Chapter III: Part 3

Such, briefly, is the condition of Byron's ancestral home as it appears nearly eighty years after he saw it for the last time. Besides the charms which won his affection and made him relinquish the Abbey with such poignant regret, it holds for us an added spell in that it has been the habitation of a transcendent genius. Where Wildman's fortune failed his wishes the present owner has supplemented his work, until the vast pile now gleams with more than its ancient splendor; and, as we take a last view through a glade whose beauty fitly frames the picture of the restored mansion, we trust that somehow and somewhere Byron knows that his hope for his beloved Newstead is accomplished:

"Haply thy sun emerging yet may shine,
Thee to irradiate with meridian ray;
Hours splendid as the past may still be thine,
And bless thy future as thy former day."

WARWICKSHIRE: THE LOAMSHIRE OF GEORGE ELIOT

_Miss Mulock--Butler--Somervile--Dyer--Rugby--Homes of George Eliot--
Scenes of Tales--Cheverel--Shepperton--Milly's Grave--Paddiford--
Milby--Coventry, etc.--Characters--Incidents._

Some one has said that to write about Warwickshire is to write about Shakespeare. True, the transcending fame of the bard of Avon gives the places associated with his life and genius pre-eminence, but the literary rambler will find in this heart of England other shrines worthy of homage. Inevitably our pilgrimage includes the Stratford scenes,--from the birthplace and the Hathaway cottage to the fane where all the world bows at Shakespeare's tomb,--but, resolutely repressing the inclination to describe again these oft-described resorts, we fare to less familiar shrines: to the birthplace of the author of "Hudibras" and the haunts and tomb of Somervile, poet of "The Chase" and "Rural Sports;" to the Rhynhill of Braddon's tale and the Kenilworth of Scott's matchless romance; to Bilton, where Addison sometime dwelt, and the Calthorpe home of Dyer, bard of "Grongar Hill" and "The Fleece," where we find his garden and a tree he planted which shades now his battlemented old church; to Rugby, where we see the dormitory of "Tom Brown" Hughes, the class-rooms he shared with Clough, Matthew Arnold, and Dean Stanley, the grave of the beloved Dr. Arnold in the "Rugby Chapel" of his son's poem.

At Avonmouth we find the Norton Bury of "John Halifax," and the old inn where Dinah Mulock lived while writing this her popular tale. The inn garden holds the yew hedge of the novel, "fifteen feet high and as many thick," and the sward over which crept the lame Phineas: sitting there, we see the view the boy admired,--the old Abbey tower, the mill of Abel Fletcher, the river where the famished rioters fought for the grains the grim old man had flung into the water, the green level of the Ham dotted with cattle, the white sails of the encircling Severn, the farther sweep of country extending to the distant hills,--and hear the sweet-toned Abbey chimes and the lazy whir of the mill which sounded so pleasantly in Phineas's ears.

[Sidenote: Other Shrines--Loamshire]

[Sidenote: Birthplace and Home of George Eliot]

[Sidenote: Scenes of her Tales]

