Chapter III: Staffordshire (1)

This is the Black Country _par excellence_,--a county whose heraldic blazon should be the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. It belongs to the central plain of England, save on the northeast, where the lower end of the Pennine chain breaks into picturesque highlands. Its gently undulating reaches are still largely given over to agriculture, but the bulk of its population, the most of its energy and wealth, are concentrated in the manufacturing towns that so thickly stud the surface over its two coal-fields. The northern is the last of that long line of coal-measures running down from Lancashire; the southern is much larger, though not so workable, and extends across all South Staffordshire. Both north and south, iron in rich quantities is found with the coal, so that for many years Staffordshire controlled the iron trade of the world. Of late, South Wales and other regions are successfully disputing its supremacy.

We had, in previous visits to England, crossed Staffordshire several times by train, and memory retained an unattractive impression of netted railways, forests of factory chimneys, and grimy miners sweethearting with rough pitgirls under smoke and cinders. If we must enter it now, the occasion seemed propitious for a trial of the automobile,--a mode of conveyance which we had deemed too sacrilegious for the Border and the Lake Country.

Toward ten o'clock on an August morning--for the chauffeur, like our Cheshire coachman, could not be hurried over his "bit of breakfast"--we tucked ourselves and a confiding Shrewsbury lady into a snug motor-car, and away we sped through northeastern Shropshire across the county line. In a gasp or two the name Eccleshall glimmered through the dust that flew against our goggles. This little town has one of the finest churches in the county, but the frenzy of speed was on us, and we tore by. Suddenly we came upon the Trent, winding along, at what struck us as a contemptibly sluggish pace, down Staffordshire on its circuitous route to the Humber. We tooted our horn and honked up its western side to the Potteries. Here the machine suffered an attack of cramps, and while it was groaning and running around in a circle and pawing the air, we had our first opportunity to look about us.

The region known as the Potteries, the chief seat of the earthenware manufactures of England, consists of a strip of densely populated land in this upper basin of the Trent, a strip some ten miles long by two miles broad, whose serried towns and villages give the aspect of one continuous street. Within this narrow district are over three hundred potteries, whose employees number nearly forty thousand, apart from the accessory industries of clay-grinding, bone-grinding, flint-grinding, and the like. It draws on its own beds of coal and iron, but the china-clay comes from Cornwall by way of Runcorn and the Grand Trunk Canal, while for flints it depends on the south coast of England and on France. Genius here is named Josiah Wedgwood. This inventor of fine porcelains, whose "Queen's ware" gained him the title of "Queen's Potter," was born in 1759 at Burslem, which had been making brown butter-pots as far back as the days of Charles I. When Burslem grew too small for his enterprise, Wedgwood established the pottery village of Etruria, to which the automobile passionately refused to take us. It dashed us into Newcastle-under-Lyme, where we did not particularly want to go, and rushed barking by Stoke-under-Trent, the capital of the Potteries and also--though we had not breath to mention it--the birthplace of Dinah Mulock Craik. In the last town of the line, Longtown, our machine fairly balked, and the chauffeur with dignity retired under it. A crowd of keen-faced men and children gathered about us, while we ungoggled to observe the endless ranks of house-doors opening into baby-peopled passages,--and, looming through the murky air, the bulging ovens of the china factories. At last our monster snorted on again, wiggling up the hill sideways with a grace peculiar to itself and exciting vain hopes of a wreck in the hearts of our attendant urchins. It must have been the Potteries that disagreed with it, for no sooner were their files of chimneys left behind than it set off at a mad pace for Uttoxeter, on whose outskirts we "alighted," like Royalty, for a wayside luncheon of sandwiches, ale, and dust.

Uttoxeter is no longer the idle little town that Hawthorne found it, when he made pilgrimage thither in honour of Dr. Johnson's penance, for the good Doctor, heart-troubled for fifty years because in boyhood he once refused to serve in his father's stead at the market bookstall, had doomed himself to stand, the whole day long, in the staring market-place, wind and rain beating against his bared grey head, "a central image of Memory and Remorse." Lichfield, Dr. Johnson's native city, commemorates this characteristic act by a bas-relief on the pedestal of the statue standing opposite the three-pillared house where the greatest of her sons was born.

While our chauffeur, resting from his labours under the hedge, genially entertained the abuse of a drunken tramp who was accusing us all of luxury, laziness, and a longing to run down our fellowmen, my thoughts turned wistfully to Lichfield, lying due south, to whose "Queen of English Minsters" we were ashamed to present our modern hippogriff. I remembered waking there one autumnal morning, years ago, at the famous old inn of the Swan, and peering from my window to see that wooden bird, directly beneath it, flapping in a rainy gale. The cathedral rose before the mental vision,--the grace of its three spires; its wonderful west front with tiers of saints and prophets and archangels, "a very Te Deum in stone"; the delicate harmonies of colour and line within; the glowing windows of the Lady Chapel; the "heaven-loved innocence" of the two little sisters sculptured by Chantrey, and his kneeling effigy of a bishop so benignant even in marble that a passing child slipped from her mother's hand and knelt beside him to say her baby prayers. What books had been shown me there in that quiet library above the chapter-house! I could still recall the richly illuminated manuscript of the "Canterbury Tales," a volume of Dr. South's sermons with Dr. Johnson's rough, vigorous pencil-marks all up and down the margins, and, treasure of treasures, an eighth-century manuscript of St. Chad's Gospels. For this is St. Chad's cathedral, still his, though the successive churches erected on this site have passed like human generations, each building itself into the next.

