" of Chertsey; but the "Cricketers," in

the Bridge Road, half a mile from the town, is the favourite resort

of anglers. Many pleasant walks are still to be found near Chertsey,

St. Ann's Hill being within a mile. As the residence of Charles James

Fox, the house, with its gardens, lawns, shady walks, and quaint

summer-houses, should be seen by all who have the opportunity of

visiting it. The old gate of wrought iron, though not by any means

extraordinary, nor indeed nearly so elaborate as some examples of

smiths' work still to be seen about old parts of Chelsea, Chiswick,

and Roehampton, is characteristic and significant of its period. From

this gate to the summit of the hill is a short walk which affords a

delightful view on a fine day, extending to Windsor on the one side,

and to London, a distance of twenty miles, on the other. St. Ann's

Well, on the descent, is a sylvan spot, which might better have been

left alone than "improved," as it has been. It once looked like what

it probably is, a veritable relic of the chapel which has been swept

away like its contemporary foundation, the abbey on the marshy island

below. St. Ann's Hill is a favourite place for picnics, as also for

volunteer exercises and reviews. Returning towards Chertsey Bridge,

on our downward Thames journey, we see the wood-crowned heights of

Woburn, and presently make or renew acquaintance with the Wey, another

tributary of the metropolitan river. The Wey rises in Hampshire, near

Alton, where good ale used to be brewed, and indeed continues to be

brewed still, in spite of the fact that this national beverage, the

wine of the country, is getting more and more into the hands of a few

noted brewers, and consequently is more and more "all alike," which

is a sad sameness to think of! Time was when small breweries were

oftener attached to inns of good repute, and when to taste the ale was

a complimentary obligation. It is no question of curious tasting in

these times; for you know pretty well what you are going to get when

you ask for "a glass of bitter," which is generally good, but somewhat

monotonous. What has become of all the country home-brewed, of the ales

of different colleges, for example?

"I have a friend who loveth me,

And sendeth me ale of Trinity,"

sang Barry Cornwall. Where is now the good ale, and where are the good

fellows who sent it?

"The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees

Is left this vault to brag of."

Through Farnham, Godalming, Guildford, Woking, Byfleet, and Weybridge,

through all that country of heath and health, of pine-trees and

rabbit-warrens, of scenery that you feel and breathe as well as see,

the Hampshire stream flows and grows till it mingles with the waters

of Thames below Chertsey, at a mill in the bend of the stream. It is

said that the best hay in England comes from Chertsey mead, which

also, during a large part of the year, affords right of commonage to

neighbouring farmers for their cows; and the milk testifies to the

richness of the pasture. It is at Weybridge that the Wey is joined by

the Bourne, as also by the Basingstoke canal, and the meeting of the

three streams is in a pleasant spot. Weybridge and Oatlands Park are

places that hold renown in common. Round about the neighbourhood are

country seats, beautifully situate, and two miles south of the town

or village is Crockham Hill, from which a transcendent prospect of

the whole weald of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex is gained, never to be

forgotten. By Chart, or by Westerham Common, the way to Crockham Gap is

the loveliest of Surrey walks, and indeed the beauty of the district

cannot be overpraised.

At the Domesday survey, "Webrige" was a manor held by the Abbot of

Chertsey, and its value was twenty shillings. With other lands, the

property pertaining to the ancient abbey, it was annexed by Henry VIII.

to the honour of Hampton Court. The estate of Oatlands was acquired

by the king in manner following. He was negotiating its purchase when

the owner, one William Rede, died, leaving his son John, a child, the

heir. A short way was taken by the king to remove all difficulty. He

constituted Sir Thomas Cromwell guardian of the boy, and the rest was

plain. Very speedily the erection of a palace for Anne of Cleves, the

king's intended wife, was commenced, the materials being found in the

dismantled monasteries. Stone was brought from Chertsey and Bisham;

marble for pavements from Abingdon; while the good red bricks which

composed the walls were made at Woking, which name was spelt by the

accountants "Okyng," much as it is pronounced at the present day by

rustic natives. For his orchards, the king took apple, pear, and cherry

trees from the orchards and gardens of Chertsey Abbey. The interior

walls of Oatlands Palace were hung with the costliest tapestries of

France and Flanders, the floors being covered with "carpets of Turque."

