"remote." On looking out of our chamber window in the morning, we remarked that the situation of the inn was beautiful, even towards the road, the place is so rich with trees; and returning to the room in which we had supped, we found with pleasure that we had a window there, presenting us with a peep into. rich meadows, where the haymakers were at work in their white shirts. A sunny room, quiet, our remote five miles, and a pleasant subject (the Poetry of British Ladies) enabled the editorial part of us to go comfortably to our morning's task; after which we left the inn to proceed on our journey. We had not seen Dulwich for many years, and were surprised to find it still so full of trees. It continues, at least in the quarter through which we passed, to deserve the recommendation given it by Armstrong, of "Dulwich, yet unspoil'd by art." He would have added, had he lived, now that art had come, even to make it better. It was with real pain, that two lovers of painting were obliged to coast the walls of the college without seeing the gallery: but we have vowed a pilgrimage very shortly to those remoter places, there to be found; to wit, the landscapes of Claude and Cuyp, and the houses of Rembrandt; and we shall make report of it, to save our character. We know not whether it was the sultriness of the day, with occasional heavy clouds, but we thought the air of Dulwich too warm, and pronounced it a place of sleepy luxuriance. So it appeared to us that morning; beautiful, however, and "remote; " and the thought of old Allen, Shakspeare's playmate, made it still more so. I remember, in my boyhood, seeing Sir Francis Bourgeois (the bequeather of the Dulwich pictures) in company with Mr. West, in the latter's gallery in Newman-street. He was in buckskins and boots, dandy dress of that time, and appeared a lively, good-natured man, with a pleasing countenance, probably because he said something pleasant of myself; he confirmed it with an oath, which startled, but did not alter this opinion. Ever afterwards I had an inclination to like his pictures, which I believe were not very good; and unfortunately, with whatever gravity he might paint, his oath and his buckskins would never allow me to consider him a serious person; so that it somewhat surprised me to hear that M. Desenfans had bequeathed him his gallery out of pure regard; and still more that Sir Francis, when he died, had ordered his own remains to be gathered to those of his benefactor and Madame Desenfans, and all three buried in the society of the pictures they loved. For the first time, I began to think that his pictures must have contained more than was found in them, and that I had done wrong (as it is customary to do) to the gaiety of his manners. If there was vanity in the bequest, as some have thought, it was at least a vanity accompanied with touching circumstances and an appearance of a very social taste; and as most people have their vanities, it might be as well for them to think what sort of accompaniments exalt or degrade theirs, or render them purely dull and selfish. As to the Gallery's being "out of the way," especially for students, I am of a different opinion, and for two reasons: first, that no gallery, whether in or out of the way, can ever produce great artists, nature, and perhaps the very want of a gallery, always settling that matter before galleries are thought of; and, second, because in going to see the pictures in a beautiful country village, people get out of their town common-places, and are better prepared for the perception of other beauties, and of the nature that makes them all. Besides, there is probably something to pay on a jaunt of this kind, and yet of a different sort from payments at a door. There is no illiberal demand at Dulwich for a liberal pleasure; but then "the inn" is inviting; people eat and drink, and get social; and the warmth which dinner and a glass diffuses, helps them to rejoice doubly in the warmth of the sunshine and the pictures, and in the fame of the great and generous. Leaving Dulwich for Norwood (where we rejoiced to hear that some of our old friends the Gipsies were still extant), we found the air very refreshing as we ascended towards the church of the latter village. It is one of the dandy modern churches (for they deserve no better name) standing on an open hill, as if to be admired. It is pleasant to see churches instead of Methodist chapels, because any moderate religion has more of real Christianity in it, than contumelious opinions of God and the next world; but there is a want of taste, of every sort, in these new churches. They are not picturesque, like the old ones; they are not humble; they are not, what they are so often miscalled, classical. A barn is a more classical building than a church with a fantastic steeple to it. In fact, a barn is of the genuine classical shape, and only wants a stone covering, and pillars about it, to become a temple of Theseus. The classical shape is the shape of simple utility and beauty. Sometimes we see it in the body of the modern church; but then a steeple must be put on it: the artist must have something of his own; and having, in fact, nothing of his own, he first puts a bit of a steeple, which he thinks will not be enough, then another bit, and then another ; adds another fantastic ornament here and there to his building, by way of rim or " border, like;" and so, having put his pepper-box over his pillars, and his pillars over his pepperbox, he pretends he has done a grand thing, while he knows very well that he has only been perplexed, and a bricklayer. For