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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Stray Studies from England and Italy, by 
+John Richard Greene
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Stray Studies from England and Italy
+
+Author: John Richard Greene
+
+Release Date: June 20, 2008 [EBook #25855]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRAY STUDIES - ENGLAND AND ITALY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Barbara Kosker, Bill Tozier
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  STRAY STUDIES
+
+  FROM
+
+  ENGLAND AND ITALY.
+
+  BY
+
+  JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
+
+
+  LONDON:
+  MACMILLAN AND CO.
+  1876.
+
+  LONDON:
+  PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS,
+  STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+I have to thank the Editors of _Macmillan's Magazine_ and the _Saturday
+Review_ for allowing me to reprint most of the papers in this series. In
+many cases however I have greatly changed their original form. A few
+pages will be found to repeat what I have already said in my 'Short
+History.'
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                   PAGE
+
+  A BROTHER OF THE POOR                               1
+
+  SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE:--
+
+      I. CANNES AND ST. HONORAT                      31
+     II. CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE                     44
+    III. TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA             59
+     IV. THE WINTER RETREAT                          71
+      V. SAN REMO                                    79
+
+  THE POETRY OF WEALTH                               93
+
+  LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS                       107
+
+  CHILDREN BY THE SEA                               167
+
+  THE FLORENCE OF DANTE                             181
+
+  BUTTERCUPS                                        198
+
+  ABBOT AND TOWN                                    211
+
+  HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS                              241
+
+  ÆNEAS: A VERGILIAN STUDY                          257
+
+  TWO VENETIAN STUDIES:--
+
+      I. VENICE AND ROME                            289
+     II. VENICE AND TINTORETTO                      300
+
+  THE DISTRICT VISITOR                              313
+
+  THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD                       329
+
+  THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS                     359
+
+  CAPRI                                             383
+
+  CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS                       395
+
+  THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS                    414
+
+
+
+
+A BROTHER OF THE POOR.
+
+
+There are few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such
+as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in
+the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly
+a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the
+grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables
+of Knoll, the chime of a village clock falls faintly on the ear, but
+there is no voice or footfall of living thing to break the silence as I
+turn over leaf after leaf of the little book I have brought with me from
+the bustle of town to this still retreat, a book that is the record of a
+broken life, of a life "broken off," as he who lived it says of another,
+"with a ragged edge."
+
+It is a book that carries one far from the woodland stillness around
+into the din and turmoil of cities and men, into the misery and
+degradation of "the East-end,"--that "London without London," as some
+one called it the other day. Few regions are more unknown than the Tower
+Hamlets. Not even Mrs. Riddell has ventured as yet to cross the border
+which parts the City from their weltering mass of busy life, their
+million of hard workers packed together in endless rows of monotonous
+streets, broken only by shipyard or factory or huge breweries, streets
+that stretch away eastward from Aldgate to the Essex marshes. And yet,
+setting aside the poetry of life which is everywhere, there is poetry
+enough in East London; poetry in the great river which washes it on the
+south, in the fretted tangle of cordage and mast that peeps over the
+roofs of Shadwell or in the great hulls moored along the wharves of
+Wapping; poetry in the "Forest" that fringes it to the east, in the few
+glades that remain of Epping and Hainault,--glades ringing with the
+shouts of school-children out for their holiday and half mad with
+delight at the sight of a flower or a butterfly; poetry of the present
+in the work and toil of these acres of dull bricks and mortar where
+everybody, man woman and child, is a worker, this England without a
+"leisure class"; poetry in the thud of the steam-engine and the white
+trail of steam from the tall sugar refinery, in the blear eyes of the
+Spitalfields weaver, or the hungering faces of the group of labourers
+clustered from morning till night round the gates of the docks and
+watching for the wind that brings the ships up the river: poetry in its
+past, in strange old-fashioned squares, in quaint gabled houses, in grey
+village churches, that have been caught and overlapped and lost, as it
+were, in the great human advance that has carried London forward from
+Whitechapel, its limit in the age of the Georges, to Stratford, its
+bound in that of Victoria.
+
+Stepney is a belated village of this sort; its grey old church of St.
+Dunstan, buried as it is now in the very heart of East London, stood
+hardly a century ago among the fields. All round it lie tracts of human
+life without a past; but memories cluster thickly round "Old Stepney,"
+as the people call it with a certain fond reverence, memories of men
+like Erasmus and Colet and the group of scholars in whom the Reformation
+began. It was to the country house of the Dean of St. Paul's, hard by
+the old church of St. Dunstan, that Erasmus betook him when tired of the
+smoke and din of town. "I come to drink your fresh air, my Colet," he
+writes, "to drink yet deeper of your rural peace." The fields and hedges
+through which Erasmus loved to ride remained fields and hedges within
+living memory; only forty years ago a Londoner took his Sunday outing
+along the field path which led past the London Hospital to what was
+still the suburban village church of Stepney. But the fields through
+which the path led have their own church now, with its parish of dull
+straight streets of monotonous houses already marked with premature
+decay, and here and there alleys haunted by poverty and disease and
+crime.
+
+There is nothing marked about either church or district; their character
+and that of their people are of the commonest East-end type. If I ask my
+readers to follow me to this parish of St. Philip, it is simply because
+these dull streets and alleys were chosen by a brave and earnest man as
+the scene of his work among the poor. It was here that Edward Denison
+settled in the autumn of 1867, in the second year of the great "East
+London Distress." In the October of 1869 he left England on a fatal
+voyage from which he was never to return. The collection of his letters
+which has been recently printed by Sir Baldwyn Leighton has drawn so
+much attention to the work which lay within the narrow bounds of those
+two years that I may perhaps be pardoned for recalling my own memories
+of one whom it is hard to forget.
+
+A few words are enough to tell the tale of his earlier days. Born in
+1840, the son of a bishop, and nephew of the late Speaker of the House
+of Commons, Edward Denison passed from Eton to Christchurch, and was
+forced after quitting the University to spend some time in foreign
+travel by the delicacy of his health. His letters give an interesting
+picture of his mind during this pause in an active life, a pause which
+must have been especially distasteful to one whose whole bent lay from
+the first in the direction of practical energy. "I believe," he says in
+his later days, "that abstract political speculation is my _métier_;"
+but few minds were in reality less inclined to abstract speculation.
+From the very first one sees in him what one may venture to call the
+best kind of "Whig" mind, that peculiar temper of fairness and
+moderation which declines to push conclusions to extremes, and recoils
+instinctively when opinion is extended beyond its proper bound. His
+comment on Newman's 'Apologia' paints his real intellectual temper with
+remarkable precision. "I left off reading Newman's 'Apologia' before I
+got to the end, tired of the ceaseless changes of the writer's mind, and
+vexed with his morbid scruples--perhaps, too, having got a little out of
+harmony myself with the feelings of the author, whereas I began by being
+in harmony with them. I don't quite know whether to esteem it a blessing
+or a curse; but whenever an opinion to which I am a recent convert, or
+which I do not hold with the entire force of my intellect, is forced too
+strongly upon me, or driven home to its logical conclusion, or
+over-praised, or extended beyond its proper limits, I recoil
+instinctively and begin to gravitate towards the other extreme, sure to
+be in turn repelled by it also."
+
+I dwell on this temper of his mind because it is this practical and
+moderate character of the man which gives such weight to the very
+sweeping conclusions on social subjects to which he was driven in his
+later days. A judgment which condemns the whole system of Poor Laws, for
+instance, falls with very different weight from a mere speculative
+theorist and from a practical observer whose mind is constitutionally
+averse from extreme conclusions. Throughout however we see this
+intellectual moderation jostling with a moral fervour which feels
+restlessly about for a fitting sphere of action. "Real life," he writes
+from Madeira, "is not dinner-parties and small talk, nor even croquet
+and dancing." There is a touch of exaggeration in phrases like these
+which need not blind us to the depth and reality of the feeling which
+they imperfectly express, a feeling which prompted the question which
+embodies the spirit of all these earlier letters,--the question, "What
+is my work?"
+
+The answer to this question was found both within and without the
+questioner. Those who were young in the weary days of Palmerstonian rule
+will remember the disgust at purely political life which was produced by
+the bureaucratic inaction of the time, and we can hardly wonder that,
+like many of the finer minds among his contemporaries, Edward Denison
+turned from the political field which was naturally open to him to the
+field of social effort. His tendency in this direction was aided, no
+doubt, partly by the intensity of this religious feeling and of his
+consciousness of the duty he owed to the poor, and partly by that closer
+sympathy with the physical suffering around us which is one of the most
+encouraging characteristics of the day. Even in the midst of his
+outburst of delight at a hard frost ("I like," he says, "the bright
+sunshine that generally accompanies it, the silver landscape, and the
+ringing distinctness of sounds in the frozen air"), we see him haunted
+by a sense of the way in which his pleasure contrasts with the winter
+misery of the poor. "I would rather give up all the pleasures of the
+frost than indulge them, poisoned as they are by the misery of so many
+of our brothers. What a monstrous thing it is that in the richest
+country in the world large masses of the population should be condemned
+annually to starvation and death!" It is easy to utter protests like
+these in the spirit of a mere sentimentalist; it is less easy to carry
+them out into practical effort, as Edward Denison resolved to do. After
+an unsatisfactory attempt to act as Almoner for the Society for the
+Relief of Distress, he resolved to fix himself personally in the
+East-end of London, and study the great problem of pauperism face to
+face.
+
+His resolve sprang from no fit of transient enthusiasm, but from a sober
+conviction of the need of such a step. "There are hardly any residents
+in the East rich enough to give much money, or with enough leisure to
+give much time," he says. "This is the evil. Even the best disposed in
+the West don't like coming so far off, and, indeed, few have the time to
+spare, and when they do there is great waste of time and energy on the
+journey. My plan is the only really practicable one, and as I have both
+means, time, and inclination, I should be a thief and a murderer if I
+withheld what I so evidently owe." In the autumn of 1867 he carried out
+his resolve, and took lodgings in the heart of the parish which I
+sketched in the opening of this paper. If any romantic dreams had mixed
+with his resolution they at once faded away before the dull, commonplace
+reality. "I saw nothing very striking at Stepney," is his first comment
+on the sphere he had chosen. But he was soon satisfied with his choice.
+He took up in a quiet, practical way the work he found closest at hand.
+"All is yet in embryo, but it will grow. Just now I only teach in a
+night school, and do what in me lies in looking after the sick, keeping
+an eye upon nuisances and the like, seeing that the local authorities
+keep up to their work. I go to-morrow before the Board at the workhouse
+to compel the removal to the infirmary of a man who ought to have been
+there already. I shall drive the sanitary inspector to put the Act
+against overcrowding in force." Homely work of this sort grows on him;
+we see him in these letters getting boys out to sea, keeping school with
+little urchins,--"demons of misrule" who tried his temper,--gathering
+round him a class of working men, organizing an evening club for boys.
+All this, too, quietly and unostentatiously and with as little resort as
+possible to "cheap charity," as he used to call it, to the "doles of
+bread and meat which only do the work of poor-rates."
+
+So quiet and simple indeed was his work that though it went on in the
+parish of which I then had the charge it was some little time before I
+came to know personally the doer of it. It is amusing even now to
+recollect my first interview with Edward Denison. A vicar's Monday
+morning is never the pleasantest of awakenings, but the Monday morning
+of an East-end vicar brings worries that far eclipse the mere headache
+and dyspepsia of his rural brother. It is the "parish morning." All the
+complicated machinery of a great ecclesiastical, charitable, and
+educational organization has got to be wound up afresh, and set going
+again for another week. The superintendent of the Women's Mission is
+waiting with a bundle of accounts, complicated as only ladies' accounts
+can be. The churchwarden has come with a face full of gloom to consult
+on the falling off in the offertory. The Scripture-reader has brought
+his "visiting book" to be inspected, and a special report on the
+character of a doubtful family in the parish. The organist drops in to
+report something wrong in the pedals. There is a letter to be written to
+the inspector of nuisances, directing his attention to certain
+odoriferous drains in Pig-and-Whistle Alley. The nurse brings her
+sick-list and her little bill for the sick-kitchen. The schoolmaster
+wants a fresh pupil-teacher, and discusses nervously the prospects of
+his scholars in the coming inspection. There is the interest on the
+penny bank to be calculated, a squabble in the choir to be adjusted, a
+district visitor to be replaced, reports to be drawn up for the Bishop's
+Fund and a great charitable society, the curate's sick-list to be
+inspected, and a preacher to be found for the next church festival.
+
+It was in the midst of a host of worries such as these that a card was
+laid on my table with a name which I recognized as that of a young
+layman from the West-end, who had for two or three months past been
+working in the mission district attached to the parish. Now, whatever
+shame is implied in the confession, I had a certain horror of "laymen
+from the West-end." Lay co-operation is an excellent thing in itself,
+and one of my best assistants was a letter-sorter in the post-office
+close by; but the "layman from the West-end," with a bishop's letter of
+recommendation in his pocket and a head full of theories about "heathen
+masses," was an unmitigated nuisance. I had a pretty large experience of
+these gentlemen, and my one wish in life was to have no more. Some had a
+firm belief in their own eloquence, and were zealous for a big room and
+a big congregation. I got them the big room, but I was obliged to leave
+the big congregation to their own exertions, and in a month or two their
+voices faded away. Then there was the charitable layman, who pounced
+down on the parish from time to time and threw about meat and blankets
+till half of the poor were demoralized. Or there was the statistical
+layman, who went about with a note-book and did spiritual and economical
+sums in the way of dividing the number of "people in the free seats" by
+the number of bread tickets annually distributed. There was the layman
+with a passion for homoeopathy, the ritualistic layman, the layman with
+a mania for preaching down trades' unions, the layman with an
+educational mania. All however agreed in one point, much as they
+differed in others, and the one point was that of a perfect belief in
+their individual nostrums and perfect contempt for all that was already
+doing in the neighbourhood.
+
+It was with no peculiar pleasure therefore that I rose to receive this
+fresh "layman from the West"; but a single glance was enough to show me
+that my visitor was a man of very different stamp from his predecessors.
+There was something in the tall, manly figure, the bright smile, the
+frank winning address of Edward Denison that inspired confidence in a
+moment. "I come to learn, and not to teach," he laughed, as I hinted at
+"theories" and their danger; and our talk soon fell on a certain "John's
+Place," where he thought there was a great deal to be learned. In five
+minutes more we stood in the spot which interested him, an alley running
+between two mean streets, and narrowing at one end till we crept out of
+it as if through the neck of a bottle. It was by no means the choicest
+part of the parish: the drainage was imperfect, the houses miserable;
+but wretched as it was it was a favourite haunt of the poor, and it
+swarmed with inhabitants of very various degrees of respectability.
+Costermongers abounded, strings of barrows were drawn up on the
+pavement, and the refuse of their stock lay rotting in the gutter.
+Drunken sailors and Lascars from the docks rolled along shouting to its
+houses of ill-fame. There was little crime, though one of the "ladies"
+of the alley was a well-known receiver of stolen goods, but there was a
+good deal of drunkenness and vice. Now and then a wife came plumping on
+to the pavement from a window overhead; sometimes a couple of viragoes
+fought out their quarrel "on the stones"; boys idled about in the
+sunshine in training to be pickpockets; miserable girls flaunted in
+dirty ribbons at nightfall at half-a-dozen doors.
+
+But with all this the place was popular with even respectable working
+people in consequence of the small size and cheapness of the houses--for
+there is nothing the poor like so much as a house to themselves; and the
+bulk of its population consisted of casual labourers, who gathered every
+morning round the great gates of the docks, waiting to be "called in" as
+the ships came up to unload. The place was naturally unhealthy,
+constantly haunted by fever, and had furnished some hundred cases in the
+last visitation of cholera. The work done among them in the "cholera
+time" had never been forgotten by the people, and, ill-famed as the
+place was, I visited it at all times of the day and night with perfect
+security. The apostle however of John's Place was my friend the
+letter-sorter. He had fixed on it as his special domain, and with a
+little aid from others had opened a Sunday-school and simple Sunday
+services in the heart of it. A branch of the Women's Mission was
+established in the same spot, and soon women were "putting by" their
+pence and sewing quietly round the lady superintendent as she read to
+them the stories of the Gospels.
+
+It was this John's Place which Edward Denison chose as the centre of his
+operations. There was very little in his manner to show his sense of
+the sacrifice he was making, though the sacrifice was in reality a great
+one. No one enjoyed more keenly the pleasures of life and society: he
+was a good oarsman, he delighted in outdoor exercise, and skating was to
+him "a pleasure only rivalled in my affection by a ride across country
+on a good horse." But month after month these pleasures were quietly put
+aside for his work in the East-end. "I have come to this," he says,
+laughingly, "that a walk along Piccadilly is a most exhilarating and
+delightful treat. I don't enjoy it above once in ten days, but therefore
+with double zest." What told on him most was the physical depression
+induced by the very look of these vast, monotonous masses of sheer
+poverty. "My wits are getting blunted," he says, "by the monotony and
+_ugliness_ of this place. I can almost imagine, difficult as it is, the
+awful effect upon a human mind of never seeing anything but the meanest
+and vilest of men and men's works, and of complete exclusion from the
+sight of God and His works,--a position in which the villager never is."
+But there was worse than physical degradation. "This summer there is not
+so very much actual suffering for want of food, nor from sickness. What
+is so bad is the habitual condition of this mass of humanity--its
+uniform mean level, the absence of anything more civilizing than a
+grinding organ to raise the ideas beyond the daily bread and beer, the
+utter want of education, the complete indifference to religion, with the
+fruits of all this--improvidence, dirt, and their secondaries, crime and
+disease."
+
+Terrible however as these evils were, he believed they could be met; and
+the quiet good sense of his character was shown in the way in which he
+met them. His own residence in the East-end was the most effective of
+protests against that severance of class from class in which so many of
+its evils take their rise. When speaking of the overcrowding and the
+official ill-treatment of the poor, he says truly: "These are the sort
+of evils which, where there are no resident gentry, grow to a height
+almost incredible, and on which the remedial influence of the mere
+presence of a gentleman known to be on the alert is inestimable." But
+nothing, as I often had occasion to remark, could be more judicious than
+his interference on behalf of the poor, or more unlike the fussy
+impertinence of the philanthropists who think themselves born "to
+expose" Boards of Guardians. His aim throughout was to co-operate with
+the Guardians in giving, not less, but greater effect to the Poor Laws,
+and in resisting the sensational writing and reckless abuse which aim at
+undoing their work. "The gigantic subscription lists which are regarded
+as signs of our benevolence," he says truly, "are monuments of our
+indifference."
+
+The one hope for the poor, he believed, lay not in charity, but in
+themselves. "Build school-houses, pay teachers, give prizes, frame
+workmen's clubs, help them to help themselves, lend them your brains;
+but give them no money, except what you sink in such undertakings as
+above." This is not the place to describe or discuss the more detailed
+suggestions with which he faced the great question of poverty and
+pauperism in the East-end; they are briefly summarized in a remarkable
+letter which he addressed in 1869 to an East-end newspaper:--"First we
+must so discipline and regulate our charities as to cut off the
+resources of the habitual mendicant. Secondly, all who by begging
+proclaim themselves destitute, must be taken at their word. They must be
+taken up and kept at penal work--not for one morning, as now, but for a
+month or two; a proportion of their earnings being handed over to them
+on dismissal, as capital on which to begin a life of honest industry.
+Thirdly, we must promote the circulation of labour, and obviate morbid
+congestions of the great industrial centres. Fourthly, we must improve
+the condition of the agricultural poor." Stern as such suggestions may
+seem, there are few who have really thought as well as worked for the
+poor without feeling that sternness of this sort is, in the highest
+sense, mercy. Ten years in the East of London had brought me to the same
+conclusions; and my Utopia, like Edward Denison's, lay wholly in a
+future to be worked out by the growing intelligence and thrift of the
+labouring classes themselves.
+
+But stern as were his theories, there is hardly a home within his
+district that has not some memory left of the love and tenderness of his
+personal charity. I hardly like to tell how often I have seen the face
+of the sick and dying brighten as he drew near, or how the little
+children, as they flocked out of school, would run to him, shouting his
+name for very glee. For the Sunday-school was soon transformed by his
+efforts into a day-school for children, whose parents were really
+unable to pay school-fees; and a large schoolroom, erected near John's
+Place, was filled with dirty little scholars. Here too he gathered round
+him a class of working men, to whom he lectured on the Bible every
+Wednesday evening; and here he delivered addresses to the dock-labourers
+whom he had induced to attend, of a nature somewhat startling to those
+who talk of "preaching down to the intelligence of the poor." I give the
+sketch of one of these sermons (on "Not forsaking the assembling of
+yourselves together") in his own words:--"I presented Christianity as a
+society; investigated the origin of societies, the family, the tribe,
+the nation, with the attendant expanded ideas of rights and duties; the
+common weal, the bond of union; rising from the family dinner-table to
+the sacrificial rites of the national gods; drew parallels with trades'
+unions and benefit clubs, and told them flatly they would not be
+Christians till they were communicants." No doubt this will seem to most
+sensible people extravagant enough, even without the quotations from
+"Wordsworth, Tennyson, and even Pope" with which his addresses were
+enlivened; but I must confess that my own experience among the poor
+agrees pretty much with Edward Denison's, and that I believe "high
+thinking" put into plain English to be more likely to tell on a
+dock-yard labourer than all the "simple Gospel sermons" in the world.
+
+His real power however for good among the poor lay not so much in what
+he did as in what he was. It is in no spirit of class self-sufficiency
+that he dwells again and again throughout these letters on the
+advantages to such a neighbourhood of the presence of a "gentleman" in
+the midst of it. He lost little, in the end he gained much, by the
+resolute stand he made against the indiscriminate almsgiving which has
+done so much to create and encourage pauperism in the East of London.
+The poor soon came to understand the man who was as liberal with his
+sympathy as he was chary of meat and coal tickets, who only aimed at
+being their friend, at listening to their troubles, and aiding them with
+counsel, as if he were one of themselves, at putting them in the way of
+honest work, at teaching their children, at protecting them with a
+perfect courage and chivalry against oppression and wrong. He
+instinctively appealed in fact to their higher nature, and such an
+appeal seldom remains unanswered. In the roughest costermonger there is
+a vein of real nobleness, often even of poetry, in which lies the whole
+chance of his rising to a better life. I remember, as an instance of the
+way in which such a vein can be touched, the visit of a lady, well known
+for her work in the poorer districts of London, to a low alley in this
+very parish. She entered the little mission-room with a huge basket,
+filled not with groceries or petticoats, but with roses. There was
+hardly one pale face among the women bending over their sewing that did
+not flush with delight as she distributed her gifts. Soon, as the news
+spread down the alley, rougher faces peered in at window and door, and
+great "navvies" and dock-labourers put out their hard fists for a
+rosebud with the shyness and delight of schoolboys. "She was a _real_
+lady," was the unanimous verdict of the alley; like Edward Denison she
+had somehow discovered that man does not live by bread alone, and that
+the communion of rich and poor is not to be found in appeals to the
+material but to the spiritual side of man.
+
+"What do you look on as the greatest boon that has been conferred on the
+poorer classes in later years?" said a friend to me one day, after
+expatiating on the rival claims of schools, missions, shoe-black
+brigades, and a host of other philanthropic efforts for their
+assistance. I am afraid I sank in his estimation when I answered,
+"Sixpenny photographs." But any one who knows what the worth of family
+affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of
+little portraits stuck over a labourer's fireplace, still gathering
+together into one the "home" that life is always parting--the boy that
+has "gone to Canada," the girl "out at service," the little one with the
+golden hair that sleeps under the daisies, the old grandfather in the
+country--will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies,
+social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family
+affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all
+the philanthropists in the world.
+
+It is easy indeed to resolve on "helping" the poor; but it is far less
+easy to see clearly how we can help them, what is real aid, and what is
+mere degradation. I know few books where any one who is soberly facing
+questions like these can find more help than in the "Letters" of Edward
+Denison. Broken and scattered as his hints necessarily appear, the main
+lines along which his thought moves are plain enough. He would
+discriminate between temporary, and chronic distress, between the
+poverty caused by a sudden revolution of trade and permanent destitution
+such as that of Bethnal Green. The first requires exceptional treatment;
+the second a rigid and universal administration of the Poor Laws. "Bring
+back the Poor Law," he repeats again and again, "to the spirit of its
+institution; organize a sufficiently elastic labour test, without which
+no outdoor relief to be given; make the few alterations which altered
+times demand, and impose every possible discouragement on private
+benevolence." The true cure for pauperism lies in the growth of thrift
+among the poor. "I am not drawing the least upon my imagination when I
+say that a young man of twenty could in five years, even as a
+dock-labourer, which is much the lowest employment and least well paid
+there is, save about £20. This is not exactly Utopia; it is within the
+reach of nearly every man, if quite at the bottom of the tree; but if it
+were of anything like common occurrence the destitution and disease of
+this life would be within manageable limits."
+
+I know that words like these are in striking contrast with the usual
+public opinion on the subject, as well as with the mere screeching over
+poverty in which sentimentalists are in the habit of indulging. But it
+is fair to say that they entirely coincide with my own experience. The
+sight which struck me most in Stepney was one which met my eyes when I
+plunged by sheer accident into the back-yard of a jobbing carpenter, and
+came suddenly upon a neat greenhouse with fine flowers inside it. The
+man had built it with his own hands and his own savings; and the sight
+of it had so told on his next-door neighbour--a cobbler, if I remember
+rightly--as to induce him to leave off drinking, and build a rival
+greenhouse with savings of his own. Both had become zealous florists,
+and thrifty, respectable men; but the thing which surprised both of them
+most was that they had been able to save at all.
+
+It is in the letters themselves however rather than in these desultory
+comments of mine that the story of these two years of earnest combat
+with the great problem of our day must be studied. Short as the time
+was, it was broken by visits to France, to Scotland, to Guernsey, and by
+his election as Member of Parliament for the borough of Newark. But
+even these visits and his new parliamentary position were meant to be
+parts of an effort for the regeneration of our poorer classes. His
+careful examination of the thrift of the peasantry of the Channel
+Islands, his researches into the actual working of the "Assistance
+Publique" in Paris, the one remarkable speech he delivered in Parliament
+on the subject of vagrancy, were all contributions to this great end. In
+the midst of these labours a sudden attack of his old disease forced him
+to leave England on a long sea-voyage, and within a fortnight of his
+landing in Australia he died at Melbourne. His portrait hangs in the
+school which he built, and rough faces as they gaze at it still soften
+even into tears as they think of Edward Denison.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
+
+
+
+I.
+
+CANNES AND ST. HONORAT.
+
+
+In a colloquial sort of way we talk glibly enough of leaving England,
+but England is by no means an easy country to leave. If it bids us
+farewell from the cliffs of Dover, it greets us again on the quay of
+Calais. It would be a curious morning's amusement to take a map of
+Europe, and mark with a dot of red the settlements of our lesser English
+colonies. A thousand Englands would crop up along the shores of the
+Channel or in quiet nooks of Normandy, around mouldering Breton castles
+or along the banks of the Loire, under the shadow of the Maritime Alps
+or the Pyrenees, beneath the white walls of Tunis or the Pyramids of the
+Nile. During the summer indeed England is everywhere--fishing in the
+fiords of Norway, sketching on the Kremlin, shooting brigands in
+Albania, yachting among the Cyclades, lion-hunting in the Atlas,
+crowding every steamer on the Rhine, annexing Switzerland, lounging
+through Italian galleries, idling in the gondolas of Venice. But even
+winter is far from driving England home again; what it really does is to
+concentrate it in a hundred little Britains along the sunny shores of
+the South. Each winter resort brings home to us the power of the British
+doctor. It is he who rears pleasant towns at the foot of the Pyrenees,
+and lines the sunny coasts of the Riviera with villas that gleam white
+among the olive groves. It is his finger that stirs the camels of
+Algeria, the donkeys of Palestine, the Nile boats of Egypt. At the first
+frosts of November the doctor marshals his wild geese for their winter
+flitting, and the long train streams off, grumbling but obedient, to the
+little Britains of the South.
+
+Of these little Britains none is more lovely than Cannes. The place is a
+pure creation of the health-seekers whose gay villas are thrown
+fancifully about among its sombre fir-woods, though the "Old Town," as
+it is called nowadays, remains clinging to its original height, street
+above street leading up to a big bare church of the Renascence period,
+to fragments of mediæval walls and a great tower which crowns the summit
+of the hill. At the feet of this height lie the two isles of Lerins, set
+in the blue waters of the bay; on the east the eye ranges over the
+porphyry hills of Napoul to the huge masses of the Estrelles; landwards
+a tumbled country with bright villas dotted over it rises gently to the
+Alps. As a strictly winter resort Cannes is far too exposed for the more
+delicate class of invalids; as a spring resort it is without a rival.
+Nowhere is the air so bright and elastic, the light so wonderfully
+brilliant and diffused. The very soil, full of micaceous fragments,
+sparkles at our feet. Colour takes a depth as well as a refinement
+strange even to the Riviera; nowhere is the sea so darkly purple,
+nowhere are the tones of the distant hills so delicate and evanescent,
+nowhere are the sunsets so sublime. The scenery around harmonizes in its
+gaiety, its vivacity, its charm with this brightness of air and light.
+There is little of grandeur about it, little to compare in magnificence
+with the huge background of the cliffs behind Mentone or the mountain
+wall which rises so steeply from its lemon groves. But everywhere there
+is what Mentone lacks--variety, largeness, picturesqueness of contrast
+and surprise. Above us is the same unchanging blue as there, but here it
+overarches gardens fresh with verdure and bright with flowers, and
+houses gleaming white among the dark fir-clumps; hidden little ravines
+break the endless tossings of the ground; in the distance white roads
+rush straight to grey towns hanging strangely against the hill-sides; a
+thin snow-line glitters along the ridge of the Maritime Alps; dark
+purple shadows veil the recesses of the Estrelles.
+
+Nor is it only this air of cheerfulness and vivacity which makes Cannes
+so pleasant a spring resort for invalids; it possesses in addition an
+advantage of situation which its more sheltered rivals necessarily want.
+The high mountain walls that give their complete security from cold
+winds to Mentone or San Remo are simply prison walls to visitors who are
+too weak to face a steep ascent on foot or even on donkey-back, for
+drives are out of the question except along one or two monotonous roads.
+But the country round Cannes is full of easy walks and drives, and it is
+as varied and beautiful as it is accessible. You step out of your hotel
+into the midst of wild scenery, rough hills of broken granite screened
+with firs, or paths winding through a wilderness of white heath.
+Everywhere in spring the ground is carpeted with a profusion of
+wild-flowers, cistus and brown orchis, narcissus and the scarlet
+anemone; sometimes the forest scenery sweeps away, and leaves us among
+olive-grounds and orange-gardens arranged in formal, picturesque rows.
+And from every little height there are the same distant views of far-off
+mountains, or the old town flooded with yellow light, or islands lying
+gem-like in the dark blue sea, or the fiery hue of sunset over the
+Estrelles.
+
+Nor are these land-trips the only charm of Cannes. No one has seen the
+coast of Provence in its beauty who has not seen it from the sea. A sail
+to the isles of Lerins reveals for the first time the full glory of
+Cannes even to those who have enjoyed most keenly the large
+picturesqueness of its landscapes, the delicate colouring of its distant
+hills, the splendour of its sunsets. As one drifts away from the shore
+the circle of the Maritime Alps rises like the framework of some perfect
+picture, the broken outline of the mountains to the left contrasting
+with the cloud-capt heights above Turbia, snow-peaks peeping over the
+further slopes between them, delicate lights and shadows falling among
+the broken country of the foreground, Cannes itself stretching its
+bright line of white along the shore. In the midst of the bay, the
+centre as it were of this exquisite landscape, lie the two isles of
+Lerins. With the larger, that of St. Marguerite, romance has more to do
+than history, and the story of the "Man in the Iron Mask," who was so
+long a prisoner in its fortress, is fast losing the mystery which made
+it dear even to romance. The lesser and more distant isle, that of St.
+Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the
+starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its
+Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism
+of Egypt first penetrated into the West.
+
+The devotees whom the fame of Antony and of the Coenobites of the Nile
+had drawn in crowds to the East returned at the close of the fourth
+century to found similar retreats in the isles which line the coasts of
+the Mediterranean. The sea took the place of the desert, but the type of
+monastic life which the solitaries had found in Egypt was faithfully
+preserved. The Abbot of Lerins was simply the chief of some thousands of
+religious devotees, scattered over the island in solitary cells, and
+linked together by the common ties of obedience and prayer. By a curious
+concurrence of events the coenobitic life of Lerins, so utterly unlike
+the later monasticism of the Benedictines, was long preserved in a
+remote corner of Christendom. Patrick, the most famous of its scholars,
+transmitted its type of monasticism to the Celtic Church which he
+founded in Ireland, and the vast numbers, the asceticism, the loose
+organization of such abbeys as those of Bangor or Armagh preserved to
+the twelfth century the essential characteristics of Lerins. Nor is this
+all its historical importance. What Iona is to the ecclesiastical
+history of Northern England, what Fulda and Monte Cassino are to the
+ecclesiastical history of Germany and Southern Italy, that this Abbey of
+St. Honorat became to the Church of Southern Gaul. For nearly two
+centuries, and those centuries of momentous change, when the wreck of
+the Roman Empire threatened civilization and Christianity with ruin like
+its own, the civilization and Christianity of the great district between
+the Loire, the Alps, and the Pyrenees rested mainly on the Abbey of
+Lerins. Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the
+barbaric invaders who poured down on the Rhône and the Garonne, it
+exercised over Provence and Aquitaine a supremacy such as Iona till the
+Synod of Whitby exercised over Northumbria. All the more illustrious
+sees of Southern Gaul were filled by prelates who had been reared at
+Lerins; to Arles, for instance, it gave in succession Hilary, Cæsarius,
+and Virgilius. The voice of the Church was found in that of its doctors;
+the famous rule of faith, "quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus,"
+is the rule of Vincent of Lerins; its monk Salvian painted the agony of
+the dying Empire in his book on the government of God; the long fight of
+semi-Pelagianism against the sterner doctrines of Augustin was chiefly
+waged within its bounds.
+
+Little remains to illustrate this earlier and more famous period of the
+monastic history of Lerins which extends to the massacre of its monks by
+Saracen pirates at the opening of the eighth century. The very look of
+the island has been changed by the revolutions of the last hundred
+years. It is still a mere spit of sand, edged along the coast with
+sombre pines; but the whole of the interior has been stripped of its
+woods by the agricultural improvements which are being carried on by the
+Franciscans who at present possess it, and all trace of solitude and
+retirement has disappeared. A well in the centre of the island and a
+palm-tree beside the church are linked to the traditional history of the
+founders of the abbey. Worked into the later buildings we find marbles
+and sculptures which may have been brought from the mainland, as at
+Torcello, by fugitives who had escaped the barbaric storm. A bas-relief
+of Christ and the Apostles, which is now inserted over the west gate of
+the church, and a column of red marble which stands beside it, belong
+probably to the earliest days of the settlement at Lerins. In the little
+chapels scattered over the island fragments of early sarcophagi,
+inscriptions, and sculpture have been industriously collected and
+preserved. But the chapels themselves are far more interesting than
+their contents. Of the seven which originally lined the shore, two or
+three only now remain uninjured; in these the building itself is either
+square or octagonal, pierced with a single rough Romanesque window, and
+of diminutive size. The walls and vaulting are alike of rough
+stonework. The chapels served till the Revolution as seven stations
+which were visited by the pilgrims to the island, but we can hardly
+doubt that in these, as in the Seven Chapels at Glendalough, we see
+relics of the earlier coenobitic establishment.
+
+The cloister of the abbey is certainly of a date later than the massacre
+of the monks, which took place according to tradition in the little
+square of wild greensward which lies within it; but the roughness of its
+masonry, the plain barrel roof, and the rude manner in which the low,
+gloomy vaulting is carried round its angles, are of the same character
+as in the usual tenth-century buildings of Southern Gaul. With the
+exception of the masonry of its side walls there is nothing in the
+existing remains of the abbey church itself earlier than its
+reconstruction at the close of the eleventh century. The building has
+been so utterly wrecked that little architectural detail is left; but
+the broad nave, with its narrow side aisles, the absence, as in the
+Aquitanian churches, of triforium and clerestory, and the shortness of
+the choir space, give their own individual mark to St. Honorat. Of the
+monastic buildings directly connected with the church only a few rooms
+remain, and these are destitute of any features of interest. They are
+at present used as an orphanage by the Franciscans whom the Bishop of
+Frejus, by whom the island was purchased some fifteen years ago, has
+settled there as an agricultural colony, and whose reverence for the
+relics around them is as notable as their courtesy to the strangers who
+visit them. If it is true that the island narrowly escaped being turned
+into a tea-garden and resort for picnics by some English speculators, we
+can only feel a certain glow of gratitude to the Bishop of Frejus. The
+brown train of the eleven brothers as we saw them pacing slowly beneath
+the great caroub-tree close to the abbey, or the row of boys blinking in
+the sunshine as they repeat their lesson to the lay-brother who acts as
+schoolmaster, jar less roughly on the associations of Lerins than the
+giggle of happy lovers or the pop of British champagne.
+
+There is little interest in the later story of St. Honorat, from the
+days of the Saracen massacre to its escape from conversion into a
+tea-garden. The appearance of the Moslem pirates at once robbed it of
+its old security, and the cessation of their attacks was followed by new
+dangers from the Genoese and Catalans who infested the coast in the
+fourteenth century. The isle was alternately occupied by French and
+Spaniards in the war between Francis and Charles V.; it passed under the
+rule of Commendatory abbots, and in 1789, when it was finally
+secularized, the four thousand monks of its earlier history had shrunk
+to four. Perhaps the most curious of all the buildings of Lerins is that
+which took its rise in the insecurity of its mediæval existence. The
+Castle of Lerins, which lies on the shore to the south of the church, is
+at once a castle and an abbey. Like many of the great monasteries of the
+East, its first object was to give security to its inmates against the
+marauders who surrounded them. Externally its appearance is purely
+military; the great tower rises from its trench cut deep in the rock, a
+portcullis protects the gate, the walls are pierced with loopholes and
+crowned with battlements. But within, the arrangements, so far as it is
+possible to trace them in the present ruined state of the building, seem
+to have been purely monastic. The interior of the tower is occupied by a
+double-arched cloister, with arcades of exquisite first-pointed work,
+through which one looks down into the little court below. The visitor
+passes from this into the ruins of the abbot's chapel, to which the
+relics were transferred for security from the church of St. Honorat,
+and which was surrounded by the cells, the refectory, and the domestic
+buildings of the monks. The erection of the castle is dated in the
+twelfth century, and from this time we may consider the older abbey
+buildings around the church to have been deserted and left to ruin; but
+we can hardly grumble at a transfer which has given us so curious a
+combination of military and monastic architecture in the castle itself.
+
+Something of the feudal spirit which such a residence would be likely to
+produce appears in the abbot's relations with the little town of Cannes,
+which formed a part of his extensive lordship on the mainland. Its
+fishers were harassed by heavy tolls on their fishery, and the rights of
+first purchase in the market and forced labour were rigorously exacted
+by the monastic officers. It is curious to compare, as one's boat floats
+back across the waters of the bay, the fortunes of these serfs and of
+their lords.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE.
+
+
+Carnival in an ordinary little Italian town seems, no doubt, commonplace
+enough to those who have seen its glories in Rome--the crowded Corso,
+the rush of the maddened horses, the firefly twinklings of the
+Maccoletti. A single evening of simple fun, a few peasants laughing in
+the sunshine, a few children scrambling for bonbons, form an almost
+ridiculous contrast to the gorgeous outburst of revelry and colour that
+ushers in Lent at the capital. But there are some people after all who
+still find a charm in the simple and the commonplace, and to whom the
+everyday life of Italy is infinitely pleasanter than the stately
+ceremonial of Rome. At any rate the stranger who has fled from Northern
+winters to the shelter of the Riviera is ready to greet in the
+homeliest Carnival the incoming of spring. His first months of exile
+have probably been months of a little disappointment. He is far from
+having found the perpetual sunshine which poets and guide-books led him
+to hope for. He has shivered at Christmas just as he shivered at home,
+he has had his days of snowfall and his weeks of rain. If he is
+thoroughly British, he has growled and grumbled, and written to expose
+"the humbug of the sunny South" in the _Times_; if he is patient, he has
+jotted down day after day in his diary, and found a cold sort of
+statistical comfort in the discovery that the sunny days after all
+outnumbered the gloomy ones. The worst winter of the Riviera, he is
+willing to admit, would be a very mild winter at home, but still, after
+each concession to one's diary and common sense, there remains a latent
+feeling of disappointment and deception.
+
+But Carnival sweeps all this feeling away with the coming of the spring.
+From the opening of February week follows week in a monotony of warm
+sunshine. Day after day there is the same cloudless cope of blue
+overhead, the same marvellous colour in the sea, the same blaze of
+roses in the gardens, the same scent of violets in every lazy breath of
+air that wanders down from the hills. Every almond-tree is a mass of
+white bloom. The narcissus has found a rival along the terraces in the
+anemone, and already the wild tulip is preparing to dispute the palm of
+supremacy with both. It is the time for picnics, for excursions, for
+donkey-rides, for dreams beneath the clump of cypresses that shoot up
+black into the sky, for siestas beneath the olives. It is wonderful what
+a prodigious rush of peace and good temper follows on the first rush of
+spring. The very doctors of the winter resort shake hands with one
+another, the sermons of the chaplain lose their frost-bitten savour and
+die down into something like charity, scandal and tittle-tattle go to
+sleep in the sunshine. The stolid, impassive English nature blooms into
+a life strangely unlike its own. Papas forget their _Times_. Mammas
+forget their propriety. The stout British merchant finds himself astride
+of a donkey, and exchanging good-humoured badinage with the labourers in
+the olive-terraces. The Dorcas of Exeter Hall leaves her tracts at home,
+and passes without a groan the pictured Madonna on every wall. Carnival
+comes, and completes the wreck of the proprieties. The girls secure
+their window and pelt their black-bearded Professor in the street below
+without dread of a scolding on the "convenances." The impassive spinster
+whose voice never rises at home above the most polite whisper screams
+with delight at the first sugarplum that hits her, and furtively
+supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the war. "It is such
+fun, isn't it, papa?" shout the boys as they lean breathless over the
+balcony, laughing and pelting at the crowd that laughs and pelts back
+again. And papa, who "puts down" fairs in England, and wonders what
+amusement people can find in peepshows and merry-go-rounds, finds
+himself surprised into a "Very jolly, indeed!"
+
+It is the same welcome to the spring that gives its charm to the
+Carnival in the minds of the Italians themselves. To the priest of
+course Carnival is simply a farewell to worldly junketings and a welcome
+to Lent, but like every other Church festival it is flinging off its
+ecclesiastical disguise and donning among the people themselves its old
+mask as a sheer bit of nature-worship. The women still observe Lent, and
+their power as housekeepers forces its observance to a certain extent
+on their husbands and sons. The Italian shrugs his shoulders and submits
+in a humorous way to what is simply a bit of domestic discipline,
+revenges himself by a jest on the priesthood, and waits with his quiet
+"pazienza" till the progress of education shall have secured him a wife
+who won't grudge him his dinner. But Lent is no reality to him, and
+spring is a very real thing indeed. The winter is so short that the
+whole habit of his life and the very fabric of his home is framed on the
+apparent supposition that there is no such thing as winter at all. His
+notion of life is life in the open air, life in the sunshine. The
+peasant of the Cornice looks on with amazement at an Englishman tramping
+along in the rain. A little rainfall or a little snow keeps every
+labourer at home with a murmur of "cattivo Dio" between his teeth. A
+Scotchman or a Yorkshireman wraps his plaid around him and looks with
+contempt on an idle race who are "afraid of a sprinkle." But the peasant
+of North Italy is no more of an idler than the peasant of the Lowlands.
+The truth is, that both he and his home are absolutely unprepared for
+bad weather. His clothes are thin and scanty. His diet is low. The
+wonder is how he gets through a hard day's work on food which an
+English pauper would starve upon. He has no fireplace at home, and, if
+he had, he has no fuel. Wood is very dear, and coal there is none. If he
+gets wet through there is no hearth to dry himself or his clothes at.
+Cold means fever, and fever with low diet means death. Besides, there is
+little loss in staying at home on rainy days. In England or the Lowlands
+the peasant farmer who couldn't "bide a shower" would lose half the
+year, but a rainy day along the Cornice is so rare a thing that it makes
+little difference in the year's account.
+
+It is much the same with the townsman, the trader, the professional man.
+When work in the shop or office is over his life circles round the café.
+Society and home mean for him the chatty, gesticulating group of friends
+camped out round their little tables on the pavement under the huge
+awning that gives them shade. When winter breaks up the pleasant circle,
+and the dark, chilly evenings drive him, as we say, "home," he has no
+home to flee unto. He is not used to domestic life, or to conversation
+with his wife or his children. Above all there is no fire, no "hearth
+and home." Going home in fact means going to bed. An Italian doctor or
+an Italian lawyer knows nothing of the cosy evenings of the North, of
+the bright fire, the brighter chat round it, or the quiet book till
+sleep comes. Somebody has said truly enough that if a man wanted to see
+human life at its best he would spend his winters in England and his
+summers in Italy. We have so much winter that we have faced it, made a
+study of it, and beaten it. Our houses are a great nuisance in warm
+weather, but their thick walls and close-fitting windows and broad
+fireplaces are admirably adapted for cold. Italians, on the other hand,
+have so little winter that when the cold does come it is completely
+their master. The large, dark, cool rooms that are so grateful in July
+are simply ice-houses in December. The large windows are full of
+crevices and draughts. An ordinary Italian positively dreads a fire from
+his knowledge of the perils it entails in rooms so draughty as Italian
+rooms commonly are. He infinitely prefers to rub his blue little hands
+and wait till this inscrutable mystery of bad weather be overpast. But
+it is only the thought of what he suffers during the winter, short as it
+is in comparison with our own, that enables us to understand the ecstasy
+of his joy at the reappearance of the spring. Everybody meets everybody
+with greetings on the warmth and the sunshine. The mother comes down
+again to bask herself at every doorstep, and the little street is once
+more alive with chat and laughter. The very beggars exchange their whine
+for a more cheerful tone of insidious persuasion. The women sing as they
+jog down the hill-paths with the big baskets of olives on their heads.
+The old dispossessed friar slumbers happily by the roadside. The little
+tables come out on to the pavement, and the society of the place forms
+itself afresh into buzzing groups of energetic conversers. The
+dormouse-life of winter is over, and the spring and the Carnival has
+come.
+
+Carnival in a little Italian town, as we have said, is no very grand
+thing, and as a mere question of fun it is no doubt amusing only to
+people who are ready to be amused. And yet there is a quaint fascination
+in it as a whole, in the rows of old women with demure little children
+in their laps ranged on the stone seats along the bridge, the girls on
+the pavement, the grotesque figures dancing along the road, the
+harlequins, the mimic Capuchins, the dominoes with big noses, the
+carriages rolling along amidst a fire of sugarplums, the boys darting
+in and out and smothering one with their handfuls of flour, the sham
+cook with his pots and pans wreathed with vine-branches, the sham
+cavalier in theatrical cloak and trunk hose who dashes about on a pony,
+the solemn group tossing a doll to a church-like chant in a blanket, the
+chaff and violet bunches flung from the windows, the fun and life and
+buzz and colour of it all. It is something very different, one feels,
+from the common country fair of home. In the first place it is eminently
+picturesque. As one looks down from the balcony through a storm of
+sugarplums the eye revels in a perfect feast of colour. Even the
+russet-brown of every old woman's dress glows in the sunshine into a
+strange beauty. Every little touch of red or blue in the girls'
+head-dresses shines out in the intense light. As the oddly attired
+maskers dart in and out or whirl past in the dance the little street
+seems like a gay ribbon of shifting hues winding between its grey old
+houses with touches of fresh tints at every window and balcony. The
+crimson caps of the peasants stand out in bold relief against the dark
+green of the lemon-garden behind them. Overhead the wind is just
+stirring in the big pendant leaves of the two palm-trees in the centre
+of the street, and the eye once caught by them ranges on to the white
+mass of the town as it stands glowing on its hill-side and thence to the
+brown hilltops, and the intense blue of the sky.
+
+The whole setting of the scene is un-English, and the scene itself is as
+un-English as its setting. The fun, the enjoyment, is universal. There
+is nothing of the complicated apparatus which an English fair requires,
+none of the contrivances to make people laugh--the clowns, the
+cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and
+two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic
+photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds.
+And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless
+chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity
+and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An
+English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully
+hard work to amuse him. The peasant of Italy goes to Carnival to amuse
+himself and to amuse everybody else. He is full of joyousness and fun,
+and he wishes everybody to be as funny and as joyous as himself. He has
+no notion of doing his merriment by deputy. He claps his mask on his
+face or takes his bag of flour in his hand, and is himself the fun of
+the fair. His neighbour does precisely the same. The two farmers who
+were yesterday chaffering over the price of maize meet each other in
+Carnival as Punch and Harlequin. Every boy has his false nose or his
+squeaking whistle. The quiet little maiden whom you saw yesterday
+washing her clothes in the torrent comes tripping up the street with a
+mask on her face. The very mothers with their little ones in their laps
+throw in their contribution of smart speeches and merry taunts to the
+fun of the affair. It is wonderful how simple the elements of their
+amusement are and how perfectly they are amused. A little masquerading,
+a little dancing, a little pelting with flour and sugarplums, and
+everybody is as happy as possible.
+
+And it is a happiness that is free from any coarse intermixture. The
+badinage is childish enough, but it has none of the foul slang in which
+an English crowd delights to express its notions of humour. The girls
+bandy "chaff" with their disguised lovers, but the "chaff" is what their
+mothers might hear. There is none of the brutal horseplay of home.
+Harlequin goes by with his little bladder suspended from a string, but
+the dexterous little touch is a touch and no more. The tiny sugarplums
+rain like hail on one's face, but there is the fun of catching them and
+seeing the children hunt after them in the dust. The flour-pelting is
+the hardest to bear, but the annoyance is redeemed by the burst of
+laughter from the culprit and the bystanders. It is a rare thing to see
+anybody lose his temper. It is a yet rarer thing to see anybody drunk.
+The sulky altercations, the tipsy squabbles, of Northern amusements are
+unknown. The characteristic "prudence" of the Italian is never better
+displayed than in his merriment. He knows how far to carry his badinage.
+He knows when to have done with his fun. The tedious length of an
+English merry-making would be unintelligible to him; he doesn't care to
+spoil the day's enjoyment by making a night of it. A few hours of
+laughter satisfy him, and when evening falls and the sunshine goes, he
+goes with the sunshine.
+
+It is in the Carnival that one sees most conspicuously displayed that
+habit of social equality which is one of the special features of Italian
+life. Nothing is more unlike the social jealousy of the Frenchman, or
+the surly incivility with which a Lancashire operative thinks proper to
+show the world that he is as good a man as his master. In either case
+one feels the taint of a mere spirit of envious levelling, and a latent
+confession that the levelling process has still in reality to be
+accomplished. But the ordinary Italian has nothing of the leveller about
+him. The little town is proud of its Marchese and of the great palazzo
+that has entertained a King. It is a matter of public concern when the
+Count gambles away his patrimony. An Italian noble is no object of
+jealousy to his fellow-citizens, but then no one gives himself less of
+the airs of a privileged or exclusive caste. Cavour was a popular man
+because, noble as he was, he would smoke a cigar or stop for a chat with
+anybody. The Carnival brings out this characteristic of Italian manners
+amusingly enough. The mask, the disguise, levels all distinctions. The
+Count's whiskers are white with the flour just flung at him by the
+town-crier. The young nephews of the Baron are the two harlequins who
+are exchanging badinage with the group of country girls at the corner. A
+general pelting of sugarplums salutes the appearance of the Marchese's
+four-in-hand with the Marchese himself in an odd mufti on the box.
+
+Social equality is possible, because among rich and poor alike there is
+the same social ease. Barber or donkey-driver chats to you with a
+perfect frankness and unconsciousness of any need of reserve. In both
+rich and poor, too, there is the same social taste and refinement. The
+coarse dress of the peasant girl is worn with as native a dignity as the
+robe of a queen. An unconscious elegance breathes through the very
+disguises of the Carnival, grotesque as many of them are. The young
+fellow who has wreathed himself with flowers and vine-leaves shows a
+knowledge of colour and effect which an artist might envy him. But there
+is not one among the roughest of the peasants or of the townsfolk who
+has not that indescribable thing we call manner, or who would betray our
+insular awkwardness when we speak to a lord. And, besides this social
+equality, there is a family equality too. In England old people enjoy
+fun, but it is held to be indecorous in them to afford amusement to
+others. A Palmerston may be a jester at eighty, but the jest must never
+go beyond words. But in an Italian Carnival the old claim just as much a
+part in the fun as the young. Grandfathers and grandmothers think it the
+most natural thing in the world to turn out in odd costumes to give a
+good laugh to the grandchildren. Papa pops on the most comical mask he
+can find, and walks down the street arm-in-arm with his boy. In no
+country perhaps is the filial regard stronger than in Italy; nowhere do
+mothers claim authority so long over their sons. But this seems to be
+compatible with a domestic liberty and ease which would be impossible in
+the graver nations of the North. If once we laughed at our mother's
+absurdities a mother's influence would be gone. But an Italian will
+laugh and go on reverencing and obeying in a way we should never dream
+of. Altogether, it is wonderful how many sides of social life and
+national character find their illustration in a country carnival.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA.
+
+
+The view of Monaco, as one looks down on it from the mountain road which
+leads to Turbia, is unquestionably the most picturesque among all the
+views of the Riviera. The whole coast-line lies before us for a last
+look as far as the hills above San Remo, headland after headland running
+out into blue water, white little towns nestling in the depth of sunny
+bays or clinging to the brown hill-side, villas peeping white from the
+dark olive masses, sails gleaming white against the purple sea. The
+brilliancy of light, the purity and intensity of colour, the clear
+freshness of the mountain air, tempered as it is by the warm sun-glow,
+make the long rise from Mentone hard to forget. Mentone itself steals
+out again and again from under its huge red cliffs to look up at us; we
+pass by Roccabruna, half rock, half village, hanging high on the
+hill-side; we leave the orange groves beneath us studded with golden
+fruit; even the silvery wayward olives fail us, even the pines grow thin
+and stunted. At last the mountain rises bare above us with only a red
+rock jutting here and there from its ashen-coloured front. We reach the
+top, and right in our road rises a vast fragment of Roman masonry, the
+tower of Turbia, while, thousands of feet beneath, Monaco glows "like a
+gem" in its setting of dark blue sea. We are on the track of "The
+Daisy," and the verse of Tennyson's gay little poem comes back to us:--
+
+    What Roman strength Turbia showed
+    In ruin, by the mountain road;
+      How like a gem, beneath, the city
+    Of little Monaco basking glowed.
+
+Monaco stands on a promontory of rock which falls in bold cliffs into
+the sea; as one climbs to it from the bay one sees the citadel with its
+huge bastions frowning on the white buildings of the palace, the long
+line of grey, ivy-crested walls topping the cliffs, and above them the
+mass of the little town, broken by a single campanile and a few
+cypresses. Its situation at once marks the character of the place. It
+is the one town of the Riviera which, instead of lying screened in the
+hollow of some bay, as though eager to escape from pirate or Saracen,
+juts boldly out into the sea as if on the look-out for prey. Its grim
+walls, the guns still mounted and shot piled on its battlements, mark
+the pirate town of the past. At its feet, in trim square of hotel and
+gambling-house, with a smart Parisian look about it as if the whole had
+been just caught up out of the Boulevards and dropped on this Italian
+coast, lies the new Monaco, the pirate town of the present.
+
+Even the least among Italian cities yields so much of interest in its
+past that we turn with disappointment from the history of Monaco. The
+place has always been a mere pirate haunt, without a break of liberty or
+civic life; and yet there is a certain fascination in the perfect
+uniformity of its existence. The town from which Cæsar sailed to Genoa
+and Rome vanished before the ravages of the Saracens, and the spot
+remained desert till it passed by Imperial cession to Genoa, and the
+Genoese Commune erected a fort which became a refuge alternately for its
+Guelf or Ghibelline exiles, its Spinolas or its Grimaldis. A church of
+fine twelfth-century work is the only monument which remains of this
+earlier time; at the opening of the fourteenth century Monaco passed
+finally to the Grimaldis, and became in their hands a haunt of
+buccaneers. Only one of their line rises into historic fame, and he is
+singularly connected with a great event in English history. Charles
+Grimaldi was one of the foremost leaders in the Italian wars of his day;
+he passed as a mercenary into the service of France in her combat with
+Edward III., and his seventy-two galleys set sail from Monaco with the
+fifteen thousand Genoese bowmen who appear so unexpectedly in the
+forefront of the battle of Crécy. The massacre of these forces drove him
+home again to engage in attacks on the Catalans and Venetians and
+struggles with Genoa, till the wealth which his piracy had accumulated
+enabled him to add Mentone and Roccabruna to his petty dominions. It is
+needless to trace the history of his house any further; corsairs,
+soldiers of fortune, trimming adroitly in the struggles of the sixteenth
+century between France and Spain, sinking finally into mere vassals of
+Louis XIV. and hangers-on at the French Court, the family history of the
+Grimaldis is one of treason and blood--brother murdering brother, nephew
+murdering uncle, assassination by subjects avenging the honour of
+daughters outraged by their master's lust.
+
+Of the town itself, as we have said, there is no history at all; it
+consists indeed only of a few petty streets streaming down the hill from
+the palace square. The palace, though spoilt by a gaudy modern
+restoration, is externally a fine specimen of Italian Renascence work,
+its court painted all over with arabesques of a rough Caravaggio order,
+while the State-rooms within have a thoroughly French air, as if to
+embody the double character of their occupants, at once Lords of Monaco
+and Ducs de Valentinois. The palace is encircled with a charming little
+garden, a bit of colour and greenery squeezed in, as it were, between
+cliff and fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red
+rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or
+across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with
+gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A
+bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political
+existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far more
+wonderful that, after all the annexations of late years, it should still
+remain an independent, though the smallest, principality in the world.
+But even the Grimaldis have not managed wholly to escape from the
+general luck of their fellow-rulers; Mentone and Roccabruna were ceded
+to France some few years back for a sum of four million francs, and the
+present lord of Monaco is the ruler of but a few streets and some two
+thousand subjects. His army reminds one of the famous war establishment
+of the older German princelings; one year indeed to the amazement of
+beholders it rose to the gigantic force of four-and-twenty men; but
+then, as we were gravely told by an official, "it had been doubled in
+consequence of the war." Idler and absentee as he is, the Prince is
+faithful to the traditions of his house; the merchant indeed sails
+without dread beneath the once dreaded rocks of the pirate haunt; but a
+new pirate town has risen on the shores of its bay. It is the pillage of
+a host of gamblers that maintains the heroic army of Monaco, that
+cleanses its streets, and fills the exchequer of its lord.
+
+There is something exquisitely piquant in the contrast between the
+gloomy sternness of the older robber-hold and the gaiety and
+attractiveness of the new. Nothing can be prettier than the gardens,
+rich in fountains and statues and tropical plants, which surround the
+neat Parisian square of buildings. The hotel is splendidly decorated and
+its _cuisine_ claims to be the best in Europe; there is a pleasant café;
+the doors of the Casino itself stand hospitably open, and strangers may
+wander without a question from hall to reading-room, or listen in the
+concert-room to an excellent band which plays twice a-day. The salon
+itself, the terrible "Hell" which one has pictured with all sorts of
+Dantesque accompaniments, is a pleasant room, gaily painted, with cosies
+all round it and a huge mass of gorgeous flowers in the centre. Nothing
+can be more unlike one's preconceived ideas than the gambling itself, or
+the aspect of the gamblers around the tables. Of the wild excitement,
+the frenzy of gain, the outbursts of despair which one has come prepared
+to witness, there is not a sign. The games strike the bystander as
+singularly dull and uninteresting; one wearies of the perpetual deal and
+turn-up of the cards at rouge-et-noir, of the rattle of the ball as it
+dances into its pigeonhole at roulette, of the monotonous chant of "Make
+your game, gentlemen," or "The game is made." The croupiers rake in
+their gains or poke out the winnings with the passive regularity of
+machines; the gamblers sit round the table with the vacant solemnity of
+undertakers. The general air of the company is that of a number of
+well-to-do people bored out of their lives, and varying their boredom
+with quiet nods to the croupier and assiduous prickings of little cards.
+
+The boredom is apparently greatest at rouge-et-noir, where the circle is
+more aristocratic and thousands can be lost and won in a night.
+Everybody looks tired, absent, inattentive; nobody takes much notice of
+his neighbour or of the spectators looking on; nobody cares to speak; a
+finger suffices to direct the croupier to push the stake on to the
+desired spot, a nod or a look to indicate the winner. The game goes on
+in a dull uniformity; nobody varies his stake; a few napoleons are added
+to or subtracted from the heaps before each as the minutes go on;
+sometimes a little sum is done on a paper beside the player; but there
+is the same impassive countenance, the same bored expression everywhere.
+Now and then one player gets quietly up and another sits quietly down.
+But there is nothing startling or dramatic, no frenzies of hope or
+exclamations of despair, nothing of the gambler of fiction with "his
+hands clasped to his burning forehead," and the like. To any one who is
+not fascinated by the mere look of rolls of napoleons pushed from one
+colour to another, or of gold raked about in little heaps, there is
+something very difficult to understand in the spell which a gaming-table
+exercises. Roulette is a little more amusing, as it is more intelligible
+to the looker-on. The stakes are smaller, the company changes oftener,
+and is socially more varied. There is not such a dead, heavy earnestness
+about these riskers of five-franc pieces as about the more desperate
+gamblers of rouge-et-noir; the outside fringe of lookers-on bend over
+with their stakes to back "a run of luck," and there is a certain quiet
+buzz of interest when the game seems going against the bank. There is
+always someone going and coming, over-dressed girls lean over and drop
+their stake and disappear, young clerks bring their quarter's salary,
+the casual visitor "doesn't mind risking a few francs" at roulette.
+
+But even the excitement of roulette is of the gravest and dullest order.
+The only player who seems to throw any kind of vivacity into his
+gambling is a gaudy little Jew with heavy watch-chain, who vibrates
+between one table and another, sees nothing of the game save the
+dropping his stake at roulette and then rushing off to drop another
+stake at rouge-et-noir, and finds time in his marches to spare a merry
+little word to a friend or two. But he is the only person who seems to
+know anybody. Men who sit by one another year after year never exchange
+a word. There is not even the air of reckless adventure to excite one.
+The player who dashes down his all on any part of the table and trusts
+to fortune is a mere creature of fiction; the gambler of fact is a
+calculator, a man of business, with a contempt for speculation and a
+firm belief in long-studied combination. Each has his little card, and
+ticks off the succession of numbers with the accuracy of a ledger. It is
+in the careful study of these statistics that each believes he discovers
+the secret of the game, the arrangement which, however it may be
+defeated for a time by inscrutable interference of ill-luck, must in the
+end, if there is any truth in statistics, be successful. One looks in
+vain for the "reckless gambler" one has read about and talked about, for
+"reckless" is the very last word by which one would describe the ring of
+business-like people who come day after day with the hope of making
+money by an ingenious dodge.
+
+Their talk, if one listens to it over the dinner-table, turns altogether
+on this business-like aspect of the question. Nobody takes the least
+interest in its romantic or poetic side, in the wonderful runs of luck
+or the terrible stories of ruin and despair which form the
+stock-in-trade of the novelist. The talk might be that of a conference
+of commercial travellers. Everybody has his infallible nostrum for
+breaking the bank; but everybody looks upon the prospect of such a
+fortune in a purely commercial light. The general opinion of the wiser
+sort goes against heavy stakes, and "wild play" is only talked about
+with contempt. The qualities held in honour, so far as we can gather
+from the conversation, are "judgment," which means a careful study of
+the little cards and a certain knowledge of mathematics, and
+"constancy"--the playing not from caprice but on a definite plan and
+principle. Nobody has the least belief in "luck." A winner is
+congratulated on his "science." The loser explains the causes of his
+loss. A portly person who announces himself as one of a company of
+gamblers who have invested an enormous capital on a theory of winning by
+means of low stakes and a certain combination excites universal
+interest. Most of the talkers describe themselves frankly as men of
+business. No doubt at Monaco, as elsewhere, there is the usual
+aristocratic fringe--the Russian prince who flings away an estate at a
+sitting, the half-blind countess from the Faubourg St. Germain, the
+Polish dancer with a score of titles, the English "milord." But the bulk
+of the players have the look and air of people who have made their money
+in trade. It is well to look on at such a scene, if only to strip off
+the romance which has been so profusely showered over it. As a matter of
+fact nothing is more prosaic, nothing meaner in tone, nothing more
+utterly devoid of interest, than a gambling-table. But as a question of
+profit the establishment of M. Blanc throws into the shade the older
+piracy of Monaco. The Venetian galleons, the carracks of Genoa, the
+galleys of Marseilles, brought infinitely less gold to its harbour than
+these two little groups of the fools of half a continent.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+THE WINTER RETREAT.
+
+
+It is odd, when one is safely anchored in a winter refuge to look back
+at the terrors and reluctance with which one first faced the sentence of
+exile. Even if sunshine were the only gain of a winter flitting, it
+would still be hard to estimate the gain. The cold winds, the icy
+showers, the fogs we leave behind us, give perhaps a zest not wholly its
+own to Italian sunshine. But the abrupt plunge into a land of warmth and
+colour sends a strange shock of pleasure through every nerve. The
+flinging off of wraps and furs, the discarding of greatcoats, is like
+the beginning of a new life. It is not till we pass in this sharp,
+abrupt fashion from the November of one side the Alps to the November of
+the other that we get some notion of the way in which the actual range
+and freedom of life is cramped by the "chill north-easters" in which
+Mr. Kingsley revelled. The unchanged vegetation, the background of dark
+olive woods, the masses of ilex, the golden globes of the orange hanging
+over the garden wall, are all so many distinct gains to an eye which has
+associated winter with leafless boughs and a bare landscape. One has
+almost a boyish delight in plucking roses at Christmas or hunting for
+violets along the hedges on New Year's Day. There are chill days of
+course, and chiller nights, but cold is a relative term and loses its
+English meaning in spots where snow falls once or twice in a year and
+vanishes before midday. The mere break of habit is delightful; it is
+like a laughing defiance of established facts to lounge by the seashore
+in the hot sun-glare of a January morning. And with this new sense of
+liberty comes little by little a freedom from the overpowering dread of
+chills and colds and coughs which only invalids can appreciate. It is an
+indescribable relief not to look for a cold round every corner. The
+"lounging" which becomes one's life along the Riviera or the Bay of
+Naples is only another name for the ease and absence of anxiety which
+the mere presence of constant sunshine gives to life.
+
+Few people, in fact, actually "lounge" less than the English exiles who
+bask in the sun of Italy. Their real danger lies in the perpetual
+temptation to over-exertion which arises from the sense of renewed
+health. Every village on its hilltop, every white shrine glistening high
+up among the olives, seems to woo one up the stony paths and the long
+hot climb to the summit. But the relief from home itself, the break away
+from all the routine of one's life, is hardly less than the relief from
+greatcoats. It is not till our life is thoroughly disorganized, till the
+grave mother of a family finds herself perched on a donkey, or the
+_habitué_ of Pall Mall sees himself sauntering along through the olive
+groves, that one realizes the iron bounds within which our English
+existence moves. Every holiday of course brings this home to one more or
+less, but the long holiday of a whole winter brings it home most of all.
+England and English ways recede and become unreal. Old prepossessions
+and prejudices lose half their force when sea and mountains part us from
+their native soil. It is hard to keep up our vivid interest in the
+politics of Little Pedlington, or to maintain our old excitement over
+the matrimonial fortunes of Miss Hominy. It becomes possible to
+breakfast without the last telegram and to go to bed without the news of
+a fresh butchery. One's real interest lies in the sunshine, in the
+pleasure of having sunshine to-day, in the hope of having sunshine
+to-morrow.
+
+But really to enjoy the winter retreat one must keep as much as possible
+out of the winter retreat itself. Few places are more depressing in
+their social aspects than these picturesque little Britains. The winter
+resort is a colony of squires with the rheumatism, elderly maidens with
+delicate throats, worn-out legislators, a German princess or two with a
+due train of portly and short-sighted chamberlains, girls with a hectic
+flush of consumption, bronchitic parsons, barristers hurried off circuit
+by the warning cough. The life of these patients is little more than the
+life of a machine. As the London physician says when he bids them
+"good-bye," "The nearer you can approach to the condition of a vegetable
+the better for your chances of recovery." All the delicious
+uncertainties and irregularities that make up the freedom of existence
+disappear. The day is broken up into a number of little times and
+seasons. Dinner comes at midday, and is as exact to its moment as the
+early breakfast or the "heavy tea." And between each meal there are
+medicines to be taken, inhalations to be gone through, the due hour of
+rest to be allotted to digestion, the other due hour to exercise.
+
+The air of the sick-room lingers everywhere about the place; one
+catches, as it were, the far-off hush of the Campo Santo. Life is
+reduced to its lowest expression; people exist rather than live. Every
+one remembers that every one else is an invalid. Voices are soft,
+conversation is subdued, visits are short. There is a languid, sickly
+sweetness in the very courtesy of society. Gaiety is simply regarded as
+a danger. Every hill is a temptation to too long and fatiguing a climb.
+No sunshine makes "the patient" forget his wraps. No coolness of
+delicious shade moves him to repose. His whole energy and watchfulness
+is directed to the avoidance of a chill. Life becomes simply
+barometrical. An east wind is the subject of public lamentation; the
+vast mountain range to the north is admired less for its wild grandeur
+than for the shelter it affords against the terrible mistral. Excitement
+is a word of dread. Distance itself takes something of the sharpness
+and vividness off from the old cares and interests of home. The very
+letters that reach the winter resort are doctored, and "incidents which
+might excite" are excluded by the care of correspondents: Mamma only
+hears of Johnny's measles when Johnny is running about again. The young
+scapegrace at Oxford is far too considerate to trouble his father,
+against the doctor's orders, with the mention of his failure in the
+schools. News comes with all colour strained and filtered out of it
+through the columns of 'Galignani.' The neologian heresy, the debate in
+Convocation which would have stirred the heart of the parson at home,
+fall flat in the shape of a brown and aged 'Times.' There are no
+"evenings out." The first sign of eve is the signal for dispersion
+homewards, and it is only from the safe shelter of his own room that the
+winter patient ventures to gaze on the perilous glories of the sunset.
+The evenings are in fact a dawdle indoors as the day has been a dawdle
+out, a little music, a little reading of the quiet order, a little chat,
+a little letter-writing, and an early to bed.
+
+It is this calm monotony of day after day at which the world of the
+winter resort deliberately aims, a life like that of the deities of
+Epicurus, untouched by the cares or interests of the world without. The
+very gaiety is of the same subdued and quiet order--drives,
+donkey-rides, picnics of the small and early type. An air of slow
+respectability pervades the place; the bulk of the colonists are people
+well-to-do, who can afford the expense of a winter away from home and of
+a villa at £150 the season. The bankrupt element of Boulogne, the
+half-pay element of Dinan or Avranches, is as rare on the Riviera as the
+loungers who rejoice in the many-changing toilets of Arcachon or
+Biarritz. The quiet humdrum tone of the parson best harmonises with that
+of the winter resort, and parsons of all sorts abound there.
+
+But the chaplain is not here, as in other little Britains, the centre of
+social life; he is superseded by the doctor. The winter resort in fact
+owes its origin to the doctor. The little village or the country town
+looks with awe upon the man who has discovered for it a future of
+prosperity, at whose call hosts of rich strangers come flocking from the
+ends of the earth, at whose bidding villas rise white among the olives,
+and parades stretch along the shore. "I found it a fishing hamlet," the
+doctor may say with Augustus, "and I leave it a city." It is amusing to
+see the awful submission which the city-builder expects in return. The
+most refractory of patients trembles at the threat of his case being
+abandoned. The doctor has his theories about situation. You are
+lymphatic, and are ordered down to the very edge of the sea; you are
+excitable, and must hurry from your comfortable lodgings to the highest
+nook among the hills. He has his theories about diet, and you sink
+obediently to milk and water. His one object of hostility and contempt
+is your London physician. He tears up his rival's prescriptions with
+contempt, he reverses the treatment. He sighs as you bid him farewell to
+return to advice which is so likely to prove fatal. The London
+physician, it is true, hints that though the oracle of the winter resort
+is a clever man he is also a quack. But a quack soars into a greatness
+beyond criticism when he creates cities and rules hundreds of patients
+with his nod.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+SAN REMO.
+
+
+San Remo, though youngest in date, bids fair to become the most popular
+of all the health resorts of the Riviera. At no other point along the
+coast is the climate so mild and equable. The rural quiet and repose of
+the place form a refreshing contrast with the Brighton-like gaiety of
+Nizza or Cannes; even Mentone looks down with an air of fashionable
+superiority on a rival almost destitute of promenades, and whose
+municipality sighs in vain for a theatre. To the charms of quiet and
+sunshine the place adds that of a peculiar beauty. The Apennines rise
+like a screen behind the amphitheatre of soft hills that enclose
+it--hills soft with olive woods, and dipping down into gardens of lemon
+and orange, and vineyards dotted with palms. An isolated spur juts out
+from the centre of the semicircle, and from summit to base of it tumbles
+the oddest of Italian towns, a strange mass of arches and churches and
+steep lanes, rushing down like a stone cataract to the sea. On either
+side of the town lie deep ravines, with lemon gardens along their
+bottoms, and olives thick along their sides. The olive is the
+characteristic tree of San Remo. As late as the sixteenth century the
+place was renowned for its palms; a palm tree stands on the civic
+escutcheon, and the privilege of supplying the papal chapel with palm
+branches in the week before Easter is still possessed by a family of San
+Remese. But the palm has wandered off to Bordighera, and the high price
+of oil during the early part of this century has given unquestioned
+supremacy to the olive. The loss is after all a very little one, for the
+palm, picturesque as is its natural effect, assumes any but picturesque
+forms when grown for commercial purposes, while the thick masses of the
+olive woods form a soft and almost luxurious background to every view of
+San Remo.
+
+What strikes one most about the place in an artistic sense is its
+singular completeness. It lies perfectly shut in by the circle of
+mountains, the two headlands in which they jut into the sea, and the
+blue curve of the bay. It is only by climbing to the summit of the Capo
+Nero or the Capo Verde that one sees the broken outline of the coast
+towards Genoa or the dim forms of the Estrelles beyond Cannes. Nowhere
+does the outer world seem more strangely far-off and unreal. But between
+headland and headland it is hardly possible to find a point from which
+the scene does not group itself into an exquisite picture with the white
+gleaming mass of San Remo for a centre. Small too as the space is, it is
+varied and broken by the natural configuration of the ground; everywhere
+the hills fall steeply to the very edge of the sea and valleys and
+ravines go sharply up among the olive woods. Each of these has its own
+peculiar beauty; in the valley of the Romolo for instance, to the west
+of the town, the grey mass of San Remo perched on a cliff-like steep,
+the rocky bed of the torrent below, the light and almost fantastic arch
+that spans it, the hills in the background with the further snow range
+just peeping over them, leave memories that are hard to forget. It is
+easy too for a good walker to reach sterner scenes than those
+immediately around; a walk of two hours brings one among the pines of
+San Romolo, an hour's drive plunges one into the almost Alpine scenery
+of Ceriana. But for the ordinary frequenters of a winter resort the
+chief attractions of the place will naturally lie in the warmth and
+shelter of San Remo itself. Protected as it is on every side but that of
+the sea, it is free from the dreaded mistral of Cannes and from the
+sharp frost winds that sweep down the torrent-bed of Nizza. In the
+earlier part of the first winter I spent there the snow, which lay thick
+in the streets of Genoa and beneath even the palms of Bordighera, only
+whitened the distant hilltops at San Remo. Christmas brought at last a
+real snowfall, but every trace of it vanished before the sun-glare of
+midday. From sunset to sunrise indeed the air is sometimes bitterly
+cold, but the days themselves are often pure summer days.
+
+What gives a special charm to San Remo, as to the other health-stations
+along the Cornice, is the fact that winter and spring are here the
+season of flowers. Roses nod at one over the garden-walls, violets peep
+shyly out along the terraces, a run uphill brings one across a bed of
+narcissus. It is odd to open one's window on a January morning and count
+four-and-twenty different kinds of plants in bloom in the garden below.
+But even were flowers absent, the character of the vegetation excludes
+from northern eyes the sense of winter. The bare branches of the
+fig-tree alone remind one that "summer is over and gone." Every
+homestead up the torrent-valleys is embosomed in the lustrous foliage of
+its lemon gardens. Every rivulet is choked with maiden-hair and delicate
+ferns. The golden globes of the orange are the ornament of every garden.
+The dark green masses of the olive, ruined by strong winds into sheets
+of frosted silver, are the background of the whole. And right in front
+from headland to headland lie the bright waters of the Mediterranean,
+rising and sinking with a summer's swell, and glancing with a thousand
+colours even in the gloomiest weather.
+
+The story of San Remo begins with Saracenic inroads from Corsica and
+Sardinia in the ninth century, to which Nizza, Oneglia, and Genoa owed
+their walls. But before this time the wild Ligurian coast had afforded
+hermitages to the earlier bishops of Genoa; to Siro who became its
+apostle, to Romolo who was destined to give his name to the territory of
+the town. San Romolo is indeed its invariable designation till the
+fifteenth century, and it has been conjectured that its present name is
+owing to no fanciful punning on Romulus and Remus but to a popular
+contraction of its full ecclesiastical title, "Sancti Romuli in eremo."
+It was in this "waste," left without inhabitants by the Saracenic
+inroads, that Theodulf, bishop of Genoa, settled a little agricultural
+colony round the Carolingian fort and lands which, though within the
+feudal jurisdiction of the Counts of Ventimiglia, were the property of
+his see. Two centuries passed quietly over the little town ere the
+sudden rise of the Consulate here, as at Genoa and Milan, gave it
+municipal liberty. The civil authority of the bishops passed to the
+communal Parliament, the free assembly of the citizens in the church of
+San Stefano; all civil administration, even the right of peace and war,
+or of alliance, was exercised with perfect freedom from episcopal
+intervention. The rights of the bishop in fact were reduced to the
+nomination of the judicial magistrates of the town and the reception of
+certain fees; rights which were subsequently sold to the Dorias, and
+transferred by the Dorias to the Republic of Genoa.
+
+This great communal revolution, itself a result of the wave of feeling
+produced by the Crusades, left its characteristic mark in the armorial
+bearings of the town, the Crusaders' Palm upon its shield. While its
+neighbours, Ventimiglia and Albenga, sank into haunts of a feudal
+noblesse, San Remo became a town of busy merchants, linked by treaties
+of commerce with the trading cities of the French and Italian coasts.
+The erection of San Siro marked the wealth and devotion of its citizens.
+Ruined as it is, like all the churches of the Riviera, by the ochre and
+stucco of a tasteless restoration, San Siro still retains much of the
+characteristic twelfth-century work of its first foundation. The
+alliance of the city with Genoa was that of a perfectly free State. The
+terms of the treaty which was concluded between the two Republics in
+1361 in the Genoese basilica of San Lorenzo are curious as illustrating
+the federal relations of Italian States. It was in effect little more
+than a judicial and military convention. Internal legislation, taxation,
+rights of independent warfare, peace, and alliance were left wholly in
+the power of the free commune. San Remo was bound to contribute ships
+and men for service in Genoese warfare, but in return its citizens
+shared the valuable privileges of those of Genoa in all parts of the
+world. Genoa, as purchaser of the feudal rights of its lords, nominated
+the podesta and other judicial officers, but these officers were bound
+to administer the laws passed or adopted by the commune. The red cross
+of Genoa was placed above the palm tree of San Remo on the shield of the
+Republic; and on these terms the federal relations of the two States
+continued without quarrel or change for nearly four hundred years.
+
+The town continued to prosper till the alliance of Francis I. with the
+Turks brought the scourge of the Moslem again on the Riviera. The
+"Saracen towers" with which the coast is studded tell to this day the
+tale of the raids of Barbarossa and Dragut. The blow fell heavily on San
+Remo. The ruined quarter beneath its wall still witnesses to the heathen
+fury. San Siro, which lay without the walls, was more than once
+desecrated and reduced to ruin. A special officer was appointed by the
+town to receive contributions for the ransom of citizens carried off by
+the corsairs of Algiers or Tunis. These terrible razzias, which went on
+to the very close of the last century, have left their mark on the
+popular traditions of the coast. But the ruin which they began was
+consummated by the purposeless bombardment of San Remo by an English
+fleet during the war of the Austrian Succession, and by the perfidy with
+which Genoa crushed at a single blow the freedom she had respected for
+so many centuries. The square Genoese fort near the harbour commemorates
+the extinction of the liberty of San Remo in 1729. The French revolution
+found the city ruined and enslaved, and the gratitude of the citizens
+for their deliverance by Buonaparte was shown by a sacrifice which it is
+hard to forgive them. A row of magnificent ilexes, which stretched along
+the ridge from the town to San Romolo, is said to have been felled for
+the construction of vessels for the French navy.
+
+Some of the criticism which has been lavished on San Remo is fair and
+natural enough. To any one who has been accustomed to the exquisite
+scenery around Cannes its background of olives seems tame and
+monotonous. People who are fond of the bustle and gaiety of Nizza or
+Mentone in their better days can hardly find much to amuse them in San
+Remo. It is certainly quiet, and its quiet verges upon dulness. A more
+serious drawback lies in the scarcity of promenades or level walks for
+weaker invalids. For people with good legs, or who are at home on a
+donkey, there are plenty of charming walks and rides up into the hills.
+But it is not everybody who is strong enough to walk uphill or who cares
+to mount a donkey. Visitors with sensitive noses may perhaps find reason
+for growls at the mode of cultivation which is characteristic of the
+olive groves. The town itself and the country around is, like the bulk
+of the Riviera, entirely without architectural or archæological
+interest. There is a fine castle within a long drive at Dolceacqua, and
+a picturesque church still untouched within a short one at Ceriana, but
+this is all. Beneficial as the reforms of Carlo Borromeo may have been
+to the religious life of the Cornice, they have been fatal to its
+architecture. On the other hand, any one with an artistic eye and a
+sketch-book may pass his time pleasantly enough at San Remo. The
+botanist may revel day after day in new "finds" among its valleys and
+hill-sides. The rural quiet of the place delivers one from the
+fashionable bustle of livelier watering-places, from the throng of
+gorgeous equipages that pour along the streets of Nice, or from picnics
+with a host of flunkeys uncorking the champagne.
+
+The sunshine, the colour, the beauty of the little town, secure its
+future. The time must soon come when the whole coast of the Riviera will
+be lined with winter resorts; but we can hardly hope that any will
+surpass the happy blending of warmth and interest and repose which makes
+the charm of San Remo.
+
+
+
+
+THE POETRY OF WEALTH.
+
+
+There is one marvellous tale which is hardly likely to be forgotten so
+long as men can look down from Notre Dame de la Garde on the sunny
+beauty of Marseilles. Even if the rest of Dumas' works sink into
+oblivion, the sight of Château d'If as it rises glowing from the blue
+waters of the Mediterranean will serve to recall the wonders of 'Monte
+Christo.' But the true claim of the book to remembrance lies not in its
+mere command over the wonderful but in the peculiar sense of wonder
+which it excites. It was the first literary attempt to raise the mere
+dead fact of money into the sphere of the imagination, and to reveal the
+dormant poetry of wealth. There has as yet been only a single age in the
+world's history when wealth has told with any force upon the imagination
+of men. Unpoetic as the Roman mind essentially was, the sudden burst
+upon it of the accumulated riches of the older world kindled in
+senators and proconsuls a sense of romance which, wild and extravagant
+as it seems, has in some of its qualities found no parallel since. The
+feast of Lucullus, the gluttony of Heliogabalus, the sudden upgrowth of
+vast amphitheatres, the waste of millions on the sport of a day, the
+encounters of navies in the mimic warfare of the Coliseum, are the
+freaks of gigantic children tossing about wildly the slowly-hoarded
+treasures of past generations; but they are freaks which for the first
+time revealed the strange possibilities which lay in the future of
+wealth.
