Front matter (continued 2)

Relics

In these stately rooms and in the adjoining corridors are numerous priceless relics of the immortal bard; among them, the cap, belt, and cimeter he wore in Greece; his foils, spurs, stirrups, and boxing-gloves; a painting of his famous dog Boatswain; the bronze candlesticks from his writing-table and the table upon which were written "Bards and Reviewers," poems of "Hours of Idleness," "Hebrew Melodies," and portions of his masterpiece, "Childe Harold." Preserved here, with Byron's will, unpublished letters, and scraps of verse, are papers which indicate that the poet's chef-d'œuvre was originally designed for private circulation and was entitled "Childe Byron." An interesting relic is a section of the noted "twin-tree" bearing the names "Byron—Augusta" carved by the poet at his last visit to the Abbey. Our own Barnum once visited the place and offered Wildman five hundred pounds for this double tree (then standing in the grove), intending to remove it for exhibition; the colonel indignantly replied that five thousand would not purchase it, and that "the man capable of such a project deserved to be gibbeted." Here, too, are the portrait of the first lord of Newstead, "John Byron-the-Little-with-the-Great-Beard;" the huge iron knocker in use on the door of the Abbey seven centuries ago; a collection of mediæval armor and weapons; some personal belongings of Livingstone, and many specimens of fauna and flora gathered by him and Webb in the dark continent. One vaulted apartment of exquisite proportions, erst the sanctuary of the abbot, and later Byron's dog-kennel, is now the chapel of the household. Newstead has been the abode of royalty, and holds rooms in which, from the time of Edward III., kings have often lodged. We see the chamber occupied by Ada Byron during her visit; another, adorned with quaint carvings and once haunted by Byron-of-the-Great-Beard, was used by Irving. The noble chambers contain richly carved furniture, costly tapestries, and beds of such altitude that steps are provided for scaling them. The hangings of one bed belonged to Prince Rupert, and its counterpane was embroidered by Mary Queen of Scots.

Court and Gardens

In the centre of the edifice is the quadrangular court, surrounded by a series of low-vaulted arcades, once the stables of the Wicked Byron and long ago the "cloisters dim and damp" of the monks whose dust moulders now beneath the pavement. One crypt-like cell which holds the boilers for heating the mansion was Byron's swimming-bath. In the middle of the court the ancient stone fountain, with its grotesque sculptures of saints and monsters, graven by the patient toil of the monks, still sends out sprays of coolness.

We spend delightful hours loitering in the ancient gardens of the friars and about their ruined chapel. Through its mighty window, "yawning all desolate," pours a flood of western light upon the turf that covers the holy ground where congregations knelt in worship; while, amid the dust of the priests and near the site of the altar where they "raised their pious voices but to pray," Byron's dog lies in a tomb far handsomer than that which holds his noble master. It was in excavating Boatswain's grave that Byron found the skull afterward used as a drinking-cup. The dog's monument consists of a wide pedestal, surmounted by a panelled altar-stone which upholds a funeral urn and bears Byron's familiar eulogistic inscription and the misanthropic stanzas ending with the lines,—

"To mark a friend's remains these stones arise; I never knew but one, and here he lies."

Other panels were designed to bear the epitaph of Byron, who directed in his will (1811) that he should be buried in this spot with his valet and dog; it is said to have been discovered that the poet had made careful preparation for his entombment here, the stone trestles and slab to support his coffin being in place upon the pavement, but the sale of Newstead led to his interment elsewhere, and faithful Murray—who declined to lie here "alone with the dog"—sleeps near his master.

Grounds

The gardens of the Abbey lie about its ancient walls: here are the fish-pools of the monks; the noble terrace; the "Young Oak" of Byron's poem, planted by his hands and now grown into a large and graceful tree; other trees rooted by Livingstone and Stanley while guests here. At one side is a grove of beeches and yews, in whose gloomy recesses the Wicked Byron erected leaden statues of Pan and Pandora, of which the rustics were so afraid that they would not go near them after nightfall, and which are still respectfully spoken of in the servants' hall as "Mr. and Mrs. Devil." Before the mansion lies the lucid lake described in "Don Juan:" the forest that shades its shore and sweeps over the farther hill-side was planted by Byron to repair the spoliation of his uncle, and is called the "Poet's Wood." Upon some of the farms of the domain live descendants of Nancy Smith, whom Irving's readers will remember, her son having married despite his mother's protest and reared a family. One aged servitor claims to remember Irving's visit,Recollections and opines "the old colonel [Wildman] thought him a very fine man—for an American." He recounts some peccadilloes of Joe Murray, traditional among the servants, which show that worthy to have been less precise in morals than in dress. The ancient Byron estates were among the haunts of one whose exploits inspired a book of ballads, and we here see Robin Hood's cave and other reminders of the bold outlaw and his "merrie men in Lyncolne greene."

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.