a village, the old picturesque church is the proper thing, with its tower and its trees, as at Hendon and Finchley; or its spire, as at Beckenham. Classical beauty is one thing, Gothic or Saxon beauty is another; quite as genuine in its way, and in this instance more suitable. It has been well observed, that what is called classical architecture, though of older date than the Gothic, really does not look so old-does not so well convey the sentiment of antiquity; that is to say, the ideal associations of this world, however ancient, are far surpassed in the reach of ages by those of religion, and the patriarchs and another world; not to mention, that we have been used to identify them with the visible old age of our parents and kindred; and that Greek and Roman architecture, in its smoothness and polish, has an unfading look of youth. It might be thought, that the erection of new churches on the classical principle (taking it for granted that, they remind us more of Greek and Roman temples, than of their own absurdity) would be favourable to the growth of liberality; that, at least, liberality would not be opposed by it; whereas the preservation of the old style might tend to keep up old notions. We do not think so, except inasmuch as the old notions would not be unfavourable to the new. New opinions ought to be made to grow as kindly as possible out of old ones, and should preserve all that they contain of the affectionate and truly venerable. We could fancy the most liberal doctrines preached five hundred years hence in churches precisely like those of our ancestors, and their old dust ready to blossom into delight at the arrival of true Christianity. But these new, fine, heartlesslooking, showy churches, neither one thing nor the other, have, to our eyes, an appearance of nothing but worldliness and a job. We descended into Streatham by the lane leading to the White Lion; the which noble beast, regardant, looked at us up the narrow passage, as if intending to dispute rather than invite our approach to the castle of his hospitable proprietor. On going nearer, we found that the grimness of his aspect was purely in our imaginations, the said lordly animal having, in fact, a countenance singularly humane, and very like a gentleman we knew once of the name of Collins. It not being within our plan to accept Collins's invitation, we turned to the left, and proceeded down the village, thinking of Dr. Johnson. Seeing, however, an aged landlord at the door, we stepped back to ask him if he remembered the Doctor. He knew nothing of him, nor even of Mr. Thrale, having come late, he said, to those parts. Resuming our way, we saw, at the end of the village, a decentlooking old man, with a sharp eye and a hale countenance, who, with an easy, self-satisfied air, as if he had worked enough in his time and was no longer under the necessity of overtroubling himself, sat indolently cracking stones in the road. We asked him if he knew Dr. Johnson; and he said, with a jerk-up of his eye, "Oh yes ;-I knew him well enough." Seating myself on one side of his trench of stones, I proceeded to have that matter out with Master Whatman (for such was the name of my informant). His information did not amount to much, but it contained one or two points which I do not remember to have met with, and every addition to our knowledge of such a man is valuable. Nobody will think it more so than yourself, who will certainly yearn over this part of my letter, and make much of it. The following is the sum total of what was related :-Johnson, he said, wore a silk waistcoat embroidered with silver, and all over snuff. The snuff he carried loose in his waistcoat pocket, and would take a handful of it out with one hand, and help himself to it with the other. He would sometimes have his dinner brought out to him in the park, and set on the ground; and while he was waiting for it, would lie idly, and cut the grass with a knife. His manners were very good-natured, and sometimes so childish, that people would have taken him for "an idiot, like." His voice "low."-"Do you mean low in a gruff sense?""No: it was rather feminine.". "Then perhaps, in one sense of the word, it was high ?"—" Yes, it was.”—“ And gentle?” was "Yes, very gentle !"-(This, of course, was to people in general, and to the villagers. When he dogmatised, it became what Lord Pembroke called a "bow-wow." The late Mr. Fuseli told us the same thing of Johnson's voice; we mean, that it was high,' in contradistinction to a bass voice.) To proceed with our village historian. Our informant recurred several times to the childish manners of Johnson, saying that he often appeared" quite simple," "just like a child,"-" almost foolish, like." When he walked, he always seemed in a hurry. His walk was "between a run and a shuffle." Master Whatman was here painting a good portrait. I have often suspected that the best likeness of Johnson was a whole-length engraving of him, walking in Scotland, with that joke of his underneath, about the stick that he lost in the isle of Mull. Boswell told him the stick would be returned. "No, sir," replied he; "consider the value of such a piece of timber here." The manner of his walk in the picture is precisely that described by the villager. Whatman concluded, by giving his opinion of Mrs. Thrale, which he did in exactly the following words :-" She gathered a good deal of knowledge from him, but does not seem to have turned it to much account." Wherever you now go about the country, you recognise the effects of that "Twopenny Trash," which the illiberal affect to hold in such