But before the casket was ready the jewel had been discarded. Anne of

Cleves, on whom Henry bestowed an uncomplimentary epithet, had come,

and had proved unacceptable. The bride was divorced, and a new bride

was taken in her stead. With the new bride Henry required a new palace.

Oatlands was consigned to the keeping of Sir Anthony Brown; and, save

that it was made the occasional residence of the Princess Mary, we

hear very little more of Oatlands in King Henry's reign. We may fancy

it a many-gabled, many-towered, Tudor edifice of red brick, with stone

quoins and dressings, ornamental chimney-shafts, and handsome bays,

like Hampton Court, in fact, with the same kind of turreted central

gate-house in the principal front. There are drawings of it in the

Bodleian at Oxford. The foundations are said to have been traced

over fourteen acres. Terraces, flower-gardens, orchards, fountains,

fishponds, and detached summer-houses adorned the pleasance round the

magnificent edifice; and beyond, fenced about by a quickset hawthorn

hedge, was the deer park.

An example of wasted labour and misapplied ingenuity, the grotto

constructed in the eighteenth century by an Italian and his two sons

for Henry Clinton, Duke of Newcastle, may be cited as one of the

questionable glories of modern Oatlands. The artificers were twenty

years at their work, which cost the Duke, it is said, £40,000; the

sum stated in the early accounts being between £12,000 and £13,000.

Outside, this egregious sham is built of tufa, which is a volcanic

substance, or the calcareous deposit of certain springs. Within, the

building has three or four chambers connected by low dark passages, on

the ground floor, and one large chamber over all, with an elaborate

cupola of satin-spar stalactites. All the inner walls are a mosaic of

minerals, shells, and spars of various kinds, blending in many devices,

and inlaid with endless patience and skill. Among the many fine

specimens of minerals still left, are quartz, crystals, and ammonites

of rare perfection. Horace Walpole delivered himself of this criticism

on the Oatlands grotto: "Oatlands, that my memory had taken it into its

head was the centre of Paradise, is not half so Elysian as I used to

think. The grotto, a magnificent structure of shell-work, is a square,

regular, and, which never happened to grotto before, lives up one pair

of stairs, and yet only looks on a basin of dirty water."

[Illustration: SHEPPERTON LOCK.]

It is evident that Horace Walpole spoke of the upper chamber as

the grotto itself; and so it was mainly. This _bizarre_ kind of

architecture was quite in the taste of George IV., and accordingly,

when he was Prince of Wales, and just after Waterloo, he entertained

at a supper in this wonderful room the Emperor of Russia, the King

of Prussia, and the princes and generals in their train. As being

tastefully in accord with a stalactite cavern, lit up by cut-glass

chandeliers, the gilt chairs and sofas had satin cushions embroidered

by the Duchess of York. Oatlands underwent many transformations; was

destroyed by fire in different ages; and has sprung up again and again,

like an exceedingly protean ph[oe]nix. The only vestiges of its ancient

grandeur are the massive gateway and some magnificent cedars by the

river. It is curious to think of its many transformations, during the

dwindling and declining periods of its history. Once it was a rambling,

mock-battlemented structure, in the taste of Strawberry Hill Gothic.