Other Shrines

"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"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.Birthplace and Home of George Eliot 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.Scenes of her Tales 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."

Shepperton Church

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 MillyMilly's Grave 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.

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 MilbyMilby 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," LigginsLiggins 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.

Coventry

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,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 friendsCoventry 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.

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.Bowes This was the Lavatræ 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,—byDotheboys Hall 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.

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. SqueersSqueers 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."

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,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 mediæval 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 Brontë 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.

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"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 churchSterne'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.

Shandy Hall

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—littleSterne's Parsonage—Study 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."

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 BRONTËS

The Village—Black Bull Inn—Church—Vicarage—Memory-haunted Rooms—Brontë Tomb—Moors—Brontë Cascade—Wuthering Heights—Humble Friends—Relic and Recollection.

OTHER Brontë shrines have engaged us,—Guiseley, where Patrick Brontë 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 Brontës 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 Brontë 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.

Black Bull Inn

At the hill-top we come to the Black Bull Inn, where one Brontë 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 Brontë's predecessor took refuge from his riotous parishioners, finally escaping through the low casement at the back,—out of which poor Branwell Brontë 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 Brontë's rescue of her dog, an incident recorded in "Shirley," occurred at the inn door.

Church

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 Brontës 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 Brontë to mark the grave of Tabby, the faithful servant who served the Brontës 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. Brontë was laid there. The site of the Brontë 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 Brontë tablet in the wall bears a uniquely pathetic record, its twelve lines registering eight deaths,Brontë Tomb of which Mr. Brontë'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 Brontë, 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."

Brontë Parsonage

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 Brontës 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. Brontë's dread of fire—shade the windows, and the once bare interior is furbished and furnished in modern style; but the arrangement of the apartmentsApartments is unchanged. Most interesting of these is the Brontë parlor, at the left of the entrance; here the three curates of "Shirley" used to take tea with Mr. Brontë 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 Brontë 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 Brontë'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 Brontë'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 Brontë 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.

The Moors

By the vicarage lane were the cottage of Tabby's sister, the school the Brontës 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 Brontës 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 Brontës across the moor to the cascade, called now the "Brontë 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."

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 Brontë, 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 Brontë books may be seen on shop-signs along the way the sisters walked to Keighley.

Recollections of the Brontës

Among the villagers we meet some who remember the Brontës with affection and pride. We find them so uniformly courteous that we are willing to doubt Mrs. Gaskell's ascriptions of surly rudeness. They indignantly deny the statements of Reid, Gaskell, and others regarding the character of Mr. Brontë. One whose relations to that clergyman entitle him to credence assures us that Brontë did not destroy his wife's silk dress, nor burn his children's colored shoes, nor discharge pistols as a safety-valve for his temper: "he didn't have that sort of a temper." It would appear that many charges of the biographers were made upon the authority of a peculating servant whom Brontë had angered by dismissal. Some parishioners testify that "the Brontës had odd ways of their own," "went their gait and didn't meddle o'ermuch with us;" "nobody had a word against them." Charlotte's husband, too, became popular after her death, perhaps at first because of his tender care of her father: "to see the good old man and Nichols together when the rest were dead, and Mr. Brontë so helpless and blind, was just a pretty sight." We hear more than once of Brontë's wonderful cravat: he habitually covered it himself, putting on new silk without removing the old, until in the course of years it became one of the sights of the place, having acquired such phenomenal proportions that it concealed half his head. Many still remember hearing him preach from the depths of this cravat, while the sexton perambulated the aisles with a staff to stir up the sleepers and threaten the lads. Mr. Wood, a cabinet-maker of the village, was church-warden in Brontë's incumbency and an intimate friend of the family till the death of the last member: his loving hands fashioned the coffins for them all. He was sent for to see Richmond's portrait of Charlotte on its arrival, and was laughed at by that lady for not recognizing the likeness; while Tabby insisted that a portrait of Wellington, which came in the same case, was a picture of Mr. Brontë. That clergyman often complained to Wood that Mrs. Gaskell "tried to make us all appear as bad as she could." We find some survivors of Charlotte's Sunday-school class among the villagers. From one, who was also singer in Brontë's church choir, we obtain pictures of the church and rectory as they appeared in Charlotte's lifetime and a photographic copy of Branwell's painting of himself and sisters, in which the likenesses are said to be excellent. Charlotte is remembered as being "good looking," having a wealth of lustrous hair and remarkably expressive eyes. She was usually neatly apparelled in black, and was so small that when Mrs. F. entered her class, at the age of twelve, the pupil was larger than the teacher. Another of Charlotte's class remembers her as being nervously quick in all her movements and a rapid walker; a third stood in the church-yard and saw her pass from the vicarage to the church on the morning of her marriage wearing a very plain bridal dress and a white bonnet trimmed with green leaves. A few brief months later this person, from the same spot, beheld the mortal part of her immortal friend borne by a grief-stricken company along the same path to her burial. In the hands of another of Charlotte's pupils we see a volume of the original edition of the poems of the three sisters, presented by Charlotte, and a Yorkshire collection of hymns which contains some of Anne's sweet verses.