"John Halifax" was published simultaneously with another tale of Warwickshire life, "Amos Barton." We are newly come from the London homes of George Eliot and her grave on the Highgate hill-side, and now, as we traverse sweet Avonvale, we gladly remember that Shakespeare's shire is hers as well. A jaunt of a score of miles from Stratford brings us to the scenes amid which she was born and grew to physical and mental maturity. Our course by "Avon's stream," bowered by willows or bordered by meads, lies past the noble park where Shakespeare did not steal deer and the palace of his Justice Shallow where he was not arraigned for poaching. (We find it as impossible to keep Shakespeare out of our MS. as did Mr. Dick of "Copperfield" to keep Charles I. out of the memorial.) Beyond Charlecote is storied Warwick Castle, with the old mansion of Compton Wyniates, dwelling of the royalist knight of Scott's "Woodstock," not far away. Beyond these again we come to the Coventry region and the frontier of the "Loamshire" whose characteristics are imaged and whose traditions, phases of life, and scenery are wrought with tender touch into poem and tale by George Eliot and so made familiar to all the world. Warwickshire scenery is not sublime; Dr. Arnold characterized it as "an endless monotony of enclosed fields and hedgerow trees." While its landscapes lack striking features, theirs is the quiet, unobtrusive beauty which Hawthorne loved and which for us is full of restful charm. Across sunny vales and gentle eminences we look away to the far-off Malvern Hills, whose shadowy outlines bound many a "Loamshire" landscape. We see vistas of low-lying meads with circling "lines of willows marking the watercourses;" of slumberous expanses of green or golden fields; of villages grouped about gray church-towers; of groves of venerable woods,--survivors of Shakespeare's "Forest of Arden" which erst clothed the countryside. We find it, indeed, "worth the journey hither only to see the hedgerows,"--green, fragrant walls of hawthorn which border lane and highway, bound garden and field. With their gleaming boughs rayed by bright blossoms and festooned with interlacing vines, these barriers are often marvels of beauty and strength. Between miles of such hedgerows, and beneath lines of overshading elms, a highway running northward from the town of Godiva and "Peeping Tom" brings us to the great Arbury property of the Newdigates, where we find the South Farm homestead in which Robert Evans--newly appointed agent of the estate--temporarily placed his family, and where, in the room at the left of the central chimney-stack, at five o'clock on the morning of St. Cecilia's day, 1819, his youngest child, Mary Ann, was born. It is a broad-eaved, many-gabled, two-storied structure of stuccoed stone, with trim hedges and flower-bordered garden-beds about it, a wider environment of lawn and woodland, and colonnades of the elms which figure in her poems and were already venerable when she saw the light beneath their shade. On the same estate, near the highway between Bedworth and Nuneaton, is Griff House, "the warm nest where her affections were fledged," to which she was removed at the age of four months, and where her first score years of life were passed. It is a pleasant and picturesque double-storied mansion of brick, quaint and comfortable. Massy ivy mantles its walls, climbs to its gables, overruns its roofs, peeps in at its tiny-paned casements; doves coo upon its ridges. About it flowers shine from their setting in the emerald of the lawn, and great trees open their leaves to the sunshine and winds of summer. Spacious rooms lie upon either side of the entrance: of the one at the left, the novelist gives us a glimpse in "The Mill on the Floss." It is a home-like apartment, with low walls and a pleasant fireplace; it was the dining-room and sitting-room also in the days when "the little wench" Mary Ann was the pet of the household. Here she acted charades with her brother Isaac and astonished the family by repeating stories from "Miller's Jest Book," a treasured volume of hers in that early time. We learn from Maggie Tulliver--in whose childhood is pictured the author's inner life as a child--that Defoe's "History of the Devil" was another of Mary Ann's juvenile favorites, and her relatives preserve the worn copy she used to read here before this fireplace with her father, containing the pictures of the drowning witch and the devil which little Maggie explained to Mr. Riley in "The Mill on the Floss." Here, years afterward, Mary Ann heard, from her "Methodist Aunt Samuel," the thrilling story of the girl executed for child-murder, which was the germ of the great romance "Adam Bede." The aunt, who had been a preacher in earlier life, remained at Griff for some time, and George Eliot has told us that the character of Dinah Morris grew out of her recollections of this relative. It may be noted that in real life Dinah married Seth Bede, Adam being drawn in part--like Caleb Garth--from the novelist's father. In this same room, but a few years ago, the "Brother" of the poem, who played here at charades with little Mary Ann, suddenly expired in his chair but a few minutes after his return from "Shepperton Church." The windows of Mary Ann's chamber command a reach of the coach-road of "Felix Holt" and a farther vista of woodlands and fields; in another chamber is the mahogany bed beneath which she was once found hidden to avoid going to school. In the roof is the attic which was Maggie Tulliver's retreat, where she kept her wooden doll with the nails in its head, and here is the chimney-stack against which that vicarious sufferer was ground and beaten. The death of her mother, Mrs. Hackit of "Barton," made Mary Ann mistress of Griff at sixteen. At Griff's gates stood the cottage of Dame Moore's school, where the novelist began her education, and where years after she used to collect the children of the vicinage for religious instruction each Sabbath. A son of Mrs. Moore lately lived not far away, and had more to say in praise of "Mary Hann" than of her surviving kinsfolk, who seem ashamed of their relationship to the novelist. In a shaded part of the garden lately stood a bower with a stone table, which George Eliot doubtless had in mind when she described the finding of Casaubon's corpse in the arbor at Lowick. The exhausted quarries in the shale close by, a resort of Mary Ann's girlhood, are the "Red Deeps" where Maggie met her lover; the "brown canal" of the poem winds through the near hollow; and beyond it, on "an apology for an elevation of ground," is the "College" workhouse to which Amos Barton walked through the sleet to read prayers. Not far distant is Arbury Hall, seat of the Newdigates, for whom the tenant of Griff was and is agent. This is the Cheverel Manor of "Gilfil," an imposing castellated structure of gray stone, with flanking towers and great mullioned windows of multishaped panes, famous for its elaborately decorated ceilings. That George Eliot had often been within this mansion is shown by her familiarity with the arrangement and ornamentation of the rooms, accurately described as scenes of many incidents of the tale. In the grounds, too, the imagery of the "Love Story" may be perfectly realized: here are the lawn where little Caterina sat with Lady Cheverel, and the shimmering pool, with its swans and water-lilies, which was searched for her corpse the morning of her flight; at a little distance we find "Moss-lands," and the cottage of the gardener to which the dead body of Wybrow was carried; and, farther away, the spot under giant limes where the poor girl, coming to meet her recreant lover "with a dagger in her dress and murder in her heart," found him lying dead in the path, his hand clutching the dark leaves, his eyes unheeding the "sunlight that darted upon them between the boughs." A touching incident in the life of a former owner of Arbury was made the plot of Otway's tragedy "The Orphan."

[Sidenote: Shepperton Church--Milly's Grave]

A mile northward from Griff is the quaint church of Chilvers Coton, where Mary Ann was christened at the age of a week, where a little later her "devotional patience" was fostered by smuggled bread-and-butter, and where as child and woman she worshipped for twenty years. It is a massive stone edifice with Gothic windows, one of them being a memorial of the wife of Isaac Evans, and with a square tower rising above its low roofs; at one corner, "a flight of stone steps, with their wooden rail running up the outer wall," still leads to the children's gallery as in the days of Gilfil and Amos Barton, for this is the Shepperton Church of the tales. Within we see the memorials of Rev. Gilpin Ebdell (thought to be Gilfil) and of the original of Mrs. Farquhar; the place where Gilfil read his sermons from manuscript "rather yellow and worn at the edges," and where Barton later "preached without book." About the renovated fane is the church-yard, with its grassy mounds and mouldering tombstones, one of which, protected by a paling and shaded by leafy boughs, is crowned by a funeral urn and marks the spot where Milly was laid,--"the sweet mother with her baby in her arms,"--the grave to which Barton came back an old man with Patty supporting his infirm steps. Its inscription is to "Emma, beloved wife of Revd. John Gwyther, B.A.," curate here in George Eliot's girlhood: during his incumbency the community felt aggrieved for his wife on account of the prolonged stay at the parsonage of a strange woman who, years after, was described as Countess Czerlaski by one who as a child had seen her here. Not far from Milly's monument the parents of George Eliot lie in one grave, with Isaac, the "Brother" of her poem, sleeping near. By the church-yard wall stands the pleasant ivy-grown parsonage to which Gilfil brought his dark-eyed bride, and where, after brief months of happiness, he lived the long years of solitude and sorrow. We see the cosy parlor--smelling no longer of his or Barton's pipe--where the lonely old man sat with his dog, and above, its pretty window overlooking the garden, the chamber where he tenderly cherished the dainty belongings of his dead wife with the unused baby-clothes her fingers had fashioned, and where, in another tale, is laid one of the most affecting and high-wrought scenes in all fiction, the death of Milly Barton.