A quasi-Italian style has been its later phase, and this remains, in

the aspect now presented by the house, which has been converted to the

purpose of a residential hotel. Oatlands has a longer story than can be

told, even in outline, here. After Henry VIII. abandoned his intention

to keep up its royal splendour, it became the temporary abode, at

different periods, of Edward VI., Elizabeth, James I., Charles I., and

Henrietta Maria--their youngest son, Henry, being born here--Queen

Henrietta's second husband, the Earl of St. Albans, and then a

succession of nobles, under various terms of tenure, till the Duke of

York purchased the property in 1790, when the rococo edifice on the

Strawberry Hill pattern of modern antiquity made its appearance, and

became the bone of contention between two architects, the inglorious

though not mute Pugin and Barry of the time, as we may call them--each

claiming the honour of its invention. Greville's Memoirs give us as

much as we want of the private life of His Royal Highness in his

queer castle, or, if further information be desired, some interesting

additions may be found in the "Life of George Brummell, Esq., commonly

called Beau Brummell," who passed much of his time there, and whose

most constant benefactor, after he had been cut by the Prince Regent,

and other summer-friends, was _sa toute affectionnée amie et servante_,

the kind Duchess. In justice to one or other of the rival claimants

to the glory of architectural design, it may be said that the outside

folly of Oatlands, as conceived either by Holland, the architect of

Drury Lane Theatre--his best work--or John Carter, more favourably

known by his etchings from the Gothic, was redeemed by its interior

fitness and stately proportion. An example of the effect produced by

transplanted architecture is conspicuous on Weybridge Green. Here, a

Cockney wanderer out of his element of Babel life, stands the column

celebrated by Gay in his "Trivia."

"Where famed St. Giles's ancient limits spread,

An inrailed column rears its lofty head;

Here to seven streets seven dials count the day,

And from each other catch the circling ray."

A rover, indeed, was this monument from Seven Dials. First it was taken

to Sayes Court, but never erected. Wanting a memorial to the Duchess

of York, the villagers of Weybridge picked up the neglected masonry,

altered it to suit their purpose, by discarding the dial-faced top

and substituting a clumsy crown, and stuck it where it now stands. In

the crypt of a small Roman Catholic chapel, facing a fine group of

fir-trees on Weybridge Common, the body of Louis Philippe was laid,

till the royal remains were taken to France and re-interred in the

Orleans mausoleum at Dreux.

[Illustration: SHEPPERTON.]

Largely frequented by anglers, Weybridge must take care if it desires

to retain the favour of boating-men. While the towing-path crosses the

boat-yard, and dredging is neglected by those, whoever they may be,

on whom the duty rests, it is very difficult to avoid grounding; so

that many owners have been taking their boats away, as the constant

dragging not only scratches but strains them. Shepperton, on the

Middlesex shore, is a pretty village, small and quiet, with its chief

places of residence hidden away behind trees, or peeping out upon the

river. It has a railway terminus, on the South Western system, and is

about an hour, that is, nineteen miles, from Waterloo. The deeps afford

tolerable fly-fishing in the trout season, and are more frequently

fished for jack, perch, roach, and barbel. There are several good swims

in pretty equal favour with anglers, to wit the upper deep, the lower

deep, and the old deep, east of the creek rails. Besides these, the

creek itself is often resorted to. The anglers' inns at Shepperton are

the "Anchor" and the "Crown." It is an unspoilt Thames-side village,

this Shepperton, in spite of its many pleasure-seeking visitors; a

class, to say the sad truth, apt to disclose a selfish indifference

to the pleasure of others. If the holiday-maker is to be traced by

scientific investigation, the marks to be looked for will be broken

bottles, greasy sandwich-papers, and lobster-shell, just as flint

tools and weapons denote other and earlier savages who have lived on

the earth, and have made it as disagreeable as possible for their

fellow-brutes. Shepperton Lock and Ferry are both picturesque in

themselves, as well as being foregrounds of scenery that is charming

to the eye nurtured by art. Truly, landscape-painting has done noble

service in fostering the love of nature. Though real beauty must be

above the skill of man to imitate, it is a curious truth that no age

in which that skill has not been exercised has ever left any written

records of a feeling for the grandeur of mountains, or the simple

loveliness of woods, fields, and brooks. Chaucer, you say? Why, Chaucer

pictured everything because he had seen it in pictures; had the very

soul of a limner; lived in the sincerest age of art; saw Flanders and

Italy; was familiar with all that was exquisite in the refinement

of courts; and, unless his appointment as clerk of the works at St.

George's Chapel, Windsor, was a gross sinecure, knew how a daisy should

look in stone as well as in nature's finer fashioning. He who imagines

Chaucer to have displayed natural observation without cognisance of

art has totally misread Chaucer's time, rich in actual colour, as in

the very dress that distinguished "gentle and simple;" for, as Mr.