St. Chad, hermit and bishop, came from Ireland as an apostle to Mercia in the seventh century. Among his first converts were the king's two sons, martyred for their faith. Even in these far distant days his tradition is revered, and on Holy Thursday the choristers of the cathedral yet go in procession to St. Chad's Well, bearing green boughs and chanting. A century or so ago, the well was adorned with bright garlands for this festival. The boy Addison, whose father was Dean of Lichfield, may have gathered daffodils and primroses to give to good St. Chad.

The ancient city has other memories. Farquhar set the scene of his "Beaux' Stratagem" there. Major André knew those shaded walks. In the south transept of the cathedral is the sepulchre of Garrick, whose death, the inscription tells us, "eclipsed the gaiety of nations and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure." It may be recalled that Hawthorne found it "really pleasant" to meet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's tomb in the minster, and that Scott asserts there used to be, in "moated Lichfield's lofty pile," a monument to Marmion, whose castle stood a few miles to the southeast, at Tamworth.

But the motor-car, full-fed with gasoline, would brook no further pause. As self-important as John Hobs, the famous Tanner of Tamworth whom "not to know was to know nobody," it stormed through Uttoxeter and on, outsmelling the breweries of Burton-on-Trent. Ducks, hens, cats, dogs, babies, the aged and infirm, the halt and the blind, scuttled to left and right. Policemen glared out at it from their "motor-traps" in the hedges. A group of small boys sent a rattle of stones against it. Rocester! Only three miles away were the ruins of the Cistercian Abbey of Croxden. We would have liked to see them, if only to investigate the story that the heart of King John is buried there, for we had never before heard that he had a heart; but while we were voicing our desire we had already crossed the Dove and whizzed into Derbyshire.

Dovedale was our goal. This beautiful border district of Derby and Staffordshire abounds in literary associations. Near Ilam Hall, whose grounds are said to have suggested to Dr. Johnson the "happy valley" in "Rasselas," and in whose grotto Congreve wrote his "Old Bachelor," stands the famous Isaak Walton Inn. The patron saint of the region is the Gentle Angler, who in these "flowery meads" and by these "crystal streams" loved to

"see a black-bird feed her young,
Or a laverock build her nest."

Here he would raise his

"low-pitched thoughts above
Earth, or what poor mortals love."

On a stone at the source of the Dove, and again on the Fishing-House which has stood since 1674 "Piscatoribus sacrum," his initials are interlaced with those of his friend and fellow-fisherman Charles Cotton, the patron sinner of the locality. In Beresford Dale may be found the little cave where this gay and thriftless gentleman, author of the second part of "The Complete Angler," used to hide from his creditors. At Wootton Hall Jean Jacques Rousseau once resided for over a year, writing on his "Confessions" and amusing himself scattering through Dovedale the seeds of many of the mountain plants of France. In a cottage at Church Mayfield, Moore wrote his "Lalla Rookh," and near Colwich Abbey once stood the house in which Handel composed much of the "Messiah."

We did not see any of these spots. The automobile would none of them. It whisked about giddily half an hour, ramping into the wrong shrines and out again, disconcerting a herd of deer and a pack of young fox-hounds, and then impetuously bolted back to Uttoxeter. There were antiquities all along the way,--British barrows, Roman camps, mediæval churches, Elizabethan mansions,--but the dusty and odoriferous trail of our car was flung impartially over them all.

We shot through Uttoxeter and went whirring on. A glimpse of the hillside ruins of Chartley Castle brought a fleeting sorrow for Mary Queen of Scots. It was one of those many prisons that she knew in the bitter years between Cockermouth and Fotheringay,--the years that whitened her bright hair and twisted her with cruel rheumatism. She was harried from Carlisle in Cumberland to Bolton Castle in Yorkshire, and thence sent to Tutbury, on the Derby side of the Dove, in custody of the unlucky Earl of Shrewsbury and his keen-eyed, shrewish-tongued dame, Bess of Hardwick. But still the poor queen was shifted from one stronghold to another. Yorkshire meted out to her Elizabeth's harsh hospitality at Sheffield, Warwickshire at Coventry, Leicestershire at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Derbyshire at Wingfield Manor and Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall, even at Buxton, where she was occasionally allowed to go for the baths, and Staffordshire at Tixall and here at Chartley. It was while she was at Chartley, with Sir Amyas Paulet for her jailer, that the famous Babington conspiracy was hatched, and anything but an automobile would have stopped and searched for that stone wall in which a brewer's boy deposited the incriminating letters, read and copied every one by Walsingham before they reached the captive.

At Weston we jumped the Trent again and pounded on to Stafford, the shoemakers' town, where we came near knocking two bicyclists into a ditch. They were plain-spoken young men, and, addressing themselves to the chauffeur, they expressed an unfavourable opinion of his character. Stafford lies half-way between the two coal-fields of the county. Directly south some fifteen miles is Wolverhampton, the capital of the iron-manufacturing district. We remembered that Stafford was the birthplace of Isaak Walton, but it was too late to gain access to the old Church of St. Mary's, which has his bust in marble and, to boot, the strangest font in England. We climbed the toilsome heights of Stafford Castle for the view it was too dark to see, and then once more delivered ourselves over to the champing monster, which spun us back to Shrewsbury through a weird, infernal world flaring with tongues of fire.