Branwell Brontë

It is evident that, of all the family, the hapless Branwell was most admired by the villagers. They delight to extol his pleasant manners, his ready repartee, his wonderful learning, his ambidextrousness, his personal courage. On one occasion restraint was required to prevent his attacking alone a dozen mill-rioters, "any one of whom could have put him in his pocket." Holding a pen in each hand, he could simultaneously write letters on two dissimilar subjects while he discoursed on a third. Wood thought him naturally the brightest of the family, and believed that lack of occupation, in a place where there was nothing to stimulate mental effort, accounted for his vices and failures. He came often with his sisters to Wood's house, and would talk by the hour of his projects to achieve fame and fortune. One of his associates preserved some letters received from him while he was "away tutoring," in which he shamelessly recorded his follies and referred to himself as a "Joseph in Egypt." A local society has collected in its museum some BrontëBrontë Relics mementos: a relative of Martha, Tabby's successor in the household, saved a few,—Charlotte's silken purse, her thimble-case and some articles of dress, elementary drawings made by the sisters, autograph letters of Charlotte and her copies of the "Quarterly" and other periodicals in which she had read the reviews of "Jane Eyre." Among the treasures Wood preserved were sketches by Emily and Branwell; a signatured set of Brontë volumes presented by Brontë the day before his death; Charlotte's worn history containing annotations in her microscopic chirography; a copy of "Jane Eyre" presented by Charlotte before its authorship was ascertained; an article on "Advantages of Poverty," by Mrs. Brontë; a highly graphic tale and religious poems by Mr. Brontë. Comment upon the latter reminded Wood that Brontë had shown him some poems by an Irish ancestor Hugh Brontë, and that he had met at the vicarage an irate relative who came from Ireland with a shillalah to "break the head" of a cruel critic of "Jane Eyre." Most of the Brontë belongings were removed by Mr. Nichols. He served the parish assiduously, as the people declare, for fifteen years, and at Brontë's death they desired that Nichols should succeed him; but the living was bestowed upon a stranger, and Nichols removed to the south of Ireland, where he married his cousin and is now a gentleman farmer. Martha Brown, the devoted servant of the family, accompanied him, and Nancy Wainwright, the Brontës' nurse, died some years ago in Bradford workhouse: so every living vestige of the family has disappeared from the vicinage.

Charlotte Brontë's Husband

A resident of near-by Wharfedale lately possessed a package of Charlotte's essays, written at the Brussels school and amended by "M. Paul." Study of these confirms the belief that she was for a time tortured by a hopeless love for her preceptor, husband of "Madame Beck," and that it was this wretched passage in her life, rather than the fall of her brother, which "drove her to literary speech for relief." Her marriage with Nichols was eventually happy, but her own descriptions of him show that his were not the attributes that would please her fancy or readily gain her love. In "Shirley" she writes of him as successor of Malone: "the circumstance of finding himself invited to tea with a Dissenter would unhinge him for a week; the spectacle of a Quaker wearing his hat in church, the thought of an unbaptized fellow-creature being interred with Christian rites, these things would make strange havoc in his physical and mental economy." In a letter to E. Charlotte writes, "I am not to marry Mr. Nichols. I couldn't think of mentioning such a rumor to him, even as a joke. It would make me the laughing-stock of himself and fellow-curates for half a year to come. They regard me as an old maid, and I regard them, one and all, as highly uninteresting, narrow, and unattractive specimens of the coarser sex." Why then did she finally accept Mr. Nichols? Was it not from the same motive that had led her to reject his addresses not long before, the desire to please her father?

EARLY HAUNTS OF ROBERT COLLYER: EUGENE ARAM

Childhood Home—Ilkley Scenes, Friends, Smithy, Chapel—Bolton-Associations—Wordsworth—Rogers—Eliot—Turner—Aram's Homes—Schools—Place of the Murder—Gibbet—Probable Innocence.