[Sidenote: Milby--Liggins]

A half-mile distant lies the village of Attleboro, where, at the age of five, Mary Ann was sent to Miss Lathorn's school; and a mile southward from Griff, in a region blackened by pits, is the town of Bedworth,--"dingy with coal-dust and noisy with looms,"--whose men "walk with knees bent outward from squatting in the mine," and whose haggard, overworked women and dirty children and cottages are pathetically pictured in "Felix Holt." Obviously the changes of the half-century which has elapsed since George Eliot knew its wretchedness have wrought little improvement in this place, over which her nephew is rector: we see pale, hungry faces in the streets, squalor in the poor dwellings, proofs of pinching poverty everywhere. A little beyond Chilvers Coton we find the market-town of Nuneaton, the Milby of the romances. The shaking of hand-looms is less noticeable now than in George Eliot's school-days here, factories having supplanted the cottage industry; but the dingy, smoky town, with its environment of flat fields, is still "nothing but dreary prose." Here we find, near the church, "The Elms" of her girlhood, a tall brick edifice embowered with ivy; on its garden side, the long low-ceiled school-room, with its heavy beams, broad windows, and plain furniture, where she was four years a pupil; the dormitory whence she beheld the riot which she describes in the election-riot at Treby in "Felix Holt." Another vision of her girlhood here was a "tall, black-coated young clergyman-in-embryo," Liggins by name, who afterward claimed the authorship of her books and so far imposed upon the public that a subscription was made for him. Mrs. Gaskell was one of the last to relinquish the belief that Liggins was George Eliot. He spent most of his time drinking, but did his own house-work, and was found by a deputation of literary admirers washing his slop-basin at the pump. All about us at Nuneaton lie familiar objects: the cosy Bull Inn is the "Red Lion" where, in the opening of "Janet's Repentance," Dempser is discovered in theologic discussion, and from whose window he harangued the anti-Tyranite mob; the fine old church, with its beautiful oaken carvings, is the sanctuary where Mr. Crewe, in brown Brutus wig, delivered his "inaudible sermons," and where Mr. Elty preached later; adjoining is the parsonage, erst redolent of Crewe's tobacco, where Janet helped his deaf wife to spread the luncheon for the bishop, and where, in the time of Elty, Barton came to the sessions of the "Clerical Meeting and Book Society;" on this Church street, "Orchard Street" of Eliot, a quaint stuccoed house with casement windows was Dempser's home, whence he thrust his wife at midnight into the darkness and cold; the arched passage near by is that through which she fled to the haven of Mrs. Pettifer's house. A little way westward amid the pits is Stockingford, "Paddiford" of the tale, and the chapel where Mr. Tyran preached. A cousin of George Eliot's was recently a coal-master in this vicinity.

[Sidenote: Coventry--Birds Grove]

[Sidenote: Coventry Friends]

Eight miles from Griff is Coventry, where our companion is one who had met Rossetti there forty years before. George Eliot was sometime a pupil of Miss Franklin's school, lately standing in Little Park Street, and saw there that lady's father, whom she described as Rev. Rufus Lyon of Treby Chapel. His diminutive legs, large head, and other peculiarities are yet remembered by some who were in the school; his home is accurately pictured in "Felix Holt." In the Foleshill suburb we find the stone villa of Birds Grove, which was the home of the novelist after Isaac Evans had succeeded his father at Griff. The house has been enlarged, but the apartments she knew are little changed: a plain little room above the entrance, whose window looked beyond the tree-tops to the superb spire of St. Michael's Church,--where Kemble and Siddons were married,--was her study, in which, despite her tasks as her father's housewife and nurse, she accomplished much literary work. At the right of the window stood her desk, with an ivory crucifix above it, and here her translation of Strauss's "Leben Jesu," undertaken through the persuasion of her friends at Rosehill, was written. Some portions of this work she found distressing; she declared to Mrs. Bray that nothing but the sight of the Christ image enabled her to endure dissecting the beautiful story of the crucifixion. Adjoining the study is her modest bedchamber, and beyond it that of her father, where during many months of sickness she was his sole attendant, often sitting the long night through at his bedside with her hand in his. The grounds are little changed, save that the occupant has removed much of the foliage which formerly shrouded the mansion, but some of George Eliot's favorite trees remain on the lawn. Half a mile away is the pretty villa of Rosehill, whilom the home of Mrs. Bray and her sister Sara Hennel, who were the most valued friends of the novelist's young-womanhood and exerted the strongest influence upon her life. Her letters to these friends constitute a great part of Cross's "Life." At Rosehill she met Chapman, Mackay, Robert Owen, Combe, Thackeray, Herbert Spencer, and others of like genius, and here she spent a day with Emerson and wrote next day, "I have seen Emerson--the first _man_ I have ever seen." Sara Hennel testifies that Emerson was impressed with Miss Evans and declared, "That young lady has a serious soul." When he asked her, "What one book do you like best?" and she replied, "Rousseau's Confessions," he quickly responded, "So do I: there is a point of sympathy between us." After her father's death she was for sixteen months a resident at Rosehill, and there wrote, among other things, the review of Mackay's "Progress of the Intellect." Financial reverses caused the Brays long ago to relinquish this beautiful home, but some of this household were lately living in another suburb of Coventry and receiving an annuity bequeathed by George Eliot. Here, too, lately resided another old-time friend, the Mary Sibtree of the novelist's Coventry days, to whom were addressed some of the letters used by Cross.