+
+It is hard to say whether such a time will ever return. No doubt the
+world is infinitely richer now than it was in the time of the Romans,
+and no doubt too there are at least a dozen people in London alone whose
+actual income far exceeds that of the wealthiest of proconsuls. But the
+wealth of the modern capitalist is a wealth which has grown by slow
+accumulations, a wealth which has risen almost insensibly into its
+enormous mass, and the vastness of which its owner has never had brought
+home to him with the same sort of shock as that which Lucullus must have
+felt when he fronted the treasures of Mithridates, or Clive when he
+threaded his way among the sacks of jewels in the royal vaults of
+Moorshedabad. So far indeed is wealth from stimulating the imagination
+nowadays that a banker is the very type of the unimaginative man, and
+the faintest suspicion of genius is enough to render a financier an
+object of suspicion to the money market. But it is conceivable in the
+odd freaks of things that we may yet see the advent of the
+Poet-Capitalist. It is almost impossible to say what new opportunities
+the possession of fabulous resources might not add to the fancy of a
+dreamer or to the speculations of a philanthropist. It is not till after
+a little thought that we realize how materially the course of human
+progress is obstructed by sheer want of money at critical moments, or
+how easily the sum of human happiness might be increased by the sudden
+descent of a golden shower on the right people at the right time.
+
+There are dreams which men have been dreaming for generation after
+generation which require nothing for their realization but the
+appearance of such a capitalist as we have imagined. To take what may
+seem perhaps an odd instance, just because it is an odd instance, let us
+remember what a wonderful amount of hope and anticipation has been
+thrown by a great religious party into the restoration of the Jews.
+Rightly or wrongly, it is the one theme which sends a throb of
+excitement through the life of quiet parsonages and kindles a new fire
+even in the dreariest May meetings at Exeter Hall. But in point of
+actual fact there is not the slightest necessity to await any great
+spiritual revolution for the accomplishment of such a dream if its
+accomplishment were really desirable. A league of Evangelical bankers
+who fully believed in the prophecies they are so fond of quoting could
+turn the wildest fancies of Dr. Cumming into sober earnest with very
+little trouble indeed. Any emigration agent would undertake the
+transport of Houndsditch bodily to Joppa; the bare limestone uplands of
+Judæa could be covered again with terraces of olive and vine at
+precisely the same cost of money and industry as is still required to
+keep up the cultivation of the Riviera; and Mr. Fergusson would furnish
+for a due consideration plans and estimates for a restoration of the
+Temple on Zion. We are not suggesting such a scheme as an opportunity
+for investing money to any great profit, but it is odd to live in a
+world of wealthy people who believe firmly that its realization would
+make this world into a little heaven below and yet never seem to feel
+that they have the means of bringing it about in their cheque-books. Or
+to take a hardly less odd instance, but one which has actually been
+brought a little nearer to practical realization. Some time ago a body
+of Welsh patriots determined to save the tongue and literature of the
+Cymry from extinction by founding a new Welsh nation on the shores of
+Patagonia. Nothing but Welsh was to be spoken, none but Welsh books were
+to be read, and the laws of the colony were to be an amalgam of the
+codes of Moses and of Howel the Good. The plan failed simply because its
+originators were poor and unable to tide over the first difficulties of
+the project. But conceive an ardent capitalist with a passion for
+nationalities embracing such a cause, and at the cost of a few hundreds
+of thousands creating perhaps a type of national life which might
+directly or indirectly affect the future of the world. Such a man might
+secure himself a niche in history at less cost and with less trouble
+than he could obtain a large estate and a share in the commission of the
+peace for a midland county.
+
+But there is no need to restrict ourselves simply to oddities, although
+oddities of this sort acquire a grandeur of their own at the touch of
+wealth. The whole field of social experiment lies open to a great
+capitalist. The one thing required, for instance, to render the squalor
+and misery of our larger towns practically impossible would be the
+actual sight of a large town without squalor or misery; and yet if
+Liverpool were simply handed over to a great philanthropist with the
+income of half-a-dozen Dukes of Westminster such a sight might easily be
+seen. Schemes of this sort require nothing but what we may term the
+poetic employment of capital for their realization. It is strange that
+no financial hero makes his appearance to use his great money-club to
+fell direr monsters than those which Hercules encountered, and by the
+creation of a city at once great, beautiful, and healthy to realize the
+conception of the Utopia and the dream of Sir Thomas More. Or take a
+parallel instance from the country. Those who have watched the issues of
+the co-operative system as applied to agriculture believe they see in it
+the future solution of two of our greatest social difficulties--those,
+we mean, which spring from the increasing hardships of the farmer's
+position, and those which arise from the terrible serfage of the rural
+labourer. But the experiments which have been as yet carried on are on
+too small a scale either to produce any influence on the labour market
+as a whole, or to make that impression on the public imagination which
+could alone raise the matter into a "question of the day." What is
+wanted is simply that two or three dukes should try the experiment of
+peasant co-operation on a whole county, and try it with a command of
+capital which would give the experiment fair play. Whether it succeeded
+or not, such an attempt would have a poetic and heroic aspect of a
+different order from the usual expenditure of a British peer.
+
+Or we may turn to a wholly different field, the field of art. We are
+always ready to cry out against "pot boilers" as we wander through the
+galleries of the Academy, and to grumble at the butchers' bills and
+bonnet bills which stand between great artists and the production of
+great works. But the butchers' bills and bonnet bills of all the forty
+Academicians might be paid by a great capitalist without any deep dip
+into his money bags, and a whole future opened to English art by the
+sheer poetry of wealth. There are hundreds of men with special faculties
+for scientific inquiry who are at the present moment pinned down to the
+daily drudgery of the lawyer's desk or the doctor's consulting-room by
+the necessities of daily bread. A Rothschild who would take a score of
+natural philosophers and enable them to apply their whole energies to
+investigation would help forward science as really as Newton himself, if
+less directly. But there are even direct ways in which wealth on a
+gigantic scale might put out a poetic force which would affect the very
+fortunes of the world. There are living people who are the masters of
+twenty millions; and twenty millions would drive a tunnel under the
+Straits of Dover. If increased intercourse means, as is constantly
+contended, an increase of friendship and of mutual understanding among
+nations, the man who devoted a vast wealth to linking two peoples
+together would rise at once to the level of the great benefactors of
+mankind. An opportunity for a yet more direct employment of the
+influence of wealth will some day or other be found in the field of
+international politics. Already those who come in contact with the
+big-wigs of the financial world hear whispers of a future when the
+destinies of peoples are to be decided in bank parlours, and questions
+of peace and war settled, not by the diplomatist and statesman, but by
+the capitalist. But as yet these are mere whispers, and no European
+Gould has risen up to "finance" Downing Street into submission, or to
+meet the boldest move of Prince Bismarck by a fall of the Stock
+Exchange. Of all the schemes however which we have suggested, this is
+probably the nearest to practical realization. If not we ourselves, our
+children at any rate may see International Congresses made possible by a
+few people quietly buttoning their breeches-pockets, and the march of
+"armed nations" arrested by "a run for gold."
+
+Taking however men as they are, it is far more wonderful that no one has
+hit on the enormous field which wealth opens for the developement of
+sheer downright mischief. The sense of mischief is a sense which goes
+quietly to sleep as soon as childhood is over from mere want of
+opportunity. The boy who wants to trip up his tutor can easily find a
+string to tie across the garden walk; but when one has got beyond the
+simpler joys of childhood strings are not so easy to find. To carry out
+a practical joke of the Christopher Sly sort we require, as Shakespere
+saw, the resources of a prince. But once grant possession of unlimited
+wealth, and the possibilities of mischief rise to a grandeur such as
+the world has never realized. The Erie Ring taught us a little of what
+capital might do in this way, but in the Erie Ring capital was fettered
+by considerations of profit and loss. Throw these considerations
+overboard and treat a great question in the spirit of sheer mischief,
+and the results may be simply amazing. Conceive, for instance, a
+capitalist getting the railways round London into his power, and then in
+sheer freak stopping the traffic for a single day. No doubt the day
+would be a short one, but even twelve hours of such a practical joke
+would bring about a "Black Monday" such as England has never seen. But
+there would be no need of such an enormous operation to enable us to
+realize the power of latent mischief which the owner of great wealth
+really possesses. An adroit operator might secure every omnibus and
+every cab in the metropolis and compel us to paddle about for a week in
+the mud of November before the loss was replaced.
+
+It is quite possible indeed that gigantic mischief of this sort may find
+its sphere in practical politics. Already Continental Governments watch
+with anxiety the power which employers possess of bringing about a
+revolution by simply closing their doors and throwing thousands of
+unemployed labourers on the street; but it is a power which in some
+degree or other capital will always possess, and any one who remembers
+the assistance which Reform derived from the Hyde Park rows will see at
+once that mischief on the large scale might be made in this way an
+important factor in political questions.
+
+Ambition has yet a wider sphere of action than even mischief in this
+poetic use of wealth. A London preacher recently drew pointed attention
+to the merely selfish use of their riches by great English nobles, and
+contrasted it with the days when Elizabeth's Lords of the Council
+clubbed together to provide an English fleet against the Armada, or the
+nobles of Venice placed their wealth on every great emergency at the
+service of the State. But from any constitutional point of view there is
+perhaps nothing on which we may more heartily congratulate ourselves
+than on the blindness which hides from the great capitalists of England
+the political power which such a national employment of their wealth
+would give them--a blindness which is all the more wonderful in what is
+at once the wealthiest and the most political aristocracy which the
+world has ever seen. What fame the mere devotion of a quarter of a
+million to public uses may give to a quiet merchant the recent example
+of Mr. Peabody abundantly showed. But the case of the Baroness Burdett
+Coutts is yet more strictly to the point. The mere fact that she has
+been for years credited with a wide and unselfish benevolence has given
+her a power over the imagination of vast masses of the London poor which
+no one who is not really conversant with their daily life and modes of
+thinking could for an instant imagine. Her bounty is enlarged in the
+misty air of the slums of Wapping or Rotherhithe to colossal dimensions,
+and the very quietness and unobtrusiveness of her work gives it an air
+of mystery which tells like romance on the fancy of the poor.
+
+It was characteristic of the power which such a use of wealth may give
+that the mobs who smashed the Hyde Park railings stopped to cheer before
+the house of Lady Burdett Coutts. Luckily none of our political nobles
+has ever bethought himself of the means by which the great Roman leaders
+rose habitually to influence or won over the labouring masses by "panem
+et Circenses." But a nobler ambition might find its field in a large
+employment of wealth for public ends of a higher sort. Something of the
+old patrician pride might have spurred the five or six great Houses who
+own half London to construct the Thames Embankment at their own cost,
+and to hand it over free from the higglings of Mr. Gore to the people at
+large. Even now we may hear of some earl whose rent-roll is growing with
+fabulous rapidity as coming forward to relieve the Treasury by the offer
+of a National Gallery of Art, or checkmating the jobbers of South
+Kensington by the erection of a National Museum. It seems to be easy
+enough for peer after peer to fling away a hundred thousand at Newmarket
+or Tattersall's, and yet a hundred thousand would establish in the
+crowded haunts of working London great "Conservatoires" where the finest
+music might be brought to bear without cost on the coarseness and
+vulgarity of the life of the poor. The higher drama may be perishing in
+default of a State subvention, but it never seems to enter any one's
+head that there are dozens of people among those who grumbled at the
+artistic taste of Mr. Ayrton who could furnish such a subvention at the
+present cost of their stable. As yet however we must be content, we
+suppose, with such a use of wealth as 'Lothair' brings to the front--the
+purely selfish use of it carried to the highest pitch which selfishness
+has ever reached. Great parks and great houses, costly studs and costly
+conservatories, existence relieved of every hitch and discomfort--these
+are the outlets which wealth has as yet succeeded in finding. For nobler
+outlets we must wait for the advent of the Poet-Capitalist.
+
+
+
+
+LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS.
+
+
+A little higher up the river, but almost opposite to the huge mass of
+the Houses of Parliament, lies a broken, irregular pile of buildings, at
+whose angle, looking out over the Thames, is one grey weatherbeaten
+tower. The broken pile is the archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth; the grey
+weatherbeaten building is its Lollards' Tower. From this tower the
+mansion itself stretches in a varied line, chapel and guard-room and
+gallery and the stately buildings of the new house looking out on the
+terrace and garden; while the Great Hall, in which the library has now
+found a home, is the low picturesque building which reaches southward
+along the river to the gate.
+
+The story of each of these spots will interweave itself with the thread
+of our narrative as we proceed; but I would warn my readers at the
+outset that I do not purpose to trace the history of Lambeth in itself,
+or to attempt any architectural or picturesque description of the place.
+What I attempt is simply to mark in incident after incident which has
+occurred within its walls the relation of the House to the Primates whom
+it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the
+literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm.
+
+Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better than the site of
+the house itself. It is doubtful whether we can date the residence of
+the Archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, which was then a manor house
+of the see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the
+Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice of the spot as
+there was a significance in the date at which the choice was made. So
+long as the political head of the English people ruled, like Ælfred or
+Æthelstan or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English
+people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the
+Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the
+Kings finally to Westminster that the Archbishops were permanently
+drawn to their suffragan's manor house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave
+a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national history
+which opened with the Conquest the Church was called to play a part
+greater than she had ever known before. Hitherto the Archbishop had been
+simply the head of the ecclesiastical order--a representative of the
+moral and spiritual forces on which government was based. The Conquest,
+the cessation of the great Witenagemots in which the nation, however
+imperfectly, had till then found a voice, turned him into a Tribune of
+the People.
+
+Foreigner though he might be, it was the Primate's part to speak for the
+conquered race the words it could no longer utter. He was in fact the
+permanent leader (to borrow a modern phrase) of a Constitutional
+Opposition; and in addition to the older religious forces which he
+wielded he wielded a popular and democratic force which held the new
+King and the new baronage in check. It was he who received from the
+sovereign whom he crowned the solemn oath that he would rule not by his
+own will, but according to the customs, or as we should say now, the
+traditional constitution of the realm. It was his to call on the people
+to declare whether they chose him for their king, to receive the
+thundered "Ay, ay," of the crowd, to place the priestly unction on
+shoulder and breast, the royal crown on brow. To watch over the
+observance of the covenant of that solemn day, to raise obedience and
+order into religious duties, to uphold the custom and law of the realm
+against personal tyranny, to guard amid the darkness and brutality of
+the age those interests of religion, of morality, of intellectual life
+which as yet lay peacefully together beneath the wing of the
+Church,--this was the political office of the Primate in the new order
+which the Conquest created, and it was this office which expressed
+itself in the site of the house that fronted the King's house over
+Thames.
+
+From the days of Archbishop Anselm therefore to the days of Stephen
+Langton, Lambeth only fronted Westminster as the Archbishop fronted the
+King. Synod met over against Council; the clerical court of the one
+ruler rivalled in splendour, in actual influence, the baronial court of
+the other. For more than a century of our history the great powers which
+together were to make up the England of the future lay marshalled over
+against each other on either side the water.
+
+With the union of the English people and the sudden arising of English
+freedom which followed the Great Charter this peculiar attitude of the
+Archbishops passed necessarily away. When the people itself spoke again,
+its voice was heard not in the hall of Lambeth but in the Chapter-house
+which gave a home to the House of Commons in its earlier sessions at
+Westminster. From the day of Stephen Langton the nation has towered
+higher and higher above its mere ecclesiastical organization, till the
+one stands dwarfed beside the other as Lambeth now stands dwarfed before
+the mass of the Houses of Parliament. Nor was the religious change less
+than the political. In the Church as in the State the Archbishops
+suddenly fell into the rear. From the days of the first English
+Parliament to the days of the Reformation they not only cease to be
+representatives of the moral and religious forces of the nation but
+stand actually opposed to them. Nowhere is this better brought out than
+in their house beside the Thames. The political history of Lambeth lies
+spread over the whole of its site, from the gateway of Morton to the
+garden where we shall see Cranmer musing on the fate of Anne Boleyn. Its
+ecclesiastical interest on the other hand is concentrated in a single
+spot. We must ask our readers therefore to follow us beneath the
+groining of the Gate-House into the quiet little court that lies on the
+river-side of the hall. Passing over its trim grass-plot to a doorway at
+the angle of Lollards' Tower, and mounting a few steps, they will find
+themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a
+single small window looking out towards the Thames. The chamber is at
+the base of Lollards' Tower; in the centre stands a huge oaken pillar,
+to which the room owes its name of the "Post-room," and to which
+somewhat mythical tradition asserts Lollards to have been tied when they
+were "examined" by the whip. On its western side a doorway of the purest
+Early English work leads us directly into the palace Chapel.
+
+It is strange to stand at a single step in the very heart of the
+ecclesiastical life of so many ages, within walls beneath which the men
+in whose hands the fortunes of English religion have been placed from
+the age of the Great Charter till to-day have come and gone; to see the
+light falling through the tall windows with their marble shafts on the
+spot where Wyclif fronted Sudbury, on the lowly tomb of Parker, on the
+stately screen-work of Laud, on the altar where the last sad communion
+of Sancroft originated the Nonjurors. It is strange to note the very
+characteristics of the building itself, marred as it is by modern
+restoration, and to feel how simply its stern, unadorned beauty, the
+beauty of Salisbury and of Lincoln, expressed the very tone of the
+Church that finds its centre there.
+
+And hardly less strange is it to recall the odd, roystering figure of
+the Primate to whom, if tradition be true, it owes this beauty. Boniface
+of Savoy was the youngest of three brothers out of whom their niece
+Eleanor, the queen of Henry the Third, was striving to build up a
+foreign party in the realm. Her uncle Amadeus was richly enfeoffed with
+English lands; the Savoy Palace in the Strand still recalls the
+settlement and the magnificence of her uncle Peter. For this third and
+younger uncle she grasped at the highest post in the State save the
+Crown itself. "The handsome Archbishop," as his knights loved to call
+him, was not merely a foreigner as Lanfranc and Anselm had been
+foreigners--strange in manner or in speech to the flock whom they
+ruled--he was foreign in the worst sense: strange to their freedom,
+their sense of law, their reverence for piety. His first visit set
+everything on fire. He retreated to Lyons to hold a commission in the
+Pope's body-guard, but even Innocent was soon weary of his tyranny. When
+the threat of sequestration recalled him after four years of absence to
+his see, his hatred of England, his purpose soon to withdraw again to
+his own sunny South, were seen in his refusal to furnish Lambeth.
+Certainly he went the wrong way to stay here. The young Primate brought
+with him Savoyard fashions, strange enough to English folk. His armed
+retainers, foreigners to a man, plundered the City markets. His own
+archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground a prior who opposed his
+visitation. It was the Prior of St. Bartholomew's by Smithfield; and
+London, on the King's refusal to grant redress, took the matter into her
+own hands. The City bells swung out, and a noisy crowd of citizens were
+soon swarming beneath the walls of the palace, shouting threats of
+vengeance.
+
+For shouts Boniface cared little. In the midst of the tumult he caused
+the sentences of excommunication which he had fulminated to be legally
+executed in the chapel of his house. But bravado like this soon died
+before the universal resentment, and "the handsome Archbishop" fled
+again to Lyons. How helpless the successor of Augustine really was was
+shown by a daring outrage perpetrated in his absence. Master Eustace,
+his official, had thrown into prison the Prior of St. Thomas's Hospital
+for some contempt of court; and the Prior's diocesan, the Bishop of
+Winchester, a prelate as foreign and lawless as Boniface himself, took
+up the injury as his own. A party of his knights appeared before the
+house at Lambeth, tore the gates from their hinges, set Master Eustace
+on horseback, and carried him off to the episcopal prison at Farnham. At
+last Boniface bowed to submission, surrendered the points at issue,
+recalled his excommunications, and was suffered to return. He had learnt
+his lesson well enough to remain from that time a quiet, inactive man,
+with a dash of continental frugality and wit about him. Whether he built
+the chapel or no, he would probably have said of it as he said of the
+Great Hall at Canterbury, "My predecessors built, and I discharge the
+debt for their building. It seems to me that the true builder is the man
+that pays the bill."
+
+But Boniface never learnt to be an Englishman. When under the guidance
+of Earl Simon of Montfort the barons wrested the observance of their
+Charter from the King the Primate of England found shelter in a fresh
+exile. The Church had in fact ceased to be national. The figure of the
+first Reformer, as he stands on the chapel floor, is in itself the
+fittest comment on the age in which the chapel was built, an age when
+the interests of popular liberty and of intellectual freedom had sheered
+off from the church which had so long been their protector. With them
+the moral and spiritual life of the people sheered off too. The vast
+ecclesiastical fabric rested in the days of Archbishop Sudbury solely on
+its wealth and its tradition. Suddenly a single man summed up in himself
+the national, the mental, the moral power it had lost, and struck at the
+double base on which it rested. Wyclif, the keenest intellect of his
+day, national and English to the very core, declared its tradition
+corrupt and its wealth antichrist. The two forces that above all had
+built up the system of mediæval Christianity, the subtlety of the
+schoolman, the enthusiasm of the penniless preacher, united to strike it
+down.
+
+It is curious to mark how timidly the Primate of the day dealt with such
+a danger as this. Sudbury was acting in virtue of a Papal injunction,
+but he acted as though the shadow of the terrible doom that was awaiting
+him had already fallen over him. He summoned the popular Bishop of
+London to his aid ere he cited the Reformer to his judgment-seat. It was
+not as a prisoner that Wyclif appeared in the chapel: from the first his
+tone was that of a man who knew that he was secure. He claimed to have
+the most favourable construction put upon his words; then, availing
+himself of his peculiar subtlety of interpretation, he demanded that
+where they might bear two meanings his judges should take them in an
+orthodox sense. It was not a noble scene--there was little in it of
+Luther's "Here stand I--I can none other;" but both sides were in fact
+acting a part. On the one hand the dead pressure of ecclesiastical
+fanaticism was driving the Primate into a position from which he sought
+only to escape; on the other Wyclif was merely gaining time--"beating
+step," as men say--with his scholastic formulæ. What he looked for soon
+came. There was a rumour in the City that Papal delegates were sitting
+in judgment on the Reformer, and London was at once astir. Crowds of
+angry citizens flocked round the archiepiscopal house, and already there
+was talk of attacking it when a message from the Council of Regency
+commanded a suspension of all proceedings in the case. Sudbury dismissed
+his prisoner with a formal injunction, and the day was for ever lost to
+the Church.
+
+But if in Sudbury the Church had retreated peaceably before Wyclif, it
+was not from any doubt of the deadly earnestness of the struggle that
+lay before her. Archbishop Chichele's accession to the primacy was the
+signal for the building of Lollards' Tower. Dr. Maitland has shown that
+the common name rests on a mere error, and that the Lollards' Tower
+which meets us so grimly in the pages of Foxe was really a western tower
+of St. Paul's. But, as in so many other instances, the popular voice
+showed a singular historical tact in its mistake; the tower which
+Chichele raised marked more than any other in the very date of its
+erection the new age of persecution on which England was to enter. From
+a gateway in the northern side of the Post-room worn stone steps lead up
+to a dungeon in which many a prisoner for the faith must have lain. The
+massive oaken door, the iron rings bolted into the wall, the one narrow
+window looking out over the river, tell their tale as well as the broken
+sentences scratched or carved around. Some are mere names; here and
+there some light-pated youngster paying for his night's uproar has
+carved his dice or his "Jesus kep me out of all il compane, Amen." But
+"Jesus est amor meus" is sacred, whether Lollard or Jesuit graved it in
+the lonely prison hours, and not less sacred the "Deo sit gratiarum
+actio" that marks perhaps the leap of a martyr's heart at the news of
+the near advent of his fiery deliverance. It is strange to think, as one
+winds once more down the stairs that such feet have trodden, how soon
+England answered to the challenge that Lollards' Tower flung out over
+the Thames. The white masonry had hardly grown grey under the buffetings
+of a hundred years ere Lollard was no longer a word of shame, and the
+reformation that Wyclif had begun sat enthroned within the walls of the
+chapel where he had battled for his life.
+
+The attitude of the primates indeed showed that sooner or later such a
+reformation was inevitable. From the moment when Wyclif stood in
+Lambeth Chapel the Church sank ecclesiastically as well as politically
+into non-existence. It survived merely as a vast landowner, whilst its
+primates, after a short effort to resume their older position as real
+heads of their order, dwindled into ministers and tools of the Crown.
+The Gate-tower of the house, the grand mass of brickwork, whose dark red
+tones are (or, alas! were till a year or two since) so exquisitely
+brought out by the grey stone of its angles and the mullions of its
+broad arch-window, recalls an age--that of its builder, Archbishop
+Morton--when Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of the
+crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler elements of political
+life. It was raised from this degradation by the efforts of a primate to
+whose merits justice has hardly as yet been done. First in date among
+the genuine portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury which hang round
+the walls of the Guard-room at Lambeth is the portrait of Archbishop
+Warham. The plain, homely old man's face still looks down on us line for
+line as the "seeing eye" of Holbein gazed on it three centuries ago. "I
+instance this picture," says Mr. Wornum, in his life of the painter, "as
+an illustration that Holbein had the power of seeing what he looked on,
+and of perfectly transferring to his picture what he saw." Memorable in
+the annals of art as the first of that historic series which brings home
+to us as no age has ever been brought home to eyes of aftertime the age
+of the English Reformation, it is even more memorable as marking the
+close of the great intellectual movement which the Reformation swept
+away.
+
+It was with a letter from Erasmus in his hands that Hans Holbein stood
+before the aged Archbishop, still young as when he sketched himself at
+Basel with the fair, frank, manly face, the sweet gentle mouth, the
+heavy red cap flinging its shade over the mobile, melancholy brow. But
+it was more than the "seventy years" that he has so carefully noted
+above it that the artist saw in the Primate's face; it was the still,
+impassive calm of a life's disappointment. Only ten years before, at the
+very moment when the painter first made his entry into Basel, Erasmus
+had been forwarding to England the great work in which he had recalled
+theologians to the path of sound biblical criticism. "Every lover of
+letters," the great scholar wrote sadly, after the old man had gone to
+his rest,--"Every lover of letters owes to Warham that he is the
+possessor of my 'Jerome';" and with an acknowledgment of the Primate's
+bounty such as he alone in Christendom could give the edition bore in
+its forefront his memorable dedication to the Archbishop. That Erasmus
+could find protection for such a work in Warham's name, that he could
+address him with a conviction of his approval in words so bold and
+outspoken as those of his preface, tell us how completely the old man
+sympathized with the highest tendencies of the New Learning.
+
+Of the Renascence, that "new birth" of the world--for I cling to a word
+so eminently expressive of a truth that historians of our day seem
+inclined to forget or to deny--of that regeneration of mankind through
+the sudden upgrowth of intellectual liberty, Lambeth was in England the
+shrine. With the Reformation which followed it Lambeth, as we shall see,
+had little to do. But the home of Warham was the home of the revival of
+letters. With a singular fitness, the venerable library which still
+preserves their tradition, ousted from its older dwelling-place by the
+demolition of the cloister, has in modern days found refuge in the Great
+Hall, the successor and copy of that hall where the men of the New
+Learning, where Colet and More and Grocyn and Linacre gathered round the
+table of Warham.
+
+It was with Grocyn that Erasmus rowed up the river to the Primate's
+board. Warham addressed a few kindly words to the poor scholar before
+and after dinner, and then drawing him aside into a corner of the hall
+(his usual way when he made a present to any one) slipped into his hand
+an acknowledgment for the book and dedication he had brought with him.
+"How much did the Archbishop give you?" asked his companion as they
+rowed home again. "An immense amount!" replied Erasmus, but his friend
+saw the discontent on his face, and drew from him how small the sum
+really was. Then the disappointed scholar burst into a string of
+indignant questions: was Warham miserly, or was he poor, or did he
+really think such a present expressed the value of the book? Grocyn
+frankly blurted out the true reason for Warham's economy in his shrewd
+suspicion that this was not the first dedication that had been prefixed
+to the 'Hecuba,' and it is likely enough that the Primate's suspicion
+was right. At any rate, Erasmus owns that Grocyn's sardonic comment, "It
+is the way with you scholars," stuck in his mind even when he returned
+to Paris, and made him forward to the Archbishop a perfectly new
+translation of the 'Iphigenia.'
+
+Few men seem to have realized more thoroughly than Warham the new
+conception of an intellectual and moral equality before which the old
+social distinctions were to vanish away. In his intercourse with this
+group of friends he seems utterly unconscious of the exalted station
+which he occupied in the eyes of men. Take such a story as Erasmus tells
+of a visit of Dean Colet to Lambeth. The Dean took Erasmus in the boat
+with him, and read as they rowed along a section called 'The Remedy for
+Anger' in his friend's popular 'Handbook of the Christian Soldier.' When
+they reached the hall however Colet plumped gloomily down by Warham's
+side, neither eating nor drinking nor speaking in spite of the
+Archbishop's good-humoured attempt to draw him into conversation. It was
+only by starting the new topic of a comparison of ages that the
+Archbishop was at last successful; and when dinner was over Colet's
+ill-temper had utterly fled. Erasmus saw him draw aside an old man who
+had shared their board, and engage in the friendliest greeting. "What a
+fortunate fellow you are!" began the impetuous Dean, as the two friends
+stepped again into their boat; "what a tide of good-luck you bring with
+you!" Erasmus, of course, protested (one can almost see the
+half-earnest, half-humorous smile on his lip) that he was the most
+unfortunate fellow on earth. He was at any rate a bringer of good
+fortune to his friends, the Dean retorted; one friend at least he had
+saved from an unseemly outbreak of passion. At the Archbishop's table,
+in fact, Colet had found himself placed opposite to an uncle with whom
+he had long waged a bitter family feud, and it was only the singular
+chance which had brought him thither fresh from the wholesome lessons of
+the 'Handbook' that had enabled the Dean to refrain at the moment from
+open quarrel, and at last to get such a full mastery over his temper as
+to bring about a reconciliation with his kinsman. Colet was certainly
+very lucky in his friend's lessons, but he was perhaps quite as
+fortunate in finding a host so patient and good-tempered as Archbishop
+Warham.
+
+Primate and scholar were finally separated at last by the settlement of
+Erasmus at Basel, but the severance brought no interruption to their
+friendship. "England is my last anchor," Erasmus wrote bitterly to a
+rich German prelate; "if that goes, I must beg." The anchor held as long
+as Warham lived. Years go by, but the Primate is never tired of new
+gifts and remembrances to the brave, sensitive scholar at whose heels
+all the ignorance and bigotry of Europe was yelping. Sometimes indeed he
+was luckless in his presents; once he sent a horse to his friend, and,
+in spite of the well-known proverb about looking such a gift in the
+mouth, got a witty little snub for his pains. "He is no doubt a good
+steed at bottom," Erasmus gravely confesses, "but it must be owned he is
+not over-handsome; however he is at any rate free from all mortal sins,
+with the trifling exception of gluttony and laziness! If he were only a
+father confessor now! he has all the qualities to fit him for
+one--indeed, he is only _too_ prudent, modest, humble, chaste, and
+peaceable!" Still, admirable as these characteristics are, he is not
+quite the nag one expected. "I fancy that through some knavery or
+blundering on your servant's part, I must have got a different steed
+from the one you intended for me. In fact, now I come to remember, I had
+bidden my servant not to accept a horse except it were a good one; but
+I am infinitely obliged to you all the same." Even Warham's temper must
+have been tried as he laughed over such a letter as this; but the
+precious work of art which Lambeth contains proves that years only
+intensified their friendship. It was, as we have seen, with a letter of
+Erasmus in his hands, that on his first visit to England Holbein
+presented himself before Warham; and Erasmus responded to his friend's
+present of a copy of this portrait by forwarding a copy of his own.
+
+With the Reformation in its nobler and purer aspects Lambeth--as we have
+said--had little to do. Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Alasco, gathered there
+for a moment round Cranmer, but it was simply as a resting-place on
+their way to Cambridge, to Oxford, and to Austin Friars. Only one of the
+symbols of the new Protestantism has any connection with it; the
+Prayer-Book was drawn up in the peaceful seclusion of Otford. The party
+conferences, the rival martyrdoms of the jarring creeds, took place
+elsewhere. The memories of Cranmer which linger around Lambeth are
+simply memories of degradation, and that the deepest degradation of all,
+the degradation of those solemn influences which the Primacy embodies
+to the sanction of political infamy. It is fair indeed to remember the
+bitterness of Cranmer's suffering. Impassive as he seemed, with a face
+that never changed and sleep seldom known to be broken, men saw little
+of the inner anguish with which the tool of Henry's injustice bent
+before that overmastering will. But seldom as it was that the silent
+lips broke into complaint the pitiless pillage of his see wrung
+fruitless protests even from Cranmer. The pillage had began on the very
+eve of his consecration, and from that moment till the king's death
+Henry played the part of sturdy beggar for the archiepiscopal manors.
+Concession followed concession, and yet none sufficed to purchase
+security. The Archbishop lived in the very shadow of death. At one time
+he heard the music of the royal barge as it passed Lambeth, and hurried
+to the waterside to greet the King. "I have news for you my chaplain!"
+Henry broke out with his rough laugh as he drew Cranmer on board: "I
+know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent!" and pulling a paper from
+his sleeve he showed him his denunciation by the prebendaries of his own
+cathedral. At another time he was summoned from his bed, and crossed the
+river to find Henry pacing the gallery at Whitehall and to hear that on
+the petition of the Council the King had consented to his committal to
+the Tower. The law of the Six Articles parted him from wife and child.
+"Happy man that you are" Cranmer groaned to Alexander Ales, whom with
+his wonted consideration for others he had summoned to Lambeth to warn
+him of his danger as a married priest; "happy man that you are that you
+can escape! I would that I could do the same. Truly my see would be no
+hindrance to me."
+
+The bitter words must have recalled to Ales words of hardly less
+bitterness which he had listened to on a visit to Lambeth years before.
+If there was one person upon earth whom Cranmer loved it was Anne
+Boleyn. When the royal summons had called him to Lambeth to wait till
+the time arrived when his part was to be played in the murder of the
+Queen his affection found vent in words of a strange pathos. "I loved
+her not a little," he wrote to Henry in fruitless intercession, "for the
+love which I judged her to bear towards God and His Gospel. I was most
+bound to her of all creatures living." So he wrote, knowing there was
+wrong to be done towards the woman he loved, wrong which he alone could
+do, and knowing too that he would stoop to do it. The large garden
+stretched away northward from his house then as now, but then thick, no
+doubt, with the elm rows that vanished some thirty years back as the
+great city's smoke drifted over them, and herein the early morning (it
+was but four o'clock) Ales, who had found sleep impossible and had
+crossed the river in a boat to seek calm in the fresh air and stillness
+of the place, met Cranmer walking. On the preceding day Anne had gone
+through the mockery of her trial, but to the world outside the little
+circle of the court nothing was known, and it was in utter
+unconsciousness of this that Ales told the Archbishop he had been roused
+by a dream of her beheading. Cranmer was startled out of his usual calm.
+"Don't you know then," he asked after a moment's silence, "what is to
+happen to-day?" Then raising his eyes to heaven he added with a wild
+burst of tears, "She who has been Queen of England on earth will this
+day become a queen in heaven!" Some hours afterwards the Queen stood
+before him as her judge, and passed back to the Tower and the block.
+
+Cranmer was freed by his master's death from this helplessness of
+terror only to lend himself to the injustice of the meaner masters who
+followed Henry. Their enemies were at least his own, and, kindly as from
+many instances we know his nature to have been, its very weakness made
+him spring eagerly in such an hour of deliverance at the opportunity of
+showing his power over those who so long held him down. On charges of
+the most frivolous nature Bishop Gardiner and Bishop Bonner were
+summoned before the Archbishop at Lambeth, deposed from their sees, and
+flung into prison. It is only the record of their trials, as it still
+stands in the pages of Foxe, that can enable us to understand the
+violence of the reaction under Mary. Gardiner with characteristic
+dignity confined himself to simply refuting the charges brought against
+him and protesting against the injustice of the court. But the coarser,
+bull-dog nature of Bonner turned to bay. By gestures, by scoff, by plain
+English speech he declared again and again his sense of the wrong that
+was being done. A temper naturally fearless was stung to bravado by the
+sense of oppression. As he entered the hall at Lambeth he passed
+straight by the Archbishop and his fellow-commissioners, still keeping
+his cap on his head as though in unconsciousness of his presence. One
+who stood by plucked his sleeve, and bade him do reverence. Bonner
+turned laughingly round and addressed the Archbishop, "What, my Lord,
+are you here? By my troth I saw you not." "It was because you would not
+see," Cranmer sternly rejoined. "Well," replied Bonner, "you sent for
+me: have you anything to say to me?" The charge was read. The Bishop had
+been commanded in a sermon to acknowledge that the acts of the King
+during his minority were as valid as if he were of full age. The command
+was flatly in contradiction with existing statutes, and the Bishop had
+no doubt disobeyed it.
+
+But Bonner was too adroit to make a direct answer to the charge. He
+gained time by turning suddenly on the question of the Sacrament; he
+cited the appearance of Hooper as a witness in proof that it was really
+on this point that he was brought to trial, and he at last succeeded in
+arousing Cranmer's love of controversy. A reply of almost incredible
+profanity from the Archbishop, if we may trust Foxe's report, rewarded
+Bonner's perseverance in demanding a statement of his belief. The Bishop
+was not slow to accept the advantage he had gained. "I am right sorry to
+hear your Grace speak these words," he said, with a grave shake of his
+head, and Cranmer was warned by the silence and earnest looks of his
+fellow-commissioners to break up the session.
+
+Three days after, the addition of Sir Thomas Smith, the bitterest of
+Reformers, to the number of his assessors emboldened Cranmer to summon
+Bonner again. The court met in the chapel, and the Bishop was a second
+time commanded to reply to the charge. He objected now to the admission
+of the evidence of either Hooper or Latimer on the ground of their
+notorious heresy. "If that be the law," Cranmer replied hastily, "it is
+no godly law." "It is the King's law used in the realm," Bonner bluntly
+rejoined. Again Cranmer's temper gave his opponent the advantage. "Ye be
+too full of your law," replied the angry Primate; "I would wish you had
+less knowledge in that law and more knowledge in God's law and of your
+duty!" "Well," answered the Bishop with admirable self-command, "seeing
+your Grace falleth to wishing, I can also wish many things to be in your
+person." It was in vain that Smith strove to brush away his objections
+with a contemptuous "You do use us thus to be seen a common lawyer."
+"Indeed," the veteran canonist coolly retorted; "I knew the law ere you
+could read it!" There was nothing for it but a second adjournment of the
+court. At its next session all parties met in hotter mood. The Bishop
+pulled Hooper's books on the Sacrament from his sleeve and began reading
+them aloud. Latimer lifted up his head, as he alleged, to still the
+excitement of the people who crowded the chapel; as Bonner believed, to
+arouse a tumult. Cries of "Yea, yea," "Nay, nay," interrupted Bonner's
+reading. The Bishop turned round and faced the throng, crying out in
+humorous defiance, "Ah! Woodcocks! Woodcocks!" The taunt was met with
+universal laughter, but the scene had roused Cranmer's temper as well as
+his own. The Primate addressed himself to the people, protesting that
+Bonner was called in question for no such matter as he would persuade
+them. Again Bonner turned to the people with "Well now, hear what the
+Bishop of London saith for his part," but the commissioners forbade him
+to speak more. The court was at last recalled to a quieter tone, but
+contests of this sort still varied the proceedings as they dragged their
+slow length along in chapel and hall.
+
+At last Cranmer resolved to make an end. Had he been sitting simply as
+Archbishop, he reminded Bonner sharply, he might have expected more
+reverence and obedience from his suffragan. As it was, "at every time
+that we have sitten in commission you have used such unseemly fashions,
+without all reverence or obedience, giving taunts and checks as well
+unto us, with divers of the servants and chaplains, as also unto certain
+of the ancientest that be here, calling them fools and daws, with such
+like, that you have given to the multitude an intolerable example of
+disobedience." "You show yourself to be a meet judge!" was Bonner's
+scornful reply. It was clear he had no purpose to yield. The real matter
+at issue, he contended, was the doctrine of the Sacrament, and from the
+very courtroom he sent his orders to the Lord Mayor to see that no
+heretical opinions were preached before him. At the close of the trial
+he once more addressed Cranmer in solemn protest against his breach of
+the law. "I am sorry" he said "that I being a bishop am thus handled at
+your Grace's hand, but more sorry that you suffer abominable heretics to
+practise as they do in London and elsewhere--answer it as you can!" Then
+bandying taunts with the throng, the indomitable bishop followed the
+officers to the Marshalsea.
+
+From the degradation of scenes like these Lambeth was raised to new
+dignity and self-respect by the primacy of Parker. His consecration in
+the same chapel which had witnessed Wyclif's confession was the triumph
+of Wyclif's principles, the close of that storm of the Reformation, of
+that Catholic reaction, which ceased alike with the accession of
+Elizabeth. But it was far more than this. It was in itself a symbol of
+the Church of England as it stands to-day, of that quiet illogical
+compromise between past and present which Parker and the Queen were to
+mould into so lasting a shape. Every circumstance of the service marked
+the strange contrasts which were to be blended in the future of the
+English Church. The zeal of Edward the Sixth's day had dashed the
+stained glass from the casements of Lambeth; the zeal of Elizabeth's day
+was soon to move, if it had not already moved, the holy table into the
+midst of the chapel. But a reaction from the mere iconoclasm and
+bareness of Calvinistic Protestantism showed itself in the tapestries
+hung for the day along the eastern wall and in the rich carpet which was
+spread over the floor. The old legal forms, the old Ordination Service
+reappeared, but in their midst came the new spirit of the Reformation,
+the oath of submission to the royal supremacy, the solemn gift no
+longer of the pastoral staff but of the Bible. The very dress of the
+four consecrating bishops showed the same confusion. Barlow, with the
+Archbishop's chaplains who assisted him in the office of the Communion,
+wore the silken copes of the older service; Scory and Hodgskins the fair
+linen surplice of the new. Yet more noteworthy was the aged figure of
+Coverdale, "Father Coverdale," as men used affectionately to call him,
+the well-known translator of the Bible, whose life had been so hardly
+wrung by royal intercession from Mary. Rejecting the very surplice as
+Popery, in his long Genevan cloak he marks the opening of the Puritan
+controversy over vestments which was to rage so fiercely from Parker on
+to Laud.
+
+The library of Parker, though no longer within its walls, is memorable
+in the literary history of Lambeth as the first of a series of such
+collections made after his time by each successive Archbishop. Many of
+these indeed have passed away. The manuscripts of Parker form the glory
+of Corpus College, Cambridge; the Oriental collections of Laud are among
+the most precious treasures of the Bodleian. In puerile revenge for his
+fall Sancroft withdrew his books from Lambeth, and bequeathed them to
+Emmanuel College. The library which the munificence of Tenison
+bequeathed to his old parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields has been
+dispersed by a shameless act of Vandalism within our own memories. An
+old man's caprice deposited the papers of Archbishop Wake at Christ
+Church. But the treasures thus dispersed are, with the exception of the
+Parker MSS., far surpassed by the collections that remain. I cannot
+attempt here to enter with any detail into the nature of the history of
+the archiepiscopal library. It owes its origin to Archbishop Bancroft,
+it was largely supplemented by his successor Abbot, and still more
+largely after a long interval by the book-loving Primates Tenison and
+Secker. The library of 30,000 volumes still mainly consists of these
+collections, though it has been augmented by the smaller bequests of
+Sheldon and Cornwallis and in a far less degree by those of later
+Archbishops. One has at any rate the repute of having augmented it
+during his primacy simply by a treatise on gout and a book about
+butterflies. Of the 1,200 volumes of manuscripts and papers, 500 are due
+to Bancroft and Abbot, the rest mainly to Tenison, who purchased the
+Carew Papers, the collections of Wharton, and the Codices that bear his
+name. If Wake left his papers to Christ Church in dread of the
+succession of Bishop Gibson the bequest of Gibson's own papers more than
+made up the loss. The most valuable addition since Gibson's day has been
+that of the Greek Codices collected in the East at the opening of this
+century by Dr. Carlyle.
+
+The importance of Parker's primacy however was political and
+ecclesiastical rather than literary. The first Protestant Archbishop was
+not the man to stoop to servility like Cranmer, nor was Elizabeth the
+queen to ask such stooping. But the concordat which the two tacitly
+arranged, the policy so resolutely clung to in spite of Burleigh and
+Walsingham, was perhaps a greater curse both to nation and to Church
+than the meanness of Cranmer. The steady support given by the Crown to
+the new ecclesiastical organization which Parker moulded into shape was
+repaid by the conversion of every clergyman into the advocate of
+irresponsible government. It was as if publicly to ratify this concordat
+that the Queen came in person to Lambeth in the spring of 1573. On
+either side the chapel in that day stood a greater and lesser cloister.
+The last, which lay on the garden side, was swept away by the
+demolitions of the eighteenth century, the first still fills the space
+between chapel and hall but has been converted into domestic offices by
+the "restoration" of our own. Even Mr. Blore might have spared the
+cloisters from whose gallery on the side towards the Thames Elizabeth
+looked down on the gay line of nobles and courtiers who leaned from the
+barred windows beneath and on the crowd of meaner subjects who filled
+the court, while she listened to Dr. Pearce as he preached from a pulpit
+set by the well in the midst. At its close the Queen passed to dinner in
+the Archbishop's chamber of presence, while the noble throng beneath
+followed Burleigh and Lord Howard to the hall whose oaken roof told
+freshly of Parker's hand. At four the short visit was over, and
+Elizabeth again on her way to Greenwich. But, short as it was, it marked
+the conclusion of a new alliance between Church and State out of which
+the Ecclesiastical Commission was to spring.
+
+Such an alliance would have been deadly for English religion as for
+English liberty had not its strength been broken by the obstinate
+resistance in wise as well as unwise ways of the Puritan party. There
+are few more interesting memorials of the struggle which followed than
+the 'Martin Marprelate' tracts which still remain in the collection at
+Lambeth, significantly scored in all their more virulent passages by the
+red pencil of Archbishop Whitgift. But the story of that controversy
+cannot be told here, though it was at Lambeth, as the seat of the High
+Commission, that it was really fought out. More and more it parted all
+who clung to liberty from the Church, and knit the episcopate in a
+closer alliance with the Crown. When Elizabeth set Parker at the head of
+the new Ecclesiastical Commission, half the work of the Reformation was
+in fact undone.
+
+Under Laud this great engine of ecclesiastical tyranny was perverted to
+the uses of civil tyranny of the vilest kind. Under Laud the clerical
+invectives of a Martin Marprelate deepened into the national fury of
+'Canterburie's Doom.' With this political aspect of his life we have not
+now to deal; what Lambeth Chapel brings out with singular vividness is
+the strange audacity with which the Archbishop threw himself across the
+strongest religious sentiments of his time. Men noted as a fatal omen
+the accident that marked his first entry into Lambeth; the overladen
+ferry-boat upset in the crossing, and though horses and servants were
+saved the Primate's coach remained at the bottom of the Thames. But no
+omen brought hesitation to that bold, narrow mind. His first action, he
+tells us himself, was the restoration of the chapel, and, as Laud
+managed it, restoration was the simple undoing of all that the
+Reformation had done.
+
+"I found the windows so broken, and the chapel lay so nastily," he wrote
+long after in his Defence, "that I was ashamed to behold, and could not
+resort unto it but with some disdain." With characteristic energy the
+Archbishop aided with his own hands in the repair of the windows, and
+racked his wits "in making up the history of those old broken pictures
+by help of the fragments of them, which I compared with the story." In
+the east window his glazier was scandalized at being forced by the
+Primate's express directions to "repair and new make the broken
+crucifix." The holy table was set altar-wise against the wall, and a
+cloth of arras hung behind it embroidered with the history of the Last
+Supper. The elaborate woodwork of the screen, the richly-embroidered
+copes of the chaplains, the silver candlesticks, the credence-table,
+the organ and the choir, the genuflexions to the altar, recalled the
+elaborate ceremonial of the Royal Chapel.
+
+High-handed however as the Archbishop's course had been, he felt dimly
+the approaching wreck. At the close of 1639 he notes in his diary a
+great storm that broke even the boats of the Lambeth watermen to pieces
+as they lay before his gate. A curious instance of his gloomy
+prognostications still exists among the relics in the library--a quarry
+of greenish glass, once belonging to the west window of the gallery of
+Croydon, and removed when that palace was rebuilt. On the quarry Laud
+has written with his signet-ring in his own clear, beautiful hand,
+"Memorand. Ecclesiæ de Micham, Cheme, et Stone cum aliis fulgure
+combustæ sunt. Januar. 14, 1638-9. Omen avertat Deus."
+
+The omen was far from averted. The Scottish war, the Bellum Episcopale,
+the Bishops' War, as men called it, was soon going against the King.
+Laud had been the chief mover in the war, and it was against Laud that
+the popular indignation at once directed itself. On the 9th of May he
+notes in his diary: "A paper posted upon the Royal Exchange, animating
+'prentices to sack my house on the Monday following." On that Monday
+night the mob came surging up to the gates. "At midnight my house was
+beset with 500 of these rascal routers," notes the indomitable little
+prelate. He had received notice in time to secure the house, and after
+two hours of useless shouting the mob rolled away. Laud had his revenge;
+a drummer who had joined in the attack was racked mercilessly, and then
+hanged and quartered. But retaliation like this was useless. The
+gathering of the Long Parliament sounded the knell of the sturdy little
+minister who had ridden England so hard. At the close of October he is
+in his upper study--it is one of the pleasant scholarly touches that
+redeem so much in his life--"to see some manuscripts which I was sending
+to Oxford. In that study hung my picture taken by the life" (the picture
+is at Lambeth still), "and coming in I found it fallen down upon the
+face and lying on the floor, the string being broken by which it was
+hanged against the wall. I am almost everyday threatened with my ruin in
+parliament. God grant this be no omen." On the 18th of December he was
+in charge of the gentleman-usher of the Lords on impeachment of high
+treason. In his company the Archbishop returned for a few hours to see
+his house for the last time, "for a book or two to read in, and such
+papers as pertained to my defence against the Scots;" really to burn,
+says Prynne, most of his privy papers. There is the first little break
+in the boldness with which till now he has faced the popular ill-will,
+the first little break too of tenderness, as though the shadow of what
+was to come were softening him, in the words that tell us his last
+farewell: "I stayed at Lambeth till the evening, to avoid the gaze of
+the people. I went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the day
+(Ps. 93 and 94) and cap. 50 of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me
+worthy of it, and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge hundreds of
+my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my
+house. For which I bless God and them."
+
+So Laud vanished into the dark December night never to return. The house
+seems to have been left unmolested for two years. Then "Captain Browne
+and his company entered my house at Lambeth to keep it for public
+service." The troopers burst open the door "and offered violence to the
+organ," but it was saved for the time by the intervention of their
+captain. In 1643 the zeal of the soldiers could no longer be restrained.
+Even in the solitude and terror of his prison in the Tower Laud still
+feels the bitterness of the last blow at the house he held so dear. "May
+1. My chapel windows defaced and the steps torn up." But the crowning
+bitterness was to come. If there were two men living who had personal
+wrongs to avenge on the Archbishop, they were Leighton and Prynne. It
+can only have been as a personal triumph over their humbled persecutor
+that the Parliament appointed the first custodian of Lambeth and gave
+Prynne the charge of searching the Archbishop's house and chambers for
+materials in support of the impeachment. Of the spirit in which Prynne
+executed his task, the famous 'Canterburie's Doom,' with the Breviat of
+Laud's life which preceded it, still gives pungent evidence. By one of
+those curious coincidences that sometimes flash the fact upon us through
+the dust of old libraries, the copy of this violent invective preserved
+at Lambeth is inscribed on its fly-leaf with the clear, bold "Dum spiro
+spero, C.R." of the King himself. It is hard to picture the thoughts
+that must have passed through Charles's mind as he read the bitter
+triumphant pages that told how the man he had twice pilloried and then
+flung into prison for life had come out again, as he puts it brutally,
+to "unkennel that fox," his foe.
+
+Not even the Archbishop's study with its array of Missals and Breviaries
+and Books of Hours, not even the gallery with its "superstitious
+pictures," the three Italian masterpieces that he hurried as evidence to
+the bar of the House of Lords, so revealed to this terrible detective
+"the rotten, idolatrous heart" of the Primate as the sight of the
+chapel. It was soon reduced to simplicity. We have seen how sharply even
+in prison Laud felt the havoc made by the soldiery. But worse
+profanation was to follow. In 1648 the house passed by sale to the
+regicide Colonel Scott; the Great Hall was at once demolished, and the
+chapel turned into the dining-room of the household. The tomb of Parker
+was levelled with the ground; and if we are to believe the story of the
+royalists, the new owner felt so keenly the discomfort of dining over a
+dead man's bones that the remains of the great Protestant primate were
+disinterred and buried anew in an adjoining field.
+
+The story of the library is a more certain one. From the days of
+Bancroft to those of Laud it had remained secure in the rooms over the
+great cloister where Parker's collection had probably stood before it
+passed to Cambridge. There in Parker's day Foxe had busied himself in
+work for the later editions of his 'Acts and Monuments;' even in the
+present library one book at least bears his autograph and the marginal
+marks of his use. There the great scholars of the seventeenth century,
+with Selden among them, had carried on their labours. The time was now
+come when Selden was to save the library from destruction. At the sale
+of Lambeth the Parliament ordered the books and manuscripts to be sold
+with the house. Selden dexterously interposed. The will of its founder,
+Bancroft, he pleaded, directed that in case room should not be found for
+it at Lambeth his gift should go to Cambridge; and the Parliament,
+convinced by its greatest scholar, suffered the books to be sent to the
+University.
+
+When the Restoration brought the Stuart home again, it flung Scott into
+the Tower and set Juxon in the ruined, desecrated walls. Of the deeper
+thoughts that such a scene might have suggested few probably found
+their way into the simple, limited mind of the new primate. The whole
+pathos of Juxon's position lay in fact in his perfect absorption in the
+past. The books were reclaimed from their Cambridge Adullam. The chapel
+was rescued from desecration, and the fine woodwork of screen and stalls
+replaced as Laud had left them. The demolition of the hall left him a
+more serious labour, and the way in which he entered on it brought
+strikingly out Juxon's temper. He knew that he had but a few years to
+live, and he set himself but one work to do before he died, the
+replacing everything in the state in which the storm of the rebellion
+had found it. He resolved therefore not only to rebuild the hall but to
+rebuild it precisely as it had stood before it was destroyed. It was in
+vain that he was besieged by the remonstrances of "classical"
+architects, that he was sneered at even by Pepys as "old-fashioned";
+times had changed and fashions had changed, but Juxon would recognize no
+change at all. He died ere the building was finished, but even in death
+his inflexible will provided that his plans should be adhered to. The
+result has been a singularly happy one. It was not merely that the
+Archbishop has left us one of the noblest examples of that strange yet
+successful revival of Gothic feeling of which the staircase of Christ
+Church Hall, erected at much about the same time, furnishes so exquisite
+a specimen. It is that in his tenacity to the past he has preserved the
+historic interest of his hall. Beneath the picturesque woodwork of the
+roof, in the quiet light that breaks through the quaint mullions of its
+windows, the student may still recall without a jar the figures which
+make Lambeth memorable, figures such as those of Warham and Erasmus, of
+Grocyn and Colet and More. Unhappily there was a darker side to this
+conservatism. The Archbishops had returned like the Bourbons, forgetting
+nothing and having learned hardly anything. If any man could have
+learned the lesson of history it was Juxon's successor, the hard
+sceptical Sheldon, and one of the jottings in Pepys' Diary shows us what
+sort of lesson he had learned. Pepys had gone down the river at noon to
+dine with the Archbishop in company with Sir Christopher Wren, "the
+first time," as he notes, "that I ever was there, and I have long longed
+for it." Only a few days before he had had a terrible disappointment,
+for "Mr. Wren and I took boat, thinking to dine with my Lord of
+Canterbury, but when we came to Lambeth the gate was shut, which is
+strictly done at twelve o'clock, and nobody comes in afterwards, so we
+lost our labour." On this occasion Pepys was more fortunate. He found "a
+noble house and well furnished with good pictures and furniture, and
+noble attendance in good order, and a great deal of company, though an
+ordinary day, and exceeding good cheer, nowhere better or so much that
+ever I think I saw." Sheldon with his usual courtesy gave his visitors
+kindly welcome, and Pepys was preparing to withdraw at the close of
+dinner when he heard news which induced him to remain. The almost
+incredible scene that followed must be told in his own words:--"Most of
+the company gone, and I going, I heard by a gentleman of a sermon that
+was to be there; and so I stayed to hear it, thinking it to be serious,
+till by-and-by the gentleman told me it was a mockery by one Cornet
+Bolton, a very gentlemanlike man, that behind a chair did pray and
+preach like a Presbyter Scot, with all the possible imitation in
+grimaces and voice. And his text about the hanging up their harps upon
+the willows; and a serious, good sermon too, exclaiming against bishops
+and crying up of my good Lord Eglington till it made us all burst. But
+I did wonder to hear the Bishop at this time to make himself sport with
+things of this kind; but I perceive it was shown to him as a rarity, and
+he took care to have the room door shut; but there were about twenty
+gentlemen there, infinitely pleased with the 'novelty.'"
+
+It was "novelties" like these that led the last of the Stuarts to his
+fatal belief that he could safely defy a Church that had so severed
+itself from the English religion in doing the work of the Crown. The pen
+of a great historian has told for all time the Trial of the Seven
+Bishops, and though their protest was drawn up at Lambeth I may not
+venture to tell it here. Of all the seven in fact Sancroft was probably
+the least inclined to resistance, the one prelate to whom the cheers of
+the great multitude at their acquittal brought least sense of triumph.
+
+No sooner indeed was James driven from the throne than the Primate fell
+back into the servile king-worship of an England that was passing away.
+Within the closed gates of Lambeth he debated endlessly with himself and
+with his fellow-bishops the questions of "de jure" and "de facto" right
+to the crown. Every day he sheered further and further from the actual
+world around him. Newton, who was with him at Lambeth when it was
+announced that the Convention had declared the throne vacant, found that
+Sancroft's thoughts were not with England or English freedom--they were
+concentrated on the question whether James's child were a supposititious
+one or no. "He wished," he said, "they had gone on a more regular method
+and examined into the birth of the young child. There was reason," he
+added, "to believe he was not the same as the first, which might easily
+be known, for he had a mole on his neck." The new Government bore long
+with the old man, and Bancroft for a time seems really to have wavered.
+He suffered his chaplains to take the oaths and then scolded them
+bitterly for praying for William and Mary. He declined to take his seat
+at the Council board, and yet issued his commission for the consecration
+of Burnet. At last his mind was made up and the Government on his final
+refusal to take the oath of allegiance had no alternative but to declare
+the see vacant.
+
+For six months Bancroft was still suffered to remain in his house,
+though Tillotson was nominated as his successor. With a perfect
+courtesy, worthy of the saintly temper which was his characteristic,
+Tillotson waited long at the deprived Archbishop's door desiring a
+conference. But Sancroft refused to see him. Evelyn found the old man in
+a dismantled house, bitter at his fall. "Say 'nolo,' and say it from the
+heart," he had replied passionately to Beveridge when he sought his
+counsel on the offer of a bishopric. Others asked whether after refusing
+the oaths they might attend worship where the new sovereigns were prayed
+for. "If they do," answered Sancroft, "they will need the Absolution at
+the end as well as at the beginning of the service." In the answer lay
+the schism of the Nonjurors, and to this schism Sancroft soon gave
+definite form. On Whitsunday the new Church was started in the
+archiepiscopal Chapel. The throng of visitors was kept standing at the
+palace gate. No one was admitted to the Chapel but some fifty who had
+refused the oaths. The Archbishop himself consecrated: one Nonjuror
+reading the prayers, another preaching. A formal action of ejectment was
+the answer to this open defiance, and on the evening of its decision in
+favour of the Crown Sancroft withdrew quietly by boat over Thames to
+the Temple. He was soon followed by many who, amidst the pettiness of
+his public views, could still realize the grandeur of his self-devotion.
+To one, the Earl of Aylesbury, the Archbishop himself opened the door.
+His visitor, struck with the change of all he saw from the pomp of
+Lambeth, burst into tears and owned how deeply the sight affected him.
+"O my good lord," replied Sancroft, "rather rejoice with me, for now I
+live again."
+
+With Sancroft's departure opens a new age of Lambeth's ecclesiastical
+history. The Revolution which flung him aside had completed the work of
+the great Rebellion in sweeping away for ever the old pretensions of the
+primates to an autocracy within the Church of England. But it seemed to
+have opened a nobler prospect in placing them at the head of the
+Protestant Churches of the world. In their common peril before the great
+Catholic aggression, which found equal support at Paris and Vienna, the
+Reformed communities of the Continent looked for aid and sympathy to the
+one Reformed Church whose position was now unassailable. The
+congregations of the Palatinate appealed to Lambeth when they were
+trodden under foot beneath the horse-hoofs of Turenne. The same appeal
+came from the Vaudois refugees in Germany, the Silesian Protestants, the
+Huguenot churches that still fought for existence in France, the
+Calvinists of Geneva, the French refugees who had forsaken their sunny
+homes in the south for the Gospel and God. In the dry letter-books on
+the Lambeth shelves, in the records of bounty dispensed through the
+Archbishop to the persecuted and the stranger, in the warm and cordial
+correspondence with Lutheran and Calvinist, survives a faint memory of
+the golden visions which filled Protestant hearts after the accession of
+the great Deliverer. "The eyes of the world are upon us," was Tenison's
+plea for union with Protestants at home. "All the Reformed Churches are
+in expectation of something to be done which may make for union and
+peace." When a temper so cold as Tenison's could kindle in this fashion
+it is no wonder that more enthusiastic minds launched into loftier
+expectations--that Leibnitz hoped to see the union of Calvinist and
+Lutheran accomplished by a common adoption of the English Liturgy, that
+a High Churchman like Nicholls revived the plan, which Cranmer had
+proposed and Calvin had supported, of a general council of Protestants
+to be held in England. One by one such visions faded before the
+virulence of party spirit, the narrowness and timidity of Churchmen, the
+base and selfish politics of the time. Few men had higher or more
+spiritual conceptions of Christian unity than Tenison; yet the German
+translation of our Liturgy, stamped with the royal monogram of King
+Frederick, which still exists in the library, reminds us how in mere
+jealousy of a Tory triumph Tenison flung away the offer of a union with
+the Church of Prussia. The creeping ambition of Dubois foiled whatever
+dreams Archbishop Wake may have entertained of a union with the Church
+of France.
+
+From the larger field of political and ecclesiastical history we may
+turn again ere we close to the narrower limits of the Lambeth Library.
+The storm which drove Sancroft from his house left his librarian, Henry
+Wharton, still bound to the books he loved so well. Wharton is one of
+those instances of precocious developement which are rarer in the sober
+walks of historical investigation than in art. It is a strange young
+face that we see in the frontispiece to his sermons, the impression of
+its broad, high brow and prominent nose so oddly in contrast with the
+delicate, feminine curves of the mouth, and yet repeated in the hard,
+concentrated gaze of the large, full eyes which look out from under the
+enormous wig. Wharton was the most accomplished of Cambridge students
+when he quitted the University at twenty-two to aid Cave in his
+'Historia Litteraria.' But the time proved too exciting for a purely
+literary career. At Tenison's instigation the young scholar plunged into
+the thick of the controversy which had been provoked by the aggression
+of King James, and his vigour soon attracted the notice of Sancroft. He
+became one of the Archbishop's chaplains, and was presented in a single
+year to two of the best livings in his gift. With these however save in
+his very natural zeal for pluralities he seems to have concerned himself
+little. It was with the library which now passed into his charge that
+his name was destined to be associated. Under him its treasures were
+thrown liberally open to the ecclesiastical antiquaries of his day--to
+Hody, to Stillingfleet, to Collier, to Atterbury, and to Strype, who was
+just beginning his voluminous collections towards the illustration of
+the history of the sixteenth century. But no one made so much use of the
+documents in his charge as Wharton himself. In them, no doubt, lay the
+secret of his consent to take the oath, to separate from his earlier
+patron, to accept the patronage of Tenison. But there was no permanent
+breach with Sancroft; on his deathbed the Archbishop committed to him
+the charge of editing Laud's papers, a charge redeemed by his
+publication of the 'Troubles and Trials' of the Archbishop in 1694.
+
+But this with other labours were mere by-play. The design upon which his
+energies were mainly concentrated was "to exhibit a complete
+ecclesiastical history of England to the Reformation," and the two
+volumes of the 'Anglia Sacra,' which appeared during his life, were
+intended as a partial fulfilment of this design. Of these, as they now
+stand, the second is by far the more valuable. The four archiepiscopal
+biographies by Osbern, the three by Eadmer, Malmesbury's lives of
+Aldhelm and Wulstan, the larger collection of works by Giraldus
+Cambrensis, Chaundler's biographies of Wykeham and Bekington, and the
+collection of smaller documents which accompanied these, formed a more
+valuable contribution to our ecclesiastical history than had up to
+Wharton's time ever been made. The first volume contained the chief
+monastic annals which illustrated the history of the sees whose
+cathedrals were possessed by monks; those served by canons regular or
+secular were reserved for a third volume, while a fourth was to have
+contained the episcopal annals of the Church from the Reformation to the
+Revolution.
+
+The last however was never destined to appear, and its predecessor was
+interrupted after the completion of the histories of London and St.
+Asaph by the premature death of the great scholar. In 1694 Battely
+writes a touching account to Strype of his interview with Wharton at
+Canterbury:--"One day he opened his trunk and drawers, and showed me his
+great collections concerning the state of our Church, and with a great
+sigh told me his labours were at an end, and that his strength would not
+permit him to finish any more of that subject." Vigorous and healthy as
+his natural constitution was he had worn it out with the severity of his
+toil. He denied himself refreshment in his eagerness for study, and sat
+over his books in the bitterest days of winter till hands and feet were
+powerless with the cold. At last nature abruptly gave way, his last
+hopes of recovery were foiled by an immoderate return to his old
+pursuits, and at the age of thirty-one Henry Wharton died a quiet
+scholar's death. Archbishop Tenison stood with Bishop Lloyd by the grave
+in Westminster, where the body was laid "with solemn and devout anthems
+composed by that most ingenious artist, Mr. Harry Purcell;" and over it
+were graven words that tell the broken story of so many a student
+life:--"Multa ad augendam et illustrandam rem literariam conscripsit;
+plura moliebatur."
+
+The library no longer rests in those quiet rooms over the great cloister
+in which a succession of librarians, such as Gibson and Wilkins and
+Ducarel, preserved the tradition of Henry Wharton. The 'Codex' of the
+first, the 'Concilia' of the second, and the elaborate analysis of the
+Canterbury Registers which we owe to the third are, like Wharton's own
+works, of primary importance to the study of English ecclesiastical
+history. It was reserved for our own day to see these memories swept
+away by the degradation of the cloister into a kitchen yard and a
+scullery; but the Great Hall of Archbishop Juxon, to which by a happy
+fortune the books were transferred, has seen in Dr. Maitland and
+Professor Stubbs keepers whose learning more than rivals the learning of
+Wharton himself. It is not without significance that this great library
+still lies open to the public as a part and a notable part of the palace
+of the chief prelate of the English Church. Even if Philistines abound
+in it the spirit and drift of the English Church have never been wholly
+Philistine. It has managed somehow to reflect and represent the varying
+phases of English life and English thought; it has developed more and
+more a certain original largeness and good-tempered breadth of view;
+amidst the hundred jarring theories of itself and its position which it
+has embraced at one time or another it has never stooped to the mere
+"pay over the counter" theory of Little Bethel. Above all it has as yet
+managed to find room for almost every shade of religious opinion; and it
+has answered at once to every national revival of taste, of beauty, and
+of art.
+
+Great as are the faults of the Church of England, these are merits which
+make men who care more for the diffusion of culture than for the
+propagation of this shade or that shade of religious opinion shrink from
+any immediate wish for her fall. And they are merits which spring from
+this, that she is still a learned Church, not learned in the sense of
+purely theological or ecclesiastical learning, but a Church which is
+able to show among its clergy men of renown in every branch of
+literature, critical, poetical, historical, or scientific. How long this
+distinction is to continue her own it is hard to say; there are signs
+indeed in the theological temper which is creeping over the clergy that
+it is soon to cease. But the spirit of intelligence, of largeness of
+view, of judicious moderation, which is so alien from the theological
+spirit, can still look for support from the memories of Lambeth.
+Whatever its influence may have been, it has not grown out of the noisy
+activity of theological "movement." Its strength has been to sit still
+and let such "movements" pass by. It is by a spirit the very opposite of
+theirs--a spirit of conciliation, of largeness of heart, that it has won
+its power over the Church. None of the great theological impulses of
+this age or the last, it is sometimes urged, came out of Lambeth. Little
+of the theological bitterness, of the controversial narrowness of this
+age or the last, it may fairly be answered, has ever entered its gates.
+Of Lambeth we may say what Matthew Arnold says of Oxford, that many as
+are its faults it has never surrendered itself to ecclesiastical
+Philistines. In the calm, genial silence of its courts, its library, its
+galleries, in the presence of its venerable past, the virulence, the
+petty strife, the tumult of religious fanaticism finds itself hushed.
+Amongst the storm of the Wesleyan revival, of the Evangelical revival,
+of the Puseyite revival, the voice of Lambeth has ever pleaded for a
+truth simpler, larger, more human than theirs. Amid the deafening
+clamour of Tractarian and anti-Tractarian disputants both sides united
+in condemning the silence of Lambeth. Yet the one word that came from
+Lambeth will still speak to men's hearts when all their noisy
+disputations are forgotten. "How," a prelate, whose nearest relative had
+joined the Church of Rome, asked Archbishop Howley, "how shall I treat
+my brother?" "As a brother," was the Archbishop's reply.
+
+
+
+
+CHILDREN BY THE SEA.
+
+
+Autumn brings its congresses--scientific, ecclesiastical,
+archæological--but the prettiest of autumnal congresses is the
+children's congress by the sea. It is like a leap from prose into poetry
+when we step away from Associations and Institutes, from stuffy
+lecture-rooms and dismal sections, to the strip of sand which the
+children have chosen for their annual gathering. Behind us are the great
+white cliffs, before us the reach of grey waters with steamers and their
+smoke-trail in the offing and waves washing lazily in upon the shore.
+And between sea and cliff are a world of little creatures, digging,
+dabbling, delighted. What strikes us at first sight is the number of
+them. In ordinary life we meet the great host of children in detail, as
+it were; we kiss our little ones in the morning, we tumble over a
+perambulator, we dodge a hoop, we pat back a ball. Child after child
+meets us, but we never realize the world of children till we see it
+massed upon the sands. Children of every age, from the baby to the
+schoolboy; big children and tiny children, weak little urchins with pale
+cheeks and plump little urchins with sturdy legs; children of all
+tempers, from the screeching child in arms to the quiet child sitting
+placid and gazing out of large grey eyes; gay little madcaps paddling at
+the water's edge; busy children, idle children, children careful of
+their dress, hoydens covered with sand and seaweed, wild children,
+demure children--all are mustered in the great many-coloured camp
+between the cliffs and the sea.
+
+It is their holiday as it is ours, but what is a mere refreshment to us
+is life to them. What a rapture of freedom looks up at us out of the
+little faces that watch us as we thread our way from group to group! The
+mere change of dress is a revolution in the child's existence. These
+brown-holland frocks, rough sunshades, and sandboots, these clothes that
+they may wet and dirty and tear as they like, mean deliverance from
+endless dressings--dressings for breakfast and dressings for lunch,
+dressings to go out with mamma and dressings to come down to dessert--an
+escape from fashionable little shoes and tight little hats and stiff
+little flounces that it is treason to rumple. There is an inexpressible
+triumph in their return at eventide from the congress by the sea,
+dishevelled, bedraggled, but with no fear of a scolding from nurse. Then
+too there is the freedom from "lessons." There are no more of those
+dreadful maps along the wall, no French exercises, no terrible
+arithmetic. The elder girls make a faint show of keeping up their
+practising, but the goody books which the governess packed carefully at
+the bottom of their boxes remain at the bottom unopened. There is no
+time for books, the grave little faces protest to you; there is only
+time for the sea. That is why they hurry over breakfast to get early to
+the sands, and are moody and restless at the length of luncheon. It is a
+hopeless business to keep them at home; they yawn over picture-books,
+they quarrel over croquet, they fall asleep over draughts. Home is just
+now only an interlude of sleeping or dining in the serious business of
+the day.
+
+The one interest of existence is in the sea. Its novelty, its vastness,
+its life, dwarf everything else in the little minds beside it. There is
+the endless watching for the ships, the first peep at the little dot on
+the horizon, the controversies as it rises about its masts or its flag,
+the questions as to where it is coming from and where it is going to.
+There is the endless speculation on the tide, the doubt every morning
+whether it is coming in or going out, the wonder of its perpetual
+advance or retreat, the whispered tales of children hemmed in between it
+and the cliffs, the sense of a mysterious life, the sense of a
+mysterious danger. Above all there is the sense of a mysterious power.
+The children wake as the wind howls in the night, or the rain dashes
+against the window panes, to tell each other how the waves are leaping
+high over the pier and ships tearing to pieces on reefs far away. So
+charming and yet so terrible, the most playful of playfellows, the most
+awful of possible destroyers, the child's first consciousness of the
+greatness and mystery of the world around him is embodied in the sea.
+
+It is amusing to see the precision with which the children's congress
+breaks up into its various sections. The most popular and important is
+that of the engineers. The little members come toddling down from the
+cliffs with a load of implements, shouldering rake and spade, and
+dangling tiny buckets from their arms. One little group makes straight
+for its sand-hole of yesterday, and is soon busy with huge heaps and
+mounds which are to take the form of a castle. A crowing little urchin
+beside is already waving the Union Jack which is ready to crown the
+edifice, if the Fates ever suffer it to be crowned. Engineers of less
+military taste are busy near the water's edge with an elaborate system
+of reservoirs and canals, and greeting with shouts of triumph the
+admission of the water to miniature little harbours. A corps of
+absolutely unscientific labourers are simply engaged in digging the
+deepest hole they can, and the blue nets over their sunshades are alone
+visible above the edge of the excavation. It is delightful to watch the
+industry, the energy, the absolute seriousness and conviction of the
+engineers. Sentries warn you off from the limits of the fortress; you
+are politely asked to "please take care," as your clumsy foot strays
+along the delicate brink of the canal. Suggestions that have a
+mechanical turn about them, hints on the best way of reaching the water
+or the possibility of a steeper slope for the sand-walls, are listened
+to with attention and respect. You are rewarded by an invitation which
+allows you to witness the very moment when the dyke is broken and the
+sea admitted into basin and canal, or the yet more ecstatic moment when
+the Union Jack waves over the completed castle.
+
+Indolence and adventure charm the dabblers, as industry absorbs the
+engineers. The sands are of all earthly spots the most delightful; but a
+greater delight than any earthly spot can afford awaits the dabbler in
+the sea. It is mostly the girls who dabble; the gaiety and frolic suit
+them better than the serious industry of castles and canals. Deliverance
+from shoes and stockings, the first thrill of pleasure and surprise at
+the cool touch of the water, the wild rush along the brim, the dainty
+advance till the sea covers the little ankles, the tremulous waiting
+with an air of defiance as the wave deepens round till it touches the
+knee, the firm line with which the dabblers grasp hand in hand and face
+the advancing tide, the sudden panic, the break, the disorderly flight,
+the tears and laughter, the run after the wave as it retreats again, the
+fresh advance and defiance--this is the paradise of the dabbler. Hour
+after hour, with clothes tucked round their waist and a lavish display
+of stout little legs, the urchins wage their mimic warfare with the
+sea. Meanwhile the scientific section is encamped upon the rocks. With
+torn vestments and bruised feet the votaries of knowledge are peeping
+into every little pool, detecting mussel-shells, picking up seaweed,
+hunting for anemones. A shout of triumph from the tiny adventurer who
+has climbed over the rough rock-shelf announces that he has secured a
+prize for the glass jar at home, where the lumps of formless jelly burst
+into rosy flowers with delicate tendrils waving gently round them for
+food. A cry of woe tells of some infantile Whymper who has lost his hold
+on an Alpine rock-edge some six inches high. Knowledge has its
+difficulties as well as its dangers, and the difficulty of forming a
+rock-section in the face of the stern opposition of mothers and nurses
+is undoubtedly great. Still, formed it is, and science furnishes a
+goodly company of votaries and martyrs to the congress by the sea.
+
+But of course the naval section bears away the palm. It is for the most
+part composed of the elder boys and of a few girls who would be boys if
+they could. Its members all possess a hopeless passion for the sea, and
+besiege their mothers for promises that their future life shall be that
+of middies. They wear straw hats and loose blue shirts, and affect as
+much of the sailor in their costume as they can. Each has a boat, or as
+they call it a "vessel," and the build and rig of these vessels is a
+subject of constant discussion and rivalry in the section. Much critical
+inquiry is directed to the propriety of Arthur's jib, or the necessity
+of "ballasting" or pouring a little molten lead into Edward's keel. The
+launch of a new vessel is the event of the week. The coast-guardsman is
+brought in to settle knotty questions of naval architecture and
+equipment, and the little seamen listen to his verdicts, his yarns, the
+records of his voyages, with a wondering reverence. They ask knowingly
+about the wind and the prospects of the weather; they submit to his
+higher knowledge their theories as to the nature and destination of each
+vessel that passes; they come home with a store of naval phrases which
+are poured recklessly out over the tea-table. The pier is a favourite
+haunt of the naval section. They delight in sitting on rough coils of
+old rope. Nothing that is of the sea comes amiss to them. "I like the
+smell of tar," shouts a little enthusiast. They tell tales among
+themselves of the life of a middie and the fun of the "fo-castle," and
+watch the waves leaping up over the pier-head with a wild longing to
+sing 'Rule Britannia.' Every ship in the offing is a living thing to
+them, and the appearance of a man-of-war sends them sleepless to bed.
+
+There is but one general meeting of the children's congress, and that is
+in front of the bathing-machines. Rows of little faces wait for their
+turn, watching the dash of the waves beneath the wheels, peeping at the
+black-robed figures who are bobbing up and down in the sea, half longing
+for their dip, half shrinking as the inevitable moment comes nearer and
+nearer, dashing forward joyously at last as the door opens and the
+bathing woman's "Now, my dear," summons them to the quaint little box.
+One lingers over the sight as one lingers over a bed of flowers. There
+is all the fragrance, the colour, the sweet caprice, the wilfulness, the
+delight of childhood in the tiny figures that meet us on the return from
+their bath, with dancing eyes and flushed cheeks and hair streaming over
+their shoulders. What a hero the group finds in the urchin who never
+cries! With what envy they regard the big sister who never wants to come
+out of the water! It is pleasant to listen to their prattle as they
+stroll over the sands with a fresh life running through every vein, to
+hear their confession of fright at the first dip, their dislike of
+putting their head under water, their chaff of the delicate little
+sister who "will only bathe with mamma." Mammas are always good-humoured
+by the sea; papas come out of their eternal newspaper and toss the wee
+brats on their shoulders, uncles drop down on the merry little group
+with fresh presents every day. The restraint, the distance of home
+vanishes with the practical abolition of the nursery and the schoolroom.
+Home, schoolroom, nursery, all are crammed together in the little
+cockleshell of a boat where the little ones are packed round father and
+mother and tossing gaily over the waves. What endless fun in the rising
+and falling, the creaking of the sail, the gruff voice of the boatman,
+the sight of the distant cliffs, the flock of sea-gulls nestling in the
+wave-hollows! The little ones trail their hands in the cool water and
+fancy they see mermaids in the cool green depths. The big boy watches
+the boatman and studies navigation. The little brother dips a hook now
+and then in a fond hope of whiting. The tide has come in ere they
+return, and the little voyagers are lifted out, tired and sleepy, in
+the boatman's arms, to dream that night of endless sailings over endless
+seas.
+
+It is a terrible morning that brings the children news of their recall
+to the smoke and din of town. They wander for a last visit down to the
+beach, listen for the last time to the young bandit in his Spanish
+sombrero who charms the nursery-maids with lays of love, club their
+pence for a last interview with the itinerant photographer. It is all
+over; the sands are thinner now, group after group is breaking up,
+autumn is dying into winter, and rougher winds are blowing over the sea.
+But the sea is never too rough for the little ones. With hair blown
+wildly about their faces they linger disconsolately along the brink,
+count the boats they shall never see again, make pilgrimages to the rock
+caves to tell its separate story of enjoyment in each of them, and fling
+themselves with a last kiss on the dear, dear sands! Then they shoulder
+their spade and rake, and with one fond look at the cliffs turn their
+backs on the sea. But the sea is with them still, even when the crowded
+train has whirled them far from waves that the white gull skims over.
+They have their tales of it to tell to their governess, their memories
+of it to count over before they fall asleep, their dreams of it as they
+lie asleep, their hopes of seeing it again when weary winter and spring
+and summer have at last slipped away. They listen to stories of wrecks,
+and find a halfpenny for the sham sailor who trolls his ballads in the
+street. Now and then they look lovingly at the ships and the
+sand-buckets piled away in the play-cupboard. So with one abiding
+thought at their little hearts the long days glide away till autumn
+finds them again children by the sea.
+
+
+
+
+THE FLORENCE OF DANTE.
+
+
+The one story in the history of the modern world which rivals in
+concentrated interest the story of Athens is the story of Florence in
+the years just before and after the opening of the fourteenth
+century--the few years, that is, of its highest glory in freedom, in
+letters, in art. Never since the days of Pericles had such a varied
+outburst of human energy been summed up in so short a space.
+Architecture reared the noble monuments of the Duomo and Santa Croce.
+Cimabue revolutionized painting, and then "the cry was Giotto's."
+Italian poetry, preluded by the canzonets of Guido Cavalcanti and his
+rivals, rose to its fullest grandeur in the 'Commedia' of Dante. Italian
+prose was born in the works of Malaspina and Dino. Within, the
+Florentines worked out patiently and bravely amidst a thousand obstacles
+the problem of free and popular government. Without, they covered sea
+and land with their commerce; their agents supplied the Papal treasury,
+while private firms were already beginning that career of vast foreign
+loans which at a later time enabled the victor of Crécy to equip his
+armies with Florentine gold.
+
+We can only realize the attitude of Florence at this moment by its
+contrast with the rest of Europe. It was a time when Germany was sinking
+down into feudal chaos under the earlier Hapsburgs. The system of
+despotic centralization invented by St. Louis and perfected by Philippe
+le Bel was crushing freedom and vigour out of France. If Parliamentary
+life was opening in England, literature was dead, and a feudalism which
+had become embittered by the new forms of law which the legal spirit of
+the age gave it was pressing harder and harder on the peasantry. Even in
+Italy Florence stood alone. The South lay crushed beneath the oppression
+of its French conquerors. In the North the earlier communal freedom had
+already made way for the rule of tyrants when it was just springing into
+life in the city by the Arno. For it is noteworthy that of all the
+cities of Italy Florence is the most modern. Genoa and Pisa had been
+rivals in commercial activity a hundred years before the merchants of
+Florence were known out of Tuscany. Sicily had caught the gift of song
+from the Provençal troubadours half a century before the Florentine
+singers. Too insignificant to share in the great struggle of the Empire
+and the Papacy, among the last to be divided into Guelph and Ghibelline,
+Florence emerged into communal greatness when that of Milan or Bologna
+was already in decay.