THE HEART OF ENGLAND--WARWICKSHIRE

A few miles to the northwest of Coventry lies the village of Meriden, which is called the centre of England. There on a tableland is a little pool from which the water flows both west and east, on the one side reaching the Severn and the British Channel, on the other the Trent and the North Sea. "Leafy Warwickshire" is watered, as all the world knows, by the Avon. The county, though its borders show here and there a hilly fringe, and though the spurs of the Cotswolds invade it on the south, is in the main a fertile river-basin, given over to agriculture and to pasturage. The forest of Arden, that once covered the Midlands, is still suggested by rich-timbered parks and giant trees of ancient memory. On the north, Warwickshire tapers up into the Staffordshire coal-fields and puts on a manufacturing character. The great town of this district is Birmingham, capital of the hardware industries.

It was from Birmingham that we started out on our Warwickshire trip. We had but a hasty impression of a well-built, prosperous, purposeful town, but if we had known at the time what masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were to be seen in the Art Gallery we would have taken a later train than we did for Nuneaton. Here we bade farewell to railways, having decided to "post" through the county. Our automobile scamper across Staffordshire had left us with a conviction that this mode of travel was neither democratic nor becoming,--least of all adapted to a literary pilgrimage. We preferred to drive ourselves, but the English hostlers, shaking their stolid heads, preferred that we should be driven. It was only by a lucky chance that we had found, in the Lake Country, a broad-minded butcher who would trust us on short expeditions with "Toby" and a pony-cart. After all, it is easier to adapt yourself to foreign ways than to adapt them to you, and the old, traditional, respectable method of travel in England is by post. The regular rate for a victoria--which carries light luggage--and a single horse is a shilling a mile, with no charge for return, but with a considerable tip to the driver. In out-of-the-way places the rate was sometimes only ninepence a mile, but in the regions most affected by tourists it might run up to eighteenpence. So at Nuneaton we took a carriage for Coventry, a distance, with the digressions we proposed, of about twelve miles, and set out, on a fair August afternoon, to explore the George Eliot country.

Our driver looked blank at the mention of George Eliot, but brightened at the name of Mary Anne Evans. He could not locate for us, however, the school which she had attended in Nuneaton, but assured us that "Mr. Jones 'ud know." To consult this oracle we drove through a prosaic little town, dodging the flocks of sheep that were coming in for the fair, to a stationer's shop. Mr. Jones, the photographer of the neighbourhood, proved to be as well versed in George Eliot literature and George Eliot localities as he was generous in imparting his knowledge. He mapped out our course with all the concern and kindliness of a host, and practically conferred upon us the freedom of the city.

Nuneaton was as placidly engaged in making hats and ribbons as if the foot of genius had never hallowed its soil, and went its ways, regardless while we peered out at inns and residences mirrored in George Eliot's writings. The school to which Robert Evans' "little lass" used to ride in on donkeyback every morning, as the farmers' daughters ride still, is The Elms on Vicarage Street,--a plain bit of a place, with its bare walls and hard forms, to have been the scene of the awakening of that keen intelligence. We were duly shown the cloak-closet, to reach whose hooks a girl of eight or nine must have had to stand on tiptoe, the small classrooms, and the backyard that served as a playground. The educational equipment was of the simplest,--but what of that? Hamlet could have been "bounded in a nutshell," and here there was space enough for thought. A Nuneaton lady, lodging with the caretaker during the vacation, told us with a touch of quiet pride that her husband had known "Marian Evans" well in their young days, and had often walked home with her of an evening from the rectory.

As we drove away toward that rectory in Chilvers Coton, the parish adjoining Nuneaton on the south, we could almost see the little schoolgirl riding homeward on her donkey. It is Maggie Tulliver, of "The Mill on the Floss," who reveals the nature of that tragic child, "a creature full of eager and passionate longing for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away, and would not come near to her; with a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it."

Chilvers Coton, like Nuneaton, has no memories of its famous woman of letters. The only time we saw her name that afternoon was as we drove, two hours later, through a grimy colliery town where a row of posters flaunted the legend:

ASK FOR GEORGE ELIOT SAUCE.

But in the Chilvers Coton church, familiar to readers of "Scenes from Clerical Life," is a window given by Mr. Isaac Evans in memory of his wife, not of his sister, with an inscription so like Tom Tulliver's way of admonishing Maggie over the shoulder that we came near resenting it:

"She layeth her hands to the spindle."

But we would not flout the domestic virtues, and still less would we begrudge Tom's wife--not without her share of shadow, for no people are so hard to live with as those who are always right--her tribute of love and honour. So with closed lips we followed the sexton out into the churchyard, past the much visited grave of "Milly Barton," past the large recumbent monument that covers the honest ashes of Robert Evans of Griff, and past so many fresh mounds that we exclaimed in dismay. Our guide, however, viewed them with a certain decorous satisfaction, and intimated that for this branch of his craft times were good in Chilvers Coton, for an epidemic was rioting among the children. "I've had twelve graves this month already," he said, "and there"--pointing to where a spade stood upright in a heap of earth--"I've got another to-day." We demurred about detaining him, with such pressure of business on his hands, but he had already led us, over briars and sunken slabs, to a stone inscribed with the name of Isaac Pearson Evans of Griff and with the text:

"The memory of the just is blessed."

As we stood there, with our attendant ghoul telling us, in rambling, gossipy fashion, what a respectable man Mr. Isaac Evans was, and how he never would have anything to do with "his sister for years, but after she married Mr. Cross he took her up again and went to her funeral,"--how could we force out of mind a passage that furnishes such strange commentary on that graven line?