contempt, and are really so afraid of. They have reason; for people now canvass their pretensions in good set terms, who would have said nothing but "Anan!" to a question thirty years back. Not that Mr. Whatman discussed politics with us. Let no magnanimous Quarterly Reviewer try to get him turned out of a place on that score. We are speaking of the peasantry at large, and then, not merely of politics, but of questions of all sorts interesting to humanity; which the very clowns now discuss by the road-side, to an extent at which their former leaders would not dare to discuss them. This is one reason, among others, why knowledge must go on victoriously. A real zeal for the truth can discuss anything; slavery can only go the length of its chain. In quitting Streatham, we met a lady on horseback, accompanied by three curs and a footman, which a milkman facetiously termed a footman and "three outriders." Entering Mitcham by the green where they play at cricket, we noticed a pretty, moderate-sized house, with the largest geraniums growing on each side the door that we ever beheld in that situation. Mitcham reminded me of its neighbour, Merton, and of the days of my childhood; but we could not go out of our way to see it. There was the little river Wandle, however, turning a mill, and flowing between flowery meadows. The mill was that of a copper manufactory, at which the people work night as well as day, one half taking the duties alternately. The reason given for this is, that by night, the river not being interrupted by other demands upon it, works to better advantage. The epithet of "flowery" applied to the district, is no poetical licence. In the fields about Mitcham they cultivate herbs for the apothecaries; so that in the height of the season, you walk as in the Elysian fields, "In yellow meads of asphodel, And amaranthine bowers." Apothecaries' Hall, I understand, is entirely supplied with this poetical part of medicine from some acres of ground belonging to Major Moor. A beautiful bed of poppies, as we entered Morden, glowed in the setting sun, like the dreams of Titian. It looked like a bed for Proserpina-a glow of melancholy beauty, containing a joy perhaps beyond joy. Poppies, with their dark ruby cups and crowned heads, the more than wine colour of their sleepy silk, and the funeral look of their anthers, seem to have a meaning about them beyond other flowers. They look as if they held a mystery at their hearts, like sleeping kings of Lethe. The church of Mitcham has been rebuilt, if I recollect rightly, but in the proper old style. Morden has a good old church, which tempted us to look into the church-yard; but a rich man who lives near it, and who did not choose his house to be approached on that side, had locked up the gate, so that there was no path through it, except on Sundays. Can this be a lawful exercise of power? If people have a right to call any path their own, I should think it must be that which leads to the graves of their fathers and mothers; and next to their right, such a path is the right of the traveller. The traveller may be in some measure regarded as a representative of wandering humanity. He claims relationship with all whom he finds attached to a place in idea. He and the dead are at once in a place, and apart from it. Setting aside this remoter sentiment, it is surely an inconsiderate thing in any man to shut up a church-yard from the villagers; and should these pages meet the eye of the person in question, he is recommended to think better of it. Possibly I may not know the whole of the case, and on that account, though not that only, I mention no names; for the inhabitant with whom I talked on the subject, and who regarded it in the same light, added, with a candour becoming his objections, that "the gentleman was a very good-natured gentleman, too, and kind to the poor." How his act of power squares with his kindness, I do not know. Very good-natured people are sometimes very fond of having their own way; but this is a mode of indulging it, which a truly generous person, I should think, will, on reflection, be glad to give up. Such a man, I am sure, can afford to concede a point, where others, who do not deserve the character, will try hard to retain every little proof of their importance. On the steps of the George Inn, at Morden, the rustic inn of a hamlet, stood a personage much grimmer than the White Lion of Streatham; looking, in fact, with his fiery eyes, his beak, and his old mouth and chin, very like the cock, or "grim leoun," of Chaucer. He was tall and thin, with a flapped hat over his eyes, and appeared as sulky and dissatisfied as if he had quarrelled with the whole world, the exciseman in particular. We asked him if he could let us have some tea. He said, "Yes, he believed so ;" and pointed with an indifferent, or rather hostile air, to a room at the side, which we entered. A buxom good-natured girl, with a squint, that was bewitching after the moral deformity of our friend's visage, served us up tea; and "tea, sir," as Johnson might have said, "inspires placidity." The room was adorned with some engravings after Smirke, the subjects out of Shakspeare, which never look so well, I think, as when thus encountered on a journey. Shakspeare is in the highway of life, with exquisite side-touches of the remoteness of the poet; and nobody links all kindly together as he does. We afterwards found in conversing with the villager above-mentioned, that our host of the George had got rich, and was preparing to quit for a new house he had built, in which he meant to turn gentleman farmer, Habit made him dislike to go; pride and his wife (who vowed she would go whether he did or not) rendered him unable to stay; and so between his grudging the new-comer and the old rib, he was in as pretty a state of irritability as any successful non-succeeder need be. People had been galling him all day, I suppose, with showing how many pots of ale would be drunk under the new tenant; and our arrival crowned the measure of his receipts and his wretchedness, by intimating that "gentlefolks" intended to come to tea.