Early Home

THE factory-town of Keighley,—amid the moors of western Yorkshire,—to which the Brontë pilgrimage brings us, becomes itself an object of interest when we remember it was the birthplace of Robert Collyer. On a dingy side-street resonant with the din of spindles and looms and sullied with soot from factory chimneys, of humble parentage, and in a home not less lowly than that of another Yorkshire blacksmith in which Faraday was born, our orator and author first saw the light. Collyer came to Keighley "only to be born," and soon was removed to the lovely Washburndale, a few miles away. Here we find the place of the boyhood home he has made known to us—the cottage of two rooms with whitewashed walls and floor of flags—occupied by the mansion of a mill-owner, and the Collyer family vanished from the vicinage. "Little Sam," the kind-hearted father, fell dead at his anvil one summer day; the blue-eyed, fair-haired mother, of whom the preacher so loves to speak, died in benign age; and the boisterous bairns who once filled the cottage are scattered in the Old World and the New. A little way down the sparkling burn is the picturesque old church of Fewston, where Collyer was christened, where Amos Barton of George Eliot's tale later preached, and where the poet Edward Fairfax—of the ancient family which gave to Virginia its best blood—was buried with his child who "was held to have died of witchcraft." Near by was Collyer's school,School taught by a crippled and cross-eyed old fiddler named Willie Hardie, who survived at our first sojourn in the dale and had much to tell about his pupil "Boab," whom he had often "fairly thrashed." Collyer's school education ended in his eighth year, and he was early apprenticed at Ilkley, in the next valley, where he grew to physical manhood and attained to a measure of that intellectual stature which has since been recognized.

Companions

At Ilkley we find some who remember when Collyer came first, a stripling lad, to work in "owd Jackie's" smithy, and who in the long-ago worked, played, and fought with him in the village or read with him on the moors. One remembers that he was from the first an insatiable student, often reading as he plied the bellows or switched the flies from a customer's horse. His master "Jackie" Birch, who was native of Eugene Aram's home, is recalled as a selfish and unpopular man, who had no sympathy with the lad's studious habit, but tolerated it when it did not interfere with his work. Collyer's love of books was contagious, and soon a little circle of lads habitually assembled, whenever released from toil, to read with him the volumes borrowed from friends or purchased by clubbing their own scant hoards. A survivor of this group walked with us through the village, pointing out the spots associated with Collyer's life here, and afterward showed us upon the slopes of the overlooking hills the nooks where the lads read together in summer holidays. Collyer was especially intimate with the Dobsons: of these John was best beloved, because he shared most fully Collyer's studies and aspirations; between the two an affectionate friendship was formed which, despite long separation and disparity of position,—for John remained a laborer,—ended only with his death. When, thirty years ago, Collyer—honored and famous—revisited the scenes of his early struggles and was eagerly invited to opulent and cultured homes, he turned away from all to abide in the humble cottage of Dobson, which we found near the site of the smithy and occupied by others who were friends of Collyer's youth. His associates of the early time—some of them old andCollyer's Humble Friends poor—tell us with obvious pleasure and pride of his visits to their poor homes in these later summers when he comes to the place, and we suspect he often leaves with them more substantial tokens of his remembrance than kind words and wishes: indeed, he once made us his almoner to the more needy of them, one of whom we found in the workhouse. Some of his old-time friends recall the circumstances of his conversion under the preaching of a Wesleyan named Bland, his own eloquent and touching prayers, and his first timorous essays to conduct the services of the little chapel to which the villagers were bidden by the bellman, who proclaimed through the streets, "The blacksmith will preach t'night." When he preaches at Ilkley now, the Assembly-rooms are thronged with friends, old and new, eager to hear him. "Jackie" sleeps with his fathers, and the smithyThe Smithy is replaced by a modern cottage, into whose masonry many blackened stones from the old forge were incorporated. One of Collyer's chums showed us the door of the smithy which he had rescued from demolition and religiously preserved, and presented us with a photograph which we were assured represents the building just as Collyer knew it,—a long, low fabric of stone, with a shed joined at one end, two forge chimneys rising out of the roof, and the rough doors and window-shutters placarded with public notices. Before the forge was demolished, the large two-horned anvil on which Collyer wrought twelve years was bought for a price and removed to Chicago, where it is still preserved in the study of Unity Church, albeit Collyer long ago predicted to the writer, with a characteristic twinkle and a sweet hint of the dialect his tongue was born to, "they'll soon be sellin' thet for old iron."

Wharfedale Antiquities

The health-giving waters of the hill-sides attract hundreds of invalids and idlers, and the Ilkley of to-day is a smart town of well-kept houses, hotels, and shops, amid which we find here and there a quaint low-roofed structure which is a relic of the village of Collyer's boyhood. Among the survivals is the chapel—now a local museum, inaugurated by Collyer—where our "blacksmith" was converted and where he labored at the spiritual anvil as a local preacher. He has told us that for his labors in the Wesleyan pulpit during several years in Yorkshire and America he received in all seven dollars and fifty cents; he expounded for love, but pounded for a living. Another survival is the ancient parish church, built upon the site of the Roman fortress Olicana and of stones from its ruined walls, which preserves in its masonry many antiquarian treasures of Roman sculpture and inscription. Standing without are three curious monolithic columns, graven with mythological figures of men, dragons, birds, etc., which give them an archæological value beyond price. A doltish rector damaged them by using them as gate-posts; from this degradation the hands of Collyer helped to rescue them, and the same hands fashioned at the forge the neat iron gates which enclose the church-yard.