In 1851 George Eliot left this circle of friends to become an inmate of Chapman's house in London, returning to them for occasional visits for the next few years; then came her union with Lewes, after which the loved scenes of her youth knew her no more in the flesh; but the allusions to them which run like threads of gold through all her work show how oft she revisited them in "shadowy spirit form."

YORKSHIRE SHRINES: DOTHEBOYS HALL AND ROKEBY

_Village of Bowes--Dickens--Squeers's School--The Master and his
Family--Haunt of Scott._

[Sidenote: Bowes--Dotheboys Hall]

From the familiar shrines of Cumberland, the lakeside haunts of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, a journey across a wild moorland region--from whose higher crags we see through the fog-rifts the German Ocean and the Irish Sea--brings us into Gretavale, on the northern border of great Yorkshire. In the upper portion of the valley, among the outlying spurs of the Pennines, the storied Greta flows at the foot of a bleak, treeless hill on whose summit we find the village of Bowes. This was the Lavatrae of the Romans, who for three centuries had here a station, and remains of great Roman works may still be traced in the vicinage; but to the literary pilgrim Bowes is chiefly of interest as representing "the delightful village of Dotheboys" described in Squeers's advertisement of his school in "Nicholas Nickleby." The aspect of the village is dreary and desolate in the extreme. A single street, steep and straight, bordered by straggling houses of dull gray stone, extends along the hill, which is crowned by the church and an ancient castle: the dun moors decline steeply on every side, leaving the treeless village dismal and bare and often exposed to a wind "fit to knock a man off his legs," as Squeers said to Nicholas. In the midst of the village stands a cosy inn, where Dickens for some time lodged and was visited by John Browdie, and where we are shown the wainscoted apartment in which some portion of "Nickleby" was noted. At the time of Dickens's sojourn here, Bowes was the centre of the pernicious cheap-school system which he came to expose, and half the houses of the village were "academies" similar to that of Squeers: among them one is pointed out as being the place where Cobden was a pupil. But most interesting of all is the large house at the top of the hill which Dickens depicted as Dotheboys Hall,--by which name it was long known among the older dwellers of the place,--a long, heavy, two-storied, dingy structure of stone, with many windows along its front, and presenting, despite its bowering vines and trees, an aspect so chill and cheerless that one can scarcely conceive of a more depressing domicile for the neglected children who once thronged it. Through an archway at one end could be seen the pump which was frozen on the first morning of Nicholas's stay, and beyond it the garden which, by a surprising mistake, Dickens represents a pupil to be weeding on a freezing winter's day.

[Sidenote: Squeers]

A few residents of the neighborhood remember the "measther" of Dotheboys Hall; his name, like Squeers's, was of one syllable and began with S; in person he was not like Squeers, nor was he an ignorant man. A quondam pupil of the school informed the writer that Johnny S. was fairly drawn as Wackford Squeers, but Miss S. was a young lady of considerable refinement and was in no sense like the spiteful Fanny of the tale. Squeers had the largest of the schools, and, besides rooms in the adjoining house, he hired barns in which to lodge his many pupils. A farm attached to his house was cultivated by the scholars, whose food was chiefly oatmeal: scanty diet and liberal flogging was the portion of all who displeased the master. According to local belief, this school was not so bad as some of its neighbors, and no one of the schools realized all the wretchedness which Dickens portrays; yet, despite the author's avowal that Squeers was a representative of a class, and not an individual, the popular identification of this school as the typical Dotheboys, and the odium consequent thereupon, wrought its speedy ruin and the death of the master and mistress. The latter result is to be deplored, for the reason that in the case of this pair the abhorrence seems to have been not wholly deserved. Two charges, at least, which affected them most painfully--that of goading the boys to suicide and that of feeding them upon the flesh of diseased cattle--were, by the testimony of their neighbors, unfounded so far as the proprietors of this school were concerned. Relatives of Squeers lately occupied Dotheboys Hall, which had become a farm-house, and other relatives and descendants are respectable denizens of the vicinity. Dickens's exposure of the schools led to their extinction and to the consignment of Bowes to its present somnolent condition. In the village church-yard lie the lovers whose simultaneous deaths were commemorated by Mallet in "Edwin and Emma." At Barnard Castle, a few miles away, the prototype of Newman Noggs is still traditionally known, and known as "a gentleman."

[Sidenote: Rokeby]

The abounding beauties of the Greta have been painted by Turner and sung by Scott, both frequenters of this vale. From Bowes, a ramble along the lovely stream, between steep tree-shaded banks where it chafes and "greets" over the great rocks, and through mossy dells where it softly murmurs its content, brings us to the demesne of Rokeby, where Scott laid the scene of his famous poem. On every hand amid this region of enchantment, in glade and grove, in riven cliff and headlong torrent, in sunny slope and dingle's shade, we recognize the poetic imagery of Scott. Every turn reveals some new vista, rendered doubly delightful by the romantic associations with which the great poet has invested it. To the poet himself Greta's banks were potent allurements, and they were his habitual haunts during his sojourns in the valley. A descendant of the friend whom Scott visited here and to whom the poem is inscribed, points out to us a natural grotto, in the precipitous bank above the stream, where the poet often sat, and where some part of "Rokeby" was pondered and composed amid the scenery it portrays.