-Adieu, till next week. We left Morden after tea, and proceeded on our road for Epsom. The landscape continued flat but luxuriant. You are sure, I believe, of trees in Surrey, except on the downs; and they are surrounded with wood, and often have beautiful clumps of it. The sun began to set a little after we had got beyond the Post-house; and was the largest I remember to have seen. It looked through hedges of elms and wild roses; the mowers were going home; and by degrees the landscape was bathed in a balmy twilight. Patient and placid thought succeeded. It was an hour, and a scene, in which one would suppose that the weariest-laden pilgrim must feel his burden easier. Pope seems to have lifted up his delicate nose at Twickenham, and scented his dinner a dozen miles off. At Epsom we supped and slept ; and finding the inn comfortable, and having some work to do, we stopped there a day or two. Do you not like those solid, wainscotted rooms in old houses, with seats in the windows, and no pretension but to comfort? They please me exceedingly. Their merits are complete, if the houses are wide and low, and situate in a spot at once woody and dry. Wood is not to be expected in a high street; but the house (the King's Head) was of this description; and Epsom itself is in a nest of trees. Next morning on looking out of window, we found ourselves in a proper country town, remarkably neat, the houses not old enough to be ruinous, nor yet to have been exchanged for new ones of a London character. Opposite us was the watch-house with the market-clock, and a pond which is said to contain gold and silver fish. How those delicate little creatures came to inhabit a pond in the middle of a town I cannot say. One fancies they must have been put in by the fantastic hand of some fine lady in the days of Charles the Second; for this part of the country is eminent in the annals of About a mile from Ewell a post-chaise over- gaiety. Charles used to come to the races here; took and passed us, the driver of which was the palace of Nonesuch, which he gave to Lady seated, and had taken up an eleemosynary girl Castlemain, is a few miles off; and here he to sit with him. Postilions run along a road, visited the gentry in the neighbourhood. At conscious of a pretty power in that way, and Ashted Park, close by, and still in possession of able to select some fair one, to whom they gal- inheritors of the name of Howard by marriage, lantly make a present of a ride. Not having he visited Sir Robert Howard, the brothera fare of one sort, they make it up to them-in-law of Dryden, who probably used to come selves by taking another. You may be pretty sure on these occasions, that there is nobody"hid in their vacant interlunar" chaise. So taking pity on my companions (for after I am once tired, I seem as if I could go on, tired for ever), I started and ran after the charioteer. Some good-natured peasants (they all appear such in this county) aided the shouts which I sent after him. He stopped; and the gallantry on both sides was rewarded by the addition of two females to his vehicle. We were soon through Ewell, a pretty neat-looking place with a proper old church, and a handsome house opposite, new but in the old style. The church has trees by it, and there was a moon over them.-At Ewell was born the facetious Bishop Corbet, who when a bald man was brought before him to be confirmed, said to his assistant, "Some dust, Lushington:"-(to keep his hand from slipping.) The night air struck cold on passing Ewell; and for the first time there was an appearance of a bleak and barren country to the left. This was Epsom Downs. They are the same as the Banstead and Leatherhead downs, the name varying with the neighbourhood. You remember Banstead mutton? "To Hounslow-heath I point, and Banstead down; Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own." there also. They preserved there till not long ago the table at which the king dined. This Ashted is a lovely spot,-both park and village. The village, or rather hamlet, is on the road to Leatherhead; so indeed is the park; but the mansion is out of sight; and near the mansion, and in the very thick of the park and the trees, with the deer running about it, is the village church, small, old, and picturesque, - a little stone tower; and the churchyard, of proportionate dimensions, is beside it. When I first saw it, looking with its pointed windows through the trees, the surprise was beautiful. The inside disappoints you, not because it is so small, but because the accommodations and the look of them are so homely. The wood of the pews resembles that of an old kitchen dresser in colour; the lord of the manor's being not a whit better than the rest. This is in good taste, considering the rest; and Col. Howard, who has the reputation of being a liberal man, probably keeps the church just as he found it, without thinking about the matter. At any rate, he does not exalt himself, in a Christian assembly, at the expense of his neighbours. But loving old churches as I do, and looking forward to a time when a