+
+The City of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh
+vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became
+living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative
+poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and
+Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so
+grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni
+sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful
+struggle. His 'Chronicle' indeed has been roughly attacked of late by
+the sweeping scepticism of German critics, but the attack has proved an
+unsuccessful one. The strongest evidence of its genuineness indeed lies
+in the impression of a distinct personality which is left on us by a
+simple perusal of the 'Chronicle' itself. Some of its charm no doubt
+rises from the naïve simplicity of Dino's story-telling. With him and
+with his contemporaries, Malaspina, Dante, and Villani, Italian prose
+begins; and we can hardly fancy a better training in style for any young
+Italian than to be brought face to face in Dino with the nervous
+picturesque accents that marked the birth of his mother-tongue. But the
+charm is more one of character than one of style. Throughout we feel the
+man, a man whose temper is so strongly and clearly marked in its
+contrast with so reflective a temper as Villani's that the German theory
+which makes his chronicle a mere cento from the later work hardly needs
+discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the dramatic force, the
+tenderness of Froissart, but it is a nobler and more human tenderness; a
+pity not for the knight only, but for knight and burgher as well. The
+sham tinsel of chivalry which flutters over the pages of the gay Canon
+of Liège is exchanged in Dino for a manly patriotism, a love of civic
+freedom, of justice, of religion. In his quiet way he is a great artist.
+There is an Herodotean picturesqueness as well as an Herodotean
+simplicity in such a picture as that of Dante's first battle-field, the
+Florentine victory of Campaldino:--
+
+     "On the appointed day the men of Florence advanced their
+     standards to go into the enemies' land, and passed by
+     Casentino along an ill road where, had the enemy found them,
+     they had received no little damage; but such was not the will
+     of God. And they came near to Bibbiena, at a place called
+     Campaldino where was the enemy, and there they halted in array
+     of battle. The captains of war sent the light-armed foot to
+     the front; and each man's shield, with a red lily on a white
+     ground, was stretched out well before him. Then the Bishop,
+     who was short-sighted, asked, 'Those there: what walls be
+     they?' They answered him, 'The shields of the enemy.' Messer
+     Barone de' Mangiadori da San Miniato, a chevalier frank and
+     well skilled in deeds of arms, gathered his men-at-arms
+     together and said to them, 'My masters, in Tuscan wars men
+     were wont to conquer by making a stout onset, and that lasted
+     but a while, and few men died, for it was not in use to kill.
+     Now is the fashion changed, and men conquer by holding their
+     ground stoutly, wherefore I counsel you that ye stand firm and
+     let them assault you.' And so they settled to do. The men of
+     Arezzo made their onset with such vigour and so great force
+     that the body of the Florentines fell back not a little. The
+     fight was hard and keen. Messer Corso Donati with a brigade of
+     the men of Pistoja charged the enemy in flank; the quarrels
+     from the crossbows poured down like rain; the men of Arezzo
+     had few of them, and were withal charged in flank where they
+     were exposed; the air was covered with clouds, and there was a
+     very great dust. Then the footmen of Arezzo set themselves to
+     creep under the bellies of the horses, knife in hand, and
+     disembowelled them, and some of them penetrated so far that in
+     the very midst of the battalion were many dead of either part.
+     Many that were counted of great prowess were shown vile that
+     day, and many of whom none spoke word won honour.... The men
+     of Arezzo were broken, not by cowardice or little prowess, but
+     by the greater number of their enemies were they put to the
+     rout and slain. The soldiers of Florence that were used to
+     fighting slew them; the villeins had no pity."
+
+"Pity" is almost the characteristic word of Dino Compagni--pity alike
+for foe or friend; for the warriors of Arezzo or the starved-out
+patriots of Pistoja as well as for the heroes of his own Florence; pity
+for the victims of her feuds, and even for the men who drove them into
+exile; pity, most of all, for Florence herself. We read his story indeed
+at first with a strange sense of disappointment and surprise. To the
+modern reader the story of Florence in the years which Dino covers is
+above all the story of Dante. As the 'Chronicle' jots patiently down the
+hopes and fears, the failures and successes of the wiser citizens in
+that struggle for order and good government which brought Dante to his
+long exile, we feel ourselves standing in the very midst of events out
+of which grew the threefold Poem of the After-World and face to face
+with the men who front us in the 'Inferno' and 'Paradise.' But this is
+not the world Dino stands in. Of what seem to us the greater elements of
+the life around him he sees and tells us nothing. Of art or letters his
+'Chronicle' says never a word. The name of Dante is mentioned but once
+and then without a syllable of comment. It is not in Dante that Dino
+interests himself: his one interest, his one passion is Florence.
+
+And yet as we read page after page a new interest in the story grows on
+us, the interest that Dino himself felt in the tragedy around him. Our
+sympathies go with that earnest group of men to which he belonged, men
+who struggled honestly to reconcile freedom and order in a State torn
+with antipathies of the past, with jealousies and ambitions and feuds of
+the present. The terrible sadness of the 'Divina Commedia' becomes more
+intelligible as we follow step by step the ruin of those hopes for his
+country which Dante entertained as well as Dino. And beyond this
+interest there is the social picture of the Florence of the fourteenth
+century itself, its strange medley of past and present, the old world of
+feudalism jostling with the new world of commerce, the trader elbowing
+the noble and the artisan the trader, an enthusiastic mystical devotion
+jealous of the new classicalism or the scepticism of men like Guido
+Cavalcanti, the petty rivalries of great houses alternating with large
+schemes of public policy, the tenderest poetry with brutal outrage and
+lust, the art of Giotto with the slow, patient bloodthirst of the
+vendetta.
+
+What was the cause--the question presses on us through every page of
+Dino or of Dante--what was the cause of that ruin which waited in
+Florence as in every Italian city on so short a burst of freedom? What
+was it that foiled alike the counsel of statesmen and the passionate
+love of liberty in the people at large? What was it which drove Dante
+into exile and stung the simple-hearted Dino into a burst of eloquent
+despair? The answer--if we set aside the silly talk about "democracy"
+and look simply at the facts themselves--is a very simple one. The ruin
+of Florentine liberty, like the ruin of liberty elsewhere throughout
+Italy, lay wholly with its _noblesse_. It was equally perilous for an
+Italian town to leave its nobles without the walls or to force them to
+reside within. In their own robber-holds or their own country estates
+they were a scourge to the trader whose wains rolled temptingly past
+their walls. Florence, like its fellow Italian States, was driven to the
+demolition of the feudal castles, and to enforcing the residence of
+their lords within its own civic bounds. But the danger was only brought
+nearer home. Excluded by civic jealousy, wise or unwise, from all share
+in municipal government, their huge palazzi rose like fortresses in
+every quarter of the city. Within them lay the noble, a wild beast all
+the fiercer for his confinement in so narrow a den, with the old tastes,
+hatreds, preferences utterly unchanged, at feud as of old with his
+fellow-nobles, knit to them only by a common scorn of the burghers and
+the burgher life around them, stung to madness by his exclusion from all
+rule in the commonwealth, bitter, revengeful, with the wilfulness of a
+child, shameless, false, unprincipled.
+
+The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and
+Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its
+nobility. Buondelmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo
+Giantrufetti, passes beneath a palace of the Donati at whose window
+stands Madonna Aldruda with her two fair daughters. Seeing him pass by
+Aldruda calls aloud to him, pointing with her finger to the damsel by
+her side. "Whom have you taken to wife?" she says, "This is the wife I
+kept for you." The damsel pleased the youth, but his troth bound him,
+and he answered, "I can wed none other, now at any rate!" "Yes," cried
+Aldruda, "for I will pay the penalty for thee." "Then will I have her,"
+said Buondelmonte. "Cosa fatta capo ha," was the famous comment of the
+outraged house--"stone dead has no fellow"--and as Dino puts it, in the
+most ordinary way in the world, "they settled to kill him the day he
+was to have married the damsel, and so they did." "Kill, kill," echoes
+everywhere through the story of these Florentine nobles. Assassination
+is an event of every day. Corso Donati sends murderers to kill an enemy
+among the Cerchi. Guido Cavalcanti strives to stab Corso in the back as
+he passes him. Where the dagger fails, they try poison without scruple.
+The best of them decline a share in a murder much as an Irish peasant
+may decline a share in an agrarian outrage, with a certain delicacy and
+readiness to stand by and see it done. When the assassination of the
+Bishop of Arezzo was decided on, Guglielmo da Pazzi, who was in the
+counsel, protested "he would have been content had it been done without
+his knowledge, but were the question put to him he might not be guilty
+of his blood."
+
+Among such men even Corso Donati towers into a certain grandeur:--
+
+     "Knight he was of great valour and renown, gentle of blood and
+     manners, of a most fair body even to old age, comely in
+     figure, with delicate features, and a white skin; a pleasing,
+     prudent, and eloquent speaker; one who ever aimed at great
+     ends; friend and comrade of great lords and nobles; a man too
+     of many friends and great fame throughout all Italy. Foe he
+     was of the people and its leaders; the darling of soldiers,
+     full of evil devices, evil-hearted, cunning."
+
+Such was the man who drove Dante into exile:--
+
+     "Who for his pride was called 'Il Barone,' so that when he
+     passed through the land many cried 'Viva Il Barone!' and the
+     land seemed all his own."
+
+He stood not merely at the head of the Florentine nobility, but at the
+head of the great Guelph organization which extended from city to city
+throughout Tuscany--a league with its own leaders, its own policy, its
+own treasure. In the attempt to seize this treasure for the general
+service of the State the most popular of Florentine leaders, Giano della
+Bella, had been foiled and driven into exile. An honest attempt to
+secure the peace of the city by the banishment of Corso and his friends
+brought about the exile of Dante. It is plain that powerless as they
+were before the united forces of the whole people the nobles were strong
+enough by simply biding their time and availing themselves of popular
+divisions to crush one opponent after another. And yet the struggle
+against them was one of life and death for the city. No atom of the new
+civilization, the new spirit of freedom or humanity, seems to have
+penetrated among them. Behind the gloomy walls of their city fortresses
+they remained the mere murderous tyrants of a brutal feudalism. "I
+counsel, lords, that we free ourselves from this slavery," cried Berto
+Frescobaldi to his brother nobles in the church of San Jacopo; "let us
+arm ourselves and run on to the Piazza, and there kill friend and foe
+alike as many as we find, so that neither we nor our children be ever
+subject to them more." Those who, like Sismondi, censure the sternness
+of the laws which pressed upon the nobles forget what wild beasts they
+were intended to hold down. Their outbreaks were the blind outbreaks of
+mere ruffians. The victory of Corso over Dante and the wiser citizens
+was followed by a carnival of bloodshed, firing of houses, pillage and
+lawlessness which wrings from Dino curses as bitter as those of the
+'Inferno.'
+
+From the hopeless task of curbing the various elements of disorder by
+the single force of each isolated city the wiser and more patriotic
+among the men of that day turned in despair to the Empire. Guelph and
+Ghibelline, Papalist and Imperialist, were words which as Dante saw had
+now lost their old meaning. In the twelfth century the Emperor was at
+once the foe of religion and the one obstacle to the rising freedom of
+the towns. In the fourteenth that freedom had either perished by its own
+excesses, or, as at Florence, was strong enough to defy even an Imperial
+assailant. Religion found its bitterest enemy in such a Pope as Boniface
+VIII., or the church over which he ruled. Whatever might have been its
+fortune under happier circumstances, the great experiment of democratic
+self-government, of free and independent city-states, had failed,
+whether from the wars of city with city, or from the civil feuds that
+rent each in sunder. The papacy could furnish no centre of union; its
+old sanctity was gone, its greed and worldliness weakened it every day.
+On the other hand, the remembrance of the tyranny of Barbarossa, of the
+terrible struggle by which the peace of Constance had been won, had
+grown faint and dim in the course of years. It was long since Italy had
+seen an Emperor at all.
+
+But the old Ghibellinism had recovered new vigour from an unlooked-for
+quarter. As the revival of the Roman law had given an artificial
+prestige to the Empire in the twelfth century, so the revival of
+classical literature threw a new halo around it in the fourteenth. To
+Dante, penetrated with the greater Latin authors, Henry of Luxemburg is
+no stranger from over the Alps, but the descendant of the Augustus whom
+his own Vergil had loved and sung. The same classical feeling tells on
+Dino. With him Florence is "the daughter of Rome." The pages of Sallust
+and of Livy have stirred him to undertake her annals. "The remembrance
+of ancient histories has long spurred my mind to write the events, full
+of danger yet reaching to no prosperous end, that this noble city,
+daughter of Rome, has encountered." It was the same sense that united
+with his own practical appreciation of the necessities of the time in
+his impatient longing for the intervention of the new Emperor. As Prior,
+Dino had acted the part of a brave and honest man, striving to
+conciliate party with party, refusing to break the law, chased at last
+with the rest of the magistracy from the Palace of the Signory by the
+violence of Corso Donati and the nobles. If he did not share Dante's
+exile, he had at any rate acted with Dante in the course of policy
+which brought that penalty on him. Both were Priors together in 1300;
+both have the same passionate love of Florence, the same haughty disdain
+of the factions that tore it to pieces. If the appeal of Dino to his
+fellows in Santa Trinità is less thrilling than the verse of Dante, it
+has its own pathetic force:--"My masters, why will ye confound and undo
+so good a city? Against whom do ye will to fight? Against your brethren?
+What victory will ye gain?--none other than weeping!" The words fell on
+deaf ears, and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, and exile forced
+Dino to look to the stranger. There is something strangely touching in
+the dry, passionless way in which he tracks Henry of Luxemburg from city
+to city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here and there
+in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the Emperor finds. The weary
+waiting came to nothing. Dino leaves us still looking for Henry's
+coming; Dante tells us of the death that dashed all hope to the ground.
+Even in the hour of his despair the poet could console himself by
+setting his "divino Arrigo" in the regions of the blest. What comfort
+the humble chronicler found whose work we have been studying none can
+know.
+
+
+
+
+BUTTERCUPS.
+
+
+It is not the least debt we owe to the holidays that they give us our
+buttercups back again. Few faces have stirred us with a keener touch of
+pity through the whole of the season than the face of the pale, awkward
+girl who slips by us now and then on the stairs, a face mutinous in
+revolt against its imprisonment in brick and mortar, dull with the
+boredom of the schoolroom, weary of the formal walk, the monotonous
+drive, the inevitable practice on that hated piano, the perpetual round
+of lessons from the odd creatures who leave their odder umbrellas in the
+hall. It is amazingly pleasant to meet the same little face on the lawn,
+and to see it blooming with new life at the touch of freedom and fresh
+air. It blooms with a sense of individuality, a sense of power. In the
+town the buttercup was nobody, silent, unnoticed, lost in the bustle and
+splendour of elder sisterdom. Here among the fields and the hedges she
+is queen. Her very laugh, the reckless shout that calls for mamma's
+frown and dooms the governess to a headache, rings out like a claim of
+possession. Here in her own realm she rushes at once to the front, and
+if we find ourselves enjoying a scamper over the common or a run down
+the hill-side, it is the buttercup that leads the way.
+
+All the silent defiance of her town bondage vanishes in the chatty
+familiarities of home. She has a story about the elm and the pond, she
+knows where Harry landed the trout last year, she is intimate with the
+keeper, and hints to us his mysterious hopes about the pheasants. She is
+great in short cuts through the woods, and has made herself wondrous
+lurking-places which she betrays under solemn promises of secrecy. She
+is a friend of every dog about the place, and if the pony lies nearest
+to her heart her lesser affections range over a world of favourites. It
+is hard to remember the pale, silent, schoolgirl of town in the vivid,
+chatty little buttercup who hurries one from the parrot to the pigeon,
+from the stables to the farm, and who knows and describes the merits of
+every hound in the kennels.
+
+It is natural enough, that the dethroned beauties who meet us at
+luncheon should wonder at our enthusiasm for nymphs of bread-and-butter,
+and ask with a certain severity of scorn the secret of our happy
+mornings. The secret is simply that the buttercup is at home, and that
+with the close of her bondage comes a grace and a naturalness that take
+her out of the realms of bread-and-butter. However difficult it may be
+for her maturer rivals to abdicate, it is the buttercup in fact who
+gives the tone to the holidays. There is a subtle contagion about
+pleasure, and it is from her that we catch the sense of largeness and
+liberty and physical enjoyment that gives a new zest to life. She laughs
+at our moans about sunshine as she laughs at our moans about mud, till
+we are as indifferent to mud and sunshine as she is herself. The whole
+atmosphere of our life is in fact changed, and it is amusing to
+recognize how much of the change we owe to the buttercup.
+
+It is impossible perhaps to be whirled in this fashion out of the
+whisperings and boredoms of town without longing to know a little more
+of the pretty magician who works this wonderful transformation scene.
+But it is no easy matter to know much of the buttercup. Her whole charm
+lies in her freedom from self-consciousness; she has a reserved force of
+shyness behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of
+shyness. Her character in fact is one of which it is easier to feel the
+beauty than to analyse or describe it. Like all transitional phases,
+girlhood is full of picturesque inequalities, strange slumbers of one
+faculty and stranger developements of another; full of startling
+effects, of contrasts and surprises, of light and shade, that no other
+phase of life affords. Unconsciously month after month drifts the
+buttercup on to womanhood; consciously she lives in the past of the
+child. She comes to us trailing clouds of glory--as Wordsworth
+sings--from her earlier existence, from her home, her schoolroom, her
+catechism. The girl of twenty summers whose faith has been wrecked by
+clerical croquet looks with amazement on the implicit faith which the
+buttercup retains in the clergy. Even on the curate, shy and awkward as
+he is, she looks as on a being sacred and ineffable. Perhaps his very
+shyness and awkwardness creates a sympathy between the two, and rouses a
+keener remorse for her yawns under his sermons and a keener gratitude
+for the heavenly generosity with which he bestowed on her the
+confirmation ticket. Free as she is from fancies, her conception of the
+daily life of her clergyman shows amusingly enough that she can attain a
+very fair pitch of idealism. We remember the story of a certain parson
+of our acquaintance who owned to a meek little buttercup his habit of
+carrying a book in his pocket for reading in leisure hours. "Ah, yes,"
+replied the eager little auditor, with a hush of real awe in her
+voice--"the Bible, of course! Unluckily," it was the _Physiologie du
+Goût_.
+
+Still more does the sister of a couple of seasons wonder at the ardour
+and fidelity of buttercup friendships. In after-life men have friends
+and women have lovers. The home and the husband and the child absorb the
+whole tenderness of a woman where they only temper and moderate the old
+external affections of her spouse. But then girl-friendship is a much
+more vivid and far more universal thing than friendship among boys. The
+one means, in nine cases out of ten, an accident of neighbourhood in
+school that fades with the next remove, or a partnership in some
+venture, or a common attachment to some particular game. But the school
+friendship of a girl is a passionate idolatry and devotion of friend
+for friend. Their desks are full of little gifts to each other. They
+have pet names that no strange ear may know, and hidden photographs that
+no strange eye may see. They share all the innocent secrets of their
+hearts, they are fondly interested in one another's brothers, they plan
+subtle devices to wear the same ribbons and to dress their hair in the
+same fashion. No amount of affection ever made a boy like the business
+of writing his friend a letter in the holidays, but half the charm of
+holidays to a girl lies in the letters she gets and the letters she
+sends. Nothing save friendship itself is more sacred to girlhood than a
+friend's letter; nothing more exquisite than the pleasure of stealing
+from the breakfast-table to kiss it and read it, and then tie it up with
+the rest that lie in the nook that nobody knows but the one pet brother.
+The pet brother is as necessary an element in buttercup life as the
+friend. He is generally the dullest, the most awkward, the most silent
+of the family group. He takes all this sisterly devotion as a matter of
+course, and half resents it as a matter of boredom. He is fond of
+informing his adorer that he hates girls, that they are always kissing
+and crying, and that they can't play cricket. The buttercup rushes away
+to pour out her woes to her little nest in the woods, and hurries back
+to worship as before. Girlhood indeed is the one stage of feminine
+existence in which woman has brothers. Her first season out digs a gulf
+between their sister and "the boys" of the family that nothing can fill
+up. Henceforth the latter are useful to get tickets for her, to carry
+her shawls, to drive her to Goodwood or to Lord's. In the mere fetching
+and carrying business they sink into the general ruck of cousins,
+grumbling only a little more than cousins usually do at the luck that
+dooms them to hew wood and draw water for the belle of the season. But
+in the pure equality of earlier days the buttercup shares half the games
+and all the secrets of the boys about her, and brotherhood and
+sisterhood are very real things indeed.
+
+Unluckily the holidays pass away, and the buttercup passes away like the
+holidays. There is a strange humour about the subtle gradations by which
+girlhood passes out of all this free, genial, irreflective life into the
+self-consciousness, the reserve, the artificiality of womanhood. It is
+the sudden discovery of a new sense of enjoyment that first whirls the
+buttercup out of her purely family affections. She laughs at the worship
+of her new adorer. She is as far as Dian herself from any return of it;
+but the sense of power is awakened, and she has a sort of Puckish pride
+in bringing her suitor to her feet. Nobody is so exacting, so
+capricious, so uncertain, so fascinating as a buttercup, because no one
+is so perfectly free from love. The first touch of passion renders her
+more exacting and more charming than ever. She resents the suspicion of
+a tenderness whose very novelty scares her, and she visits her
+resentment on her worshipper. If he enjoys a kind farewell overnight, he
+atones for it by the coldest greeting in the morning. There are days
+when the buttercup runs amuck among her adorers, days of snubbing and
+sarcasm and bitterness. The poor little bird beats savagely against the
+wires that are closing her round. And then there are days of pure
+abandon and coquetry and fun. The buttercup flirts, but she flirts in
+such an open and ingenuous fashion that nobody is a bit the worse for
+it. She tells you the fun she had overnight with that charming young
+fellow from Oxford, and you know that to-morrow she will be telling that
+hated Guardsman what fun she has had with you. She is a little dazzled
+with the wealth and profusion of the new life that is bursting on her,
+and she wings her way from one charming flower to another with little
+thought of more than a sip from each. Then there is a return of pure
+girlhood, days in which the buttercup is simply the buttercup again.
+Flirtations are forgotten, conquests are abandoned, brothers are
+worshipped with the old worship; and we start back, and rub our eyes,
+and wonder whether life is all a delusion, and whether this pure
+creature of home and bread-and-butter is the volatile, provoking little
+puss who gave our hand such a significant squeeze yesterday.
+
+But it is just this utterly illogical, unreasonable, inconsequential
+character that gives the pursuit of the buttercup its charm. There is a
+pleasure in this irregular warfare, with its razzias and dashes and
+repulses and successes and skirmishes and flights, which we cannot get
+out of the regular operations of the sap and the mine. We sympathize
+with the ingenious gentleman who declined to study astronomy on the
+ground of his dislike to the sun for the monotonous regularity of its
+daily rising and setting. There is something delightfully cometary about
+the affection of the buttercup. Any experienced strategist in the art of
+getting married will tell us the exact time within which her elder
+sister may be reduced, and sketch for us a plan of the campaign. But the
+buttercup lies outside of the rules of war. She gives one the pleasure
+of adoration in its purest and most ideal form, and she adds to this the
+pleasure of _rouge et noir_. One feels in the presence of a buttercup
+the possibility of combining enjoyments which are in no other sphere
+compatible with each other--the delight, say, of a musing over 'In
+Memoriam' with the fiercer joys of the gaming-table. And meanwhile the
+buttercup drifts on, recking little of us and of our thoughts, into a
+world mysterious and unknown to her. Tones of deeper colour flush the
+pure white light of her dawn, and announce the fuller day of womanhood.
+And with the death of the dawn the buttercup passes insensibly away. The
+next season steals her from us; it is only the holidays that give her to
+us, and dispel half our conventionality, our shams, our conceit with the
+laugh of the buttercup.
+
+
+
+
+ABBOT AND TOWN.
+
+
+The genius of a great writer of our own days has made Abbot Sampson of
+St. Edmunds the most familiar of mediæval names to the bulk of
+Englishmen. By a rare accident the figure of the silent, industrious
+Norfolk monk who at the close of Henry the Second's reign suddenly found
+himself ruler of the wealthiest, if not the greatest, of English abbeys
+starts out distinct from the dim canvas of the annals of his house.
+Annals indeed in any strict sense St. Edmunds has none; no national
+chronicle was ever penned in its _scriptorium_ such as that which flings
+lustre round its rival, St. Albans; nor is even a record of its purely
+monastic life preserved such as that which gives a local and
+ecclesiastical interest to its rival of Glastonbury. One book alone the
+abbey has given us, but that one book is worth a thousand chronicles. In
+the wandering, gossipy pages of Jocelyn of Brakeland the life of the
+twelfth century, so far as it could penetrate abbey walls, still glows
+distinct for us round the figure of the shrewd, practical, kindly,
+imperious abbot who looks out, a little travestied perhaps, from the
+pages of Mr. Carlyle.
+
+It is however to an incident in this abbot's life, somewhat later than
+most of the events told so vividly in 'Past and Present,' that I wish to
+direct my readers' attention. A good many eventful years had passed by
+since Sampson stood abbot-elect in the court of King Henry; it was from
+the German prison where Richard was lying captive that the old abbot was
+returning, sad at heart, to his stately house. His way lay through the
+little town that sloped quietly down to the abbey walls, along the
+narrow little street that led to the stately gate-tower, now grey with
+the waste of ages, but then fresh and white from the builder's hand. It
+may have been in the shadow of that gateway that a group of townsmen
+stood gathered to greet the return of their lord, but with other
+business on hand besides kindly greeting. There was a rustling of
+parchment as the alderman unfolded the town-charters, recited the brief
+grants of Abbots Anselm and Ording and Hugh, and begged from the Lord
+Abbot a new confirmation of the liberties of the town.
+
+As Sampson paused a moment--he was a prudent, deliberate man in all his
+ways--he must have read in the faces of all the monks who gathered round
+him, in the murmured growl that monastic obedience just kept within
+bounds, very emphatic counsel of refusal. On the other hand there was
+the alderman pleading for the old privileges of the town--for security
+of justice in its own town-mote, for freedom of sale in its market, for
+just provisions to enforce the recovery of debts--the simple, efficient
+liberty that stood written in the parchment with the heavy seals--the
+seals of Anselm and Ording and Hugh. "Only the same words as your
+predecessor used, Lord Abbot, simply the same words"--and then came the
+silvery jingle of the sixty marks that the townsmen offered for their
+lord's assent. A moment more and the assent was won, "given pleasantly
+too," the monks commented bitterly, as "murmuring and grunting," to use
+their own emphatic phrase, they led Sampson to the chapter-house. But
+murmurings and gruntings broke idly against the old abbot's imperious
+will. "Let the brethren murmur," he flashed out when one of his friends
+told him there was discontent in the cloister at his dealings with the
+townsmen; "let them blame me, and say among themselves what they will. I
+am their father and abbot. So long as I live I will not give mine honour
+to another."
+
+The words were impatient, wilful enough; but it was the impatience of a
+man who frets at the blindness of others to what is clear and evident to
+his own finer sense. The shrewd, experienced eye of the old Churchman
+read with a perfect sagacity the signs of the times. He had just stood
+face to face in his German prison with one who, mere reckless soldier as
+he seemed, had read them as clearly, as sagaciously as himself. When
+History drops her drums and trumpets and learns to tell the story of
+Englishmen, it will find the significance of Richard, not in his crusade
+or in his weary wars along the Norman border, but in his lavish
+recognition of municipal life. When, busy with the preparations for his
+Eastern journey, the King sold charter after charter to the burgesses of
+his towns, it seemed a mere outburst of royal greed, a mere carrying out
+of his own bitter scoff that he would have sold London itself could he
+have found a purchaser. But the hard cynical words of the Angevins were
+veils which they flung over political conceptions too large for the
+comprehension of their day. Richard was in fact only following out the
+policy which had been timidly pursued by his father, which was to find
+its fullest realization under John.
+
+The silent growth and elevation of the English people was the real work
+of their reigns, and in this work the boroughs led the way. Unnoticed
+and despised, even by the historian of to-day, they had alone preserved
+the full tradition of Teutonic liberty. The right of self-government,
+the right of free speech in free parliament, the right of equal justice
+by one's peers,--it was these that the towns had brought safely across
+the ages of Norman rule, these that by the mouth of traders and
+shop-keepers asked recognition from the Angevin kings. No liberty was
+claimed in the Great Charter for the realm at large which had not in
+borough after borough been claimed and won beforehand by plain burgesses
+whom the "mailed barons" who wrested it from their king would have
+despised. That out of the heap of borough-charters which he flung back
+to these townsmen that Charter was to be born, Richard could not know;
+but that a statesman so keen and far-sighted as he really was could have
+been driven by mere greed of gold, or have been utterly blind to the
+real nature of the forces to which he gave legal recognition, is
+impossible. We have no such pithy hints of what was passing in his mind
+as we shall find Abbot Sampson dropping in the course of our story. But
+Richard can hardly have failed to note what these hints proved his
+mitred counsellor to have noted well--the silent revolution which was
+passing over the land, and which in a century and a half had raised
+serfs like those of St. Edmunds into freeholders of a town.
+
+It is only in such lowly records as those which we are about to give
+that we can follow the progress of that revolution. But simple as the
+tale is there is hardly better historic training for a man than to set
+him frankly in the streets of a quiet little town like Bury St. Edmunds,
+and bid him work out the history of the men who lived and died there. In
+the quiet, quaintly-named streets, in the town-mead and the
+market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the ruffed and
+furred brasses of its burghers in the church, lies the real life of
+England and Englishmen, the life of their home and their trade, their
+ceaseless, sober struggle with oppression, their steady, unwearied
+battle for self-government. It is just in the pettiness of its details,
+in its commonplace incidents, in the want of marked features and
+striking events, that the real lesson of the whole story lies. For two
+centuries this little town of Bury St. Edmunds was winning liberty for
+itself, and yet we hardly note as we pass from one little step to
+another little step how surely that liberty was being won. It is hard
+indeed merely to catch a glimpse of the steps. The monks were too busy
+with royal endowments and papal grants of mitre and ring, too full of
+their struggles with arrogant bishops and encroaching barons, to tell us
+how the line of tiny hovels crept higher and higher from the abbey gate
+up the westerly sunlit slope. It is only by glimpses that we catch sight
+of the first steps towards civic life, of market and market-toll, of
+flax-growing and women with distaffs at their door, of fullers at work
+along the abbey-stream, of gate-keepers for the rude walls, of
+town-meetings summoned in old Teutonic fashion by blast of horn.
+
+It is the Great Survey of the Conqueror that gives us our first clear
+peep at the town. Much that had been plough-land in the time of the
+Confessor was covered with houses under the Norman rule. No doubt the
+great abbey-church of stone that Abbot Baldwin was raising amidst all
+the storm of the Conquest drew its craftsmen and masons to mingle with
+the ploughers and reapers of the broad domain. The troubles of the time
+too did their part here as elsewhere; the serf, the fugitive from
+justice or his lord, the trader, the Jew, would naturally seek shelter
+under the strong hand of St. Edmund. On the whole the great house looked
+kindly on a settlement which raised the value of its land and brought
+fresh pence to the cellarer. Not a settler that held his acre for a year
+and a day but paid his pence to the treasury and owned the abbot for his
+lord. Not a serf but was bound to plough a rood of the abbot's land, to
+reap in the abbot's harvest field, to fold his sheep in the abbey folds,
+to help bring the annual catch of eels from the abbey-waters. Within the
+four crosses that bounded the abbot's domain, land and water were his;
+the cattle of the townsmen paid for their pasture on the common; if the
+fullers refused the loan of their cloth, the cellarer would withhold the
+use of the stream, and seize their looms wherever he found them.
+Landlord's rights passed easily as ever into landlord's wrongs. No toll,
+for instance, might be levied on a purchaser of produce from the abbey
+farms, and the house drove better bargains than its country rivals.
+First-purchase was a privilege even more vexatious, and we can catch the
+low growl of the customers as they waited with folded hands before shop
+and stall till the buyers of the Lord Abbot had had their pick of the
+market. But there was little chance of redress, for if they growled in
+the town-mote there were the abbot's officers before whom the meeting
+must be held; and if they growled to their alderman, he was the abbot's
+nominee and received the symbol of office, the mot-horn, the town-horn,
+at his hands.
+
+By what process these serfs of a rural hamlet had grown into the busy
+burgesses whom we saw rustling their parchments and chinking their
+silver marks in the ears of Abbot Sampson in Richard's time, it is hard
+to say. Like all the greater revolutions of society, this advance was a
+silent one. The more galling and oppressive instances of serfdom seem to
+have slipped unconsciously away. Some, like the eel-fishery, were
+commuted for an easy rent; others, like the slavery of the fullers and
+the toll of flax, simply disappeared. No one could tell when the
+retainers of the abbey came to lose their exemption from local taxation
+and to pay the town penny to the alderman like the rest of the
+burgesses. "In some way, I don't know how,"--as Jocelyn grumbles about
+just such an unnoted change,--by usage, by omission, by downright
+forgetfulness, here by a little struggle, there by a little present to a
+needy abbot, the town won freedom. But progress was not always
+unconscious, and one incident in the history of Bury St. Edmunds,
+remarkable if only regarded as marking the advance of law, is yet more
+remarkable as indicating the part which a new moral sense of human right
+to equal justice was to play in the general advance of the realm.
+
+The borough, as we have seen, had preserved the old English right of
+meeting in full assembly of the townsmen for government and law. In the
+presence of the burgesses justice was administered in the old English
+fashion, and the accused acquitted or condemned by the oath of his
+neighbours, the "compurgators," out of whom our jury was to grow. Rough
+and inadequate as such a process seems to us, it insured substantial
+justice; the meanest burgher had his trial by his peers as thoroughly as
+the belted earl. Without the borough bounds however the system of the
+Norman judicature prevailed. The rural tenants who did suit and service
+at the cellarer's court were subject to the "judicial duel" which the
+Conqueror had introduced. In the twelfth century however the strong
+tendency to national unity told heavily against judicial inequality, and
+the barbarous injustice of the foreign system became too apparent even
+for the baronage or the Church to uphold it. "Kebel's case," as a lawyer
+would term it, brought the matter to an issue at Bury St. Edmunds. In
+the opinion of his neighbours Kebel seems to have been guiltless of the
+robbery with which he had been charged; but he was "of the cellarer's
+fee," and subject to the feudal jurisdiction of his court. The duel went
+against him and he was hung just without the gates. The taunts of the
+townsmen woke the farmers to a sense of their wrong. "Had Kebel been a
+dweller within the borough," said the burgesses, "he would have got his
+acquittal from the oaths of his neighbours, as our liberty is." The
+scandal at last moved the convent itself to action. The monks were
+divided in opinion, but the saner part determined that their tenants
+"should enjoy equal liberty" with the townsmen. The cellarer's court was
+abolished; the franchise of the town was extended to the rural
+possessions of the abbey; the farmers "came to the toll-house, and were
+written in the alderman's roll, and paid the town-penny."
+
+A moral revolution like this is notable at any time, but a change
+wrought avowedly "that all might enjoy equal liberty" is especially
+notable in the twelfth century. Cases like Kebel's were everywhere
+sounding the knell of feudal privilege and of national division, long
+before freedom fronted John by the sedges of Runnymede. Slowly and
+fitfully through the reign of his father the new England which had grown
+out of conquered and conquerors woke to self-consciousness. It was this
+awakening that Abbot Sampson saw and noted with his clear, shrewd eyes.
+To him, we can hardly doubt, the revolt of the town-wives, for instance,
+was more than a mere scream of angry women. The "rep-silver," the
+commutation for that old service of reaping in the abbot's fields, had
+ceased to be exacted from the richer burgesses. At last the poorer sort
+refused to pay. Then the cellarer's men came seizing gate and stool by
+way of distress till the women turning out, distaff in hand, put them
+ignominiously to flight. Sampson had his own thoughts about the matter,
+saw perhaps that the days of inequality were over, that in the England
+that was coming there would be one law for rich and poor. At any rate he
+quietly compromised the question for twenty shillings a year.
+
+The convent was indignant. "Abbot Ording, who lies there," muttered an
+angry monk, as he pointed to the tomb in the choir, "would not have done
+this for five hundred marks of silver." That their abbot should
+capitulate to a mob of infuriated town-wives was too much for the
+patience of the brotherhood. All at once they opened their eyes to the
+facts which had been going on unobserved for so many long years. There
+was their own town growing, burgesses encroaching on the market space,
+settlers squatting on their own acre with no leave asked, aldermen who
+were once only the abbey servants taking on themselves to give
+permission for this and that, tradesmen thriving and markets increasing,
+and the abbey never one penny the richer for it all. It was quite time
+that Abbot Sampson should be roused to do his duty, and to do it in very
+sharp fashion indeed. However we will let one of the monks tell his own
+tale in his own gossiping way:--
+
+"In the tenth year of Abbot Sampson's abbacy we monks, after full
+deliberation in chapter, laid our formal plaint before the abbot in his
+court. We said that the rents and revenues of all the good towns and
+boroughs in England were steadily growing and increasing to the
+enrichment of their lords, in every case save in that of our town of St.
+Edmund. The customary rent of £40 which it pays never rises higher. That
+this is so we imputed solely to the conduct of the townspeople, who are
+continually building new shops and stalls in the market-place without
+any leave of the convent" (abbey-land though it was). "The only
+permission, in fact, which they ask is that of their alderman, an
+officer who himself was of old times a mere servant of our sacrist, and
+bound to pay into his hands the yearly rent of the town, and removable
+at his pleasure."
+
+Never, Jocelyn evidently thinks, was a case plainer; but into the
+justice or injustice of it the burgesses refused sturdily to enter. When
+they were summoned to make answer they pleaded simple possession. "They
+were in the King's justice, and no answer would they make concerning
+tenements which they and their fathers had held in peace for a year and
+a day." Such answer would in fact, they added, be utterly contrary to
+the freedom of the town. No plea could have been legally more complete
+as none could have been more provoking. The monks turned in a rage upon
+the abbot, and simply requested him to eject their opponents. Then they
+retired angrily into the chapter-house, and waited in a sort of white
+heat to hear what the abbot would do. This is what Sampson did. He
+quietly bade the townsmen wait; then he "came into chapter just like one
+of ourselves, and told us privily that he would right us as far as he
+could, but that if he were to act it must be by law. Be the case right
+or wrong, he did not dare eject without trial his free men from land and
+property which they had held year after year; in fact, if he did so, he
+would at once fall into the King's justice. At this moment in came the
+townsfolk into the chapter-house, and offered to compromise the matter
+for an annual quit rent of a hundred shillings. This offer we refused.
+We preferred a simple adjournment of our claim in the hope that in some
+other abbot's time we might get all back again."
+
+Notwithstanding his many very admirable qualities, in fact, this present
+abbot was on these municipal points simply incorrigible. Was it quite by
+an oversight, for instance, that in Sampson's old age, "in some way, I
+don't quite know how, the new alderman of the town got chosen in other
+places than in chapter, and without leave of the house,"--in simple
+town-motes, that is, and by sheer downright delegation of power on the
+part of his fellow-burgesses? At any rate it was by no oversight that
+Sampson granted his charter on the day he came back from Richard's
+prison, when "we monks were murmuring and grumbling" in his very ear!
+And yet was the abbot foolish in his generation? This charter of his
+ranks lineally among the ancestors of that Great Charter which his
+successor was first to unroll on the altar-steps of the choir (we can
+still measure off the site in the rough field by the great piers of the
+tower arch that remain) before the baronage of the realm. At any rate,
+half a century after that scene in chapter, the new England that Sampson
+had foreseen came surging stormily enough against the abbey gates.
+Later abbots had set themselves sturdily against his policy of
+concession and conciliation; and riots, lawsuits, royal commissions,
+mark the troubled relations of Town and Abbey under the first two
+Edwards. Under the third came the fierce conflict of 1327.
+
+On the 25th of January in that year the townsmen of Bury St. Edmunds,
+headed by Richard Drayton, burst into the Abbey. Its servants were
+beaten off, the monks driven into choir, and dragged thence with their
+prior (for the abbot was away in London) to the town prison. The abbey
+itself was sacked; chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar
+frontals, the books of the library, the very vats and dishes of the
+kitchen, all disappeared. Chattels valued at £10,000, £500 worth of
+coin, 3000 "florins,"--this was the abbey's estimate of its loss. But
+neither florins nor chasubles were what their assailants really aimed
+at. Their next step shows what were the grievances which had driven the
+burgesses to this fierce outbreak of revolt. They were as much personal
+as municipal. The gates of the town indeed were still in the abbot's
+hands. He had succeeded in enforcing his claim to the wardship of
+orphans born within his domain. From claims such as these the town could
+never feel itself safe so long as mysterious charters from Pope and
+King, interpreted yet more mysteriously by the wit of the new lawyer
+class, were stored in the abbey archives. But the archives contained
+other and yet more formidable documents. The religious houses,
+untroubled by the waste of war, had profited more than any landowners by
+the general increase of wealth. They had become great proprietors,
+money-lenders to their tenants, extortionate as the Jew whom they had
+banished from the land. There were few townsmen of St. Edmund who had
+not some bond laid up in the abbey registry. Nicholas Fowke and a band
+of debtors had a covenant lying there for the payment of 500 marks and
+fifty casks of wine. Philip Clopton's mark bound him to discharge a debt
+of £22; a whole company of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors in
+a bond for no less a sum than £10,000. The new spirit of commercial
+enterprise, joined with the troubles of the time, seems to have thrown
+the whole community into the abbot's hands.
+
+It was from the troubles of the time that the burghers looked for
+escape; and the general disturbance which accompanied the deposition of
+Edward II. seems to have quickened their longing into action. Their
+revolt soon disclosed its practical aims. From their prison in the town
+the trembling prior and his monks were brought back to their own
+chapter-house. The spoil of their registry--the papal bulls and the
+royal charters, the deeds and bonds and mortgages of the townsmen--were
+laid before them. Amidst the wild threats of the mob, they were forced
+to execute a grant of perfect freedom and of a guild to the town, and a
+full release to their debtors. Then they were left masters of the ruined
+house. But all control over the town was gone. Through spring and summer
+no rent or fine was paid. The bailiffs and other officers of the abbey
+did not dare to show their faces in the streets. Then news came that the
+abbot was in London, appealing for aid to King and Court, and the whole
+county was at once on fire. A crowd of rustics, maddened at the thought
+of revived claims of serfage, of interminable suits of law which had
+become a tyranny, poured into the streets of the town. From thirty-two
+of the neighbouring villages the priests marched at the head of their
+flocks to this new crusade. Twenty thousand in number, so men guessed,
+the wild mass of men, women, and children rushed again on the abbey. For
+four November days the work of destruction went on unhindered, whilst
+gate, stables, granaries, kitchen, infirmary, hostelry, went up in
+flames. From the wreck of the abbey itself the great multitude swept
+away too the granges and barns of the abbey farms. The monks had become
+vast agricultural proprietors: 1,000 horses, 120 oxen, 200 cows, 300
+bullocks, 300 hogs, 10,000 sheep were driven off for spoil, and as a
+last outrage, the granges and barns were burnt to the ground. £60,000,
+the justiciaries afterwards decided, would hardly cover the loss.
+
+Weak as was the government of Mortimer and Isabella, there never was a
+time in English history when government stood with folded hands before a
+scene such as this. The appeal of the abbot was no longer neglected; a
+royal force quelled the riot and exacted vengeance for this breach of
+the King's peace. Thirty carts full of prisoners were despatched to
+Norwich; twenty-four of the chief townsmen, thirty-two of the village
+priests, were convicted as aiders and abettors. Twenty were at once
+summarily hung. But with this first vigorous effort at repression the
+danger seemed again to roll away. Nearly 200 persons remained indeed
+under sentence of outlawry, and for five weary years their case dragged
+on in the King's courts. At last matters ended in a lawless, ludicrous
+outrage. Out of patience and irritated by repeated breaches of promise
+on the abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses seized him as he lay in his
+manor of Chevington, robbed, bound and shaved him, and carried him off
+to London. There he was hurried from street to street, lest his
+hiding-place should be detected, till opportunity offered for his
+shipping off to Brabant. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope himself,
+levelled their excommunications against the perpetrators of this daring
+outrage in vain.
+
+The prison of their victim was at last discovered; he was released and
+brought home. But the lesson seems to have done good. The year 1332 saw
+a concordat arranged between the Abbey and Town. The damages assessed by
+the royal justiciaries, a sum enormous now but incredible then, were
+remitted, the outlawry was reversed, the prisoners were released. On the
+other hand, the deeds were again replaced in the archives of the abbey,
+and the charters which had been extorted from the trembling monks were
+formally cancelled. In other words, the old process of legal oppression
+was left to go on. The spirit of the townsmen was, as we shall see,
+crushed by the failure of their outbreak of despair. It was from a new
+quarter that help was for a moment to come. No subject is more difficult
+to treat, as nothing is more difficult to explain, than the communal
+revolt which shook the throne of Richard II., and the grievances which
+prompted it. But one thing is clear; it was a revolt against oppression
+which veiled itself under the form of law. The rural tenants found
+themselves in a mesh of legal claims--old services revived, old dues
+enforced, endless suits in the King's courts grinding them again to
+serfage. Oppression was no longer the rough blow of the rough baron; it
+was the delicate, ruthless tyranny of the lawyer-clerk.
+
+Prior John of Cambridge, who, in the vacancy of the abbot, was now in
+charge of the house, was a man skilled in all the arts of his day. In
+sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists
+pronounced him the superior of Orpheus, of Nero, of one yet more
+illustrious but, save in the Bury cloisters, more obscure, the Breton
+Belgabred. He was a man "industrious and subtle;" and subtlety and
+industry found their scope in suit after suit with the farmers and
+burgesses around. "Faithfully he strove," says his monastic eulogist,
+"with the villeins of Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen he
+owned as his foes, his "adversaries;" but it was the rustics who were
+especially to show how memorable a hate he had won. It was a perilous
+time in which to win men's hate. We have seen the private suffering of
+the day, but nationally too England was racked with despair and the
+sense of wrong; with the collapse of the French war, with the ruinous
+taxation, with the frightful pestilence that had swept away half the
+population; with the iniquitous labour-laws that, in the face of such a
+reduction, kept down the rate of wages in the interest of the landlords;
+with the frightful law of settlement that, to enforce this wrong,
+reduced at a stroke the free labourer again to a serfage from which he
+has yet fully to emerge. That terrible revolution of social sentiment
+had begun which was to turn law into the instrument of the basest
+interests of a class, which was with the Statute of Labourers and the
+successive labour-regulations that followed to create pauperism, and
+with pauperism to create that hatred of class to class which hangs like
+a sick dream over us to-day. The earliest, the most awful instance of
+such a hatred was gathering round Prior John, while at his manor-house
+of Mildenhall he studied his parchments and touched a defter lute than
+Nero or the Breton Belgabred. In a single hour hosts of armed men arose,
+as it were, out of the earth. Kent gathered round Wat Tyler; in Norfolk,
+in Essex, fifty thousand peasants hoisted the standard of Jack Straw. It
+was no longer a local rising or a local grievance, no longer the old
+English revolution headed by the baron and priest. Priest and baron were
+swept away before this sudden storm of national hate. The howl of the
+great multitude broke roughly in on the delicate chanting of Prior John.
+He turned to fly, but his own serfs betrayed him, judged him in rude
+mockery of the law that had wronged them, condemned him, killed him.[1]
+Five days the corpse lay half-stripped in the open field, none daring to
+bury it--so ran the sentence of his murderers--while the mob poured
+unresisted into Bury. The scene was like some wild orgy of the French
+Revolution than any after-scenes in England. Bearing the prior's head on
+a lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng reached at
+last the gallows where the head of Cavendish, the chief justice, stood
+already impaled, and pressing the cold lips together, in fierce mockery
+of the old friendship between the two, set them side by side.
+
+Another head soon joined them. The abbey gates had been burst open, the
+cloister was full of the dense maddened crowd, howling for a new victim,
+John Lackenheath. Warden of the barony as he was, few knew him as he
+stood among the group of trembling monks; there was still amidst this
+outburst of frenzy the dread of a coming revenge, and the rustic who had
+denounced him had stolen back silent into the crowd. But if Lackenheath
+resembled the French nobles in the hatred he had roused, he resembled
+them also in the cool contemptuous courage with which they fronted
+death. "I am the man you seek," he said, stepping forward; and in a
+moment, with a mighty roar of "Devil's son! monk! traitor!" he was swept
+to the gallows and his head hacked from his shoulders. Then the crowd
+rolled back again to the abbey-gate and summoned the monks before them.
+They told them that now for a long time they had oppressed their
+fellows, the burgesses of Bury; wherefore they willed that in the sight
+of the Commons they should forthwith surrender their bonds and their
+charters. The monks brought the parchments to the market-place; many
+which might have served the purposes of the townsmen they swore they
+could not find. The Commons disbelieved them, and bade the burgesses
+inspect the documents. But the iron had entered too deeply into these
+men's souls. Not even in their hour of triumph could they shake off
+their awe of the trembling black-robed masters who stood before them. A
+compromise was patched up. The charters should be surrendered till the
+popular claimant of the abbacy should confirm them. Then, unable to do
+more, the great crowd ebbed away.
+
+Common history tells the upshot of the revolt; the despair when in the
+presence of the boy-king Wat Tyler was struck down by a foul treason;
+the ruin when the young martial Bishop of Norwich came trampling in upon
+the panic-stricken multitude at Barton. Nationally the movement had
+wrought good; from this time the law was modified in practice, and the
+tendency to reduce a whole class to serfage was effectually checked. But
+to Bury it brought little but harm. A hundred years later the town again
+sought freedom in the law-courts, and again sought it in vain. The abbey
+charters told fatally against mere oral customs. The royal council of
+Edward IV. decided that "the abbot is lord of the whole town of Bury,
+the sole head and captain within the town." All municipal appointments
+were at his pleasure, all justice in his hands. The townsmen had no
+communal union, no corporate existence. Their leaders paid for riot and
+insult by imprisonment and fine.
+
+The dim, dull lawsuit was almost the last incident in the long struggle,
+the last and darkest for the town. But it was the darkness that goes
+before the day. Fifty years more and abbot and abbey were swept away
+together, and the burghers were building their houses afresh with the
+carved ashlar and the stately pillars of their lord's house. Whatever
+other aspects the Reformation may present, it gave at any rate
+emancipation to the one class of English to whom freedom had been
+denied, the towns that lay in the dead hand of the Church. None more
+heartily echoed the Protector's jest, "We must pull down the rooks'
+nests lest the rooks may come back again," than the burghers of St.
+Edmunds. The completeness of the Bury demolitions hangs perhaps on the
+long serfdom of the town, and the shapeless masses of rubble that alone
+recall the graceful cloister and the long-drawn aisle may find their
+explanation in the story of the town's struggles. But the story has a
+pleasanter ending. The charter of James--for the town had passed into
+the King's hands as the abbot's successor--gave all that it had ever
+contended for, and crowned the gift by the creation of a mayor. Modern
+reform has long since swept away the municipal oligarchy which owed its
+origin to the Stuart king. But the essence of his work remains; and in
+its mayor, with his fourfold glory of maces borne before him, Bury sees
+the strange close of the battle waged through so many centuries for
+simple self-government.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] To one who knows what frightful cruelty and oppression may lie in
+simple legal phrases, the indignant sentence in which Walsingham tells
+his death is the truest comment on the scene: "Non tam villanorum
+prædictæ villæ de Bury, suorum adversariorum, sed propriorum servorum et
+nativorum arbitrio simul et judicio addictus morti."
+
+
+
+
+HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS.
+
+
+When the snow has driven everybody home again from the Oberland and the
+Rigi and all the Swiss hotel-keepers have resumed their original dignity
+as Landammans of their various cantons, it is a little amusing to
+reflect how much of the pleasure of one's holiday has been due to one's
+own countrymen. It is not that the Englishman abroad is particularly
+entertaining, for the Frenchman is infinitely more vivacious; nor that
+he is peculiarly stolid, for he yields in that to most of the German
+students who journey on the faith of a nightcap and a pipe; or that he
+is especially boring, for every American whom one meets whips him easily
+in boredom. It is that he is so nakedly and undisguisedly English. We
+never see Englishmen in England. They are too busy, too afraid of Mrs.
+Grandy, too oppressed with duties and responsibilities and insular
+respectabilities and home decencies to be really themselves. They are
+forced to dress decently, to restrain their temper, to affect a little
+modesty; there is the pulpit to scold them, and the 'Times' to give them
+something to talk about, and an infinite number of grooves and lines and
+sidings along which they can be driven in a slow and decent fashion, or
+into which as a last resort they can be respectably shunted. But grooves
+and lines end with the British Channel. The true Englishman has no awe
+for 'Galignani'; he has a slight contempt for the Continental chaplain.
+He can wear what hat he likes, show what temper he likes, and be
+himself. It is he whose boots tramp along the Boulevards, whose snore
+thunders loudest of all in the night train, who begins his endless growl
+after "a decent dinner" at Basle, and his endless contempt for "Swiss
+stupidity" at Lucerne. We track him from hotel to hotel, we meet him at
+station after station, we revel in the chase as coat after coat of the
+outer man peels away and the inner Englishman stands more plainly
+revealed. But it is in the hotels of the higher mountains that we first
+catch the man himself.
+
+There is a sort of snow-line of nations, and nothing amazes one more in
+a run through the Alps than to see how true the various peoples among
+their visitors are to their own specific level. As a rule the Frenchman
+clings to the road through the passes, the American pauses at the end of
+the mule-track, the German stops at the châlet in the pine-forest. It is
+only at the Alpine _table d'hôte_, with a proud consciousness of being
+seven thousand feet above the sea-level, that one gets the Englishman
+pure. It is a very odd sensation, in face of the huge mountain-chains,
+and with the glacier only an hour's walk overhead, to find one's self
+again in a little England, with the very hotel-keeper greeting one in
+one's native tongue, and the guides exchanging English oaths over their
+trinkgelt. Cooped up within four walls one gets a better notion of the
+varieties, the lights and shadows, of home-life than one gets in Pall
+Mall. The steady old Indian couple whose climb is so infinitely slow and
+sure, the Oxford freshman who comes blooming up the hill-side to declare
+Titiens beautiful and to gush over the essays of Frederick Robertson,
+the steady man of business who does his Alps every summer, the jaded
+London curate who lingers with a look of misery round the stove, the
+British mother, silken, severe, implacable as below, the British maiden
+sitting alone in the rock-clefts and reviewing the losses and gains of
+the last season--all these are thrown together in an odd jumble of rank
+and taste by the rain, fog, and snowdrift which form some two-thirds of
+the pleasures of the Alps. But, odd as the jumble is, it illustrates in
+a way that nothing else does some of the characteristics of the British
+nation, and impresses on one in a way that one never forgets the real
+native peculiarities of Englishmen.
+
+In the first place, no scene so perfectly brings out the absolute
+vacuity of the British mind when one can get it free from the
+replenishing influences of the daily paper. Alpine talk is the lowest
+variety of conversation, as the common run of Alpine writing is the
+lowest form of literature. It is in fact simply drawing-room talk as
+drawing-room talk would be if all news, all scandal, all family details
+were suddenly cut off. In its way it throws a pleasant light on English
+education and on the amount of information about other countries which
+it is considered essential to an English gentleman to possess. The
+guardsman swears that the Swiss are an uneducated nation, with a
+charming unconsciousness that their school system is without a rival in
+Europe; the young lady to one's right wonders why such nice people
+should be republicans; the Cambridge man across the table exposes the
+eccentricity of a friend who wished to know in what canton he was
+travelling; the squire with the pink and white daughters is amazed at
+the absence of police. In the very heart of the noblest home of liberty
+which Europe has seen our astonishing nation lives and moves with as
+contented and self-satisfied an ignorance of the laws, the history, the
+character of the country or its people, as if Switzerland were
+Timbuctoo. Still, even sublime ignorance such as this is better than to
+listen to the young thing of thirty-five summers, with her drivel about
+William Tell; and one has always the resource of conceiving a Swiss
+party tramping about England with no other notion of Englishmen than
+that they are extortionate hotel-keepers, or of the English Constitution
+than that it is democratic and absurd, or of English history than that
+Queen Eleanor sucked the poison from her husband's arm.
+
+The real foe of life over an Alpine table is that weather-talk, raised
+to its highest power, which forms nine-tenths of the conversation. The
+beautiful weather one had on the Rigi, the execrable weather one had at
+the Furca, the unsettled weather one had on the Lake of Thun; the
+endless questions whether you have been here and whether you have been
+there; the long catechism as to the insect-life and the tariff of the
+various hotels; the statements as to the route by which they have come,
+the equally gratuitous information as to the route by which they shall
+go; the "oh, so beautiful" of the gusher in ringlets, the lawyer's
+"decidedly sublime," the monotonous "grand, grand" of the man of
+business; the constant asseveration of all as to every prospect which
+they have visited that they never have seen such a beautiful view in
+their life--form a cataract of boredom which pours down from morn to
+dewy eve. It is in vain that one makes desperate efforts to procure
+relief, that the inventive mind entraps the spinster into discussion
+over ferns, tries the graduate on poetry, beguiles the squire towards
+politics, lures the Indian officer into a dissertation on coolies, leads
+the British mother through flowery paths of piety towards the new
+vacancies in the episcopal bench. The British mother remembers a bishop
+whom she met at Lucerne, the Indian officer gets back by the Ghauts to
+the Schreckhorn, the graduate finds his way again through 'Manfred' to
+the precipices. In an instant the drone recommences, the cataract pours
+down again, and there is nothing for it but to wander out on the terrace
+of six feet by four, and wonder what the view would be if there were no
+fog.
+
+But even a life like this must have its poetry and its hero, and at
+seven thousand feet above the sea-level it is very natural to find one's
+poetry in what would be dull enough below. The hero of the Bell Alp or
+the OEggischorn is naturally enough the Alpine Clubbist. He has
+hurried silent and solitary through the lower country, he only blooms
+into real life at the sight of "high work." It is wonderful how lively
+the little place becomes as he enters it, what a run there is on the
+landlord for information as to his projects, what endless consultations
+of the barometer, what pottering over the pages of 'Peaks, Passes, and
+Glaciers.' How many guides will he take, has he a dog, will he use the
+rope, what places has he done before?--a thousand questions of this sort
+are buzzing about the room as the hero sits quietly down to his dinner.
+The elderly spinster remembers the fatal accident of last season, and
+ventures to ask him what preparations he has made for the ascent. The
+hero stops his dinner politely, and shows her the new little box of
+lip-salve with which he intends to defy the terrors of the Alps. To say
+the truth, the Alpine climber is not an imaginative man. With him the
+climb which fills every bystander with awe is "a good bit of work, but
+nothing out of the way you know." He has never done this particular
+peak, and so he has to do it; but it has been too often done before to
+fill him with any particular interest in the matter. As to the ascent
+itself, he sets about planning it as practically as if he were planning
+a run from London to Lucerne. We see him sitting with his guides,
+marking down the time-table of his route, ascertaining the amount of
+meat and wine which will be required, distributing among his followers
+their fair weights of blankets and ropes. Then he tells us the hour at
+which he shall be back to-morrow, and the file of porters set off with
+him quietly and steadily up the hill-side. We turn out and give him a
+cheer as he follows, but the thought of the provisions takes a little of
+the edge off our romance. Still, there is a great run that evening on
+'Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers,' and a constant little buzz round the
+fortunate person who has found the one record of an ascent of this
+particular peak.
+
+What is it which makes men in Alpine travel-books write as men never
+write elsewhere? What is the origin of a style unique in literature,
+which misses both the sublime and the ridiculous, and constantly hops
+from tall-talk to a mirth feeble and inane? Why is it that the senior
+tutor, who is so hard on a bit of bad Latin, plunges at the sight of an
+Alp into English inconceivable, hideous? Why does page after page look
+as if it had been dredged with French words through a pepper-castor? Why
+is the sunrise or the scenery always "indescribable," while the appetite
+of the guides lends itself to such reiterated description? These are
+questions which suggest themselves to quiet critics, but hardly to the
+group in the hotel. They have found the hole where the hero is to snatch
+a few hours of sleep before commencing the ascent. They have followed
+him in imagination round the edge of the crevasses. All the old awe and
+terror that disappeared in his presence revive at the eloquent
+description of the _arête_. There is a gloom over us as we retire to bed
+and think of the little company huddled in their blankets, waiting for
+the dawn. There is a gloom over us at breakfast as the spinster recalls
+one "dreadful place where you look down five thousand feet clear." The
+whole party breaks up into little groups, who set out for high points
+from which, the first view of the returning hero will be caught.
+Everybody comes back certain they have seen him, till the landlord
+pronounces that everybody has mistaken the direction in which he must
+come. At last there is a distant _jodel_, and in an hour or so the hero
+arrives. He is impassive and good-humoured as before. When we crowd
+around him for the tidings of peril and adventure, he tells us, as he
+told us before he started, that it is "a good bit of work, but nothing
+out of the way." Pressed by the spinster, he replies, in the very words
+of 'Peaks and Passes,' that the sunrise was "indescribable," and then,
+like the same inspired volume, enlarges freely on the appetite of his
+guides. Then he dines, and then he tells us that what he has really
+gained from his climb is entire faith in the efficacy of his little box
+for preventing all injury from sun or from snow. He is a little proud,
+too, to have done the peak in twenty minutes less time than Jones, and
+at ten shillings less cost. Altogether, it must be confessed, the Alpine
+Clubbist is not an imaginative man. His one grief in life seems to be
+the failure of his new portable cooking apparatus, and he pronounces
+"Liebig's Extract" to be the great discovery of the age. But such as he
+is, solid, practical, slightly stupid, he is the hero of the Alpine
+hotel.
+
+At such an elevation the religious developement of the British mind
+becomes strangely jerky and irregular. The arrival of Sunday is suddenly
+revealed to the group round the breakfast-table by the severity with
+which the spinster's eye is fixed on an announcement over the stove that
+the English service in the hotel is at ten o'clock. But the announcement
+is purely speculative. The landlord "hopes" there will be service, and
+plunges again into the kitchen. Profane sounds of fiddling and dancing
+reach the ear from an outbuilding where the guides and the maids are
+celebrating the day by a dance. The spinster is in earnest, but the
+insuperable difficulty lies in the non-existence of a parson. The Indian
+civilian suggests that we should adopt the naval usage, and that the
+senior layman read prayers. But the attorney is the senior layman, and
+he objects to such a muddling of the professions. The young Oxford
+undergraduate tells his little tale of a service on board ship where the
+major, unversed in such matters, began with the churching service, and
+ended with the office for the burial of the dead. Then he withers
+beneath the stony stare of the British mother, who is reading her
+"lessons" in the corner. At last there is a little buzz of excitement,
+and every eye is fixed upon the quiet-looking traveller in a brown
+shooting-coat and a purple tie, who is chipping his egg and imbibing his
+coffee in silence and unconsciousness. The spinster is sure that the
+stranger is Mr. Smith. The attorney doubts whether such a remarkable
+preacher would go about in such a costume. The British mother solves the
+whole difficulty by walking straight up to him, and with an eye on the
+announcement in question, asking point-blank whether she has the
+pleasure of addressing that eminent divine. Smith hesitates, and is
+lost. His egg and coffee disappear. The table is cleared, and the chairs
+arranged with as little regard to comfort as may be. The divine retires
+for the sermon which--prescient of his doom--he has slipped into his
+valise. The landlord produces two hymn-books of perfectly different
+origins, and some time is spent in finding a hymn which is common to
+both. When the time comes for singing it, the landlord joins in with a
+fine but wandering bass, catching an English word here and there as he
+goes along. The sermon is as usual on the Prodigal Son, and the Indian
+civilian nods at every mention of "going into a far country," as a topic
+specially appropriate for the occasion. But the divine is seen no more.
+His cold becomes rapidly serious, and he takes to his bed at the very
+hour of afternoon service. The British maiden wanders out to read
+Tennyson in the rock-clefts, and is wonder-struck to come upon the
+unhappy sufferer reading Tennyson in the rock-clefts too. After all, bed
+is not good for a cold, and the British Sunday is insufferable, and
+poetry is the expression of the deepest and most sacred emotions. This
+is the developement which religion takes with a British maiden and a
+British parson in regions above the clouds.
+
+
+
+
+ÆNEAS:
+
+A VERGILIAN STUDY.
+
+
+In the revival side by side of Homeric and Vergilian study it is easy to
+see the reflection of two currents of contrasted sentiment which are
+telling on the world around us. A cry for simpler living and simpler
+thinking, a revolt against the social and intellectual perplexities in
+which modern life loses its direct and intensest joys, a craving for a
+world untroubled by the problems that weigh on us, express themselves as
+vividly in poems like the 'Earthly Paradise' as in the return to the
+Iliad. The charm of Vergil on the other hand lies in the strange
+fidelity with which across so many ages he echoes those complex thoughts
+which make the life of our own. Vergil is the Tennyson of the older
+world; his power, like that of the laureate, lies in the sympathy with
+which he reflects the strength and weakness of his time, its humanity,
+its new sense of human brotherhood, its pitifulness, its moral
+earnestness, its high conception of the purpose of life and the dignity
+of man, its attitude of curious but condescending interest towards the
+past, its vast dreams of a future, embodied by the one poet in the vague
+dreamland of 'Locksley Hall,' by the other in the enduring greatness of
+Rome.
+
+From beginning to end the Æneid is a song of Rome. Throughout it we feel
+ourselves drawing nearer and nearer to that sense of the Roman greatness
+which filled the soul of Vergil; with him in verse after verse "tendimus
+in Latium." Nowhere does the song rise to a higher grandeur than when
+the singer sings the majesty of that all-embracing empire, the wide
+peace of the world beneath its sway. But the Æneid is no mere outburst
+of Roman pride. To Vergil the time in which he lived was at once an end
+and a beginning, a close of the long struggles which had fitted Rome to
+be the mistress of the world, an opening of her new and mightier career
+as a reconciler and leader of the nations. His song is broken by divine
+prophecies, not merely of Roman greatness, but of the work Rome had to
+do in warring down the rebels against her universal sway, in showing
+clemency to the conquered, in binding hostile peoples together, in
+welding the nations into a new human race. The Æneid is a song of the
+future rather than of the present or past, a song not of pride but of
+duty. The work that Rome has done points throughout to the nobler work
+which Rome has yet to do. And in the very forefront of this dream of the
+future Vergil sets the ideal of the new Roman by whom this mighty task
+shall be wrought, the picture of one who by loyalty to a higher purpose
+had fitted himself to demand loyalty from those whom he ruled, one who
+by self-mastery had learned to be master of men.
+
+It is this thought of self-mastery which is the key to the Æneid. Filled
+as he is with a sense of the greatness of Rome, the mood of Vergil seems
+constantly to be fluctuating between a pathetic consciousness of the
+toils and self-devotion, the suffering and woe, that run through his
+national history and the final greatness which they bought. His poem
+draws both these impressions together in the figure of Æneas. Æneas is
+the representative of that "piety," that faith in his race and in his
+destiny, which had drawn the Roman from his little settlement on the
+hills beside Tiber to a vast empire "beyond the Garamantians and the
+Indians." All the endurance, the suffering, the patriotism, the
+self-devotion of generation after generation is incarnate in him. It is
+by his mouth that in the darkest hours of national trial Roman seems to
+say to Roman, "O passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem." It is to
+this "end" that the wanderings of Æneas, like the labours of consul and
+dictator, inevitably tend, and it is the firm faith in such a close that
+gives its peculiar character to the pathos of the Æneid.
+
+Rome is before us throughout, "per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in
+Latium." It is not as a mere tale of romance that we follow the
+wanderings of "the man who first came from Trojan shores to Italy." They
+are the sacrifice by which the father of the Roman race wrought out the
+greatness of his people, the toils he endured "dum conderet urbem."
+"Italiam quæro patriam" is the key-note of the Æneid, but the Quest of
+Æneas is no self-sought quest of his own. "Italiam non sponte sequor,"
+he pleads as Dido turns from him in the Elysian Fields with eyes of
+speechless reproach. He is the chosen instrument of a Divine purpose
+working out its ends alike across his own buffetings from shore to shore
+or the love-tortures of the Phoenician Queen. The memorable words that
+Æneas addresses to Dares, "Cede Deo," "bend before a will higher as well
+as stronger than thine own," are in fact the faith of his own career.
+
+But it is in this very submission to the Divine order that he himself
+soars into greatness. The figure of the warrior who is so insignificant
+in the Homeric story of the fight around Troy becomes that of a hero in
+the horror of its capture. Æneas comes before us the survivor of an
+immense fall, sad with the sadness of lost home and slaughtered friends,
+not even suffered to fall amidst the wreck, but driven forth by voices
+of the Fates to new toils and a distant glory. He may not die; his
+"moriamur" is answered by the reiterated "Depart" of the gods, the "Heu,
+fuge!" of the shade of Hector. The vision of the great circle of the
+gods fighting against Troy drives him forth in despair to a life of
+exile, and the carelessness of despair is over him as he drifts from
+land to land. "Sail where you will," he cries to his pilot, "one land
+is as good as another now Troy is gone." More and more indeed as he
+wanders he recognizes himself as the agent of a Divine purpose, but all
+personal joy in life has fled. Like Dante he feels the bitterness of
+exile, how hard it is to climb another's stairs, how bitter to eat is
+another's bread. Here and there he meets waifs and strays of the great
+wreck, fugitives like himself, but who have found a refuge and a new
+Troy on foreign shores. He greets them, but he may not stay. At last the
+very gods themselves seem to give him the passionate love of Dido, but
+again the fatal "Depart" tears him from her arms. The chivalrous love of
+Pallas casts for a moment its light and glory round his life, but the
+light and glory sink into gloom again beneath the spear of Turnus. Æneas
+is left alone with his destiny to the very end, but it is a destiny that
+has grown into a passion that absorbs the very life of the man.
+
+        "Italiam magnam Grynæus Apollo,
+    Italiam Lyciæ jussere capessere sortes.
+    Hic amor, hæc patria est!"
+
+It is in the hero of the Idylls and not in the hero of the Iliad that we
+find the key to such a character as this. So far is Vergil from being
+the mere imitator of Homer that in spite of his close and loving study
+of the older poem its temper seems to have roused him only to poetic
+protest. He recoils from the vast personality of Achilleus, from that
+incarnate "wrath," heedless of divine purposes, measuring itself boldly
+with the gods, careless as a god of the fate and fortunes of men. In the
+face of this destroyer the Roman poet sets a founder of cities and
+peoples, self-forgetful, patient, loyal to a divine aim, calm with a
+Roman calmness, yet touched as no Roman had hitherto been touched with
+pity and tenderness for the sorrows of men. The one poem is a song of
+passion, a mighty triumph of the individual man, a poem of human energy
+in defiant isolation. The other is an epic of social order, of a divine
+law manifesting itself in the fortunes of the world, of the bonds which
+link man to his fellow men, a song of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
+reverence, of "piety."
+
+It is in realizing the temper of the poem that we realize the temper of
+its hero. Æneas is the Arthur of the Vergilian epic, with the same
+absorption of all individuality in the nobleness of his purpose, the
+same undertone of melancholy, the same unearthly vagueness of outline
+and remoteness from the meaner interests and passions of men. As the
+poet of our own day has embodied his ideal of manhood in the king, so
+Vergil has embodied it in the hero-founder of his race. The temper of
+Æneas is the highest conception of human character to which the old
+world ever attained. The virtues of the Homeric combatants are there:
+courage, endurance, wisdom in council, eloquence, chivalrous friendship,
+family affection, faith to plighted word; but with these mingle virtues
+unknown to Hector or Achilleus, temperance, self-control, nobleness and
+unselfishness of aim, loyalty to an inner sense of right, the piety of
+self-devotion and self-sacrifice, refinement of feeling, a pure and
+delicate sense of the sweetness of woman's love, pity for the fallen and
+the weak.
+
+In the Homeric picture Achilleus sits solitary in his tent, bound as it
+were to the affections of earth by the one tie of his friendship for
+Patroclos. No figure has ever been painted by a poet's pen more terrible
+in the loneliness of its wrath, its sorrow, its revenge. But from one
+end of his song to the other Vergil has surrounded Æneas with the ties
+and affections of home. In the awful night with which his story opens
+the loss of Creusa, the mocking embrace in which the dead wife flies
+from his arms, form his farewell to Troy. "Thrice strove I there to
+clasp my arms about her neck,"--everyone knows the famous lines:--
+
+    "Thrice I essayed her neck to clasp,
+    Thrice the vain semblance mocked my grasp,
+    As wind or slumber light."
+
+Amid all the terror of the flight from the burning city the figure of
+his child starts out bright against the darkness, touched with a
+tenderness which Vergil seems to reserve for his child-pictures.[2] But
+the whole escape is the escape of a family. Not merely child and wife,
+but father and household accompany Æneas. Life, he tells them when they
+bid him leave them to their fate, is worthless without them; and the
+"commune periclum, una salus" runs throughout all his wanderings. The
+common love of his boy is one of the bonds that link Dido with Æneas,
+and a yet more exquisite touch of poetic tenderness makes his affection
+for Ascanius the one final motive for his severance from the Queen. Not
+merely the will of the gods drives him from Carthage, but the sense of
+the wrong done to his boy.[3] His friendship is as warm and constant as
+his love for father or child. At the two great crises of his life the
+thought of Hector stirs a new outpouring of passionate regret. It is the
+vision of Hector which rouses him from the slumber of the terrible night
+when Troy is taken; the vision of the hero not as glorified by death,
+but as the memory of that last pitiful sight of the corpse dragged at
+the chariot wheels of Achilleus had stamped it for ever on the mind of
+his friend. It is as though all recollection of his greatness had been
+blotted out by the shame and terror of his fall ("quantum mutatus ab
+illo Hectore!"), but the gory hair and the mangled form only quicken the
+passionate longing of Æneas.[4] The tears, the "mighty groan," burst
+forth again as in the tapestry of the Sidonian temple he sees pictured
+anew the story of Hector's fall. In the hour of his last combat the
+thought of his brother-in-arms returns to him, and the memory of Hector
+is the spur to nobleness and valour which he bequeaths to his boy.
+
+But throughout it is this refinement of feeling, this tenderness and
+sensitiveness to affection, that Vergil has loved to paint in the
+character of Æneas. To him Dido's charm lies in her being the one
+pitying face that has as yet met his own. Divine as he is, the child,
+like Achilleus, of a goddess, he broods with a tender melancholy over
+the sorrows of his fellow-men. "Sunt lacrymæ rerum et mentem mortalia
+tangunt," are words in which Sainte-Beuve has found the secret of the
+Æneid; they are at any rate the key to the character of Æneas. Like the
+poet of our own days, he longs for "the touch of a vanished hand, and
+the sound of a voice that is still."[5] He stands utterly apart from
+those epical heroes "that delight in war." The joy in sheer downright
+fighting which rings through Homer is wholly absent from the Æneid.
+Stirring and picturesque as is "The gathering of the Latin Clans,"
+brilliant as is the painting of the last combat with Turnus, we feel
+everywhere the touch of a poet of peace. Nothing is more noteworthy than
+the careful exclusion of the Roman cruelty, the Roman ambition, from the
+portrait of Æneas. Vergil seems to protest in his very hero against the
+poetic compulsion that drags him to the battle-field. On the eve of his
+final triumph, Æneas
+
+                          "incusat voce Latinum;
+    Testaturque deos iteram se ad proelia cogi."
+
+Even when host is marshalled against host the thought of reconciliation
+is always kept steadily to the front, and the bitter cry of the hero
+asks in the very hour of the combat why bloodshed should divide peoples
+who are destined to be one.
+
+It is the conflict of these two sides of the character of Æneas, the
+struggle between this sensitiveness to affection and his entire
+absorption in the mysterious destiny to which he is called, between his
+clinging to human ties and his readiness to forsake all and follow the
+divine voice which summons him, the strife in a word between love and
+duty, which gives its meaning and pathos to the story of Æneas and Dido.
+Attractive as it undoubtedly is, the story of Dido is in the minds of
+nine modern readers out of ten fatal to the effect of the Æneid as a
+whole. The very beauty of the tale is partly the cause of this. To the
+schoolboy and to thousands who are schoolboys no longer the poem is
+nothing more than the love story of the Trojan leader and the Tyrian
+queen. Its human interest ends with the funeral fires of Dido, and the
+books which follow are read merely as ingenious displays of the
+philosophic learning, the antiquarian research, and the patriotism of
+Vergil. But the story is yet more directly fatal in the way in which it
+cuts off the hero himself from modern sympathies. His desertion of Dido
+makes, it has been said, "an irredeemable poltroon of him in all honest
+English eyes." Dryden can only save his character by a jest, and
+Rousseau damns it with an epigram. Mr. Keble supposes that in the
+interview among the Shades the poet himself intended the abasement of
+his hero, and Mr. Gladstone has capped this by a theory that Vergil
+meant to draw his readers' admiration, not to Æneas but to Turnus.
+
+It is wiser perhaps to turn from the impressions of Vergil's critics to
+the impression which the story must have left in the mind of Vergil
+himself. It is surely needless to assume that the first of poetic
+artists has forgotten the very rudiments of his art in placing at the
+opening of his song a figure which strips all interest from his hero.
+Nor is it needful to believe that such a blunder has been unconscious,
+and that Vergil has had to learn the true effect of his episode on the
+general texture of his poem from the reader of to-day. The poet who
+paints for us the character of Dido must have felt, ere he could have
+painted it, that charm which has ever since bewitched the world. Every
+nerve in Vergil must have thrilled at the consummate beauty of this
+woman of his own creation, her self-abandonment, her love, her
+suffering, her despair. If he deliberately uses her simply as a foil to
+the character of Æneas it is with a perception of this charm infinitely
+deeper and tenderer than ours. But he does use her as a foil. Impulse,
+passion, the mighty energies of unbridled will are wrought up into a
+figure of unequalled beauty, and then set against the true manhood of
+the founder and type of Rome, the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
+self-control.
+
+To the stoicism of Vergil, steadied by a high sense of man's worth and
+work in the world, braced to patience and endurance for noble ends,
+passion--the revolt of the individual self against the world's
+order--seemed a light and trivial thing. He could feel and paint with
+exquisite delicacy and fire the charm of woman's utter love; but woman
+with all her loveliness wanted to him the grandeur of man's higher
+constancy to an unselfish purpose, "varium et mutabile semper foemina."
+Passion on the other hand is the mainspring of modern poetry, and it is
+difficult for us to realize the superior beauty of the calmer and vaster
+ideal of the poets of old. The figure of Dido, whirled hither and
+thither by the storms of warring emotions, reft even of her queenly
+dignity by the despair of her love, degraded by jealousy and
+disappointment to a very scold, is to the calm, serene figure of Æneas
+as modern sculpture, the sculpture of emotion, is to the sculpture of
+classic art. Each, no doubt, has its own peculiar beauty, and the work
+of a true criticism is to view either from its own standpoint and not
+from the standpoint of its rival. But if we would enter into the mind of
+Vergil we must view Dido with the eyes of Æneas and not Æneas with the
+eyes of Dido.
+
+When Vergil first sets the two figures before us, it is not on the
+contrast but on the unity of their temper and history that he dwells.
+Touch after touch brings out this oneness of mood and aim as they drift
+towards one another. The same weariness, the same unconscious longing
+for rest and love, fills either heart. It is as a queen, as a Dian
+over-topping her nymphs by the head, that Dido appears on the scene,
+distributing their task to her labourers as a Roman Cornelia distributed
+wool to her house-slaves, questioning the Trojan strangers who sought
+her hospitality and protection. It is with the brief, haughty tone of a
+ruler of men that she bids them lay by their fears and assures them of
+shelter. Around her is the hum and stir of the city-building, a scene in
+which the sharp, precise touches of Vergil betray the hand of the
+town-poet. But within is the lonely heart of a woman. Dido, like Æneas,
+is a fugitive, an exile of bitter, vain regrets. Her husband, "loved
+with a mighty love," has fallen by a brother's hand; and his ghost, like
+that of Creusa, has driven her in flight from her Tyrian fatherland.
+Like Æneas too she is no solitary wanderer; she guides a new colony to
+the site of the future Carthage as he to the site of the future Rome.
+When Æneas stands before her, it is as a wanderer like herself. His
+heart is bleeding at the loss of Creusa, of Helen, of Troy. He is
+solitary in his despair. He is longing for the touch of a human hand,
+the sound of a voice of love. He is weary of being baffled by the
+ghostly embraces of his wife, by the cloud that wraps his mother from
+his view. He is weary of wandering, longing with all the old-world
+intensity of longing for a settled home. "O fortunati quorum jam moenia
+surgunt," he cries as he looks on the rising walls of Carthage. His
+gloom has been lightened indeed by the assurance of his fame which he
+gathers from the pictures of the great Defence graven on the walls of
+the Tyrian temple. But the loneliness and longing still press heavily on
+him when the cloud which has wrapt him from sight parts suddenly
+asunder, and Dido and Æneas stand face to face.
+
+Few situations in poetry are more artistic than this meeting of Æneas
+and the Queen in its suddenness and picturesqueness. A love born of pity
+speaks in the first words of the hero,[6] and the reply of Dido strikes
+the same sympathetic note.[7] But the fervour of passion is soon to
+supersede this compassionate regard. Love himself in the most exquisite
+episode of the Æneid takes the place of Ascanius; while the Trojan boy
+lies sleeping on Ida, lapped on Earth's bosom beneath the cool mountain
+shade, his divine "double" lies clasped to Dido's breast, and pours his
+fiery longings into her heart. Slowly, unconsciously, the lovers draw
+together. The gratitude of Æneas is still at first subordinate to his
+quest. "Thy name and praise shall live," he says to Dido, "whatever
+lands call me." In the same way, though the Queen's generosity has shown
+itself in her first offer to the sailors ("urbem quam statuo vestra
+est"), it is still generosity and not passion. Passion is born in the
+long night through which, with Eros still folded in her arms, Dido
+listens to the "Tale of Troy."
+
+The very verse quickens with the new pulse of love. The preface of the
+Æneid, the stately introduction that fortells the destinies of Rome and
+the divine end to which the fates were guiding Æneas, closes in fact
+with the appearance of Dido. The poem takes a gayer and lighter tone.
+The disguise and recognition of Venus as she appears to her son, the
+busy scene of city-building, the sudden revelation of Æneas to the
+Queen, have the note of exquisite romance. The honey-sweet of the
+lover's tale, to use the poet's own simile,[8] steals subtly on the
+graver epic. Step by step Vergil leads us on through every stage of
+pity, of fancy, of reverie, of restlessness, of passion, to the fatal
+close. None before him had painted the thousand delicate shades of
+love's advance; none has painted them more tenderly, more exquisitely
+since. As the Queen listens to the tale of her lover's escape she
+showers her questions as one that could never know enough.
+
+    "Multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa."
+
+Her passion feeds through sleepless nights on the recollection of his
+look, on the memory of his lightest words. Even the old love of Sychæus
+seems to revive in and blend with this new affection.[9] Her very
+queenliness delights to idealize her lover, to recognize in the hero
+before whom she falls "one of the race of the gods." For a while the
+figure of Dido is that of happy, insatiate passion. The rumours of war
+from the jealous chieftains about her fall idly on her ear. She hovers
+round her hero with sweet observances of love, she hangs at his side the
+jewelled sword and the robe of Tyrian purple woven by her queenly hands.
+
+But even in the happiest moments of his story the consummate art of the
+poet has prepared for the final catastrophe. Little words, like
+"misera," "infelix," "fati nescia," sound the first undertones of a woe
+to come, even amidst the joy of the first meeting or the glad tumult of
+the hunting-scene. The restlessness, the quick alternations of feeling
+in the hour of Dido's triumph, prepare us for the wild swaying of the
+soul from bitterest hate to pitiful affection in the hour of her agony.