Ruskin has said, speaking of "the lovely and fantastic dressing of the

thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries" (in the very heart and flower

of which period Chaucer lived), "no good historical painting ever yet

existed, or ever can exist, where the dresses of the people of the time

are not beautiful."

Shepperton, hale, green, and old, in its plentiful trees, mostly elms

and horse-chestnuts, has likewise an age in history. It is a noted

spot for Roman remains; it has a church that was venerable and still

retains claims to veneration; and it has a rectory-house older, for the

most part, than the parish church to which it belongs. The dwelling

in question is of fifteenth century erection, and is principally

of timber, the soundest, the strongest, the most enduring--English

oak. Builders will come back in time to the wisdom of such building,

as they are even now aware of the folly which assumes iron to be

fireproof. Halliford is our next halt, a mile down from Shepperton

Railway Station, the nearest to the place. It is quite accessible

enough for anglers, whose interest, if not whose taste, leads them to

a preference of seclusion to racket and noise. Proverbially "jolly,"

the angler understands jollity in the Waltonian sense, as, indeed, the

most sensible of us all, anglers or not, understand it. The vulgar

adverb, "awfully," does, indeed, too literally qualify at times the

modern adjective. Halliford Bridge was washed away some years ago by

the floods; and now the Surrey and Middlesex shores are connected by

a brick and iron structure which is named Walton Bridge, and which,

having been the occasion of war between Bumbledom on both sides the

river, was painted of two colours, a chromatic difference that greatly

increased the normal ugliness of the design. The most plentiful fish

at Halliford are roach and bream, but there is an abundant variety of

others. To distinguish this little place from another Halliford, which

is a hamlet of Sunbury, it is sometimes called Lower Halliford. The

views along and across the river, every way, are charming; and as we

look over to Oatlands, the Surrey hills form a beautiful background;

while on one side we have Walton and Ashley Park, and on the other

Weybridge. The "Red Lion" is a favourite haunt of anglers, and all who

visit the spot by road or river; and other houses of entertainment are

the "Crown," the "Ship," and Mrs. Searle's. The narrow creek adjacent

to the "Red Lion" is in frequent request as a harbour for punts and

small craft in general. A little further and we come to Walton, having

crossed the river once again into Surrey.

[Illustration: HALLIFORD.]

Walton-on-Thames was, in old Saxon days, as its name plainly indicates,

a walled town. Etymology apart, the traces of its having been fortified

speak for themselves in the neighbouring remains of important

earthworks. It is now a village; and, as a village, large; but it is

not quite large enough to be considered a town; and of its walls there

are no traces above ground. Walton Bridge crosses the river just where

there was once a ford that, as relics show, was strongly defended. A

little above Walton is the spot at which Cæsar crossed, in the time of

his second invasion. It is called Cowey Stakes, and has afforded matter

for many an antiquarian discussion. The "Stakes" were driven in front

of the bank to repel attempts at landing. Some accounts of them state

that they were placed upright in two rows, across the shallow bend of

the river, so as to support a bridge. Walton has an interesting church,

very old in some parts, but modern in others, with Norman piers, on

one of which may be read, deeply cut, the verse ascribed to Queen

Elizabeth, when princess, and when it was sought by Mary to entrap her

in a heresy regarding the doctrine of Transubstantiation.

"Christ was the Worde and spake it;

He took the bread and brake it;

And what the Worde doth make it,

That I believe, and take it."

Among the monuments are works of note by Roubiliac and Chantrey,

the older sculptor excelling in the bold inventiveness and forcible

execution of his work, a superb monument to Lord Shannon. On the left

side of the communion table is buried William Lilly, the astrologer,

that "cunning man, hight Sidrophel," as he figures, or is supposed

to figure, in "Hudibras." Another tomb, but it is in the churchyard,

not the church, holds the remains of "bright, broken Maginn," who

sleeps without a memorial. President Bradshaw's house, at the back

of Church Street, is divided into a group of wretched tenements, all

in a squalid condition; yet in a room on the ground-floor of one of

them, covered with dirt and whitewash, is a carved oak chimney-piece,

with coupled columns and a cornice, the room itself being panelled,

and an elaborately carved beam crossing the ceiling. There is a

tradition that Charles I.'s death-warrant was signed in this room. One

of the curiosities of Walton-on-Thames, shown at a house next that of

Rosewell, the boat-builder, is a scold's gag, or bridle, few examples

of which instrument yet remain in England. This particular specimen

bears an inscription which, though now illegible, has no doubt been

accurately quoted as follows:--

"Chester presents Walton with a Bridle,

To curb Women's tongues when they bee idle."