Christianity still more worthy of the name shall be preached in them, I could not help wishing that the inside were more worthy of the out. A coat of shining walnut, a painting at one end, and a small organ with its dark wood and its golden-looking pipes at the other, would make, at no great expense to a wealthy man, a jewel of an interior, worthy of the lovely spot in which the church is situate. One cannot help desiring something of this kind the more, on account of what has been done for other village-churches in the neighbourhood, which I shall presently notice. Epsom church, I believe, is among them; the outside unquestionably (I have not seen the interior); and a spire has been added, which makes a pretty addition to the scenery. The only ornaments of Ashted church, besides two or three monuments of the Howards, are the family 'scutcheon, and that of his Sacred Majesty Charles the Second; which I suppose was put up at the time of his restoration or his visit, and has remained ever since, the lion still looking lively and threatening. One imagines the court coming to church, and the whole place filled with perukes and courtiers, with love-locks and rustling silks. Sir Robert is in a state of exaltation. Dryden stands near him, observant. Charles composes his face to the sermon, upon which Buckingham and Sedley are cracking almost unbearable jokes behind their gloves; and the poor village maidens, gaping alternately at his Majesty's sacred visage and the profane beauty of the Countess of Castlemain, and then losing their eyes among 66 a power" of cavaliers, "the handsomest men as ever was," are in a way to bring the hearts, thumping in their boddices, to a fine market. I wonder how many descendants there are of earls and marquises living this minute at Epsom! How much noble blood ignobly occupied with dairies and ploughs, and looking gules in the cheeks of bumpkins. Ashted Park has some fine walnut-trees (Surrey is the 'great garden of walnuts) and one of the noblest limes I ever saw. The park is well kept, has a pretty lodge and gamekeeper's house with roses at the doors; and a farm cottage, where the "gentlefolks may play at rustics. A lady of quality, in a boddice, gives one somehow a pretty notion; especially if she has a heart high enough really to sympathise with humility. A late Earl of Exeter lived unknown for some time in a village, under the name of Jones (was not that a good name to select?) and married a country girl, whom he took to Burleigh House, and then for the first time told her she was the mistress of it and a Countess! This is a romance of real life, which has been deservedly envied. If I, instead of being a shattered student, an old intellectual soldier, "not worth a lady's eye," and forced to compose his frame to abide the biddings of his resolution, were a young fellow in the bloom of life, and equally clever and penniless, I cannot imagine a fortune of which I should be prouder, and which would give me a right to take a manlier aspect in the eyes of love, than to owe everything I had in the world, down to my very shoestrings, to a woman who should have played over the same story with me, the sexes being reversed; who should say, "You took me for a cottager, and I am a Countess; and this is the only deception you will ever have to forgive me." What a pleasure to strive after daily excellence, in order to show one's gratitude to such a woman; to fight for her; to suffer for her; to wear her name like a priceless jewel; to hold her hand in long sickness, and look in her face when it had lost its beauty; to say, questioning, "You know how I love you?" and for her to answer with such a face of truth, that nothing but exceeding health could hinder one from being faint with adoring her. Alas! why are not all hearts that are capable of love, rich in the knowledge how to show it; which would supersede the necessity of other riches? Or indeed, are not all hearts which are truly so capable, gifted with the riches by the capacity? Forgive me this dream under the walnuttrees of Ashted Park; and let us return to the colder loves of the age of Charles the Second. I thought to give you a good picture of Epsom, by turning to Shadwell's comedy of Epsom Wells; but it contains nothing of any sort except a sketch of a wittol or two, though Sedley is said to have helped him in it, and though (probably on that account) it was very successful. Pepys, however, will supply us with a scene or two : "26th, Lord's-day.-Up and to the Wells, where a great store of citizens, which was the greatest part of the company, though there were some others of better quality. Thence I walked to Mr. Minnes's house, and thence to Durdan's, and walked within the court-yard &c. to the bowling-green, where I have seen so much mirth in my time; but now no family in it (my Lord Barkeley, whose it is, being with his family at London). Then rode through Epsom, the whole town over, seeing the various companies that were there walking; which is very pleasant, seeing how they are without knowing what to do, but only in the morning to drink waters. But Lord! to see how many I met there of citizens, that I could not have thought to have seen there; that they had ever had it in their heads or purses to go down there. We went through Nonesuch Park to the house, and there viewed as much as we could of the outside, and looked through the great gates, and found a noble court: and altogether believe it to have been a very noble house, and a delicate parke about it, where just now there was a doe killed for the king, to carry up to court."-Vol. i. p. 241. |