+She is the first in the sensitiveness of her passion to catch the change
+in Æneas, and the storm of her indignation sweeps away the excuses of
+her lover, as the storm of her love had swept away his earlier resolve.
+All dignity, all queenliness breaks before the "fury of a woman
+scorned." She dashes herself against the rooted purpose of Æneas as the
+storm-winds, to use Vergil's image, dash themselves from this quarter
+and that against the rooted oak. The madness of her failure drives her
+through the streets like a Mænad in the nightly orgies of Cithæron; she
+flies at last to her chamber like a beast at bay, and gazes out
+distracted at the Trojan shipmen putting off busily from the shores. Yet
+ever and again the wild frenzy-bursts are broken by notes of the old
+pathetic tenderness. In the midst of her taunts and menaces she turns
+with a woman's delicacy to protest against her own violence, "heu,
+furiis incensa feror!" She humbles herself even to pray for a little
+respite, if but for a few hours.[10] She pleads her very loneliness; she
+catches as it were from Æneas the thought of the boy whose future he had
+pleaded as one cause of his departure and finds in it a plea for pity.
+
+Sometimes her agony is too terrible for speech; she can only answer with
+those "speechless eyes" with which her shade was once more to meet Æneas
+in the Elysian fields. But her wonderful energy forbids her to lie, like
+weaker women, crushed in her despair. She hurries her sister to the feet
+of her lover that nothing may be left untried. From the first she stakes
+her life on the issue; it is as one "about to die" that she prays Æneas
+not to leave her. When all has failed and hope itself deserts her the
+weariness of life gathers round and she "tires of the sight of day."
+
+Never have the mighty energies of unbridled human will been wrought up
+into a form of more surpassing beauty; never have they been set more
+boldly and sharply against the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
+self-control. If the tide of Dido's passion sweeps away for the moment
+the consciousness of a divine mission which has borne Æneas to the
+Tyrian shore, the consciousness lies still in the very heart of the man
+and revives at the new call of the gods. The call bids him depart at
+once; and without a struggle he "burns to depart." He stamps down and
+hides within the deep recesses of his heart the "care" that the wild
+entreaties of the woman he loved arouse within him; the life that had
+swung for an hour out of its course returns to its old bearings; once
+more Italy and his destiny become aim and fatherland, "hic amor, hæc
+patria est." Æneas bows to the higher will, and from that moment all
+that has turned him from his course is of the past. Dido becomes a part
+of his memory as of the things that were.[11]
+
+Æneas is as "resolute to depart" as Dido is "resolute to die." And in
+both the resolve lifts the soul out of its lower passion-life into a
+nobler air. The queen rises into her old queenliness as she passes
+"majestic to the grave;" and her last curse as the Tyrian ships quit
+her shore is no longer the wild imprecation of a frenzied woman; it is
+the mighty curse of the founder of a people calling down on the Roman
+race ages of inextinguishable hate. "Fight shore with shore: fight sea
+with sea!" is the prophecy of that struggle with Carthage which all but
+wrecked for a moment the destinies of Rome. But Vergil saw in the
+character of Dido herself a danger to Rome's future far greater than the
+sword of Hannibal. His very sense of the grandeur of Rome's destinies
+frees him from the vulgar self-confidence of meaner men. Throughout his
+poem he is haunted by the memories of civil war, by the sense of
+instability which clings to men who have grown up in the midst of
+revolutions. The grandest picture in the Æneid reflects the terror of
+that hour of suspense when the galleys of Augustus jostled against the
+galleys of Antony. From that moment, as Vergil's prescience foresaw, the
+dangers of Rome were to spring from a single source. Passion, greed,
+lawless self-seeking, personal ambition, the decay of the older Roman
+sense of unselfish duty, of that "pietas" which subordinated the
+interest of the individual man to the common interest of the state, this
+was henceforth to be the real enemy of Rome. More and more, as the Roman
+peace drew the world together, the temper of the East, the temper which
+Vergil has embodied in his sketch of Dido, would tell and tell fatally
+on the temper of the West. Orontes--to borrow Juvenal's phrase--was
+already flowing into Tiber, and the sterner virtues of the conquerors
+were growing hourly more distasteful beside the variety, the geniality,
+the passionate flush and impulse of the conquered.
+
+It was their common sense of this danger which drew together Vergil and
+the Emperor. It is easy to see throughout his poem what critics are
+accustomed to style a compliment to Augustus. But the loving admiration
+and reverence of Vergil had no need to stoop to the flattery of
+compliment. To him Augustus was in a deep and true sense the realization
+of that ideal Roman whom his song was meant to set in the forefront of
+Rome. When Antony in the madness of his enchantment forgot the high
+mission to which Rome was called, the spell had only been broken by the
+colder "piety" of Cæsar. To Vergil Augustus was the founder of a new
+Rome, the Æneas who after long wanderings across the strife of civil war
+had brought her into quiet waters and bound warring factions into a
+peaceful people. Vergil felt, as even we can feel so many ages later,
+the sense of a high mission, the calm silent recognition of a vast work
+to be done, which lifted the cold, passionless Imperator into greatness.
+It was the bidding of Augustus that had called him from his "rustic
+measure" to this song of Borne, and the thought of Augustus blended,
+whether he would or not, with that Rome of the future which seemed
+growing up under his hands. Unlike too as Vergil was to the Emperor,
+there was a common undertone of melancholy that drew the two men
+together. The wreck of the older faiths, the lingering doubt whether
+good was after all the strongest thing in the world, whether "the gods"
+were always on the side of justice and right, throws its gloom over the
+noblest passages of the Æneid. It is the same doubt, hardened by the
+temper of the man into a colder and more mocking scepticism, that sounds
+in the "plaudite et valete" of the deathbed of Augustus. The Emperor had
+played his part well, but it was a part that he could hardly persuade
+himself was real. All that wisdom and power could do had been done, but
+Augustus had no faith in the great fabric he had reared. Vergil drew
+faith in the fortunes of Rome from his own enthusiasm, but to him too
+the moral order of the world brought only the melancholy doubt of
+Hamlet. Everywhere we feel "the pity on't." The religious theory of the
+universe, the order of the world around him, jars at every step with his
+moral faith. Æneas is the reflection of a time out of joint. Everywhere
+among good men there was the same moral earnestness, the same stern
+resolve after nobleness and grandeur of life, and everywhere there was
+the same inability to harmonize this moral life with the experience of
+the world.
+
+A noble stoicism breathes in the character of Æneas, the virtue of the
+virtuous man, refined and softened by a poet's pitifulness, heightened
+above all by the lingering doubt whether there were any necessary
+connection between virtue and the divine order of things around it.
+
+    "Dî tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid
+    Usquam Justitia est et mens sibi conscia recti,
+    Præmia digna ferant!"
+
+The words glow, so to speak, with moral earnestness, but through them we
+feel the doubt whether, after all, uprightness and a good conscience
+were really the object of a divine care. Heaven had flown further off
+from earth than in the days of the Iliad. The laws of the universe, as
+time had revealed them, the current of human affairs, the very might of
+the colossal Empire in which the world of civilization found itself
+prisoned, all seemed to be dwarfing man. Man remained, the sad stern
+manhood of the Stoic, the spirit that breathes through the character of
+Æneas, enduring, baffled, yet full of a faith that the very storms that
+drove him from sea to sea were working out some mysterious and divine
+order. Man was greater than his fate:--
+
+         "Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur,
+    Quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est."
+
+There is the same sad Cato-like stoicism in the words with which Æneas
+addresses himself to his final combat:--
+
+    "Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
+    Fortunam ex aliis."
+
+But the "dîs aliter visum" meets us at every step. Ripheus is the most
+just and upright among the warriors of Troy, but he is the first to
+fall. An inscrutable mystery hangs around the order of the world. Men of
+harder, colder temper shrug their shoulders, and like Augustus repeat
+their "vanitas vanitatum" with a smile of contempt at the fools who take
+life in earnest. Nobler and more sensitive souls like that of Vergil
+carry about with them "the pity of it." It is this melancholy that
+flings its sad grace over the verse of the Æneid. We close it as we
+close the Idylls with the King's mournful cry in our ears. But the Roman
+stoicism is of harder and manlier stuff than the chivalrous spiritualism
+of Arthur. The ideal of the old world is of nobler, sterner tone than
+the ideal of the new. Even with death and ruin around him, and the
+mystery of the world darkening his soul, man remains man and master of
+his fate. The suffering and woe of the individual find amends in the
+greatness and welfare of the race. We pity, the wandering of Æneas, but
+his wanderings found the city. The dream of Arthur vanishes as the dark
+boat dies into a dot upon the mere; the dream of Æneas becomes Rome.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2]                     "Dextræ se parvus Iulus
+    Implicuit, sequiturque patrem non passibus æquis."
+
+    "His steps scarce matching with my stride."
+
+Mr. Conington's translation hardly renders the fond little touch of the
+Vergilian phrase, a phrase only possible to a lover of children.
+
+[3] "Me puer Ascanius, capitisque injuria cari,
+    Quem regno Hesperiæ fraudo et fatalibus arvis."
+
+[4]           "Quibus Hector ab oris
+    Expectate venis?"
+
+[5]           "Cur dextræ jungere dextram
+    Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"
+
+[6] "O sola infandos Trojæ miserata labores."
+
+[7] "Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco."
+
+[8] "Fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella."
+
+[9] "Agnosco veteris vestigia ammæ."
+
+[10] "Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori,
+     Dum mea me victam doceat fortuna dolere."
+
+[11] "Nec me meminisse pigebit Elissæ."
+
+
+
+
+TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+VENICE AND ROME.
+
+
+It is the strangeness and completeness of the contrast which makes one's
+first row from Venice to Torcello so hard to forget. Behind us the great
+city sinks slowly into a low line of domes and towers; around us, dotted
+here and there over the gleaming surface, are the orange sails of
+trailing market-boats; we skirt the great hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose
+boatmen bandy _lazzi_ and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a
+lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of
+brown sedge and brushwood, the tower of Torcello rises sharply against
+the sky. There is something weird and unearthly in the suddenness with
+which one passes from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred
+with soft lines of violet light and broken with reflections of wall and
+bell-tower, into this presence of desolation and death. A whole world
+seems to part those dreary flats broken with lifeless inlets, those
+patches of sodden fields flung shapelessly among sheets of sullen water,
+from the life and joy of the Grand Canal. And yet really to understand
+the origin of Venice, those ages of terror and flight and exile in which
+the Republic took its birth, we must study them at Torcello. It was from
+the vast Alpine chain which hangs in the haze of midday like a long dim
+cloud-line to the north that the hordes of Hun and Goth burst on the
+Roman world. Their path lay, along the coast trending round to the west,
+where lost among little villages that stand out white in the distant
+shadow lie the sites of Heraclea and Altinum. Across these grey shallows
+cut by the blue serpentine windings of deeper channels the Romans of the
+older province of Venetia on the mainland fled before Attila or
+Theodoric or Alboin to found the new Venetia of the lagoon. Eastward
+over Lido the glimmer of the Adriatic recalls the long centuries of the
+Pirate war, that, struggle for life which shaped into their after-form
+the government and destinies of the infant state. Venice itself, the
+crown and end of struggle and of flight, lies over shining miles of
+water to the south. But it is here that one can best study the story of
+its birth; it is easier to realize those centuries of exile and
+buffeting for life amid the dreary flats, the solitude, the poverty of
+Torcello than beneath the gleaming front of the Ducal Palace or the
+mosaics of St. Mark.
+
+Here in fact lies the secret of Venetian history, the one key by which
+it is possible to understand the strange riddle of the Republic. For
+thirteen centuries Venice lay moored as it were off the coast of Western
+Europe, without political analogue or social parallel. Its patriciate,
+its people, its government were not what government or people or
+patriciate were in other countries of Western Christendom. The
+difference lay not in any peculiar institutions which it had developed,
+or in any novel form of social or administrative order which it had
+invented, but in the very origin of the State itself. We see this the
+better if we turn from Venice to our own homeland. The same age saw the
+birth of the two great maritime Powers of modern Europe, for the
+settlements of the English in Britain cover the same century with those
+of the Roman exiles in the Venetian Lagoon. But the English
+colonization was the establishment of a purely Teutonic State on the
+wreck of Rome, while the Venetian was the establishment of a purely
+Roman State in the face of the Teuton. Venice in its origin was simply
+the Imperial province of Venetia floated across to the islands of the
+shore. Before the successive waves of the northern inroad the citizens
+of the coast fled to the sandbanks which had long served them as gardens
+or merchant-ports. The "Chair of Attila," the rough stone seat beside
+the church of San Fosco, preserves the memory of one destroyer before
+whom a third part of the people of Altinum fled to Torcello and the
+islands around. Their city--even materially--passed with them. The new
+houses were built from the ruins of the old. The very stones of Altinum
+served for the "New Altinum" which arose on the desolate isle, and
+inscriptions, pillars, capitals came in the track of the exiles across
+the lagoon to be worked into the fabric of its cathedral.
+
+Neither citizens nor city were changed even in name. They had put out
+for security a few miles to sea, but the sandbanks on which they landed
+were still Venetia. The fugitive patricians were neither more nor less
+citizens of the imperial province because they had fled from Padua or
+Altinum to Malamocco or Torcello. Their political allegiance was still
+due to the Empire. Their social organization remained unaffected by the
+flight. So far were they from being severed from Rome, so far from
+entertaining any dreams of starting afresh in the "new democracy" which
+exists in the imagination of Daru and his followers, that the one boast
+of their annalists is that they are more Roman than the Romans
+themselves. Their nobles looked with contempt on the barbaric blood
+which had tainted that of the Colonnas or the Orsini, nor did any
+Isaurian peasant ever break the Roman line of Doges as Leo broke the
+line of Roman Emperors. Venice--as she proudly styled herself in after
+time--was "the legitimate daughter of Rome." The strip of sea-board from
+the Brenta to the Isonzo was the one spot in the Empire from the Caspian
+to the Atlantic where foot of barbarian never trod. And as it rose, so
+it set. From that older world of which it was a part the history of
+Venice stretched on to the French Revolution untouched by Teutonic
+influences. The old Roman life which became strange even to the Capitol
+lingered unaltered, unimpaired, beside the palace of the duke. The
+strange ducal cap, the red ducal slippers, the fan of bright feathers
+borne before the ducal chair, all came unchanged from ages when they
+were the distinctions of every great officer of the Imperial State. It
+is startling to think that almost within the memory of living men Venice
+brought Rome--the Rome of Ambrose and Theodosius--to the very doors of
+the Western world; that the living and unchanged tradition of the Empire
+passed away only with the last of the Doges. Only on the tomb of Manin
+could men write truthfully, "Hic jacet ultimus Romanorum."
+
+It is this simple continuance of the old social organization which the
+barbarians elsewhere overthrew that explains the peculiar character of
+the Venetian patriciate. In all other countries of the West the new
+feudal aristocracy sprang from the Teutonic invaders. In Italy itself
+the nobles were descendants of Lombard conquerors, or of the barons who
+followed Emperor after Emperor across the Alps. Even when their names
+and characters had alike been moulded into Southern form, the "Seven
+Houses" of Pisa boasted of their descent from the seven barons of
+Emperor Otto. But the older genealogies of the senators whose names
+stood written in the Golden Book of Venice ran, truly or falsely, not to
+Teutonic but to Roman origins. The Participazii, the Dandoli, the
+Falieri, the Foscari, told of the flight of their Roman fathers before
+the barbarian sword from Pavia, Gaeta, Fano, Messina. Every quarter of
+Italy had given its exiles, but above all the coast round the head of
+the Gulf from Ravenna to Trieste. It was especially a flight and
+settlement of nobles. As soon as the barbaric hordes had swept away to
+the South the farmer or the peasant would creep back to his fields and
+his cabin and submit to the German master whom the conquest had left
+behind it. But the patrician had filled too great a place in the old
+social order to stoop easily to the new. He remained camped as before in
+his island-refuge, among a crowd of dependents, his fishermen, his
+dock-labourers. Throughout the long ages which followed, this original
+form of Venetian society remained unchanged. The populace of dependents
+never grew into a people. To the last fisherman and gondolier clung to
+the great houses of which they were the clients, as the fishers of
+Torcello had clung to the great nobles of Altinum. No difference of
+tradition or language or blood parted them. Tradition, on the contrary,
+bound them together. No democratic agitator could appeal from the
+present to the past, as Rienzi invoked the memories of the Tribunate
+against the feudal tyranny of the Colonnas. In Venice the past and
+present were one. The patrician of Venice simply governed the State as
+his fathers, the curials of Padua or Aquileia, had governed the State
+ten centuries before him.
+
+It is this unity of Venetian society which makes Venetian history so
+unlike the history of other Italian towns, and to which Venice owes the
+peculiar picturesqueness and brightness which charms us still in its
+decay. Elsewhere the history of mediæval Italy sprang from the
+difference of race and tradition between conquered and conquerors,
+between Lombard noble and Italian serf. The communal revolt of the
+twelfth century, the democratic constitutions of Milan or of Bologna,
+were in effect a rising of race against race, the awakening of a new
+people in the effort to throw off the yoke of the stranger. The huge
+embattled piles which flung their dark shadows over the streets of
+Florence tell of the ceaseless war between baronage and people. The
+famous penalty by which some of the democratic communes condemned a
+recreant cobbler or tinker to "descend" as his worst punishment "into
+the order of the _noblesse_," tells of the hate and issue of the
+struggle between them. But no trace of struggle or of hate breaks the
+annals of Venice. There is no people, no democratic Broletto, no Hall of
+the Commune. And as there was no "people," so in the mediæval sense of
+the word there was no "baronage." The nobles of Venice were not Lombard
+barons but Roman patricians, untouched by feudal traditions or by the
+strong instinct of personal independence which created feudalism. The
+shadow of the Empire is always over them, they look for greatness not to
+independent power or strife, but to joint co-operation in the government
+of the State. Their instinct is administrative, they shrink from
+disorder as from a barbaric thing, they are citizens, and nobles only
+because they are citizens. Of this political attitude of its patricians
+Venice is itself the type. The palaces of Torcello or Rialto were
+houses, not of war, but of peace; no dark masses of tower and wall, but
+bright with marbles and frescoes, and broken with arcades of fretted
+masonry.
+
+Venice, in a word, to her very close was a city of nobles, the one
+place in the modern world where the old senatorial houses of the fifth
+century lived and ruled as of old. But it was a city of Roman nobles.
+Like the Teutonic passion for war the Teutonic scorn of commerce was
+strange and unknown to the curial houses of the Italian municipalities,
+as it had been strange and unknown to the greatest houses of Rome. The
+Senator of Padua or Aquileia, of Concordia, Altinum, or Ravenna, had
+always been a merchant, and in his new refuge he remained a merchant
+still. Venice was no "crowd of poor fishermen," as it has been sometimes
+described, who were gradually drawn to wider ventures and a larger
+commerce. The port of Aquileia had long been the emporium of a trade
+which reached northwards to the Danube and eastward to Byzantium. What
+the Roman merchants of Venetia had been at Aquileia they remained at
+Grado. The commerce of Altinum simply transferred itself to Torcello.
+The Paduan merchants passed to their old port of Rialto. Vague and
+rhetorical as is the letter of Cassiodorus, it shows how keen was the
+mercantile activity of the State from its beginning. Nothing could be
+more natural, more continuous in its historical developement; nothing
+was more startling, more incomprehensible to the new world which had
+grown up in German moulds. The nobles of Henry VIII.'s Court could not
+restrain their sneer at "the fishermen of Venice," the stately
+patricians who could look back from merchant-noble to merchant-noble
+through ages when the mushroom houses of England were unheard of. Only
+the genius of Shakspere seized the grandeur of a social organization
+which was still one with that of Rome and Athens and Tyre. The merchant
+of Venice is with him "a royal merchant." His "argosies o'ertop the
+petty traffickers." At the moment when feudalism was about to vanish
+away, the poet comprehended the grandeur of that commerce which it
+scorned and the grandeur of the one State which had carried the nobler
+classic tradition across ages of brutality and ignorance. The great
+commercial State, whose merchants are nobles, whose nobles are Romans,
+rises in all its majesty before us in the 'Merchant of Venice.'
+
+
+
+
+
+TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+VENICE AND TINTORETTO.
+
+
+The fall of Venice dates from the League of Cambray, but her victory
+over the crowd of her assailants was followed by half a century of peace
+and glory such as she had never known. Her losses on the mainland were
+in reality a gain, enforcing as they did the cessation of that policy of
+Italian aggression which had eaten like a canker into the resources of
+the State and drawn her from her natural career of commerce and
+aggrandizement on the sea. If the political power of Venice became less,
+her political influence grew greater than ever. The statesmen of France,
+of England, and of Germany studied in the cool, grave school of her
+Senate. We need only turn to 'Othello' to find reflected the universal
+reverence for the wisdom of her policy and the order of her streets. No
+policy, however wise, could indeed avert her fall. The Turkish
+occupation of Egypt and the Portuguese discovery of a sea route round
+the Cape of Good Hope were destined to rob the Republic of that trade
+with the East which was the life-blood of its commerce. But, though the
+blow was already dealt, its effects were for a time hardly discernible.
+On the contrary, the accumulated wealth of centuries poured itself out
+in an almost riotous prodigality. A new Venice, a Venice of loftier
+palaces, of statelier colonnades, rose under Palladio and Sansovino
+along the line of its canals. In the deep peace of the sixteenth
+century, a peace unbroken even by religious struggles (for Venice was
+the one State exempt from the struggle of the Reformation), literature
+and art won their highest triumphs. The press of the Aldi gave for the
+first time the masterpieces of Greek poetry to Europe. The novels of
+Venice furnished plots for our own drama, and became the origin of
+modern fiction. Painting reached its loftiest height in Giorgione,
+Titian, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese.
+
+The greatest of colourists sprang from a world of colour. Faded, ruined
+as the city is now, the frescoes of Giorgione swept from its palace
+fronts by the sea-wind, its very gondoliers bare and ragged, the glory
+of its sunsets alone remains vivid as of old. But it is not difficult to
+restore the many-hued Venice out of which its painters sprang. There are
+two pictures by Carpaccio in the Accademia which bring back vividly its
+physical aspect. The scene of the first, the 'Miracle of the Patriarch
+of Grado' as it is called, lies on the Grand Canal immediately in front
+of the Rialto. It is the hour of sunset, and darker-edged clouds are
+beginning to fleck the golden haze of the west which still arches over
+the broken sky-line, roof and turret and bell-tower and chimneys of
+strange fashion with quaint conical tops. The canal lies dusk in the
+eventide, but the dark surface throws into relief a crowd of gondolas,
+and the lithe, glowing figures of their gondoliers. The boats themselves
+are long and narrow as now, but without the indented prora which has
+become universal; the sumptuary law of the Republic has not yet robbed
+them of colour, and instead of the present "coffin" we see canopies of
+gaily-hued stuffs supported on four light pillars. The gondolier himself
+is commonly tricked out in almost fantastic finery; red cap with long
+golden curls flowing down over the silken doublet, slashed hose, the
+light dress displaying those graceful attitudes into which the rower
+naturally falls. On the left side of the canal its white marble steps
+are crowded with figures of the nobler Venetian life; a black robe here
+or there breaking the gay variety of golden and purple and red and blue,
+while in the balcony above a white group of clergy, with golden
+candlesticks towering overhead, are gathered round the dæmoniac whose
+cure forms the subject of the picture.
+
+But the most noteworthy point in it is the light it throws on the
+architectural aspect of Venice at the close of the fifteenth century. On
+the right the houses are wholly of mediæval type, the flat
+marble-sheeted fronts pierced with trefoil-headed lights; one of them
+splendid with painted arabesques dipping at its base into the very
+waters of the canal and mounting up to enwreathe in intricate patterns
+the very chimney of the roof. The left is filled by a palace of the
+early Renascence, but the change of architectural style, though it has
+modified the tone and extent of colour, is far from dismissing it
+altogether. The flat pilasters which support the round arches of its
+base are sheeted with a delicately-tinged marble; the flower-work of
+their capitals and the mask enclosed within it are gilded like the
+continuous billet moulding which runs round in the hollow of each arch,
+while the spandrils are filled in with richer and darker marbles, each
+broken with a central medallion of gold. The use of gold indeed seems a
+"note" of the colouring of the early Renascence; a broad band of gold
+wreathes the two rolls beneath and above the cornice, and lozenges of
+gold light up the bases of the light pillars in the colonnade above. In
+another picture of Carpaccio, the 'Dismissal of the Ambassadors,' one
+sees the same principles of colouring extended to the treatment of
+interiors. The effect is obtained partly by the contrast of the lighter
+marbles with those of deeper colour or with porphyry, partly by the
+contrast of both with gold. Everywhere, whether in the earlier buildings
+of mediæval art or in the later efforts of the Renascence, Venice seemed
+to clothe itself in robes of Oriental splendour, and to pour over
+Western art before its fall the wealth and gorgeousness of the East.
+
+Of the four artist-figures who--in the tradition of Tintoret's
+picture--support this "Golden Calf" of Venice, Tintoret himself is the
+one specially Venetian. Giorgione was of Castel Franco; Titian came from
+the mountains of Cadore; Paolo from Verona. But Jacopo Robusti, the
+"little dyer," the Tintoretto, was born, lived, and died in Venice. His
+works, rare elsewhere, crowd its churches, its palaces, its galleries.
+Its greatest art-building is the shrine of his faith. The school of San
+Rocco has rightly been styled by Mr. Ruskin "one of the three most
+precious buildings in the world"; it is the one spot where all is
+Tintoret. Few contrasts are at first sight more striking than the
+contrast between the building of the Renascence which contains his forty
+masterpieces and the great mediæval church of the Frari which stands
+beside it. But a certain oneness after all links the two buildings
+together. The Friars had burst on the caste spirit of the middle age,
+its mere classification of brute force, with the bold recognition of
+human equality which ended in the socialism of Wyclif and the Lollards.
+Tintoret found himself facing a new caste-spirit in the Renascence, a
+classification of mankind founded on æsthetic refinement and
+intellectual power; and it is hard not to see in the greatest of his
+works a protest as energetic as theirs for the common rights of men.
+Into the grandeur of the Venice about him, her fame, her wealth, her
+splendour, none could enter more vividly. He rises to his best painting,
+as Mr. Ruskin has observed, when his subjects are noble--doges, saints,
+priests, senators clad in purple and jewels and gold. But Tintoret is
+never quite Veronese. He cannot be untrue to beauty, and the pomps and
+glories of earth are beautiful to him; but there is a beauty too in
+earth, in man himself. The brown half-naked gondolier lies stretched on
+the marble steps which the Doge in one of his finest pictures has
+ascended. It is as if he had stripped off the stately robe and the ducal
+cap, and shown the soul of Venice in the bare child of the lagoons. The
+"want of dignity" which some have censured in his scenes from the
+Gospels is in them just as it is in the Gospels themselves. Here, as
+there, the poetry lies in the strange, unearthly mingling of the
+commonest human life with the sublimest divine. In his 'Last Supper,' in
+San Giorgio Maggiore, the apostles are peasants; the low, mean life of
+the people is there, but hushed and transfigured by the tall standing
+figure of the Master who bends to give bread to the disciple by His
+side. And above and around crowd in the legions of heaven, cherubim and
+seraphim mingling their radiance with the purer radiance from the halo
+of their Lord; while amid all this conflict of celestial light the
+twinkling candles upon the board burn on, and the damsel who enters
+bearing food, bathed as she is in the very glory of heaven, is busy,
+unconscious--a serving-maid, and nothing more.
+
+The older painters had seen something undivine in man; the colossal
+mosaic, the tall unwomanly Madonna, expressed the sense of the Byzantine
+artist that to be divine was to be unhuman. The Renascence, with little
+faith in God, had faith in man, but only in the might and beauty and
+knowledge of man. With Tintoret the common life of man is ever one with
+heaven. This was the faith which he flung on "acres of canvas" as
+ungrudgingly as apostle ever did, toiling and living as apostles lived
+and toiled. This was the faith he found in Old Testament and New, in
+saintly legend or in national history. In the 'Annunciation' at San
+Rocco a great bow of angels streaming either way from the ethereal Dove
+sweeps into a ruined hut, a few mean chairs its only furniture, the mean
+plaster dropping from the bare brick pilasters; without, Joseph at work
+unheeding, amid piles of worthless timber flung here and there. So in
+the 'Adoration of the Magi' the mother wonders with a peasant's wonder
+at the jewels and gold. Again, the 'Massacre of the Innocents' is one
+wild, horror-driven rush of pure motherhood, reckless of all in its
+clutch at its babe. So in the splendour of his 'Circumcision' it is from
+the naked child that the light streams on the High Priest's brow, on the
+mighty robe of purple and gold held up by stately forms like a vast
+banner behind him. The peasant mother to whose poorest hut that first
+stir of child-life has brought a vision of angels, who has marvelled at
+the wealth of precious gifts which a babe brings to her breast, who has
+felt the sword piercing her own bosom also as danger threatened it, on
+whose mean world her child has flung a glory brighter than glory of
+earth, is the truest critic of Tintoret.
+
+What Shakespere was to the national history of England in his great
+series of historic dramas, his contemporary Tintoret was to the history
+of Venice. It was perhaps from an unconscious sense that her annals were
+really closed that the Republic began to write her history and her
+exploits in the series of paintings which covers the walls of the Ducal
+Palace. Her apotheosis is like that of the Roman Emperors; it is when
+death has fallen upon her that her artists raise her into a divine form,
+throned amid heavenly clouds and crowned by angel hands with the laurel
+wreath of victory. It is no longer St. Mark who watches over Venice, it
+is Venice herself who bends from heaven to bless boatman and senator. In
+the divine figure of the Republic with which Tintoret filled the central
+cartoon of the Great Hall every Venetian felt himself incarnate. His
+figure of 'Venice' in the Senate Hall is yet nobler; the blue sea-depths
+are cleft open, and strange ocean-shapes wave their homage and yet more
+unearthly forms dart up with tribute of coral and pearls to the feet of
+the Sea Queen as she sits in the silken state of the time with the
+divine halo around her. But if from this picture in the roof the eye
+falls suddenly on the fresco which fills the close of the room, we can
+hardly help reading the deeper comment of Tintoret on the glory of the
+State. The Sala del Consiglio is the very heart of Venice. In the double
+row of plain seats running round it sat her nobles; on the raised dais
+at the end, surrounded by the graver senators, sat her duke. One long
+fresco occupies the whole wall above the ducal seat; in the background
+the blue waters of the Lagoon with the towers and domes of Venice rising
+from them; around a framework of six bending saints; in front two
+kneeling Doges in full ducal robes with a black curtain of clouds
+between them. The clouds roll back to reveal a mighty glory, and in the
+heart of it the livid figure of a dead Christ taken from the cross. Not
+one eye of all the nobles gathered in council could have lifted itself
+from the figure of the Doge without falling on the figure of the dead
+Christ. Strange as the conception is it is hard to believe that in a
+mind so peculiarly symbolical as that of Tintoret the contrast could
+have been without a definite meaning. And if this be so, it is a meaning
+that one can hardly fail to read in the history of the time. The brief
+interval of peace and glory had passed away ere Tintoret's brush had
+ceased to toil. The victory of Lepanto had only gilded that disgraceful
+submission to the Turk which preluded the disastrous struggle in which
+her richest possessions were to be wrested from the Republic. The
+terrible plague of 1576 had carried off Titian. Twelve years after
+Titian Paul Veronese passed away. Tintoret, born almost at its opening,
+lingered till the very close of the century to see Venice sinking into
+powerlessness and infamy and decay. May not the figure of the dead
+Christ be the old man's protest against a pride in which all true
+nobleness and effort had ceased to live, and which was hurrying to so
+shameful a fall?
+
+
+
+
+THE DISTRICT VISITOR.
+
+
+It would be hard to define exactly the office and duties of the District
+Visitor. Historically she is the direct result of the Evangelical
+movement which marked the beginning of this century; the descendant of
+the "devout women not a few" who played, like Hannah More, the part of
+mothers in Israel to the Simeons and Wilberforces of the time. But the
+mere tract-distributor of fifty years ago has grown into a parochial and
+ecclesiastical force of far greater magnitude. The District Visitor of
+to-day is parson and almoner in one; the parochial censor of popular
+morals, the parochial instructor in domestic economy. She claims the
+same right as the vicar to knock at every door and obtain admission into
+every house. But once within it her scope of action is far larger than
+the parson's. To the spiritual influence of the tract or "the chapter"
+she adds the more secular and effective power of the bread-ticket. "The
+way to the heart of the poor," as she pithily puts it, "lies through
+their stomachs." Her religious exhortations are backed by scoldings and
+fussiness. She is eloquent upon rags and tatters, and severe upon dirty
+floors. She flings open the window and lectures her flock on the
+advantages of fresh air. She hurries little Johnny off to school and
+gets Sally out to service. She has a keen nose for drains and a passion
+for clean hands and faces. What worries her most is the fatalism and
+improvidence of the poor. She is full of exhortations to "lay by" for
+the rainy day, and seductive in her praises of the Penny Bank. The whole
+life of the family falls within her supervision. She knows the wages of
+the husband and the occasional jobs of the wife. She inquires what there
+is for dinner and gives wise counsels on economical cookery. She has her
+theory as to the hour when children ought to be in bed, and fetches in
+Tommy, much weeping, from the last mud-pie of sunset. Only "the master"
+himself lies outside of her rule. Between the husband and the District
+Visitor there exists a sort of armed neutrality. Her visits are
+generally paid when he is at work. If she arrives when he happens to be
+at home, he calls for "missus," and retires sheepishly to the 'Blue
+Boar.' The energetic Dorcas who fixes him in a corner gets little for
+her pains. He "supposes" that "missus" knows where and when the children
+go to school, and that "missus" may some day or other be induced to go
+to church. But the theory of the British labourer is that with his home
+or his family, their religion or their education, he has nothing
+personally to do. And so he has nothing to do with the District Visitor.
+His only demand is that she should let him alone, and the wise District
+Visitor soon learns, as parson and curate have long learnt, to let him
+alone.
+
+Like theirs, her work lies with wife and children, and as we have seen
+it is of far wider scope even here than the work of the clergy. But,
+fussy and dictatorial as she is, the District Visitor is as a rule more
+popular than the clergyman. In the first place, the parson is only doing
+a duty he is bound to do while the District Visitor is a volunteer. The
+parson, as the poor roughly say, is paid for it. Again, however
+simple-hearted and courteous he may be, he never gets very close home to
+the poor. Their life is not his life, nor their ways his ways. They do
+not understand his refinement, his delicacy about interference, his
+gentlemanly reticence, his abhorrence of gossip and scandal. They are
+accustomed to be ordered about, to rough words, to gossip over their
+neighbours. And so the District Visitor is "more in their way," as they
+tell her. She is profuse of questions, routing out a thousand little
+details that no parson would ever know. She has little of the sensitive
+pride that hinders the vicar from listening to scandal, or of the manly
+objection to "telling tales" which hurries him out of the room when
+neighbour brings charges against neighbour. She is entirely unaffected
+by his scruples against interference with the conscience or religion of
+the poor. "Where do you go to church?" and "Why don't you go to church?"
+are her first stock questions in her cross-examination of every family.
+Her exhortations at the sick-bed have a somewhat startling
+peremptoriness about them. We can hardly wonder at the wish of a poor
+patient that she were a rich one, because then she could "die in peace,
+and have nobody to come in and pray over her." What irritates the
+District Visitor in cases where she has bestowed special religious
+attention is that people when so effectively prepared for death "won't
+die." But hard, practical action such as this does not jostle against
+the feelings of the poor as it would against our own. Women especially
+forgive all because the District Visitor listens as well as talks. They
+could no more pour out their little budget of domestic troubles to the
+parson than to a being from another world. But the District Visitor is
+the recipient of all. The washerwoman stops her mangle to talk about the
+hard times and the rise of a halfpenny on the loaf. The matron next door
+turns up her sleeve to show the bruise her husband bestowed on her on
+his return from the 'Chequers.' She enters largely and minutely into the
+merits and defects of her partner's character, and protests with a
+subtle discrimination that "he's a good father when he ain't bothered
+with the children, and a good husband when he's off the drink." The old
+widow down the lane is waiting for "the lady" to write a letter for her
+to her son in Australia, and to see the "pictur," the cheap photograph
+of the grandchildren she has never seen or will see, that John has sent
+home. A girl home from her "place" wants the District Visitor to
+intercede with her mistress, and listens in all humility to a lecture on
+her giddiness and love of finery.
+
+The society in fact of the little alley is very much held together by
+the District Visitor. In her love of goody gossip she fulfils the office
+which in an Italian town is filled by the barber. She retails
+tittle-tattle for the highest ends. She relates Mrs. A.'s misdemeanour
+for the edification and correction of Mrs. B. She has the true version
+of the quarrel between Smith and his employer. She is the one person to
+whom the lane looks for accurate information as to the domestic
+relations of the two Browns, whose quarrels are the scandal of the
+neighbourhood. Her influence in fact over the poor is a strange mixture
+of good and evil, of real benevolence with an interference that saps all
+sense of self-respect, of real sympathy and womanly feeling with a good
+deal of womanly meddling, curiosity, and babble.
+
+But her influence on the parish at large is a far more delicate
+question. To the outer world a parish seems a sheer despotism. The
+parson prays, preaches, changes the order of service, distributes the
+parochial charities at his simple discretion. One of the great cries of
+the Church reformer is generally for the substitution of some
+constitutional system, some congregational council, some lay
+co-operation, for this clerical tyranny. But no one in fact feels the
+narrow limits of his power more keenly than the parson himself. As the
+old French monarchy was a despotism tempered by epigrams, so the rule of
+a parish is a despotism tempered by parochial traditions, by the
+observation of neighbouring clergymen, by the suggestions of the squire,
+by the opposition of churchwardens, by the hints and regrets of
+"Constant Attendants," by the state of the pew-letting or the ups and
+downs of the offertory, by the influences of local opinion, by the
+censorship of the District Visitor. What the assembly of his "elders" is
+to a Scotch minister, the District Visitors' meeting is to the English
+clergyman. He has to prove in the face of a standing jealousy that his
+alms have been equally distributed between district and district. His
+selection of tracts is freely criticised. Mrs. A. regrets that her poor
+people have seen so little of their vicar lately. Mrs. B. is sorry to
+report the failure of her attempts to get her sheep to church, in face
+of the new Ritualistic developement, the processions, and the surplices.
+Mrs. C., whose forte is education, declines any longer to induce mothers
+to send their children to "such" a master. The curates shudder as Mrs.
+D. laments their frequent absence from the Penny Bank, not that they can
+do any good there, but "we are always glad of the presence and sympathy
+of our clergy." The curates promise amendment of life. The vicar engages
+to look out for another schoolmaster, and be more diligent in his
+attentions to Muck Lane. A surreptitious supply of extra tickets to the
+ultra-Protestant appeases for the moment her wrath against the choir
+surplices. But the occasional screw of the monthly meeting is as nothing
+to the daily pressure applied by the individual District Visitor. At the
+bottom of every alley the vicar runs up against a parochial censor. The
+"five minutes' conversation" which the District Visitor expects as the
+reward of her benevolence becomes a perpetual trickle of advice,
+remonstrance, and even reproof. A strong-minded parson of course soon
+makes himself master of his District Visitors, but the ordinary vicar
+generally feels that his District Visitors are masters of him. The harm
+that comes of this feminine despotism is the feminine impress it leaves
+on the whole aspect of the parish. Manly preaching disappears before the
+disappointed faces the preacher encounters on Monday. A policy of
+expedients and evasions takes the place of any straightforward attempt
+to meet or denounce local evils. The vicar's time and energy are
+frittered away on a thousand little jealousies and envyings, his temper
+is tried in humouring one person and conciliating another, he learns to
+be cautious and reserved and diplomatic, to drop hints and suggestions,
+to become in a word the first District Visitor of his parish. He flies
+to his wife for protection, and finds in her the most effective buffer
+against parochial collisions. Greek meets Greek when the vicar's wife
+meets the District Visitor. But the vicar himself sinks into a parochial
+nobody, a being as sacred and as powerless as the Lama of Thibet.
+
+It was hardly to be expected that the progress of religion and
+charitable feeling should fail to raise up formidable rivals to the
+District Visitor. To the more ecclesiastical mind she is hardly
+ecclesiastical enough for the prominent part she claims in the parochial
+system. Her lace and Parisian bonnet are an abomination. She has a trick
+of being terribly Protestant, and her Protestantism is somewhat
+dictatorial. On the other hand, to the energetic organizer whose ideal
+of a parish is a well-oiled machine turning out piety and charity
+without hitches or friction she is simply a parochial impediment. She
+has no system. Her visiting days are determined by somewhat eccentric
+considerations. Her almsgiving is regulated by no principle whatever.
+She carries silly likes and dislikes into her work among the poor. She
+rustles into wrath at any attempt to introduce order into her efforts,
+and regards it as a piece of ungrateful interference. She is always
+ready with threats of resignation, with petty suspicions of
+ill-treatment, with jealousies of her fellow-workers. We can hardly
+wonder that in ecclesiastical quarters she is retreating before the
+Sister of Mercy, while in the more organized parishes she is being
+superseded by the Deaconess. The Deaconess has nothing but contempt for
+the mere "volunteer" movement in charity. She has a strong sense of
+order and discipline, and a hatred of "francs-tireurs." Above all she is
+a woman of business. She is without home or child, and her time and
+labour are arranged with military precision. She has her theory of the
+poor and of what can be done for the poor, and she rides her hobby from
+morning to night with an equal contempt for the sentimental almsgiving
+of the District Visitor and for the warnings of the political economist.
+No doubt an amazing deal of good is done, but it is done in a
+methodical fashion that is a little trying to ordinary flesh and blood.
+The parish is elaborately tabulated. The poor are grouped and ticketed.
+The charitable agencies of the parish are put in connection with the
+hospital and the workhouse. This case is referred to the dispensary,
+that to the overseer. The Deaconess prides herself on not being "taken
+in." The washerwoman finds that her "outdoor allowance" has been
+ascertained and set off against her share in the distribution of alms.
+The pious old woman who has played off the charity of the church against
+the charity of the chapel is struck off the list. The miserable creature
+who drags out existence on a bit of bread and a cup of tea is kindly but
+firmly advised to try "the house." Nothing can be wiser, nothing more
+really beneficial to the poor, than the work of the Deaconess, but it is
+a little dry and mechanical. The ill-used wife of the drunkard sighs
+after the garrulous sympathy of the District Visitor. The old gossip and
+dawdle have disappeared from the parochial charity, but with them has
+gone a good deal of the social contact, the sympathy of rich with poor,
+in which its chief virtue lay. The very vicar sighs after a little
+human imperfection and irregularity as he reads the list of sick cases
+"to be visited this morning."
+
+The one lingering touch of feminine weakness in the Deaconess comes out
+in her relations with the clergy. The Deaconess is not a "Sister"--she
+is most precise in enforcing the distinction--but she is a woman with a
+difference. She has not retired from the world, but a faint flavour of
+the nun hangs about her. She has left behind all thought of coquetry,
+but she prefers to work with a married clergyman. Her delicacy can just
+endure a celibate curate, but it shrinks aghast from a bachelor
+incumbent. We know a case where a bishop, anxious to retain a Deaconess
+in a poor parish, was privately informed that her stay would depend on
+the appointment of a married clergyman to the vacant living. On the
+other hand, a married clergyman is as great a trial to the Sister of
+Mercy as an unmarried one to the Deaconess. The "Sister" idealizes the
+priesthood as she idealizes the poor. Their poverty is a misfortune;
+their improvidence an act of faith; their superstition the last ray of
+poetic religion lingering in this world of scepticism and commonplace.
+All the regularity and sense of order which exists in the Sister's mind
+is concentrated on her own life in the sisterhood; she is punctilious
+about her "hours," and lives in a perpetual tinkle of little bells. But
+in her work among the poor she revolts from system or organization. She
+hates the workhouse. She looks upon a guardian or an overseer as an
+oppressor of the poor. She regards theories of pauperism as something
+very wicked and irreligious, and lavishes her alms with a perfect faith
+that good must come of it. In a word, she is absolutely unwise, but
+there is a poetry in her unwisdom that contrasts strangely with the
+sensible prose of the Deaconess. While the one enters in her book of
+statistics the number of uneducated children, the other is trotting
+along the street with little Tommy in one hand and little Polly in the
+other on their way to the school. She has washed their faces and tidied
+their hair, and believes she has done service to little angels. Tommy
+and Polly are very far from being angels, but both sides are the happier
+for the romantic hypothesis. There is a good deal of romance and
+sentiment in the Sister's view of her work among the poor; but it is a
+romance that nerves her to a certain grandeur of soul. A London
+clergyman in whose district the black fever had broken out could get no
+nurses among the panic-stricken neighbours. He telegraphed to a "Home,"
+and next morning he found a ladylike girl on her knees on the floor of
+the infected house, scrubbing, cleaning, putting the worn-out mother to
+bed, hushing the children, nursing quietly and thoroughly as few nurses
+could do. The fever was beaten, and the little heroine went off at the
+call of another telegram to charge another battery of death. It is this
+chivalrous poetic side that atones for the many follies of Sisterhoods;
+for the pauperism they introduce among the poor, the cliqueism of their
+inner life, the absurdities of their "holy obedience." Each of these
+charitable agencies in fact has its work to do, and does it in its own
+way. On paper there can be no doubt that the Sister of Mercy is the more
+attractive figure of the three. The incumbent of a heavy parish will
+probably turn with a smile to the more methodical labours of the
+Deaconess. But those who shrink alike from the idealism of one and the
+system of the other, who feel that the poor are neither angels nor
+wheels in a machine, and that the chief work to be done among them is
+the diffusion of kindly feeling and the drawing of class nearer to
+class, will probably prefer to either the old-fashioned District
+Visitor.
+
+
+
+
+THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD.
+
+
+To most Oxford men, indeed to the common visitor of Oxford, the town
+seems a mere offshoot of the University. Its appearance is altogether
+modern; it presents hardly any monument that can vie in antiquity with
+the venerable fronts of colleges and halls. An isolated church here and
+there tells a different tale; but the largest of its parish churches is
+best known as the church of the University, and the church of St.
+Frideswide, which might suggest even to a careless observer some idea of
+the town's greatness before University life began, is known to most
+visitors simply as Christchurch Chapel. In all outer seeming Oxford
+appears a mere assemblage of indifferent streets that have grown out of
+the needs of the University, and this impression is heightened by its
+commercial unimportance. The town has no manufacture or trade. It is not
+even, like Cambridge, a great agricultural centre. Whatever importance
+it derived from its position on the Thames has been done away with by
+the almost total cessation of river navigation. Its very soil is in
+large measure in academical hands. As a municipality it seems to exist
+only by grace or usurpation of prior University privileges. It is not
+long since Oxford gained control over its own markets or its own police.
+The peace of the town is still but partially in the hands of its
+magistrates, and the riotous student is amenable only to university
+jurisdiction. Within the memory of living men the chief magistrate of
+the city on his entrance into office was bound to swear in a humiliating
+ceremony not to violate the privileges of the great academical body
+which reigned supreme within its walls.
+
+Historically the very reverse of all this is really the case. So far is
+the University from being older than the city that Oxford had already
+seen five centuries of borough life before a student appeared within its
+streets. Instead of its prosperity being derived from its connection
+with the University, that connection has probably been its commercial
+ruin. The gradual subjection both of markets and trade to the arbitrary
+control of an ecclesiastical corporation was inevitably followed by
+their extinction. The University found Oxford a busy, prosperous
+borough, and reduced it to a cluster of lodging-houses. It found it
+among the first of English municipalities, and it so utterly crushed its
+freedom that the recovery of some of the commonest rights of
+self-government has only been brought about by recent legislation.
+Instead of the Mayor being a dependent on Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor,
+Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor have simply usurped the far older
+authority of the Mayor.
+
+The story of the struggle which ended in this usurpation is one of the
+most interesting in our municipal annals, and it is one which has left
+its mark not on the town only but on the very constitution and character
+of the conquering University. But to understand the struggle, we must
+first know something of the town itself. At the earliest moment, then,
+when its academic history can be said to open, at the arrival of the
+legist Vacarius in the reign of Stephen, Oxford stood in the first rank
+of English municipalities. In spite of antiquarian fancies, it is
+certain that no town had arisen on its site for centuries after the
+departure of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. The little
+monastery of St. Frideswide rises in the turmoil of the eighth century
+only to fade out of sight again without giving us a glimpse of the
+borough which gathered probably beneath its walls. The first definite
+evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English
+Chronicle which records its seizure by the successor of Ælfred. But
+though the form of this entry shows the town to have been already
+considerable, we hear nothing more of it till the last terrible wrestle
+of England with the Dane, when its position on the borders of the
+Mercian and West-Saxon realms seems for the moment to have given it a
+political importance under Æthelred and Cnut strikingly analogous to
+that which it acquired in the Great Rebellion. Of the life of its
+burgesses in this earlier period of Oxford life we know little or
+nothing. The names of its parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred,
+and St. Edmund, show how early church after church gathered round the
+earlier church of St. Martin. The minster of St. Frideswide, in becoming
+the later cathedral, has brought down to our own times the memory of the
+ecclesiastical origins to which the little borough owed its existence.
+But the men themselves are dim to us. Their town-meeting, their
+Portmannimote, still lives in shadowy fashion as the Freeman's Common
+Hall; their town-mead is still Port-meadow. But it is only by later
+charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage
+to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or
+judging and law-making in their busting, their merchant guild regulating
+trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or honey or
+marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats
+floating down the Thames towards London and paying the toll of a hundred
+herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon by the way.
+
+Of the conquest of Oxford by William the Norman we know nothing, though
+the number of its houses marked "waste" in the Survey seems to point to
+a desperate resistance. But the ruin was soon repaired. No city better
+illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of its new
+masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion
+of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. The
+architectural glory of the town in fact dates from the settlement of the
+Norman within its walls. To the west of the town rose one of the
+stateliest of English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly
+less stately Abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the
+Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St. Frideswide
+reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathedral: the
+piety of the Norman earls rebuilt almost all the parish churches of the
+city and founded within their new castle walls the church of the canons
+of St. George.
+
+But Oxford does more than illustrate this outburst of industrial effort;
+it does something towards explaining its cause. The most characteristic
+result of the Conquest was planted in the very heart of the town in the
+settlement of the Jew. Here as elsewhere the Jewry was a town within a
+town, with its own language, its own religion and law, its peculiar
+commerce, its peculiar dress. The policy of our foreign kings secured
+each Hebrew settlement from the common taxation, the common justice, the
+common obligations of Englishmen. No city bailiff could penetrate into
+the square of little streets which lay behind the present Town-hall; the
+Church itself was powerless against the synagogue that rose in haughty
+rivalry beside the cloister of St. Frideswide. The picture which Scott
+has given us in 'Ivanhoe' of Aaron of York, timid, silent, crouching
+under oppression, accurately as it represents our modern notions of the
+position of his race during the Middle Ages, is far from being borne out
+by historical fact. In England at least the attitude of the Jew is
+almost to the end an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. His
+extortion was sheltered from the common law. His bonds were kept under
+the royal seal. A royal commission visited with heavy penalties any
+outbreak of violence against these "chattels" of the king. The thunders
+of the Church broke vainly on the yellow gaberdine of the Jew. In a
+well-known story of Eadmer's the Red King actually forbids the
+conversion of a Jew to the Christian faith: it was a poor exchange which
+would have robbed him of a valuable property and given him only a
+subject.
+
+At Oxford the attitude of the Jewry towards the national religion showed
+a marked consciousness of this royal protection. Prior Philip of St.
+Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew with the odd name of
+"Deus-cum-crescat," who stood at his door as the procession of the
+saint passed by, mocking at the miracles wrought at her shrine. Halting
+and then walking firmly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as if
+with palsy and then flinging open his fingers, the mocking Jew claimed
+gifts and oblations from the crowd who flocked to St. Frideswide's on
+the ground that such recoveries of limb and strength were quite as real
+as any Frideswide had wrought. But though sickness and death, in the
+prior's story, avenge the insult to his shrine, no earthly power,
+ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to meddle with
+"Deus-cum-crescat." The feud between the priory and the Jewry went on
+unchecked for a century more to culminate in a daring act of fanaticism
+on the Ascension-day of 1268. As the usual procession of scholars and
+citizens returned from St. Frideswide's, a Jew suddenly burst from the
+group of his comrades in front of the synagogue, and snatching the
+crucifix from its bearer trod it under foot. But even in presence of
+such an outrage as this the terror of the Crown shielded the Jewry from
+any burst of popular indignation. The sentence of the king condemned the
+Jews of Oxford to erect a cross of marble on the spot where the crime
+was committed; but even this was remitted in part, and a less offensive
+place was allotted for the cross in an open plot by Merton College.
+
+With the Jewish settlement began the cultivation of physical science in
+Oxford. The Hebrew instruction, the Hebrew books which he found among
+its rabbis, were the means by which Roger Bacon penetrated to the older
+world of material research. A medical school which we find established
+there and in high repute during the twelfth century can hardly have been
+other than Jewish: in the operation for the stone, which one of the
+stories in the 'Miracles of St. Frideswide' preserves for us, we trace
+the traditional surgery which is still common in the East. But it is
+perhaps in a more purely material way that the Jewry at Oxford most
+directly influenced our academical history. There as elsewhere the Jew
+brought with him something more than the art or science which he had
+gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of
+wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet statelier abbeys, which
+followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral or
+conventual church, marks the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can
+study the earlier history of our great monastic houses without finding
+the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial activity to which we
+owe the noblest of our minsters in the loans of the Jew. The bonds of
+many a great baron, the relics of many an abbey, lay pledged for
+security in the "Star-chamber" of the Jew.
+
+His arrival at Oxford is marked by the military and ecclesiastical
+erections of its Norman earls. But a result of his presence, which bore
+more directly on the future of the town, was seen in the remarkable
+developement of its domestic architecture. To the wealth of the Jew, to
+his need of protection against sudden outbursts of popular passion, very
+probably to the greater refinement of his social life, England owes the
+introduction of stone houses. Tradition attributes almost every instance
+of the earliest stone buildings of a domestic character to the Jew; and
+where the tradition can be tested, as at Bury St. Edmunds or Lincoln, it
+has proved to be in accordance with the facts. In Oxford nearly all the
+larger dwelling-houses which were subsequently converted into halls bore
+traces of their Jewish origin in their names, such as Moysey's Hall,
+Lombards', Jacob's Hall. It is a striking proof of the superiority of
+the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian houses around them that each of
+the successive town-halls of the borough had, before their expulsion,
+been houses of Jews. Such houses were abundant in the town, not merely
+in the purely Jewish quarter on Carfax but in the lesser Jewry which was
+scattered over the parish of St. Aldate; and we can hardly doubt that
+this abundance of substantial buildings in the town was at least one of
+the causes which drew teachers and students within its walls.
+
+The same great event which flung down the Jewish settlement in the very
+heart of the English town bounded it to the west by the castle and the
+abbey of the conquerors. Oxford stood first on the line of great
+fortresses which, passing by Wallingford and Windsor to the Tower of
+London, guarded the course of the Thames. Its castellan, Robert D'Oilly,
+had followed William from Normandy and had fought by his side at Senlac.
+Oxfordshire was committed by the Conqueror to his charge; and he seems
+to have ruled it in rude, soldierly fashion, enforcing order, heaping up
+riches, tripling the taxation of the town, pillaging without scruple the
+older religious houses of the neighbourhood. It was only by ruthless
+exaction such as this that the work which William had set him to do
+could be done. Money was needed above all for the great fortress which
+held the town. The new castle rose on the eastern bank of the Thames,
+broken here into a number of small streamlets, one of which served as
+the deep moat which encircled its walls. A well marked the centre of the
+wide castle-court; to the north of it on a lofty mound rose the great
+keep; to the west the one tower which remains, the tower of St. George,
+frowned over the river and the mill. Without the walls of the fortress
+lay the Bailly, a space cleared by the merciless policy of the
+castellan, with the church of St. Peter le Bailly which still marks its
+extent.
+
+The hand of Robert D'Oilly fell as heavily on the Church as on the
+townsmen. Outside the town lay a meadow belonging to the Abbey of
+Abingdon, which seemed suitable for the exercise of the soldiers of his
+garrison. The earl was an old plunderer of the Abbey; he had wiled away
+one of its finest manors from its Abbot Athelm; but his seizure of the
+meadow beside Oxford drove the monks to despair. Night and day they
+threw themselves weeping before the altar of the two English saints
+whose names were linked to the older glories of their house. But while
+they invoked the vengeance of Dunstan and Æthelwold on their plunderer,
+the earl, fallen sick, tossed fever-smitten on his bed. At last Robert
+dreamt that he stood in a vast court, one of a crowd of nobles gathered
+round a throne whereon sate a lady passing fair. Before her knelt two
+brethren of the abbey, weeping for the loss of their mead and pointing
+out the castellan as the robber. The lady bade Robert be seized, and two
+youths hurried him away to the field itself, seated him on the ground,
+piled burning hay around him, smoked him, tossed haybands in his face,
+and set fire to his beard. The earl woke trembling at the divine
+discipline; he at once took boat for Abingdon, and restored to the monks
+the meadow he had reft from them. His terror was not satisfied by the
+restitution of his plunder, and he returned to set about the restoration
+of the ruined churches within and without the walls of Oxford. The tower
+of St. Michael, the doorway of St. Ebbe, the chancel arch of Holywell,
+the crypt and chancel of St. Peter's-in-the-East, are fragments of the
+work done by Robert and his house. But the great monument of the
+devotion of the D'Oillys rose beneath the walls of their castle.
+Robert, a nephew of the first castellan, had wedded Edith, a concubine
+of Henry I. The rest of the story we may tell in the English of Leland.
+"Edith used to walke out of Oxford Castelle with her gentlewomen to
+solace, and that oftentymes where yn a certen place in a tree, as often
+as she cam, a certain pyes used to gather to it, and ther to chattre,
+and as it were to spek on to her, Edyth much mervelyng at this matter,
+and was sumtyme sore ferid by it as by a wonder." Radulf, a canon of St.
+Frideswide's, was consulted on the marvel, and his counsel ended in the
+erection of the priory of Osney beneath the walls of the castle. The
+foundation of the D'Oillys became one of the wealthiest and largest of
+the English abbeys; but of its vast church and lordly abbot's house, the
+great quadrangle of its cloisters, the almshouses without its gate, the
+pleasant walks shaded with stately elms beside the river, not a trace
+remains. Its bells alone were saved at the Dissolution by their transfer
+to Christchurch.
+
+The military strength of the castle of the D'Oillys was tested in the
+struggle between Stephen and the Empress. Driven from London by a rising
+of its burghers at the very moment when the crown seemed within her
+grasp, Maud took refuge at Oxford. In the succeeding year Stephen found
+himself strong enough to attack his rival in her stronghold; his knights
+swam the river, fell hotly on the garrison which had sallied without the
+walls to meet them, chased them through the gates, and rushed pell-mell
+with the fugitives into the city. Houses were burnt and the Jewry
+sacked; the Jews, if tradition is to be trusted, were forced to raise
+against the castle the work that still bears the name of "Jews' Mount";
+but the strength of its walls foiled the efforts of the besiegers, and
+the attack died into a close blockade. Maud was however in Stephen's
+grasp, and neither the loss of other fortresses nor the rigour of the
+winter could tear the king from his prey. Despairing of relief the
+Empress at last resolved to break through the enemy's lines. Every
+stream was frozen and the earth covered with snow, when clad in white
+and with three knights in white garments as her attendants Maud passed
+unobserved through the outposts, crossed the Thames upon the ice, and
+made her way to Abingdon and the fortress of Wallingford.
+
+With the surrender which followed the military history of Oxford ceases
+till the Great Rebellion. Its political history had still to attain its
+highest reach in the Parliament of De Montfort. The great assemblies
+held at Oxford under Cnut, Stephen, and Henry III., are each memorable
+in their way. With the first closed the struggle between Englishman and
+Dane, with the second closed the conquest of the Norman, with the third
+began the regular progress of constitutional liberty. The position of
+the town, on the border between the England that remained to the
+West-Saxon kings and the England that had become the "Danelagh" of their
+northern assailants, had from the first pointed it out as the place
+where a union between Dane and Englishman could best be brought about.
+The first attempt was foiled by the savage treachery of Æthelred the
+Unready. The death of Swegen and the return of Cnut to Denmark left an
+opening for a reconciliation, and Englishmen and Danes gathered at
+Oxford round the king. But all hope was foiled by the assassination of
+the Lawmen of the Seven Danish Boroughs, Sigeferth and Morcar, who fell
+at a banquet by the hand of the minister Eadric, while their followers
+threw themselves into the tower of St. Frideswide and perished in the
+flames that consumed it. The overthrow of the English monarchy avenged
+the treason. But Cnut was of nobler stuff than Æthelred, and his
+conquest of the realm was followed by the gathering of a new gemote at
+Oxford to resume the work of reconciliation which Eadric had
+interrupted. Englishman and Dane agreed to live together as one people
+under Eadgar's Law, and the wise government of the King completed in the
+long years of his reign the task of national fusion. The conquest of
+William set two peoples a second time face to face upon the same soil,
+and it was again at Oxford that by his solemn acceptance and
+promulgation of the Charter of Henry I. in solemn parliament Stephen
+closed the period of military tyranny, and began the union of Norman and
+Englishman into a single people. These two great acts of national
+reconciliation were fit preludes for the work of the famous assembly
+which has received from its enemies the name of "the Mad Parliament." In
+the June of 1258 the barons met at Oxford under earl Simon de Montfort
+to commence the revolution to which we owe our national liberties.
+Followed by long trains of men in arms and sworn together by pledges of
+mutual fidelity, they wrested from Henry III. the great reforms which,
+frustrated for the moment, have become the basis of our constitutional
+system. On the "Provisions of Oxford" followed the regular
+establishment of parliamentary representation and power, of a popular
+and responsible ministry, of the principle of local self-government.
+
+From parliaments and sieges, from Jew and castellan, it is time to turn
+back to the humbler annals of the town itself. The first event that
+lifts it into historic prominence is its league with London. The
+"bargemen" of the borough seem to have already existed before the
+Conquest, and to have been closely united from the first with the more
+powerful guild, the "boatmen" or "merchants" of the capital. In both
+cases it is probable that the bodies bearing this name represented what
+in later language was known as the merchant guild of the town; the
+original association, that is, of its principal traders for purposes of
+mutual protection, of commerce, and of self-government. Royal
+recognition enables us to trace the merchant guild of Oxford from the
+time of Henry I.; even then indeed lands, islands, pastures already
+belonged to it, and amongst them the same "Port-meadow" or "Town-mead"
+so familiar to Oxford men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to Godstow,
+and which still remains the property of the freemen of the town. The
+connection between the two cities and their guilds was primarily one of
+traffic. Prior even to the Conquest, "in the time of King Eadward and
+Abbot Ordric," the channel of the river running beneath the walls of the
+Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up "that boats could scarce pass as
+far as Oxford." It was at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London
+and Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through the meadow to the
+south of his church, the two cities engaging that each barge should pay
+a toll of a hundred herrings on its passage during Lent. But the union
+soon took a constitutional form. The earliest charter of the capital
+which remains in detail is that of Henry I., and from the charter of his
+grandson we find a similar date assigned to the liberties of Oxford. The
+customs and exemptions of its burghers are granted by Henry II., "as
+ever they enjoyed them in the time of King Henry my grandfather, and in
+like manner as my citizens of London hold them." This identity of
+municipal privileges is of course common to many other boroughs, for the
+charter of London became the model for half the charters of the kingdom;
+what is peculiar to Oxford is the federal bond which in Henry II.'s time
+already linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt or contest
+about judgment in their own court the burgesses of Oxford were empowered
+to refer the matter to the decision of London, "and whatever the
+citizens of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed right."
+The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each city were assimilated
+by Henry's charter. "Of whatever matter they shall be put in plea, they
+shall deraign themselves according to the law and customs of the city of
+London and not otherwise, because they and the citizens of London are of
+one and the same custom, law, and liberty."
+
+In no two cities has municipal freedom experienced a more different fate
+than in the two that were so closely bound together. The liberties of
+London waxed greater and greater till they were lost in the general
+freedom of the realm: those of Oxford were trodden under foot till the
+city stood almost alone in its bondage among the cities of England. But
+it would have been hard for a burgher of the twelfth century, flushed
+with the pride of his new charter, or fresh from the scene of a
+coronation where he had stood side by side with the citizens of London
+and Winchester as representing one of the chief cities of the realm, to
+have dreaded any danger to the liberties of his borough from the mob of
+half-starved boys who were beginning to pour year after year into the
+town. The wealthy merchant who passed the group of shivering students
+huddled round a teacher as poor as themselves in porch and doorway, or
+dropped his alms into the cap of the mendicant scholar, could hardly
+discern that beneath rags and poverty lay a power greater than the power
+of kings, the power for which Becket had died and which bowed Henry to
+penance and humiliation. On all but its eastern side indeed the town was
+narrowly hemmed in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The
+precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the castle, bounded
+it narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away to the little
+church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The
+Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed the southern
+horizon, held his leet court in the small hamlet of Grampound beyond the
+bridge. Nor was the whole space within its walls altogether subject to
+the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry, a town within a town,
+lay isolated and exempt from the common justice or law in the very
+heart of the borough. Scores of householders, dotted over the various
+streets, were tenants of abbey or castle, and paid neither suit nor
+service to the city court. But within these narrow bounds and amidst
+these various obstacles the spirit of municipal liberty lived a life the
+more intense that it was so closely cabined and confined.
+
+It was in fact at the moment when the first Oxford students appeared
+within its walls that the city attained complete independence. The
+twelfth century, the age of the Crusades, of the rise of the scholastic
+philosophy, of the renewal of classical learning, was also the age of a
+great communal movement, that stretched from Italy along the Rhône and
+the Rhine, the Seine and the Somme, to England. The same great revival
+of individual, human life in the industrial masses of the feudal world
+that hurried half Christendom to the Holy Land, or gathered hundreds of
+eager faces round the lecture-stall of Abelard, beat back Barbarossa
+from the walls of Alessandria and nerved the burghers of Northern France
+to struggle as at Amiens for liberty. In England the same spirit took a
+milder and perhaps more practical form, from the different social and
+political conditions with which it had to deal. The quiet townships of
+Teutonic England had no traditions of a Roman past to lure them on, like
+the cities of Italy, into dreams of sovereignty. Their ruler was no
+foreign Cæsar, distant enough to give a chance for resistance, but a
+king near at hand and able to enforce obedience and law. The king's
+peace shielded them from that terrible oppression of the mediæval
+baronage which made liberty with the cities of Germany a matter of life
+or death. The peculiarity of municipal life in fact in England is that
+instead of standing apart from and in contrast with the general life
+around it the progress of the English town moved in perfect harmony with
+that of the nation at large. The earlier burgher was the freeman within
+the walls, as the peasant-ceorl was the freeman without. Freedom went
+with the possession of land in town as in country. The citizen held his
+burgher's rights by his tenure of the bit of ground on which his
+tenement stood. He was the king's free tenant, and like the rural
+tenants he owed his lord dues of money or kind. In township or manor
+alike the king's reeve gathered this rental, administered justice,
+commanded the little troop of soldiers that the spot was bound to
+furnish in time of war. The progress of municipal freedom, like that of
+national freedom, was wrought rather by the slow growth of wealth and of
+popular spirit, by the necessities of kings, by the policy of a few
+great statesmen, than by the sturdy revolts that wrested liberty from
+the French seigneur or the century of warfare that broke the power of
+the Cæsars in the plain of the Po.
+
+Much indeed that Italy or France had to win by the sword was already the
+heritage of every English freeman within walls or without. The common
+assembly in which their own public affairs were discussed and decided,
+the borough-mote to which every burgher was summoned by the town-bell
+swinging out of the town-tower, had descended by traditional usage from
+the customs of the first English settlers in Britain. The close
+association of the burghers in the sworn brotherhood of the guild was a
+Teutonic custom of immemorial antiquity. Gathered at the guild supper
+round the common fire, sharing the common meal, and draining the guild
+cup, the burghers added to the tie of mere neighbourhood that of loyal
+association, of mutual counsel, of mutual aid. The regulation of
+internal trade, all lesser forms of civil jurisdiction, fell quietly
+and without a struggle into the hands of the merchant guild. The rest
+of their freedom was bought with honest cash. The sale of charters
+brought money to the royal treasury, exhausted by Norman wars, by the
+herd of mercenaries, by Crusades, by the struggle with France. The towns
+bought first the commutation of the uncertain charges to which they were
+subject at the royal will for a fixed annual rent. Their purchase of the
+right of internal justice followed. Last came the privilege of electing
+their own magistrates, of enjoying complete self-government. Oxford had
+already passed through the earlier steps of this emancipation before the
+conquest of the Norman. Her citizens assembled in their Portmannimote,
+their free self-ruling assembly. Their merchant-guild leagued with that
+of London. Their dues to the Crown are assessed in Domesday at a fixed
+sum of honey and coin. The charter of Henry II. marks the acquisition by
+Oxford, probably at a far earlier date, of judicial and commercial
+freedom. Liberty of external commerce was given by the exception of its
+citizens from toll on the king's lands; the decision of either political
+or judicial affairs was left to their borough-mote. The highest point of
+municipal independence was reached when the Charter of John substituted
+a mayor of their own choosing for the mere bailiff of the Crown.
+
+It is hard in dry constitutional details such as these to realize the
+quick pulse of popular life that stirred such a community as Oxford.
+Only a few names, of street and lane, a few hints gathered from obscure
+records, enable one to see the town of the twelfth or thirteenth
+century. The church of St. Martin in the very heart of it, at the
+"Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four roads meet, was the centre of the
+city's life. The Town-mote was held in its church yard. Justice was
+administered by mayor and bailiff sitting beneath the low shed, the
+"penniless bench" of later times, without its eastern wall. Its bell
+summoned the burghers to counsel or to arms. Around the church lay the
+trade-guilds, ranged as in some vast encampment; Spicery and Vintnery to
+the south, Fish Street falling noisily down to the Bridge, the corn
+market occupying then as now the street which led to North-gate, the
+stalls of the butchers ranged in their "Butcher-row" along the road to
+the castle. Close beneath the church to the south-east lay a nest of
+huddled lanes broken by a stately synagogue and traversed from time to
+time by the yellow gaberdine of the Jew, whose burying-place lay far
+away to the eastward on the site of the present Botanic Garden. Soldiers
+from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets; the bells of
+Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; long processions of pilgrims
+wound past the Jewry to the shrine of Saint Frideswide. It was a rough
+time, and frays were common enough,--now the sack of a Jew's house, now
+burgher drawing knife on burgher, now an outbreak of the young student
+lads, who grew every day in numbers and audacity. But as yet the town
+seemed well in hand. The clang of the city bell called every citizen to
+his door, the summons of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in
+hand and banners flying to enforce the king's peace. Order and freedom
+seemed absolutely secure, and there was no sign which threatened that
+century of disorder, of academical and ecclesiastical usurpation, which
+humbled the municipal freedom of Oxford to the dust.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS.
+
+
+For those who possess historic tastes, slender purses, and an exemption
+from Alpine mania, few holidays are more pleasant than a lounge along
+the Loire. There is always something refreshing in the companionship of
+a fine river, and whatever one may think of its summer sands Loire
+through the spring and the autumn is a very fine river indeed. There is,
+besides, the pleasantest variety of scenery as one wanders along from
+the sombre granite of Brittany to the volcanic cinder-heaps of Auvergne.
+There is the picturesque contrast between the vast dull corn-flats to
+the north of the great river and the vines and acacias to the south.
+There is the same contrast in an ethnological point of view, for one is
+traversing the watershed that parts two different races, and enough of
+difference still remains in dialect and manner to sever the Acquitanian
+from the Frank. And historically every day brings one across some
+castle or abbey or town that has been hitherto a mere name in the pages
+of Lingard or Sismondi, but which one actual glimpse changes into a
+living fact. There are few tracts of country indeed where the historical
+interest ranges equally over so long a space of time. The river which
+was the "revolutionary torrent" of Carrier had been the highway for the
+Northmen into the heart of Carolingian France. Saumur blends the tenth
+century and the sixteenth together in the names of Gelduin and Du
+Plessis; Chinon brings into contact the age of the Plantagenets and the
+age of Joan of Arc. From the mysterious dolmen and the legendary well to
+the stone that marks the fusillade of the heroes of La Vendée there is a
+continuous chain of historic event in these central provinces. Every
+land has its pet periods of history, and the brilliant chapters of M.
+Michelet are hardly needed to tell us how thoroughly France identifies
+the splendour and infamy of the Renascence with the Loire. Blois,
+Amboise, Chenonceaux, embody still in the magnificence of their ruin the
+very spirit of Catherine de Medicis, of Francis, of Diana of Poitiers.
+To Englishmen the relics of an earlier period have naturally a greater
+charm. Nothing clears one's ideas about the character of the Angevin
+rule, the rule of Henry II. or Richard or John, so thoroughly as a
+stroll through Anjou.
+
+There the Angevin Counts are as vivid, as real, as the Angevin Kings are
+on English soil unreal and dim. Hardly a building in his realm preserves
+the memory of Henry II.; Richard is a mere visitor to English shores;
+Beaulieu alone and the graven tomb at Worcester enable us to realize
+John. But along the Loire these Angevin rulers meet us in river-bank and
+castle and bridge and town. Their names are familiar words still through
+the length and breadth of the land. At Angers men show you the vast
+hospital of Henry II., while the suburb around it is the creation of his
+son. And not only do the men come vividly before us, but they come
+before us in another and a fresher light. To us they are strangers and
+foreigners, stern administrators, exactors of treasure, tyrants to whose
+tyranny, sometimes just and sometimes unjust, England was destined to
+owe her freedom. But for Anjou the period of their rule was the period
+of a peace and fame and splendour that never came back save in the
+shadowy resurrection under King René. Her soil is covered with
+monuments of their munificence, of their genuine care for the land of
+their race. Nine-tenths of her great churches, in the stern grandeur of
+their vaulting, their massive pillars, their capitals breaking into the
+exquisite foliage of the close of the century, witness to the pious
+liberality of sovereigns who in England were the oppressors of the
+Church, and who when doomed to endow a religious house in their realm
+did it by turning its inhabitants out of an already existing one and
+giving it simply a new name. As one walks along the famous Levee, the
+gigantic embankment along the Loire by which Henry saved the valley from
+inundation, or as one looks at his hospitals at Angers or Le Mans, it is
+hard not to feel a sympathy and admiration for the man from whom one
+shrinks coldly under the Martyrdom at Canterbury. There is a French side
+to the character of these Kings which, though English historians have
+disregarded it, is worth regarding if only because it really gave the
+tone to their whole life and rule. But it is a side which can only be
+understood when we study these Angevins in Anjou.
+
+To the English traveller Angers is in point of historic interest without
+a rival among the towns of France. Rouen indeed is the cradle of our
+Norman dynasty as Angers of our Plantagenet dynasty; but the Rouen of
+the Dukes has almost vanished while Angers remains the Angers of the
+Counts. The physiognomy of the place--if we may venture to use the
+term--has been singularly preserved. Few towns have it is true suffered
+more from the destructive frenzy of the Revolution; gay boulevards have
+replaced "the flinty ribs of this contemptuous city," the walls which
+play their part in Shakspere's 'King John'; the noblest of its abbeys
+has been swept away to make room for a Prefecture; four churches were
+demolished at a blow to be replaced by the dreariest of squares; the
+tombs of its later dukes have disappeared from the Cathedral. In spite
+however of new faubourgs, new bridges, and new squares, Angers still
+retains the impress of the middle ages; its steep and narrow streets,
+its dark tortuous alleys, the fantastic woodwork of its houses, the
+sombre grimness of the slate-rock out of which the city is built, defy
+even the gay audacity of Imperialist prefects to modernize them. One
+climbs up from the busy quay along the Mayenne into a city which is
+still the city of the Counts. From Geoffry Greygown to John Lackland
+there is hardly one who has not left his name stamped on church or
+cloister or bridge or hospital. The stern tower of St. Aubin recalls in
+its founder Geoffry himself; the nave of St. Maurice, the choir of St.
+Martin's, the walls of Roncevray, the bridge over Mayenne, proclaim the
+restless activity of Fulc Nerra; Geoffry Martel rests beneath the ruins
+of St. Nicholas on its height across the river; beyond the walls to the
+south is the site of the burial place of Fulc Rechin; one can tread the
+very palace halls to which Geoffry Plantagenet led home his English
+bride; the suburb of Roncevray, studded with buildings of an exquisite
+beauty, is almost the creation of Henry Fitz-Empress and his sons.
+
+But, apart from its historical interest, Angers is a mine of treasure to
+the archæologist or the artist. In the beauty and character of its site
+it strongly resembles Le Mans. The river Mayenne comes down from the
+north, from its junction with the Sarthe, edged on either side by low
+ranges of _coteaux_ which approaching it nearly on the west leave room
+along its eastern bank for vast level flats of marshy meadow land, cut
+through by white roads and long poplar-rows--meadows which in reality
+represent the old river-bed in some remote geological age before it had
+shrunk to its present channel. Below Angers the valley widens, and as
+the Mayenne coils away to Ponts de Ce it throws out on either side broad
+flats, rich in grass and golden flowers, and scored with rhines as
+straight and choked with water-weeds as the rhines of Somersetshire. It
+is across these lower meadows, from the base of the abbey walls of St.
+Nicholas, that one gets the finest view of Angers, the colossal mass of
+its castle, the two delicate towers of the Cathedral rising sharp
+against the sky, the stern belfry of St. Aubin. Angers stands in fact on
+a huge block of slate-rock, thrown forward from one of the higher
+plateaux which edge the marshy meadows, and closing up to the river in
+what was once a cliff as abrupt as that of Le Mans. Pleasant boulevards
+curve away in a huge semicircle from the river, and between these
+boulevards and the Mayenne lies the dark old town pierced by steep lanes
+and break-neck alleys. On the highest point of the block and approached
+by the steepest lane of all stands the Cathedral of St. Maurice, the
+tall slender towers of its western front and the fantastic row of
+statues which fill the arcade between them contrasting picturesquely
+enough with the bare grandeur of its interior, where the broad, low
+vaulting reminds us that we are on the architectural border of northern
+and southern Europe. St. Maurice is in the strictest sense the mother
+church of the town. M. Michelet has with singular lucklessness selected
+Angers as the type of a feudal city; with the one exception of the
+Castle of St. Louis it is absolutely without a trace of the feudal
+impress. Up to the Revolution it remained the most ecclesiastical of
+French towns. Christianity found the small Roman borough covering little
+more than the space on the height above the river afterwards occupied by
+the Cathedral precincts, planted its church in the midst of it,
+buttressed it to north and south with the great Merovingian Abbeys of
+St. Aubin and St. Serge, and linked them together by a chain of inferior
+foundations that entirely covered its eastern side. From the river on
+the south to the river on the north Angers lay ringed in by a belt of
+priories and churches and abbeys. Of the greatest of these, that of St.
+Aubin, only one huge tower remains, but fragments of it are still to be
+seen embedded in the buildings of the Prefecture--above all a
+Romanesque arcade, fretted with tangled imagery and apocalyptic figures
+of the richest work of the eleventh century. The Abbey of St. Serge
+still stands to the north of Angers; its vast gardens and fishponds
+turned into the public gardens of the town, its church spacious and
+beautiful with a noble choir that may perhaps recall the munificence of
+Geoffry Martel. Of the rivals of these two great houses two only remain.
+Portions of the Carolingian Church of St. Martin, built by the wife of
+Emperor Louis le Debonnaire, are now in use as a tobacco warehouse; the
+pretty ruin of Toussaint, not at all unlike our own Tintern, stands well
+cared for in the gardens of the Museum.
+
+But, interesting as these relics are, it is not ecclesiastical Angers
+that the English traveller instinctively looks for; it is the Angers of
+the Counts, the birthplace of the Plantagenets. It is only in their own
+capital indeed that we fully understand our Angevin Kings, that we fully
+realize that they were Angevins. To an English schoolboy Henry II. is
+little more than the murderer of Beket and the friend of Fair Rosamund.
+Even an English student finds it hard after all the labours of
+Professor Stubbs to lay hold of either Henry or his sons. In spite of
+their versatile ability and of the mark which they have left on our
+judicature, our municipal liberty, our political constitution, the first
+three Plantagenets are to most of us little more than dim shapes of
+strange manner and speech, hurrying to their island realm to extort
+money, to enforce good government, and then hurrying back to Anjou. But
+there is hardly a boy in the streets of Angers to whom the name of Henry
+Fitz-Empress is strange, who could not point to the ruins of his bridge
+or the halls of his Hospice, or tell of the great "Levee" by which the
+most beneficent of Angevin Counts saved the farmers' fields from the
+floods of the Loire. Strangers in England, the three first Plantagenets
+are at home in the sunny fields along the Mayenne. The history of Anjou,
+the character of the Counts, their forefathers, are the keys to the
+subtle policy, to the strangely-mingled temper of Henry and his sons.
+The countless robber-holds of the Angevin noblesse must have done much
+towards the steady resolve with which they bridled feudalism in their
+island realm. The crowd of ecclesiastical foundations that ringed in
+their Angevin capital hardly failed to embitter, if not to suggest,
+their jealousy of the Church.
+
+Of the monuments of the Counts which illustrate our own history, the
+noblest, in spite of its name, is the Bishop's Palace to the north of
+the Cathedral. The residence of the Bishop was undoubtedly at first the
+residence of the Counts, and the tradition which places its transfer as
+far back as the days of Ingelger can hardly be traced to any earlier
+source than the local annalist of the seventeenth century. It is at
+least probable that the occupation of the Palace by the Bishop did not
+take place till after the erection of the Castle on the site of the
+original Evêché in the time of St. Louis; and this is confirmed by the
+fact that the well-known description of Angers by Ralph de Diceto places
+the Comitial Palace of the twelfth century in the north-east quarter of
+the town--on the exact site, that is, of the present episcopal
+residence. But if this identification be correct, there is no building
+in the town which can compare with it in historical interest for
+Englishmen. The chapel beneath, originally perhaps simply the
+substructure of the building, dates from the close of the eleventh
+century; the fine hall above, with its grand row of windows looking out
+upon the court, from the earlier half of the twelfth. It was to the
+building as it actually stands therefore that Geoffry Plantagenet must
+have brought home his English bride, Maud the Empress, the daughter of
+our Henry I., along the narrow streets hung with gorgeous tapestries and
+filled with long trains of priests and burghers. To Angers that day
+represented the triumphant close of a hundred years' struggle with
+Normandy; to England it gave the line of its Plantagenet Kings.
+
+The proudest monuments of the sovereigns who sprang from this match, our
+Henry the Second and his sons, lie not in Angers itself but in the
+suburb across the river. The suburb seems to have originated in the
+chapel of Roncevray, the Roman-like masonry of whose exterior may date
+back as far as Fulc Nerra in the tenth century. But its real importance
+dates from Henry Fitz-Empress. It is characteristic of the temper and
+policy of the first of our Plantagenet Kings that in Anjou, as in
+England, no religious house claimed him as its founder. Here indeed the
+Papal sentence on his part in the murder of Archbishop Thomas compelled
+him to resort to the ridiculous trick of turning the canons out of
+Waltham to enable him to refound it as a priory of his own without cost
+to the royal exchequer. But in his Continental dominions he did not even
+stoop to the pretence of such a foundation. No abbey figured among the
+costly buildings with which he adorned his birthplace Le Mans. It was as
+if in direct opposition to the purely monastic feeling that he devoted
+his wealth to the erection of the Hospitals at Angers and Le Mans. It is
+a relief, as we have said--a relief which one can only get here--to see
+the softer side of Henry's nature represented in works of mercy and
+industrial utility. The bridge of Angers, like the bridges of Tours and
+Saumur, dates back to the first of the Count-Kings. Henry seems to have
+been the Pontifex Maximus of his day, while his care for the means of
+industrial communication points to that silent growth of the new
+mercantile class which the rule of the Angevins did so much to foster.