STERNE'S SWEET RETIREMENT

_Sutton--Crazy Castle--Yorick's Church--Parsonage--Where Tristram
Shandy and the Sentimental Journey were written--Reminiscences--
Newburgh Hall--Where Sterne died--Sepulchre._

At historic old York we are fairly in the midst of great Yorkshire: standing upon the tower of its colossal cathedral, we overlook half that ancient county. At our feet lie the quaint olden streets depicted in Collins's "No Name," where erstwhile dwelt Porteus, Defoe, Wallis, Lindley Murray, Mrs. Stannard, Poole of "Synopsis Criticorum," Burton the author immortalized by Sterne as "Dr. Slop." Below us we see the feudal castle where Eugene Aram was hanged, the ancient city wall with its gate-ways and battlements, the ruins of mediaeval shrine and of Roman citadel and necropolis; abroad we behold the vale which Bunsen pronounces the "most beautiful in the world (the vale of Normandy excepted)," with its streams, its mosaics of green and golden fields and sombre woods, its distant border of savage moors and uplands. The Ouse, shining like a ribbon of silver, flows at our feet; we may trace its course from the hills of Craven on the one hand, while southward we behold it "slow winding through the level plain" on its way to the sea; into its valley we see the Wharfe flowing from the lovely dale where Collyer grew to manhood, and, farther away, the Aire emerging from the dreary region where lived the sad sisters Bronte and wove the sombre threads of their lives into romance. The Foss flows toward us from the northeast, and our view along its valley embraces the region where dwelt Sydney Smith, while rising in the north are the Hambleton Hills, which shelter the vale where Sterne wrote the books that made him famous. Indeed, this region of York is pervaded with memories of that prince of sentimentalists: in the great minster beneath us we find the tomb and monument of his grandfather, once archbishop of this diocese; in the carved pulpit of the minster Sterne preached as prebendary, and here he delivered his last sermon; his uncle was a dignitary of the old minster; his "indefatigably prolific" mother was native to this region; his wife was born here, and was first seen and loved by Sterne within sound of the glorious minster bells; most of his adult life was passed within sight of the minster towers.

[Sidenote: Crazy Castle]

[Sidenote: Sterne's Church]

At Sutton, Sterne's first living, the pilgrim finds little to reward his devotion. Sterne's life here was obscure and, save in preparation, unproductive. Skelton Castle was then the seat of his college friend Stevenson, author of "Crazy Tales," etc., who was the Eugenius of "Shandy," and to whom the "Sentimental Journey" was inscribed. Here Sterne found a library rich in rare treatises upon unusual subjects, in which, during his stay at Sutton, he spent much time and acquired a fund of odd and fanciful learning which constituted in part his equipment for his work. We find this castle nearer the stern coast which Yorkshire opposes to the endless thunders of the North Sea. Once a Roman stronghold, then a feudal fortress and castle of the Bruces, later a country-seat, it has since Sterne's time been rebuilt and modernized out of all semblance to the "Crazy Castle" of his letters. It is believed that only a few of the rooms remain substantially as he knew them. A tradition is preserved to the effect that during his visits here he bribed the servants to tie the vane with the point toward the west, because Eugenius would never leave his bed while an east wind prevailed. A near-by hill is called Sterne's Seat, but time has left here little to remind us of the sentimental "Yorick" who long haunted the place. It is only at Coxwold, fourteen miles from York and in the deeper depths of the shire, that we find many remaining objects that were associated with his work and with that portion of his life which chiefly concerns the literary world. A result of the publication of the first part of "Tristram Shandy" was the presentation of this living to its author, and his removal to this sequestered retreat, which was to be his home during his too few remaining years. The hamlet has now a railway station, but the usual approach is by a rustic highway which conducts to and constitutes the village street. Within the hamlet we find a low-eaved road-side inn, and by it the shaded green where the rural festivals were held, and where, to celebrate the coronation of George III., Sterne had an ox roasted whole and served with great quantities of ale to his parishioners. Just beyond, Sterne's church stands intact upon a gentle eminence, overlooking a lovely pastoral landscape bounded by verdant hills. The church dates from the fifteenth century and is a pleasing structure of perpendicular Gothic style, with a shapely octagonal tower embellished with fretted pinnacles and a parapet of graceful design. One window has been filled with stained glass, but Sterne's pulpit remains, and the interior of the edifice is scarcely changed since he preached here his quaint sermons. The walls are plain; the low ceiling is divided by beams whose intersections are marked by grotesque bosses; the whole effect is depressing, and to the sensitive "Yorick"--haunted as he was by habitual dread that his ministrations might provoke a fatal pulmonary hemorrhage--it must have been dismal indeed. Among the effigied tombs of the Fauconbergs which line the chancel we find that of Sterne's friend who gave him this living.