Scenery

By the village and through the dale which Gray thought so beautiful flows the Wharfe; winding amid verdant meads, rushing between lofty banks, or loitering in sunny shallows, it holds its shining course to the Ouse, beyond the fateful field of Towton, where the red rose of Lancaster went down in blood. Ilkley nestles cosily at the foot of green slopes which swell away from the stream and are dotted with copses and embowered villas. Farther away the dim lines rise to the heights of the Whernside, whence we look to the chimneys of Leeds and the towers of York's mighty minster. Detached from Rumbald's cliffs lie two masses, called "Cow and Calf Rocks," bearing the imprint of giant Rumbald's foot: these rocks are a resort of the young people, and here Collyer and his friends oft came with their books. From this point Wharfedale, domed by a summer sky, seems a paradise of loveliness; its every aspect, from the glinting stream to the highest moorland crags, is replete with the beauty Turner loved to paint and which here first inspired his genius. Ruskin discerns this Wharfedale scenery throughout the great artist's works, bits of its beauty being unconsciously wrought into other scenes. These landscapes were a daily vision to the eyes of Collyer in the days when Turner still came to the neighborhood. This region abounds with memorials of the mighty past, with treasures of Druidical, Runic, and Roman history and tradition, but the literary pilgrim finds it rife with associations for him still more interesting: here lived the ancestors of our Longfellow, and the family whence Thackeray sprang; the fathers of that gentle singer, Heber, dwelt in their castle here and sleep now under the pavement of the church; a little way across the moors the Brontës dwelt and died. Here, too, lived the Fairfaxes,—one of them a poet and translator of Tasso,—and among their tombs we find that of Fawkes of Farnley, Turner's early friend and patron, while at the near-by hall are the rooms the painter occupied during the years he was transferring to canvas the beauties he here beheld. Farnley holds the best private collection of Turner's works, comprising, besides many finished pictures, numerous drawings and color-sketches made here.

Bolton Abbey

A delightful excursion from Ilkley, one never omitted by Collyer from his summer saunterings in Wharfedale, is to the sacred shades of Bolton Abbey. The way is enlivened with the prattle and sheen of the limpid Wharfe. A mile past the hamlet of Addingham, where Collyer preached his first sermon, the stream curves about a slight eminence which is crowned by the ruins of the ancient shrine. Some portions of the walls are fallen and concealed by shrubbery; other portions withstand the ravages of the centuries, and we see the crumbling arches, ruined cloisters, and mullioned windows, mantled with masses of ivy and bloom and set in the scene of restful beauty which Turner painted and Rogers and Wordsworth poetized. Our pleasure in the ruin and its environment of wood, mead, and stream is enhanced by the companionship of one who had, on another summer's day, explored the charms of the spot with George Eliot, and who repeats to us her expressions of rapturous delight at each new vista. Wordsworth loved this spot, and the incident to which the Abbey owed its erection—the drowning of young Romilly, the noble "Boy of Egremond," in the gorge near by—is beautifully told by him in the familiar poems written here.

Nidderdale

Another excursion, by Knaresborough and the deadly field of Marston Moor, brings us into lovely Nidderdale, where stalks the dusky ghost of the Eugene Aram of Bulwer's tale and Hood's poem amid the scenes of his early life and of the crime for which he died. In the upper portion of the valley the Nidd winds like a ribbon of silver between green braes and moorland hills which rise steeply to the narrow horizon. From either side brooklets flow through wooded glens to join the wimpling Nidd, and at the mouth of one of these we find Ramsgill, where Aram was born. It is a straggling hamlet of thatched cottages, set among bowering orchards and gardens and wearing an aspect of tranquil comfort. The site of the laborer's hut in which the gentle student was born is shown at the back of one of the newer cottages of the place. Farther up the picturesque stream is the pretty village of Lofthouse, an assemblage of gray stone houses nestled beneath clustering trees, to which Aram returned after a short residence at Skipton, in the dale of the Brontës. Here he wooed sweet Annie Spence and passed his early years of married life; here his first children were born and one of them died. At the church in near-by Middlesmoor he was married; here his first child was christened, and in the bleak church-yard it was buried. Near a sombre "gill" which opens into the valley some distance below was Gowthwaite Hall,Aram's Schools where Aram taught his first pupils,—an ancient, rambling structure of stone, two stories in height, with many steep gables and wide latticed windows. Venerable trees shaded the walls, leafy vines climbed to and overran the roofs, and a quaint garden of prim squares and formally trimmed foliage lay at one side. We found these externals little changed since Aram was tutor here. The partition of the mansion into three tenements had altered the arrangement of the interior, but the wide stairway still led from the entrance to the upper room at the east end, where Aram taught: it was a large, lofty apartment, reputed to be haunted, changed since his time only by the closing of one casement. Richard Craven was then tenant of the Hall, and his son, the erudite doctor, doubtless received his first tuition in this room and from Aram.