"Tom, indeed, was of opinion that Maggie was a silly little
thing. All girls were silly.... Still he was very fond of his
sister, and meant always to take care of her, make her his
housekeeper, and punish her when she did wrong.... Tom, you
perceive, was rather a Rhadamanthine personage, having more
than the usual share of boy's justice in him--the justice
that desires to hurt culprits as much as they deserve to be
hurt, and is troubled with no doubts concerning the exact
amount of their deserts."

It is in this parish of Chilvers Coton that George Eliot was born, in a quiet brown house set among laden apple-trees, as we saw it, with a bright, old-fashioned garden of dahlias, sweet peas, and hollyhocks. The place is known as South Farm or Arbury Farm, for it is on the grounds of Arbury Priory, one of the smaller monasteries that fell prey to Henry VIII, now held by the Newdigate family. We drove to it through a park of noble timber, where graceful deer were nibbling the aristocratic turf or making inquisitive researches among the rabbit warrens. Robert Evans, of Welsh origin, was a Staffordshire man. A house-builder's son, he had himself begun life as a carpenter. Adam Bede was made in his likeness. Rising to the position of forester and then to that of land agent, he was living, at the time of his daughter's birth, at Arbury Farm, in charge of the Newdigate estate. Three or four months later he removed to Griff, an old brick farmhouse standing at a little distance from the park, on the highroad. Griff House passed, in due course of time, from the occupancy of Robert Evans to that of his son, and on the latter's death, a few years ago, was converted into a Dairy School "for gentleman-farmers' daughters." Pleasant and benignant was its look that August afternoon, as it stood well back among its beautiful growth of trees,--cut-leaf birch and yellowing chestnut, Cedar of Lebanon, pine, locust, holly, oak, and yew, with a pear-tree pleached against the front wall on one side, while the other was thickly overgrown with ivy. Geraniums glowed about the door, and the mellow English sunshine lay softly over all. This was a sweet and tender setting for the figure of that ardent wonder-child,--a figure imagination could not disassociate from that of the sturdy elder brother, whose presence--if he were in affable and condescending mood--made her paradise.

"They trotted along and sat down together, with no thought
that life would ever change much for them. They would only
get bigger and not go to school, and it would always be like
the holidays; they would always live together and be fond of
each other.... Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet
they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves
of those first years would always make part of their lives.
We could never have loved this earth so well if we had had no
childhood in it."

We forgave, as we lingered in that gracious scene, "the memory of the just." For all Tom's virtues, he had given Maggie, though she was her father's darling and had no lack of indulgent love about her, the best happiness of her childhood. Across the years of misunderstanding and separation she could write:

"But were another childhood's world my share,
I would be born a little sister there."

We had even a disloyal impulse of sympathy for these kinsfolk of genius, who must needs pay the price by having their inner natures laid bare before the world, but we checked it. Our worlds, little or large, are bound to say and believe something concerning us: let us be content in proportion as it approximates the truth.

Our road to Coventry ran through a mining district. Every now and then we met groups of black-faced colliers. Robert Evans must often have driven his daughter along this way, for in her early teens she was at school in the City of the Three Spires, and later on, when her widowed father resigned to his son his duties as land agent, and Griff House with them, she removed there with him to make him a new home. The house is still to be seen in Foleshill road, on the approach from the north; but here the star of George Eliot pales before a greater glory, the all-eclipsing splendour, for at Coventry we are on the borders of the Shakespeare country.

Stratford-on-Avon lies only twenty miles to the south, and what were twenty miles to the creator of Ariel and Puck? Surely his young curiosity must have brought him early to this

"Quaint old town of toil and trouble,
Quaint old town of art and song."

The noble symmetries of St. Michael's, its companion spires of Holy Trinity and Grey Friars, the narrow streets and over-jutting housetops, the timber-framed buildings, the frescoed walls and carven window-heads, all that we see to-day of the mediæval fashion he must have seen in fresher beauty, and far more; yet even then the glory of Coventry had departed. From the eleventh century, when Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and his Countess of beloved memory, the Lady Godiva, built their magnificent abbey, of which hardly a trace remains, the city had been noted for its religious edifices. Its triple-spired cathedral of St. Mary,--existing to-day in but a few foundation fragments,--its monasteries and nunneries and churches of the various orders formed an architectural group unmatched in England. Coventry was conspicuous, too, for civic virtues. As its merchants increased in riches, they lavished them freely on their queenly town. The Earl in his now crumbled castle and the Lord Abbot had hitherto divided the rule, but in 1345 came the first Mayor. It was while the Rose-red Richard sat so gaily on his rocking throne that Coventry celebrated the completion of its massive walls, three miles in circuit, with twelve gates and thirty-two towers. In the middle of the fifteenth century it received a special charter, and Henry VI declared it "the best governed city in all his realm." It was then that the famous guilds of Coventry were at their height, for its merchants had waxed wealthy in the wool trade, and its artisans were cunning at cloth-making.

As we stood in St. Mary's Hall, erected toward the end of the fourteenth century by the united fraternities known as the Holy Trinity Guild, we realised something of the devotional spirit and artistic joy of those old craftsmen. The oak roof of the Great Hall is exquisitely figured with a choir of angels playing on their divers instruments. In the kitchen--_such_ a kitchen, with stone arches and fine old timber-work!--another angel peeps down to see that the service of spit and gridiron is decorously done. The building throughout abounds in carved panels, groined roofs, state chairs of elaborate design, heraldic insignia, portraits, grotesques, and displays a marvellous tapestry, peopled with a softly fading company of saints and bishops, kings and queens.