+But a memorial of him, hardly less universal, is the Lazar-house or
+hospital. One of the few poetic legends that break the stern story of
+the Angevins is the tale of Count Fulc the Good, how, journeying along
+Loire-side towards Tours, he saw just as the towers of St. Martin's rose
+before him in the distance a leper full of sores, who put by his offer
+of alms and desired to be borne to the sacred city. Amid the jibes of
+his courtiers the good count lifted him in his arms and carried him
+along bank and bridge. As they entered the town the leper vanished from
+their sight, and men told how Fulc had borne an angel unawares. Little
+of his ancestor's tenderness or poetry lingered in the practical
+utilitarian mind of Henry Fitz-Empress; but the simple Hospice in the
+fields by Le Mans or the grand Hospital of St. John in the suburb of
+Angers displayed an enlightened care for the physical condition of his
+people which is all the more striking that in him and his sons it had
+probably little connection with the usual motives of religious charity
+which made such works popular in the middle ages, but, like the rest of
+their administrative system, was a pure anticipation of modern feeling.
+There are few buildings more complete or more beautiful in their
+completeness than the Hospital of St. John; the vast hall with its
+double row of slender pillars, the exquisite chapel, trembling in the
+pure grace of its details on the very verge of Romanesque, the engaged
+shafts of the graceful cloister. The erection of these buildings
+probably went on through the whole reigns of our three Angevin
+sovereigns, but the sterner and simpler hall called the Lazar-house
+beside with its three aisles and noble sweep of wide arches is clearly
+of the date of Henry alone. It was occupied when I visited it some years
+ago as a brewery, but never was brewer more courteous, more genuinely
+archæological, than its occupant. Throughout these central provinces
+indeed, as throughout Normandy, the enlightened efforts of the
+Government have awakened a respect for and pride in their national
+monuments which extends even to the poorest of the population. Few
+buildings of a really high class are now left to ruin and desecration as
+they were twenty years ago; unfortunately their rescue from the
+destruction of time is too often followed by the more destructive attack
+of the restorer. And in almost every town of any provincial importance
+one may obtain what in England it is simply ridiculous to ask for, a
+really intelligent history of the place itself and a fair description of
+the objects of interest which it contains.
+
+The broken ruins of the Pont de Treilles, the one low tower above the
+river Mayenne which remains of the walls around the suburb of
+Roncevray, show the price which Henry and his sons set on these costly
+buildings. They have a special interest in Angevin history, for they
+were the last legacy of the Counts to their capital. Across the river,
+at the south-west corner of the town itself, stands the huge fortress
+that commemorates the close of their rule, the castle begun by the
+French conqueror, Philip Augustus, and completed by his descendant St.
+Louis. From the wide flats below Angers, where Mayenne rolls lazily on
+to the Loire, one looks up awed at the colossal mass which seems to
+dwarf even the minster beside it, at its dark curtains, its fosse
+trenched deep in the rock, its huge bastions chequered with iron-like
+bands of slate and unrelieved by art of sculptor or architect. It is as
+if the conquerors of the Angevins had been driven to express in this
+huge monument the very temper of the men from whom they reft Anjou,
+their grand, repulsive isolation, their dark pitiless power.
+
+It is a relief to turn from this castle to that southern fortress which
+the Counts made their home. A glance at the flat tame expanse of Anjou
+northward of the Loire explains at once why its sovereigns made their
+favourite sojourn in the fairer districts south of the river. There are
+few drives more enjoyable than a drive along the Vienne to the royal
+retreat of Chinon. The country is rich and noble, deep in grass and
+maize and corn, with meadows set in low broad hedgerows, and bare
+scratchy vineyards along the slopes. The road is lined with acacias,
+Tennyson's "milk-white bloom" hanging from their tender feathery boughs,
+and here beneath the hot sun of the South the acacia is no mere garden
+shrub but one of the finest and most graceful of trees. Everywhere along
+the broad sunlit river of Vienne nature is rich and lavish, and nowhere
+richer or more lavish than where, towering high on the scarped face of
+its own grey cliff above the street of brown little houses edged
+narrowly in between river and rock, stands the favourite home of our
+Angevin Kings.
+
+It is only in one or two points amidst the great mass of stately
+buildings which is known as the castle of Chinon that their hand can be
+traced now. The base of the Tour du Moulay, where tradition says the
+Grand Master of the Templars was imprisoned by Philippe le Bel, is a
+fine vault of twelfth-century date, which may have been the work of
+Henry II., and can hardly be later than his sons. But something of its
+original character as a luxurious retreat lingers still in the purpose
+to which the ground within the walls has been devoted; it serves as a
+garden for the townsfolk of Chinon, and is full of pleasant shadowy
+walks and flowers, and gay with children's games and laughter. And
+whatever else may have changed, the same rich landscape lies around that
+Henry must have looked on when he rode here to die, as we look on it now
+from the deep recessed windows of the later hall where Joan of Arc stood
+before the disguised Dauphin. Beneath is the broad bright Vienne coming
+down in great gleaming curves from Isle-Bouchard, and the pretty spire
+of St. Maurice, Henry's own handiwork perhaps, soaring lightly out of
+the tangled little town at our feet. Beyond, broken with copse and
+hedgerow and cleft by the white road to Loudun, rise the slopes of
+Pavilly leading the eye round, as it may have led the dying eye of the
+king, to the dim blue reaches of the west where Fontevraud awaited him.
+
+No scene harmonizes more thoroughly than Fontevraud with the thoughts
+which its name suggests. A shallow valley which strikes away southward
+through a break in the long cliff-wall along the Loire narrows as it
+advances into a sterner gorge, rough with forest greenery. The grey
+escarpments of rock that jut from the sides of this gorge are pierced
+here and there with the peculiar cellars and cave-dwellings of the
+country, and a few rude huts which dot their base gather as the road
+mounts steeply through this wilder scenery into a little lane of
+cottages that forms the village of Fontevraud. But it is almost suddenly
+that the great abbey church round which the village grew up stands out
+in one colossal mass from the western hill-slope; and in its very
+solitude and the rock-like grandeur of its vast nave, its noble apse,
+its low central tower, there is something that marks it as a fit
+resting-place for kings. Nor does its present use as a prison-chapel jar
+much on those who have grown familiar with the temper of the early
+Plantagenets. At the moment of my visit the choir of convicts were
+practising the music of a mass in the eastern portion of the church,
+which with the transepts has now been set apart for divine service, and
+the wild grandeur of the music, unrelieved by any treble, seemed to
+express in a way that nothing else could the spirit of the Angevins.
+"From the devil we come, and to the devil we go," said Richard. In spite
+of the luckless restoration to which their effigies have been
+submitted--and no sight makes us long more ardently that the "Let it
+alone" of Lord Melbourne had wandered from politics into archæology--it
+is still easy to read in the faces of the two King-Counts the secret of
+their policy and their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait.
+Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic
+eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine
+somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is
+marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be
+in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in both there is the same
+look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's is a face of cultivation
+and refinement, but there is a strange severity in the small delicate
+mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted king which realizes
+the verdict of his day. To an historical student one glance at these
+faces as they lie here beneath the vault raised by their ancestor, the
+fifth Count Fulc, tells more than pages of chronicles; but Fontevraud is
+far from being of interest to historians alone. In its architectural
+detail, in its Romanesque work, and in its strangely beautiful
+cinque-cento revival of the Romanesque, in its cloister and Glastonbury
+kitchen, it is a grand study for the artist or the archæologist; but
+these are merits which it shares with other French minsters. To an
+English visitor it will ever find its chief attraction in the Tombs of
+the Kings.
+
+
+
+
+CAPRI.
+
+I.
+
+
+We can hardly wonder at the love of artists for Capri, for of all the
+winter resorts of the South Capri is beyond question the most beautiful.
+Physically indeed it is little more than a block of limestone which has
+been broken off by some natural convulsion from the promontory of
+Sorrento, and changed by the strait of blue water which now parts it
+from the mainland into the first of a chain of islands which stretch
+across the Bay of Naples. But the same forces which severed it from the
+continent have given a grandeur and variety to its scenery which
+contrast in a strangely picturesque way with the narrowness of its
+bounds. There are few coast-lines which can rival in sublimity the
+coast-line around Capri; the cliff wall of sheer rock broken only twice
+by little dips which serve as landing-places for the island, and
+pierced at its base by "blue grottoes" and "green grottoes" which have
+become famous from the strange play of light within their depths. The
+reader of Hans Andersen's 'Improvisatore' will remember one of these
+caverns as the scene of its closing adventure; but strange as Andersen's
+description is it is far less strange than the scene which he sketches,
+the deep blue light which turns the rocks into turquoise and emerald or
+the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in
+their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above
+the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern
+headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the
+South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to
+the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff wall hardly inferior in
+grandeur to that of the coast runs across the midst of the island,
+dividing it into an upper and a lower plateau, with no means of
+communication save the famous rock stairs, the "Steps of Anacapri," now,
+alas, replaced by a daring road which has been driven along the face of
+the cliff.
+
+The upper plateau of Anacapri is cold and without any striking points
+of scenery, but its huge mass serves as an admirable shelter to Capri
+below, and it is with Capri that the ordinary visitor is alone
+concerned. The first thing which strikes one is the smallness of the
+place. The whole island is only some four miles long and a mile and a
+half across, and, as we have seen, a good half of this space is
+practically inaccessible. But it is just the diminutive size of Capri
+which becomes one of its greatest charms. It would be hard in fact to
+find any part of the world where so much and such varied beauty is
+packed into so small a space. The visitor who lands from Naples or
+Sorrento mounts steeply up the slopes of a grand amphitheatre flanked on
+either side by the cliffs of St. Michael and Anacapri to the white line
+of the village on the central ridge with the strange Saracenic domes of
+its church lifted weirdly against the sky. Over the crest of this ridge
+a counter valley falls as steeply to the south till it reaches a plateau
+crowned with the grey mass of a convent, and then plunges over crag and
+cliff back again to the sea. To the east of these central valleys a
+steep rise of ground ends in the ruins of the Palace of Tiberius and the
+great headland which fronts the headland of Sorrento. Everywhere the
+forms of the scenery are on the largest and boldest scale. The great
+conical Tors, Tuoro-grande and Tuoro-piccolo, the boldly scarped rock of
+Castiglione with its crown of mediæval towers, lead up the eye to the
+huge cliff wall of Anacapri, where, a thousand feet above, the white
+hermitage on Monte Solaro glimmers out fitfully from its screen of
+cloud.
+
+Among the broken heights to the east or in the two central valleys there
+are scores of different walks and a hundred different nooks, and each
+walk and nook has its own independent charm. Steeps clothed from top to
+bottom in the thick greenery of the lemon or orange; sudden breaks like
+that of Metromania where a blue strip of sea seems to have been
+cunningly let in among the rocks; backgrounds of tumbled limestone;
+slopes dusty grey with wild cactus; thickets of delightful greenery
+where one lies hidden in the dense scrub of myrtle and arbutus;
+olive-yards creeping thriftily up the hill-sides and over the cliffs and
+down every slope and into every rock-corner where the Caprese
+peasant-farmer can find footing; homesteads of grey stone with low domed
+Oriental roofs on which women sit spinning, their figures etched out
+against the sky; gardens where the writhed fig-trees stand barely
+waiting for the foliage of the spring; nooks amidst broken boulders and
+vast fingers of rock with the dark mass of the carouba flinging its
+shade over them; heights from which one looks suddenly northward and
+southward over a hundred miles of sea--this is Capri. The sea is
+everywhere. At one turn its waters go flashing away unbroken by a single
+sail towards the far-off African coast where the Caprese boatmen are
+coral-fishing through the hot summer months; at another the eye ranges
+over the tumbled mountain masses above Amalfi to the dim sweep of coast
+where the haze hides the temples of Pæstum; at another the Bay of Naples
+opens suddenly before us, Vesuvius and the blue deep of Castellamare and
+the white city-line along the coast seen with a strange witchery across
+twenty miles of clear air.
+
+The island is a paradise of silence for those to whom silence is a
+delight. One wanders about in the vineyards without a sound save the
+call of the vinedressers; one lies on the cliff and hears a thousand
+feet below the dreamy wash of the sea. There is hardly the cry of a bird
+to break the spell; even the girls who meet one with a smile on the
+hill-side smile quietly and gravely in the Southern fashion as they pass
+by. It is the stillest place that the sun shines on; but with all its
+stillness it is far from being a home of boredom. There are in fact few
+places in the world so full of interest. The artist finds a world of
+"studies" in its rifts and cliff walls, in the sailor groups along its
+beach and the Greek faces of the girls in its vineyards. The geologist
+reads the secret of the past in its abruptly tilted strata, in a deposit
+of volcanic ash, in the fossils and bones which Augustus set the fashion
+of collecting before geology was thought of. The historian and the
+archæologist have a yet wider field. Capri is a perfect treasure-house
+of Roman remains, and though in later remains the island is far poorer,
+the ruins of mediæval castles crown the heights of Castiglione and
+Anacapri, and the mother church of San Costanzo with its central dome
+supported on marble shafts from the ruins hard by is an early specimen
+of Sicilian or Southern Italian architecture. Perhaps the most
+remarkable touch of the South is seen in the low stone vaults which form
+the roofs of all the older houses of Capri, and whose upper surface
+serves as a terrace where the women gather in the sunshine in a way
+which brings home to one oddly the recollections of Syria and
+Jerusalem.
+
+For loungers of a steadily uninquiring order however there are plenty of
+amusements of a lighter sort. It is hard to spend a day more pleasantly
+than in boating beneath the cliffs of Capri, bobbing for "cardinals,"
+cruising round the huge masses of the Faraglioni as they rise like
+giants out of the sea, dipping in and out of the little grottoes which
+stud the coast. On land there are climbs around headlands and
+"rock-work" for the adventurous, easy little walks with exquisite peeps
+of sea and cliff for the idle, sunny little nooks where the dreamer can
+lie buried in myrtle and arbutus. The life around one, simple as it is,
+has the colour and picturesqueness of the South. The girl faces which
+meet one on the hill-side are faces such as artists love. In the church
+the little children play about among the groups of mothers with orange
+kerchiefs on their heads and heavy silver rings on every finger. Strange
+processions with cowled faces and crucifix and banners borne aloft sweep
+into the piazza and up the church steps. Old women with Sibyl-like faces
+sit spinning at their doors. Maidens with water-jars on their heads
+which might have been dug up at Pompeii; priests with broad hats and
+huge cloaks; sailors with blue shirts and red girdles; urchins who
+almost instinctively cry for a "soldo" and break into the Tarantella if
+you look at them; quiet, grave, farmer-peasants with the Phrygian cap;
+coral-fishers fresh from the African coast with tales of storm and
+tempest and the Madonna's help--make up group after group of Caprese
+life as one looks idly on, a life not specially truthful perhaps or
+moral or high-minded, but sunny and pleasant and pretty enough, and
+harmonizing in its own genial way with the sunshine and beauty around.
+
+Its rough inns, its want of English doctors, the difficulties of
+communication with the mainland from which its residents are utterly cut
+off in bad weather, make Capri an unsuitable resort for invalids in
+spite of a climate which if inferior to that of Catania is distinctly
+superior to that of either San Remo or Mentone. Those who remember the
+Riviera with no little gratitude may still shrink from the memory of its
+sharp transitions of temperature, the chill shade into which one plunges
+from the direct heat of its sun-rays, and the bitter cold of its winter
+nights. Out of the sun indeed the air of the Riviera towards Christmas
+is generally keen, and a cloudy day with an east wind sweeping along
+the shore will bring back unpleasant reminiscences of the England one
+has left behind. Capri is no hotter perhaps in the sunshine, but it is
+distinctly warmer in the shade. The wraps and shawls which are a
+necessity of health at San Remo or Mentone are far less necessary in the
+South. One may live frankly in the open air in a way which would hardly
+be safe elsewhere, and it is just life in the open air which is most
+beneficial to invalids. It is this natural warmth which tells on the
+temperature of the nights. The sudden change at sunset which is the
+terror of the Riviera is far less perceptible at Capri; indeed the
+average night temperature is but two degrees lower than that of the day.
+The air too is singularly pure and invigorating, for the village and its
+hotels stand some four or five hundred feet above the sea, and there are
+some fairly level and accessible walks along the hill-sides. At San
+Remo, or in the eastern bay of Mentone, one purchases shelter by living
+in a teacup and the only chance of exercise lies in climbing up its
+sides. But it must fairly be owned that these advantages are accompanied
+by some very serious drawbacks. If Capri is fairly free from the bitter
+east wind of the Riviera, the Riviera is free from the stifling
+scirocco of Capri. In the autumn and in the earlier part of the winter
+this is sometimes almost intolerable. The wind blows straight from
+Africa, hot, dusty, and oppressive in a strange and almost indescribable
+way. All the peculiar clearness of the atmosphere disappears; one sees
+every feature of the landscape as one would see them through a raw
+autumn day in England. The presence of fine dust in the air--the dust of
+the African desert to which this effect is said to be owing--may perhaps
+account for the peculiar oppressiveness of the scirocco; certain it is,
+that after two days of it every nerve in the body seems set ajar.
+Luckily however it only lasts for three days and dies down into rain as
+the wind veers round to the west.
+
+
+
+
+CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS.
+
+II.
+
+
+Among the many charms of Capri must be counted the number and interest
+of its Roman remains. The whole island is in fact a vast Roman wreck.
+Hill-side and valley are filled with a mass of _débris_ that brings home
+to one in a way which no detailed description can do the scale of the
+buildings with which it was crowded. At either landing-place huge
+substructures stretch away beneath the waves, the relics of moles, of
+arsenals, and of docks; a network of roads may still be traced which
+linked together the ruins of Imperial villas; every garden is watered
+from Roman cisterns; dig where he will, the excavator is rewarded by the
+discovery of vases, of urns, of fragments of sculpture, of mosaic
+pavements, of precious marbles. Every peasant has a handful of Roman
+coins to part with for a few soldi. The churches of the island and the
+royal palaces of the mainland are full of costly columns which have been
+removed from the ruins of Capri; and the Museum of Naples is largely
+indebted for its treasures of statuary to the researches made here at
+the close of the last century. The main archæological interest of the
+island however lies not in fragments or "finds" such as these but in the
+huge masses of ruin which lie scattered so thickly over it. The Pharos
+which guided the Alexandrian corn-ships to Puteoli stands shattered on
+one of its headlands. The waves dash idly against an enormous fragment
+of the sea-baths of Tiberius. His palace-citadel still looks from the
+summit of a mighty cliff across the Straits of Sorrento. The Stairs of
+Anacapri, which in the absence of any other date to which it is possible
+to assign them, we are forced to refer to the same period of
+construction, hewn as they were to the height of a thousand feet in the
+solid rock, vied in boldness with almost any achievement of Roman
+engineering. The smallness of the space--for the lower part of the
+island within which these relics are crowded is little more than a mile
+and a half either way--adds to the sense of wonder which the size and
+number of these creations excite. All that remains too, it must be
+remembered, is the work of but a few years. There is no ground for
+believing that anything of importance was added after the death of
+Tiberius or begun before the old age of Augustus.
+
+We catch glimpses indeed of the history of the island long before its
+purchase by the aged Emperor. Its commanding position at the mouth of
+the great Campanian bay raised it into importance at a very early
+period. The Teleboes whom tradition named as its first inhabitants have
+left only a trace of their existence in the verse of Vergil; but in the
+great strife between the Hellenic and Tyrrhenian races for the
+commercial monopoly of Southern Italy Capri, like Sorrento, was seized
+as a naval station by the Etruscans, whose alliance with the Phoenicians
+in their common war against the Greeks may perhaps explain the vague
+legends of a Semitic settlement on the island. The Hellenic victory of
+Cumæ however settled the fate of Capri, as it settled the fate of the
+coast; and the island fell to the lot of Neapolis when the "new city"
+rose in the midst of the bay to which it has since given its name. The
+most enduring trace of its Greek colonization is to be found in the
+Greek type of countenance and form which endears Capri to artists; but
+like the cities of the mainland it preserved its Greek manners and
+speech long after it had passed with Neapolis into the grasp of Rome.
+The greater proportion of its inscriptions, even when dating from the
+Imperial period, are in Greek. Up to the time of Augustus however it
+played in Roman story but the humble part of lighting the great
+corn-fleet from Egypt through the Strait of Sorrento. Statius tells us
+of the joy with which the sailors welcomed the glare of its Pharos as
+they neared the land, the greeting they addressed to its cliff, while on
+the other hand they poured their libations to the goddess whose white
+temple gleamed from the headland of Sorrento. Its higher destinies began
+with a chance visit of Augustus when age and weakness had driven him to
+seek a summer retreat on the Campanian shore. A happy omen, the revival
+of a withered ilex at his landing, as well as the temperate air of the
+place itself so charmed the Emperor that he forced Naples to accept
+Ischia in exchange for it, and chose it as his favourite refuge from the
+excessive heat. Suetonius gives a pleasant gossiping picture of the old
+man's life in his short holidays there, his delight in idly listening
+to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played
+knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept
+through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the
+fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug
+up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of
+his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed
+him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness
+the indefatigable energy which marked the man was seen in the buildings
+with which Suetonius tells us he furnished the island, and the progress
+of which after his death may possibly have been the inducement which
+drew his successor to its shores.
+
+It is with the name of the second Cæsar rather than of the first that
+Capri is destined to be associated. While the jests and Greek verses of
+Augustus are forgotten the terrible invective of Tacitus and the sarcasm
+of Juvenal recall the cruelties and the terrors of Tiberius. His
+retirement to Capri, although as we have seen in form but a carrying out
+of the purpose of Augustus, marks a distinct stage in the developement
+of the Empire. For ten years not Rome, but an obscure island off the
+Campanian coast became the centre of the government of the world. The
+spell of the Eternal City was suddenly broken, and it was never
+thoroughly restored. If Milan, Ravenna, Nicomedia, Constantinople,
+became afterwards her rivals or supplanters as the seat of empire, it
+was because Capri had led the way. For the first time too, as Dean
+Merivale has pointed out, the world was made to see in its bare
+nakedness the fact that it had a single master. All the disguises which
+Augustus had flung around his personal rule were cast aside; Senate,
+Consuls, the Roman people itself, were left contemptuously behind. A
+single senator, a few knights, a little group of Greek scholars, were
+all that accompanied Tiberius to Capri. The figure of the Emperor stood
+out bare and alone on its solitary rock. But, great as the change really
+was, the skill of Tacitus has thrown over the retirement of Tiberius a
+character of strangeness which, as we have said, hardly belongs to it.
+What in fact distinguished it from the retirement of Augustus to the
+same spot was simply the persistence of his successor in never returning
+to Rome.
+
+Capri in itself was nothing but a part of the great pleasure resort
+which Roman luxury created round the shores of the Bay of Naples. From
+its cliffs the Emperor could see through the pure, transparent air the
+villas and watering-places which fringed the coast from Misenum to
+Sorrentum, the groves and lakes of Baisæ, the white line of Neapolis,
+Pompeii, and Herculaneum, the blue sea dappled with the painted sails of
+pleasure-boats as they wooed the summer air. The whole bay was a Roman
+Brighton, and the withdrawal of Tiberius from the world was much the
+same sort of withdrawal from the world as the seclusion of George IV. at
+the Pavilion. Of the viler pleasures which are commonly attributed to
+him in his retreat we need say nothing, for it is only by ingenious
+conjectures that any of the remains at Capri have been made to confirm
+them. The taste of Tiberius was as coarse as the taste of his fellow
+Romans, and the scenes which were common at Baiæ--the drunkards
+wandering along the shore, the songs of the revellers, the
+drinking-toasts of the sailors, the boats with their gaudy cargo of
+noisy girls, the coarse jokes of the bathers among the rose-leaves which
+strewed the water--were probably as common in the revels at Capri. But
+for the more revolting details of the old man's life we have only the
+scandal of Rome to rely on, and scandal was easily quickened by the veil
+of solitude and secrecy which Tiberius flung around his retirement. The
+tale of his cruelties, of the fisherman tortured for having climbed the
+cliff which the Emperor deemed inaccessible, of criminals dashed into
+the sea down the steep of the "Salto di Timberio," rest on the gossip of
+Suetonius alone. But in all this mass of gossip there is little that
+throws any real light on the character of the island or of the buildings
+whose remains excite our interest there; we can only guess at its far
+wilder condition from a story which shows us the Imperial litter fairly
+brought to a standstill by the thick brushwood, and the wrath of
+Tiberius venting itself in a ruthless thrashing of the centurion who
+served as his guide. The story is curious because it shows that, in
+spite of the rapidity with which the Imperial work had been carried on,
+the island when Tiberius arrived was still in many parts hidden with
+rough and impenetrable scrub, and that the wonderful series of hanging
+gardens which turned almost the whole of it into a vast pleasure-ground
+was mainly of his own creation.
+
+It would of course be impossible to pass in review the numberless sites
+where either chance or research has detected traces of the work of
+Tiberius. "Duodecim villarum nominibus et molibus insederat," says
+Tacitus; and the sites of the twelve villas may in most cases be
+identified to-day, some basking in the sunshine by the shore, some
+placed in sheltered nooks where the cool sea-breeze tempered the summer
+heat, the grander ones crowning the summit of the hills. We can trace
+the docks of the Roman island, the grottoes still paved with mosaic
+which marks them as the scene of Imperial picnics, the terraces and
+arbours of the hanging gardens with the rock boldly cut away to make
+room for them, the system of roads which linked the villas together, the
+cisterns and aqueducts which supplied water, the buildings for the
+slaves of the household and for the legionaries who guarded the shore,
+the cemetery for the dead, the shrines and pavilions scattered about on
+the heights, and a small Mithraic temple hidden in the loveliest of the
+Caprese ravines. If we restore in fancy the scene to which these ruins
+belonged, fill the gardens with the fountains and statues whose
+fragments lie profusely scattered about, rear again the porticoes of
+marble columns, and restore the frescoes whose traces exist on the
+ruined walls, we shall form some inadequate conception of the luxury
+and grace which Tiberius flung around his retirement.
+
+By a singular piece of good fortune the one great wreck which towers
+above all the rest is the spot with which the Emperor himself is
+historically associated. Through the nine terrible months during which
+the conspiracy of Sejanus was in progress, he never left, Seutonius
+tells us, the Villa Jovis; and the villa still stands on a huge
+promontory, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, from which his eye could
+watch every galley that brought its news of good or ill from Misenum and
+from Rome. Few landscapes can compare in extent or beauty with the view
+on which Tiberius looked. The promontory of Massa lies across the blue
+reach of sea, almost as it seems under one's hand yet really a few miles
+off, its northern side falling in brown slopes dotted with white villas
+to the orange gardens of Sorrento, its southern rushing steeply down to
+the hidden bays of Amalfi and Salerno. To the right the distant line of
+Apennines, broken by the shadowy dip that marks the plain of Pæstum,
+runs southward in a dim succession of capes and headlands; to the left
+the sunny bow of the Bay of Naples gleams clear and distinct through
+the brilliant air till Procida and Ischia lead the eye round again to
+the cliff of Anacapri with the busy little Marina at its feet. A tiny
+chapel in charge of a hermit now crowns the plateau which forms the
+highest point of the Villa Jovis; on three sides of the height the cliff
+falls in a sheer descent of more than a thousand feet to the sea, on the
+fourth the terrace walls are formed of fragments of brick and marble
+which recall the hanging gardens that swept downwards to the plain. The
+Villa itself lies partly hewn out of the sides of the steep rock, partly
+supported by a vast series of substructures whose arched vaults served
+as water-reservoirs and baths for the service of the house.
+
+In strength of site and in the character of its defences the palace was
+strictly what Pliny calls it, "Tiberii principis arx," but this was no
+special characteristic of the Villa Jovis. "Scias non villas esse sed
+castra," said Seneca of the luxurious villas on the coast of Baiæ; it
+was as if the soldier element of the Roman nature broke out even amidst
+the patrician's idlest repose in the choice of a military site and the
+warlike strength of the buildings he erected on it. Within however life
+seems to have been luxurious enough. The ruins of a theatre, whose
+ground-plan remains perfect, show that Tiberius combined more elegant
+relaxations with the coarse revels which are laid to his charge. Each
+passage is paved with mosaic, the walls still retain in patches their
+coloured stucco, and here and there in the small chambers we find traces
+of the designs which adorned them. It is however rather by the vast
+extent and huge size of the substructures than by the remains of the
+house itself that we can estimate the grandeur of the Villa Jovis; for
+here, as at the Baths near the Marina, the ruins have served as quarries
+for chapels and forts and every farmhouse in the neighbourhood. The
+Baths stand only second in grandeur to the Villa itself. The fall of the
+cliff has torn down fragment after fragment, but the half of an immense
+calidarium still stands like an apse fronting the sea, a grand sea-wall
+juts out into the waves, and at its base, like a great ship of stone in
+the midst of the water, lies still unbroken after eighteen hundred years
+the sea-bath itself. The roof has fallen in, the pillars are tumbled
+from its front, but the high walls, though undermined by the tide, still
+stand erect. On the cliff above, a Roman fortress which must have
+resembled Burgh Castle in form and which has since served as a modern
+fort seems to have protected the Baths and the vast series of gardens
+which occupied the whole of the lower ground beneath the Stair of
+Anacapri, and whose boundary wall remains in a series of some twenty
+almost perfect arches.
+
+The importance of these remains has long been understood by the
+archæologists of Italy, and something of their ruin may be attributed to
+the extensive excavations made by the Government of Naples a hundred
+years ago. But far more of the terrible wreck is owing to the ravages of
+time. With the death of Tiberius Capri sinks suddenly out of sight. Its
+name had in fact become associated with infamy, and there is no real
+ground for supposing that it remained as the pleasure-isle of later
+Emperors. But the vast buildings can only slowly have mouldered into
+decay; we find its Pharos flaming under Domitian, and the exile of two
+Roman princesses, Crispina and Lucilla, by Commodus, proves that
+Imperial villas still remained to shelter them. It is to the period
+which immediately follows the residence of Tiberius that we may refer
+one of the most curious among the existing monuments of Capri, the
+Mithraic temple of Metromania. Its situation is singularly picturesque.
+A stair cut in the rock leads steeply down a rift in the magnificent
+cliffs to the mouth of a little cave, once shrouded by a portico whose
+fragments lie scattered among the cacti and wild thyme. Within the walls
+are lined with the characteristic reticulated Roman masonry, broken
+chambers and doorways on either side are blocked by _débris_, and two
+semicircular platforms rise one within the other to a niche in the
+furthest recess of the cave where the bas-relief of the Eastern deity
+which is now deposited in the Museum at Naples was found by the
+excavators. Beside it lay a stone with a Greek inscription so strangely
+pathetic that it must tell its own tale:--"Welcome into Hades, O noble
+deities--dwellers in the Stygian land--welcome me too, most pitiful of
+men, ravished from life by no judgment of the Fates, but by a death
+sudden, violent, the death-stroke of a wrath defiant of justice. But now
+I stood in the first rank beside my lord! now he has left me and my
+parents alike of hope! I am not fifteen, I have not reached my twentieth
+year, and--wretched I--I see no more the light! My name is Hypatus; but
+I pray my brother and my parents to weep for wretched ones no more."
+Conjecture has coupled this wail of a strange fate with the human
+sacrifices offered at the shrine of Mithras, and has seen in Hypatus a
+slave and favourite of Tiberius devoted by his master to the Eastern
+deity; but there is no ground whatever for either of the guesses.
+
+Such as it is however the death-cry of Hypatus alone breaks the later
+silence of Capri. The introduction of Christianity was marked by the
+rise of the mother church of San Costanzo, whose inner columns of giallo
+antico and cipollino were torn from the ruins of the Baths hard by, and
+from this moment we may trace the progress of destruction in each
+monument of the new faith. The sacrarium of San Stefano is paved with a
+mosaic of marbles from the Villa Jovis, and the chapel of St. Michael is
+erected out of a Roman building which occupied its site. We do not know
+when the island ceased to form a part of the Imperial estate, but the
+evidence of a charter of Gregory II., overlooked by the local
+topographers, shows that at the opening of the eighth century the
+"Insula Capreæ cum monasterio St. Stefani" had passed like the rest of
+the Imperial property in the South to become part of the demesne of the
+Roman See. The change may have some relation to the subjection of Capri
+to the spiritual jurisdiction of Sorrento, of whose bishopric it formed
+a part till its own institution as a separate see in the tenth century.
+The name of the "Bishop of Quails," which attached itself to the prelate
+of Capri, points humorously to the chief source of his episcopal income,
+the revenue derived from the capture of the flocks of these birds who
+settle on the island in their two annual migrations in May and
+September. From the close of the ninth century, when the island passed
+out of the hands of Amalfi, it has followed the fortunes of the
+mainland; its ruin seems to have been completed by the raids of the
+Saracens from their neighbouring settlement on the coast of Lucania; and
+the two mediæval fortresses of Anacapri and Castiglione which bear the
+name of Barbarossa simply indicate that the Algerian pirate of the
+sixteenth century was the most dreaded of the long train of Moslem
+marauders who had made Capri their prey through the middle ages. Every
+raid and every fortress removed some monument of the Roman rule, and the
+fight which wrested the isle from Sir Hudson Lowe at the beginning of
+the present century put the coping-stone on the work of destruction.
+But in spite of the ravages of time and of man enough has been left to
+give a special archæological interest to the little rock-refuge of
+Capri.
+
+
+
+
+THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS.
+
+III.
+
+
+The Caprese peasant has never had time to get the fact of winter fairly
+into his head. The cold comes year after year, but it comes in a brief
+and fitful way that sets our northern conceptions at defiance. The
+stranger who flies for refuge to the shores of the little island in
+November may find himself in a blaze of almost tropical sunshine. If a
+fortnight of dull weather at the opening of December raises hopes of an
+English Christmas they are likely to be swept away by a return of the
+summer glory for a month. Far away over the sea the crests of the
+Abruzzi range lift themselves white against the sky, but February has
+almost come before winter arrives, fitful, windy, rainy, but seldom
+cold, even when the mistral, so dreaded on the Riviera, comes sweeping
+down from the north. March ought by Caprese experience to be the
+difficult month; but "Marzo e pazzo," say the loungers in the little
+piazza, and sometimes even the "madness" of March takes the form of a
+delicious lunacy of unbroken sunshine. Corn is already rippling under
+the olives, leaf-buds run like little jets of green light along the
+brown vine-stems, the grey weird fig-branches are dotted with fruit,
+women are spinning again on the housetops, boys are playing with the
+birds they have caught in the myrtles, the bright shore across the bay
+is veiled in a summer haze, and winter is gone. It is hard to provide in
+English fashion against such a winter as this, and the Capri fisherman
+prefers to regard it as something abnormal, exceptional, to be borne
+with "pazienza" and a shrug of the shoulders. When the storm-wind blows
+he lounges in the sunny corner of the Piazza; when the rain comes he
+smokes at home or mends his nets under the picture of the Madonna and
+the Bambino; when the cold comes he sits passive and numbed till the
+cold goes. But he knows that the cold will go, and that the rain will
+pass, and that peace will settle down again on the sunny bay; and so
+instead of making a fuss about winter he looks on it as a casual little
+parenthesis in the business of life, intensely disagreeable but luckily
+brief. He sees no poetry in it, no beauty of bare wold and folded mist;
+he hears no music in it like the music of tinkling icicles so dear to
+Cowper's heart. Christmas itself isn't much of a festa in the South, and
+has none of the mystery and home pathos which makes it dear to
+Englishmen. There is the "presepio" in the church, there is the
+procession of the Wise Men at Epiphany-tide, but the only real break to
+the winter's dulness is the Feast of the Coral-Fishers.
+
+What with the poverty of the island and its big families it is hard to
+see how Capri could get along at all if it were not for the extra
+employment and earnings which are afforded by the coral-fishery off the
+African coast. Some hundred or two hundred young fellows leave the
+island every spring to embark at Torre del Greco in a detachment of the
+great coral fleet which musters at that port, at Genoa, or at Leghorn;
+and the Sunday before they start--generally one of the last Sundays in
+January--serves as the Feast of the Coral-Fishers. Long before daybreak
+the banging of big crackers rouses the island from its slumbers, and
+high mass is hardly over when a procession of strange picturesqueness
+streams out of church into the sunshine. At its head come the
+"Daughters of Mary," some mere little trots, some girls of sixteen, but
+all clad in white, with garlands of flowers over their veils and girdles
+of red or blue. Behind come the fishermen, young sailor-boys followed by
+rough grizzled elders bearing candles like the girls before them, and
+then the village Brotherhood, fishers too, but clad in strange garments
+of grey, with black hoods covering their faces, and leaving nothing but
+the bright good-humoured eye to guide one under this sepulchral figure
+to the Giovanni or Beppino who was cracking jokes yesterday till the
+Blue Grotto rang again. Then beneath a great canopy upborne by the four
+elder fishers of the island, vested in gowns of "samite, mystic,
+wonderful"--somewhat like a doctor of music's gown in our unpoetic
+land--comes the Madonna herself, "La Madonna di Carmela," with a crown
+of gold on her head and a silver fish dangling from her fingers. It is
+the Madonna of Carmel who disputes with San Costanzo, the Saint of the
+mother-church below, the spiritual dominion of Capri. If he is the
+"Protector" of the island, she is its "Protectress." The older and
+graver sort indeed are faithful to their bishop-saint, and the loyalty
+of a vinedresser in the piazza remains unshaken even by the splendour
+of the procession. "Yes, signore!" he replies to a sceptical Englishman
+who presses him hard with the glory of "the Protectress," "yes, signore,
+the Madonna is great for the fisher-folk; she gives them fish. But fish
+are poor things after all and bring little money. It is San Costanzo who
+gives us the wine, the good red wine which is the wealth of the island.
+And so this winter feast of the fishermen is a poor little thing beside
+our festa of San Costanzo in the May-time. For the image of our
+Protector is all of silver, and sometimes the bishop comes over from
+Sorrento and walks behind it, and we go all the way through the
+vineyards, and he blesses them, and then at nightfall we have
+'bombi'--not such as those of the Madonna," he adds with a quiet shrug
+of the shoulders, "but great bombi and great fireworks at the cost of
+the Municipio."
+
+On the other hand, all the girls go with the fisher-folk in their love
+of the Madonna. "Ah yes, signore," laughs a maiden whose Greek face
+might have served Pheidias for a model, "San Costanzo is our protector,
+but he is old and the Madonna is young, so young and so pretty, signore,
+and she is _my_ protectress." A fisherman backs up the feminine logic
+by a gird at the silver image which is evidently the strong point of the
+opposite party. The little commune is said to have borrowed a sum of
+money on the security of this work of art, and the fisherman is
+correspondingly scornful. "San Costanzo owes much, many danari, signore;
+and it is said," he whispers roguishly, "that if they don't pay pretty
+soon his creditors at Naples will send him to prison for the debt of the
+Municipio." But the Madonna has her troubles as well as the Saint. Her
+hair which has been dyed for the occasion has unhappily turned salmon
+colour by mistake; but the blunder has no sort of effect on the
+enthusiasm of her worshippers; on the canons who follow her in stiff
+copes, shouting lustily, or on the maidens and matrons who bring up the
+rear. Slowly the procession winds its way through the little town, now
+lengthening into a line of twinkling tapers as it passes through the
+narrow alleys which serve for streets, now widening out again on the
+hill-sides where the orange kerchiefs and silver ornaments of the
+Caprese women glow and flash into a grand background of colour in the
+sun. And then comes evening and benediction, and the fireworks, without
+which the procession would go for nothing, catherine-wheels spinning in
+the Piazza, and big crackers bursting amidst a chorus of pretty outcries
+of terror and delight.
+
+Delight however ends with the festa, and the parting of the morning is a
+strange contrast in its sadness with this Sunday joy. The truth is that
+coral-fishing is a slavery to which nothing but sheer poverty drives the
+fishermen. From April to October their life is a life of ceaseless
+drudgery. Packed in a small boat without a deck, with no food but
+biscuit and foul water, touching land only at intervals of a month, and
+often deprived of sleep for days together through shortness of hands,
+the coral-fishers are exposed to a constant brutality from the masters
+of their vessels which is too horrible to bear description. Measured too
+by our English notions the pay of the men seems miserably inadequate to
+the toil and suffering which they undergo. Enough however remains to
+tempt the best of the Caprese fishermen to sea. Even a boy's earnings
+will pay his mother's rent. For a young man it is the only mode in which
+he can hope to gather a sum sufficient for marriage and his start in
+life. The early marriages so common at Naples and along the adjoining
+coast are unknown at Capri, where a girl seldom weds before twenty and
+where the poorest peasant refuses the hand of his daughter to a suitor
+who cannot furnish a wedding settlement of some twenty pounds. Even with
+the modern rise of wages it is almost impossible for a lover to
+accumulate such a sum from the produce of his ordinary toil, and his one
+resource is the coral-fishery.
+
+The toil and suffering of the summer are soon forgotten when the young
+fisherman returns and adds his earnings to the little store of former
+years. When the store is complete, the ceremonial of a Caprese betrothal
+begins with "the embassy," as it is termed, of his mother to the parents
+of the future bride. Clad in her best array and holding in her hand 'the
+favourite nosegay of the island, a branch of sweet basil sprinkled with
+cinnamon powder and with a rose-coloured carnation in the midst of it,
+the old fishwife makes her way through the dark lanes to the vaulted
+room where her friends await her with a charming air of ignorance as to
+the errand on which she comes. Half an hour passes in diplomatic fence,
+in chat over the weather, the crops, or the price of macaroni, till at a
+given signal the girl herself leaves the room, and the "ambassadress"
+breaks out in praise of her good looks, her industry, and her good
+repute. The parents retort by praise of the young fisherman, compliments
+pass quickly into business, and a vow of eternal friendship between the
+families is sworn over a bottle of rosolio. The priest is soon called in
+and the lovers are formally betrothed for six months, a ceremony which
+was followed in times past by a new appearance of the ambassadress with
+the customary offering of trinkets from the lover to his promised
+spouse. This old Caprese custom has disappeared, but the girls still
+pride themselves on the number and value of their ornaments--the
+"spadella," or stiletto which binds the elaborately braided mass of
+their ebon hair; the circular gold earrings with inner circles of
+pearls; the gold chain or lacétta, worn fold upon fold round the neck;
+the bunch of gold talismans suspended on the breast; the profusion of
+heavy silver rings which load every finger. The Sunday after her
+betrothal when she appears at High Mass in all her finery is the
+proudest day of a Capri girl's life; but love has few of the tenderer
+incidents which make its poetry in the North. There is no "lover's lane"
+in Capri, for a maiden may not walk with her betrothed save in presence
+of witnesses; and a kiss before marriage is, as "Auld Robin Gray" calls
+it, "a sin" to which no modest girl stoops. The future husband is in
+fact busy with less romantic matters; it is his business to provide bed
+and bedding, table and chairs, drawers and looking-glass, and above all
+a dozen gaudy prints from Naples of the Madonna and the favourite saints
+of the day. The bride provides the rest, and on the eve of the marriage
+the families meet once more to take an inventory of her contributions
+which remain her own property till her death. The morning's sun streams
+in upon the lovers as they kneel at the close of mass before the priest
+in San Stefano; all the boyhood of Capri is waiting outside to pelt the
+bridal train with "confetti" as it hurries amidst blushes and laughter
+across the Piazza; a dinner of macaroni and the island wine ends in a
+universal "tarantella," there is a final walk round the village at the
+close of the dance, and the coral-fisher reaps the prize of his toil as
+he leads his bride to her home.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+  LONDON:
+  PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS,
+  STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
+
+
+
+
+  THIRTY-FOURTH THOUSAND.
+
+  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
+
+  BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN
+
+  _With Coloured Maps, Genealogical Tables, and Chronological
+  Annals. Crown 8vo., price 8s. 6d._
+
+  MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON.
+
+"I thank you very much for sending me Mr. Green's book. I have read it
+with genuine admiration. It bears marks of great ability in many ways.
+There is a vast amount of research, great skill in handling and
+arranging the facts, a very pleasant and taking style, but chief of all
+a remarkable grasp of the subject--many-sided as it is in its unity and
+integrity--which makes it a work of real historical genius. I am sure I
+wish it all the success it deserves; and you are quite at liberty to
+give my opinion about it to any one who asks it."--_Extract from Letter
+of W. Stubbs, M.A., Regius Professor of Modern History, Oxford._
+
+"I think Mr. Green's 'Short History of the English People' admirably
+suited for students in the Universities and for the higher classes in
+schools. The object of the book, that of combining the history of the
+people with the history of the kingdom, is most successfully carried
+out, especially in the earlier part. It gives, I think, in the main, a
+true and accurate picture of the general course of English history. It
+displays throughout a firm hold on the subject, and a singularly wide
+range of thought and sympathy. As a composition, too, the book is clear,
+forcible, and brilliant. It is the most truly original book of the kind
+that I ever saw."--_Extract from Letter of Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L.,
+LL.D., &c. &c._
+
+"Rightly taken, the History of England is one of the grandest human
+stories, and Mr. Green has so taken it that his book should delight the
+general reader quite as much as it delights the student."--_Extract from
+Letter of Professor Henry Morley._
+
+"To say that Mr. Green's book is better than those which have preceded
+it, would be to convey a very inadequate impression of its merits. It
+stands alone as the one general history of the country, for the sake of
+which all others, if young and old are wise, will be speedily and surely
+set aside. It is perhaps the highest praise that can be given to it,
+that it is impossible to discover whether it was intended for the young
+or for the old. The size and general look of the book, its vividness of
+narration, and its avoidance of abstruse argument would place it among
+school-books; but its fresh and original views, and its general
+historical power, are only to be appreciated by those who have tried
+their own hand at writing history, and who know the enormous
+difficulties of the task."--MR. SAMUEL R. GARDINER _in the Academy._
+
+"We know of no record of the whole drama of English history to be
+compared with it. We know of none that is so distinctly a work of
+genius.... Mr. Green's volume is a really wonderful production. There is
+a freshness and originality breathing from one end to the other, a charm
+of style, and a power, both narrative and descriptive, which lifts it
+altogether out of the class of books to which at first sight it might
+seem to belong. The range too of subject, and the capacity which the
+writer shows of dealing with so many different sides of English history,
+witness to powers of no common order.... The Early History is admirably
+done; the clear and full narrative which Mr. Green is able to put
+together of the earliest days of the English people is a wonderful
+contrast to the confused and proe-scientific talk so common in most of
+the books which it is to be hoped that Mr. Green's volume will
+displace."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+
+
+    +----------------------------------------------------+
+    |            Transcriber's Note:                     |
+    |                                                    |
+    | Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the       |
+    | original document have been preserved.             |
+    |                                                    |
+    | Typographical errors corrected in the text:        |
+    |                                                    |
+    | Page   62  Créçy changed to Crécy                  |
+    | Page  184  Creçy changed to Crécy                  |
+    | Page  186  Liége changed to Liège                  |
+    | Page  230  enterprize changed to enterprise        |
+    | Page  237  liker changed to like                   |
+    | Page  243  Eigi changed to Rigi                    |
+    | Page  291  adminstrative changed to administrative |
+    | Page  302  immedietely changed to immediately      |
+    | Page  374  connexion changed to connection         |
+    | Page  404  Apennine changed to Apennines           |
+    | Page  419  maccaroni changed to macaroni           |
+    | Page  421  maccaroni changed to macaroni           |
+    +----------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Stray Studies from England and Italy, by 
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Stray Studies from England and Italy, by 
+John Richard Greene
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Stray Studies from England and Italy
+
+Author: John Richard Greene
+
+Release Date: June 20, 2008 [EBook #25855]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRAY STUDIES - ENGLAND AND ITALY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Barbara Kosker, Bill Tozier
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>STRAY STUDIES</h1>
+
+<h3>FROM</h3>
+
+<h2>ENGLAND AND ITALY.</h2>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br/>
+<br />
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>JOHN RICHARD GREEN.</h2>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<h3>London:</h3>
+<h3>MACMILLAN AND CO.</h3>
+<h3>1876.</h3>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<h4 style="margin-bottom: -1px;">LONDON:</h4>
+<h4 style="margin-bottom: -1px;margin-top: -1px;">PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS,</h4>
+<h4 style="margin-top: -1px;">STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.</h4>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE.</h2>
+
+<p>I have to thank the Editors of <i>Macmillan's Magazine</i> and the <i>Saturday
+Review</i> for allowing me to reprint most of the papers in this series. In
+many cases however I have greatly changed their original form. A few
+pages will be found to repeat what I have already said in my 'Short
+History.'</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" width="70%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Table of Contents">
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp" width="10%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdl" width="80%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdr" width="10%"><span style="font-size: 80%;">PAGE</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#A_BROTHER_OF_THE_POOR"><span class="smcap">A Brother of the Poor.</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">1</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="3"><span class="smcap">Sketches in Sunshine:&mdash;</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">I.</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><a href="#CANNES_AND_ST._HONORAT"><span class="smcap">Cannes and St. Honorat</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">31</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">II.</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><a href="#CARNIVAL_ON_THE_CORNICE"><span class="smcap">Carnival on the Cornice</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">44</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">III.</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><a href="#TWO_PIRATE_TOWNS_OF_THE_RIVIERA"><span class="smcap">Two Pirate Towns of the Riviera</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">59</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">IV.</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><a href="#THE_WINTER_RETREAT"><span class="smcap">The Winter Retreat</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">71</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">V.</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><a href="#SAN_REMO"><span class="smcap">San Remo</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">79</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#THE_POETRY_OF_WEALTH"><span class="smcap">The Poetry of Wealth</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">93</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#LAMBETH_AND_THE_ARCHBISHOPS"><span class="smcap">Lambeth and the Archbishops</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">107</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#CHILDREN_BY_THE_SEA"><span class="smcap">Children by the Sea</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">167</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#THE_FLORENCE_OF_DANTE"><span class="smcap">The Florence of Dante</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">181</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#BUTTERCUPS"><span class="smcap">Buttercups</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">198</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#ABBOT_AND_TOWN"><span class="smcap">Abbot and Town</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">211</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#HOTELS_IN_THE_CLOUDS"><span class="smcap">Hotels in the Clouds</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">241</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+ <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#AENEAS:_A_VERGILIAN_STUDY"><span class="smcap">AEneas: A Vergilian Study</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">257</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="3"><span class="smcap">Two Venetian Studies</span>:&mdash;</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">I.</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><a href="#VENICE_AND_ROME"><span class="smcap">Venice and Rome</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">289</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdrp">II.</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><a href="#VENICE_AND_TINTORETTO"><span class="smcap">Venice and Tintoretto</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">300</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#THE_DISTRICT_VISITOR"><span class="smcap">The District Visitor</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">313<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#THE_EARLY_HISTORY_OF_OXFORD"><span class="smcap">The Early History of Oxford</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">329</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#THE_HOME_OF_OUR_ANGEVIN_KINGS"><span class="smcap">The Home of Our Angevin Kings</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">359</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#CAPRI"><span class="smcap">Capri</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">383</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#CAPRI_AND_ITS_ROMAN_REMAINS"><span class="smcap">Capri and its Roman Remains</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">395</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" colspan="2"><a href="#THE_FEAST_OF_THE_CORAL-FISHERS"><span class="smcap">The Feast of the Coral-Fishers</span></a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">414</td>
+  </tr>
+
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>A BROTHER OF THE POOR.</h2>
+<br /><a name="A_BROTHER_OF_THE_POOR" id="A_BROTHER_OF_THE_POOR"></a>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>A BROTHER OF THE POOR.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>There are few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such
+as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in
+the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly
+a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the
+grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables
+of Knoll, the chime of a village clock falls faintly on the ear, but
+there is no voice or footfall of living thing to break the silence as I
+turn over leaf after leaf of the little book I have brought with me from
+the bustle of town to this still retreat, a book that is the record of a
+broken life, of a life "broken off," as he who lived it says of another,
+"with a ragged edge."</p>
+
+<p>It is a book that carries one far from the woodland stillness around
+into the din and turmoil of cities and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>men, into the misery and
+degradation of "the East-end,"&mdash;that "London without London," as some
+one called it the other day. Few regions are more unknown than the Tower
+Hamlets. Not even Mrs. Riddell has ventured as yet to cross the border
+which parts the City from their weltering mass of busy life, their
+million of hard workers packed together in endless rows of monotonous
+streets, broken only by shipyard or factory or huge breweries, streets
+that stretch away eastward from Aldgate to the Essex marshes. And yet,
+setting aside the poetry of life which is everywhere, there is poetry
+enough in East London; poetry in the great river which washes it on the
+south, in the fretted tangle of cordage and mast that peeps over the
+roofs of Shadwell or in the great hulls moored along the wharves of
+Wapping; poetry in the "Forest" that fringes it to the east, in the few
+glades that remain of Epping and Hainault,&mdash;glades ringing with the
+shouts of school-children out for their holiday and half mad with
+delight at the sight of a flower or a butterfly; poetry of the present
+in the work and toil of these acres of dull bricks and mortar where
+everybody, man woman and child, is a worker, this England without a
+"leisure class"; poetry in the thud of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>steam-engine and the white
+trail of steam from the tall sugar refinery, in the blear eyes of the
+Spitalfields weaver, or the hungering faces of the group of labourers
+clustered from morning till night round the gates of the docks and
+watching for the wind that brings the ships up the river: poetry in its
+past, in strange old-fashioned squares, in quaint gabled houses, in grey
+village churches, that have been caught and overlapped and lost, as it
+were, in the great human advance that has carried London forward from
+Whitechapel, its limit in the age of the Georges, to Stratford, its
+bound in that of Victoria.</p>
+
+<p>Stepney is a belated village of this sort; its grey old church of St.
+Dunstan, buried as it is now in the very heart of East London, stood
+hardly a century ago among the fields. All round it lie tracts of human
+life without a past; but memories cluster thickly round "Old Stepney,"
+as the people call it with a certain fond reverence, memories of men
+like Erasmus and Colet and the group of scholars in whom the Reformation
+began. It was to the country house of the Dean of St. Paul's, hard by
+the old church of St. Dunstan, that Erasmus betook him when tired of the
+smoke and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>din of town. "I come to drink your fresh air, my Colet," he
+writes, "to drink yet deeper of your rural peace." The fields and hedges
+through which Erasmus loved to ride remained fields and hedges within
+living memory; only forty years ago a Londoner took his Sunday outing
+along the field path which led past the London Hospital to what was
+still the suburban village church of Stepney. But the fields through
+which the path led have their own church now, with its parish of dull
+straight streets of monotonous houses already marked with premature
+decay, and here and there alleys haunted by poverty and disease and
+crime.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing marked about either church or district; their character
+and that of their people are of the commonest East-end type. If I ask my
+readers to follow me to this parish of St. Philip, it is simply because
+these dull streets and alleys were chosen by a brave and earnest man as
+the scene of his work among the poor. It was here that Edward Denison
+settled in the autumn of 1867, in the second year of the great "East
+London Distress." In the October of 1869 he left England on a fatal
+voyage from which he was never to return. The collection of his letters
+which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>has been recently printed by Sir Baldwyn Leighton has drawn so
+much attention to the work which lay within the narrow bounds of those
+two years that I may perhaps be pardoned for recalling my own memories
+of one whom it is hard to forget.</p>
+
+<p>A few words are enough to tell the tale of his earlier days. Born in
+1840, the son of a bishop, and nephew of the late Speaker of the House
+of Commons, Edward Denison passed from Eton to Christchurch, and was
+forced after quitting the University to spend some time in foreign
+travel by the delicacy of his health. His letters give an interesting
+picture of his mind during this pause in an active life, a pause which
+must have been especially distasteful to one whose whole bent lay from
+the first in the direction of practical energy. "I believe," he says in
+his later days, "that abstract political speculation is my <i>m&eacute;tier</i>;"
+but few minds were in reality less inclined to abstract speculation.
+From the very first one sees in him what one may venture to call the
+best kind of "Whig" mind, that peculiar temper of fairness and
+moderation which declines to push conclusions to extremes, and recoils
+instinctively when <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>opinion is extended beyond its proper bound. His
+comment on Newman's 'Apologia' paints his real intellectual temper with
+remarkable precision. "I left off reading Newman's 'Apologia' before I
+got to the end, tired of the ceaseless changes of the writer's mind, and
+vexed with his morbid scruples&mdash;perhaps, too, having got a little out of
+harmony myself with the feelings of the author, whereas I began by being
+in harmony with them. I don't quite know whether to esteem it a blessing
+or a curse; but whenever an opinion to which I am a recent convert, or
+which I do not hold with the entire force of my intellect, is forced too
+strongly upon me, or driven home to its logical conclusion, or
+over-praised, or extended beyond its proper limits, I recoil
+instinctively and begin to gravitate towards the other extreme, sure to
+be in turn repelled by it also."</p>
+
+<p>I dwell on this temper of his mind because it is this practical and
+moderate character of the man which gives such weight to the very
+sweeping conclusions on social subjects to which he was driven in his
+later days. A judgment which condemns the whole system of Poor Laws, for
+instance, falls with very different <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>weight from a mere speculative
+theorist and from a practical observer whose mind is constitutionally
+averse from extreme conclusions. Throughout however we see this
+intellectual moderation jostling with a moral fervour which feels
+restlessly about for a fitting sphere of action. "Real life," he writes
+from Madeira, "is not dinner-parties and small talk, nor even croquet
+and dancing." There is a touch of exaggeration in phrases like these
+which need not blind us to the depth and reality of the feeling which
+they imperfectly express, a feeling which prompted the question which
+embodies the spirit of all these earlier letters,&mdash;the question, "What
+is my work?"</p>
+
+<p>The answer to this question was found both within and without the
+questioner. Those who were young in the weary days of Palmerstonian rule
+will remember the disgust at purely political life which was produced by
+the bureaucratic inaction of the time, and we can hardly wonder that,
+like many of the finer minds among his contemporaries, Edward Denison
+turned from the political field which was naturally open to him to the
+field of social effort. His tendency in this direction was aided, no
+doubt, partly by the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>intensity of this religious feeling and of his
+consciousness of the duty he owed to the poor, and partly by that closer
+sympathy with the physical suffering around us which is one of the most
+encouraging characteristics of the day. Even in the midst of his
+outburst of delight at a hard frost ("I like," he says, "the bright
+sunshine that generally accompanies it, the silver landscape, and the
+ringing distinctness of sounds in the frozen air"), we see him haunted
+by a sense of the way in which his pleasure contrasts with the winter
+misery of the poor. "I would rather give up all the pleasures of the
+frost than indulge them, poisoned as they are by the misery of so many
+of our brothers. What a monstrous thing it is that in the richest
+country in the world large masses of the population should be condemned
+annually to starvation and death!" It is easy to utter protests like
+these in the spirit of a mere sentimentalist; it is less easy to carry
+them out into practical effort, as Edward Denison resolved to do. After
+an unsatisfactory attempt to act as Almoner for the Society for the
+Relief of Distress, he resolved to fix himself personally in the
+East-end of London, and study the great problem of pauperism face to
+face.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>His resolve sprang from no fit of transient enthusiasm, but from a sober
+conviction of the need of such a step. "There are hardly any residents
+in the East rich enough to give much money, or with enough leisure to
+give much time," he says. "This is the evil. Even the best disposed in
+the West don't like coming so far off, and, indeed, few have the time to
+spare, and when they do there is great waste of time and energy on the
+journey. My plan is the only really practicable one, and as I have both
+means, time, and inclination, I should be a thief and a murderer if I
+withheld what I so evidently owe." In the autumn of 1867 he carried out
+his resolve, and took lodgings in the heart of the parish which I
+sketched in the opening of this paper. If any romantic dreams had mixed
+with his resolution they at once faded away before the dull, commonplace
+reality. "I saw nothing very striking at Stepney," is his first comment
+on the sphere he had chosen. But he was soon satisfied with his choice.
+He took up in a quiet, practical way the work he found closest at hand.
+"All is yet in embryo, but it will grow. Just now I only teach in a
+night school, and do what in me lies in looking after the sick, keeping
+an eye upon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>nuisances and the like, seeing that the local authorities
+keep up to their work. I go to-morrow before the Board at the workhouse
+to compel the removal to the infirmary of a man who ought to have been
+there already. I shall drive the sanitary inspector to put the Act
+against overcrowding in force." Homely work of this sort grows on him;
+we see him in these letters getting boys out to sea, keeping school with
+little urchins,&mdash;"demons of misrule" who tried his temper,&mdash;gathering
+round him a class of working men, organizing an evening club for boys.
+All this, too, quietly and unostentatiously and with as little resort as
+possible to "cheap charity," as he used to call it, to the "doles of
+bread and meat which only do the work of poor-rates."</p>
+
+<p>So quiet and simple indeed was his work that though it went on in the
+parish of which I then had the charge it was some little time before I
+came to know personally the doer of it. It is amusing even now to
+recollect my first interview with Edward Denison. A vicar's Monday
+morning is never the pleasantest of awakenings, but the Monday morning
+of an East-end vicar brings worries that far eclipse the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>mere headache
+and dyspepsia of his rural brother. It is the "parish morning." All the
+complicated machinery of a great ecclesiastical, charitable, and
+educational organization has got to be wound up afresh, and set going
+again for another week. The superintendent of the Women's Mission is
+waiting with a bundle of accounts, complicated as only ladies' accounts
+can be. The churchwarden has come with a face full of gloom to consult
+on the falling off in the offertory. The Scripture-reader has brought
+his "visiting book" to be inspected, and a special report on the
+character of a doubtful family in the parish. The organist drops in to
+report something wrong in the pedals. There is a letter to be written to
+the inspector of nuisances, directing his attention to certain
+odoriferous drains in Pig-and-Whistle Alley. The nurse brings her
+sick-list and her little bill for the sick-kitchen. The schoolmaster
+wants a fresh pupil-teacher, and discusses nervously the prospects of
+his scholars in the coming inspection. There is the interest on the
+penny bank to be calculated, a squabble in the choir to be adjusted, a
+district visitor to be replaced, reports to be drawn up for the Bishop's
+Fund and a great charitable society, the curate's sick-list to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>be
+inspected, and a preacher to be found for the next church festival.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the midst of a host of worries such as these that a card was
+laid on my table with a name which I recognized as that of a young
+layman from the West-end, who had for two or three months past been
+working in the mission district attached to the parish. Now, whatever
+shame is implied in the confession, I had a certain horror of "laymen
+from the West-end." Lay co-operation is an excellent thing in itself,
+and one of my best assistants was a letter-sorter in the post-office
+close by; but the "layman from the West-end," with a bishop's letter of
+recommendation in his pocket and a head full of theories about "heathen
+masses," was an unmitigated nuisance. I had a pretty large experience of
+these gentlemen, and my one wish in life was to have no more. Some had a
+firm belief in their own eloquence, and were zealous for a big room and
+a big congregation. I got them the big room, but I was obliged to leave
+the big congregation to their own exertions, and in a month or two their
+voices faded away. Then there was the charitable layman, who pounced
+down on the parish from time to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>time and threw about meat and blankets
+till half of the poor were demoralized. Or there was the statistical
+layman, who went about with a note-book and did spiritual and economical
+sums in the way of dividing the number of "people in the free seats" by
+the number of bread tickets annually distributed. There was the layman
+with a passion for hom&oelig;opathy, the ritualistic layman, the layman
+with a mania for preaching down trades' unions, the layman with an
+educational mania. All however agreed in one point, much as they
+differed in others, and the one point was that of a perfect belief in
+their individual nostrums and perfect contempt for all that was already
+doing in the neighbourhood.</p>
+
+<p>It was with no peculiar pleasure therefore that I rose to receive this
+fresh "layman from the West"; but a single glance was enough to show me
+that my visitor was a man of very different stamp from his predecessors.
+There was something in the tall, manly figure, the bright smile, the
+frank winning address of Edward Denison that inspired confidence in a
+moment. "I come to learn, and not to teach," he laughed, as I hinted at
+"theories" and their danger; and our talk soon fell on a certain "John's
+Place," where he thought <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>there was a great deal to be learned. In five
+minutes more we stood in the spot which interested him, an alley running
+between two mean streets, and narrowing at one end till we crept out of
+it as if through the neck of a bottle. It was by no means the choicest
+part of the parish: the drainage was imperfect, the houses miserable;
+but wretched as it was it was a favourite haunt of the poor, and it
+swarmed with inhabitants of very various degrees of respectability.
+Costermongers abounded, strings of barrows were drawn up on the
+pavement, and the refuse of their stock lay rotting in the gutter.
+Drunken sailors and Lascars from the docks rolled along shouting to its
+houses of ill-fame. There was little crime, though one of the "ladies"
+of the alley was a well-known receiver of stolen goods, but there was a
+good deal of drunkenness and vice. Now and then a wife came plumping on
+to the pavement from a window overhead; sometimes a couple of viragoes
+fought out their quarrel "on the stones"; boys idled about in the
+sunshine in training to be pickpockets; miserable girls flaunted in
+dirty ribbons at nightfall at half-a-dozen doors.</p>
+
+<p>But with all this the place was popular with even <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>respectable working
+people in consequence of the small size and cheapness of the houses&mdash;for
+there is nothing the poor like so much as a house to themselves; and the
+bulk of its population consisted of casual labourers, who gathered every
+morning round the great gates of the docks, waiting to be "called in" as
+the ships came up to unload. The place was naturally unhealthy,
+constantly haunted by fever, and had furnished some hundred cases in the
+last visitation of cholera. The work done among them in the "cholera
+time" had never been forgotten by the people, and, ill-famed as the
+place was, I visited it at all times of the day and night with perfect
+security. The apostle however of John's Place was my friend the
+letter-sorter. He had fixed on it as his special domain, and with a
+little aid from others had opened a Sunday-school and simple Sunday
+services in the heart of it. A branch of the Women's Mission was
+established in the same spot, and soon women were "putting by" their
+pence and sewing quietly round the lady superintendent as she read to
+them the stories of the Gospels.</p>
+
+<p>It was this John's Place which Edward Denison chose as the centre of his
+operations. There was very <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>little in his manner to show his sense of
+the sacrifice he was making, though the sacrifice was in reality a great
+one. No one enjoyed more keenly the pleasures of life and society: he
+was a good oarsman, he delighted in outdoor exercise, and skating was to
+him "a pleasure only rivalled in my affection by a ride across country
+on a good horse." But month after month these pleasures were quietly put
+aside for his work in the East-end. "I have come to this," he says,
+laughingly, "that a walk along Piccadilly is a most exhilarating and
+delightful treat. I don't enjoy it above once in ten days, but therefore
+with double zest." What told on him most was the physical depression
+induced by the very look of these vast, monotonous masses of sheer
+poverty. "My wits are getting blunted," he says, "by the monotony and
+<i>ugliness</i> of this place. I can almost imagine, difficult as it is, the
+awful effect upon a human mind of never seeing anything but the meanest
+and vilest of men and men's works, and of complete exclusion from the
+sight of God and His works,&mdash;a position in which the villager never is."
+But there was worse than physical degradation. "This summer there is not
+so very much actual suffering for want of food, nor from sickness. What
+is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>so bad is the habitual condition of this mass of humanity&mdash;its
+uniform mean level, the absence of anything more civilizing than a
+grinding organ to raise the ideas beyond the daily bread and beer, the
+utter want of education, the complete indifference to religion, with the
+fruits of all this&mdash;improvidence, dirt, and their secondaries, crime and
+disease."</p>
+
+<p>Terrible however as these evils were, he believed they could be met; and
+the quiet good sense of his character was shown in the way in which he
+met them. His own residence in the East-end was the most effective of
+protests against that severance of class from class in which so many of
+its evils take their rise. When speaking of the overcrowding and the
+official ill-treatment of the poor, he says truly: "These are the sort
+of evils which, where there are no resident gentry, grow to a height
+almost incredible, and on which the remedial influence of the mere
+presence of a gentleman known to be on the alert is inestimable." But
+nothing, as I often had occasion to remark, could be more judicious than
+his interference on behalf of the poor, or more unlike the fussy
+impertinence of the philanthropists who think themselves born "to
+expose" <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>Boards of Guardians. His aim throughout was to co-operate with
+the Guardians in giving, not less, but greater effect to the Poor Laws,
+and in resisting the sensational writing and reckless abuse which aim at
+undoing their work. "The gigantic subscription lists which are regarded
+as signs of our benevolence," he says truly, "are monuments of our
+indifference."</p>
+
+<p>The one hope for the poor, he believed, lay not in charity, but in
+themselves. "Build school-houses, pay teachers, give prizes, frame
+workmen's clubs, help them to help themselves, lend them your brains;
+but give them no money, except what you sink in such undertakings as
+above." This is not the place to describe or discuss the more detailed
+suggestions with which he faced the great question of poverty and
+pauperism in the East-end; they are briefly summarized in a remarkable
+letter which he addressed in 1869 to an East-end newspaper:&mdash;"First we
+must so discipline and regulate our charities as to cut off the
+resources of the habitual mendicant. Secondly, all who by begging
+proclaim themselves destitute, must be taken at their word. They must be
+taken up and kept at penal work&mdash;not for one morning, as now, but for a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>month or two; a proportion of their earnings being handed over to them
+on dismissal, as capital on which to begin a life of honest industry.
+Thirdly, we must promote the circulation of labour, and obviate morbid
+congestions of the great industrial centres. Fourthly, we must improve
+the condition of the agricultural poor." Stern as such suggestions may
+seem, there are few who have really thought as well as worked for the
+poor without feeling that sternness of this sort is, in the highest
+sense, mercy. Ten years in the East of London had brought me to the same
+conclusions; and my Utopia, like Edward Denison's, lay wholly in a
+future to be worked out by the growing intelligence and thrift of the
+labouring classes themselves.</p>
+
+<p>But stern as were his theories, there is hardly a home within his
+district that has not some memory left of the love and tenderness of his
+personal charity. I hardly like to tell how often I have seen the face
+of the sick and dying brighten as he drew near, or how the little
+children, as they flocked out of school, would run to him, shouting his
+name for very glee. For the Sunday-school was soon transformed by his
+efforts into a day-school for children, whose parents were really
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>unable to pay school-fees; and a large schoolroom, erected near John's
+Place, was filled with dirty little scholars. Here too he gathered round
+him a class of working men, to whom he lectured on the Bible every
+Wednesday evening; and here he delivered addresses to the dock-labourers
+whom he had induced to attend, of a nature somewhat startling to those
+who talk of "preaching down to the intelligence of the poor." I give the
+sketch of one of these sermons (on "Not forsaking the assembling of
+yourselves together") in his own words:&mdash;"I presented Christianity as a
+society; investigated the origin of societies, the family, the tribe,
+the nation, with the attendant expanded ideas of rights and duties; the
+common weal, the bond of union; rising from the family dinner-table to
+the sacrificial rites of the national gods; drew parallels with trades'
+unions and benefit clubs, and told them flatly they would not be
+Christians till they were communicants." No doubt this will seem to most
+sensible people extravagant enough, even without the quotations from
+"Wordsworth, Tennyson, and even Pope" with which his addresses were
+enlivened; but I must confess that my own experience among the poor
+agrees pretty much with Edward Denison's, and that I believe <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>"high
+thinking" put into plain English to be more likely to tell on a
+dock-yard labourer than all the "simple Gospel sermons" in the world.</p>
+
+<p>His real power however for good among the poor lay not so much in what
+he did as in what he was. It is in no spirit of class self-sufficiency
+that he dwells again and again throughout these letters on the
+advantages to such a neighbourhood of the presence of a "gentleman" in
+the midst of it. He lost little, in the end he gained much, by the
+resolute stand he made against the indiscriminate almsgiving which has
+done so much to create and encourage pauperism in the East of London.
+The poor soon came to understand the man who was as liberal with his
+sympathy as he was chary of meat and coal tickets, who only aimed at
+being their friend, at listening to their troubles, and aiding them with
+counsel, as if he were one of themselves, at putting them in the way of
+honest work, at teaching their children, at protecting them with a
+perfect courage and chivalry against oppression and wrong. He
+instinctively appealed in fact to their higher nature, and such an
+appeal seldom remains unanswered. In the roughest costermonger there is
+a vein of real <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>nobleness, often even of poetry, in which lies the whole
+chance of his rising to a better life. I remember, as an instance of the
+way in which such a vein can be touched, the visit of a lady, well known
+for her work in the poorer districts of London, to a low alley in this
+very parish. She entered the little mission-room with a huge basket,
+filled not with groceries or petticoats, but with roses. There was
+hardly one pale face among the women bending over their sewing that did
+not flush with delight as she distributed her gifts. Soon, as the news
+spread down the alley, rougher faces peered in at window and door, and
+great "navvies" and dock-labourers put out their hard fists for a
+rosebud with the shyness and delight of schoolboys. "She was a <i>real</i>
+lady," was the unanimous verdict of the alley; like Edward Denison she
+had somehow discovered that man does not live by bread alone, and that
+the communion of rich and poor is not to be found in appeals to the
+material but to the spiritual side of man.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you look on as the greatest boon that has been conferred on the
+poorer classes in later years?" said a friend to me one day, after
+expatiating on the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>rival claims of schools, missions, shoe-black
+brigades, and a host of other philanthropic efforts for their
+assistance. I am afraid I sank in his estimation when I answered,
+"Sixpenny photographs." But any one who knows what the worth of family
+affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of
+little portraits stuck over a labourer's fireplace, still gathering
+together into one the "home" that life is always parting&mdash;the boy that
+has "gone to Canada," the girl "out at service," the little one with the
+golden hair that sleeps under the daisies, the old grandfather in the
+country&mdash;will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies,
+social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family
+affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all
+the philanthropists in the world.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy indeed to resolve on "helping" the poor; but it is far less
+easy to see clearly how we can help them, what is real aid, and what is
+mere degradation. I know few books where any one who is soberly facing
+questions like these can find more help than in the "Letters" of Edward
+Denison. Broken and scattered as his hints necessarily appear, the main
+lines along <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>which his thought moves are plain enough. He would
+discriminate between temporary, and chronic distress, between the
+poverty caused by a sudden revolution of trade and permanent destitution
+such as that of Bethnal Green. The first requires exceptional treatment;
+the second a rigid and universal administration of the Poor Laws. "Bring
+back the Poor Law," he repeats again and again, "to the spirit of its
+institution; organize a sufficiently elastic labour test, without which
+no outdoor relief to be given; make the few alterations which altered
+times demand, and impose every possible discouragement on private
+benevolence." The true cure for pauperism lies in the growth of thrift
+among the poor. "I am not drawing the least upon my imagination when I
+say that a young man of twenty could in five years, even as a
+dock-labourer, which is much the lowest employment and least well paid
+there is, save about &pound;20. This is not exactly Utopia; it is within the
+reach of nearly every man, if quite at the bottom of the tree; but if it
+were of anything like common occurrence the destitution and disease of
+this life would be within manageable limits."</p>
+
+<p>I know that words like these are in striking contrast <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>with the usual
+public opinion on the subject, as well as with the mere screeching over
+poverty in which sentimentalists are in the habit of indulging. But it
+is fair to say that they entirely coincide with my own experience. The
+sight which struck me most in Stepney was one which met my eyes when I
+plunged by sheer accident into the back-yard of a jobbing carpenter, and
+came suddenly upon a neat greenhouse with fine flowers inside it. The
+man had built it with his own hands and his own savings; and the sight
+of it had so told on his next-door neighbour&mdash;a cobbler, if I remember
+rightly&mdash;as to induce him to leave off drinking, and build a rival
+greenhouse with savings of his own. Both had become zealous florists,
+and thrifty, respectable men; but the thing which surprised both of them
+most was that they had been able to save at all.</p>
+
+<p>It is in the letters themselves however rather than in these desultory
+comments of mine that the story of these two years of earnest combat
+with the great problem of our day must be studied. Short as the time
+was, it was broken by visits to France, to Scotland, to Guernsey, and by
+his election as Member of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>Parliament for the borough of Newark. But
+even these visits and his new parliamentary position were meant to be
+parts of an effort for the regeneration of our poorer classes. His
+careful examination of the thrift of the peasantry of the Channel
+Islands, his researches into the actual working of the "Assistance
+Publique" in Paris, the one remarkable speech he delivered in Parliament
+on the subject of vagrancy, were all contributions to this great end. In
+the midst of these labours a sudden attack of his old disease forced him
+to leave England on a long sea-voyage, and within a fortnight of his
+landing in Australia he died at Melbourne. His portrait hangs in the
+school which he built, and rough faces as they gaze at it still soften
+even into tears as they think of Edward Denison.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.</h2>
+<br /><a name="CANNES_AND_ST._HONORAT" id="CANNES_AND_ST._HONORAT"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<h2>I.</h2>
+
+<h2>CANNES AND ST. HONORAT.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>In a colloquial sort of way we talk glibly enough of leaving England,
+but England is by no means an easy country to leave. If it bids us
+farewell from the cliffs of Dover, it greets us again on the quay of
+Calais. It would be a curious morning's amusement to take a map of
+Europe, and mark with a dot of red the settlements of our lesser English
+colonies. A thousand Englands would crop up along the shores of the
+Channel or in quiet nooks of Normandy, around mouldering Breton castles
+or along the banks of the Loire, under the shadow of the Maritime Alps
+or the Pyrenees, beneath the white walls of Tunis or the Pyramids of the
+Nile. During the summer indeed England is everywhere&mdash;fishing in the
+fiords of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>Norway, sketching on the Kremlin, shooting brigands in
+Albania, yachting among the Cyclades, lion-hunting in the Atlas,
+crowding every steamer on the Rhine, annexing Switzerland, lounging
+through Italian galleries, idling in the gondolas of Venice. But even
+winter is far from driving England home again; what it really does is to
+concentrate it in a hundred little Britains along the sunny shores of
+the South. Each winter resort brings home to us the power of the British
+doctor. It is he who rears pleasant towns at the foot of the Pyrenees,
+and lines the sunny coasts of the Riviera with villas that gleam white
+among the olive groves. It is his finger that stirs the camels of
+Algeria, the donkeys of Palestine, the Nile boats of Egypt. At the first
+frosts of November the doctor marshals his wild geese for their winter
+flitting, and the long train streams off, grumbling but obedient, to the
+little Britains of the South.</p>
+
+<p>Of these little Britains none is more lovely than Cannes. The place is a
+pure creation of the health-seekers whose gay villas are thrown
+fancifully about among its sombre fir-woods, though the "Old Town," as
+it is called nowadays, remains clinging to its original <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>height, street
+above street leading up to a big bare church of the Renascence period,
+to fragments of medi&aelig;val walls and a great tower which crowns the summit
+of the hill. At the feet of this height lie the two isles of Lerins, set
+in the blue waters of the bay; on the east the eye ranges over the
+porphyry hills of Napoul to the huge masses of the Estrelles; landwards
+a tumbled country with bright villas dotted over it rises gently to the
+Alps. As a strictly winter resort Cannes is far too exposed for the more
+delicate class of invalids; as a spring resort it is without a rival.
+Nowhere is the air so bright and elastic, the light so wonderfully
+brilliant and diffused. The very soil, full of micaceous fragments,
+sparkles at our feet. Colour takes a depth as well as a refinement
+strange even to the Riviera; nowhere is the sea so darkly purple,
+nowhere are the tones of the distant hills so delicate and evanescent,
+nowhere are the sunsets so sublime. The scenery around harmonizes in its
+gaiety, its vivacity, its charm with this brightness of air and light.
+There is little of grandeur about it, little to compare in magnificence
+with the huge background of the cliffs behind Mentone or the mountain
+wall which rises so steeply from its lemon groves. But <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>everywhere there
+is what Mentone lacks&mdash;variety, largeness, picturesqueness of contrast
+and surprise. Above us is the same unchanging blue as there, but here it
+overarches gardens fresh with verdure and bright with flowers, and
+houses gleaming white among the dark fir-clumps; hidden little ravines
+break the endless tossings of the ground; in the distance white roads
+rush straight to grey towns hanging strangely against the hill-sides; a
+thin snow-line glitters along the ridge of the Maritime Alps; dark
+purple shadows veil the recesses of the Estrelles.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is it only this air of cheerfulness and vivacity which makes Cannes
+so pleasant a spring resort for invalids; it possesses in addition an
+advantage of situation which its more sheltered rivals necessarily want.
+The high mountain walls that give their complete security from cold
+winds to Mentone or San Remo are simply prison walls to visitors who are
+too weak to face a steep ascent on foot or even on donkey-back, for
+drives are out of the question except along one or two monotonous roads.
+But the country round Cannes is full of easy walks and drives, and it is
+as varied and beautiful as it is accessible. You step out <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>of your hotel
+into the midst of wild scenery, rough hills of broken granite screened
+with firs, or paths winding through a wilderness of white heath.
+Everywhere in spring the ground is carpeted with a profusion of
+wild-flowers, cistus and brown orchis, narcissus and the scarlet
+anemone; sometimes the forest scenery sweeps away, and leaves us among
+olive-grounds and orange-gardens arranged in formal, picturesque rows.
+And from every little height there are the same distant views of far-off
+mountains, or the old town flooded with yellow light, or islands lying
+gem-like in the dark blue sea, or the fiery hue of sunset over the
+Estrelles.</p>
+
+<p>Nor are these land-trips the only charm of Cannes. No one has seen the
+coast of Provence in its beauty who has not seen it from the sea. A sail
+to the isles of Lerins reveals for the first time the full glory of
+Cannes even to those who have enjoyed most keenly the large
+picturesqueness of its landscapes, the delicate colouring of its distant
+hills, the splendour of its sunsets. As one drifts away from the shore
+the circle of the Maritime Alps rises like the framework of some perfect
+picture, the broken outline of the mountains to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>the left contrasting
+with the cloud-capt heights above Turbia, snow-peaks peeping over the
+further slopes between them, delicate lights and shadows falling among
+the broken country of the foreground, Cannes itself stretching its
+bright line of white along the shore. In the midst of the bay, the
+centre as it were of this exquisite landscape, lie the two isles of
+Lerins. With the larger, that of St. Marguerite, romance has more to do
+than history, and the story of the "Man in the Iron Mask," who was so
+long a prisoner in its fortress, is fast losing the mystery which made
+it dear even to romance. The lesser and more distant isle, that of St.
+Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the
+starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its
+Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism
+of Egypt first penetrated into the West.</p>
+
+<p>The devotees whom the fame of Antony and of the C&oelig;nobites of the Nile
+had drawn in crowds to the East returned at the close of the fourth
+century to found similar retreats in the isles which line the coasts of
+the Mediterranean. The sea took the place of the desert, but the type of
+monastic life which the solitaries had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>found in Egypt was faithfully
+preserved. The Abbot of Lerins was simply the chief of some thousands of
+religious devotees, scattered over the island in solitary cells, and
+linked together by the common ties of obedience and prayer. By a curious
+concurrence of events the c&oelig;nobitic life of Lerins, so utterly unlike
+the later monasticism of the Benedictines, was long preserved in a
+remote corner of Christendom. Patrick, the most famous of its scholars,
+transmitted its type of monasticism to the Celtic Church which he
+founded in Ireland, and the vast numbers, the asceticism, the loose
+organization of such abbeys as those of Bangor or Armagh preserved to
+the twelfth century the essential characteristics of Lerins. Nor is this
+all its historical importance. What Iona is to the ecclesiastical
+history of Northern England, what Fulda and Monte Cassino are to the
+ecclesiastical history of Germany and Southern Italy, that this Abbey of
+St. Honorat became to the Church of Southern Gaul. For nearly two
+centuries, and those centuries of momentous change, when the wreck of
+the Roman Empire threatened civilization and Christianity with ruin like
+its own, the civilization and Christianity of the great district between
+the Loire, the Alps, and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>Pyrenees rested mainly on the Abbey of
+Lerins. Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the
+barbaric invaders who poured down on the Rh&ocirc;ne and the Garonne, it
+exercised over Provence and Aquitaine a supremacy such as Iona till the
+Synod of Whitby exercised over Northumbria. All the more illustrious
+sees of Southern Gaul were filled by prelates who had been reared at
+Lerins; to Arles, for instance, it gave in succession Hilary, C&aelig;sarius,
+and Virgilius. The voice of the Church was found in that of its doctors;
+the famous rule of faith, "quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus,"
+is the rule of Vincent of Lerins; its monk Salvian painted the agony of
+the dying Empire in his book on the government of God; the long fight of
+semi-Pelagianism against the sterner doctrines of Augustin was chiefly
+waged within its bounds.</p>
+
+<p>Little remains to illustrate this earlier and more famous period of the
+monastic history of Lerins which extends to the massacre of its monks by
+Saracen pirates at the opening of the eighth century. The very look of
+the island has been changed by the revolutions of the last hundred
+years. It is still a mere spit of sand, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>edged along the coast with
+sombre pines; but the whole of the interior has been stripped of its
+woods by the agricultural improvements which are being carried on by the
+Franciscans who at present possess it, and all trace of solitude and
+retirement has disappeared. A well in the centre of the island and a
+palm-tree beside the church are linked to the traditional history of the
+founders of the abbey. Worked into the later buildings we find marbles
+and sculptures which may have been brought from the mainland, as at
+Torcello, by fugitives who had escaped the barbaric storm. A bas-relief
+of Christ and the Apostles, which is now inserted over the west gate of
+the church, and a column of red marble which stands beside it, belong
+probably to the earliest days of the settlement at Lerins. In the little
+chapels scattered over the island fragments of early sarcophagi,
+inscriptions, and sculpture have been industriously collected and
+preserved. But the chapels themselves are far more interesting than
+their contents. Of the seven which originally lined the shore, two or
+three only now remain uninjured; in these the building itself is either
+square or octagonal, pierced with a single rough Romanesque window, and
+of diminutive size. The walls and vaulting are alike of rough
+stonework. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>The chapels served till the Revolution as seven stations
+which were visited by the pilgrims to the island, but we can hardly
+doubt that in these, as in the Seven Chapels at Glendalough, we see
+relics of the earlier c&oelig;nobitic establishment.</p>
+
+<p>The cloister of the abbey is certainly of a date later than the massacre
+of the monks, which took place according to tradition in the little
+square of wild greensward which lies within it; but the roughness of its
+masonry, the plain barrel roof, and the rude manner in which the low,
+gloomy vaulting is carried round its angles, are of the same character
+as in the usual tenth-century buildings of Southern Gaul. With the
+exception of the masonry of its side walls there is nothing in the
+existing remains of the abbey church itself earlier than its
+reconstruction at the close of the eleventh century. The building has
+been so utterly wrecked that little architectural detail is left; but
+the broad nave, with its narrow side aisles, the absence, as in the
+Aquitanian churches, of triforium and clerestory, and the shortness of
+the choir space, give their own individual mark to St. Honorat. Of the
+monastic buildings directly connected with the church only a few rooms
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>remain, and these are destitute of any features of interest. They are
+at present used as an orphanage by the Franciscans whom the Bishop of
+Frejus, by whom the island was purchased some fifteen years ago, has
+settled there as an agricultural colony, and whose reverence for the
+relics around them is as notable as their courtesy to the strangers who
+visit them. If it is true that the island narrowly escaped being turned
+into a tea-garden and resort for picnics by some English speculators, we
+can only feel a certain glow of gratitude to the Bishop of Frejus. The
+brown train of the eleven brothers as we saw them pacing slowly beneath
+the great caroub-tree close to the abbey, or the row of boys blinking in
+the sunshine as they repeat their lesson to the lay-brother who acts as
+schoolmaster, jar less roughly on the associations of Lerins than the
+giggle of happy lovers or the pop of British champagne.</p>
+
+<p>There is little interest in the later story of St. Honorat, from the
+days of the Saracen massacre to its escape from conversion into a
+tea-garden. The appearance of the Moslem pirates at once robbed it of
+its old security, and the cessation of their attacks was followed by new
+dangers from the Genoese and Catalans who infested <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>the coast in the
+fourteenth century. The isle was alternately occupied by French and
+Spaniards in the war between Francis and Charles V.; it passed under the
+rule of Commendatory abbots, and in 1789, when it was finally
+secularized, the four thousand monks of its earlier history had shrunk
+to four. Perhaps the most curious of all the buildings of Lerins is that
+which took its rise in the insecurity of its medi&aelig;val existence. The
+Castle of Lerins, which lies on the shore to the south of the church, is
+at once a castle and an abbey. Like many of the great monasteries of the
+East, its first object was to give security to its inmates against the
+marauders who surrounded them. Externally its appearance is purely
+military; the great tower rises from its trench cut deep in the rock, a
+portcullis protects the gate, the walls are pierced with loopholes and
+crowned with battlements. But within, the arrangements, so far as it is
+possible to trace them in the present ruined state of the building, seem
+to have been purely monastic. The interior of the tower is occupied by a
+double-arched cloister, with arcades of exquisite first-pointed work,
+through which one looks down into the little court below. The visitor
+passes from this into the ruins of the abbot's chapel, to which the
+relics were transferred <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>for security from the church of St. Honorat,
+and which was surrounded by the cells, the refectory, and the domestic
+buildings of the monks. The erection of the castle is dated in the
+twelfth century, and from this time we may consider the older abbey
+buildings around the church to have been deserted and left to ruin; but
+we can hardly grumble at a transfer which has given us so curious a
+combination of military and monastic architecture in the castle itself.</p>
+
+<p>Something of the feudal spirit which such a residence would be likely to
+produce appears in the abbot's relations with the little town of Cannes,
+which formed a part of his extensive lordship on the mainland. Its
+fishers were harassed by heavy tolls on their fishery, and the rights of
+first purchase in the market and forced labour were rigorously exacted
+by the monastic officers. It is curious to compare, as one's boat floats
+back across the waters of the bay, the fortunes of these serfs and of
+their lords.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr style="width: 45%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.</h2>
+<br /><a name="CARNIVAL_ON_THE_CORNICE" id="CARNIVAL_ON_THE_CORNICE"></a>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+
+<h2>II.</h2>
+
+<h2>CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Carnival in an ordinary little Italian town seems, no doubt, commonplace
+enough to those who have seen its glories in Rome&mdash;the crowded Corso,
+the rush of the maddened horses, the firefly twinklings of the
+Maccoletti. A single evening of simple fun, a few peasants laughing in
+the sunshine, a few children scrambling for bonbons, form an almost
+ridiculous contrast to the gorgeous outburst of revelry and colour that
+ushers in Lent at the capital. But there are some people after all who
+still find a charm in the simple and the commonplace, and to whom the
+everyday life of Italy is infinitely pleasanter than the stately
+ceremonial of Rome. At any rate the stranger who has fled from Northern
+winters to the shelter of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>the Riviera is ready to greet in the
+homeliest Carnival the incoming of spring. His first months of exile
+have probably been months of a little disappointment. He is far from
+having found the perpetual sunshine which poets and guide-books led him
+to hope for. He has shivered at Christmas just as he shivered at home,
+he has had his days of snowfall and his weeks of rain. If he is
+thoroughly British, he has growled and grumbled, and written to expose
+"the humbug of the sunny South" in the <i>Times</i>; if he is patient, he has
+jotted down day after day in his diary, and found a cold sort of
+statistical comfort in the discovery that the sunny days after all
+outnumbered the gloomy ones. The worst winter of the Riviera, he is
+willing to admit, would be a very mild winter at home, but still, after
+each concession to one's diary and common sense, there remains a latent
+feeling of disappointment and deception.</p>
+
+<p>But Carnival sweeps all this feeling away with the coming of the spring.
+From the opening of February week follows week in a monotony of warm
+sunshine. Day after day there is the same cloudless cope of blue
+overhead, the same marvellous colour in the sea, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>same blaze of
+roses in the gardens, the same scent of violets in every lazy breath of
+air that wanders down from the hills. Every almond-tree is a mass of
+white bloom. The narcissus has found a rival along the terraces in the
+anemone, and already the wild tulip is preparing to dispute the palm of
+supremacy with both. It is the time for picnics, for excursions, for
+donkey-rides, for dreams beneath the clump of cypresses that shoot up
+black into the sky, for siestas beneath the olives. It is wonderful what
+a prodigious rush of peace and good temper follows on the first rush of
+spring. The very doctors of the winter resort shake hands with one
+another, the sermons of the chaplain lose their frost-bitten savour and
+die down into something like charity, scandal and tittle-tattle go to
+sleep in the sunshine. The stolid, impassive English nature blooms into
+a life strangely unlike its own. Papas forget their <i>Times</i>. Mammas
+forget their propriety. The stout British merchant finds himself astride
+of a donkey, and exchanging good-humoured badinage with the labourers in
+the olive-terraces. The Dorcas of Exeter Hall leaves her tracts at home,
+and passes without a groan the pictured Madonna on every wall. Carnival
+comes, and completes the wreck of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>proprieties. The girls secure
+their window and pelt their black-bearded Professor in the street below
+without dread of a scolding on the "convenances." The impassive spinster
+whose voice never rises at home above the most polite whisper screams
+with delight at the first sugarplum that hits her, and furtively
+supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the war. "It is such
+fun, isn't it, papa?" shout the boys as they lean breathless over the
+balcony, laughing and pelting at the crowd that laughs and pelts back
+again. And papa, who "puts down" fairs in England, and wonders what
+amusement people can find in peepshows and merry-go-rounds, finds
+himself surprised into a "Very jolly, indeed!"</p>
+
+<p>It is the same welcome to the spring that gives its charm to the
+Carnival in the minds of the Italians themselves. To the priest of
+course Carnival is simply a farewell to worldly junketings and a welcome
+to Lent, but like every other Church festival it is flinging off its
+ecclesiastical disguise and donning among the people themselves its old
+mask as a sheer bit of nature-worship. The women still observe Lent, and
+their power as housekeepers forces its observance <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>to a certain extent
+on their husbands and sons. The Italian shrugs his shoulders and submits
+in a humorous way to what is simply a bit of domestic discipline,
+revenges himself by a jest on the priesthood, and waits with his quiet
+"pazienza" till the progress of education shall have secured him a wife
+who won't grudge him his dinner. But Lent is no reality to him, and
+spring is a very real thing indeed. The winter is so short that the
+whole habit of his life and the very fabric of his home is framed on the
+apparent supposition that there is no such thing as winter at all. His
+notion of life is life in the open air, life in the sunshine. The
+peasant of the Cornice looks on with amazement at an Englishman tramping
+along in the rain. A little rainfall or a little snow keeps every
+labourer at home with a murmur of "cattivo Dio" between his teeth. A
+Scotchman or a Yorkshireman wraps his plaid around him and looks with
+contempt on an idle race who are "afraid of a sprinkle." But the peasant
+of North Italy is no more of an idler than the peasant of the Lowlands.
+The truth is, that both he and his home are absolutely unprepared for
+bad weather. His clothes are thin and scanty. His diet is low. The
+wonder is how he gets through a hard day's work on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>food which an
+English pauper would starve upon. He has no fireplace at home, and, if
+he had, he has no fuel. Wood is very dear, and coal there is none. If he
+gets wet through there is no hearth to dry himself or his clothes at.
+Cold means fever, and fever with low diet means death. Besides, there is
+little loss in staying at home on rainy days. In England or the Lowlands
+the peasant farmer who couldn't "bide a shower" would lose half the
+year, but a rainy day along the Cornice is so rare a thing that it makes
+little difference in the year's account.</p>
+
+<p>It is much the same with the townsman, the trader, the professional man.
+When work in the shop or office is over his life circles round the caf&eacute;.
+Society and home mean for him the chatty, gesticulating group of friends
+camped out round their little tables on the pavement under the huge
+awning that gives them shade. When winter breaks up the pleasant circle,
+and the dark, chilly evenings drive him, as we say, "home," he has no
+home to flee unto. He is not used to domestic life, or to conversation
+with his wife or his children. Above all there is no fire, no "hearth
+and home." Going home in fact means going to bed. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>An Italian doctor or
+an Italian lawyer knows nothing of the cosy evenings of the North, of
+the bright fire, the brighter chat round it, or the quiet book till
+sleep comes. Somebody has said truly enough that if a man wanted to see
+human life at its best he would spend his winters in England and his
+summers in Italy. We have so much winter that we have faced it, made a
+study of it, and beaten it. Our houses are a great nuisance in warm
+weather, but their thick walls and close-fitting windows and broad
+fireplaces are admirably adapted for cold. Italians, on the other hand,
+have so little winter that when the cold does come it is completely
+their master. The large, dark, cool rooms that are so grateful in July
+are simply ice-houses in December. The large windows are full of
+crevices and draughts. An ordinary Italian positively dreads a fire from
+his knowledge of the perils it entails in rooms so draughty as Italian
+rooms commonly are. He infinitely prefers to rub his blue little hands
+and wait till this inscrutable mystery of bad weather be overpast. But
+it is only the thought of what he suffers during the winter, short as it
+is in comparison with our own, that enables us to understand the ecstasy
+of his joy at the reappearance of the spring. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>Everybody meets everybody
+with greetings on the warmth and the sunshine. The mother comes down
+again to bask herself at every doorstep, and the little street is once
+more alive with chat and laughter. The very beggars exchange their whine
+for a more cheerful tone of insidious persuasion. The women sing as they
+jog down the hill-paths with the big baskets of olives on their heads.
+The old dispossessed friar slumbers happily by the roadside. The little
+tables come out on to the pavement, and the society of the place forms
+itself afresh into buzzing groups of energetic conversers. The
+dormouse-life of winter is over, and the spring and the Carnival has
+come.</p>
+
+<p>Carnival in a little Italian town, as we have said, is no very grand
+thing, and as a mere question of fun it is no doubt amusing only to
+people who are ready to be amused. And yet there is a quaint fascination
+in it as a whole, in the rows of old women with demure little children
+in their laps ranged on the stone seats along the bridge, the girls on
+the pavement, the grotesque figures dancing along the road, the
+harlequins, the mimic Capuchins, the dominoes with big noses, the
+carriages rolling along amidst a fire of sugarplums, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>boys darting
+in and out and smothering one with their handfuls of flour, the sham
+cook with his pots and pans wreathed with vine-branches, the sham
+cavalier in theatrical cloak and trunk hose who dashes about on a pony,
+the solemn group tossing a doll to a church-like chant in a blanket, the
+chaff and violet bunches flung from the windows, the fun and life and
+buzz and colour of it all. It is something very different, one feels,
+from the common country fair of home. In the first place it is eminently
+picturesque. As one looks down from the balcony through a storm of
+sugarplums the eye revels in a perfect feast of colour. Even the
+russet-brown of every old woman's dress glows in the sunshine into a
+strange beauty. Every little touch of red or blue in the girls'
+head-dresses shines out in the intense light. As the oddly attired
+maskers dart in and out or whirl past in the dance the little street
+seems like a gay ribbon of shifting hues winding between its grey old
+houses with touches of fresh tints at every window and balcony. The
+crimson caps of the peasants stand out in bold relief against the dark
+green of the lemon-garden behind them. Overhead the wind is just
+stirring in the big pendant leaves of the two palm-trees in the centre
+of the street, and the eye once caught by them <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>ranges on to the white
+mass of the town as it stands glowing on its hill-side and thence to the
+brown hilltops, and the intense blue of the sky.</p>
+
+<p>The whole setting of the scene is un-English, and the scene itself is as
+un-English as its setting. The fun, the enjoyment, is universal. There
+is nothing of the complicated apparatus which an English fair requires,
+none of the contrivances to make people laugh&mdash;the clowns, the
+cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and
+two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic
+photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds.
+And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless
+chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity
+and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An
+English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully
+hard work to amuse him. The peasant of Italy goes to Carnival to amuse
+himself and to amuse everybody else. He is full of joyousness and fun,
+and he wishes everybody to be as funny and as joyous as himself. He has
+no notion of doing his merriment by deputy. He claps his mask on his
+face or takes his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>bag of flour in his hand, and is himself the fun of
+the fair. His neighbour does precisely the same. The two farmers who
+were yesterday chaffering over the price of maize meet each other in
+Carnival as Punch and Harlequin. Every boy has his false nose or his
+squeaking whistle. The quiet little maiden whom you saw yesterday
+washing her clothes in the torrent comes tripping up the street with a
+mask on her face. The very mothers with their little ones in their laps
+throw in their contribution of smart speeches and merry taunts to the
+fun of the affair. It is wonderful how simple the elements of their
+amusement are and how perfectly they are amused. A little masquerading,
+a little dancing, a little pelting with flour and sugarplums, and
+everybody is as happy as possible.</p>
+
+<p>And it is a happiness that is free from any coarse intermixture. The
+badinage is childish enough, but it has none of the foul slang in which
+an English crowd delights to express its notions of humour. The girls
+bandy "chaff" with their disguised lovers, but the "chaff" is what their
+mothers might hear. There is none of the brutal horseplay of home.
+Harlequin goes by with his little bladder suspended from a string, but
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>the dexterous little touch is a touch and no more. The tiny sugarplums
+rain like hail on one's face, but there is the fun of catching them and
+seeing the children hunt after them in the dust. The flour-pelting is
+the hardest to bear, but the annoyance is redeemed by the burst of
+laughter from the culprit and the bystanders. It is a rare thing to see
+anybody lose his temper. It is a yet rarer thing to see anybody drunk.
+The sulky altercations, the tipsy squabbles, of Northern amusements are
+unknown. The characteristic "prudence" of the Italian is never better
+displayed than in his merriment. He knows how far to carry his badinage.
+He knows when to have done with his fun. The tedious length of an
+English merry-making would be unintelligible to him; he doesn't care to
+spoil the day's enjoyment by making a night of it. A few hours of
+laughter satisfy him, and when evening falls and the sunshine goes, he
+goes with the sunshine.</p>
+
+<p>It is in the Carnival that one sees most conspicuously displayed that
+habit of social equality which is one of the special features of Italian
+life. Nothing is more unlike the social jealousy of the Frenchman, or
+the surly incivility with which a Lancashire operative <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>thinks proper to
+show the world that he is as good a man as his master. In either case
+one feels the taint of a mere spirit of envious levelling, and a latent
+confession that the levelling process has still in reality to be
+accomplished. But the ordinary Italian has nothing of the leveller about
+him. The little town is proud of its Marchese and of the great palazzo
+that has entertained a King. It is a matter of public concern when the
+Count gambles away his patrimony. An Italian noble is no object of
+jealousy to his fellow-citizens, but then no one gives himself less of
+the airs of a privileged or exclusive caste. Cavour was a popular man
+because, noble as he was, he would smoke a cigar or stop for a chat with
+anybody. The Carnival brings out this characteristic of Italian manners
+amusingly enough. The mask, the disguise, levels all distinctions. The
+Count's whiskers are white with the flour just flung at him by the
+town-crier. The young nephews of the Baron are the two harlequins who
+are exchanging badinage with the group of country girls at the corner. A
+general pelting of sugarplums salutes the appearance of the Marchese's
+four-in-hand with the Marchese himself in an odd mufti on the box.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>Social equality is possible, because among rich and poor alike there is
+the same social ease. Barber or donkey-driver chats to you with a
+perfect frankness and unconsciousness of any need of reserve. In both
+rich and poor, too, there is the same social taste and refinement. The
+coarse dress of the peasant girl is worn with as native a dignity as the
+robe of a queen. An unconscious elegance breathes through the very
+disguises of the Carnival, grotesque as many of them are. The young
+fellow who has wreathed himself with flowers and vine-leaves shows a
+knowledge of colour and effect which an artist might envy him. But there
+is not one among the roughest of the peasants or of the townsfolk who
+has not that indescribable thing we call manner, or who would betray our
+insular awkwardness when we speak to a lord. And, besides this social
+equality, there is a family equality too. In England old people enjoy
+fun, but it is held to be indecorous in them to afford amusement to
+others. A Palmerston may be a jester at eighty, but the jest must never
+go beyond words. But in an Italian Carnival the old claim just as much a
+part in the fun as the young. Grandfathers and grandmothers think it the
+most natural thing in the world to turn out in odd costumes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>to give a
+good laugh to the grandchildren. Papa pops on the most comical mask he
+can find, and walks down the street arm-in-arm with his boy. In no
+country perhaps is the filial regard stronger than in Italy; nowhere do
+mothers claim authority so long over their sons. But this seems to be
+compatible with a domestic liberty and ease which would be impossible in
+the graver nations of the North. If once we laughed at our mother's
+absurdities a mother's influence would be gone. But an Italian will
+laugh and go on reverencing and obeying in a way we should never dream
+of. Altogether, it is wonderful how many sides of social life and
+national character find their illustration in a country carnival.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr style="width: 45%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.</h2>
+<br /><a name="TWO_PIRATE_TOWNS_OF_THE_RIVIERA" id="TWO_PIRATE_TOWNS_OF_THE_RIVIERA"></a>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+
+<h2>III.</h2>
+
+<h2>TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The view of Monaco, as one looks down on it from the mountain road which
+leads to Turbia, is unquestionably the most picturesque among all the
+views of the Riviera. The whole coast-line lies before us for a last
+look as far as the hills above San Remo, headland after headland running
+out into blue water, white little towns nestling in the depth of sunny
+bays or clinging to the brown hill-side, villas peeping white from the
+dark olive masses, sails gleaming white against the purple sea. The
+brilliancy of light, the purity and intensity of colour, the clear
+freshness of the mountain air, tempered as it is by the warm sun-glow,
+make the long rise from Mentone hard to forget. Mentone itself steals
+out again and again from under its huge red cliffs to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>look up at us; we
+pass by Roccabruna, half rock, half village, hanging high on the
+hill-side; we leave the orange groves beneath us studded with golden
+fruit; even the silvery wayward olives fail us, even the pines grow thin
+and stunted. At last the mountain rises bare above us with only a red
+rock jutting here and there from its ashen-coloured front. We reach the
+top, and right in our road rises a vast fragment of Roman masonry, the
+tower of Turbia, while, thousands of feet beneath, Monaco glows "like a
+gem" in its setting of dark blue sea. We are on the track of "The
+Daisy," and the verse of Tennyson's gay little poem comes back to us:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">What Roman strength Turbia showed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In ruin, by the mountain road;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">How like a gem, beneath, the city<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of little Monaco basking glowed.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Monaco stands on a promontory of rock which falls in bold cliffs into
+the sea; as one climbs to it from the bay one sees the citadel with its
+huge bastions frowning on the white buildings of the palace, the long
+line of grey, ivy-crested walls topping the cliffs, and above them the
+mass of the little town, broken by a single campanile and a few
+cypresses. Its situation at once <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>marks the character of the place. It
+is the one town of the Riviera which, instead of lying screened in the
+hollow of some bay, as though eager to escape from pirate or Saracen,
+juts boldly out into the sea as if on the look-out for prey. Its grim
+walls, the guns still mounted and shot piled on its battlements, mark
+the pirate town of the past. At its feet, in trim square of hotel and
+gambling-house, with a smart Parisian look about it as if the whole had
+been just caught up out of the Boulevards and dropped on this Italian
+coast, lies the new Monaco, the pirate town of the present.</p>
+
+<p>Even the least among Italian cities yields so much of interest in its
+past that we turn with disappointment from the history of Monaco. The
+place has always been a mere pirate haunt, without a break of liberty or
+civic life; and yet there is a certain fascination in the perfect
+uniformity of its existence. The town from which C&aelig;sar sailed to Genoa
+and Rome vanished before the ravages of the Saracens, and the spot
+remained desert till it passed by Imperial cession to Genoa, and the
+Genoese Commune erected a fort which became a refuge alternately for its
+Guelf or Ghibelline exiles, its Spinolas or its Grimaldis. A church of
+fine <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>twelfth-century work is the only monument which remains of this
+earlier time; at the opening of the fourteenth century Monaco passed
+finally to the Grimaldis, and became in their hands a haunt of
+buccaneers. Only one of their line rises into historic fame, and he is
+singularly connected with a great event in English history. Charles
+Grimaldi was one of the foremost leaders in the Italian wars of his day;
+he passed as a mercenary into the service of France in her combat with
+Edward III., and his seventy-two galleys set sail from Monaco with the
+fifteen thousand Genoese bowmen who appear so unexpectedly in the
+forefront of the battle of Cr&eacute;cy. The massacre of these forces drove him
+home again to engage in attacks on the Catalans and Venetians and
+struggles with Genoa, till the wealth which his piracy had accumulated
+enabled him to add Mentone and Roccabruna to his petty dominions. It is
+needless to trace the history of his house any further; corsairs,
+soldiers of fortune, trimming adroitly in the struggles of the sixteenth
+century between France and Spain, sinking finally into mere vassals of
+Louis XIV. and hangers-on at the French Court, the family history of the
+Grimaldis is one of treason and blood&mdash;brother murdering brother, nephew
+murdering uncle, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>assassination by subjects avenging the honour of
+daughters outraged by their master's lust.</p>
+
+<p>Of the town itself, as we have said, there is no history at all; it
+consists indeed only of a few petty streets streaming down the hill from
+the palace square. The palace, though spoilt by a gaudy modern
+restoration, is externally a fine specimen of Italian Renascence work,
+its court painted all over with arabesques of a rough Caravaggio order,
+while the State-rooms within have a thoroughly French air, as if to
+embody the double character of their occupants, at once Lords of Monaco
+and Ducs de Valentinois. The palace is encircled with a charming little
+garden, a bit of colour and greenery squeezed in, as it were, between
+cliff and fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red
+rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or
+across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with
+gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A
+bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political
+existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far more
+wonderful that, after all the annexations of late years, it should still
+remain an independent, though the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>smallest, principality in the world.
+But even the Grimaldis have not managed wholly to escape from the
+general luck of their fellow-rulers; Mentone and Roccabruna were ceded
+to France some few years back for a sum of four million francs, and the
+present lord of Monaco is the ruler of but a few streets and some two
+thousand subjects. His army reminds one of the famous war establishment
+of the older German princelings; one year indeed to the amazement of
+beholders it rose to the gigantic force of four-and-twenty men; but
+then, as we were gravely told by an official, "it had been doubled in
+consequence of the war." Idler and absentee as he is, the Prince is
+faithful to the traditions of his house; the merchant indeed sails
+without dread beneath the once dreaded rocks of the pirate haunt; but a
+new pirate town has risen on the shores of its bay. It is the pillage of
+a host of gamblers that maintains the heroic army of Monaco, that
+cleanses its streets, and fills the exchequer of its lord.</p>
+
+<p>There is something exquisitely piquant in the contrast between the
+gloomy sternness of the older robber-hold and the gaiety and
+attractiveness of the new. Nothing can be prettier than the gardens,
+rich in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>fountains and statues and tropical plants, which surround the
+neat Parisian square of buildings. The hotel is splendidly decorated and
+its <i>cuisine</i> claims to be the best in Europe; there is a pleasant caf&eacute;;
+the doors of the Casino itself stand hospitably open, and strangers may
+wander without a question from hall to reading-room, or listen in the
+concert-room to an excellent band which plays twice a-day. The salon
+itself, the terrible "Hell" which one has pictured with all sorts of
+Dantesque accompaniments, is a pleasant room, gaily painted, with cosies
+all round it and a huge mass of gorgeous flowers in the centre. Nothing
+can be more unlike one's preconceived ideas than the gambling itself, or
+the aspect of the gamblers around the tables. Of the wild excitement,
+the frenzy of gain, the outbursts of despair which one has come prepared
+to witness, there is not a sign. The games strike the bystander as
+singularly dull and uninteresting; one wearies of the perpetual deal and
+turn-up of the cards at rouge-et-noir, of the rattle of the ball as it
+dances into its pigeonhole at roulette, of the monotonous chant of "Make
+your game, gentlemen," or "The game is made." The croupiers rake in
+their gains or poke out the winnings with the passive regularity of
+machines; the gamblers <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>sit round the table with the vacant solemnity of
+undertakers. The general air of the company is that of a number of
+well-to-do people bored out of their lives, and varying their boredom
+with quiet nods to the croupier and assiduous prickings of little cards.</p>
+
+<p>The boredom is apparently greatest at rouge-et-noir, where the circle is
+more aristocratic and thousands can be lost and won in a night.
+Everybody looks tired, absent, inattentive; nobody takes much notice of
+his neighbour or of the spectators looking on; nobody cares to speak; a
+finger suffices to direct the croupier to push the stake on to the
+desired spot, a nod or a look to indicate the winner. The game goes on
+in a dull uniformity; nobody varies his stake; a few napoleons are added
+to or subtracted from the heaps before each as the minutes go on;
+sometimes a little sum is done on a paper beside the player; but there
+is the same impassive countenance, the same bored expression everywhere.
+Now and then one player gets quietly up and another sits quietly down.
+But there is nothing startling or dramatic, no frenzies of hope or
+exclamations of despair, nothing of the gambler of fiction with "his
+hands clasped to his burning forehead," and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>like. To any one who is
+not fascinated by the mere look of rolls of napoleons pushed from one
+colour to another, or of gold raked about in little heaps, there is
+something very difficult to understand in the spell which a gaming-table
+exercises. Roulette is a little more amusing, as it is more intelligible
+to the looker-on. The stakes are smaller, the company changes oftener,
+and is socially more varied. There is not such a dead, heavy earnestness
+about these riskers of five-franc pieces as about the more desperate
+gamblers of rouge-et-noir; the outside fringe of lookers-on bend over
+with their stakes to back "a run of luck," and there is a certain quiet
+buzz of interest when the game seems going against the bank. There is
+always someone going and coming, over-dressed girls lean over and drop
+their stake and disappear, young clerks bring their quarter's salary,
+the casual visitor "doesn't mind risking a few francs" at roulette.</p>
+
+<p>But even the excitement of roulette is of the gravest and dullest order.
+The only player who seems to throw any kind of vivacity into his
+gambling is a gaudy little Jew with heavy watch-chain, who vibrates
+between one table and another, sees nothing of the game save the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>dropping his stake at roulette and then rushing off to drop another
+stake at rouge-et-noir, and finds time in his marches to spare a merry
+little word to a friend or two. But he is the only person who seems to
+know anybody. Men who sit by one another year after year never exchange
+a word. There is not even the air of reckless adventure to excite one.
+The player who dashes down his all on any part of the table and trusts
+to fortune is a mere creature of fiction; the gambler of fact is a
+calculator, a man of business, with a contempt for speculation and a
+firm belief in long-studied combination. Each has his little card, and
+ticks off the succession of numbers with the accuracy of a ledger. It is
+in the careful study of these statistics that each believes he discovers
+the secret of the game, the arrangement which, however it may be
+defeated for a time by inscrutable interference of ill-luck, must in the
+end, if there is any truth in statistics, be successful. One looks in
+vain for the "reckless gambler" one has read about and talked about, for
+"reckless" is the very last word by which one would describe the ring of
+business-like people who come day after day with the hope of making
+money by an ingenious dodge.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>Their talk, if one listens to it over the dinner-table, turns altogether
+on this business-like aspect of the question. Nobody takes the least
+interest in its romantic or poetic side, in the wonderful runs of luck
+or the terrible stories of ruin and despair which form the
+stock-in-trade of the novelist. The talk might be that of a conference
+of commercial travellers. Everybody has his infallible nostrum for
+breaking the bank; but everybody looks upon the prospect of such a
+fortune in a purely commercial light. The general opinion of the wiser
+sort goes against heavy stakes, and "wild play" is only talked about
+with contempt. The qualities held in honour, so far as we can gather
+from the conversation, are "judgment," which means a careful study of
+the little cards and a certain knowledge of mathematics, and
+"constancy"&mdash;the playing not from caprice but on a definite plan and
+principle. Nobody has the least belief in "luck." A winner is
+congratulated on his "science." The loser explains the causes of his
+loss. A portly person who announces himself as one of a company of
+gamblers who have invested an enormous capital on a theory of winning by
+means of low stakes and a certain combination excites universal
+interest. Most of the talkers describe themselves <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>frankly as men of
+business. No doubt at Monaco, as elsewhere, there is the usual
+aristocratic fringe&mdash;the Russian prince who flings away an estate at a
+sitting, the half-blind countess from the Faubourg St. Germain, the
+Polish dancer with a score of titles, the English "milord." But the bulk
+of the players have the look and air of people who have made their money
+in trade. It is well to look on at such a scene, if only to strip off
+the romance which has been so profusely showered over it. As a matter of
+fact nothing is more prosaic, nothing meaner in tone, nothing more
+utterly devoid of interest, than a gambling-table. But as a question of
+profit the establishment of M. Blanc throws into the shade the older
+piracy of Monaco. The Venetian galleons, the carracks of Genoa, the
+galleys of Marseilles, brought infinitely less gold to its harbour than
+these two little groups of the fools of half a continent.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr style="width: 45%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.</h2>
+<br /><a name="THE_WINTER_RETREAT" id="THE_WINTER_RETREAT"></a>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+
+<h2>IV.</h2>
+
+<h2>THE WINTER RETREAT.</h2>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>It is odd, when one is safely anchored in a winter refuge to look back
+at the terrors and reluctance with which one first faced the sentence of
+exile. Even if sunshine were the only gain of a winter flitting, it
+would still be hard to estimate the gain. The cold winds, the icy
+showers, the fogs we leave behind us, give perhaps a zest not wholly its
+own to Italian sunshine. But the abrupt plunge into a land of warmth and
+colour sends a strange shock of pleasure through every nerve. The
+flinging off of wraps and furs, the discarding of greatcoats, is like
+the beginning of a new life. It is not till we pass in this sharp,
+abrupt fashion from the November of one side the Alps to the November of
+the other that we get some notion of the way in which the actual range
+and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>freedom of life is cramped by the "chill north-easters" in which
+Mr. Kingsley revelled. The unchanged vegetation, the background of dark
+olive woods, the masses of ilex, the golden globes of the orange hanging
+over the garden wall, are all so many distinct gains to an eye which has
+associated winter with leafless boughs and a bare landscape. One has
+almost a boyish delight in plucking roses at Christmas or hunting for
+violets along the hedges on New Year's Day. There are chill days of
+course, and chiller nights, but cold is a relative term and loses its
+English meaning in spots where snow falls once or twice in a year and
+vanishes before midday. The mere break of habit is delightful; it is
+like a laughing defiance of established facts to lounge by the seashore
+in the hot sun-glare of a January morning. And with this new sense of
+liberty comes little by little a freedom from the overpowering dread of
+chills and colds and coughs which only invalids can appreciate. It is an
+indescribable relief not to look for a cold round every corner. The
+"lounging" which becomes one's life along the Riviera or the Bay of
+Naples is only another name for the ease and absence of anxiety which
+the mere presence of constant sunshine gives to life.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>Few people, in fact, actually "lounge" less than the English exiles who
+bask in the sun of Italy. Their real danger lies in the perpetual
+temptation to over-exertion which arises from the sense of renewed
+health. Every village on its hilltop, every white shrine glistening high
+up among the olives, seems to woo one up the stony paths and the long
+hot climb to the summit. But the relief from home itself, the break away
+from all the routine of one's life, is hardly less than the relief from
+greatcoats. It is not till our life is thoroughly disorganized, till the
+grave mother of a family finds herself perched on a donkey, or the
+<i>habitu&eacute;</i> of Pall Mall sees himself sauntering along through the olive
+groves, that one realizes the iron bounds within which our English
+existence moves. Every holiday of course brings this home to one more or
+less, but the long holiday of a whole winter brings it home most of all.
+England and English ways recede and become unreal. Old prepossessions
+and prejudices lose half their force when sea and mountains part us from
+their native soil. It is hard to keep up our vivid interest in the
+politics of Little Pedlington, or to maintain our old excitement over
+the matrimonial fortunes of Miss Hominy. It <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>becomes possible to
+breakfast without the last telegram and to go to bed without the news of
+a fresh butchery. One's real interest lies in the sunshine, in the
+pleasure of having sunshine to-day, in the hope of having sunshine
+to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>But really to enjoy the winter retreat one must keep as much as possible
+out of the winter retreat itself. Few places are more depressing in
+their social aspects than these picturesque little Britains. The winter
+resort is a colony of squires with the rheumatism, elderly maidens with
+delicate throats, worn-out legislators, a German princess or two with a
+due train of portly and short-sighted chamberlains, girls with a hectic
+flush of consumption, bronchitic parsons, barristers hurried off circuit
+by the warning cough. The life of these patients is little more than the
+life of a machine. As the London physician says when he bids them
+"good-bye," "The nearer you can approach to the condition of a vegetable
+the better for your chances of recovery." All the delicious
+uncertainties and irregularities that make up the freedom of existence
+disappear. The day is broken up into a number of little times and
+seasons. Dinner comes at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>midday, and is as exact to its moment as the
+early breakfast or the "heavy tea." And between each meal there are
+medicines to be taken, inhalations to be gone through, the due hour of
+rest to be allotted to digestion, the other due hour to exercise.</p>
+
+<p>The air of the sick-room lingers everywhere about the place; one
+catches, as it were, the far-off hush of the Campo Santo. Life is
+reduced to its lowest expression; people exist rather than live. Every
+one remembers that every one else is an invalid. Voices are soft,
+conversation is subdued, visits are short. There is a languid, sickly
+sweetness in the very courtesy of society. Gaiety is simply regarded as
+a danger. Every hill is a temptation to too long and fatiguing a climb.
+No sunshine makes "the patient" forget his wraps. No coolness of
+delicious shade moves him to repose. His whole energy and watchfulness
+is directed to the avoidance of a chill. Life becomes simply
+barometrical. An east wind is the subject of public lamentation; the
+vast mountain range to the north is admired less for its wild grandeur
+than for the shelter it affords against the terrible mistral. Excitement
+is a word of dread. Distance <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>itself takes something of the sharpness
+and vividness off from the old cares and interests of home. The very
+letters that reach the winter resort are doctored, and "incidents which
+might excite" are excluded by the care of correspondents: Mamma only
+hears of Johnny's measles when Johnny is running about again. The young
+scapegrace at Oxford is far too considerate to trouble his father,
+against the doctor's orders, with the mention of his failure in the
+schools. News comes with all colour strained and filtered out of it
+through the columns of 'Galignani.' The neologian heresy, the debate in
+Convocation which would have stirred the heart of the parson at home,
+fall flat in the shape of a brown and aged 'Times.' There are no
+"evenings out." The first sign of eve is the signal for dispersion
+homewards, and it is only from the safe shelter of his own room that the
+winter patient ventures to gaze on the perilous glories of the sunset.
+The evenings are in fact a dawdle indoors as the day has been a dawdle
+out, a little music, a little reading of the quiet order, a little chat,
+a little letter-writing, and an early to bed.</p>
+
+<p>It is this calm monotony of day after day at which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>the world of the
+winter resort deliberately aims, a life like that of the deities of
+Epicurus, untouched by the cares or interests of the world without. The
+very gaiety is of the same subdued and quiet order&mdash;drives,
+donkey-rides, picnics of the small and early type. An air of slow
+respectability pervades the place; the bulk of the colonists are people
+well-to-do, who can afford the expense of a winter away from home and of
+a villa at &pound;150 the season. The bankrupt element of Boulogne, the
+half-pay element of Dinan or Avranches, is as rare on the Riviera as the
+loungers who rejoice in the many-changing toilets of Arcachon or
+Biarritz. The quiet humdrum tone of the parson best harmonises with that
+of the winter resort, and parsons of all sorts abound there.</p>
+
+<p>But the chaplain is not here, as in other little Britains, the centre of
+social life; he is superseded by the doctor. The winter resort in fact
+owes its origin to the doctor. The little village or the country town
+looks with awe upon the man who has discovered for it a future of
+prosperity, at whose call hosts of rich strangers come flocking from the
+ends of the earth, at whose bidding villas rise white among the olives,
+and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>parades stretch along the shore. "I found it a fishing hamlet," the
+doctor may say with Augustus, "and I leave it a city." It is amusing to
+see the awful submission which the city-builder expects in return. The
+most refractory of patients trembles at the threat of his case being
+abandoned. The doctor has his theories about situation. You are
+lymphatic, and are ordered down to the very edge of the sea; you are
+excitable, and must hurry from your comfortable lodgings to the highest
+nook among the hills. He has his theories about diet, and you sink
+obediently to milk and water. His one object of hostility and contempt
+is your London physician. He tears up his rival's prescriptions with
+contempt, he reverses the treatment. He sighs as you bid him farewell to
+return to advice which is so likely to prove fatal. The London
+physician, it is true, hints that though the oracle of the winter resort
+is a clever man he is also a quack. But a quack soars into a greatness
+beyond criticism when he creates cities and rules hundreds of patients
+with his nod.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr style="width: 45%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.</h2>
+<br /><a name="SAN_REMO" id="SAN_REMO"></a>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+
+<h2>V.</h2>
+
+<h2>SAN REMO.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>San Remo, though youngest in date, bids fair to become the most popular
+of all the health resorts of the Riviera. At no other point along the
+coast is the climate so mild and equable. The rural quiet and repose of
+the place form a refreshing contrast with the Brighton-like gaiety of
+Nizza or Cannes; even Mentone looks down with an air of fashionable
+superiority on a rival almost destitute of promenades, and whose
+municipality sighs in vain for a theatre. To the charms of quiet and
+sunshine the place adds that of a peculiar beauty. The Apennines rise
+like a screen behind the amphitheatre of soft hills that enclose
+it&mdash;hills soft with olive woods, and dipping down into gardens of lemon
+and orange, and vineyards dotted with palms. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>An isolated spur juts out
+from the centre of the semicircle, and from summit to base of it tumbles
+the oddest of Italian towns, a strange mass of arches and churches and
+steep lanes, rushing down like a stone cataract to the sea. On either
+side of the town lie deep ravines, with lemon gardens along their
+bottoms, and olives thick along their sides. The olive is the
+characteristic tree of San Remo. As late as the sixteenth century the
+place was renowned for its palms; a palm tree stands on the civic
+escutcheon, and the privilege of supplying the papal chapel with palm
+branches in the week before Easter is still possessed by a family of San
+Remese. But the palm has wandered off to Bordighera, and the high price
+of oil during the early part of this century has given unquestioned
+supremacy to the olive. The loss is after all a very little one, for the
+palm, picturesque as is its natural effect, assumes any but picturesque
+forms when grown for commercial purposes, while the thick masses of the
+olive woods form a soft and almost luxurious background to every view of
+San Remo.</p>
+
+<p>What strikes one most about the place in an artistic sense is its
+singular completeness. It lies perfectly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>shut in by the circle of
+mountains, the two headlands in which they jut into the sea, and the
+blue curve of the bay. It is only by climbing to the summit of the Capo
+Nero or the Capo Verde that one sees the broken outline of the coast
+towards Genoa or the dim forms of the Estrelles beyond Cannes. Nowhere
+does the outer world seem more strangely far-off and unreal. But between
+headland and headland it is hardly possible to find a point from which
+the scene does not group itself into an exquisite picture with the white
+gleaming mass of San Remo for a centre. Small too as the space is, it is
+varied and broken by the natural configuration of the ground; everywhere
+the hills fall steeply to the very edge of the sea and valleys and
+ravines go sharply up among the olive woods. Each of these has its own
+peculiar beauty; in the valley of the Romolo for instance, to the west
+of the town, the grey mass of San Remo perched on a cliff-like steep,
+the rocky bed of the torrent below, the light and almost fantastic arch
+that spans it, the hills in the background with the further snow range
+just peeping over them, leave memories that are hard to forget. It is
+easy too for a good walker to reach sterner scenes than those
+immediately around; a walk of two hours brings one <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>among the pines of
+San Romolo, an hour's drive plunges one into the almost Alpine scenery
+of Ceriana. But for the ordinary frequenters of a winter resort the
+chief attractions of the place will naturally lie in the warmth and
+shelter of San Remo itself. Protected as it is on every side but that of
+the sea, it is free from the dreaded mistral of Cannes and from the
+sharp frost winds that sweep down the torrent-bed of Nizza. In the
+earlier part of the first winter I spent there the snow, which lay thick
+in the streets of Genoa and beneath even the palms of Bordighera, only
+whitened the distant hilltops at San Remo. Christmas brought at last a
+real snowfall, but every trace of it vanished before the sun-glare of
+midday. From sunset to sunrise indeed the air is sometimes bitterly
+cold, but the days themselves are often pure summer days.</p>
+
+<p>What gives a special charm to San Remo, as to the other health-stations
+along the Cornice, is the fact that winter and spring are here the
+season of flowers. Roses nod at one over the garden-walls, violets peep
+shyly out along the terraces, a run uphill brings one across a bed of
+narcissus. It is odd to open one's window on a January morning and count
+four-and-twenty different <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>kinds of plants in bloom in the garden below.
+But even were flowers absent, the character of the vegetation excludes
+from northern eyes the sense of winter. The bare branches of the
+fig-tree alone remind one that "summer is over and gone." Every
+homestead up the torrent-valleys is embosomed in the lustrous foliage of
+its lemon gardens. Every rivulet is choked with maiden-hair and delicate
+ferns. The golden globes of the orange are the ornament of every garden.
+The dark green masses of the olive, ruined by strong winds into sheets
+of frosted silver, are the background of the whole. And right in front
+from headland to headland lie the bright waters of the Mediterranean,
+rising and sinking with a summer's swell, and glancing with a thousand
+colours even in the gloomiest weather.</p>
+
+<p>The story of San Remo begins with Saracenic inroads from Corsica and
+Sardinia in the ninth century, to which Nizza, Oneglia, and Genoa owed
+their walls. But before this time the wild Ligurian coast had afforded
+hermitages to the earlier bishops of Genoa; to Siro who became its
+apostle, to Romolo who was destined to give his name to the territory of
+the town. San Romolo is indeed its invariable designation till the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>fifteenth century, and it has been conjectured that its present name is
+owing to no fanciful punning on Romulus and Remus but to a popular
+contraction of its full ecclesiastical title, "Sancti Romuli in eremo."
+It was in this "waste," left without inhabitants by the Saracenic
+inroads, that Theodulf, bishop of Genoa, settled a little agricultural
+colony round the Carolingian fort and lands which, though within the
+feudal jurisdiction of the Counts of Ventimiglia, were the property of
+his see. Two centuries passed quietly over the little town ere the
+sudden rise of the Consulate here, as at Genoa and Milan, gave it
+municipal liberty. The civil authority of the bishops passed to the
+communal Parliament, the free assembly of the citizens in the church of
+San Stefano; all civil administration, even the right of peace and war,
+or of alliance, was exercised with perfect freedom from episcopal
+intervention. The rights of the bishop in fact were reduced to the
+nomination of the judicial magistrates of the town and the reception of
+certain fees; rights which were subsequently sold to the Dorias, and
+transferred by the Dorias to the Republic of Genoa.</p>
+
+<p>This great communal revolution, itself a result of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>the wave of feeling
+produced by the Crusades, left its characteristic mark in the armorial
+bearings of the town, the Crusaders' Palm upon its shield. While its
+neighbours, Ventimiglia and Albenga, sank into haunts of a feudal
+noblesse, San Remo became a town of busy merchants, linked by treaties
+of commerce with the trading cities of the French and Italian coasts.
+The erection of San Siro marked the wealth and devotion of its citizens.
+Ruined as it is, like all the churches of the Riviera, by the ochre and
+stucco of a tasteless restoration, San Siro still retains much of the
+characteristic twelfth-century work of its first foundation. The
+alliance of the city with Genoa was that of a perfectly free State. The
+terms of the treaty which was concluded between the two Republics in
+1361 in the Genoese basilica of San Lorenzo are curious as illustrating
+the federal relations of Italian States. It was in effect little more
+than a judicial and military convention. Internal legislation, taxation,
+rights of independent warfare, peace, and alliance were left wholly in
+the power of the free commune. San Remo was bound to contribute ships
+and men for service in Genoese warfare, but in return its citizens
+shared the valuable privileges of those of Genoa in all parts of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>world. Genoa, as purchaser of the feudal rights of its lords, nominated
+the podesta and other judicial officers, but these officers were bound
+to administer the laws passed or adopted by the commune. The red cross
+of Genoa was placed above the palm tree of San Remo on the shield of the
+Republic; and on these terms the federal relations of the two States
+continued without quarrel or change for nearly four hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>The town continued to prosper till the alliance of Francis I. with the
+Turks brought the scourge of the Moslem again on the Riviera. The
+"Saracen towers" with which the coast is studded tell to this day the
+tale of the raids of Barbarossa and Dragut. The blow fell heavily on San
+Remo. The ruined quarter beneath its wall still witnesses to the heathen
+fury. San Siro, which lay without the walls, was more than once
+desecrated and reduced to ruin. A special officer was appointed by the
+town to receive contributions for the ransom of citizens carried off by
+the corsairs of Algiers or Tunis. These terrible razzias, which went on
+to the very close of the last century, have left their mark on the
+popular traditions of the coast. But the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>ruin which they began was
+consummated by the purposeless bombardment of San Remo by an English
+fleet during the war of the Austrian Succession, and by the perfidy with
+which Genoa crushed at a single blow the freedom she had respected for
+so many centuries. The square Genoese fort near the harbour commemorates
+the extinction of the liberty of San Remo in 1729. The French revolution
+found the city ruined and enslaved, and the gratitude of the citizens
+for their deliverance by Buonaparte was shown by a sacrifice which it is
+hard to forgive them. A row of magnificent ilexes, which stretched along
+the ridge from the town to San Romolo, is said to have been felled for
+the construction of vessels for the French navy.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the criticism which has been lavished on San Remo is fair and
+natural enough. To any one who has been accustomed to the exquisite
+scenery around Cannes its background of olives seems tame and
+monotonous. People who are fond of the bustle and gaiety of Nizza or
+Mentone in their better days can hardly find much to amuse them in San
+Remo. It is certainly quiet, and its quiet verges upon dulness. A more
+serious drawback lies in the scarcity of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>promenades or level walks for
+weaker invalids. For people with good legs, or who are at home on a
+donkey, there are plenty of charming walks and rides up into the hills.
+But it is not everybody who is strong enough to walk uphill or who cares
+to mount a donkey. Visitors with sensitive noses may perhaps find reason
+for growls at the mode of cultivation which is characteristic of the
+olive groves. The town itself and the country around is, like the bulk
+of the Riviera, entirely without architectural or arch&aelig;ological
+interest. There is a fine castle within a long drive at Dolceacqua, and
+a picturesque church still untouched within a short one at Ceriana, but
+this is all. Beneficial as the reforms of Carlo Borromeo may have been
+to the religious life of the Cornice, they have been fatal to its
+architecture. On the other hand, any one with an artistic eye and a
+sketch-book may pass his time pleasantly enough at San Remo. The
+botanist may revel day after day in new "finds" among its valleys and
+hill-sides. The rural quiet of the place delivers one from the
+fashionable bustle of livelier watering-places, from the throng of
+gorgeous equipages that pour along the streets of Nice, or from picnics
+with a host of flunkeys uncorking the champagne.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>The sunshine, the colour, the beauty of the little town, secure its
+future. The time must soon come when the whole coast of the Riviera will
+be lined with winter resorts; but we can hardly hope that any will
+surpass the happy blending of warmth and interest and repose which makes
+the charm of San Remo.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>
+<h2>THE POETRY OF WEALTH.</h2>
+<br /><a name="THE_POETRY_OF_WEALTH" id="THE_POETRY_OF_WEALTH"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>THE POETRY OF WEALTH.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>There is one marvellous tale which is hardly likely to be forgotten so
+long as men can look down from Notre Dame de la Garde on the sunny
+beauty of Marseilles. Even if the rest of Dumas' works sink into
+oblivion, the sight of Ch&acirc;teau d'If as it rises glowing from the blue
+waters of the Mediterranean will serve to recall the wonders of 'Monte
+Christo.' But the true claim of the book to remembrance lies not in its
+mere command over the wonderful but in the peculiar sense of wonder
+which it excites. It was the first literary attempt to raise the mere
+dead fact of money into the sphere of the imagination, and to reveal the
+dormant poetry of wealth. There has as yet been only a single age in the
+world's history when wealth has told with any force upon the imagination
+of men. Unpoetic as the Roman mind essentially was, the sudden burst
+upon it of the accumulated riches of the older world kindled in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>senators and proconsuls a sense of romance which, wild and extravagant
+as it seems, has in some of its qualities found no parallel since. The
+feast of Lucullus, the gluttony of Heliogabalus, the sudden upgrowth of
+vast amphitheatres, the waste of millions on the sport of a day, the
+encounters of navies in the mimic warfare of the Coliseum, are the
+freaks of gigantic children tossing about wildly the slowly-hoarded
+treasures of past generations; but they are freaks which for the first
+time revealed the strange possibilities which lay in the future of
+wealth.</p>
+
+<p>It is hard to say whether such a time will ever return. No doubt the
+world is infinitely richer now than it was in the time of the Romans,
+and no doubt too there are at least a dozen people in London alone whose
+actual income far exceeds that of the wealthiest of proconsuls. But the
+wealth of the modern capitalist is a wealth which has grown by slow
+accumulations, a wealth which has risen almost insensibly into its
+enormous mass, and the vastness of which its owner has never had brought
+home to him with the same sort of shock as that which Lucullus must have
+felt when he fronted the treasures of Mithridates, or Clive when he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>threaded his way among the sacks of jewels in the royal vaults of
+Moorshedabad. So far indeed is wealth from stimulating the imagination
+nowadays that a banker is the very type of the unimaginative man, and
+the faintest suspicion of genius is enough to render a financier an
+object of suspicion to the money market. But it is conceivable in the
+odd freaks of things that we may yet see the advent of the
+Poet-Capitalist. It is almost impossible to say what new opportunities
+the possession of fabulous resources might not add to the fancy of a
+dreamer or to the speculations of a philanthropist. It is not till after
+a little thought that we realize how materially the course of human
+progress is obstructed by sheer want of money at critical moments, or
+how easily the sum of human happiness might be increased by the sudden
+descent of a golden shower on the right people at the right time.</p>
+
+<p>There are dreams which men have been dreaming for generation after
+generation which require nothing for their realization but the
+appearance of such a capitalist as we have imagined. To take what may
+seem perhaps an odd instance, just because it is an odd instance, let us
+remember what a wonderful amount of hope and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>anticipation has been
+thrown by a great religious party into the restoration of the Jews.
+Rightly or wrongly, it is the one theme which sends a throb of
+excitement through the life of quiet parsonages and kindles a new fire
+even in the dreariest May meetings at Exeter Hall. But in point of
+actual fact there is not the slightest necessity to await any great
+spiritual revolution for the accomplishment of such a dream if its
+accomplishment were really desirable. A league of Evangelical bankers
+who fully believed in the prophecies they are so fond of quoting could
+turn the wildest fancies of Dr. Cumming into sober earnest with very
+little trouble indeed. Any emigration agent would undertake the
+transport of Houndsditch bodily to Joppa; the bare limestone uplands of
+Jud&aelig;a could be covered again with terraces of olive and vine at
+precisely the same cost of money and industry as is still required to
+keep up the cultivation of the Riviera; and Mr. Fergusson would furnish
+for a due consideration plans and estimates for a restoration of the
+Temple on Zion. We are not suggesting such a scheme as an opportunity
+for investing money to any great profit, but it is odd to live in a
+world of wealthy people who believe firmly that its realization would
+make this world into a little <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>heaven below and yet never seem to feel
+that they have the means of bringing it about in their cheque-books. Or
+to take a hardly less odd instance, but one which has actually been
+brought a little nearer to practical realization. Some time ago a body
+of Welsh patriots determined to save the tongue and literature of the
+Cymry from extinction by founding a new Welsh nation on the shores of
+Patagonia. Nothing but Welsh was to be spoken, none but Welsh books were
+to be read, and the laws of the colony were to be an amalgam of the
+codes of Moses and of Howel the Good. The plan failed simply because its
+originators were poor and unable to tide over the first difficulties of
+the project. But conceive an ardent capitalist with a passion for
+nationalities embracing such a cause, and at the cost of a few hundreds
+of thousands creating perhaps a type of national life which might
+directly or indirectly affect the future of the world. Such a man might
+secure himself a niche in history at less cost and with less trouble
+than he could obtain a large estate and a share in the commission of the
+peace for a midland county.</p>
+
+<p>But there is no need to restrict ourselves simply <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>to oddities, although
+oddities of this sort acquire a grandeur of their own at the touch of
+wealth. The whole field of social experiment lies open to a great
+capitalist. The one thing required, for instance, to render the squalor
+and misery of our larger towns practically impossible would be the
+actual sight of a large town without squalor or misery; and yet if
+Liverpool were simply handed over to a great philanthropist with the
+income of half-a-dozen Dukes of Westminster such a sight might easily be
+seen. Schemes of this sort require nothing but what we may term the
+poetic employment of capital for their realization. It is strange that
+no financial hero makes his appearance to use his great money-club to
+fell direr monsters than those which Hercules encountered, and by the
+creation of a city at once great, beautiful, and healthy to realize the
+conception of the Utopia and the dream of Sir Thomas More. Or take a
+parallel instance from the country. Those who have watched the issues of
+the co-operative system as applied to agriculture believe they see in it
+the future solution of two of our greatest social difficulties&mdash;those,
+we mean, which spring from the increasing hardships of the farmer's
+position, and those which arise from the terrible serfage of the rural
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>labourer. But the experiments which have been as yet carried on are on
+too small a scale either to produce any influence on the labour market
+as a whole, or to make that impression on the public imagination which
+could alone raise the matter into a "question of the day." What is
+wanted is simply that two or three dukes should try the experiment of
+peasant co-operation on a whole county, and try it with a command of
+capital which would give the experiment fair play. Whether it succeeded
+or not, such an attempt would have a poetic and heroic aspect of a
+different order from the usual expenditure of a British peer.</p>
+
+<p>Or we may turn to a wholly different field, the field of art. We are
+always ready to cry out against "pot boilers" as we wander through the
+galleries of the Academy, and to grumble at the butchers' bills and
+bonnet bills which stand between great artists and the production of
+great works. But the butchers' bills and bonnet bills of all the forty
+Academicians might be paid by a great capitalist without any deep dip
+into his money bags, and a whole future opened to English art by the
+sheer poetry of wealth. There are hundreds of men with special faculties
+for scientific inquiry who <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>are at the present moment pinned down to the
+daily drudgery of the lawyer's desk or the doctor's consulting-room by
+the necessities of daily bread. A Rothschild who would take a score of
+natural philosophers and enable them to apply their whole energies to
+investigation would help forward science as really as Newton himself, if
+less directly. But there are even direct ways in which wealth on a
+gigantic scale might put out a poetic force which would affect the very
+fortunes of the world. There are living people who are the masters of
+twenty millions; and twenty millions would drive a tunnel under the
+Straits of Dover. If increased intercourse means, as is constantly
+contended, an increase of friendship and of mutual understanding among
+nations, the man who devoted a vast wealth to linking two peoples
+together would rise at once to the level of the great benefactors of
+mankind. An opportunity for a yet more direct employment of the
+influence of wealth will some day or other be found in the field of
+international politics. Already those who come in contact with the
+big-wigs of the financial world hear whispers of a future when the
+destinies of peoples are to be decided in bank parlours, and questions
+of peace and war settled, not by the diplomatist and statesman, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>but by
+the capitalist. But as yet these are mere whispers, and no European
+Gould has risen up to "finance" Downing Street into submission, or to
+meet the boldest move of Prince Bismarck by a fall of the Stock
+Exchange. Of all the schemes however which we have suggested, this is
+probably the nearest to practical realization. If not we ourselves, our
+children at any rate may see International Congresses made possible by a
+few people quietly buttoning their breeches-pockets, and the march of
+"armed nations" arrested by "a run for gold."</p>
+
+<p>Taking however men as they are, it is far more wonderful that no one has
+hit on the enormous field which wealth opens for the developement of
+sheer downright mischief. The sense of mischief is a sense which goes
+quietly to sleep as soon as childhood is over from mere want of
+opportunity. The boy who wants to trip up his tutor can easily find a
+string to tie across the garden walk; but when one has got beyond the
+simpler joys of childhood strings are not so easy to find. To carry out
+a practical joke of the Christopher Sly sort we require, as Shakespere
+saw, the resources of a prince. But once grant possession of unlimited
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>wealth, and the possibilities of mischief rise to a grandeur such as
+the world has never realized. The Erie Ring taught us a little of what
+capital might do in this way, but in the Erie Ring capital was fettered
+by considerations of profit and loss. Throw these considerations
+overboard and treat a great question in the spirit of sheer mischief,
+and the results may be simply amazing. Conceive, for instance, a
+capitalist getting the railways round London into his power, and then in
+sheer freak stopping the traffic for a single day. No doubt the day
+would be a short one, but even twelve hours of such a practical joke
+would bring about a "Black Monday" such as England has never seen. But
+there would be no need of such an enormous operation to enable us to
+realize the power of latent mischief which the owner of great wealth
+really possesses. An adroit operator might secure every omnibus and
+every cab in the metropolis and compel us to paddle about for a week in
+the mud of November before the loss was replaced.</p>
+
+<p>It is quite possible indeed that gigantic mischief of this sort may find
+its sphere in practical politics. Already Continental Governments watch
+with anxiety <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>the power which employers possess of bringing about a
+revolution by simply closing their doors and throwing thousands of
+unemployed labourers on the street; but it is a power which in some
+degree or other capital will always possess, and any one who remembers
+the assistance which Reform derived from the Hyde Park rows will see at
+once that mischief on the large scale might be made in this way an
+important factor in political questions.</p>
+
+<p>Ambition has yet a wider sphere of action than even mischief in this
+poetic use of wealth. A London preacher recently drew pointed attention
+to the merely selfish use of their riches by great English nobles, and
+contrasted it with the days when Elizabeth's Lords of the Council
+clubbed together to provide an English fleet against the Armada, or the
+nobles of Venice placed their wealth on every great emergency at the
+service of the State. But from any constitutional point of view there is
+perhaps nothing on which we may more heartily congratulate ourselves
+than on the blindness which hides from the great capitalists of England
+the political power which such a national employment of their wealth
+would give them&mdash;a blindness which is all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>the more wonderful in what is
+at once the wealthiest and the most political aristocracy which the
+world has ever seen. What fame the mere devotion of a quarter of a
+million to public uses may give to a quiet merchant the recent example
+of Mr. Peabody abundantly showed. But the case of the Baroness Burdett
+Coutts is yet more strictly to the point. The mere fact that she has
+been for years credited with a wide and unselfish benevolence has given
+her a power over the imagination of vast masses of the London poor which
+no one who is not really conversant with their daily life and modes of
+thinking could for an instant imagine. Her bounty is enlarged in the
+misty air of the slums of Wapping or Rotherhithe to colossal dimensions,
+and the very quietness and unobtrusiveness of her work gives it an air
+of mystery which tells like romance on the fancy of the poor.</p>
+
+<p>It was characteristic of the power which such a use of wealth may give
+that the mobs who smashed the Hyde Park railings stopped to cheer before
+the house of Lady Burdett Coutts. Luckily none of our political nobles
+has ever bethought himself of the means by which the great Roman leaders
+rose habitually to influence or won over the labouring masses by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>"panem
+et Circenses." But a nobler ambition might find its field in a large
+employment of wealth for public ends of a higher sort. Something of the
+old patrician pride might have spurred the five or six great Houses who
+own half London to construct the Thames Embankment at their own cost,
+and to hand it over free from the higglings of Mr. Gore to the people at
+large. Even now we may hear of some earl whose rent-roll is growing with
+fabulous rapidity as coming forward to relieve the Treasury by the offer
+of a National Gallery of Art, or checkmating the jobbers of South
+Kensington by the erection of a National Museum. It seems to be easy
+enough for peer after peer to fling away a hundred thousand at Newmarket
+or Tattersall's, and yet a hundred thousand would establish in the
+crowded haunts of working London great "Conservatoires" where the finest
+music might be brought to bear without cost on the coarseness and
+vulgarity of the life of the poor. The higher drama may be perishing in
+default of a State subvention, but it never seems to enter any one's
+head that there are dozens of people among those who grumbled at the
+artistic taste of Mr. Ayrton who could furnish such a subvention at the
+present cost of their stable. As yet <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>however we must be content, we
+suppose, with such a use of wealth as 'Lothair' brings to the front&mdash;the
+purely selfish use of it carried to the highest pitch which selfishness
+has ever reached. Great parks and great houses, costly studs and costly
+conservatories, existence relieved of every hitch and discomfort&mdash;these
+are the outlets which wealth has as yet succeeded in finding. For nobler
+outlets we must wait for the advent of the Poet-Capitalist.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS.</h2>
+<br /><a name="LAMBETH_AND_THE_ARCHBISHOPS" id="LAMBETH_AND_THE_ARCHBISHOPS"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>A little higher up the river, but almost opposite to the huge mass of
+the Houses of Parliament, lies a broken, irregular pile of buildings, at
+whose angle, looking out over the Thames, is one grey weatherbeaten
+tower. The broken pile is the archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth; the grey
+weatherbeaten building is its Lollards' Tower. From this tower the
+mansion itself stretches in a varied line, chapel and guard-room and
+gallery and the stately buildings of the new house looking out on the
+terrace and garden; while the Great Hall, in which the library has now
+found a home, is the low picturesque building which reaches southward
+along the river to the gate.</p>
+
+<p>The story of each of these spots will interweave itself with the thread
+of our narrative as we proceed; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>but I would warn my readers at the
+outset that I do not purpose to trace the history of Lambeth in itself,
+or to attempt any architectural or picturesque description of the place.
+What I attempt is simply to mark in incident after incident which has
+occurred within its walls the relation of the House to the Primates whom
+it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the
+literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better than the site of
+the house itself. It is doubtful whether we can date the residence of
+the Archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, which was then a manor house
+of the see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the
+Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice of the spot as
+there was a significance in the date at which the choice was made. So
+long as the political head of the English people ruled, like &AElig;lfred or
+&AElig;thelstan or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English
+people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the
+Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the
+Kings finally to Westminster that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>the Archbishops were permanently
+drawn to their suffragan's manor house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave
+a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national history
+which opened with the Conquest the Church was called to play a part
+greater than she had ever known before. Hitherto the Archbishop had been
+simply the head of the ecclesiastical order&mdash;a representative of the
+moral and spiritual forces on which government was based. The Conquest,
+the cessation of the great Witenagemots in which the nation, however
+imperfectly, had till then found a voice, turned him into a Tribune of
+the People.</p>
+
+<p>Foreigner though he might be, it was the Primate's part to speak for the
+conquered race the words it could no longer utter. He was in fact the
+permanent leader (to borrow a modern phrase) of a Constitutional
+Opposition; and in addition to the older religious forces which he
+wielded he wielded a popular and democratic force which held the new
+King and the new baronage in check. It was he who received from the
+sovereign whom he crowned the solemn oath that he would rule not by his
+own will, but according to the customs, or as we should say now, the
+traditional constitution of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>the realm. It was his to call on the people
+to declare whether they chose him for their king, to receive the
+thundered "Ay, ay," of the crowd, to place the priestly unction on
+shoulder and breast, the royal crown on brow. To watch over the
+observance of the covenant of that solemn day, to raise obedience and
+order into religious duties, to uphold the custom and law of the realm
+against personal tyranny, to guard amid the darkness and brutality of
+the age those interests of religion, of morality, of intellectual life
+which as yet lay peacefully together beneath the wing of the
+Church,&mdash;this was the political office of the Primate in the new order
+which the Conquest created, and it was this office which expressed
+itself in the site of the house that fronted the King's house over
+Thames.</p>
+
+<p>From the days of Archbishop Anselm therefore to the days of Stephen
+Langton, Lambeth only fronted Westminster as the Archbishop fronted the
+King. Synod met over against Council; the clerical court of the one
+ruler rivalled in splendour, in actual influence, the baronial court of
+the other. For more than a century of our history the great powers which
+together were to make up the England of the future lay <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>marshalled over
+against each other on either side the water.</p>
+
+<p>With the union of the English people and the sudden arising of English
+freedom which followed the Great Charter this peculiar attitude of the
+Archbishops passed necessarily away. When the people itself spoke again,
+its voice was heard not in the hall of Lambeth but in the Chapter-house
+which gave a home to the House of Commons in its earlier sessions at
+Westminster. From the day of Stephen Langton the nation has towered
+higher and higher above its mere ecclesiastical organization, till the
+one stands dwarfed beside the other as Lambeth now stands dwarfed before
+the mass of the Houses of Parliament. Nor was the religious change less
+than the political. In the Church as in the State the Archbishops
+suddenly fell into the rear. From the days of the first English
+Parliament to the days of the Reformation they not only cease to be
+representatives of the moral and religious forces of the nation but
+stand actually opposed to them. Nowhere is this better brought out than
+in their house beside the Thames. The political history of Lambeth lies
+spread over the whole of its site, from the gateway of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>Morton to the
+garden where we shall see Cranmer musing on the fate of Anne Boleyn. Its
+ecclesiastical interest on the other hand is concentrated in a single
+spot. We must ask our readers therefore to follow us beneath the
+groining of the Gate-House into the quiet little court that lies on the
+river-side of the hall. Passing over its trim grass-plot to a doorway at
+the angle of Lollards' Tower, and mounting a few steps, they will find
+themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a
+single small window looking out towards the Thames. The chamber is at
+the base of Lollards' Tower; in the centre stands a huge oaken pillar,
+to which the room owes its name of the "Post-room," and to which
+somewhat mythical tradition asserts Lollards to have been tied when they
+were "examined" by the whip. On its western side a doorway of the purest
+Early English work leads us directly into the palace Chapel.</p>
+
+<p>It is strange to stand at a single step in the very heart of the
+ecclesiastical life of so many ages, within walls beneath which the men
+in whose hands the fortunes of English religion have been placed from
+the age of the Great Charter till to-day have come <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>and gone; to see the
+light falling through the tall windows with their marble shafts on the
+spot where Wyclif fronted Sudbury, on the lowly tomb of Parker, on the
+stately screen-work of Laud, on the altar where the last sad communion
+of Sancroft originated the Nonjurors. It is strange to note the very
+characteristics of the building itself, marred as it is by modern
+restoration, and to feel how simply its stern, unadorned beauty, the
+beauty of Salisbury and of Lincoln, expressed the very tone of the
+Church that finds its centre there.</p>
+
+<p>And hardly less strange is it to recall the odd, roystering figure of
+the Primate to whom, if tradition be true, it owes this beauty. Boniface
+of Savoy was the youngest of three brothers out of whom their niece
+Eleanor, the queen of Henry the Third, was striving to build up a
+foreign party in the realm. Her uncle Amadeus was richly enfeoffed with
+English lands; the Savoy Palace in the Strand still recalls the
+settlement and the magnificence of her uncle Peter. For this third and
+younger uncle she grasped at the highest post in the State save the
+Crown itself. "The handsome Archbishop," as his knights loved to call
+him, was not merely a foreigner as Lanfranc and Anselm <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>had been
+foreigners&mdash;strange in manner or in speech to the flock whom they
+ruled&mdash;he was foreign in the worst sense: strange to their freedom,
+their sense of law, their reverence for piety. His first visit set
+everything on fire. He retreated to Lyons to hold a commission in the
+Pope's body-guard, but even Innocent was soon weary of his tyranny. When
+the threat of sequestration recalled him after four years of absence to
+his see, his hatred of England, his purpose soon to withdraw again to
+his own sunny South, were seen in his refusal to furnish Lambeth.
+Certainly he went the wrong way to stay here. The young Primate brought
+with him Savoyard fashions, strange enough to English folk. His armed
+retainers, foreigners to a man, plundered the City markets. His own
+archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground a prior who opposed his
+visitation. It was the Prior of St. Bartholomew's by Smithfield; and
+London, on the King's refusal to grant redress, took the matter into her
+own hands. The City bells swung out, and a noisy crowd of citizens were
+soon swarming beneath the walls of the palace, shouting threats of
+vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>For shouts Boniface cared little. In the midst of the tumult he caused
+the sentences of excommunication <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>which he had fulminated to be legally
+executed in the chapel of his house. But bravado like this soon died
+before the universal resentment, and "the handsome Archbishop" fled
+again to Lyons. How helpless the successor of Augustine really was was
+shown by a daring outrage perpetrated in his absence. Master Eustace,
+his official, had thrown into prison the Prior of St. Thomas's Hospital
+for some contempt of court; and the Prior's diocesan, the Bishop of
+Winchester, a prelate as foreign and lawless as Boniface himself, took
+up the injury as his own. A party of his knights appeared before the
+house at Lambeth, tore the gates from their hinges, set Master Eustace
+on horseback, and carried him off to the episcopal prison at Farnham. At
+last Boniface bowed to submission, surrendered the points at issue,
+recalled his excommunications, and was suffered to return. He had learnt
+his lesson well enough to remain from that time a quiet, inactive man,
+with a dash of continental frugality and wit about him. Whether he built
+the chapel or no, he would probably have said of it as he said of the
+Great Hall at Canterbury, "My predecessors built, and I discharge the
+debt for their building. It seems to me that the true builder is the man
+that pays the bill."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>But Boniface never learnt to be an Englishman. When under the guidance
+of Earl Simon of Montfort the barons wrested the observance of their
+Charter from the King the Primate of England found shelter in a fresh
+exile. The Church had in fact ceased to be national. The figure of the
+first Reformer, as he stands on the chapel floor, is in itself the
+fittest comment on the age in which the chapel was built, an age when
+the interests of popular liberty and of intellectual freedom had sheered
+off from the church which had so long been their protector. With them
+the moral and spiritual life of the people sheered off too. The vast
+ecclesiastical fabric rested in the days of Archbishop Sudbury solely on
+its wealth and its tradition. Suddenly a single man summed up in himself
+the national, the mental, the moral power it had lost, and struck at the
+double base on which it rested. Wyclif, the keenest intellect of his
+day, national and English to the very core, declared its tradition
+corrupt and its wealth antichrist. The two forces that above all had
+built up the system of medi&aelig;val Christianity, the subtlety of the
+schoolman, the enthusiasm of the penniless preacher, united to strike it
+down.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>It is curious to mark how timidly the Primate of the day dealt with such
+a danger as this. Sudbury was acting in virtue of a Papal injunction,
+but he acted as though the shadow of the terrible doom that was awaiting
+him had already fallen over him. He summoned the popular Bishop of
+London to his aid ere he cited the Reformer to his judgment-seat. It was
+not as a prisoner that Wyclif appeared in the chapel: from the first his
+tone was that of a man who knew that he was secure. He claimed to have
+the most favourable construction put upon his words; then, availing
+himself of his peculiar subtlety of interpretation, he demanded that
+where they might bear two meanings his judges should take them in an
+orthodox sense. It was not a noble scene&mdash;there was little in it of
+Luther's "Here stand I&mdash;I can none other;" but both sides were in fact
+acting a part. On the one hand the dead pressure of ecclesiastical
+fanaticism was driving the Primate into a position from which he sought
+only to escape; on the other Wyclif was merely gaining time&mdash;"beating
+step," as men say&mdash;with his scholastic formul&aelig;. What he looked for soon
+came. There was a rumour in the City that Papal delegates were sitting
+in judgment on the Reformer, and London was at once <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>astir. Crowds of
+angry citizens flocked round the archiepiscopal house, and already there
+was talk of attacking it when a message from the Council of Regency
+commanded a suspension of all proceedings in the case. Sudbury dismissed
+his prisoner with a formal injunction, and the day was for ever lost to
+the Church.</p>
+
+<p>But if in Sudbury the Church had retreated peaceably before Wyclif, it
+was not from any doubt of the deadly earnestness of the struggle that
+lay before her. Archbishop Chichele's accession to the primacy was the
+signal for the building of Lollards' Tower. Dr. Maitland has shown that
+the common name rests on a mere error, and that the Lollards' Tower
+which meets us so grimly in the pages of Foxe was really a western tower
+of St. Paul's. But, as in so many other instances, the popular voice
+showed a singular historical tact in its mistake; the tower which
+Chichele raised marked more than any other in the very date of its
+erection the new age of persecution on which England was to enter. From
+a gateway in the northern side of the Post-room worn stone steps lead up
+to a dungeon in which many a prisoner for the faith must have lain. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>The
+massive oaken door, the iron rings bolted into the wall, the one narrow
+window looking out over the river, tell their tale as well as the broken
+sentences scratched or carved around. Some are mere names; here and
+there some light-pated youngster paying for his night's uproar has
+carved his dice or his "Jesus kep me out of all il compane, Amen." But
+"Jesus est amor meus" is sacred, whether Lollard or Jesuit graved it in
+the lonely prison hours, and not less sacred the "Deo sit gratiarum
+actio" that marks perhaps the leap of a martyr's heart at the news of
+the near advent of his fiery deliverance. It is strange to think, as one
+winds once more down the stairs that such feet have trodden, how soon
+England answered to the challenge that Lollards' Tower flung out over
+the Thames. The white masonry had hardly grown grey under the buffetings
+of a hundred years ere Lollard was no longer a word of shame, and the
+reformation that Wyclif had begun sat enthroned within the walls of the
+chapel where he had battled for his life.</p>
+
+<p>The attitude of the primates indeed showed that sooner or later such a
+reformation was inevitable. From the moment when Wyclif stood in
+Lambeth <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>Chapel the Church sank ecclesiastically as well as politically
+into non-existence. It survived merely as a vast landowner, whilst its
+primates, after a short effort to resume their older position as real
+heads of their order, dwindled into ministers and tools of the Crown.
+The Gate-tower of the house, the grand mass of brickwork, whose dark red
+tones are (or, alas! were till a year or two since) so exquisitely
+brought out by the grey stone of its angles and the mullions of its
+broad arch-window, recalls an age&mdash;that of its builder, Archbishop
+Morton&mdash;when Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of the
+crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler elements of political
+life. It was raised from this degradation by the efforts of a primate to
+whose merits justice has hardly as yet been done. First in date among
+the genuine portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury which hang round
+the walls of the Guard-room at Lambeth is the portrait of Archbishop
+Warham. The plain, homely old man's face still looks down on us line for
+line as the "seeing eye" of Holbein gazed on it three centuries ago. "I
+instance this picture," says Mr. Wornum, in his life of the painter, "as
+an illustration that Holbein had the power of seeing what he looked on,
+and of perfectly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>transferring to his picture what he saw." Memorable in
+the annals of art as the first of that historic series which brings home
+to us as no age has ever been brought home to eyes of aftertime the age
+of the English Reformation, it is even more memorable as marking the
+close of the great intellectual movement which the Reformation swept
+away.</p>
+
+<p>It was with a letter from Erasmus in his hands that Hans Holbein stood
+before the aged Archbishop, still young as when he sketched himself at
+Basel with the fair, frank, manly face, the sweet gentle mouth, the
+heavy red cap flinging its shade over the mobile, melancholy brow. But
+it was more than the "seventy years" that he has so carefully noted
+above it that the artist saw in the Primate's face; it was the still,
+impassive calm of a life's disappointment. Only ten years before, at the
+very moment when the painter first made his entry into Basel, Erasmus
+had been forwarding to England the great work in which he had recalled
+theologians to the path of sound biblical criticism. "Every lover of
+letters," the great scholar wrote sadly, after the old man had gone to
+his rest,&mdash;"Every lover of letters owes to Warham that he is the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>possessor of my 'Jerome';" and with an acknowledgment of the Primate's
+bounty such as he alone in Christendom could give the edition bore in
+its forefront his memorable dedication to the Archbishop. That Erasmus
+could find protection for such a work in Warham's name, that he could
+address him with a conviction of his approval in words so bold and
+outspoken as those of his preface, tell us how completely the old man
+sympathized with the highest tendencies of the New Learning.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Renascence, that "new birth" of the world&mdash;for I cling to a word
+so eminently expressive of a truth that historians of our day seem
+inclined to forget or to deny&mdash;of that regeneration of mankind through
+the sudden upgrowth of intellectual liberty, Lambeth was in England the
+shrine. With the Reformation which followed it Lambeth, as we shall see,
+had little to do. But the home of Warham was the home of the revival of
+letters. With a singular fitness, the venerable library which still
+preserves their tradition, ousted from its older dwelling-place by the
+demolition of the cloister, has in modern days found refuge in the Great
+Hall, the successor and copy of that hall where the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>men of the New
+Learning, where Colet and More and Grocyn and Linacre gathered round the
+table of Warham.</p>
+
+<p>It was with Grocyn that Erasmus rowed up the river to the Primate's
+board. Warham addressed a few kindly words to the poor scholar before
+and after dinner, and then drawing him aside into a corner of the hall
+(his usual way when he made a present to any one) slipped into his hand
+an acknowledgment for the book and dedication he had brought with him.
+"How much did the Archbishop give you?" asked his companion as they
+rowed home again. "An immense amount!" replied Erasmus, but his friend
+saw the discontent on his face, and drew from him how small the sum
+really was. Then the disappointed scholar burst into a string of
+indignant questions: was Warham miserly, or was he poor, or did he
+really think such a present expressed the value of the book? Grocyn
+frankly blurted out the true reason for Warham's economy in his shrewd
+suspicion that this was not the first dedication that had been prefixed
+to the 'Hecuba,' and it is likely enough that the Primate's suspicion
+was right. At any rate, Erasmus owns that Grocyn's sardonic comment, "It
+is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>the way with you scholars," stuck in his mind even when he returned
+to Paris, and made him forward to the Archbishop a perfectly new
+translation of the 'Iphigenia.'</p>
+
+<p>Few men seem to have realized more thoroughly than Warham the new
+conception of an intellectual and moral equality before which the old
+social distinctions were to vanish away. In his intercourse with this
+group of friends he seems utterly unconscious of the exalted station
+which he occupied in the eyes of men. Take such a story as Erasmus tells
+of a visit of Dean Colet to Lambeth. The Dean took Erasmus in the boat
+with him, and read as they rowed along a section called 'The Remedy for
+Anger' in his friend's popular 'Handbook of the Christian Soldier.' When
+they reached the hall however Colet plumped gloomily down by Warham's
+side, neither eating nor drinking nor speaking in spite of the
+Archbishop's good-humoured attempt to draw him into conversation. It was
+only by starting the new topic of a comparison of ages that the
+Archbishop was at last successful; and when dinner was over Colet's
+ill-temper had utterly fled. Erasmus saw him draw aside an old man who
+had shared their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>board, and engage in the friendliest greeting. "What a
+fortunate fellow you are!" began the impetuous Dean, as the two friends
+stepped again into their boat; "what a tide of good-luck you bring with
+you!" Erasmus, of course, protested (one can almost see the
+half-earnest, half-humorous smile on his lip) that he was the most
+unfortunate fellow on earth. He was at any rate a bringer of good
+fortune to his friends, the Dean retorted; one friend at least he had
+saved from an unseemly outbreak of passion. At the Archbishop's table,
+in fact, Colet had found himself placed opposite to an uncle with whom
+he had long waged a bitter family feud, and it was only the singular
+chance which had brought him thither fresh from the wholesome lessons of
+the 'Handbook' that had enabled the Dean to refrain at the moment from
+open quarrel, and at last to get such a full mastery over his temper as
+to bring about a reconciliation with his kinsman. Colet was certainly
+very lucky in his friend's lessons, but he was perhaps quite as
+fortunate in finding a host so patient and good-tempered as Archbishop
+Warham.</p>
+
+<p>Primate and scholar were finally separated at last by the settlement of
+Erasmus at Basel, but the severance <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>brought no interruption to their
+friendship. "England is my last anchor," Erasmus wrote bitterly to a
+rich German prelate; "if that goes, I must beg." The anchor held as long
+as Warham lived. Years go by, but the Primate is never tired of new
+gifts and remembrances to the brave, sensitive scholar at whose heels
+all the ignorance and bigotry of Europe was yelping. Sometimes indeed he
+was luckless in his presents; once he sent a horse to his friend, and,
+in spite of the well-known proverb about looking such a gift in the
+mouth, got a witty little snub for his pains. "He is no doubt a good
+steed at bottom," Erasmus gravely confesses, "but it must be owned he is
+not over-handsome; however he is at any rate free from all mortal sins,
+with the trifling exception of gluttony and laziness! If he were only a
+father confessor now! he has all the qualities to fit him for
+one&mdash;indeed, he is only <i>too</i> prudent, modest, humble, chaste, and
+peaceable!" Still, admirable as these characteristics are, he is not
+quite the nag one expected. "I fancy that through some knavery or
+blundering on your servant's part, I must have got a different steed
+from the one you intended for me. In fact, now I come to remember, I had
+bidden my servant not to accept a horse except it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>were a good one; but
+I am infinitely obliged to you all the same." Even Warham's temper must
+have been tried as he laughed over such a letter as this; but the
+precious work of art which Lambeth contains proves that years only
+intensified their friendship. It was, as we have seen, with a letter of
+Erasmus in his hands, that on his first visit to England Holbein
+presented himself before Warham; and Erasmus responded to his friend's
+present of a copy of this portrait by forwarding a copy of his own.</p>
+
+<p>With the Reformation in its nobler and purer aspects Lambeth&mdash;as we have
+said&mdash;had little to do. Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Alasco, gathered there
+for a moment round Cranmer, but it was simply as a resting-place on
+their way to Cambridge, to Oxford, and to Austin Friars. Only one of the
+symbols of the new Protestantism has any connection with it; the
+Prayer-Book was drawn up in the peaceful seclusion of Otford. The party
+conferences, the rival martyrdoms of the jarring creeds, took place
+elsewhere. The memories of Cranmer which linger around Lambeth are
+simply memories of degradation, and that the deepest degradation of all,
+the degradation of those solemn influences which the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>Primacy embodies
+to the sanction of political infamy. It is fair indeed to remember the
+bitterness of Cranmer's suffering. Impassive as he seemed, with a face
+that never changed and sleep seldom known to be broken, men saw little
+of the inner anguish with which the tool of Henry's injustice bent
+before that overmastering will. But seldom as it was that the silent
+lips broke into complaint the pitiless pillage of his see wrung
+fruitless protests even from Cranmer. The pillage had began on the very
+eve of his consecration, and from that moment till the king's death
+Henry played the part of sturdy beggar for the archiepiscopal manors.