[Sidenote: Shandy Hall]

[Sidenote: Sterne's Parsonage--Study]

Beyond the church and near the highway stands the quaint and picturesque old edifice where dwelt Sterne during the eight famous years of his life. In his letters he calls it Castle Shandy, and in all the countryside it is now known as Shandy Hall, shandy meaning in the local dialect crack-brained. It is a long, rambling, low-eaved fabric, with many heavy gables and chimneys, and steep roofs of tiles. Curious little casements are under the eaves; larger windows look out from the gables and are aligned nearer the ground, many of them shaded by the dark ivy which clings to the old walls and overruns the roofs. Abutting the kitchen is an astounding pyramidal structure of masonry--an Ailsa Craig in shape and solidity, yet more resembling Stromboli with its emissions of smoke,--which, beginning at the ground as a buttress, terminates as a kitchen-chimney and imparts to this portion of the house an architectural character altogether unique. Shrubbery grows about the old domicile, venerable trees which may have cast their shade upon "Yorick" himself are by the door, and the aspect of the place is decidedly attractive. To Sir George Wombwell, who inherits the Fauconberg estate through a daughter of Sterne's patron, we are indebted for the preservation of the exterior of the house in the condition it was when Sterne inhabited it; but the interior has been partitioned into two dwellings and thus considerably altered. However, we may see the same sombre wainscots and low ceiling that Sterne knew, and we find the one room which interests us most--Sterne's parlor and study--little changed. It is a pleasant apartment, with windows looking into the garden, where stood the summer-house in which he sometimes wrote, and beyond which was the sward where "my uncle Toby" habitually demonstrated the siege of Namur and Dendermond. On the low walls of this room Sterne disposed his seven hundred books,--"bought at a purchase dog-cheap,"--and here he wrote, besides his sermons, seven volumes of "Tristram Shandy" and the "Sentimental Journey." There is a local tradition that other MSS. written here were found by the succeeding tenant and used to line the hangings of the room. Sterne's letters afford glimpses of him in this room: in one we see him "before the fire, with his cat purring beside him;" in another he is "sitting here and cudgelling his brains" for ideas, though he usually wrote facilely and rapidly; in another he shows us a prettier picture, in which "My Lydia" (his daughter) "helps to copy for me, and my wife knits and listens as I read her chapters;" and later, after his estrangement from Mrs. Sterne, we see him "sitting here alone, as sad and solitary as a tomcat, which by the way is all the company I keep." In the repose of this charming place, and amid the peaceful influences about him here in his pretty home, Sterne appears at his best. And here for a time he was happy; we find his letters attesting, "I am in high spirits, care never enters this cottage;" "I am happy as a prince at Coxwold;" "I wish you could see in what a princely manner I live. I sit down to dinner--fish and wild fowl, or a couple of fowls, with cream and all the simple plenty a rich valley can produce, with a clean cloth on my table and a bottle of wine on my right hand to drink your health." But the melancholy days came all too soon; the "bursting of vessels in his lungs" became more and more frequent, his struggle with dread consumption was inaugurated, and now his letters from the pretty parsonage abound with references to his "vile cough, weak nerves, dismal headaches," etc. Now his "sweet retirement" has become "a cuckoldy retreat;" he complains of its situation, of its "death-doing, pestiferous wind." Returning to it from a sentimental journey or from a brilliant season of lionizing in London, he finds its quiet and seclusion insufferably irksome. Mortally ill, growing old, hopelessly estranged from his wife, deprived of the companionship of his idolized child, the poor master of Castle Shandy is "sad and desolate," his "pleasures are few," he sits "alone in silence and gloom." Such were some of the diverse phases of his life which these dumb walls have witnessed; in the dismalest, they have seen him at his desk here, resolutely ignoring his ills and tracing the passages of wit and fancy which were to delight the world. The incomplete "Sentimental Journey" was written in his last months of life.

A mile from Sterne's cottage, and approached by a way oft trodden by him and his "little Lyd," is Newburgh Hall, the ancient seat of Sterne's friend. Parts of the walls of a priory founded here in 1145 are incorporated into the oldest portion of the hall, and this has been added to by successive generations until a great, incongruous pile has resulted, which, however, is not devoid of picturesque beauty. Within this mansion Sterne was a familiar guest: urged by the friendly persistence of Fauconberg, he frequently came here to chat or dine with his friend and the guests of the hall, his brilliant converse making him the life of the company. Among the family portraits here are that of his benefactor and one of Mary Cromwell, wife of the second Fauconberg, who preserved here many relics of the great Protector, including his bones, which were somehow rescued from Tyburn and concealed in a mass of masonry in an upper apartment of the hall.

Sterne was not only popular with his lordly neighbor of Newburgh, but also, improbable as it would seem, with the illiterate yeomen who were his parishioners: although they understood not the sermons and found the sermonizer in most regards a hopeless enigma, yet, according to the traditions of the place, these simple folk discerned something in the complexly blended character of the creator of "my uncle Toby" which elicited their esteem and prompted many acts of love and service. In a letter to an American friend, Arthur Lee, Sterne writes, "Not a parishioner catches a hare, a rabbit, or a trout, but he brings it an offering to me."

[Sidenote: Place of Sterne's Death and Burial]

As set forth by the inscription at Sterne's cottage, he died in London. One autumn day we find ourselves pondering the sad event of his last sojourn in the great city, as we stand upon the spot where his "truceless fight with disease" was ended, barely a fortnight after the "Sentimental Journey" was issued. His wish to die "untroubled by the concern of his friends and the last service of wiping his brows and smoothing his pillow" was literally realized. During the publication of the "Journey" he lodged in rooms above a silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street; here he rapidly sank, and in the evening of March 18, 1768, attended only by a hireling who robbed his body, and in the presence of a staring footman, the dying man suddenly cried, "Now it is come!" and, raising his hand as if to repel a blow, expired. A few furlongs distant, opposite Hyde Park, we find an old cemetery hidden from the streets by houses and high walls which shut out the din of the great city. Here, in seclusion almost as complete as that of the graveyard of his own Coxwold, Sterne was consigned to earth. The spot is overlooked by the windows of Thackeray's sometime home. An old tree stands close by, and in its boughs the birds twitter above us as we essay to read the inscription which marks Sterne's poor sepulchre. But, mean and neglected as it is, we may never know that his ashes found rest even here; a report which has too many elements of probability and which never was disproved, avers that the grave was desecrated and that a horror-stricken friend recognized Sterne's mutilated corse upon the dissecting-table of a medical school. "Alas, poor Yorick!"