Chester, according to tradition, was a person who lost an estate

through the evil speaking of a loose-tongued gossip, and took this

mode of revenging himself on the sex. The bridle is a combination of

head-piece and collar, a flat iron projection inside the latter being

forced over the tongue, while a slit in the former, which passes

over the face and skull, allows the nose to protrude. Not far from

the church, on the road to the railway station, is Ashley Park, with

its late Tudor or early Stuart mansion of red brick, containing a

great hall, which takes the whole height of the house, and a gallery

extending throughout its entire length of a hundred feet. The park, a

richly wooded demesne, adjoins Oatlands. From St. George's Hill, in the

vicinity, the magnificent prospect includes seven counties. The stream

at Walton Bridge runs over many shallows, fast on the Surrey shore, and

it is not easy to sail round the bend.

[Illustration: SUNBURY WEIR.]

Along a pleasant reach of the river, on the Middlesex bank, lies the

village of Sunbury, with three or four boating and angling inns,

which are much frequented by pleasure parties, though it is always

a marvel to foreigners that the accommodation at these and other

Thames-side inns should not be of a higher order. At Sunbury are the

rearing-ponds of the Thames Angling Preservation Society; and the

fishing of all kinds is excellent, no part of the river affording

better sport with the fly than Sunbury Weir, which abounds with

trout. The "Flower Pot," the "Magpie," and the "Castle" are in Thames

Street; and the "Weir Hotel" is on the Surrey side. The stone lock

and lock-house are prettily placed amid pretty scenery, and there is

a good camping-ground. As it is not often that a church is altered

to its improvement, justice demands a recognition of the fact that

the church of the Virgin Mary, by the river-side at Sunbury, from

having been as ugly a brick building as was ever consecrated to public

worship, has been rendered sightly by the insertion of new windows

and the introduction of a semicircular chancel, and an elaborate

Byzantine porch with stone arcades on either side. Till changed to the

form we now see, the church appeared as it had been rebuilt in the

eighteenth century. The ancient church was of Saxon foundation, dating

from the time of Edward the Confessor. When the Orleans family made

their retreat in the neighbourhood of the Thames, the Duke of Nemours

assisted at the consecration, by Dr. (now Cardinal Archbishop) Manning,

of a small Roman Catholic church a short distance off, prettily

constructed of stone, from the drawing of Mr. Charles Buckler. The

sailing clubs have made Sunbury a rendezvous, and boat-building is a

prosperous occupation.

[Illustration: SUNBURY CHURCH.]

[Illustration: BETWEEN HAMPTON AND SUNBURY.]

As we near Hampton, the historical and the "Happy," Garrick's villa

comes into view. The watery way, down from Sunbury, is between banks

which are flat and uninteresting, osiers hiding the land from those

who voyage in boats. Robert Adam, who, in conjunction with his

brother James, improved the street architecture of London--their

fraternal labours being commemorated in the name of that since-spoilt

river-terrace, the "Adelphi"--built the Corinthian front of Hampton

House, as it was called when Garrick bought it, though the mansion has

since been renamed after the great actor himself. Adam's portico, the

salient feature of the house, reaches, with its pediment, above the

attic storey. Much is said about the building, its contents and its

visitors, by Horace Walpole; for Garrick's dinners, his illuminated

grounds, and his night-fêtes, attracted company of the first order.