Place of Murder

Some miles down the valley is Knaresborough, to which Aram removed from Lofthouse to establish a school, and where eleven years later the murder was committed. Soon after, Aram removed from the neighborhood, and during his residence at Lynn, where he was arrested for the crime, he was some time tutor in the house of Bulwer's grandfather, a circumstance which led to the production of the fascinating tale. A little way out of Knaresborough, in a recess at the base of the limestone cliffs which here border the murmuring Nidd, is the place where Clarke was killed and buried. This impressive spot was long the hermitage of "Saint Robert," who formed the cave out of the crag. In clearing the rubbish from the place after the publication of Bulwer's tale, the remains of a little shrine were found, and a coffin hewn from the rock, which proved that the hermitage had before been a place of burial, as urged by Aram in his defence. Upon a hill of the forest not far away the body of Aram hung in irons, and local tradition avers that his widow watched to recover the bones as they fell, and when she had at last interred them all, emigrated with her children to America.

Belief in Aram's Innocence

It is noteworthy that belief in his innocence was universal among those who knew him in this countryside. Incidents illustrating his self-denial, patient forbearance, disregard for money, and care to preserve even the lowest forms of life are still cherished and recounted here as showing that robbery and murder were for him impossible crimes. We were reminded, too, that at the time of Clarke's disappearance Aram was husband of a woman of his own station, father of a family, and master of a moderately prosperous school,—conditions of which Bulwer could scarcely have been unaware, and which are inconsistent with the only motives suggested as inciting Aram to crime. In the opinion of the descendants of Aram's old neighbors in his native Nidderdale, Houseman was alone guilty; and if Aram had, instead of undertaking to conduct his own defence, intrusted it to proper counsel, the trial would have resulted in his acquittal.

HOME OF SYDNEY SMITH

Heslington-Foston, Twelve Miles from a Lemon-Church—Rector's Head—Study—Room-of-all-work—Grounds—Guests—Universal Scratcher—Immortal Chariot—Reminiscences.

THE metropolis of England holds many places which knew "the greatest of the many Smiths:" dwellings he some time inhabited, mansions in which he was the honored guest, pulpits and rostrums from which he discoursed, the room in which he died, the tomb where loving hands laid him beside his son. But it is in a remote valley of Yorkshire, where half his adult years were passed in a lonely retreat among the humble poor, that we find the scenes most intimately associated with the fruitful period of his life. In the lovely dale of York, not far from one of the ancient gates and within sound of the bells of the great minster, is the village of Heslington,Heslington Smith's first place of abode in Yorkshire. His dwelling here—lately the rectory of a parish which has been created since his time, and one of the best houses of the village—is a spacious and substantial old-fashioned mansion of brick, two stories in height and delightfully cosy in appearance. Large bow-windows, built by Smith, project from the front and rise to the eaves. The rooms are of comfortable dimensions, and that in which Smith wrote is "glorified" by the sunlight from one of his great windows, near which his writing-table was placed. The house stands a rod or two from the highway, amid a mass of foliage; an iron railing borders the yard, trees grow upon either side, and at the back is an ample garden which was Smith's especial delight, and which he paced for hours as he pondered his compositions. It was here that the dignified Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review rode the children's pet donkey over the grass. Smith's famous "Peter Plimley" letters were produced at Heslington. He never felt at home here, because he constantly contemplated removing. His own parish had no rectory, and he was permitted by his bishop to reside here while he sought to exchange the living for another: failing in this, he was allowed a further term in which to erect a dwelling in his parish, consequently Heslington was his home for some years. During this time he made weekly excursions to his church, twelve miles distant, behind a steed which he commemorates as Peter the Cruel, and in the year he built his parsonage the excursions were so frequent that he computed he had ridden Peter "several times round the world, going and coming from Heslington."