HAWORTH AND THE BRONTES

_The Village--Black Bull Inn--Church--Vicarage--Memory-haunted
Rooms--Bronte Tomb--Moors--Bronte Cascade--Wuthering Heights--Humble
Friends--Relic and Recollection._

Other Bronte shrines have engaged us,--Guiseley, where Patrick Bronte was married and Neilson worked as a mill-girl; the lowly Thornton home, where Charlotte was born; the cottage where she visited Harriet Martineau; the school where she found Caroline Helstone and Rose and Jessy Yorke; the Fieldhead, Lowood, and Thornfield of her tales; the Villette where she knew her hero; but it is the bleak Haworth hill-top where the Brontes wrote the wonderful books and lived the pathetic lives that most attracts and longest holds our steps. Our way is along Airedale, now a highway of toil and trade, desolated by the need of hungry poverty and greed of hungrier wealth: meads are replaced by blocks of grimy huts, groves are supplanted by factory chimneys that assoil earth and heaven, the once "shining" stream is filthy with the refuse of many mills. At Keighley our walk begins, and, although we have no peas in our "pilgrim shoon," the way is heavy with memories of the sad sisters Bronte who so often trod the dreary miles which bring us to Haworth. The village street, steep as a roof, has a pavement of rude stones, upon which the wooden shoes of the villagers clank with an unfamiliar sound. The dingy houses of gray stone, barren and ugly in architecture, are huddled along the incline and encroach upon the narrow street. The place and its situation are a proverb of ugliness in all the countryside; one dweller in Airedale told us that late in the evening of the last day of creation it was found that a little rubbish was left, and out of that Haworth was made. But, grim and rough as it is, the genius of a little woman has made the place illustrious and draws to it visitors from every quarter of the world. We are come in the "glory season" of the moors, and as we climb through the village we behold above and beyond it vast undulating sweeps of amethyst-tinted hills rising circle beyond circle,--all now one great expanse of purple bloom stirred by zephyrs which waft to us the perfume of the heather.

[Sidenote: Black Bull Inn]

At the hill-top we come to the Black Bull Inn, where one Bronte drowned his genius in drink, and from our apartment here we look upon all the shrines we seek. The inn stands at the church-yard gates, and is one of the landmarks of the place. Long ago preacher Grimshaw flogged the loungers from its tap-room into chapel; here Wesley and Whitefield lodged when holding meetings on the hill-top; here Bronte's predecessor took refuge from his riotous parishioners, finally escaping through the low casement at the back,--out of which poor Branwell Bronte used to vault when his sisters asked for him at the door. This inn is a quaint structure, low-eaved and cosy; its furniture is dark with age. We sleep in a bed once occupied by Henry J. Raymond, and so lofty that steps are provided to ascend its heights. Our meals are served in the old-fashioned parlor to which Branwell came. In a nook between the fireplace and the before-mentioned casement stood the tall arm-chair, with square seat and quaintly carved back, which was reserved for him. The landlady denied that he was summoned to entertain travellers here: "he never needed to be sent for, he came fast enough of himsel'." His wit and conviviality were usually the life of the circle, but at times he was mute and abstracted and for hours together "would just sit and sit in his corner there." She described him as a "little, red-haired, light-complexioned chap, cleverer than all his sisters put together. What they put in their books they got from him," quoth she, reminding us of the statement in Grundy's Reminiscences that Branwell declared he invented the plot and wrote the major part of "Wuthering Heights." Certain it is he possessed transcending genius and that in this room that genius was slain. Here he received the message of renunciation from his depraved mistress which finally wrecked his life; the landlady, entering after the messenger had gone, found him in a fit on the floor. Emily Bronte's rescue of her dog, an incident recorded in "Shirley," occurred at the inn door.

[Sidenote: Church--Bronte Tomb]

The graveyard is so thickly sown with blackened tombstones that there is scant space for blade or foliage to relieve its dreariness, and the villagers, for whom the yard is a thoroughfare, step from tomb to tomb: in the time of the Brontes the village women dried their linen on these graves. Close to the wall which divides the church-yard from the vicarage is a plain stone set by Charlotte Bronte to mark the grave of Tabby, the faithful servant who served the Brontes from their childhood till all but Charlotte were dead. The very ancient church-tower still "rises dark from the stony enclosure of its yard;" the church itself has been remodelled and much of its romantic interest destroyed. No interments have been made in the vaults beneath the aisles since Mr. Bronte was laid there. The site of the Bronte pew is by the chancel; here Emily sat in the farther corner, Anne next, and Charlotte by the door, within a foot of the spot where her ashes now lie. A former sacristan remembered to have seen Thackeray and Miss Martineau sitting with Charlotte in the pew. And here, almost directly above her sepulchre, she stood one summer morning and gave herself in marriage to the man who served for her as "faithfully and long as did Jacob for Rachel." The Bronte tablet in the wall bears a uniquely pathetic record, its twelve lines registering eight deaths, of which Mr. Bronte's, at the age of eighty-five, is the last. On a side aisle is a beautiful stained window inscribed "To the Glory of God, in Memory of Charlotte Bronte, by an American citizen." The list shows that most of the visitors come from America, and it was left for a dweller in that far land to set up here almost the only voluntary memento of England's great novelist. A worn page of the register displays the tremulous autograph of Charlotte as she signs her maiden name for the last time, and the signatures of the witnesses to her marriage,--Miss Wooler, of "Roe Head," and Ellen Nussy, who is the E of Charlotte's letters and the Caroline of "Shirley."