Among the Coventry artists, that gladsome throng of architects, painters, weavers, goldsmiths, and silversmiths who wrought so well for the adornment of their city, John Thornton is best remembered. It was he who made--so they say at Coventry--the east window of York minster, and here in St. Mary's Hall he placed superb stained glass of harmoniously blended browns. We could fancy a Stratford boy with hazel eyes intent upon it, conning the faces of those English kings to whom he was to give new life and longer reigns. Henry VI holds the centre, thus revealing the date of the window, and near him are Henry IV and Henry V, Lancastrian usurpers to whose side the partial dramatist has lured us all. It was to join their forces at Shrewsbury that he sent Falstaff marching through Coventry with his ragged regiment, whose every soldier looked like "Lazarus in the painted cloth." Richard II is conspicuous by his absence, but in writing his tragedy the young Shakespeare remembered that Coventry was the scene of the attempted trial at arms between Bolingbroke and the Duke of Norfolk. The secret cause of the combat involved the honour of Richard, and he, not daring to trust the issue, threw "his warder down," forbade the duel, and sentenced both champions to

"tread the stranger paths of banishment."

But Shakespeare's Coventry, like Shakespeare's London, was largely a city of ruins. Broken towers and desolate courts told of the ruthless sweep of the Reformation. The cloth trade, too, was falling off, and even that blue thread whose steadfast dye gave rise to the proverb "True as Coventry blue" was less in demand under Elizabeth than under Henry VIII. Yet though so much of its noble ecclesiastical architecture was defaced or overthrown, though its tide of fortune had turned, the city was lovely still, among its most charming buildings being various charitable institutions founded and endowed by wealthy citizens. That exquisite timber-and-plaster almshouse for aged women, Ford's Hospital, then almost new, may have gained in mellow tints with time, but its rich wood-work, one fretted story projecting over another like the frilled heads of antiquated dames, row above row, peering out to see what might be passing in the street beneath, must have delighted the vision then as it delights it still. I dare say Will Shakespeare, saucy lad that he was, doffed his cap and flashed a smile as reviving as a beam of sunshine at some wistful old body behind the diamond panes of her long and narrow window. For there she would have been sitting, as her successor is sitting yet, trying to be thankful for her four shillings a week, her fuel, her washing, and her doctoring, but ever, in her snug corner, dusting and rearranging the bits of things,--cups and spoons, a cushion or two, Scripture texts,--her scanty salvage from the wreck of home. That the pathos of the old faces enhances the picturesqueness of it all, those eyes so keen to read the book of human life would not have failed to note.

Coventry would have had for the seeking heart of a poet other attractions than those of architectural beauty. It was a storied city, with its treasured legend of Lady Godiva's ride--a legend not then vulgarised by the Restoration addition of Peeping Tom--and with its claim to be the birthplace of England's patron saint, the redoubtable dragon slayer. A fourteenth-century poet even asserts of St. George and his bride that they

"many years of joy did see;
They lived and died in Coventree."

It had a dim memory of some old-time slaughter--perhaps of Danes--commemorated in its play of Hock Tuesday. Coventry was, indeed, a "veray revelour" in plays and pageants, and if nothing else could have brought a long-limbed, wide-awake youth to try what his Rosalind and Celia and Orlando found so easy, a holiday escapade in the Forest of Arden, we may be all but sure the Corpus Christi Mysteries would have given the fiend the best of the argument with conscience. It is not likely, however, that it had to be a runaway adventure. That worshipful alderman, John Shakespeare, was himself of a restless disposition and passing fond of plays. He would have made little, in the years of his prosperity, of a summer-day canter to Coventry, with his small son of glowing countenance mounted on the same stout nag. Later on, when debts and lawsuits were weighing down his spirits, the father may have turned peevish and withheld both his company and his horse, but by that time young Will, grown tall and sturdy, could have trudged it, putting his enchanting tongue to use, when his legs, like Touchstone's, were weary, in winning a lift from some farmer's wain for a mile or so along the road. But by hook or by crook he would be there, laughing in his doublet-sleeve at the blunders of the "rude mechanicals"--of the tailors who were playing the Nativity and of the weavers on whose pageant platform was set forth the Presentation in the Temple. Robin Starveling the Tailor, and his donkeyship Nick Bottom the Weaver, were they not natives of Coventry? And when the truant--if truant he was--came footsore back to Stratford and acted over again in the Henley Street garden, sweet with June, the "swaggering" of the "hempen home-spuns," did not his gentle mother hide her smiles by stooping to tend her roses, while the father's lungs, despite himself, began to "crow like Chanticleer"?

Foolish city, to have kept no record of those visits of the yeoman's son, that dusty youngster with the dancing eyes! When royal personages came riding through your gates, you welcomed them with stately ceremonies and splendid gifts, with gay street pageants and gold cups full of coin. Your quills ran verse as lavishly as your pipes ran wine. You had ever a loyal welcome for poor Henry VI; and for his fiery queen, Margaret of Anjou, you must needs present, in 1456, St. Margaret slaying the dragon. Four years later, though with secret rage, you were tendering an ovation to her arch enemy and conqueror, Edward IV. Here this merry monarch kept his Christmas in 1465, and nine years later came again to help you celebrate the feast of St. George. For Prince Edward, three years old, your Mayor and Council, all robed in blue and green, turned out in 1474, while players strutted before the child's wondering eyes, while the music of harp and viol filled his ears, and the "Children of Issarell" flung flowers before his little feet. His murderer, Richard III, you received with no less elaborate festivities nine years later, when he came to see your Corpus Christi plays. But it was to you that his supplanter, Henry VII, repaired straight from the victory of Bosworth Field, and you, never Yorkist at heart, flew your banners with enthusiastic joy. His heir, Arthur, a winsome and delicate prince, you greeted with unconscious irony, four years before his death, by the blessings of the Queen of Fortune. You summoned the "Nine Orders of Angels," with a throng of "divers beautiful damsels," to welcome Henry VIII and the ill-omened Catherine of Aragon in 1510. They were sumptuously entertained at your glorious Priory, for whose destruction that graceless guest, the King, was presently to seal command. But before its day of doom it sheltered one more royal visitor of yours, the Princess Mary, who came in 1525 to see the Mercers' Pageant. In 1565, the year after Shakespeare's birth, you fêted with all splendour Queen Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, and in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, you spread the feast for King James, the first of the Stuarts. But you have forgotten your chief guest of all, the roguish youngster munching his bread and cheese in the front rank of the rabble, the heaven-crowned poet who was to be more truly king-maker than the great Warwick himself.