On the lawn, near the water's edge, was and is a miniature Grecian

temple, of octagonal shape, with an Ionic porch, the structure being

designed for a summer-house, in which for a time was placed Roubiliac's

statue of Shakespeare, to be removed, after Garrick's death, to the

British Museum. Garrick planted his domain very tastefully, and the

trees that have grown to goodly height and umbrageousness since his

day, now invest the spot with a dignified grace. For twenty-five years

Garrick enjoyed his liberal ease and the pleasures of well-chosen

society in this home of comfort and elegance; and his wife, who

survived him by forty-three years, living to a great age, continued to

dwell here, maintaining everything in the same place as when he was

her companion. The forget-me-not, commonest of wild flowers in this

neighbourhood, finds surely a congenial soil where David Garrick's

memory was cherished so fondly and so long. Islands in thick succession

dot the stream, and when fishing-rods are patiently extended here and

there, the picture is at once socially and tranquilly suggestive.

Opposite the town and church of Hampton lies Moulsey Hurst, between

the villages of East and West Moulsey. This wide and beautiful meadow,

"hard and smooth as velvet," as one of Archibald Constable's literary

correspondents describes it, has been degraded in all ways attributable

to civilisation. As a race-course, it is probably the vulgarest in the

world; and its history is bound up with the annals of duelling and

prize-fighting. A letter, very characteristic of the time, contains

the following candid record:--"Breakfasted at Mr. Maule's very early,

and went along with him and the Bailie to see the great fight between

Belcher and Cribb, at Moseley Hurst, near Hampton. The day was very

fine, and we had a charming drive out in our coach-and-four, and beat

all the coaches and chaises by the way. We had three hard runs with

one post-chaise and four very fine horses, before we could pass it,

and drove buggies, horsemen, and all off the road into lanes and doors

of houses." Among the gentlemen present, as the same frank-spoken

witness testifies, were "the Duke of Kent, Mr. Wyndham, Lord Archibald

Hamilton (a famous hand, I am told), Lord Kinnaird, Mr. T. Sheridan,

&c. &c., and all the fighting-men in town, of course." These last,

we read further, were "the Game Chicken, Woods, Tring, Pitloon, &c.

Captain Barclay of Urie received us, and put us across the river in

a boat, and he followed with Cribb, whom he backed at all hands. The

Hon. Barclay (Berkeley) Craven was the judge." This charming chronicler

proceeds to tell us that the odds were on Belcher, but that the hero

in question, after a long fight, "was at length obliged to give in."

Poor fellow! Modern adherents to the theory that fisticuffs had any

early origin in Great Britain may be consoled for the decadence of the

"good old national art of self-defence" by the assurance that boxing

was a practice which endured little more than a century and a half,

if so long, and was learnt from North American savages. Its real

antiquity is Greek, the grounds for believing that the Anglo-Saxons,

and, after them, the Plantagenets, favoured this form of pugilism being

extremely slender. The English prize-fighters of the eighteenth century

encountered one another with broadswords. There are other "arts of

self-defence" far better entitled to rank as English than boxing. The

quarter-staff is one.

[Illustration: GARRICK'S VILLA, HAMPTON.]

On the road to Moulsey from Walton-on-Thames stands Apps Court, or the

modern representative of that capital mansion, once inhabited by Mrs.

or Miss Catherine Barton, who might have been called a "professional

beauty" had the phrase, together with photography, been invented in her

day. The manor was bequeathed to her for life by Charles Montague, Earl

of Halifax. She was a reigning "toast," and her name frequently occurs

in Swift's journal to Stella. Catherine Barton, who was a sort of niece

to Sir Isaac Newton, being, in fact, the daughter of his half-sister,

has been spoken of as the mistress of Lord Halifax; though it is now

pretty clearly established that she was privately married to him,

before his elevation to the peerage. She afterwards married a master

of the Mint, who succeeded in that office her illustrious uncle. Many

other persons of note are historically associated with "delightful Ab's

Court," so designated by Pope, in his Horatian epistle to one of its

proprietors, Colonel Cotterell. The grounds, like most of the Thames

pleasances, contain some grand timber; oaks and elms being conspicuous

objects.

A little past Moulsey Lock is Hampton Court Bridge, a five-arched

iron structure, by which we take our way to the palace and its famous

grounds.

/Godfrey Turner/.

[Illustration: THE APPROACH TO HAMPTON COURT.]