Foston-le-Clay

In the remoter hamlet of Foston, "twelve miles from a lemon," we find the church where he ministered for twenty years and the house which was his home longer than any other. Our way thither—the same once so familiar to Smith and his cruel steed—lies along the green valley through which the wimpling Foss ripples and sings on its way to the Ouse. In sun and shadow our road leads through a pleasant country until we see the roofs of Smith's parsonageSmith's Parsonage rising among the tree-tops. The Rector's Head, as the wit delighted to call his home, stands among the glebe-lands at a little distance from the highway, and a carriage-drive—constructed by Smith after some of his guests had been almost inextricably mired in their attempts to reach his door—conducts from a road-side gate near the school through the tasteful and well-kept grounds. Before we reach the rectory a second barrier is encountered, Smith's "Screeching Gate," which, like the gate at "Amen Corner," remains just as it was when he bestowed its name. The mansion, of which he was both architect and builder, described by him and his friend Loch as "the ugliest house ever seen," presents a singularly attractive aspect of cosiness and comfort. The edifice is somewhat improved since the great essayist dwelt beneath its roof, but the original structure remains,—an oblong brick fabric, of ample proportions and unpretentious architecture, two stories in height, with hip-roofs of warm-tinted tiles. A large bay-window struts from one side wall; a beautiful conservatory abuts upon another side; a little porch, overgrown with creepers and flowers, protects the entrance. The once plain brickwork, which rose bare of ornamentation, is mantled with ivy and flowering vines which clamber to the roofs and riot along the walls, imparting to the "unparsonic parsonage" a picturesque charm which no architectural decoration could produce. The bare field in which Smith erected his house has been transformed into an Eden of beauty and bloom; on every side are velvety lawns, curving walks, beds of flowers, patches of shrubbery, and groups of woodland trees, forming a pretty park, mostly planned by Smith and planted by his hand. Within, we find the apartments spacious and cheerful: the windows are the same that were screened by the many-hued patchwork shades designed by Smith and wrought by the deft fingers of his daughters, the chimney-pieces of Portland stone which he erected remain, but tasteful and elegant furniture now replaces the rude handiwork of the village carpenter, which was disposed through these rooms during Smith's incumbency. He blithely tells a guest, "I needed furniture; I bought a cart-load of boards and got the carpenter, Jack Robinson; told him, 'Jack, furnish my house,' and you see the result." Some of the resulting furniture is still preserved in the neighborhood and valued above price. From the bay-window of the parlor the gray towers of York's colossal cathedral are seen ten miles away; the room adjoining at the left is the memorable apartment which was Smith's study, school-room, court, surgery, and what-not. Here his gayly-bound books were arranged by his daughter, the future Lady Holland, and here, when not applied to him, his famous "rheumatic armor" stood in a bag in yonder corner. Here he wrote his sermons, his brilliant and witty essays, the wise and effective disquisitions on the disabilities of the Catholics, the coruscating and incisive articles for the Review which electrified the English world. In this room he taught his children and gave Bible lessons to the youth of the parish, some of whom survive to praise and bless him; here, too, he prescribed for the sick and dispensed mercy rather than justice to culprits haled before him; for, as his letters declare, he was at once "village magistrate, village parson, village doctor, village comforter, and Edinburgh Reviewer." To these manifold avocations he added, despite his "not knowing a turnip from a carrot," that of the farmer, and managed the three hundred acresFields and Farmsteading of glebe-lands which were so unproductive that no one else would cultivate them. A door-way of the rectory overlooks most of the plantation, and he suspended here a telescope and a tremendous speaking-trumpet by means of which he could observe and direct much of his operations without himself going afield. Behind the house, and screened by trees which Smith planted, are the farmstead buildings he planned; here are the stables and pens where he was welcomed by every individual of his stock, whom he daily visited to feed and pet; here is the enclosure where he found his fuddled pigs "grunting God save the King about the sty" after he had administered a medicament of fermented grains. In the adjoining field is the site of his "Universal Scratcher,"—a sharp-edged pole having a tall support at one extremity and a low one at the other, which so adapted it to the height of every animal that "they could scratch themselves with the greatest facility and luxury; even the 'Reviewer' [himself] could take his turn."

Guests—Reminiscences

Of Smith's life in this retirement his many letters and the memoirs of his daughter give us pleasant pictures. Although he said his whole life had "been passed like a razor, in hot water or a scrape," the years spent here seem to have been happy ones. Even his removal to this house while it was yet so damp that the walls ran down with wet and the grounds were so miry that his wife lost her shoes at the door, was made enjoyable. He writes to one friend, "I am too busy to be lonely;" to another, "I thank God who made me poor that he also made me merry, a better gift than much land with a doleful heart;" to another, "I am content and doubling in size every year;" to Lady Grey, "Come and see how happy people can be in a small parsonage;" to Jeffrey, "My situation is one of great solitude, but I possess myself in cheerfulness." He had expended upon his improvements here more than the living was worth, therefore economy ruled the selection of the personnel of this establishment. Faithful Annie Kay was first employed as child's-maid; later she was housekeeper and trusted friend, removed from here with her loved master, attended him in his last illness, and lies near him in the long sleep. A garden girl, made like a mile-stone, was hired by Smith, who "christened her Bunch, gave her a napkin, and made her his butler." Jack Robinson was retained as general factotum of the place, and Molly Mills, "a yeowoman, with short petticoat, legs like mill-posts, and cheeks shrivelled like winter apples," did duty as "cow-, pig-, poultry-, garden-, and post-woman." Guests testify that good-natured training had, out of this unpromising material, produced such efficient servants that the household ran smoothly in the stress of much company. For, despite the seclusion of Smith's retreat, his fame and the charm and wit of his conversation drew many visitors to his house. Lords Carlisle and Morpeth were almost weekly guests; Sir Humphry Davy and his gifted wife were many times guests for days together; among those who came less frequently were Jeffrey, Macaulay, Marcet, Dugald Stewart, John Murray, Mackintosh, and Lord and Lady Holland, with many of less fame; and we may imagine something of the scintillant converse these rooms knew when the master wit entertained such company. Neither his friends nor his literary pursuits were allowed to interfere with his attentions to the simple rustics of his parish; in sickness and trouble he was tireless in their service, furnishing medicines, food, and clothing out of his slender means. During the prevalence of an infectious fever he was constantly among them, as physician, nurse, and priest. The oldest parishioners speak of him by his Christian name, and testify that he was universally beloved. One lately remembered that Sydney had cared for his father during a long illness and maintained the family until he could return to his work. Another had been accustomed, as a child, to run after Sydney on the highway and cling to him until he bestowed the sugar-plums he always carried in his pockets. In one portion of the glebe we found small enclosures of land stocked with abundant fruit-trees and called Sydney's Orchards, which were planted by him and given to the parishioners at a nominal rental.