Our first seeing of the name of Warwick in Warwickshire was over a green-grocer's shop in Coventry. The green-grocer was all very well, but the sewing-machine factories and, worse yet, the flourishing business in bicycles and motor-cars jarred on our sixteenth-century dream. I am ashamed to confess how speedily we accomplished our Coventry sightseeing, and how early, on the day following our arrival, we took the road again. We set out in our sedate victoria with high expectations, for we had been told over and over that the route from Coventry to Warwick was "the most beautiful drive in England." For most of the distance we found it a long, straight, level avenue, bordered by large trees. There were few outlooks; clouds of dust hung in the air, and gasoline odours trailed along the way. We counted it, as a drive, almost the dullest of our forty odd, but it was good roading, and the opinion of the horse may have been more favourable.

Five miles brought us to Kenilworth, about whose stately ruins were wandering the usual summer groups of trippers and tourists. Its ivies were at their greenest and its hollies glistened with an emerald sheen, but when I had last seen the castle, in a far-away October, those hollies were yet more beautiful with gold-edged leaves and with ruby berries. Then, as now, the lofty red walls seemed to me to wear an aspect, if not of austerity, at least of courtly reserve, as if, whoever might pry and gossip, their secrets were still their own. In point of fact, the bewitchments of Sir Walter Scott have made it well-nigh impossible for any of us to bear in mind that in the ancient fortress of Kenilworth King John was wont to lurk, spinning out his spider-webs, that Simon de Montfort once exercised gay lordship here, and here, in sterner times, held Henry III and Prince Edward prisoners; that these towers witnessed the humiliation of the woful Edward II, and that in these proud halls the mirth-loving Queen Bess had been entertained by the Earl of Leicester on three several occasions prior to the famous visit of 1575. On her first coming our poet was a prattler of two--if only Mistress Shakespeare had kept a "Baby Record"!--and I am willing to admit that the event may not have interested him. When her second royal progress excited Warwickshire, he was a four-year-old, teasing his mother for fairy stories, and peeping into the acorn-cups for hidden elves, but hardly likely to have been chosen to play the part of Cupid while

"the imperial votaress passèd on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free."

As a boy of eight, however, a "gallant child, one that makes old hearts fresh," he may have stood by the roadside, or been perched on some friendly shoulder to add his shrill note to the loyal shout when the Queen rode by amid her retinue; and three years later, I warrant his quick wits found a way to see something of those glittering shows, those "princely pleasures of Kenilworth Castle," which lasted nineteen days and were the talk of the county. How eagerly his winged imagination would have responded to the Lady of the Lake, to Silvanus, Pomona and Ceres, to the "savage man" and the satyrs, to the "triton riding on a mermaid 18 foot long; as also Arion on a dolphin, with rare music"![6] If we did not think so much about Amy Robsart at Kenilworth as, according to Scott, we should have done, it is because we were unfortunate enough to know that she perished fifteen years before these high festivities,--three years, indeed, before the Castle was granted to Robert Dudley.

Stoneleigh Abbey, with its tempting portraits, lay three miles to the left, and we would not swerve from our straight road, which, however, grew more exciting as we neared Warwick, for it took us past Blacklow Hill, to whose summit, six hundred years ago, the fierce barons of Edward II dragged his French favourite, Piers Gaveston, and struck off that jaunty head, which went bounding down the hill to be picked up at the bottom by a friar, who piously bore it in his hood to Oxford.

We halted again at Guy's Cliff, constrained by its ancient tradition of Guy, Earl of Warwick, he who

"did quell that wondrous cow"

of Dunsmore Heath. My own private respect for horned beasts kept me from flippantly undervaluing this exploit. After other doughty deeds, giants, monsters, and Saracens falling like ninepins before him, Guy returned in the odour of sanctity from the Holy Land, but instead of going home to Warwick, where his fair countess was pining, he sought out this cliff rising from the Avon and, in a convenient cavity, established himself as a hermit. Every day he begged bread at the gate of his own castle, and his wife, not recognising her dread lord in this meek anchorite, supplied his needs. Just before his end he sent her a ring, and she, thus discovering the identity of the beggar, sped to the cave, arriving just in time to see him die. Other hermits succeeded to his den, and in the reign of Henry VI, Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, founded a chantry there. Henry VIII made short work of that, and the romantic rocks passed from one owner to another, the present mansion having been built above them in the eighteenth century. Guy's Cliff was termed by Leland "a place delightful to the muses," and we were pleased to find it still enjoyed their favour. One of those supernaturally dignified old servitors who hang about to catch the pennies struck an attitude on the bridge and, informing us that he was a poet and had had verses in print, recited with touching earnestness the following effusion:

"'Ere yer can sit and rest a while,
And watch the wild ducks dive in play,
Listen to the cooin' dove
And the noisy jay,
Watch the moorhen as she builds her rushy nest
Swayin' hupon the himmortal Havon's 'eavin' breast."