[Sidenote: Bronte Parsonage--Apartments]

The vicarage and its garden are out of a corner of the church-yard and separated from it by a low wall. A lane lies along one side of the church-yard and leads from the street to the vicarage gates. The garden, which was Emily's care, where she tended stunted shrubs and borders of unresponsive flowers and where Charlotte planted the currant-bushes, is beautiful with foliage and flowers, and its boundary wall is overtopped by a screen of trees which shuts out the depressing prospect of the graves from the vicarage windows and makes the place seem less "a church-yard home" than when the Brontes inhabited it. The dwelling is of gray stone, two stories high, of plain and sombre aspect. A wing is added, the little window-panes are replaced by larger squares, the stone floors are removed or concealed, curtains--forbidden by Mr. Bronte's dread of fire--shade the windows, and the once bare interior is furbished and furnished in modern style; but the arrangement of the apartments is unchanged. Most interesting of these is the Bronte parlor, at the left of the entrance; here the three curates of "Shirley" used to take tea with Mr. Bronte and were upbraided by Charlotte for their intolerance; here the sisters discussed their plots and read each other's MSS.; here they transmuted the sorrows of their lives into the stories which make the name of Bronte immortal; here Emily, "her imagination occupied with Wuthering Heights," watched in the darkness to admit Branwell coming late and drunken from the Black Bull; here Charlotte, the survivor of all, paced the night-watches in solitary anguish, haunted by the vanished faces, the voices forever stilled, the echoing footsteps that came no more. Here, too, she lay in her coffin. The room behind the parlor was fitted by Charlotte for Nichols's study. On the right was Bronte's study, and behind it the kitchen, where the sisters read with their books propped on the table before them while they worked, and where Emily (prototype of "Shirley"), bitten by a dog at the gate of the lane, took one of Tabby's glowing irons from the fire and cauterized the wound, telling no one till danger was past. Above the parlor is the chamber in which Charlotte and Emily died, the scene of Nichols's loving ministrations to his suffering wife. Above Bronte's study was his chamber; the adjoining children's study was later Branwell's apartment and the theatre of the most terrible tragedies of the stricken family; here that ill-fated youth writhed in the horrors of _mania-a-potu_; here Emily rescued him--stricken with drunken stupor--from his burning couch, as "Jane Eyre" saved Rochester; here he breathed out his blighted life erect upon his feet, his pockets filled with love-letters from the perfidious woman who wrought his ruin. Even now the isolated site of the parsonage, its environment of graves and wild moors, its exposure to the fierce winds of the long winters, make it unspeakably dreary; in the Bronte time it must have been cheerless indeed. Its influence darkened the lives of the inmates and left its fateful impression upon the books here produced. Visitors are rarely admitted to the vicarage; among those against whom its doors have been closed is the gifted daughter of Charlotte's literary idol, to whom "Jane Eyre" was dedicated, Thackeray.

[Sidenote: The Moors]

By the vicarage lane were the cottage of Tabby's sister, the school the Brontes daily visited, and the sexton's dwelling where the curates lodged. Behind the vicarage a savage expanse of gorse and heather rises to the horizon and stretches many miles away: a path oft trodden by the Brontes leads between low walls from their home to this open moor, their habitual resort in childhood and womanhood. The higher plateaus afford a wide prospect, but, despite the August bloom and fragrance and the delightful play of light and shadow along the sinuous sweeps, the aspect of the bleak, treeless, houseless waste of uplands is even now dispiriting; when frosts have destroyed its verdure and wintry skies frown above, its gloom and desolation must be terrible beyond description. Remembering that the sisters found even these usually dismal moors a welcome relief from their tomb of a dwelling, we may appreciate the utter dreariness of their situation and the pathos of Charlotte's declaration, "I always dislike to leave Haworth, it takes so long to be content again after I return." We trace the steps of the Brontes across the moor to the cascade, called now the "Bronte Falls," where a brooklet descends over great boulders into a shaded glen. This was their favorite excursion, and as we loiter here we recall their many visits to the spot: first they came four children to play upon these rocks; later came three grave maidens with Caroline Helstone or Rose Yorke; later came two saddened women; and then Charlotte came alone, finding the moor a featureless wilderness full of torturing reminders of her dead, and seeing their vanished forms "in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon." Later still, during her few months of happiness, she came here many times with her husband, and her last walk on earth was made with him to see the cascade "in its winter wildness and power."

[Sidenote: Wuthering Heights]

Above the village was the parsonage of Grimshaw and the original "Wuthering Heights." It was a sombre structure; a few trees grew about it, the moors rose behind; the apartments were like the oak-lined, stone-paved interior pictured in the tale, while the inscription above the door, H E 1659, was changed to Hareton Earnshaw 1500 by Miss Bronte, who described here much of her own grandfather's early life and suffering and portrayed his wife in Catherine Linton. It is notable that the name Earnshaw and other names in the Bronte books may be seen on shop-signs along the way the sisters walked to Keighley.

[Sidenote: Recollections of the Brontes]