Smith's solitary excursions through the parish were made astride a gaunt charger, called by him Calamity, noted for length of limb and strength of appetite, as well as for a propensity to part company with his rider, sometimes throwing the great Smith "over his head into the next parish." But when the rector's family were to accompany him, the ancient green chariotThe Chariot was employed. This was believed to have been the first vehicle of the kind, was purchased by Smith at second (or twenty-second) hand, and was from time to time partially restored by the unskilled village mechanics. Anent this structure the delightful Smith writes, "Each year added to its charms: it grew younger and younger: a new wheel, a new spring; I christened it the Immortal: it was known everywhere: the village boys cheered it, the village dogs barked at it." To the ends of the shafts Smith attached a rod so that it projected in front of the horse and sustained a measure of grain just beyond his reach,—a device which evoked a maximum of speed from the beast with the minimum of exertion on the part of the driver, the deluded horse being "stimulated to unwonted efforts by hope of overtaking the provender." We have talked with some in the vicinage who remembered seeing Smith and his family riding in this perennial chariot, drawn by a plough-horse which was harnessed with plough-lines and driven by a plough-boy.

Smith's Church

A mile from the rectory, past the few straggling cottages of the hamlet, we come to the quaint little church of Foston, one of the oldest in England. It was already in existence in 1081 when Doomsday Book was compiled, being then the property of Earl Allen: later it was conveyed to St. Mary's Abbey, whose ruins—marvellously beautiful even in decay—we find at the gates of York. It is noteworthy that this church of Foston early contained an image of the Virgin of such repute that people flocked to it in great numbers, and in 1313 the archbishop issued an edict that they should not desert their own churches to come here. Smith's church is prettily placed upon a gentle eminence from which we look across a wave-like expanse of smiling fields to steeper slopes beyond, a picture of pastoral peace and calm. Beneath the many mouldering heaps of the church-yard sleep the rustic poor for whom Smith labored, many of them having been committed to their narrow cells, "in the certain hope of the life to come," by his kindly hands. Among the graves stands the old church, the plainest and smallest of its kind. The present venerable and reverend incumbent, to whom we are indebted for many courtesies, has at his own expense restored the chancel as a memorial of his wife, but the principal portion of the edifice remains the same "miserable hovel" that Macaulay described in Smith's day. A heavy porch shelters the entrance, and above this is a sculptured Norman arch of great antiquity, a Scripture subject being graven upon each stone, that upon the key-block representing the Last Supper. The bare walls are surmounted by a dilapidated belfry, and the barn-like edifice is desolate and neglected. We find the interior dismal and depressive, and quite unchanged since Smith's time, save that the stove-pipe now enters a flue instead of emerging through a window. The quaint old pulpit, perched high in the corner opposite the gallery and beneath a huge sounding-board, is the same in which he so often stood; its frayed and faded cushions are said to be those that he belabored in his discourses, and out of which, on one occasion, he raised such a cloud of dust "that for some minutes he lost sight of the congregation." The pewter communion plate he used is preserved in a recess of the wall. Across the end and along one side of the church extends a gallery, in which sat the children under Smith's sharp eye, and kept in order, as some remember, by "a threaten-shake of his head." Along the front of this gallery ugly wooden pegs are aligned, on which the occupants of the pews hang their wraps, and so diminutive is the place that there are but four pews between door and pulpit. The present rector, whose father owned most of the parish and was Smith's firm friend, attended as a boy Smith's ministrations here, and remembers something of the direct eloquence of his sermons and their impressive effect upon the auditors. Attracted by his fame, some came from far to hear him preach who afterward became his ardent friends, among these being Macaulay and the Mrs. Apreece whom de Staël depicted as "Corinne" and who subsequently, as wife of Humphry Davy, was guest at The Rector's Head. In this shabby little church Smith gave away his daughter Emily, the Archbishop of York reading the marriage service; and not long after Smith removed to Somerset, and Foston saw him no more.