Warwick, a wide-streeted, stately old town, with two of its mediæval gates still standing, was familiar to us both. I had spent a week here, some years ago, and taken occasion, after inspecting the lions, to view the horses, for the autumn races chanced to be on. I remember sitting, surprised at myself, on the grand stand, in an atmosphere of tobacco smoke and betting. The bookmakers stood below, conspicuous in green velveteen coats; some had their names on the open money-bags hanging from their necks; all were shouting themselves hoarse. A red-nosed lady in dashing apparel sat on my right, enlightening my ignorance with a flood of jockey English, while on my left a plain-faced, anxious little body would turn from helping her husband decide his bets to urge upon me the superior morality of this to all other forms of English sport. The green below was filled with a bustling crowd of men, women, and children, pressing about the booths, the Punch-and-Judys and the show-carts, adventuring upon the swings and merry-go-rounds, tossing balls at gay whirligigs and winning cocoanuts in the fascinating game of "Aunt Sally," or ransacking the "silken treasury,"

"Lawns as white as driven snow,
Cyprus black as e'er was crow,"

of many a modern Autolycus. The throng was bright with fluttering pennons, red soldier coats, and the vivid finery of housemaids on a holiday. I saw five out of the seven races sweep by and waxed enthusiastic over "Porridge" and "Odd Mixture," but "good old Maggie Cooper," on which my red-nosed neighbour lost heavily, while the husband of my moral little friend won, put me to such embarrassment between them that I bethought myself of my principles and slipped away.

Eschewing such profane reminiscences, I recalled the Church of St. Mary, with its haughty Beauchamp Chapel where ancient Earls of Warwick keep their marble state, together with the Earl of Leicester and his "noble impe." I recalled the delectable home for old soldiers, Leycester's Hospital, so inimitably described by Hawthorne. Across the years I still could see the antique quadrangle with its emblazoned scutcheons and ornately lettered texts; the vaulted hall with its great carven beams; the delightful kitchen with its crested fireplace of huge dimensions, its oaken settles and copper flagons, its Saxon chair that has rested weary mortality for a thousand years, and its silken fragment of Amy Robsart's needlework. Most clearly of all rose from memory the figures of the old pensioners, the "brethren" garbed in long blue gowns with silver badge on shoulder, stamped, as the whole building is stamped over and over, with the cognisance of The Bear and the Ragged Staff. I had done homage at Warwick to the memory of Landor, who was born there in a house dear to his childhood for its mulberries and cedars, its chestnut wood, and its fig tree at the window. Partly for his sake I had visited Rugby, on the eastern border of Warwickshire,--that great public school which became, under Dr. Arnold's mastership, such a power in English life. Rugby disapproved of my special interest, for it has had better boys than Landor, so wild-tempered a lad that his father was requested to remove him when, only fifteen, he was within five of being head of the school. But the neighbouring village of Bilton entirely endorsed my motives when I went the rounds of Bilton Hall as an act of respectful sympathy for the eminent Mr. Addison, who wedded the Dowager Countess of Warwick and here resided with her for the three years that his life endured under that magnificent yoke.

With so much sightseeing to our credit, we decided to limit our Warwick experiences on this occasion to luncheon and the castle, for although we both had "done" the splendid home of the Earls of Warwick more than once, even viewing it by moonlight and by dawnlight from the bridge across the Avon, it did not seem decorous to pass by without leaving cards--not our visiting cards, but those for which one pays two shillings apiece in the shop over against the gate.

Warwick Castle, built of the very centuries, cannot be expected to alter with Time's "brief hours and weeks"--at least, with so few of them as fall to one poor mortal's lot. From visit to visit I find it as unchanged as the multiplication table. By that same chill avenue, cut through the solid rock and densely shaded, we passed into the same grassy court lorded over by the same arrogant peacocks--who have, however, developed an intemperate appetite for sweet chocolate--and girt about by the same proud walls and grey, embattled towers. A princely seat of splendid memories, one is half ashamed to join the inquisitive procession that trails after a supercilious guide through the series of state apartments--Great Hall, Red Drawing Room, Cedar Room, Gilt Drawing Room, Boudoir, Armory Passage, and so on to the end. We looked at the same relics,--old Guy's dubious porridge pot, Marie Antoinette's mosaic table, Queen Anne's red velvet bed, the mace of the King-maker, Cromwell's helmet; the same treasures of rare workmanship and fabulous cost,--a Venetian table inlaid with precious stones, shimmering tapestries, enamelled cabinets and clocks; the same notable succession of portraits in which the varying art of Van Dyke, Holbein, Rembrandt, Rubens, Lely, Kneller has perpetuated some of the most significant faces of history. How strangely they turn their eyes on one another!--Anne Boleyn; her Bluebeard, Henry VIII, pictured here not only in his rank manhood, but as a sweet-lipped child; Loyola in priestly vestments of gold and crimson; the Earl of Strafford with his doomful look; Charles I; Henrietta Maria; Rupert of the Rhine; the heroic Marquis of Montrose; the literary Duke of Newcastle; the romantic Gondomar, Spanish ambassador to Elizabeth; and with them--confuting my rash statement that the castle knows no change--Sargent's portrait of the present Countess of Warwick, a democrat of the democrats, enfolding her little son. There remained the walk through the gardens to the conservatory, whose Warwick Vase, said to have been found in Hadrian's Villa, is, for all its grandeur, less dear to memory than the level green branches of the great cedars of Lebanon. But when it came to peacocks and pussycats cut in yew, we deemed it time to resume our journey.