+Concession followed concession, and yet none sufficed to purchase
+security. The Archbishop lived in the very shadow of death. At one time
+he heard the music of the royal barge as it passed Lambeth, and hurried
+to the waterside to greet the King. "I have news for you my chaplain!"
+Henry broke out with his rough laugh as he drew Cranmer on board: "I
+know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent!" and pulling a paper from
+his sleeve he showed him his denunciation by the prebendaries of his own
+cathedral. At another time he was summoned from his bed, and crossed the
+river to find Henry pacing the gallery at Whitehall <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>and to hear that on
+the petition of the Council the King had consented to his committal to
+the Tower. The law of the Six Articles parted him from wife and child.
+"Happy man that you are" Cranmer groaned to Alexander Ales, whom with
+his wonted consideration for others he had summoned to Lambeth to warn
+him of his danger as a married priest; "happy man that you are that you
+can escape! I would that I could do the same. Truly my see would be no
+hindrance to me."</p>
+
+<p>The bitter words must have recalled to Ales words of hardly less
+bitterness which he had listened to on a visit to Lambeth years before.
+If there was one person upon earth whom Cranmer loved it was Anne
+Boleyn. When the royal summons had called him to Lambeth to wait till
+the time arrived when his part was to be played in the murder of the
+Queen his affection found vent in words of a strange pathos. "I loved
+her not a little," he wrote to Henry in fruitless intercession, "for the
+love which I judged her to bear towards God and His Gospel. I was most
+bound to her of all creatures living." So he wrote, knowing there was
+wrong to be done towards the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>woman he loved, wrong which he alone could
+do, and knowing too that he would stoop to do it. The large garden
+stretched away northward from his house then as now, but then thick, no
+doubt, with the elm rows that vanished some thirty years back as the
+great city's smoke drifted over them, and herein the early morning (it
+was but four o'clock) Ales, who had found sleep impossible and had
+crossed the river in a boat to seek calm in the fresh air and stillness
+of the place, met Cranmer walking. On the preceding day Anne had gone
+through the mockery of her trial, but to the world outside the little
+circle of the court nothing was known, and it was in utter
+unconsciousness of this that Ales told the Archbishop he had been roused
+by a dream of her beheading. Cranmer was startled out of his usual calm.
+"Don't you know then," he asked after a moment's silence, "what is to
+happen to-day?" Then raising his eyes to heaven he added with a wild
+burst of tears, "She who has been Queen of England on earth will this
+day become a queen in heaven!" Some hours afterwards the Queen stood
+before him as her judge, and passed back to the Tower and the block.</p>
+
+<p>Cranmer was freed by his master's death from this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>helplessness of
+terror only to lend himself to the injustice of the meaner masters who
+followed Henry. Their enemies were at least his own, and, kindly as from
+many instances we know his nature to have been, its very weakness made
+him spring eagerly in such an hour of deliverance at the opportunity of
+showing his power over those who so long held him down. On charges of
+the most frivolous nature Bishop Gardiner and Bishop Bonner were
+summoned before the Archbishop at Lambeth, deposed from their sees, and
+flung into prison. It is only the record of their trials, as it still
+stands in the pages of Foxe, that can enable us to understand the
+violence of the reaction under Mary. Gardiner with characteristic
+dignity confined himself to simply refuting the charges brought against
+him and protesting against the injustice of the court. But the coarser,
+bull-dog nature of Bonner turned to bay. By gestures, by scoff, by plain
+English speech he declared again and again his sense of the wrong that
+was being done. A temper naturally fearless was stung to bravado by the
+sense of oppression. As he entered the hall at Lambeth he passed
+straight by the Archbishop and his fellow-commissioners, still keeping
+his cap on his head as though in unconsciousness of his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>presence. One
+who stood by plucked his sleeve, and bade him do reverence. Bonner
+turned laughingly round and addressed the Archbishop, "What, my Lord,
+are you here? By my troth I saw you not." "It was because you would not
+see," Cranmer sternly rejoined. "Well," replied Bonner, "you sent for
+me: have you anything to say to me?" The charge was read. The Bishop had
+been commanded in a sermon to acknowledge that the acts of the King
+during his minority were as valid as if he were of full age. The command
+was flatly in contradiction with existing statutes, and the Bishop had
+no doubt disobeyed it.</p>
+
+<p>But Bonner was too adroit to make a direct answer to the charge. He
+gained time by turning suddenly on the question of the Sacrament; he
+cited the appearance of Hooper as a witness in proof that it was really
+on this point that he was brought to trial, and he at last succeeded in
+arousing Cranmer's love of controversy. A reply of almost incredible
+profanity from the Archbishop, if we may trust Foxe's report, rewarded
+Bonner's perseverance in demanding a statement of his belief. The Bishop
+was not slow to accept the advantage he had gained. "I am right sorry to
+hear your Grace <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>speak these words," he said, with a grave shake of his
+head, and Cranmer was warned by the silence and earnest looks of his
+fellow-commissioners to break up the session.</p>
+
+<p>Three days after, the addition of Sir Thomas Smith, the bitterest of
+Reformers, to the number of his assessors emboldened Cranmer to summon
+Bonner again. The court met in the chapel, and the Bishop was a second
+time commanded to reply to the charge. He objected now to the admission
+of the evidence of either Hooper or Latimer on the ground of their
+notorious heresy. "If that be the law," Cranmer replied hastily, "it is
+no godly law." "It is the King's law used in the realm," Bonner bluntly
+rejoined. Again Cranmer's temper gave his opponent the advantage. "Ye be
+too full of your law," replied the angry Primate; "I would wish you had
+less knowledge in that law and more knowledge in God's law and of your
+duty!" "Well," answered the Bishop with admirable self-command, "seeing
+your Grace falleth to wishing, I can also wish many things to be in your
+person." It was in vain that Smith strove to brush away his objections
+with a contemptuous "You do use <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>us thus to be seen a common lawyer."
+"Indeed," the veteran canonist coolly retorted; "I knew the law ere you
+could read it!" There was nothing for it but a second adjournment of the
+court. At its next session all parties met in hotter mood. The Bishop
+pulled Hooper's books on the Sacrament from his sleeve and began reading
+them aloud. Latimer lifted up his head, as he alleged, to still the
+excitement of the people who crowded the chapel; as Bonner believed, to
+arouse a tumult. Cries of "Yea, yea," "Nay, nay," interrupted Bonner's
+reading. The Bishop turned round and faced the throng, crying out in
+humorous defiance, "Ah! Woodcocks! Woodcocks!" The taunt was met with
+universal laughter, but the scene had roused Cranmer's temper as well as
+his own. The Primate addressed himself to the people, protesting that
+Bonner was called in question for no such matter as he would persuade
+them. Again Bonner turned to the people with "Well now, hear what the
+Bishop of London saith for his part," but the commissioners forbade him
+to speak more. The court was at last recalled to a quieter tone, but
+contests of this sort still varied the proceedings as they dragged their
+slow length along in chapel and hall.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>At last Cranmer resolved to make an end. Had he been sitting simply as
+Archbishop, he reminded Bonner sharply, he might have expected more
+reverence and obedience from his suffragan. As it was, "at every time
+that we have sitten in commission you have used such unseemly fashions,
+without all reverence or obedience, giving taunts and checks as well
+unto us, with divers of the servants and chaplains, as also unto certain
+of the ancientest that be here, calling them fools and daws, with such
+like, that you have given to the multitude an intolerable example of
+disobedience." "You show yourself to be a meet judge!" was Bonner's
+scornful reply. It was clear he had no purpose to yield. The real matter
+at issue, he contended, was the doctrine of the Sacrament, and from the
+very courtroom he sent his orders to the Lord Mayor to see that no
+heretical opinions were preached before him. At the close of the trial
+he once more addressed Cranmer in solemn protest against his breach of
+the law. "I am sorry" he said "that I being a bishop am thus handled at
+your Grace's hand, but more sorry that you suffer abominable heretics to
+practise as they do in London and elsewhere&mdash;answer it as you can!" Then
+bandying taunts with the throng, the indomitable bishop followed the
+officers to the Marshalsea.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>From the degradation of scenes like these Lambeth was raised to new
+dignity and self-respect by the primacy of Parker. His consecration in
+the same chapel which had witnessed Wyclif's confession was the triumph
+of Wyclif's principles, the close of that storm of the Reformation, of
+that Catholic reaction, which ceased alike with the accession of
+Elizabeth. But it was far more than this. It was in itself a symbol of
+the Church of England as it stands to-day, of that quiet illogical
+compromise between past and present which Parker and the Queen were to
+mould into so lasting a shape. Every circumstance of the service marked
+the strange contrasts which were to be blended in the future of the
+English Church. The zeal of Edward the Sixth's day had dashed the
+stained glass from the casements of Lambeth; the zeal of Elizabeth's day
+was soon to move, if it had not already moved, the holy table into the
+midst of the chapel. But a reaction from the mere iconoclasm and
+bareness of Calvinistic Protestantism showed itself in the tapestries
+hung for the day along the eastern wall and in the rich carpet which was
+spread over the floor. The old legal forms, the old Ordination Service
+reappeared, but in their midst came the new spirit of the Reformation,
+the oath of submission to the royal <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>supremacy, the solemn gift no
+longer of the pastoral staff but of the Bible. The very dress of the
+four consecrating bishops showed the same confusion. Barlow, with the
+Archbishop's chaplains who assisted him in the office of the Communion,
+wore the silken copes of the older service; Scory and Hodgskins the fair
+linen surplice of the new. Yet more noteworthy was the aged figure of
+Coverdale, "Father Coverdale," as men used affectionately to call him,
+the well-known translator of the Bible, whose life had been so hardly
+wrung by royal intercession from Mary. Rejecting the very surplice as
+Popery, in his long Genevan cloak he marks the opening of the Puritan
+controversy over vestments which was to rage so fiercely from Parker on
+to Laud.</p>
+
+<p>The library of Parker, though no longer within its walls, is memorable
+in the literary history of Lambeth as the first of a series of such
+collections made after his time by each successive Archbishop. Many of
+these indeed have passed away. The manuscripts of Parker form the glory
+of Corpus College, Cambridge; the Oriental collections of Laud are among
+the most precious treasures of the Bodleian. In puerile revenge for his
+fall Sancroft withdrew his books from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>Lambeth, and bequeathed them to
+Emmanuel College. The library which the munificence of Tenison
+bequeathed to his old parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields has been
+dispersed by a shameless act of Vandalism within our own memories. An
+old man's caprice deposited the papers of Archbishop Wake at Christ
+Church. But the treasures thus dispersed are, with the exception of the
+Parker MSS., far surpassed by the collections that remain. I cannot
+attempt here to enter with any detail into the nature of the history of
+the archiepiscopal library. It owes its origin to Archbishop Bancroft,
+it was largely supplemented by his successor Abbot, and still more
+largely after a long interval by the book-loving Primates Tenison and
+Secker. The library of 30,000 volumes still mainly consists of these
+collections, though it has been augmented by the smaller bequests of
+Sheldon and Cornwallis and in a far less degree by those of later
+Archbishops. One has at any rate the repute of having augmented it
+during his primacy simply by a treatise on gout and a book about
+butterflies. Of the 1,200 volumes of manuscripts and papers, 500 are due
+to Bancroft and Abbot, the rest mainly to Tenison, who purchased the
+Carew Papers, the collections of Wharton, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>and the Codices that bear his
+name. If Wake left his papers to Christ Church in dread of the
+succession of Bishop Gibson the bequest of Gibson's own papers more than
+made up the loss. The most valuable addition since Gibson's day has been
+that of the Greek Codices collected in the East at the opening of this
+century by Dr. Carlyle.</p>
+
+<p>The importance of Parker's primacy however was political and
+ecclesiastical rather than literary. The first Protestant Archbishop was
+not the man to stoop to servility like Cranmer, nor was Elizabeth the
+queen to ask such stooping. But the concordat which the two tacitly
+arranged, the policy so resolutely clung to in spite of Burleigh and
+Walsingham, was perhaps a greater curse both to nation and to Church
+than the meanness of Cranmer. The steady support given by the Crown to
+the new ecclesiastical organization which Parker moulded into shape was
+repaid by the conversion of every clergyman into the advocate of
+irresponsible government. It was as if publicly to ratify this concordat
+that the Queen came in person to Lambeth in the spring of 1573. On
+either side the chapel in that day stood a greater and lesser cloister.
+The last, which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>lay on the garden side, was swept away by the
+demolitions of the eighteenth century, the first still fills the space
+between chapel and hall but has been converted into domestic offices by
+the "restoration" of our own. Even Mr. Blore might have spared the
+cloisters from whose gallery on the side towards the Thames Elizabeth
+looked down on the gay line of nobles and courtiers who leaned from the
+barred windows beneath and on the crowd of meaner subjects who filled
+the court, while she listened to Dr. Pearce as he preached from a pulpit
+set by the well in the midst. At its close the Queen passed to dinner in
+the Archbishop's chamber of presence, while the noble throng beneath
+followed Burleigh and Lord Howard to the hall whose oaken roof told
+freshly of Parker's hand. At four the short visit was over, and
+Elizabeth again on her way to Greenwich. But, short as it was, it marked
+the conclusion of a new alliance between Church and State out of which
+the Ecclesiastical Commission was to spring.</p>
+
+<p>Such an alliance would have been deadly for English religion as for
+English liberty had not its strength been broken by the obstinate
+resistance in wise as well as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>unwise ways of the Puritan party. There
+are few more interesting memorials of the struggle which followed than
+the 'Martin Marprelate' tracts which still remain in the collection at
+Lambeth, significantly scored in all their more virulent passages by the
+red pencil of Archbishop Whitgift. But the story of that controversy
+cannot be told here, though it was at Lambeth, as the seat of the High
+Commission, that it was really fought out. More and more it parted all
+who clung to liberty from the Church, and knit the episcopate in a
+closer alliance with the Crown. When Elizabeth set Parker at the head of
+the new Ecclesiastical Commission, half the work of the Reformation was
+in fact undone.</p>
+
+<p>Under Laud this great engine of ecclesiastical tyranny was perverted to
+the uses of civil tyranny of the vilest kind. Under Laud the clerical
+invectives of a Martin Marprelate deepened into the national fury of
+'Canterburie's Doom.' With this political aspect of his life we have not
+now to deal; what Lambeth Chapel brings out with singular vividness is
+the strange audacity with which the Archbishop threw himself across the
+strongest religious sentiments of his time. Men noted as a fatal omen
+the accident that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>marked his first entry into Lambeth; the overladen
+ferry-boat upset in the crossing, and though horses and servants were
+saved the Primate's coach remained at the bottom of the Thames. But no
+omen brought hesitation to that bold, narrow mind. His first action, he
+tells us himself, was the restoration of the chapel, and, as Laud
+managed it, restoration was the simple undoing of all that the
+Reformation had done.</p>
+
+<p>"I found the windows so broken, and the chapel lay so nastily," he wrote
+long after in his Defence, "that I was ashamed to behold, and could not
+resort unto it but with some disdain." With characteristic energy the
+Archbishop aided with his own hands in the repair of the windows, and
+racked his wits "in making up the history of those old broken pictures
+by help of the fragments of them, which I compared with the story." In
+the east window his glazier was scandalized at being forced by the
+Primate's express directions to "repair and new make the broken
+crucifix." The holy table was set altar-wise against the wall, and a
+cloth of arras hung behind it embroidered with the history of the Last
+Supper. The elaborate woodwork of the screen, the richly-embroidered
+copes of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>chaplains, the silver candlesticks, the credence-table,
+the organ and the choir, the genuflexions to the altar, recalled the
+elaborate ceremonial of the Royal Chapel.</p>
+
+<p>High-handed however as the Archbishop's course had been, he felt dimly
+the approaching wreck. At the close of 1639 he notes in his diary a
+great storm that broke even the boats of the Lambeth watermen to pieces
+as they lay before his gate. A curious instance of his gloomy
+prognostications still exists among the relics in the library&mdash;a quarry
+of greenish glass, once belonging to the west window of the gallery of
+Croydon, and removed when that palace was rebuilt. On the quarry Laud
+has written with his signet-ring in his own clear, beautiful hand,
+"Memorand. Ecclesi&aelig; de Micham, Cheme, et Stone cum aliis fulgure
+combust&aelig; sunt. Januar. 14, 1638-9. Omen avertat Deus."</p>
+
+<p>The omen was far from averted. The Scottish war, the Bellum Episcopale,
+the Bishops' War, as men called it, was soon going against the King.
+Laud had been the chief mover in the war, and it was against Laud that
+the popular indignation at once directed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>itself. On the 9th of May he
+notes in his diary: "A paper posted upon the Royal Exchange, animating
+'prentices to sack my house on the Monday following." On that Monday
+night the mob came surging up to the gates. "At midnight my house was
+beset with 500 of these rascal routers," notes the indomitable little
+prelate. He had received notice in time to secure the house, and after
+two hours of useless shouting the mob rolled away. Laud had his revenge;
+a drummer who had joined in the attack was racked mercilessly, and then
+hanged and quartered. But retaliation like this was useless. The
+gathering of the Long Parliament sounded the knell of the sturdy little
+minister who had ridden England so hard. At the close of October he is
+in his upper study&mdash;it is one of the pleasant scholarly touches that
+redeem so much in his life&mdash;"to see some manuscripts which I was sending
+to Oxford. In that study hung my picture taken by the life" (the picture
+is at Lambeth still), "and coming in I found it fallen down upon the
+face and lying on the floor, the string being broken by which it was
+hanged against the wall. I am almost everyday threatened with my ruin in
+parliament. God grant this be no omen." On the 18th of December he was
+in charge of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>the gentleman-usher of the Lords on impeachment of high
+treason. In his company the Archbishop returned for a few hours to see
+his house for the last time, "for a book or two to read in, and such
+papers as pertained to my defence against the Scots;" really to burn,
+says Prynne, most of his privy papers. There is the first little break
+in the boldness with which till now he has faced the popular ill-will,
+the first little break too of tenderness, as though the shadow of what
+was to come were softening him, in the words that tell us his last
+farewell: "I stayed at Lambeth till the evening, to avoid the gaze of
+the people. I went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the day
+(Ps. 93 and 94) and cap. 50 of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me
+worthy of it, and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge hundreds of
+my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my
+house. For which I bless God and them."</p>
+
+<p>So Laud vanished into the dark December night never to return. The house
+seems to have been left unmolested for two years. Then "Captain Browne
+and his company entered my house at Lambeth to keep it for public
+service." The troopers burst open the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>door "and offered violence to the
+organ," but it was saved for the time by the intervention of their
+captain. In 1643 the zeal of the soldiers could no longer be restrained.
+Even in the solitude and terror of his prison in the Tower Laud still
+feels the bitterness of the last blow at the house he held so dear. "May
+1. My chapel windows defaced and the steps torn up." But the crowning
+bitterness was to come. If there were two men living who had personal
+wrongs to avenge on the Archbishop, they were Leighton and Prynne. It
+can only have been as a personal triumph over their humbled persecutor
+that the Parliament appointed the first custodian of Lambeth and gave
+Prynne the charge of searching the Archbishop's house and chambers for
+materials in support of the impeachment. Of the spirit in which Prynne
+executed his task, the famous 'Canterburie's Doom,' with the Breviat of
+Laud's life which preceded it, still gives pungent evidence. By one of
+those curious coincidences that sometimes flash the fact upon us through
+the dust of old libraries, the copy of this violent invective preserved
+at Lambeth is inscribed on its fly-leaf with the clear, bold "Dum spiro
+spero, C.R." of the King himself. It is hard to picture the thoughts
+that must have passed through Charles's mind <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>as he read the bitter
+triumphant pages that told how the man he had twice pilloried and then
+flung into prison for life had come out again, as he puts it brutally,
+to "unkennel that fox," his foe.</p>
+
+<p>Not even the Archbishop's study with its array of Missals and Breviaries
+and Books of Hours, not even the gallery with its "superstitious
+pictures," the three Italian masterpieces that he hurried as evidence to
+the bar of the House of Lords, so revealed to this terrible detective
+"the rotten, idolatrous heart" of the Primate as the sight of the
+chapel. It was soon reduced to simplicity. We have seen how sharply even
+in prison Laud felt the havoc made by the soldiery. But worse
+profanation was to follow. In 1648 the house passed by sale to the
+regicide Colonel Scott; the Great Hall was at once demolished, and the
+chapel turned into the dining-room of the household. The tomb of Parker
+was levelled with the ground; and if we are to believe the story of the
+royalists, the new owner felt so keenly the discomfort of dining over a
+dead man's bones that the remains of the great Protestant primate were
+disinterred and buried anew in an adjoining field.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>The story of the library is a more certain one. From the days of
+Bancroft to those of Laud it had remained secure in the rooms over the
+great cloister where Parker's collection had probably stood before it
+passed to Cambridge. There in Parker's day Foxe had busied himself in
+work for the later editions of his 'Acts and Monuments;' even in the
+present library one book at least bears his autograph and the marginal
+marks of his use. There the great scholars of the seventeenth century,
+with Selden among them, had carried on their labours. The time was now
+come when Selden was to save the library from destruction. At the sale
+of Lambeth the Parliament ordered the books and manuscripts to be sold
+with the house. Selden dexterously interposed. The will of its founder,
+Bancroft, he pleaded, directed that in case room should not be found for
+it at Lambeth his gift should go to Cambridge; and the Parliament,
+convinced by its greatest scholar, suffered the books to be sent to the
+University.</p>
+
+<p>When the Restoration brought the Stuart home again, it flung Scott into
+the Tower and set Juxon in the ruined, desecrated walls. Of the deeper
+thoughts <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>that such a scene might have suggested few probably found
+their way into the simple, limited mind of the new primate. The whole
+pathos of Juxon's position lay in fact in his perfect absorption in the
+past. The books were reclaimed from their Cambridge Adullam. The chapel
+was rescued from desecration, and the fine woodwork of screen and stalls
+replaced as Laud had left them. The demolition of the hall left him a
+more serious labour, and the way in which he entered on it brought
+strikingly out Juxon's temper. He knew that he had but a few years to
+live, and he set himself but one work to do before he died, the
+replacing everything in the state in which the storm of the rebellion
+had found it. He resolved therefore not only to rebuild the hall but to
+rebuild it precisely as it had stood before it was destroyed. It was in
+vain that he was besieged by the remonstrances of "classical"
+architects, that he was sneered at even by Pepys as "old-fashioned";
+times had changed and fashions had changed, but Juxon would recognize no
+change at all. He died ere the building was finished, but even in death
+his inflexible will provided that his plans should be adhered to. The
+result has been a singularly happy one. It was not merely that the
+Archbishop has left <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>us one of the noblest examples of that strange yet
+successful revival of Gothic feeling of which the staircase of Christ
+Church Hall, erected at much about the same time, furnishes so exquisite
+a specimen. It is that in his tenacity to the past he has preserved the
+historic interest of his hall. Beneath the picturesque woodwork of the
+roof, in the quiet light that breaks through the quaint mullions of its
+windows, the student may still recall without a jar the figures which
+make Lambeth memorable, figures such as those of Warham and Erasmus, of
+Grocyn and Colet and More. Unhappily there was a darker side to this
+conservatism. The Archbishops had returned like the Bourbons, forgetting
+nothing and having learned hardly anything. If any man could have
+learned the lesson of history it was Juxon's successor, the hard
+sceptical Sheldon, and one of the jottings in Pepys' Diary shows us what
+sort of lesson he had learned. Pepys had gone down the river at noon to
+dine with the Archbishop in company with Sir Christopher Wren, "the
+first time," as he notes, "that I ever was there, and I have long longed
+for it." Only a few days before he had had a terrible disappointment,
+for "Mr. Wren and I took boat, thinking to dine with my Lord of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>Canterbury, but when we came to Lambeth the gate was shut, which is
+strictly done at twelve o'clock, and nobody comes in afterwards, so we
+lost our labour." On this occasion Pepys was more fortunate. He found "a
+noble house and well furnished with good pictures and furniture, and
+noble attendance in good order, and a great deal of company, though an
+ordinary day, and exceeding good cheer, nowhere better or so much that
+ever I think I saw." Sheldon with his usual courtesy gave his visitors
+kindly welcome, and Pepys was preparing to withdraw at the close of
+dinner when he heard news which induced him to remain. The almost
+incredible scene that followed must be told in his own words:&mdash;"Most of
+the company gone, and I going, I heard by a gentleman of a sermon that
+was to be there; and so I stayed to hear it, thinking it to be serious,
+till by-and-by the gentleman told me it was a mockery by one Cornet
+Bolton, a very gentlemanlike man, that behind a chair did pray and
+preach like a Presbyter Scot, with all the possible imitation in
+grimaces and voice. And his text about the hanging up their harps upon
+the willows; and a serious, good sermon too, exclaiming against bishops
+and crying up of my good Lord Eglington till it made us all burst. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>But
+I did wonder to hear the Bishop at this time to make himself sport with
+things of this kind; but I perceive it was shown to him as a rarity, and
+he took care to have the room door shut; but there were about twenty
+gentlemen there, infinitely pleased with the 'novelty.'"</p>
+
+<p>It was "novelties" like these that led the last of the Stuarts to his
+fatal belief that he could safely defy a Church that had so severed
+itself from the English religion in doing the work of the Crown. The pen
+of a great historian has told for all time the Trial of the Seven
+Bishops, and though their protest was drawn up at Lambeth I may not
+venture to tell it here. Of all the seven in fact Sancroft was probably
+the least inclined to resistance, the one prelate to whom the cheers of
+the great multitude at their acquittal brought least sense of triumph.</p>
+
+<p>No sooner indeed was James driven from the throne than the Primate fell
+back into the servile king-worship of an England that was passing away.
+Within the closed gates of Lambeth he debated endlessly with himself and
+with his fellow-bishops the questions of "de jure" and "de facto" right
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>to the crown. Every day he sheered further and further from the actual
+world around him. Newton, who was with him at Lambeth when it was
+announced that the Convention had declared the throne vacant, found that
+Sancroft's thoughts were not with England or English freedom&mdash;they were
+concentrated on the question whether James's child were a supposititious
+one or no. "He wished," he said, "they had gone on a more regular method
+and examined into the birth of the young child. There was reason," he
+added, "to believe he was not the same as the first, which might easily
+be known, for he had a mole on his neck." The new Government bore long
+with the old man, and Bancroft for a time seems really to have wavered.
+He suffered his chaplains to take the oaths and then scolded them
+bitterly for praying for William and Mary. He declined to take his seat
+at the Council board, and yet issued his commission for the consecration
+of Burnet. At last his mind was made up and the Government on his final
+refusal to take the oath of allegiance had no alternative but to declare
+the see vacant.</p>
+
+<p>For six months Bancroft was still suffered to remain <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>in his house,
+though Tillotson was nominated as his successor. With a perfect
+courtesy, worthy of the saintly temper which was his characteristic,
+Tillotson waited long at the deprived Archbishop's door desiring a
+conference. But Sancroft refused to see him. Evelyn found the old man in
+a dismantled house, bitter at his fall. "Say 'nolo,' and say it from the
+heart," he had replied passionately to Beveridge when he sought his
+counsel on the offer of a bishopric. Others asked whether after refusing
+the oaths they might attend worship where the new sovereigns were prayed
+for. "If they do," answered Sancroft, "they will need the Absolution at
+the end as well as at the beginning of the service." In the answer lay
+the schism of the Nonjurors, and to this schism Sancroft soon gave
+definite form. On Whitsunday the new Church was started in the
+archiepiscopal Chapel. The throng of visitors was kept standing at the
+palace gate. No one was admitted to the Chapel but some fifty who had
+refused the oaths. The Archbishop himself consecrated: one Nonjuror
+reading the prayers, another preaching. A formal action of ejectment was
+the answer to this open defiance, and on the evening of its decision in
+favour of the Crown Sancroft withdrew <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>quietly by boat over Thames to
+the Temple. He was soon followed by many who, amidst the pettiness of
+his public views, could still realize the grandeur of his self-devotion.
+To one, the Earl of Aylesbury, the Archbishop himself opened the door.
+His visitor, struck with the change of all he saw from the pomp of
+Lambeth, burst into tears and owned how deeply the sight affected him.
+"O my good lord," replied Sancroft, "rather rejoice with me, for now I
+live again."</p>
+
+<p>With Sancroft's departure opens a new age of Lambeth's ecclesiastical
+history. The Revolution which flung him aside had completed the work of
+the great Rebellion in sweeping away for ever the old pretensions of the
+primates to an autocracy within the Church of England. But it seemed to
+have opened a nobler prospect in placing them at the head of the
+Protestant Churches of the world. In their common peril before the great
+Catholic aggression, which found equal support at Paris and Vienna, the
+Reformed communities of the Continent looked for aid and sympathy to the
+one Reformed Church whose position was now unassailable. The
+congregations of the Palatinate appealed to Lambeth when they were
+trodden <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>under foot beneath the horse-hoofs of Turenne. The same appeal
+came from the Vaudois refugees in Germany, the Silesian Protestants, the
+Huguenot churches that still fought for existence in France, the
+Calvinists of Geneva, the French refugees who had forsaken their sunny
+homes in the south for the Gospel and God. In the dry letter-books on
+the Lambeth shelves, in the records of bounty dispensed through the
+Archbishop to the persecuted and the stranger, in the warm and cordial
+correspondence with Lutheran and Calvinist, survives a faint memory of
+the golden visions which filled Protestant hearts after the accession of
+the great Deliverer. "The eyes of the world are upon us," was Tenison's
+plea for union with Protestants at home. "All the Reformed Churches are
+in expectation of something to be done which may make for union and
+peace." When a temper so cold as Tenison's could kindle in this fashion
+it is no wonder that more enthusiastic minds launched into loftier
+expectations&mdash;that Leibnitz hoped to see the union of Calvinist and
+Lutheran accomplished by a common adoption of the English Liturgy, that
+a High Churchman like Nicholls revived the plan, which Cranmer had
+proposed and Calvin had supported, of a general council of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>Protestants
+to be held in England. One by one such visions faded before the
+virulence of party spirit, the narrowness and timidity of Churchmen, the
+base and selfish politics of the time. Few men had higher or more
+spiritual conceptions of Christian unity than Tenison; yet the German
+translation of our Liturgy, stamped with the royal monogram of King
+Frederick, which still exists in the library, reminds us how in mere
+jealousy of a Tory triumph Tenison flung away the offer of a union with
+the Church of Prussia. The creeping ambition of Dubois foiled whatever
+dreams Archbishop Wake may have entertained of a union with the Church
+of France.</p>
+
+<p>From the larger field of political and ecclesiastical history we may
+turn again ere we close to the narrower limits of the Lambeth Library.
+The storm which drove Sancroft from his house left his librarian, Henry
+Wharton, still bound to the books he loved so well. Wharton is one of
+those instances of precocious developement which are rarer in the sober
+walks of historical investigation than in art. It is a strange young
+face that we see in the frontispiece to his sermons, the impression of
+its broad, high brow and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>prominent nose so oddly in contrast with the
+delicate, feminine curves of the mouth, and yet repeated in the hard,
+concentrated gaze of the large, full eyes which look out from under the
+enormous wig. Wharton was the most accomplished of Cambridge students
+when he quitted the University at twenty-two to aid Cave in his
+'Historia Litteraria.' But the time proved too exciting for a purely
+literary career. At Tenison's instigation the young scholar plunged into
+the thick of the controversy which had been provoked by the aggression
+of King James, and his vigour soon attracted the notice of Sancroft. He
+became one of the Archbishop's chaplains, and was presented in a single
+year to two of the best livings in his gift. With these however save in
+his very natural zeal for pluralities he seems to have concerned himself
+little. It was with the library which now passed into his charge that
+his name was destined to be associated. Under him its treasures were
+thrown liberally open to the ecclesiastical antiquaries of his day&mdash;to
+Hody, to Stillingfleet, to Collier, to Atterbury, and to Strype, who was
+just beginning his voluminous collections towards the illustration of
+the history of the sixteenth century. But no one made so much use of the
+documents in his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>charge as Wharton himself. In them, no doubt, lay the
+secret of his consent to take the oath, to separate from his earlier
+patron, to accept the patronage of Tenison. But there was no permanent
+breach with Sancroft; on his deathbed the Archbishop committed to him
+the charge of editing Laud's papers, a charge redeemed by his
+publication of the 'Troubles and Trials' of the Archbishop in 1694.</p>
+
+<p>But this with other labours were mere by-play. The design upon which his
+energies were mainly concentrated was "to exhibit a complete
+ecclesiastical history of England to the Reformation," and the two
+volumes of the 'Anglia Sacra,' which appeared during his life, were
+intended as a partial fulfilment of this design. Of these, as they now
+stand, the second is by far the more valuable. The four archiepiscopal
+biographies by Osbern, the three by Eadmer, Malmesbury's lives of
+Aldhelm and Wulstan, the larger collection of works by Giraldus
+Cambrensis, Chaundler's biographies of Wykeham and Bekington, and the
+collection of smaller documents which accompanied these, formed a more
+valuable contribution to our ecclesiastical history than had up to
+Wharton's time <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>ever been made. The first volume contained the chief
+monastic annals which illustrated the history of the sees whose
+cathedrals were possessed by monks; those served by canons regular or
+secular were reserved for a third volume, while a fourth was to have
+contained the episcopal annals of the Church from the Reformation to the
+Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>The last however was never destined to appear, and its predecessor was
+interrupted after the completion of the histories of London and St.
+Asaph by the premature death of the great scholar. In 1694 Battely
+writes a touching account to Strype of his interview with Wharton at
+Canterbury:&mdash;"One day he opened his trunk and drawers, and showed me his
+great collections concerning the state of our Church, and with a great
+sigh told me his labours were at an end, and that his strength would not
+permit him to finish any more of that subject." Vigorous and healthy as
+his natural constitution was he had worn it out with the severity of his
+toil. He denied himself refreshment in his eagerness for study, and sat
+over his books in the bitterest days of winter till hands and feet were
+powerless with the cold. At last nature abruptly gave <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>way, his last
+hopes of recovery were foiled by an immoderate return to his old
+pursuits, and at the age of thirty-one Henry Wharton died a quiet
+scholar's death. Archbishop Tenison stood with Bishop Lloyd by the grave
+in Westminster, where the body was laid "with solemn and devout anthems
+composed by that most ingenious artist, Mr. Harry Purcell;" and over it
+were graven words that tell the broken story of so many a student
+life:&mdash;"Multa ad augendam et illustrandam rem literariam conscripsit;
+plura moliebatur."</p>
+
+<p>The library no longer rests in those quiet rooms over the great cloister
+in which a succession of librarians, such as Gibson and Wilkins and
+Ducarel, preserved the tradition of Henry Wharton. The 'Codex' of the
+first, the 'Concilia' of the second, and the elaborate analysis of the
+Canterbury Registers which we owe to the third are, like Wharton's own
+works, of primary importance to the study of English ecclesiastical
+history. It was reserved for our own day to see these memories swept
+away by the degradation of the cloister into a kitchen yard and a
+scullery; but the Great Hall of Archbishop Juxon, to which by a happy
+fortune the books were transferred, has seen in Dr. Maitland and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>Professor Stubbs keepers whose learning more than rivals the learning of
+Wharton himself. It is not without significance that this great library
+still lies open to the public as a part and a notable part of the palace
+of the chief prelate of the English Church. Even if Philistines abound
+in it the spirit and drift of the English Church have never been wholly
+Philistine. It has managed somehow to reflect and represent the varying
+phases of English life and English thought; it has developed more and
+more a certain original largeness and good-tempered breadth of view;
+amidst the hundred jarring theories of itself and its position which it
+has embraced at one time or another it has never stooped to the mere
+"pay over the counter" theory of Little Bethel. Above all it has as yet
+managed to find room for almost every shade of religious opinion; and it
+has answered at once to every national revival of taste, of beauty, and
+of art.</p>
+
+<p>Great as are the faults of the Church of England, these are merits which
+make men who care more for the diffusion of culture than for the
+propagation of this shade or that shade of religious opinion shrink from
+any immediate wish for her fall. And they are merits <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>which spring from
+this, that she is still a learned Church, not learned in the sense of
+purely theological or ecclesiastical learning, but a Church which is
+able to show among its clergy men of renown in every branch of
+literature, critical, poetical, historical, or scientific. How long this
+distinction is to continue her own it is hard to say; there are signs
+indeed in the theological temper which is creeping over the clergy that
+it is soon to cease. But the spirit of intelligence, of largeness of
+view, of judicious moderation, which is so alien from the theological
+spirit, can still look for support from the memories of Lambeth.
+Whatever its influence may have been, it has not grown out of the noisy
+activity of theological "movement." Its strength has been to sit still
+and let such "movements" pass by. It is by a spirit the very opposite of
+theirs&mdash;a spirit of conciliation, of largeness of heart, that it has won
+its power over the Church. None of the great theological impulses of
+this age or the last, it is sometimes urged, came out of Lambeth. Little
+of the theological bitterness, of the controversial narrowness of this
+age or the last, it may fairly be answered, has ever entered its gates.
+Of Lambeth we may say what Matthew Arnold says of Oxford, that many as
+are its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>faults it has never surrendered itself to ecclesiastical
+Philistines. In the calm, genial silence of its courts, its library, its
+galleries, in the presence of its venerable past, the virulence, the
+petty strife, the tumult of religious fanaticism finds itself hushed.
+Amongst the storm of the Wesleyan revival, of the Evangelical revival,
+of the Puseyite revival, the voice of Lambeth has ever pleaded for a
+truth simpler, larger, more human than theirs. Amid the deafening
+clamour of Tractarian and anti-Tractarian disputants both sides united
+in condemning the silence of Lambeth. Yet the one word that came from
+Lambeth will still speak to men's hearts when all their noisy
+disputations are forgotten. "How," a prelate, whose nearest relative had
+joined the Church of Rome, asked Archbishop Howley, "how shall I treat
+my brother?" "As a brother," was the Archbishop's reply.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>CHILDREN BY THE SEA.</h2>
+<br /><a name="CHILDREN_BY_THE_SEA" id="CHILDREN_BY_THE_SEA"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>CHILDREN BY THE SEA.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Autumn brings its congresses&mdash;scientific, ecclesiastical,
+arch&aelig;ological&mdash;but the prettiest of autumnal congresses is the
+children's congress by the sea. It is like a leap from prose into poetry
+when we step away from Associations and Institutes, from stuffy
+lecture-rooms and dismal sections, to the strip of sand which the
+children have chosen for their annual gathering. Behind us are the great
+white cliffs, before us the reach of grey waters with steamers and their
+smoke-trail in the offing and waves washing lazily in upon the shore.
+And between sea and cliff are a world of little creatures, digging,
+dabbling, delighted. What strikes us at first sight is the number of
+them. In ordinary life we meet the great host of children in detail, as
+it were; we kiss our little ones in the morning, we tumble over a
+perambulator, we dodge a hoop, we pat back a ball. Child after child
+meets us, but we never <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>realize the world of children till we see it
+massed upon the sands. Children of every age, from the baby to the
+schoolboy; big children and tiny children, weak little urchins with pale
+cheeks and plump little urchins with sturdy legs; children of all
+tempers, from the screeching child in arms to the quiet child sitting
+placid and gazing out of large grey eyes; gay little madcaps paddling at
+the water's edge; busy children, idle children, children careful of
+their dress, hoydens covered with sand and seaweed, wild children,
+demure children&mdash;all are mustered in the great many-coloured camp
+between the cliffs and the sea.</p>
+
+<p>It is their holiday as it is ours, but what is a mere refreshment to us
+is life to them. What a rapture of freedom looks up at us out of the
+little faces that watch us as we thread our way from group to group! The
+mere change of dress is a revolution in the child's existence. These
+brown-holland frocks, rough sunshades, and sandboots, these clothes that
+they may wet and dirty and tear as they like, mean deliverance from
+endless dressings&mdash;dressings for breakfast and dressings for lunch,
+dressings to go out with mamma and dressings to come down to dessert&mdash;an
+escape from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>fashionable little shoes and tight little hats and stiff
+little flounces that it is treason to rumple. There is an inexpressible
+triumph in their return at eventide from the congress by the sea,
+dishevelled, bedraggled, but with no fear of a scolding from nurse. Then
+too there is the freedom from "lessons." There are no more of those
+dreadful maps along the wall, no French exercises, no terrible
+arithmetic. The elder girls make a faint show of keeping up their
+practising, but the goody books which the governess packed carefully at
+the bottom of their boxes remain at the bottom unopened. There is no
+time for books, the grave little faces protest to you; there is only
+time for the sea. That is why they hurry over breakfast to get early to
+the sands, and are moody and restless at the length of luncheon. It is a
+hopeless business to keep them at home; they yawn over picture-books,
+they quarrel over croquet, they fall asleep over draughts. Home is just
+now only an interlude of sleeping or dining in the serious business of
+the day.</p>
+
+<p>The one interest of existence is in the sea. Its novelty, its vastness,
+its life, dwarf everything else in the little minds beside it. There is
+the endless <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>watching for the ships, the first peep at the little dot on
+the horizon, the controversies as it rises about its masts or its flag,
+the questions as to where it is coming from and where it is going to.
+There is the endless speculation on the tide, the doubt every morning
+whether it is coming in or going out, the wonder of its perpetual
+advance or retreat, the whispered tales of children hemmed in between it
+and the cliffs, the sense of a mysterious life, the sense of a
+mysterious danger. Above all there is the sense of a mysterious power.
+The children wake as the wind howls in the night, or the rain dashes
+against the window panes, to tell each other how the waves are leaping
+high over the pier and ships tearing to pieces on reefs far away. So
+charming and yet so terrible, the most playful of playfellows, the most
+awful of possible destroyers, the child's first consciousness of the
+greatness and mystery of the world around him is embodied in the sea.</p>
+
+<p>It is amusing to see the precision with which the children's congress
+breaks up into its various sections. The most popular and important is
+that of the engineers. The little members come toddling down from the
+cliffs with a load of implements, shouldering rake <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>and spade, and
+dangling tiny buckets from their arms. One little group makes straight
+for its sand-hole of yesterday, and is soon busy with huge heaps and
+mounds which are to take the form of a castle. A crowing little urchin
+beside is already waving the Union Jack which is ready to crown the
+edifice, if the Fates ever suffer it to be crowned. Engineers of less
+military taste are busy near the water's edge with an elaborate system
+of reservoirs and canals, and greeting with shouts of triumph the
+admission of the water to miniature little harbours. A corps of
+absolutely unscientific labourers are simply engaged in digging the
+deepest hole they can, and the blue nets over their sunshades are alone
+visible above the edge of the excavation. It is delightful to watch the
+industry, the energy, the absolute seriousness and conviction of the
+engineers. Sentries warn you off from the limits of the fortress; you
+are politely asked to "please take care," as your clumsy foot strays
+along the delicate brink of the canal. Suggestions that have a
+mechanical turn about them, hints on the best way of reaching the water
+or the possibility of a steeper slope for the sand-walls, are listened
+to with attention and respect. You are rewarded by an invitation which
+allows you to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>witness the very moment when the dyke is broken and the
+sea admitted into basin and canal, or the yet more ecstatic moment when
+the Union Jack waves over the completed castle.</p>
+
+<p>Indolence and adventure charm the dabblers, as industry absorbs the
+engineers. The sands are of all earthly spots the most delightful; but a
+greater delight than any earthly spot can afford awaits the dabbler in
+the sea. It is mostly the girls who dabble; the gaiety and frolic suit
+them better than the serious industry of castles and canals. Deliverance
+from shoes and stockings, the first thrill of pleasure and surprise at
+the cool touch of the water, the wild rush along the brim, the dainty
+advance till the sea covers the little ankles, the tremulous waiting
+with an air of defiance as the wave deepens round till it touches the
+knee, the firm line with which the dabblers grasp hand in hand and face
+the advancing tide, the sudden panic, the break, the disorderly flight,
+the tears and laughter, the run after the wave as it retreats again, the
+fresh advance and defiance&mdash;this is the paradise of the dabbler. Hour
+after hour, with clothes tucked round their waist and a lavish display
+of stout little legs, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>urchins wage their mimic warfare with the
+sea. Meanwhile the scientific section is encamped upon the rocks. With
+torn vestments and bruised feet the votaries of knowledge are peeping
+into every little pool, detecting mussel-shells, picking up seaweed,
+hunting for anemones. A shout of triumph from the tiny adventurer who
+has climbed over the rough rock-shelf announces that he has secured a
+prize for the glass jar at home, where the lumps of formless jelly burst
+into rosy flowers with delicate tendrils waving gently round them for
+food. A cry of woe tells of some infantile Whymper who has lost his hold
+on an Alpine rock-edge some six inches high. Knowledge has its
+difficulties as well as its dangers, and the difficulty of forming a
+rock-section in the face of the stern opposition of mothers and nurses
+is undoubtedly great. Still, formed it is, and science furnishes a
+goodly company of votaries and martyrs to the congress by the sea.</p>
+
+<p>But of course the naval section bears away the palm. It is for the most
+part composed of the elder boys and of a few girls who would be boys if
+they could. Its members all possess a hopeless passion for the sea, and
+besiege their mothers for promises that their future life <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>shall be that
+of middies. They wear straw hats and loose blue shirts, and affect as
+much of the sailor in their costume as they can. Each has a boat, or as
+they call it a "vessel," and the build and rig of these vessels is a
+subject of constant discussion and rivalry in the section. Much critical
+inquiry is directed to the propriety of Arthur's jib, or the necessity
+of "ballasting" or pouring a little molten lead into Edward's keel. The
+launch of a new vessel is the event of the week. The coast-guardsman is
+brought in to settle knotty questions of naval architecture and
+equipment, and the little seamen listen to his verdicts, his yarns, the
+records of his voyages, with a wondering reverence. They ask knowingly
+about the wind and the prospects of the weather; they submit to his
+higher knowledge their theories as to the nature and destination of each
+vessel that passes; they come home with a store of naval phrases which
+are poured recklessly out over the tea-table. The pier is a favourite
+haunt of the naval section. They delight in sitting on rough coils of
+old rope. Nothing that is of the sea comes amiss to them. "I like the
+smell of tar," shouts a little enthusiast. They tell tales among
+themselves of the life of a middie and the fun of the "fo-castle," and
+watch the waves <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>leaping up over the pier-head with a wild longing to
+sing 'Rule Britannia.' Every ship in the offing is a living thing to
+them, and the appearance of a man-of-war sends them sleepless to bed.</p>
+
+<p>There is but one general meeting of the children's congress, and that is
+in front of the bathing-machines. Rows of little faces wait for their
+turn, watching the dash of the waves beneath the wheels, peeping at the
+black-robed figures who are bobbing up and down in the sea, half longing
+for their dip, half shrinking as the inevitable moment comes nearer and
+nearer, dashing forward joyously at last as the door opens and the
+bathing woman's "Now, my dear," summons them to the quaint little box.
+One lingers over the sight as one lingers over a bed of flowers. There
+is all the fragrance, the colour, the sweet caprice, the wilfulness, the
+delight of childhood in the tiny figures that meet us on the return from
+their bath, with dancing eyes and flushed cheeks and hair streaming over
+their shoulders. What a hero the group finds in the urchin who never
+cries! With what envy they regard the big sister who never wants to come
+out of the water! It is pleasant <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>to listen to their prattle as they
+stroll over the sands with a fresh life running through every vein, to
+hear their confession of fright at the first dip, their dislike of
+putting their head under water, their chaff of the delicate little
+sister who "will only bathe with mamma." Mammas are always good-humoured
+by the sea; papas come out of their eternal newspaper and toss the wee
+brats on their shoulders, uncles drop down on the merry little group
+with fresh presents every day. The restraint, the distance of home
+vanishes with the practical abolition of the nursery and the schoolroom.
+Home, schoolroom, nursery, all are crammed together in the little
+cockleshell of a boat where the little ones are packed round father and
+mother and tossing gaily over the waves. What endless fun in the rising
+and falling, the creaking of the sail, the gruff voice of the boatman,
+the sight of the distant cliffs, the flock of sea-gulls nestling in the
+wave-hollows! The little ones trail their hands in the cool water and
+fancy they see mermaids in the cool green depths. The big boy watches
+the boatman and studies navigation. The little brother dips a hook now
+and then in a fond hope of whiting. The tide has come in ere they
+return, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>the little voyagers are lifted out, tired and sleepy, in
+the boatman's arms, to dream that night of endless sailings over endless
+seas.</p>
+
+<p>It is a terrible morning that brings the children news of their recall
+to the smoke and din of town. They wander for a last visit down to the
+beach, listen for the last time to the young bandit in his Spanish
+sombrero who charms the nursery-maids with lays of love, club their
+pence for a last interview with the itinerant photographer. It is all
+over; the sands are thinner now, group after group is breaking up,
+autumn is dying into winter, and rougher winds are blowing over the sea.
+But the sea is never too rough for the little ones. With hair blown
+wildly about their faces they linger disconsolately along the brink,
+count the boats they shall never see again, make pilgrimages to the rock
+caves to tell its separate story of enjoyment in each of them, and fling
+themselves with a last kiss on the dear, dear sands! Then they shoulder
+their spade and rake, and with one fond look at the cliffs turn their
+backs on the sea. But the sea is with them still, even when the crowded
+train has whirled them far from waves that the white gull skims over.
+They have <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>their tales of it to tell to their governess, their memories
+of it to count over before they fall asleep, their dreams of it as they
+lie asleep, their hopes of seeing it again when weary winter and spring
+and summer have at last slipped away. They listen to stories of wrecks,
+and find a halfpenny for the sham sailor who trolls his ballads in the
+street. Now and then they look lovingly at the ships and the
+sand-buckets piled away in the play-cupboard. So with one abiding
+thought at their little hearts the long days glide away till autumn
+finds them again children by the sea.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr style="width: 45%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>THE FLORENCE OF DANTE.</h2>
+<br /><a name="THE_FLORENCE_OF_DANTE" id="THE_FLORENCE_OF_DANTE"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>THE FLORENCE OF DANTE.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The one story in the history of the modern world which rivals in
+concentrated interest the story of Athens is the story of Florence in
+the years just before and after the opening of the fourteenth
+century&mdash;the few years, that is, of its highest glory in freedom, in
+letters, in art. Never since the days of Pericles had such a varied
+outburst of human energy been summed up in so short a space.
+Architecture reared the noble monuments of the Duomo and Santa Croce.
+Cimabue revolutionized painting, and then "the cry was Giotto's."
+Italian poetry, preluded by the canzonets of Guido Cavalcanti and his
+rivals, rose to its fullest grandeur in the 'Commedia' of Dante. Italian
+prose was born in the works of Malaspina and Dino. Within, the
+Florentines worked out patiently and bravely amidst a thousand obstacles
+the problem of free and popular government. Without, they covered sea
+and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>land with their commerce; their agents supplied the Papal treasury,
+while private firms were already beginning that career of vast foreign
+loans which at a later time enabled the victor of Cr&eacute;cy to equip his
+armies with Florentine gold.</p>
+
+<p>We can only realize the attitude of Florence at this moment by its
+contrast with the rest of Europe. It was a time when Germany was sinking
+down into feudal chaos under the earlier Hapsburgs. The system of
+despotic centralization invented by St. Louis and perfected by Philippe
+le Bel was crushing freedom and vigour out of France. If Parliamentary
+life was opening in England, literature was dead, and a feudalism which
+had become embittered by the new forms of law which the legal spirit of
+the age gave it was pressing harder and harder on the peasantry. Even in
+Italy Florence stood alone. The South lay crushed beneath the oppression
+of its French conquerors. In the North the earlier communal freedom had
+already made way for the rule of tyrants when it was just springing into
+life in the city by the Arno. For it is noteworthy that of all the
+cities of Italy Florence is the most modern. Genoa and Pisa had been
+rivals in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>commercial activity a hundred years before the merchants of
+Florence were known out of Tuscany. Sicily had caught the gift of song
+from the Proven&ccedil;al troubadours half a century before the Florentine
+singers. Too insignificant to share in the great struggle of the Empire
+and the Papacy, among the last to be divided into Guelph and Ghibelline,
+Florence emerged into communal greatness when that of Milan or Bologna
+was already in decay.</p>
+
+<p>The City of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh
+vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became
+living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative
+poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and
+Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so
+grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni
+sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful
+struggle. His 'Chronicle' indeed has been roughly attacked of late by
+the sweeping scepticism of German critics, but the attack has proved an
+unsuccessful one. The strongest evidence of its genuineness indeed lies
+in the impression of a distinct <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>personality which is left on us by a
+simple perusal of the 'Chronicle' itself. Some of its charm no doubt
+rises from the na&iuml;ve simplicity of Dino's story-telling. With him and
+with his contemporaries, Malaspina, Dante, and Villani, Italian prose
+begins; and we can hardly fancy a better training in style for any young
+Italian than to be brought face to face in Dino with the nervous
+picturesque accents that marked the birth of his mother-tongue. But the
+charm is more one of character than one of style. Throughout we feel the
+man, a man whose temper is so strongly and clearly marked in its
+contrast with so reflective a temper as Villani's that the German theory
+which makes his chronicle a mere cento from the later work hardly needs
+discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the dramatic force, the
+tenderness of Froissart, but it is a nobler and more human tenderness; a
+pity not for the knight only, but for knight and burgher as well. The
+sham tinsel of chivalry which flutters over the pages of the gay Canon
+of Li&egrave;ge is exchanged in Dino for a manly patriotism, a love of civic
+freedom, of justice, of religion. In his quiet way he is a great artist.
+There is an Herodotean picturesqueness as well as an Herodotean
+simplicity in such a picture as that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>of Dante's first battle-field, the
+Florentine victory of Campaldino:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"On the appointed day the men of Florence advanced their
+standards to go into the enemies' land, and passed by
+Casentino along an ill road where, had the enemy found them,
+they had received no little damage; but such was not the will
+of God. And they came near to Bibbiena, at a place called
+Campaldino where was the enemy, and there they halted in array
+of battle. The captains of war sent the light-armed foot to
+the front; and each man's shield, with a red lily on a white
+ground, was stretched out well before him. Then the Bishop,
+who was short-sighted, asked, 'Those there: what walls be
+they?' They answered him, 'The shields of the enemy.' Messer
+Barone de' Mangiadori da San Miniato, a chevalier frank and
+well skilled in deeds of arms, gathered his men-at-arms
+together and said to them, 'My masters, in Tuscan wars men
+were wont to conquer by making a stout onset, and that lasted
+but a while, and few men died, for it was not in use to kill.
+Now is the fashion changed, and men conquer by holding their
+ground stoutly, wherefore I counsel you that ye stand firm and
+let them assault you.' And <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>so they settled to do. The men of
+Arezzo made their onset with such vigour and so great force
+that the body of the Florentines fell back not a little. The
+fight was hard and keen. Messer Corso Donati with a brigade of
+the men of Pistoja charged the enemy in flank; the quarrels
+from the crossbows poured down like rain; the men of Arezzo
+had few of them, and were withal charged in flank where they
+were exposed; the air was covered with clouds, and there was a
+very great dust. Then the footmen of Arezzo set themselves to
+creep under the bellies of the horses, knife in hand, and
+disembowelled them, and some of them penetrated so far that in
+the very midst of the battalion were many dead of either part.
+Many that were counted of great prowess were shown vile that
+day, and many of whom none spoke word won honour.... The men
+of Arezzo were broken, not by cowardice or little prowess, but
+by the greater number of their enemies were they put to the
+rout and slain. The soldiers of Florence that were used to
+fighting slew them; the villeins had no pity."</p></div>
+
+<p>"Pity" is almost the characteristic word of Dino Compagni&mdash;pity alike
+for foe or friend; for the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>warriors of Arezzo or the starved-out
+patriots of Pistoja as well as for the heroes of his own Florence; pity
+for the victims of her feuds, and even for the men who drove them into
+exile; pity, most of all, for Florence herself. We read his story indeed
+at first with a strange sense of disappointment and surprise. To the
+modern reader the story of Florence in the years which Dino covers is
+above all the story of Dante. As the 'Chronicle' jots patiently down the
+hopes and fears, the failures and successes of the wiser citizens in
+that struggle for order and good government which brought Dante to his
+long exile, we feel ourselves standing in the very midst of events out
+of which grew the threefold Poem of the After-World and face to face
+with the men who front us in the 'Inferno' and 'Paradise.' But this is
+not the world Dino stands in. Of what seem to us the greater elements of
+the life around him he sees and tells us nothing. Of art or letters his
+'Chronicle' says never a word. The name of Dante is mentioned but once
+and then without a syllable of comment. It is not in Dante that Dino
+interests himself: his one interest, his one passion is Florence.</p>
+
+<p>And yet as we read page after page a new interest in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>the story grows on
+us, the interest that Dino himself felt in the tragedy around him. Our
+sympathies go with that earnest group of men to which he belonged, men
+who struggled honestly to reconcile freedom and order in a State torn
+with antipathies of the past, with jealousies and ambitions and feuds of
+the present. The terrible sadness of the 'Divina Commedia' becomes more
+intelligible as we follow step by step the ruin of those hopes for his
+country which Dante entertained as well as Dino. And beyond this
+interest there is the social picture of the Florence of the fourteenth
+century itself, its strange medley of past and present, the old world of
+feudalism jostling with the new world of commerce, the trader elbowing
+the noble and the artisan the trader, an enthusiastic mystical devotion
+jealous of the new classicalism or the scepticism of men like Guido
+Cavalcanti, the petty rivalries of great houses alternating with large
+schemes of public policy, the tenderest poetry with brutal outrage and
+lust, the art of Giotto with the slow, patient bloodthirst of the
+vendetta.</p>
+
+<p>What was the cause&mdash;the question presses on us through every page of
+Dino or of Dante&mdash;what was the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>cause of that ruin which waited in
+Florence as in every Italian city on so short a burst of freedom? What
+was it that foiled alike the counsel of statesmen and the passionate
+love of liberty in the people at large? What was it which drove Dante
+into exile and stung the simple-hearted Dino into a burst of eloquent
+despair? The answer&mdash;if we set aside the silly talk about "democracy"
+and look simply at the facts themselves&mdash;is a very simple one. The ruin
+of Florentine liberty, like the ruin of liberty elsewhere throughout
+Italy, lay wholly with its <i>noblesse</i>. It was equally perilous for an
+Italian town to leave its nobles without the walls or to force them to
+reside within. In their own robber-holds or their own country estates
+they were a scourge to the trader whose wains rolled temptingly past
+their walls. Florence, like its fellow Italian States, was driven to the
+demolition of the feudal castles, and to enforcing the residence of
+their lords within its own civic bounds. But the danger was only brought
+nearer home. Excluded by civic jealousy, wise or unwise, from all share
+in municipal government, their huge palazzi rose like fortresses in
+every quarter of the city. Within them lay the noble, a wild beast all
+the fiercer for his confinement in so narrow a den, with the old tastes,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>hatreds, preferences utterly unchanged, at feud as of old with his
+fellow-nobles, knit to them only by a common scorn of the burghers and
+the burgher life around them, stung to madness by his exclusion from all
+rule in the commonwealth, bitter, revengeful, with the wilfulness of a
+child, shameless, false, unprincipled.</p>
+
+<p>The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and
+Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its
+nobility. Buondelmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo
+Giantrufetti, passes beneath a palace of the Donati at whose window
+stands Madonna Aldruda with her two fair daughters. Seeing him pass by
+Aldruda calls aloud to him, pointing with her finger to the damsel by
+her side. "Whom have you taken to wife?" she says, "This is the wife I
+kept for you." The damsel pleased the youth, but his troth bound him,
+and he answered, "I can wed none other, now at any rate!" "Yes," cried
+Aldruda, "for I will pay the penalty for thee." "Then will I have her,"
+said Buondelmonte. "Cosa fatta capo ha," was the famous comment of the
+outraged house&mdash;"stone dead has no fellow"&mdash;and as Dino puts it, in the
+most ordinary way in the world, "they <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>settled to kill him the day he
+was to have married the damsel, and so they did." "Kill, kill," echoes
+everywhere through the story of these Florentine nobles. Assassination
+is an event of every day. Corso Donati sends murderers to kill an enemy
+among the Cerchi. Guido Cavalcanti strives to stab Corso in the back as
+he passes him. Where the dagger fails, they try poison without scruple.
+The best of them decline a share in a murder much as an Irish peasant
+may decline a share in an agrarian outrage, with a certain delicacy and
+readiness to stand by and see it done. When the assassination of the
+Bishop of Arezzo was decided on, Guglielmo da Pazzi, who was in the
+counsel, protested "he would have been content had it been done without
+his knowledge, but were the question put to him he might not be guilty
+of his blood."</p>
+
+<p>Among such men even Corso Donati towers into a certain grandeur:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Knight he was of great valour and renown, gentle of blood and
+manners, of a most fair body even to old age, comely in
+figure, with delicate features, and a white skin; a pleasing,
+prudent, and eloquent speaker; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>one who ever aimed at great
+ends; friend and comrade of great lords and nobles; a man too
+of many friends and great fame throughout all Italy. Foe he
+was of the people and its leaders; the darling of soldiers,
+full of evil devices, evil-hearted, cunning."</p></div>
+
+<p>Such was the man who drove Dante into exile:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Who for his pride was called 'Il Barone,' so that when he
+passed through the land many cried 'Viva Il Barone!' and the
+land seemed all his own."</p></div>
+
+<p>He stood not merely at the head of the Florentine nobility, but at the
+head of the great Guelph organization which extended from city to city
+throughout Tuscany&mdash;a league with its own leaders, its own policy, its
+own treasure. In the attempt to seize this treasure for the general
+service of the State the most popular of Florentine leaders, Giano della
+Bella, had been foiled and driven into exile. An honest attempt to
+secure the peace of the city by the banishment of Corso and his friends
+brought about the exile of Dante. It is plain that powerless as they
+were before the united forces of the whole people the nobles were strong
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>enough by simply biding their time and availing themselves of popular
+divisions to crush one opponent after another. And yet the struggle
+against them was one of life and death for the city. No atom of the new
+civilization, the new spirit of freedom or humanity, seems to have
+penetrated among them. Behind the gloomy walls of their city fortresses
+they remained the mere murderous tyrants of a brutal feudalism. "I
+counsel, lords, that we free ourselves from this slavery," cried Berto
+Frescobaldi to his brother nobles in the church of San Jacopo; "let us
+arm ourselves and run on to the Piazza, and there kill friend and foe
+alike as many as we find, so that neither we nor our children be ever
+subject to them more." Those who, like Sismondi, censure the sternness
+of the laws which pressed upon the nobles forget what wild beasts they
+were intended to hold down. Their outbreaks were the blind outbreaks of
+mere ruffians. The victory of Corso over Dante and the wiser citizens
+was followed by a carnival of bloodshed, firing of houses, pillage and
+lawlessness which wrings from Dino curses as bitter as those of the
+'Inferno.'</p>
+
+<p>From the hopeless task of curbing the various <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>elements of disorder by
+the single force of each isolated city the wiser and more patriotic
+among the men of that day turned in despair to the Empire. Guelph and
+Ghibelline, Papalist and Imperialist, were words which as Dante saw had
+now lost their old meaning. In the twelfth century the Emperor was at
+once the foe of religion and the one obstacle to the rising freedom of
+the towns. In the fourteenth that freedom had either perished by its own
+excesses, or, as at Florence, was strong enough to defy even an Imperial
+assailant. Religion found its bitterest enemy in such a Pope as Boniface
+VIII., or the church over which he ruled. Whatever might have been its
+fortune under happier circumstances, the great experiment of democratic
+self-government, of free and independent city-states, had failed,
+whether from the wars of city with city, or from the civil feuds that
+rent each in sunder. The papacy could furnish no centre of union; its
+old sanctity was gone, its greed and worldliness weakened it every day.
+On the other hand, the remembrance of the tyranny of Barbarossa, of the
+terrible struggle by which the peace of Constance had been won, had
+grown faint and dim in the course of years. It was long since Italy had
+seen an Emperor at all.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>But the old Ghibellinism had recovered new vigour from an unlooked-for
+quarter. As the revival of the Roman law had given an artificial
+prestige to the Empire in the twelfth century, so the revival of
+classical literature threw a new halo around it in the fourteenth. To
+Dante, penetrated with the greater Latin authors, Henry of Luxemburg is
+no stranger from over the Alps, but the descendant of the Augustus whom
+his own Vergil had loved and sung. The same classical feeling tells on
+Dino. With him Florence is "the daughter of Rome." The pages of Sallust
+and of Livy have stirred him to undertake her annals. "The remembrance
+of ancient histories has long spurred my mind to write the events, full
+of danger yet reaching to no prosperous end, that this noble city,
+daughter of Rome, has encountered." It was the same sense that united
+with his own practical appreciation of the necessities of the time in
+his impatient longing for the intervention of the new Emperor. As Prior,
+Dino had acted the part of a brave and honest man, striving to
+conciliate party with party, refusing to break the law, chased at last
+with the rest of the magistracy from the Palace of the Signory by the
+violence of Corso Donati and the nobles. If he did not share Dante's
+exile, he had at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>any rate acted with Dante in the course of policy
+which brought that penalty on him. Both were Priors together in 1300;
+both have the same passionate love of Florence, the same haughty disdain
+of the factions that tore it to pieces. If the appeal of Dino to his
+fellows in Santa Trinit&agrave; is less thrilling than the verse of Dante, it
+has its own pathetic force:&mdash;"My masters, why will ye confound and undo
+so good a city? Against whom do ye will to fight? Against your brethren?
+What victory will ye gain?&mdash;none other than weeping!" The words fell on
+deaf ears, and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, and exile forced
+Dino to look to the stranger. There is something strangely touching in
+the dry, passionless way in which he tracks Henry of Luxemburg from city
+to city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here and there
+in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the Emperor finds. The weary
+waiting came to nothing. Dino leaves us still looking for Henry's
+coming; Dante tells us of the death that dashed all hope to the ground.
+Even in the hour of his despair the poet could console himself by
+setting his "divino Arrigo" in the regions of the blest. What comfort
+the humble chronicler found whose work we have been studying none can
+know.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>BUTTERCUPS.</h2>
+<br /><a name="BUTTERCUPS" id="BUTTERCUPS"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>BUTTERCUPS.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>It is not the least debt we owe to the holidays that they give us our
+buttercups back again. Few faces have stirred us with a keener touch of
+pity through the whole of the season than the face of the pale, awkward
+girl who slips by us now and then on the stairs, a face mutinous in
+revolt against its imprisonment in brick and mortar, dull with the
+boredom of the schoolroom, weary of the formal walk, the monotonous
+drive, the inevitable practice on that hated piano, the perpetual round
+of lessons from the odd creatures who leave their odder umbrellas in the
+hall. It is amazingly pleasant to meet the same little face on the lawn,
+and to see it blooming with new life at the touch of freedom and fresh
+air. It blooms with a sense of individuality, a sense of power. In the
+town the buttercup was nobody, silent, unnoticed, lost in the bustle and
+splendour of elder sisterdom. Here among the fields and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>hedges she
+is queen. Her very laugh, the reckless shout that calls for mamma's
+frown and dooms the governess to a headache, rings out like a claim of
+possession. Here in her own realm she rushes at once to the front, and
+if we find ourselves enjoying a scamper over the common or a run down
+the hill-side, it is the buttercup that leads the way.</p>
+
+<p>All the silent defiance of her town bondage vanishes in the chatty
+familiarities of home. She has a story about the elm and the pond, she
+knows where Harry landed the trout last year, she is intimate with the
+keeper, and hints to us his mysterious hopes about the pheasants. She is
+great in short cuts through the woods, and has made herself wondrous
+lurking-places which she betrays under solemn promises of secrecy. She
+is a friend of every dog about the place, and if the pony lies nearest
+to her heart her lesser affections range over a world of favourites. It
+is hard to remember the pale, silent, schoolgirl of town in the vivid,
+chatty little buttercup who hurries one from the parrot to the pigeon,
+from the stables to the farm, and who knows and describes the merits of
+every hound in the kennels.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>It is natural enough, that the dethroned beauties who meet us at
+luncheon should wonder at our enthusiasm for nymphs of bread-and-butter,
+and ask with a certain severity of scorn the secret of our happy
+mornings. The secret is simply that the buttercup is at home, and that
+with the close of her bondage comes a grace and a naturalness that take
+her out of the realms of bread-and-butter. However difficult it may be
+for her maturer rivals to abdicate, it is the buttercup in fact who
+gives the tone to the holidays. There is a subtle contagion about
+pleasure, and it is from her that we catch the sense of largeness and
+liberty and physical enjoyment that gives a new zest to life. She laughs
+at our moans about sunshine as she laughs at our moans about mud, till
+we are as indifferent to mud and sunshine as she is herself. The whole
+atmosphere of our life is in fact changed, and it is amusing to
+recognize how much of the change we owe to the buttercup.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible perhaps to be whirled in this fashion out of the
+whisperings and boredoms of town without longing to know a little more
+of the pretty magician who works this wonderful transformation scene.
+But it is no easy matter to know much of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>buttercup. Her whole charm
+lies in her freedom from self-consciousness; she has a reserved force of
+shyness behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of
+shyness. Her character in fact is one of which it is easier to feel the
+beauty than to analyse or describe it. Like all transitional phases,
+girlhood is full of picturesque inequalities, strange slumbers of one
+faculty and stranger developements of another; full of startling
+effects, of contrasts and surprises, of light and shade, that no other
+phase of life affords. Unconsciously month after month drifts the
+buttercup on to womanhood; consciously she lives in the past of the
+child. She comes to us trailing clouds of glory&mdash;as Wordsworth
+sings&mdash;from her earlier existence, from her home, her schoolroom, her
+catechism. The girl of twenty summers whose faith has been wrecked by
+clerical croquet looks with amazement on the implicit faith which the
+buttercup retains in the clergy. Even on the curate, shy and awkward as
+he is, she looks as on a being sacred and ineffable. Perhaps his very
+shyness and awkwardness creates a sympathy between the two, and rouses a
+keener remorse for her yawns under his sermons and a keener gratitude
+for the heavenly generosity with which he bestowed on her the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>confirmation ticket. Free as she is from fancies, her conception of the
+daily life of her clergyman shows amusingly enough that she can attain a
+very fair pitch of idealism. We remember the story of a certain parson
+of our acquaintance who owned to a meek little buttercup his habit of
+carrying a book in his pocket for reading in leisure hours. "Ah, yes,"
+replied the eager little auditor, with a hush of real awe in her
+voice&mdash;"the Bible, of course! Unluckily," it was the <i>Physiologie du
+Go&ucirc;t</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Still more does the sister of a couple of seasons wonder at the ardour
+and fidelity of buttercup friendships. In after-life men have friends
+and women have lovers. The home and the husband and the child absorb the
+whole tenderness of a woman where they only temper and moderate the old
+external affections of her spouse. But then girl-friendship is a much
+more vivid and far more universal thing than friendship among boys. The
+one means, in nine cases out of ten, an accident of neighbourhood in
+school that fades with the next remove, or a partnership in some
+venture, or a common attachment to some particular game. But the school
+friendship of a girl is a passionate idolatry and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>devotion of friend
+for friend. Their desks are full of little gifts to each other. They
+have pet names that no strange ear may know, and hidden photographs that
+no strange eye may see. They share all the innocent secrets of their
+hearts, they are fondly interested in one another's brothers, they plan
+subtle devices to wear the same ribbons and to dress their hair in the
+same fashion. No amount of affection ever made a boy like the business
+of writing his friend a letter in the holidays, but half the charm of
+holidays to a girl lies in the letters she gets and the letters she
+sends. Nothing save friendship itself is more sacred to girlhood than a
+friend's letter; nothing more exquisite than the pleasure of stealing
+from the breakfast-table to kiss it and read it, and then tie it up with
+the rest that lie in the nook that nobody knows but the one pet brother.
+The pet brother is as necessary an element in buttercup life as the
+friend. He is generally the dullest, the most awkward, the most silent
+of the family group. He takes all this sisterly devotion as a matter of
+course, and half resents it as a matter of boredom. He is fond of
+informing his adorer that he hates girls, that they are always kissing
+and crying, and that they can't play cricket. The buttercup rushes away
+to pour out her woes to her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>little nest in the woods, and hurries back
+to worship as before. Girlhood indeed is the one stage of feminine
+existence in which woman has brothers. Her first season out digs a gulf
+between their sister and "the boys" of the family that nothing can fill
+up. Henceforth the latter are useful to get tickets for her, to carry
+her shawls, to drive her to Goodwood or to Lord's. In the mere fetching
+and carrying business they sink into the general ruck of cousins,
+grumbling only a little more than cousins usually do at the luck that
+dooms them to hew wood and draw water for the belle of the season. But
+in the pure equality of earlier days the buttercup shares half the games
+and all the secrets of the boys about her, and brotherhood and
+sisterhood are very real things indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Unluckily the holidays pass away, and the buttercup passes away like the
+holidays. There is a strange humour about the subtle gradations by which
+girlhood passes out of all this free, genial, irreflective life into the
+self-consciousness, the reserve, the artificiality of womanhood. It is
+the sudden discovery of a new sense of enjoyment that first whirls the
+buttercup out of her purely family affections. She laughs at the worship
+of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>her new adorer. She is as far as Dian herself from any return of it;
+but the sense of power is awakened, and she has a sort of Puckish pride
+in bringing her suitor to her feet. Nobody is so exacting, so
+capricious, so uncertain, so fascinating as a buttercup, because no one
+is so perfectly free from love. The first touch of passion renders her
+more exacting and more charming than ever. She resents the suspicion of
+a tenderness whose very novelty scares her, and she visits her
+resentment on her worshipper. If he enjoys a kind farewell overnight, he
+atones for it by the coldest greeting in the morning. There are days
+when the buttercup runs amuck among her adorers, days of snubbing and
+sarcasm and bitterness. The poor little bird beats savagely against the
+wires that are closing her round. And then there are days of pure
+abandon and coquetry and fun. The buttercup flirts, but she flirts in
+such an open and ingenuous fashion that nobody is a bit the worse for
+it. She tells you the fun she had overnight with that charming young
+fellow from Oxford, and you know that to-morrow she will be telling that
+hated Guardsman what fun she has had with you. She is a little dazzled
+with the wealth and profusion of the new life that is bursting on her,
+and she wings her way from one <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>charming flower to another with little
+thought of more than a sip from each. Then there is a return of pure
+girlhood, days in which the buttercup is simply the buttercup again.
+Flirtations are forgotten, conquests are abandoned, brothers are
+worshipped with the old worship; and we start back, and rub our eyes,
+and wonder whether life is all a delusion, and whether this pure
+creature of home and bread-and-butter is the volatile, provoking little
+puss who gave our hand such a significant squeeze yesterday.</p>
+
+<p>But it is just this utterly illogical, unreasonable, inconsequential
+character that gives the pursuit of the buttercup its charm. There is a
+pleasure in this irregular warfare, with its razzias and dashes and
+repulses and successes and skirmishes and flights, which we cannot get
+out of the regular operations of the sap and the mine. We sympathize
+with the ingenious gentleman who declined to study astronomy on the
+ground of his dislike to the sun for the monotonous regularity of its
+daily rising and setting. There is something delightfully cometary about
+the affection of the buttercup. Any experienced strategist in the art of
+getting married will tell us the exact time within <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>which her elder
+sister may be reduced, and sketch for us a plan of the campaign. But the
+buttercup lies outside of the rules of war. She gives one the pleasure
+of adoration in its purest and most ideal form, and she adds to this the
+pleasure of <i>rouge et noir</i>. One feels in the presence of a buttercup
+the possibility of combining enjoyments which are in no other sphere
+compatible with each other&mdash;the delight, say, of a musing over 'In
+Memoriam' with the fiercer joys of the gaming-table. And meanwhile the
+buttercup drifts on, recking little of us and of our thoughts, into a
+world mysterious and unknown to her. Tones of deeper colour flush the
+pure white light of her dawn, and announce the fuller day of womanhood.
+And with the death of the dawn the buttercup passes insensibly away. The
+next season steals her from us; it is only the holidays that give her to
+us, and dispel half our conventionality, our shams, our conceit with the
+laugh of the buttercup.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>ABBOT AND TOWN.</h2>
+<br /><a name="ABBOT_AND_TOWN" id="ABBOT_AND_TOWN"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>ABBOT AND TOWN.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The genius of a great writer of our own days has made Abbot Sampson of
+St. Edmunds the most familiar of medi&aelig;val names to the bulk of
+Englishmen. By a rare accident the figure of the silent, industrious
+Norfolk monk who at the close of Henry the Second's reign suddenly found
+himself ruler of the wealthiest, if not the greatest, of English abbeys
+starts out distinct from the dim canvas of the annals of his house.
+Annals indeed in any strict sense St. Edmunds has none; no national
+chronicle was ever penned in its <i>scriptorium</i> such as that which flings
+lustre round its rival, St. Albans; nor is even a record of its purely
+monastic life preserved such as that which gives a local and
+ecclesiastical interest to its rival of Glastonbury. One book alone the
+abbey has given us, but that one book is worth a thousand chronicles. In
+the wandering, gossipy pages of Jocelyn of Brakeland the life of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>twelfth century, so far as it could penetrate abbey walls, still glows
+distinct for us round the figure of the shrewd, practical, kindly,
+imperious abbot who looks out, a little travestied perhaps, from the
+pages of Mr. Carlyle.</p>
+
+<p>It is however to an incident in this abbot's life, somewhat later than
+most of the events told so vividly in 'Past and Present,' that I wish to
+direct my readers' attention. A good many eventful years had passed by
+since Sampson stood abbot-elect in the court of King Henry; it was from
+the German prison where Richard was lying captive that the old abbot was
+returning, sad at heart, to his stately house. His way lay through the
+little town that sloped quietly down to the abbey walls, along the
+narrow little street that led to the stately gate-tower, now grey with
+the waste of ages, but then fresh and white from the builder's hand. It
+may have been in the shadow of that gateway that a group of townsmen
+stood gathered to greet the return of their lord, but with other
+business on hand besides kindly greeting. There was a rustling of
+parchment as the alderman unfolded the town-charters, recited the brief
+grants of Abbots Anselm <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>and Ording and Hugh, and begged from the Lord
+Abbot a new confirmation of the liberties of the town.</p>
+
+<p>As Sampson paused a moment&mdash;he was a prudent, deliberate man in all his
+ways&mdash;he must have read in the faces of all the monks who gathered round
+him, in the murmured growl that monastic obedience just kept within
+bounds, very emphatic counsel of refusal. On the other hand there was
+the alderman pleading for the old privileges of the town&mdash;for security
+of justice in its own town-mote, for freedom of sale in its market, for
+just provisions to enforce the recovery of debts&mdash;the simple, efficient
+liberty that stood written in the parchment with the heavy seals&mdash;the
+seals of Anselm and Ording and Hugh. "Only the same words as your
+predecessor used, Lord Abbot, simply the same words"&mdash;and then came the
+silvery jingle of the sixty marks that the townsmen offered for their
+lord's assent. A moment more and the assent was won, "given pleasantly
+too," the monks commented bitterly, as "murmuring and grunting," to use
+their own emphatic phrase, they led Sampson to the chapter-house. But
+murmurings and gruntings broke idly against the old abbot's imperious
+will. "Let the brethren murmur," <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>he flashed out when one of his friends
+told him there was discontent in the cloister at his dealings with the
+townsmen; "let them blame me, and say among themselves what they will. I
+am their father and abbot. So long as I live I will not give mine honour
+to another."</p>
+
+<p>The words were impatient, wilful enough; but it was the impatience of a
+man who frets at the blindness of others to what is clear and evident to
+his own finer sense. The shrewd, experienced eye of the old Churchman
+read with a perfect sagacity the signs of the times. He had just stood
+face to face in his German prison with one who, mere reckless soldier as
+he seemed, had read them as clearly, as sagaciously as himself. When
+History drops her drums and trumpets and learns to tell the story of
+Englishmen, it will find the significance of Richard, not in his crusade
+or in his weary wars along the Norman border, but in his lavish
+recognition of municipal life. When, busy with the preparations for his
+Eastern journey, the King sold charter after charter to the burgesses of
+his towns, it seemed a mere outburst of royal greed, a mere carrying out
+of his own bitter scoff that he would have sold <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>London itself could he
+have found a purchaser. But the hard cynical words of the Angevins were
+veils which they flung over political conceptions too large for the
+comprehension of their day. Richard was in fact only following out the
+policy which had been timidly pursued by his father, which was to find
+its fullest realization under John.</p>
+
+<p>The silent growth and elevation of the English people was the real work
+of their reigns, and in this work the boroughs led the way. Unnoticed
+and despised, even by the historian of to-day, they had alone preserved
+the full tradition of Teutonic liberty. The right of self-government,
+the right of free speech in free parliament, the right of equal justice
+by one's peers,&mdash;it was these that the towns had brought safely across
+the ages of Norman rule, these that by the mouth of traders and
+shop-keepers asked recognition from the Angevin kings. No liberty was
+claimed in the Great Charter for the realm at large which had not in
+borough after borough been claimed and won beforehand by plain burgesses
+whom the "mailed barons" who wrested it from their king would have
+despised. That out of the heap of borough-charters <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>which he flung back
+to these townsmen that Charter was to be born, Richard could not know;
+but that a statesman so keen and far-sighted as he really was could have
+been driven by mere greed of gold, or have been utterly blind to the
+real nature of the forces to which he gave legal recognition, is
+impossible. We have no such pithy hints of what was passing in his mind
+as we shall find Abbot Sampson dropping in the course of our story. But
+Richard can hardly have failed to note what these hints proved his
+mitred counsellor to have noted well&mdash;the silent revolution which was
+passing over the land, and which in a century and a half had raised
+serfs like those of St. Edmunds into freeholders of a town.</p>
+
+<p>It is only in such lowly records as those which we are about to give
+that we can follow the progress of that revolution. But simple as the
+tale is there is hardly better historic training for a man than to set
+him frankly in the streets of a quiet little town like Bury St. Edmunds,
+and bid him work out the history of the men who lived and died there. In
+the quiet, quaintly-named streets, in the town-mead and the
+market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the ruffed and
+furred brasses of its burghers in the church, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>lies the real life of
+England and Englishmen, the life of their home and their trade, their
+ceaseless, sober struggle with oppression, their steady, unwearied
+battle for self-government. It is just in the pettiness of its details,
+in its commonplace incidents, in the want of marked features and
+striking events, that the real lesson of the whole story lies. For two
+centuries this little town of Bury St. Edmunds was winning liberty for
+itself, and yet we hardly note as we pass from one little step to
+another little step how surely that liberty was being won. It is hard
+indeed merely to catch a glimpse of the steps. The monks were too busy
+with royal endowments and papal grants of mitre and ring, too full of
+their struggles with arrogant bishops and encroaching barons, to tell us
+how the line of tiny hovels crept higher and higher from the abbey gate
+up the westerly sunlit slope. It is only by glimpses that we catch sight
+of the first steps towards civic life, of market and market-toll, of
+flax-growing and women with distaffs at their door, of fullers at work
+along the abbey-stream, of gate-keepers for the rude walls, of
+town-meetings summoned in old Teutonic fashion by blast of horn.</p>
+
+<p>It is the Great Survey of the Conqueror that gives <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>us our first clear
+peep at the town. Much that had been plough-land in the time of the
+Confessor was covered with houses under the Norman rule. No doubt the
+great abbey-church of stone that Abbot Baldwin was raising amidst all
+the storm of the Conquest drew its craftsmen and masons to mingle with
+the ploughers and reapers of the broad domain. The troubles of the time
+too did their part here as elsewhere; the serf, the fugitive from
+justice or his lord, the trader, the Jew, would naturally seek shelter
+under the strong hand of St. Edmund. On the whole the great house looked
+kindly on a settlement which raised the value of its land and brought
+fresh pence to the cellarer. Not a settler that held his acre for a year
+and a day but paid his pence to the treasury and owned the abbot for his
+lord. Not a serf but was bound to plough a rood of the abbot's land, to
+reap in the abbot's harvest field, to fold his sheep in the abbey folds,
+to help bring the annual catch of eels from the abbey-waters. Within the
+four crosses that bounded the abbot's domain, land and water were his;
+the cattle of the townsmen paid for their pasture on the common; if the
+fullers refused the loan of their cloth, the cellarer would withhold the
+use of the stream, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>seize their looms wherever he found them.