Leamington was close at hand, with its Royal Pump Rooms, swimming-baths and gardens, its villas and crescents and bath-chairs and parades, its roll of illustrious invalids who have drunk of its mineral waters; but we would not turn aside for Leamington. Dr. Parr's church at Hatton could not detain us, nor other churches and mansions of renown, nor the footsteps of the worthies of the Gunpowder Plot, nor Edge Hill where Charles I met the Parliamentarians in the first battle of the Civil War, nor the park of Redway Grange in which Fielding wrote--and laughed as he wrote--a portion of "Tom Jones," nor the Red Horse cut in turf, nor any other of the many attractions of a neighbourhood so crowded with memorials of stirring life. Our thoughts were all of Shakespeare now; our goal was Stratford-on-Avon.

Should we drive by the right bank of the river, or the left? The choice lay between Snitterfield and Charlecote Park. In Snitterfield, a village four miles to the north of Stratford, the poet's paternal grandsire, Richard Shakespeare, wore out a quiet yeoman life, tilling the farm that he rented from Robert Arden of Wilmcote, father of the poet's mother. There must have been a strain of something better than audacity in the tenant's son to win him the hand of Mary Arden. Henry Shakespeare, the poet's uncle, died at Snitterfield in 1596, when the quick scion of that slow blood was in the first fever of his London successes. But we chose the left-hand road and Charlecote Park. For a while the sunny Avon, silver-flecked with such swans as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson may have smiled upon together, bore us blithe company; then we passed under the shadow of oaks with "antique root" out-peeping, and of more

"moss'd trees
That have outliv'd the eagle."

Before the Forest of Arden was cut away for the use of the Droitwich salt-boilers and other Vandals, the land was so thickly wooded that tradition says a squirrel might have skipped from bough to bough across the county, without once touching the ground. Now it is rich glebe and tillage. We skirted the broad acres of Charlecote Park and viewed its "native burghers," the deer, but were loth to believe that Shakespeare, even in his heyday of youthful riot, would have "let the law go whistle" for the sake of "a hot venison-pasty to dinner." Yet it is like enough that there was no love lost between the Shakespeares and the Lucys, a family who have held the manor since the twelfth century and, in their Elizabethan representative, laid themselves open to the suspicion of pompous bearing and deficient sense of humour. The _luces_, or pikes, in their coat of arms, the pun-loving tongue of a "most acute juvenal" could hardly have resisted. "The dozen white louses do become an old coat well." Sir Thomas Lucy entertained Queen Elizabeth in 1572, and if the boys from Stratford Grammar School were not in evidence at the Park Gates on her arrival, it must have been because Holofernes was drilling them for a show of the Nine Worthies later on.

In the fields about the town the pea-pickers, an autumn feature of this neighbourhood, were already at work. They held our eyes for a little and, when we looked forward again, there by the river rose the spire of Holy Trinity, keeping its faithful watch and ward. We clattered over the old stone bridge of fourteen arches and there we were, between the staring rows of tourist shops, all dealing in Shakespeare commercialised. His likeness, his name, his plays are pressed into every huckster's service. The windows fairly bristle with busts of Shakespeare of all sizes and half a dozen colours; with models of the Henley Street house, ranging in price, with varying magnitude and material, from pennies to pounds; with editions of his works, from miniature copies to colossal; with photographs, postal-cards, etchings, sketches; with rubbings of his tombstone inscription; with birthday books and wall texts, and with all sorts of articles, paper-cutters, match-boxes, pencil-trays, I dare say bootjacks, stamped with verse or phrase of his. This poet-barter is only a fraction of Shakespeare's endowment of his native town. Innkeepers, porters, drivers, guides, custodians are maintained by him. Sir Thomas Lucy never dreamed of such a retinue. Hardly did Warwick the King-maker support so great a household. He is not only Stratford's pride, but its prosperity, and the welfare of the descendants of Shakespeare's neighbours is not a matter for the stranger to deplore. Nevertheless, we hunted up lodgings, drank bad tea at one of the Shakespeare Tea Rooms, and were out of those greedy streets as quickly as possible on a stroll across the old ridged fields to Shottery.

On the way we met a sophisticated donkey, who, waggling his ears, asked in Bottom's name for a gratuity of "good sweet hay"; and a bevy of children scampered up, as we neared Anne Hathaway's cottage, to thrust upon us their wilted sprigs of lavender and rosemary. They were merry little merchants, however, and giggled understandingly when we put them off with "No, thank you, William," "No, thank you, Anne." We arrived a minute after six, and the cottage was closed for the night, though a medley of indignant pilgrims pounded at the garden gate and took unavailing camera shots through the twilight. But we were content with our dusky glimpse of the timber-and-plaster, vinegrown walls and low thatched roof. In former years we had trodden that box-bordered path up to an open door and had duly inspected fireplace and settle, Bible and bacon-cupboard, and the ancient bedstead. What we cared for most this time was the walk thither, coming by that worn footway toward the setting sun, as Shakespeare would have come on his eager lover's visits, and the return under a gossamer crescent which yet served to suggest the "blessed moon" that tipped

"with silver all these fruit-tree tops"

for a rash young Romeo who would better have been minding his book at home.

The next morning we spent happily in revisiting the Stratford shrines. Even the catch-shilling shops bore witness, in their garish way, to the supremacy of that genius which brings the ends of the earth to this Midland market-town.