+Landlord's rights passed easily as ever into landlord's wrongs. No toll,
+for instance, might be levied on a purchaser of produce from the abbey
+farms, and the house drove better bargains than its country rivals.
+First-purchase was a privilege even more vexatious, and we can catch the
+low growl of the customers as they waited with folded hands before shop
+and stall till the buyers of the Lord Abbot had had their pick of the
+market. But there was little chance of redress, for if they growled in
+the town-mote there were the abbot's officers before whom the meeting
+must be held; and if they growled to their alderman, he was the abbot's
+nominee and received the symbol of office, the mot-horn, the town-horn,
+at his hands.</p>
+
+<p>By what process these serfs of a rural hamlet had grown into the busy
+burgesses whom we saw rustling their parchments and chinking their
+silver marks in the ears of Abbot Sampson in Richard's time, it is hard
+to say. Like all the greater revolutions of society, this advance was a
+silent one. The more galling and oppressive instances of serfdom seem to
+have slipped unconsciously away. Some, like the eel-fishery, were
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>commuted for an easy rent; others, like the slavery of the fullers and
+the toll of flax, simply disappeared. No one could tell when the
+retainers of the abbey came to lose their exemption from local taxation
+and to pay the town penny to the alderman like the rest of the
+burgesses. "In some way, I don't know how,"&mdash;as Jocelyn grumbles about
+just such an unnoted change,&mdash;by usage, by omission, by downright
+forgetfulness, here by a little struggle, there by a little present to a
+needy abbot, the town won freedom. But progress was not always
+unconscious, and one incident in the history of Bury St. Edmunds,
+remarkable if only regarded as marking the advance of law, is yet more
+remarkable as indicating the part which a new moral sense of human right
+to equal justice was to play in the general advance of the realm.</p>
+
+<p>The borough, as we have seen, had preserved the old English right of
+meeting in full assembly of the townsmen for government and law. In the
+presence of the burgesses justice was administered in the old English
+fashion, and the accused acquitted or condemned by the oath of his
+neighbours, the "compurgators," out of whom our jury was to grow. Rough
+and inadequate <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>as such a process seems to us, it insured substantial
+justice; the meanest burgher had his trial by his peers as thoroughly as
+the belted earl. Without the borough bounds however the system of the
+Norman judicature prevailed. The rural tenants who did suit and service
+at the cellarer's court were subject to the "judicial duel" which the
+Conqueror had introduced. In the twelfth century however the strong
+tendency to national unity told heavily against judicial inequality, and
+the barbarous injustice of the foreign system became too apparent even
+for the baronage or the Church to uphold it. "Kebel's case," as a lawyer
+would term it, brought the matter to an issue at Bury St. Edmunds. In
+the opinion of his neighbours Kebel seems to have been guiltless of the
+robbery with which he had been charged; but he was "of the cellarer's
+fee," and subject to the feudal jurisdiction of his court. The duel went
+against him and he was hung just without the gates. The taunts of the
+townsmen woke the farmers to a sense of their wrong. "Had Kebel been a
+dweller within the borough," said the burgesses, "he would have got his
+acquittal from the oaths of his neighbours, as our liberty is." The
+scandal at last moved the convent itself to action. The monks were
+divided <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>in opinion, but the saner part determined that their tenants
+"should enjoy equal liberty" with the townsmen. The cellarer's court was
+abolished; the franchise of the town was extended to the rural
+possessions of the abbey; the farmers "came to the toll-house, and were
+written in the alderman's roll, and paid the town-penny."</p>
+
+<p>A moral revolution like this is notable at any time, but a change
+wrought avowedly "that all might enjoy equal liberty" is especially
+notable in the twelfth century. Cases like Kebel's were everywhere
+sounding the knell of feudal privilege and of national division, long
+before freedom fronted John by the sedges of Runnymede. Slowly and
+fitfully through the reign of his father the new England which had grown
+out of conquered and conquerors woke to self-consciousness. It was this
+awakening that Abbot Sampson saw and noted with his clear, shrewd eyes.
+To him, we can hardly doubt, the revolt of the town-wives, for instance,
+was more than a mere scream of angry women. The "rep-silver," the
+commutation for that old service of reaping in the abbot's fields, had
+ceased to be exacted from the richer burgesses. At last the poorer sort
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>refused to pay. Then the cellarer's men came seizing gate and stool by
+way of distress till the women turning out, distaff in hand, put them
+ignominiously to flight. Sampson had his own thoughts about the matter,
+saw perhaps that the days of inequality were over, that in the England
+that was coming there would be one law for rich and poor. At any rate he
+quietly compromised the question for twenty shillings a year.</p>
+
+<p>The convent was indignant. "Abbot Ording, who lies there," muttered an
+angry monk, as he pointed to the tomb in the choir, "would not have done
+this for five hundred marks of silver." That their abbot should
+capitulate to a mob of infuriated town-wives was too much for the
+patience of the brotherhood. All at once they opened their eyes to the
+facts which had been going on unobserved for so many long years. There
+was their own town growing, burgesses encroaching on the market space,
+settlers squatting on their own acre with no leave asked, aldermen who
+were once only the abbey servants taking on themselves to give
+permission for this and that, tradesmen thriving and markets increasing,
+and the abbey never one penny the richer <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>for it all. It was quite time
+that Abbot Sampson should be roused to do his duty, and to do it in very
+sharp fashion indeed. However we will let one of the monks tell his own
+tale in his own gossiping way:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"In the tenth year of Abbot Sampson's abbacy we monks, after full
+deliberation in chapter, laid our formal plaint before the abbot in his
+court. We said that the rents and revenues of all the good towns and
+boroughs in England were steadily growing and increasing to the
+enrichment of their lords, in every case save in that of our town of St.
+Edmund. The customary rent of &pound;40 which it pays never rises higher. That
+this is so we imputed solely to the conduct of the townspeople, who are
+continually building new shops and stalls in the market-place without
+any leave of the convent" (abbey-land though it was). "The only
+permission, in fact, which they ask is that of their alderman, an
+officer who himself was of old times a mere servant of our sacrist, and
+bound to pay into his hands the yearly rent of the town, and removable
+at his pleasure."</p>
+
+<p>Never, Jocelyn evidently thinks, was a case plainer; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>but into the
+justice or injustice of it the burgesses refused sturdily to enter. When
+they were summoned to make answer they pleaded simple possession. "They
+were in the King's justice, and no answer would they make concerning
+tenements which they and their fathers had held in peace for a year and
+a day." Such answer would in fact, they added, be utterly contrary to
+the freedom of the town. No plea could have been legally more complete
+as none could have been more provoking. The monks turned in a rage upon
+the abbot, and simply requested him to eject their opponents. Then they
+retired angrily into the chapter-house, and waited in a sort of white
+heat to hear what the abbot would do. This is what Sampson did. He
+quietly bade the townsmen wait; then he "came into chapter just like one
+of ourselves, and told us privily that he would right us as far as he
+could, but that if he were to act it must be by law. Be the case right
+or wrong, he did not dare eject without trial his free men from land and
+property which they had held year after year; in fact, if he did so, he
+would at once fall into the King's justice. At this moment in came the
+townsfolk into the chapter-house, and offered to compromise the matter
+for an annual quit rent of a hundred shillings. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>This offer we refused.
+We preferred a simple adjournment of our claim in the hope that in some
+other abbot's time we might get all back again."</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding his many very admirable qualities, in fact, this present
+abbot was on these municipal points simply incorrigible. Was it quite by
+an oversight, for instance, that in Sampson's old age, "in some way, I
+don't quite know how, the new alderman of the town got chosen in other
+places than in chapter, and without leave of the house,"&mdash;in simple
+town-motes, that is, and by sheer downright delegation of power on the
+part of his fellow-burgesses? At any rate it was by no oversight that
+Sampson granted his charter on the day he came back from Richard's
+prison, when "we monks were murmuring and grumbling" in his very ear!
+And yet was the abbot foolish in his generation? This charter of his
+ranks lineally among the ancestors of that Great Charter which his
+successor was first to unroll on the altar-steps of the choir (we can
+still measure off the site in the rough field by the great piers of the
+tower arch that remain) before the baronage of the realm. At any rate,
+half a century after that scene in chapter, the new England that Sampson
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>had foreseen came surging stormily enough against the abbey gates.
+Later abbots had set themselves sturdily against his policy of
+concession and conciliation; and riots, lawsuits, royal commissions,
+mark the troubled relations of Town and Abbey under the first two
+Edwards. Under the third came the fierce conflict of 1327.</p>
+
+<p>On the 25th of January in that year the townsmen of Bury St. Edmunds,
+headed by Richard Drayton, burst into the Abbey. Its servants were
+beaten off, the monks driven into choir, and dragged thence with their
+prior (for the abbot was away in London) to the town prison. The abbey
+itself was sacked; chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar
+frontals, the books of the library, the very vats and dishes of the
+kitchen, all disappeared. Chattels valued at &pound;10,000, &pound;500 worth of
+coin, 3000 "florins,"&mdash;this was the abbey's estimate of its loss. But
+neither florins nor chasubles were what their assailants really aimed
+at. Their next step shows what were the grievances which had driven the
+burgesses to this fierce outbreak of revolt. They were as much personal
+as municipal. The gates of the town indeed were still in the abbot's
+hands. He had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>succeeded in enforcing his claim to the wardship of
+orphans born within his domain. From claims such as these the town could
+never feel itself safe so long as mysterious charters from Pope and
+King, interpreted yet more mysteriously by the wit of the new lawyer
+class, were stored in the abbey archives. But the archives contained
+other and yet more formidable documents. The religious houses,
+untroubled by the waste of war, had profited more than any landowners by
+the general increase of wealth. They had become great proprietors,
+money-lenders to their tenants, extortionate as the Jew whom they had
+banished from the land. There were few townsmen of St. Edmund who had
+not some bond laid up in the abbey registry. Nicholas Fowke and a band
+of debtors had a covenant lying there for the payment of 500 marks and
+fifty casks of wine. Philip Clopton's mark bound him to discharge a debt
+of &pound;22; a whole company of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors in
+a bond for no less a sum than &pound;10,000. The new spirit of commercial
+enterprise, joined with the troubles of the time, seems to have thrown
+the whole community into the abbot's hands.</p>
+
+<p>It was from the troubles of the time that the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>burghers looked for
+escape; and the general disturbance which accompanied the deposition of
+Edward II. seems to have quickened their longing into action. Their
+revolt soon disclosed its practical aims. From their prison in the town
+the trembling prior and his monks were brought back to their own
+chapter-house. The spoil of their registry&mdash;the papal bulls and the
+royal charters, the deeds and bonds and mortgages of the townsmen&mdash;were
+laid before them. Amidst the wild threats of the mob, they were forced
+to execute a grant of perfect freedom and of a guild to the town, and a
+full release to their debtors. Then they were left masters of the ruined
+house. But all control over the town was gone. Through spring and summer
+no rent or fine was paid. The bailiffs and other officers of the abbey
+did not dare to show their faces in the streets. Then news came that the
+abbot was in London, appealing for aid to King and Court, and the whole
+county was at once on fire. A crowd of rustics, maddened at the thought
+of revived claims of serfage, of interminable suits of law which had
+become a tyranny, poured into the streets of the town. From thirty-two
+of the neighbouring villages the priests marched at the head of their
+flocks to this new crusade. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>Twenty thousand in number, so men guessed,
+the wild mass of men, women, and children rushed again on the abbey. For
+four November days the work of destruction went on unhindered, whilst
+gate, stables, granaries, kitchen, infirmary, hostelry, went up in
+flames. From the wreck of the abbey itself the great multitude swept
+away too the granges and barns of the abbey farms. The monks had become
+vast agricultural proprietors: 1,000 horses, 120 oxen, 200 cows, 300
+bullocks, 300 hogs, 10,000 sheep were driven off for spoil, and as a
+last outrage, the granges and barns were burnt to the ground. &pound;60,000,
+the justiciaries afterwards decided, would hardly cover the loss.</p>
+
+<p>Weak as was the government of Mortimer and Isabella, there never was a
+time in English history when government stood with folded hands before a
+scene such as this. The appeal of the abbot was no longer neglected; a
+royal force quelled the riot and exacted vengeance for this breach of
+the King's peace. Thirty carts full of prisoners were despatched to
+Norwich; twenty-four of the chief townsmen, thirty-two of the village
+priests, were convicted as aiders and abettors. Twenty were at once
+summarily hung. But <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>with this first vigorous effort at repression the
+danger seemed again to roll away. Nearly 200 persons remained indeed
+under sentence of outlawry, and for five weary years their case dragged
+on in the King's courts. At last matters ended in a lawless, ludicrous
+outrage. Out of patience and irritated by repeated breaches of promise
+on the abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses seized him as he lay in his
+manor of Chevington, robbed, bound and shaved him, and carried him off
+to London. There he was hurried from street to street, lest his
+hiding-place should be detected, till opportunity offered for his
+shipping off to Brabant. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope himself,
+levelled their excommunications against the perpetrators of this daring
+outrage in vain.</p>
+
+<p>The prison of their victim was at last discovered; he was released and
+brought home. But the lesson seems to have done good. The year 1332 saw
+a concordat arranged between the Abbey and Town. The damages assessed by
+the royal justiciaries, a sum enormous now but incredible then, were
+remitted, the outlawry was reversed, the prisoners were released. On the
+other hand, the deeds were again replaced in the archives of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>the abbey,
+and the charters which had been extorted from the trembling monks were
+formally cancelled. In other words, the old process of legal oppression
+was left to go on. The spirit of the townsmen was, as we shall see,
+crushed by the failure of their outbreak of despair. It was from a new
+quarter that help was for a moment to come. No subject is more difficult
+to treat, as nothing is more difficult to explain, than the communal
+revolt which shook the throne of Richard II., and the grievances which
+prompted it. But one thing is clear; it was a revolt against oppression
+which veiled itself under the form of law. The rural tenants found
+themselves in a mesh of legal claims&mdash;old services revived, old dues
+enforced, endless suits in the King's courts grinding them again to
+serfage. Oppression was no longer the rough blow of the rough baron; it
+was the delicate, ruthless tyranny of the lawyer-clerk.</p>
+
+<p>Prior John of Cambridge, who, in the vacancy of the abbot, was now in
+charge of the house, was a man skilled in all the arts of his day. In
+sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists
+pronounced him the superior of Orpheus, of Nero, of one yet more
+illustrious but, save in the Bury cloisters, more obscure, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>the Breton
+Belgabred. He was a man "industrious and subtle;" and subtlety and
+industry found their scope in suit after suit with the farmers and
+burgesses around. "Faithfully he strove," says his monastic eulogist,
+"with the villeins of Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen he
+owned as his foes, his "adversaries;" but it was the rustics who were
+especially to show how memorable a hate he had won. It was a perilous
+time in which to win men's hate. We have seen the private suffering of
+the day, but nationally too England was racked with despair and the
+sense of wrong; with the collapse of the French war, with the ruinous
+taxation, with the frightful pestilence that had swept away half the
+population; with the iniquitous labour-laws that, in the face of such a
+reduction, kept down the rate of wages in the interest of the landlords;
+with the frightful law of settlement that, to enforce this wrong,
+reduced at a stroke the free labourer again to a serfage from which he
+has yet fully to emerge. That terrible revolution of social sentiment
+had begun which was to turn law into the instrument of the basest
+interests of a class, which was with the Statute of Labourers and the
+successive labour-regulations that followed to create pauperism, and
+with pauperism to create that hatred of class to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>class which hangs like
+a sick dream over us to-day. The earliest, the most awful instance of
+such a hatred was gathering round Prior John, while at his manor-house
+of Mildenhall he studied his parchments and touched a defter lute than
+Nero or the Breton Belgabred. In a single hour hosts of armed men arose,
+as it were, out of the earth. Kent gathered round Wat Tyler; in Norfolk,
+in Essex, fifty thousand peasants hoisted the standard of Jack Straw. It
+was no longer a local rising or a local grievance, no longer the old
+English revolution headed by the baron and priest. Priest and baron were
+swept away before this sudden storm of national hate. The howl of the
+great multitude broke roughly in on the delicate chanting of Prior John.
+He turned to fly, but his own serfs betrayed him, judged him in rude
+mockery of the law that had wronged them, condemned him, killed him.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>
+Five days the corpse lay half-stripped in the open field, none daring to
+bury it&mdash;so ran the sentence of his murderers&mdash;while the mob poured
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>unresisted into Bury. The scene was like some wild orgy of the French
+Revolution than any after-scenes in England. Bearing the prior's head on
+a lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng reached at
+last the gallows where the head of Cavendish, the chief justice, stood
+already impaled, and pressing the cold lips together, in fierce mockery
+of the old friendship between the two, set them side by side.</p>
+
+<p>Another head soon joined them. The abbey gates had been burst open, the
+cloister was full of the dense maddened crowd, howling for a new victim,
+John Lackenheath. Warden of the barony as he was, few knew him as he
+stood among the group of trembling monks; there was still amidst this
+outburst of frenzy the dread of a coming revenge, and the rustic who had
+denounced him had stolen back silent into the crowd. But if Lackenheath
+resembled the French nobles in the hatred he had roused, he resembled
+them also in the cool contemptuous courage with which they fronted
+death. "I am the man you seek," he said, stepping forward; and in a
+moment, with a mighty roar of "Devil's son! monk! traitor!" he was swept
+to the gallows and his head hacked from his shoulders. Then <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>the crowd
+rolled back again to the abbey-gate and summoned the monks before them.
+They told them that now for a long time they had oppressed their
+fellows, the burgesses of Bury; wherefore they willed that in the sight
+of the Commons they should forthwith surrender their bonds and their
+charters. The monks brought the parchments to the market-place; many
+which might have served the purposes of the townsmen they swore they
+could not find. The Commons disbelieved them, and bade the burgesses
+inspect the documents. But the iron had entered too deeply into these
+men's souls. Not even in their hour of triumph could they shake off
+their awe of the trembling black-robed masters who stood before them. A
+compromise was patched up. The charters should be surrendered till the
+popular claimant of the abbacy should confirm them. Then, unable to do
+more, the great crowd ebbed away.</p>
+
+<p>Common history tells the upshot of the revolt; the despair when in the
+presence of the boy-king Wat Tyler was struck down by a foul treason;
+the ruin when the young martial Bishop of Norwich came trampling in upon
+the panic-stricken multitude at Barton. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>Nationally the movement had
+wrought good; from this time the law was modified in practice, and the
+tendency to reduce a whole class to serfage was effectually checked. But
+to Bury it brought little but harm. A hundred years later the town again
+sought freedom in the law-courts, and again sought it in vain. The abbey
+charters told fatally against mere oral customs. The royal council of
+Edward IV. decided that "the abbot is lord of the whole town of Bury,
+the sole head and captain within the town." All municipal appointments
+were at his pleasure, all justice in his hands. The townsmen had no
+communal union, no corporate existence. Their leaders paid for riot and
+insult by imprisonment and fine.</p>
+
+<p>The dim, dull lawsuit was almost the last incident in the long struggle,
+the last and darkest for the town. But it was the darkness that goes
+before the day. Fifty years more and abbot and abbey were swept away
+together, and the burghers were building their houses afresh with the
+carved ashlar and the stately pillars of their lord's house. Whatever
+other aspects the Reformation may present, it gave at any rate
+emancipation to the one class of English to whom freedom <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>had been
+denied, the towns that lay in the dead hand of the Church. None more
+heartily echoed the Protector's jest, "We must pull down the rooks'
+nests lest the rooks may come back again," than the burghers of St.
+Edmunds. The completeness of the Bury demolitions hangs perhaps on the
+long serfdom of the town, and the shapeless masses of rubble that alone
+recall the graceful cloister and the long-drawn aisle may find their
+explanation in the story of the town's struggles. But the story has a
+pleasanter ending. The charter of James&mdash;for the town had passed into
+the King's hands as the abbot's successor&mdash;gave all that it had ever
+contended for, and crowned the gift by the creation of a mayor. Modern
+reform has long since swept away the municipal oligarchy which owed its
+origin to the Stuart king. But the essence of his work remains; and in
+its mayor, with his fourfold glory of maces borne before him, Bury sees
+the strange close of the battle waged through so many centuries for
+simple self-government.</p>
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> To one who knows what frightful cruelty and oppression may
+lie in simple legal phrases, the indignant sentence in which Walsingham
+tells his death is the truest comment on the scene: "Non tam villanorum
+pr&aelig;dict&aelig; vill&aelig; de Bury, suorum adversariorum, sed propriorum servorum et
+nativorum arbitrio simul et judicio addictus morti."</p></div>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS.</h2>
+<br /><a name="HOTELS_IN_THE_CLOUDS" id="HOTELS_IN_THE_CLOUDS"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>When the snow has driven everybody home again from the Oberland and the
+Rigi and all the Swiss hotel-keepers have resumed their original dignity
+as Landammans of their various cantons, it is a little amusing to
+reflect how much of the pleasure of one's holiday has been due to one's
+own countrymen. It is not that the Englishman abroad is particularly
+entertaining, for the Frenchman is infinitely more vivacious; nor that
+he is peculiarly stolid, for he yields in that to most of the German
+students who journey on the faith of a nightcap and a pipe; or that he
+is especially boring, for every American whom one meets whips him easily
+in boredom. It is that he is so nakedly and undisguisedly English. We
+never see Englishmen in England. They are too busy, too afraid of Mrs.
+Grandy, too oppressed with duties and responsibilities and insular
+respectabilities and home decencies to be <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>really themselves. They are
+forced to dress decently, to restrain their temper, to affect a little
+modesty; there is the pulpit to scold them, and the 'Times' to give them
+something to talk about, and an infinite number of grooves and lines and
+sidings along which they can be driven in a slow and decent fashion, or
+into which as a last resort they can be respectably shunted. But grooves
+and lines end with the British Channel. The true Englishman has no awe
+for 'Galignani'; he has a slight contempt for the Continental chaplain.
+He can wear what hat he likes, show what temper he likes, and be
+himself. It is he whose boots tramp along the Boulevards, whose snore
+thunders loudest of all in the night train, who begins his endless growl
+after "a decent dinner" at Basle, and his endless contempt for "Swiss
+stupidity" at Lucerne. We track him from hotel to hotel, we meet him at
+station after station, we revel in the chase as coat after coat of the
+outer man peels away and the inner Englishman stands more plainly
+revealed. But it is in the hotels of the higher mountains that we first
+catch the man himself.</p>
+
+<p>There is a sort of snow-line of nations, and nothing amazes one more in
+a run through the Alps than to see <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>how true the various peoples among
+their visitors are to their own specific level. As a rule the Frenchman
+clings to the road through the passes, the American pauses at the end of
+the mule-track, the German stops at the ch&acirc;let in the pine-forest. It is
+only at the Alpine <i>table d'h&ocirc;te</i>, with a proud consciousness of being
+seven thousand feet above the sea-level, that one gets the Englishman
+pure. It is a very odd sensation, in face of the huge mountain-chains,
+and with the glacier only an hour's walk overhead, to find one's self
+again in a little England, with the very hotel-keeper greeting one in
+one's native tongue, and the guides exchanging English oaths over their
+trinkgelt. Cooped up within four walls one gets a better notion of the
+varieties, the lights and shadows, of home-life than one gets in Pall
+Mall. The steady old Indian couple whose climb is so infinitely slow and
+sure, the Oxford freshman who comes blooming up the hill-side to declare
+Titiens beautiful and to gush over the essays of Frederick Robertson,
+the steady man of business who does his Alps every summer, the jaded
+London curate who lingers with a look of misery round the stove, the
+British mother, silken, severe, implacable as below, the British maiden
+sitting alone in the rock-clefts and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>reviewing the losses and gains of
+the last season&mdash;all these are thrown together in an odd jumble of rank
+and taste by the rain, fog, and snowdrift which form some two-thirds of
+the pleasures of the Alps. But, odd as the jumble is, it illustrates in
+a way that nothing else does some of the characteristics of the British
+nation, and impresses on one in a way that one never forgets the real
+native peculiarities of Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, no scene so perfectly brings out the absolute
+vacuity of the British mind when one can get it free from the
+replenishing influences of the daily paper. Alpine talk is the lowest
+variety of conversation, as the common run of Alpine writing is the
+lowest form of literature. It is in fact simply drawing-room talk as
+drawing-room talk would be if all news, all scandal, all family details
+were suddenly cut off. In its way it throws a pleasant light on English
+education and on the amount of information about other countries which
+it is considered essential to an English gentleman to possess. The
+guardsman swears that the Swiss are an uneducated nation, with a
+charming unconsciousness that their school system is without a rival in
+Europe; the young lady to one's right wonders why such nice <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>people
+should be republicans; the Cambridge man across the table exposes the
+eccentricity of a friend who wished to know in what canton he was
+travelling; the squire with the pink and white daughters is amazed at
+the absence of police. In the very heart of the noblest home of liberty
+which Europe has seen our astonishing nation lives and moves with as
+contented and self-satisfied an ignorance of the laws, the history, the
+character of the country or its people, as if Switzerland were
+Timbuctoo. Still, even sublime ignorance such as this is better than to
+listen to the young thing of thirty-five summers, with her drivel about
+William Tell; and one has always the resource of conceiving a Swiss
+party tramping about England with no other notion of Englishmen than
+that they are extortionate hotel-keepers, or of the English Constitution
+than that it is democratic and absurd, or of English history than that
+Queen Eleanor sucked the poison from her husband's arm.</p>
+
+<p>The real foe of life over an Alpine table is that weather-talk, raised
+to its highest power, which forms nine-tenths of the conversation. The
+beautiful weather one had on the Rigi, the execrable weather one had at
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>the Furca, the unsettled weather one had on the Lake of Thun; the
+endless questions whether you have been here and whether you have been
+there; the long catechism as to the insect-life and the tariff of the
+various hotels; the statements as to the route by which they have come,
+the equally gratuitous information as to the route by which they shall
+go; the "oh, so beautiful" of the gusher in ringlets, the lawyer's
+"decidedly sublime," the monotonous "grand, grand" of the man of
+business; the constant asseveration of all as to every prospect which
+they have visited that they never have seen such a beautiful view in
+their life&mdash;form a cataract of boredom which pours down from morn to
+dewy eve. It is in vain that one makes desperate efforts to procure
+relief, that the inventive mind entraps the spinster into discussion
+over ferns, tries the graduate on poetry, beguiles the squire towards
+politics, lures the Indian officer into a dissertation on coolies, leads
+the British mother through flowery paths of piety towards the new
+vacancies in the episcopal bench. The British mother remembers a bishop
+whom she met at Lucerne, the Indian officer gets back by the Ghauts to
+the Schreckhorn, the graduate finds his way again through 'Manfred' to
+the precipices. In an instant the drone recommences, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>the cataract pours
+down again, and there is nothing for it but to wander out on the terrace
+of six feet by four, and wonder what the view would be if there were no
+fog.</p>
+
+<p>But even a life like this must have its poetry and its hero, and at
+seven thousand feet above the sea-level it is very natural to find one's
+poetry in what would be dull enough below. The hero of the Bell Alp or
+the &OElig;ggischorn is naturally enough the Alpine Clubbist. He has
+hurried silent and solitary through the lower country, he only blooms
+into real life at the sight of "high work." It is wonderful how lively
+the little place becomes as he enters it, what a run there is on the
+landlord for information as to his projects, what endless consultations
+of the barometer, what pottering over the pages of 'Peaks, Passes, and
+Glaciers.' How many guides will he take, has he a dog, will he use the
+rope, what places has he done before?&mdash;a thousand questions of this sort
+are buzzing about the room as the hero sits quietly down to his dinner.
+The elderly spinster remembers the fatal accident of last season, and
+ventures to ask him what preparations he has made for the ascent. The
+hero stops his dinner politely, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>shows her the new little box of
+lip-salve with which he intends to defy the terrors of the Alps. To say
+the truth, the Alpine climber is not an imaginative man. With him the
+climb which fills every bystander with awe is "a good bit of work, but
+nothing out of the way you know." He has never done this particular
+peak, and so he has to do it; but it has been too often done before to
+fill him with any particular interest in the matter. As to the ascent
+itself, he sets about planning it as practically as if he were planning
+a run from London to Lucerne. We see him sitting with his guides,
+marking down the time-table of his route, ascertaining the amount of
+meat and wine which will be required, distributing among his followers
+their fair weights of blankets and ropes. Then he tells us the hour at
+which he shall be back to-morrow, and the file of porters set off with
+him quietly and steadily up the hill-side. We turn out and give him a
+cheer as he follows, but the thought of the provisions takes a little of
+the edge off our romance. Still, there is a great run that evening on
+'Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers,' and a constant little buzz round the
+fortunate person who has found the one record of an ascent of this
+particular peak.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>What is it which makes men in Alpine travel-books write as men never
+write elsewhere? What is the origin of a style unique in literature,
+which misses both the sublime and the ridiculous, and constantly hops
+from tall-talk to a mirth feeble and inane? Why is it that the senior
+tutor, who is so hard on a bit of bad Latin, plunges at the sight of an
+Alp into English inconceivable, hideous? Why does page after page look
+as if it had been dredged with French words through a pepper-castor? Why
+is the sunrise or the scenery always "indescribable," while the appetite
+of the guides lends itself to such reiterated description? These are
+questions which suggest themselves to quiet critics, but hardly to the
+group in the hotel. They have found the hole where the hero is to snatch
+a few hours of sleep before commencing the ascent. They have followed
+him in imagination round the edge of the crevasses. All the old awe and
+terror that disappeared in his presence revive at the eloquent
+description of the <i>ar&ecirc;te</i>. There is a gloom over us as we retire to bed
+and think of the little company huddled in their blankets, waiting for
+the dawn. There is a gloom over us at breakfast as the spinster recalls
+one "dreadful place where you look down five thousand <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>feet clear." The
+whole party breaks up into little groups, who set out for high points
+from which, the first view of the returning hero will be caught.
+Everybody comes back certain they have seen him, till the landlord
+pronounces that everybody has mistaken the direction in which he must
+come. At last there is a distant <i>jodel</i>, and in an hour or so the hero
+arrives. He is impassive and good-humoured as before. When we crowd
+around him for the tidings of peril and adventure, he tells us, as he
+told us before he started, that it is "a good bit of work, but nothing
+out of the way." Pressed by the spinster, he replies, in the very words
+of 'Peaks and Passes,' that the sunrise was "indescribable," and then,
+like the same inspired volume, enlarges freely on the appetite of his
+guides. Then he dines, and then he tells us that what he has really
+gained from his climb is entire faith in the efficacy of his little box
+for preventing all injury from sun or from snow. He is a little proud,
+too, to have done the peak in twenty minutes less time than Jones, and
+at ten shillings less cost. Altogether, it must be confessed, the Alpine
+Clubbist is not an imaginative man. His one grief in life seems to be
+the failure of his new portable cooking apparatus, and he pronounces
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>"Liebig's Extract" to be the great discovery of the age. But such as he
+is, solid, practical, slightly stupid, he is the hero of the Alpine
+hotel.</p>
+
+<p>At such an elevation the religious developement of the British mind
+becomes strangely jerky and irregular. The arrival of Sunday is suddenly
+revealed to the group round the breakfast-table by the severity with
+which the spinster's eye is fixed on an announcement over the stove that
+the English service in the hotel is at ten o'clock. But the announcement
+is purely speculative. The landlord "hopes" there will be service, and
+plunges again into the kitchen. Profane sounds of fiddling and dancing
+reach the ear from an outbuilding where the guides and the maids are
+celebrating the day by a dance. The spinster is in earnest, but the
+insuperable difficulty lies in the non-existence of a parson. The Indian
+civilian suggests that we should adopt the naval usage, and that the
+senior layman read prayers. But the attorney is the senior layman, and
+he objects to such a muddling of the professions. The young Oxford
+undergraduate tells his little tale of a service on board ship where the
+major, unversed in such matters, began with the churching <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>service, and
+ended with the office for the burial of the dead. Then he withers
+beneath the stony stare of the British mother, who is reading her
+"lessons" in the corner. At last there is a little buzz of excitement,
+and every eye is fixed upon the quiet-looking traveller in a brown
+shooting-coat and a purple tie, who is chipping his egg and imbibing his
+coffee in silence and unconsciousness. The spinster is sure that the
+stranger is Mr. Smith. The attorney doubts whether such a remarkable
+preacher would go about in such a costume. The British mother solves the
+whole difficulty by walking straight up to him, and with an eye on the
+announcement in question, asking point-blank whether she has the
+pleasure of addressing that eminent divine. Smith hesitates, and is
+lost. His egg and coffee disappear. The table is cleared, and the chairs
+arranged with as little regard to comfort as may be. The divine retires
+for the sermon which&mdash;prescient of his doom&mdash;he has slipped into his
+valise. The landlord produces two hymn-books of perfectly different
+origins, and some time is spent in finding a hymn which is common to
+both. When the time comes for singing it, the landlord joins in with a
+fine but wandering bass, catching an English word here and there as he
+goes along. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>The sermon is as usual on the Prodigal Son, and the Indian
+civilian nods at every mention of "going into a far country," as a topic
+specially appropriate for the occasion. But the divine is seen no more.
+His cold becomes rapidly serious, and he takes to his bed at the very
+hour of afternoon service. The British maiden wanders out to read
+Tennyson in the rock-clefts, and is wonder-struck to come upon the
+unhappy sufferer reading Tennyson in the rock-clefts too. After all, bed
+is not good for a cold, and the British Sunday is insufferable, and
+poetry is the expression of the deepest and most sacred emotions. This
+is the developement which religion takes with a British maiden and a
+British parson in regions above the clouds.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+<h2>&AElig;NEAS: A VERGILIAN STUDY.</h2>
+<br /><a name="AENEAS:_A_VERGILIAN_STUDY" id="AENEAS:_A_VERGILIAN_STUDY"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>&AElig;NEAS: A VERGILIAN STUDY.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>In the revival side by side of Homeric and Vergilian study it is easy to
+see the reflection of two currents of contrasted sentiment which are
+telling on the world around us. A cry for simpler living and simpler
+thinking, a revolt against the social and intellectual perplexities in
+which modern life loses its direct and intensest joys, a craving for a
+world untroubled by the problems that weigh on us, express themselves as
+vividly in poems like the 'Earthly Paradise' as in the return to the
+Iliad. The charm of Vergil on the other hand lies in the strange
+fidelity with which across so many ages he echoes those complex thoughts
+which make the life of our own. Vergil is the Tennyson of the older
+world; his power, like that of the laureate, lies in the sympathy with
+which he reflects the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>strength and weakness of his time, its humanity,
+its new sense of human brotherhood, its pitifulness, its moral
+earnestness, its high conception of the purpose of life and the dignity
+of man, its attitude of curious but condescending interest towards the
+past, its vast dreams of a future, embodied by the one poet in the vague
+dreamland of 'Locksley Hall,' by the other in the enduring greatness of
+Rome.</p>
+
+<p>From beginning to end the &AElig;neid is a song of Rome. Throughout it we feel
+ourselves drawing nearer and nearer to that sense of the Roman greatness
+which filled the soul of Vergil; with him in verse after verse "tendimus
+in Latium." Nowhere does the song rise to a higher grandeur than when
+the singer sings the majesty of that all-embracing empire, the wide
+peace of the world beneath its sway. But the &AElig;neid is no mere outburst
+of Roman pride. To Vergil the time in which he lived was at once an end
+and a beginning, a close of the long struggles which had fitted Rome to
+be the mistress of the world, an opening of her new and mightier career
+as a reconciler and leader of the nations. His song is broken by divine
+prophecies, not merely of Roman greatness, but of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>the work Rome had to
+do in warring down the rebels against her universal sway, in showing
+clemency to the conquered, in binding hostile peoples together, in
+welding the nations into a new human race. The &AElig;neid is a song of the
+future rather than of the present or past, a song not of pride but of
+duty. The work that Rome has done points throughout to the nobler work
+which Rome has yet to do. And in the very forefront of this dream of the
+future Vergil sets the ideal of the new Roman by whom this mighty task
+shall be wrought, the picture of one who by loyalty to a higher purpose
+had fitted himself to demand loyalty from those whom he ruled, one who
+by self-mastery had learned to be master of men.</p>
+
+<p>It is this thought of self-mastery which is the key to the &AElig;neid. Filled
+as he is with a sense of the greatness of Rome, the mood of Vergil seems
+constantly to be fluctuating between a pathetic consciousness of the
+toils and self-devotion, the suffering and woe, that run through his
+national history and the final greatness which they bought. His poem
+draws both these impressions together in the figure of &AElig;neas. &AElig;neas is
+the representative of that "piety," that faith in his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>race and in his
+destiny, which had drawn the Roman from his little settlement on the
+hills beside Tiber to a vast empire "beyond the Garamantians and the
+Indians." All the endurance, the suffering, the patriotism, the
+self-devotion of generation after generation is incarnate in him. It is
+by his mouth that in the darkest hours of national trial Roman seems to
+say to Roman, "O passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem." It is to
+this "end" that the wanderings of &AElig;neas, like the labours of consul and
+dictator, inevitably tend, and it is the firm faith in such a close that
+gives its peculiar character to the pathos of the &AElig;neid.</p>
+
+<p>Rome is before us throughout, "per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in
+Latium." It is not as a mere tale of romance that we follow the
+wanderings of "the man who first came from Trojan shores to Italy." They
+are the sacrifice by which the father of the Roman race wrought out the
+greatness of his people, the toils he endured "dum conderet urbem."
+"Italiam qu&aelig;ro patriam" is the key-note of the &AElig;neid, but the Quest of
+&AElig;neas is no self-sought quest of his own. "Italiam non sponte sequor,"
+he pleads as Dido turns from him <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>in the Elysian Fields with eyes of
+speechless reproach. He is the chosen instrument of a Divine purpose
+working out its ends alike across his own buffetings from shore to shore
+or the love-tortures of the Ph&oelig;nician Queen. The memorable words that
+&AElig;neas addresses to Dares, "Cede Deo," "bend before a will higher as well
+as stronger than thine own," are in fact the faith of his own career.</p>
+
+<p>But it is in this very submission to the Divine order that he himself
+soars into greatness. The figure of the warrior who is so insignificant
+in the Homeric story of the fight around Troy becomes that of a hero in
+the horror of its capture. &AElig;neas comes before us the survivor of an
+immense fall, sad with the sadness of lost home and slaughtered friends,
+not even suffered to fall amidst the wreck, but driven forth by voices
+of the Fates to new toils and a distant glory. He may not die; his
+"moriamur" is answered by the reiterated "Depart" of the gods, the "Heu,
+fuge!" of the shade of Hector. The vision of the great circle of the
+gods fighting against Troy drives him forth in despair to a life of
+exile, and the carelessness of despair is over him as he drifts from
+land to land. "Sail where you <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>will," he cries to his pilot, "one land
+is as good as another now Troy is gone." More and more indeed as he
+wanders he recognizes himself as the agent of a Divine purpose, but all
+personal joy in life has fled. Like Dante he feels the bitterness of
+exile, how hard it is to climb another's stairs, how bitter to eat is
+another's bread. Here and there he meets waifs and strays of the great
+wreck, fugitives like himself, but who have found a refuge and a new
+Troy on foreign shores. He greets them, but he may not stay. At last the
+very gods themselves seem to give him the passionate love of Dido, but
+again the fatal "Depart" tears him from her arms. The chivalrous love of
+Pallas casts for a moment its light and glory round his life, but the
+light and glory sink into gloom again beneath the spear of Turnus. &AElig;neas
+is left alone with his destiny to the very end, but it is a destiny that
+has grown into a passion that absorbs the very life of the man.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Italiam magnam Gryn&aelig;us Apollo,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Italiam Lyci&aelig; jussere capessere sortes.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hic amor, h&aelig;c patria est!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is in the hero of the Idylls and not in the hero of the Iliad that we
+find the key to such a character as this. So far is Vergil from being
+the mere imitator <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>of Homer that in spite of his close and loving study
+of the older poem its temper seems to have roused him only to poetic
+protest. He recoils from the vast personality of Achilleus, from that
+incarnate "wrath," heedless of divine purposes, measuring itself boldly
+with the gods, careless as a god of the fate and fortunes of men. In the
+face of this destroyer the Roman poet sets a founder of cities and
+peoples, self-forgetful, patient, loyal to a divine aim, calm with a
+Roman calmness, yet touched as no Roman had hitherto been touched with
+pity and tenderness for the sorrows of men. The one poem is a song of
+passion, a mighty triumph of the individual man, a poem of human energy
+in defiant isolation. The other is an epic of social order, of a divine
+law manifesting itself in the fortunes of the world, of the bonds which
+link man to his fellow men, a song of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
+reverence, of "piety."</p>
+
+<p>It is in realizing the temper of the poem that we realize the temper of
+its hero. &AElig;neas is the Arthur of the Vergilian epic, with the same
+absorption of all individuality in the nobleness of his purpose, the
+same undertone of melancholy, the same unearthly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>vagueness of outline
+and remoteness from the meaner interests and passions of men. As the
+poet of our own day has embodied his ideal of manhood in the king, so
+Vergil has embodied it in the hero-founder of his race. The temper of
+&AElig;neas is the highest conception of human character to which the old
+world ever attained. The virtues of the Homeric combatants are there:
+courage, endurance, wisdom in council, eloquence, chivalrous friendship,
+family affection, faith to plighted word; but with these mingle virtues
+unknown to Hector or Achilleus, temperance, self-control, nobleness and
+unselfishness of aim, loyalty to an inner sense of right, the piety of
+self-devotion and self-sacrifice, refinement of feeling, a pure and
+delicate sense of the sweetness of woman's love, pity for the fallen and
+the weak.</p>
+
+<p>In the Homeric picture Achilleus sits solitary in his tent, bound as it
+were to the affections of earth by the one tie of his friendship for
+Patroclos. No figure has ever been painted by a poet's pen more terrible
+in the loneliness of its wrath, its sorrow, its revenge. But from one
+end of his song to the other Vergil has surrounded &AElig;neas with the ties
+and affections of home. In the awful night with which his story opens
+the loss <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>of Creusa, the mocking embrace in which the dead wife flies
+from his arms, form his farewell to Troy. "Thrice strove I there to
+clasp my arms about her neck,"&mdash;everyone knows the famous lines:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Thrice I essayed her neck to clasp,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thrice the vain semblance mocked my grasp,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As wind or slumber light."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Amid all the terror of the flight from the burning city the figure of
+his child starts out bright against the darkness, touched with a
+tenderness which Vergil seems to reserve for his child-pictures.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> But
+the whole escape is the escape of a family. Not merely child and wife,
+but father and household accompany &AElig;neas. Life, he tells them when they
+bid him leave them to their fate, is worthless without them; and the
+"commune periclum, una salus" runs throughout all his wanderings. The
+common love of his boy is one of the bonds that link Dido with &AElig;neas,
+and a yet more exquisite touch of poetic tenderness makes his affection
+for Ascanius the one final motive for his severance from the Queen. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>Not
+merely the will of the gods drives him from Carthage, but the sense of
+the wrong done to his boy.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> His friendship is as warm and constant as
+his love for father or child. At the two great crises of his life the
+thought of Hector stirs a new outpouring of passionate regret. It is the
+vision of Hector which rouses him from the slumber of the terrible night
+when Troy is taken; the vision of the hero not as glorified by death,
+but as the memory of that last pitiful sight of the corpse dragged at
+the chariot wheels of Achilleus had stamped it for ever on the mind of
+his friend. It is as though all recollection of his greatness had been
+blotted out by the shame and terror of his fall ("quantum mutatus ab
+illo Hectore!"), but the gory hair and the mangled form only quicken the
+passionate longing of &AElig;neas.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> The tears, the "mighty groan," burst
+forth again as in the tapestry of the Sidonian temple he sees pictured
+anew the story of Hector's fall. In the hour of his last combat the
+thought of his brother-in-arms returns to him, and the memory of Hector
+is the spur to nobleness and valour which he bequeaths to his boy.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>But throughout it is this refinement of feeling, this tenderness and
+sensitiveness to affection, that Vergil has loved to paint in the
+character of &AElig;neas. To him Dido's charm lies in her being the one
+pitying face that has as yet met his own. Divine as he is, the child,
+like Achilleus, of a goddess, he broods with a tender melancholy over
+the sorrows of his fellow-men. "Sunt lacrym&aelig; rerum et mentem mortalia
+tangunt," are words in which Sainte-Beuve has found the secret of the
+&AElig;neid; they are at any rate the key to the character of &AElig;neas. Like the
+poet of our own days, he longs for "the touch of a vanished hand, and
+the sound of a voice that is still."<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> He stands utterly apart from
+those epical heroes "that delight in war." The joy in sheer downright
+fighting which rings through Homer is wholly absent from the &AElig;neid.
+Stirring and picturesque as is "The gathering of the Latin Clans,"
+brilliant as is the painting of the last combat with Turnus, we feel
+everywhere the touch of a poet of peace. Nothing is more noteworthy than
+the careful exclusion of the Roman cruelty, the Roman ambition, from the
+portrait of &AElig;neas. Vergil seems to protest in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>his very hero against the
+poetic compulsion that drags him to the battle-field. On the eve of his
+final triumph, &AElig;neas</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"incusat voce Latinum;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Testaturque deos iteram se ad pr&oelig;lia cogi."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even when host is marshalled against host the thought of reconciliation
+is always kept steadily to the front, and the bitter cry of the hero
+asks in the very hour of the combat why bloodshed should divide peoples
+who are destined to be one.</p>
+
+<p>It is the conflict of these two sides of the character of &AElig;neas, the
+struggle between this sensitiveness to affection and his entire
+absorption in the mysterious destiny to which he is called, between his
+clinging to human ties and his readiness to forsake all and follow the
+divine voice which summons him, the strife in a word between love and
+duty, which gives its meaning and pathos to the story of &AElig;neas and Dido.
+Attractive as it undoubtedly is, the story of Dido is in the minds of
+nine modern readers out of ten fatal to the effect of the &AElig;neid as a
+whole. The very beauty of the tale is partly the cause of this. To the
+schoolboy and to thousands who are schoolboys no longer the poem is
+nothing more than the love story of the Trojan leader <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>and the Tyrian
+queen. Its human interest ends with the funeral fires of Dido, and the
+books which follow are read merely as ingenious displays of the
+philosophic learning, the antiquarian research, and the patriotism of
+Vergil. But the story is yet more directly fatal in the way in which it
+cuts off the hero himself from modern sympathies. His desertion of Dido
+makes, it has been said, "an irredeemable poltroon of him in all honest
+English eyes." Dryden can only save his character by a jest, and
+Rousseau damns it with an epigram. Mr. Keble supposes that in the
+interview among the Shades the poet himself intended the abasement of
+his hero, and Mr. Gladstone has capped this by a theory that Vergil
+meant to draw his readers' admiration, not to &AElig;neas but to Turnus.</p>
+
+<p>It is wiser perhaps to turn from the impressions of Vergil's critics to
+the impression which the story must have left in the mind of Vergil
+himself. It is surely needless to assume that the first of poetic
+artists has forgotten the very rudiments of his art in placing at the
+opening of his song a figure which strips all interest from his hero.
+Nor is it needful to believe that such a blunder has been unconscious,
+and that Vergil has had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>to learn the true effect of his episode on the
+general texture of his poem from the reader of to-day. The poet who
+paints for us the character of Dido must have felt, ere he could have
+painted it, that charm which has ever since bewitched the world. Every
+nerve in Vergil must have thrilled at the consummate beauty of this
+woman of his own creation, her self-abandonment, her love, her
+suffering, her despair. If he deliberately uses her simply as a foil to
+the character of &AElig;neas it is with a perception of this charm infinitely
+deeper and tenderer than ours. But he does use her as a foil. Impulse,
+passion, the mighty energies of unbridled will are wrought up into a
+figure of unequalled beauty, and then set against the true manhood of
+the founder and type of Rome, the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
+self-control.</p>
+
+<p>To the stoicism of Vergil, steadied by a high sense of man's worth and
+work in the world, braced to patience and endurance for noble ends,
+passion&mdash;the revolt of the individual self against the world's
+order&mdash;seemed a light and trivial thing. He could feel and paint with
+exquisite delicacy and fire the charm of woman's utter love; but woman
+with all her loveliness wanted to him <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>the grandeur of man's higher
+constancy to an unselfish purpose, "varium et mutabile semper
+f&oelig;mina." Passion on the other hand is the mainspring of modern
+poetry, and it is difficult for us to realize the superior beauty of the
+calmer and vaster ideal of the poets of old. The figure of Dido, whirled
+hither and thither by the storms of warring emotions, reft even of her
+queenly dignity by the despair of her love, degraded by jealousy and
+disappointment to a very scold, is to the calm, serene figure of &AElig;neas
+as modern sculpture, the sculpture of emotion, is to the sculpture of
+classic art. Each, no doubt, has its own peculiar beauty, and the work
+of a true criticism is to view either from its own standpoint and not
+from the standpoint of its rival. But if we would enter into the mind of
+Vergil we must view Dido with the eyes of &AElig;neas and not &AElig;neas with the
+eyes of Dido.</p>
+
+<p>When Vergil first sets the two figures before us, it is not on the
+contrast but on the unity of their temper and history that he dwells.
+Touch after touch brings out this oneness of mood and aim as they drift
+towards one another. The same weariness, the same unconscious longing
+for rest and love, fills either heart. It is as a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>queen, as a Dian
+over-topping her nymphs by the head, that Dido appears on the scene,
+distributing their task to her labourers as a Roman Cornelia distributed
+wool to her house-slaves, questioning the Trojan strangers who sought
+her hospitality and protection. It is with the brief, haughty tone of a
+ruler of men that she bids them lay by their fears and assures them of
+shelter. Around her is the hum and stir of the city-building, a scene in
+which the sharp, precise touches of Vergil betray the hand of the
+town-poet. But within is the lonely heart of a woman. Dido, like &AElig;neas,
+is a fugitive, an exile of bitter, vain regrets. Her husband, "loved
+with a mighty love," has fallen by a brother's hand; and his ghost, like
+that of Creusa, has driven her in flight from her Tyrian fatherland.
+Like &AElig;neas too she is no solitary wanderer; she guides a new colony to
+the site of the future Carthage as he to the site of the future Rome.
+When &AElig;neas stands before her, it is as a wanderer like herself. His
+heart is bleeding at the loss of Creusa, of Helen, of Troy. He is
+solitary in his despair. He is longing for the touch of a human hand,
+the sound of a voice of love. He is weary of being baffled by the
+ghostly embraces of his wife, by the cloud that wraps his mother from
+his view. He is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>weary of wandering, longing with all the old-world
+intensity of longing for a settled home. "O fortunati quorum jam
+m&oelig;nia surgunt," he cries as he looks on the rising walls of Carthage.
+His gloom has been lightened indeed by the assurance of his fame which
+he gathers from the pictures of the great Defence graven on the walls of
+the Tyrian temple. But the loneliness and longing still press heavily on
+him when the cloud which has wrapt him from sight parts suddenly
+asunder, and Dido and &AElig;neas stand face to face.</p>
+
+<p>Few situations in poetry are more artistic than this meeting of &AElig;neas
+and the Queen in its suddenness and picturesqueness. A love born of pity
+speaks in the first words of the hero,<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> and the reply of Dido strikes
+the same sympathetic note.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> But the fervour of passion is soon to
+supersede this compassionate regard. Love himself in the most exquisite
+episode of the &AElig;neid takes the place of Ascanius; while the Trojan boy
+lies sleeping on Ida, lapped on Earth's bosom beneath the cool mountain
+shade, his divine "double" lies clasped to Dido's breast, and pours his
+fiery <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>longings into her heart. Slowly, unconsciously, the lovers draw
+together. The gratitude of &AElig;neas is still at first subordinate to his
+quest. "Thy name and praise shall live," he says to Dido, "whatever
+lands call me." In the same way, though the Queen's generosity has shown
+itself in her first offer to the sailors ("urbem quam statuo vestra
+est"), it is still generosity and not passion. Passion is born in the
+long night through which, with Eros still folded in her arms, Dido
+listens to the "Tale of Troy."</p>
+
+<p>The very verse quickens with the new pulse of love. The preface of the
+&AElig;neid, the stately introduction that fortells the destinies of Rome and
+the divine end to which the fates were guiding &AElig;neas, closes in fact
+with the appearance of Dido. The poem takes a gayer and lighter tone.
+The disguise and recognition of Venus as she appears to her son, the
+busy scene of city-building, the sudden revelation of &AElig;neas to the
+Queen, have the note of exquisite romance. The honey-sweet of the
+lover's tale, to use the poet's own simile,<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> steals subtly on the
+graver epic. Step by step Vergil leads us on through every stage of
+pity, of fancy, of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>reverie, of restlessness, of passion, to the fatal
+close. None before him had painted the thousand delicate shades of
+love's advance; none has painted them more tenderly, more exquisitely
+since. As the Queen listens to the tale of her lover's escape she
+showers her questions as one that could never know enough.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Her passion feeds through sleepless nights on the recollection of his
+look, on the memory of his lightest words. Even the old love of Sych&aelig;us
+seems to revive in and blend with this new affection.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> Her very
+queenliness delights to idealize her lover, to recognize in the hero
+before whom she falls "one of the race of the gods." For a while the
+figure of Dido is that of happy, insatiate passion. The rumours of war
+from the jealous chieftains about her fall idly on her ear. She hovers
+round her hero with sweet observances of love, she hangs at his side the
+jewelled sword and the robe of Tyrian purple woven by her queenly hands.</p>
+
+<p>But even in the happiest moments of his story the consummate art of the
+poet has prepared for the final <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>catastrophe. Little words, like
+"misera," "infelix," "fati nescia," sound the first undertones of a woe
+to come, even amidst the joy of the first meeting or the glad tumult of
+the hunting-scene. The restlessness, the quick alternations of feeling
+in the hour of Dido's triumph, prepare us for the wild swaying of the
+soul from bitterest hate to pitiful affection in the hour of her agony.
+She is the first in the sensitiveness of her passion to catch the change
+in &AElig;neas, and the storm of her indignation sweeps away the excuses of
+her lover, as the storm of her love had swept away his earlier resolve.
+All dignity, all queenliness breaks before the "fury of a woman
+scorned." She dashes herself against the rooted purpose of &AElig;neas as the
+storm-winds, to use Vergil's image, dash themselves from this quarter
+and that against the rooted oak. The madness of her failure drives her
+through the streets like a M&aelig;nad in the nightly orgies of Cith&aelig;ron; she
+flies at last to her chamber like a beast at bay, and gazes out
+distracted at the Trojan shipmen putting off busily from the shores. Yet
+ever and again the wild frenzy-bursts are broken by notes of the old
+pathetic tenderness. In the midst of her taunts and menaces she turns
+with a woman's delicacy to protest against <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>her own violence, "heu,
+furiis incensa feror!" She humbles herself even to pray for a little
+respite, if but for a few hours.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> She pleads her very loneliness; she
+catches as it were from &AElig;neas the thought of the boy whose future he had
+pleaded as one cause of his departure and finds in it a plea for pity.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes her agony is too terrible for speech; she can only answer with
+those "speechless eyes" with which her shade was once more to meet &AElig;neas
+in the Elysian fields. But her wonderful energy forbids her to lie, like
+weaker women, crushed in her despair. She hurries her sister to the feet
+of her lover that nothing may be left untried. From the first she stakes
+her life on the issue; it is as one "about to die" that she prays &AElig;neas
+not to leave her. When all has failed and hope itself deserts her the
+weariness of life gathers round and she "tires of the sight of day."</p>
+
+<p>Never have the mighty energies of unbridled human will been wrought up
+into a form of more surpassing beauty; never have they been set more
+boldly and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>sharply against the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
+self-control. If the tide of Dido's passion sweeps away for the moment
+the consciousness of a divine mission which has borne &AElig;neas to the
+Tyrian shore, the consciousness lies still in the very heart of the man
+and revives at the new call of the gods. The call bids him depart at
+once; and without a struggle he "burns to depart." He stamps down and
+hides within the deep recesses of his heart the "care" that the wild
+entreaties of the woman he loved arouse within him; the life that had
+swung for an hour out of its course returns to its old bearings; once
+more Italy and his destiny become aim and fatherland, "hic amor, h&aelig;c
+patria est." &AElig;neas bows to the higher will, and from that moment all
+that has turned him from his course is of the past. Dido becomes a part
+of his memory as of the things that were.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p>
+
+<p>&AElig;neas is as "resolute to depart" as Dido is "resolute to die." And in
+both the resolve lifts the soul out of its lower passion-life into a
+nobler air. The queen rises into her old queenliness as she passes
+"majestic to the grave;" and her last curse as the Tyrian ships <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>quit
+her shore is no longer the wild imprecation of a frenzied woman; it is
+the mighty curse of the founder of a people calling down on the Roman
+race ages of inextinguishable hate. "Fight shore with shore: fight sea
+with sea!" is the prophecy of that struggle with Carthage which all but
+wrecked for a moment the destinies of Rome. But Vergil saw in the
+character of Dido herself a danger to Rome's future far greater than the
+sword of Hannibal. His very sense of the grandeur of Rome's destinies
+frees him from the vulgar self-confidence of meaner men. Throughout his
+poem he is haunted by the memories of civil war, by the sense of
+instability which clings to men who have grown up in the midst of
+revolutions. The grandest picture in the &AElig;neid reflects the terror of
+that hour of suspense when the galleys of Augustus jostled against the
+galleys of Antony. From that moment, as Vergil's prescience foresaw, the
+dangers of Rome were to spring from a single source. Passion, greed,
+lawless self-seeking, personal ambition, the decay of the older Roman
+sense of unselfish duty, of that "pietas" which subordinated the
+interest of the individual man to the common interest of the state, this
+was henceforth to be the real enemy of Rome. More and more, as the Roman
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>peace drew the world together, the temper of the East, the temper which
+Vergil has embodied in his sketch of Dido, would tell and tell fatally
+on the temper of the West. Orontes&mdash;to borrow Juvenal's phrase&mdash;was
+already flowing into Tiber, and the sterner virtues of the conquerors
+were growing hourly more distasteful beside the variety, the geniality,
+the passionate flush and impulse of the conquered.</p>
+
+<p>It was their common sense of this danger which drew together Vergil and
+the Emperor. It is easy to see throughout his poem what critics are
+accustomed to style a compliment to Augustus. But the loving admiration
+and reverence of Vergil had no need to stoop to the flattery of
+compliment. To him Augustus was in a deep and true sense the realization
+of that ideal Roman whom his song was meant to set in the forefront of
+Rome. When Antony in the madness of his enchantment forgot the high
+mission to which Rome was called, the spell had only been broken by the
+colder "piety" of C&aelig;sar. To Vergil Augustus was the founder of a new
+Rome, the &AElig;neas who after long wanderings across the strife of civil war
+had brought her into quiet waters and bound <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>warring factions into a
+peaceful people. Vergil felt, as even we can feel so many ages later,
+the sense of a high mission, the calm silent recognition of a vast work
+to be done, which lifted the cold, passionless Imperator into greatness.
+It was the bidding of Augustus that had called him from his "rustic
+measure" to this song of Borne, and the thought of Augustus blended,
+whether he would or not, with that Rome of the future which seemed
+growing up under his hands. Unlike too as Vergil was to the Emperor,
+there was a common undertone of melancholy that drew the two men
+together. The wreck of the older faiths, the lingering doubt whether
+good was after all the strongest thing in the world, whether "the gods"
+were always on the side of justice and right, throws its gloom over the
+noblest passages of the &AElig;neid. It is the same doubt, hardened by the
+temper of the man into a colder and more mocking scepticism, that sounds
+in the "plaudite et valete" of the deathbed of Augustus. The Emperor had
+played his part well, but it was a part that he could hardly persuade
+himself was real. All that wisdom and power could do had been done, but
+Augustus had no faith in the great fabric he had reared. Vergil drew
+faith in the fortunes of Rome <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>from his own enthusiasm, but to him too
+the moral order of the world brought only the melancholy doubt of
+Hamlet. Everywhere we feel "the pity on't." The religious theory of the
+universe, the order of the world around him, jars at every step with his
+moral faith. &AElig;neas is the reflection of a time out of joint. Everywhere
+among good men there was the same moral earnestness, the same stern
+resolve after nobleness and grandeur of life, and everywhere there was
+the same inability to harmonize this moral life with the experience of
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>A noble stoicism breathes in the character of &AElig;neas, the virtue of the
+virtuous man, refined and softened by a poet's pitifulness, heightened
+above all by the lingering doubt whether there were any necessary
+connection between virtue and the divine order of things around it.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"D&icirc; tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Usquam Justitia est et mens sibi conscia recti,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pr&aelig;mia digna ferant!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The words glow, so to speak, with moral earnestness, but through them we
+feel the doubt whether, after all, uprightness and a good conscience
+were really the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>object of a divine care. Heaven had flown further off
+from earth than in the days of the Iliad. The laws of the universe, as
+time had revealed them, the current of human affairs, the very might of
+the colossal Empire in which the world of civilization found itself
+prisoned, all seemed to be dwarfing man. Man remained, the sad stern
+manhood of the Stoic, the spirit that breathes through the character of
+&AElig;neas, enduring, baffled, yet full of a faith that the very storms that
+drove him from sea to sea were working out some mysterious and divine
+order. Man was greater than his fate:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">"Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is the same sad Cato-like stoicism in the words with which &AElig;neas
+addresses himself to his final combat:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fortunam ex aliis."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But the "d&icirc;s aliter visum" meets us at every step. Ripheus is the most
+just and upright among the warriors of Troy, but he is the first to
+fall. An inscrutable mystery hangs around the order of the world. Men of
+harder, colder temper shrug their shoulders, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>and like Augustus repeat
+their "vanitas vanitatum" with a smile of contempt at the fools who take
+life in earnest. Nobler and more sensitive souls like that of Vergil
+carry about with them "the pity of it." It is this melancholy that
+flings its sad grace over the verse of the &AElig;neid. We close it as we
+close the Idylls with the King's mournful cry in our ears. But the Roman
+stoicism is of harder and manlier stuff than the chivalrous spiritualism
+of Arthur. The ideal of the old world is of nobler, sterner tone than
+the ideal of the new. Even with death and ruin around him, and the
+mystery of the world darkening his soul, man remains man and master of
+his fate. The suffering and woe of the individual find amends in the
+greatness and welfare of the race. We pity, the wandering of &AElig;neas, but
+his wanderings found the city. The dream of Arthur vanishes as the dark
+boat dies into a dot upon the mere; the dream of &AElig;neas becomes Rome.</p>
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a>                   "Dextr&aelig; se parvus Iulus<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Implicuit, sequiturque patrem non passibus &aelig;quis."</span><br />
+</p>
+<p class="noin">"His steps scarce matching with my stride."</p>
+
+<p class="noin">Mr. Conington's translation hardly renders the fond little touch of the
+Vergilian phrase, a phrase only possible to a lover of children.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> "Me puer Ascanius, capitisque injuria cari,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Quem regno Hesperi&aelig; fraudo et fatalibus arvis."</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a>           "Quibus Hector ab oris<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Expectate venis?"</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a>            "Cur dextr&aelig; jungere dextram<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> "O sola infandos Troj&aelig; miserata labores."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> "Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> "Fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> "Agnosco veteris vestigia amm&aelig;."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> "Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0em;">Dum mea me victam doceat fortuna dolere."</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> "Nec me meminisse pigebit Eliss&aelig;."</p></div>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.</h2>
+<br /><a name="VENICE_AND_ROME" id="VENICE_AND_ROME"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.</h2>
+<br />
+<h2>I.</h2>
+
+<h2>VENICE AND ROME.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>It is the strangeness and completeness of the contrast which makes one's
+first row from Venice to Torcello so hard to forget. Behind us the great
+city sinks slowly into a low line of domes and towers; around us, dotted
+here and there over the gleaming surface, are the orange sails of
+trailing market-boats; we skirt the great hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose
+boatmen bandy <i>lazzi</i> and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a
+lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of
+brown sedge and brushwood, the tower of Torcello rises sharply against
+the sky. There is something weird and unearthly in the suddenness with
+which one passes from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred
+with soft lines of violet light and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>broken with reflections of wall and
+bell-tower, into this presence of desolation and death. A whole world
+seems to part those dreary flats broken with lifeless inlets, those
+patches of sodden fields flung shapelessly among sheets of sullen water,
+from the life and joy of the Grand Canal. And yet really to understand
+the origin of Venice, those ages of terror and flight and exile in which
+the Republic took its birth, we must study them at Torcello. It was from
+the vast Alpine chain which hangs in the haze of midday like a long dim
+cloud-line to the north that the hordes of Hun and Goth burst on the
+Roman world. Their path lay, along the coast trending round to the west,
+where lost among little villages that stand out white in the distant
+shadow lie the sites of Heraclea and Altinum. Across these grey shallows
+cut by the blue serpentine windings of deeper channels the Romans of the
+older province of Venetia on the mainland fled before Attila or
+Theodoric or Alboin to found the new Venetia of the lagoon. Eastward
+over Lido the glimmer of the Adriatic recalls the long centuries of the
+Pirate war, that, struggle for life which shaped into their after-form
+the government and destinies of the infant state. Venice itself, the
+crown and end of struggle and of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>flight, lies over shining miles of
+water to the south. But it is here that one can best study the story of
+its birth; it is easier to realize those centuries of exile and
+buffeting for life amid the dreary flats, the solitude, the poverty of
+Torcello than beneath the gleaming front of the Ducal Palace or the
+mosaics of St. Mark.</p>
+
+<p>Here in fact lies the secret of Venetian history, the one key by which
+it is possible to understand the strange riddle of the Republic. For
+thirteen centuries Venice lay moored as it were off the coast of Western
+Europe, without political analogue or social parallel. Its patriciate,
+its people, its government were not what government or people or
+patriciate were in other countries of Western Christendom. The
+difference lay not in any peculiar institutions which it had developed,
+or in any novel form of social or administrative order which it had
+invented, but in the very origin of the State itself. We see this the
+better if we turn from Venice to our own homeland. The same age saw the
+birth of the two great maritime Powers of modern Europe, for the
+settlements of the English in Britain cover the same century with those
+of the Roman exiles in the Venetian Lagoon. But the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>English
+colonization was the establishment of a purely Teutonic State on the
+wreck of Rome, while the Venetian was the establishment of a purely
+Roman State in the face of the Teuton. Venice in its origin was simply
+the Imperial province of Venetia floated across to the islands of the
+shore. Before the successive waves of the northern inroad the citizens
+of the coast fled to the sandbanks which had long served them as gardens
+or merchant-ports. The "Chair of Attila," the rough stone seat beside
+the church of San Fosco, preserves the memory of one destroyer before
+whom a third part of the people of Altinum fled to Torcello and the
+islands around. Their city&mdash;even materially&mdash;passed with them. The new
+houses were built from the ruins of the old. The very stones of Altinum
+served for the "New Altinum" which arose on the desolate isle, and
+inscriptions, pillars, capitals came in the track of the exiles across
+the lagoon to be worked into the fabric of its cathedral.</p>
+
+<p>Neither citizens nor city were changed even in name. They had put out
+for security a few miles to sea, but the sandbanks on which they landed
+were still Venetia. The fugitive patricians were neither <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>more nor less
+citizens of the imperial province because they had fled from Padua or
+Altinum to Malamocco or Torcello. Their political allegiance was still
+due to the Empire. Their social organization remained unaffected by the
+flight. So far were they from being severed from Rome, so far from
+entertaining any dreams of starting afresh in the "new democracy" which
+exists in the imagination of Daru and his followers, that the one boast
+of their annalists is that they are more Roman than the Romans
+themselves. Their nobles looked with contempt on the barbaric blood
+which had tainted that of the Colonnas or the Orsini, nor did any
+Isaurian peasant ever break the Roman line of Doges as Leo broke the
+line of Roman Emperors. Venice&mdash;as she proudly styled herself in after
+time&mdash;was "the legitimate daughter of Rome." The strip of sea-board from
+the Brenta to the Isonzo was the one spot in the Empire from the Caspian
+to the Atlantic where foot of barbarian never trod. And as it rose, so
+it set. From that older world of which it was a part the history of
+Venice stretched on to the French Revolution untouched by Teutonic
+influences. The old Roman life which became strange even to the Capitol
+lingered unaltered, unimpaired, beside <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>the palace of the duke. The
+strange ducal cap, the red ducal slippers, the fan of bright feathers
+borne before the ducal chair, all came unchanged from ages when they
+were the distinctions of every great officer of the Imperial State. It
+is startling to think that almost within the memory of living men Venice
+brought Rome&mdash;the Rome of Ambrose and Theodosius&mdash;to the very doors of
+the Western world; that the living and unchanged tradition of the Empire
+passed away only with the last of the Doges. Only on the tomb of Manin
+could men write truthfully, "Hic jacet ultimus Romanorum."</p>
+
+<p>It is this simple continuance of the old social organization which the
+barbarians elsewhere overthrew that explains the peculiar character of
+the Venetian patriciate. In all other countries of the West the new
+feudal aristocracy sprang from the Teutonic invaders. In Italy itself
+the nobles were descendants of Lombard conquerors, or of the barons who
+followed Emperor after Emperor across the Alps. Even when their names
+and characters had alike been moulded into Southern form, the "Seven
+Houses" of Pisa boasted of their descent from the seven barons of
+Emperor <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>Otto. But the older genealogies of the senators whose names
+stood written in the Golden Book of Venice ran, truly or falsely, not to
+Teutonic but to Roman origins. The Participazii, the Dandoli, the
+Falieri, the Foscari, told of the flight of their Roman fathers before
+the barbarian sword from Pavia, Gaeta, Fano, Messina. Every quarter of
+Italy had given its exiles, but above all the coast round the head of
+the Gulf from Ravenna to Trieste. It was especially a flight and
+settlement of nobles. As soon as the barbaric hordes had swept away to
+the South the farmer or the peasant would creep back to his fields and
+his cabin and submit to the German master whom the conquest had left
+behind it. But the patrician had filled too great a place in the old
+social order to stoop easily to the new. He remained camped as before in
+his island-refuge, among a crowd of dependents, his fishermen, his
+dock-labourers. Throughout the long ages which followed, this original
+form of Venetian society remained unchanged. The populace of dependents
+never grew into a people. To the last fisherman and gondolier clung to
+the great houses of which they were the clients, as the fishers of
+Torcello had clung to the great nobles of Altinum. No difference of
+tradition or language or blood parted <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>them. Tradition, on the contrary,
+bound them together. No democratic agitator could appeal from the
+present to the past, as Rienzi invoked the memories of the Tribunate
+against the feudal tyranny of the Colonnas. In Venice the past and
+present were one. The patrician of Venice simply governed the State as
+his fathers, the curials of Padua or Aquileia, had governed the State
+ten centuries before him.</p>
+
+<p>It is this unity of Venetian society which makes Venetian history so
+unlike the history of other Italian towns, and to which Venice owes the
+peculiar picturesqueness and brightness which charms us still in its
+decay. Elsewhere the history of medi&aelig;val Italy sprang from the
+difference of race and tradition between conquered and conquerors,
+between Lombard noble and Italian serf. The communal revolt of the
+twelfth century, the democratic constitutions of Milan or of Bologna,
+were in effect a rising of race against race, the awakening of a new
+people in the effort to throw off the yoke of the stranger. The huge
+embattled piles which flung their dark shadows over the streets of
+Florence tell of the ceaseless war between baronage and people. The
+famous penalty by which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>some of the democratic communes condemned a
+recreant cobbler or tinker to "descend" as his worst punishment "into
+the order of the <i>noblesse</i>," tells of the hate and issue of the
+struggle between them. But no trace of struggle or of hate breaks the
+annals of Venice. There is no people, no democratic Broletto, no Hall of
+the Commune. And as there was no "people," so in the medi&aelig;val sense of
+the word there was no "baronage." The nobles of Venice were not Lombard
+barons but Roman patricians, untouched by feudal traditions or by the
+strong instinct of personal independence which created feudalism. The
+shadow of the Empire is always over them, they look for greatness not to
+independent power or strife, but to joint co-operation in the government
+of the State. Their instinct is administrative, they shrink from
+disorder as from a barbaric thing, they are citizens, and nobles only
+because they are citizens. Of this political attitude of its patricians
+Venice is itself the type. The palaces of Torcello or Rialto were
+houses, not of war, but of peace; no dark masses of tower and wall, but
+bright with marbles and frescoes, and broken with arcades of fretted
+masonry.</p>
+
+<p>Venice, in a word, to her very close was a city of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>nobles, the one
+place in the modern world where the old senatorial houses of the fifth
+century lived and ruled as of old. But it was a city of Roman nobles.
+Like the Teutonic passion for war the Teutonic scorn of commerce was
+strange and unknown to the curial houses of the Italian municipalities,
+as it had been strange and unknown to the greatest houses of Rome. The
+Senator of Padua or Aquileia, of Concordia, Altinum, or Ravenna, had
+always been a merchant, and in his new refuge he remained a merchant
+still. Venice was no "crowd of poor fishermen," as it has been sometimes
+described, who were gradually drawn to wider ventures and a larger
+commerce. The port of Aquileia had long been the emporium of a trade
+which reached northwards to the Danube and eastward to Byzantium. What
+the Roman merchants of Venetia had been at Aquileia they remained at
+Grado. The commerce of Altinum simply transferred itself to Torcello.
+The Paduan merchants passed to their old port of Rialto. Vague and
+rhetorical as is the letter of Cassiodorus, it shows how keen was the
+mercantile activity of the State from its beginning. Nothing could be
+more natural, more continuous in its historical developement; nothing
+was more startling, more <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>incomprehensible to the new world which had
+grown up in German moulds. The nobles of Henry VIII.'s Court could not
+restrain their sneer at "the fishermen of Venice," the stately
+patricians who could look back from merchant-noble to merchant-noble
+through ages when the mushroom houses of England were unheard of. Only
+the genius of Shakspere seized the grandeur of a social organization
+which was still one with that of Rome and Athens and Tyre. The merchant
+of Venice is with him "a royal merchant." His "argosies o'ertop the
+petty traffickers." At the moment when feudalism was about to vanish
+away, the poet comprehended the grandeur of that commerce which it
+scorned and the grandeur of the one State which had carried the nobler
+classic tradition across ages of brutality and ignorance. The great
+commercial State, whose merchants are nobles, whose nobles are Romans,
+rises in all its majesty before us in the 'Merchant of Venice.'</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr style="width: 45%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.</h2>
+<br /><a name="VENICE_AND_TINTORETTO" id="VENICE_AND_TINTORETTO"></a>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>II.</h2>
+
+<h2>VENICE AND TINTORETTO.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The fall of Venice dates from the League of Cambray, but her victory
+over the crowd of her assailants was followed by half a century of peace
+and glory such as she had never known. Her losses on the mainland were
+in reality a gain, enforcing as they did the cessation of that policy of
+Italian aggression which had eaten like a canker into the resources of
+the State and drawn her from her natural career of commerce and
+aggrandizement on the sea. If the political power of Venice became less,
+her political influence grew greater than ever. The statesmen of France,
+of England, and of Germany studied in the cool, grave school of her
+Senate. We need only turn to 'Othello' to find reflected the universal
+reverence for the wisdom of her policy and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>the order of her streets. No
+policy, however wise, could indeed avert her fall. The Turkish
+occupation of Egypt and the Portuguese discovery of a sea route round
+the Cape of Good Hope were destined to rob the Republic of that trade
+with the East which was the life-blood of its commerce. But, though the
+blow was already dealt, its effects were for a time hardly discernible.
+On the contrary, the accumulated wealth of centuries poured itself out
+in an almost riotous prodigality. A new Venice, a Venice of loftier
+palaces, of statelier colonnades, rose under Palladio and Sansovino
+along the line of its canals. In the deep peace of the sixteenth
+century, a peace unbroken even by religious struggles (for Venice was
+the one State exempt from the struggle of the Reformation), literature
+and art won their highest triumphs. The press of the Aldi gave for the
+first time the masterpieces of Greek poetry to Europe. The novels of
+Venice furnished plots for our own drama, and became the origin of
+modern fiction. Painting reached its loftiest height in Giorgione,
+Titian, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest of colourists sprang from a world of colour. Faded, ruined
+as the city is now, the frescoes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>of Giorgione swept from its palace
+fronts by the sea-wind, its very gondoliers bare and ragged, the glory
+of its sunsets alone remains vivid as of old. But it is not difficult to
+restore the many-hued Venice out of which its painters sprang. There are
+two pictures by Carpaccio in the Accademia which bring back vividly its
+physical aspect. The scene of the first, the 'Miracle of the Patriarch
+of Grado' as it is called, lies on the Grand Canal immediately in front
+of the Rialto. It is the hour of sunset, and darker-edged clouds are
+beginning to fleck the golden haze of the west which still arches over
+the broken sky-line, roof and turret and bell-tower and chimneys of
+strange fashion with quaint conical tops. The canal lies dusk in the
+eventide, but the dark surface throws into relief a crowd of gondolas,
+and the lithe, glowing figures of their gondoliers. The boats themselves
+are long and narrow as now, but without the indented prora which has
+become universal; the sumptuary law of the Republic has not yet robbed
+them of colour, and instead of the present "coffin" we see canopies of
+gaily-hued stuffs supported on four light pillars. The gondolier himself
+is commonly tricked out in almost fantastic finery; red cap with long
+golden curls <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>flowing down over the silken doublet, slashed hose, the
+light dress displaying those graceful attitudes into which the rower
+naturally falls. On the left side of the canal its white marble steps
+are crowded with figures of the nobler Venetian life; a black robe here
+or there breaking the gay variety of golden and purple and red and blue,
+while in the balcony above a white group of clergy, with golden
+candlesticks towering overhead, are gathered round the d&aelig;moniac whose
+cure forms the subject of the picture.</p>
+
+<p>But the most noteworthy point in it is the light it throws on the
+architectural aspect of Venice at the close of the fifteenth century. On
+the right the houses are wholly of medi&aelig;val type, the flat
+marble-sheeted fronts pierced with trefoil-headed lights; one of them
+splendid with painted arabesques dipping at its base into the very
+waters of the canal and mounting up to enwreathe in intricate patterns
+the very chimney of the roof. The left is filled by a palace of the
+early Renascence, but the change of architectural style, though it has
+modified the tone and extent of colour, is far from dismissing it
+altogether. The flat pilasters which support the round arches of its
+base are sheeted <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>with a delicately-tinged marble; the flower-work of
+their capitals and the mask enclosed within it are gilded like the
+continuous billet moulding which runs round in the hollow of each arch,
+while the spandrils are filled in with richer and darker marbles, each
+broken with a central medallion of gold. The use of gold indeed seems a
+"note" of the colouring of the early Renascence; a broad band of gold
+wreathes the two rolls beneath and above the cornice, and lozenges of
+gold light up the bases of the light pillars in the colonnade above. In
+another picture of Carpaccio, the 'Dismissal of the Ambassadors,' one
+sees the same principles of colouring extended to the treatment of
+interiors. The effect is obtained partly by the contrast of the lighter
+marbles with those of deeper colour or with porphyry, partly by the
+contrast of both with gold. Everywhere, whether in the earlier buildings
+of medi&aelig;val art or in the later efforts of the Renascence, Venice seemed
+to clothe itself in robes of Oriental splendour, and to pour over
+Western art before its fall the wealth and gorgeousness of the East.</p>
+
+<p>Of the four artist-figures who&mdash;in the tradition of Tintoret's
+picture&mdash;support this "Golden Calf" of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>Venice, Tintoret himself is the
+one specially Venetian. Giorgione was of Castel Franco; Titian came from
+the mountains of Cadore; Paolo from Verona. But Jacopo Robusti, the
+"little dyer," the Tintoretto, was born, lived, and died in Venice. His
+works, rare elsewhere, crowd its churches, its palaces, its galleries.
+Its greatest art-building is the shrine of his faith. The school of San
+Rocco has rightly been styled by Mr. Ruskin "one of the three most
+precious buildings in the world"; it is the one spot where all is
+Tintoret. Few contrasts are at first sight more striking than the
+contrast between the building of the Renascence which contains his forty
+masterpieces and the great medi&aelig;val church of the Frari which stands
+beside it. But a certain oneness after all links the two buildings
+together. The Friars had burst on the caste spirit of the middle age,
+its mere classification of brute force, with the bold recognition of
+human equality which ended in the socialism of Wyclif and the Lollards.
+Tintoret found himself facing a new caste-spirit in the Renascence, a
+classification of mankind founded on &aelig;sthetic refinement and
+intellectual power; and it is hard not to see in the greatest of his
+works a protest as energetic as theirs for the common rights of men.
+Into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>the grandeur of the Venice about him, her fame, her wealth, her
+splendour, none could enter more vividly. He rises to his best painting,
+as Mr. Ruskin has observed, when his subjects are noble&mdash;doges, saints,
+priests, senators clad in purple and jewels and gold. But Tintoret is
+never quite Veronese. He cannot be untrue to beauty, and the pomps and
+glories of earth are beautiful to him; but there is a beauty too in
+earth, in man himself. The brown half-naked gondolier lies stretched on
+the marble steps which the Doge in one of his finest pictures has
+ascended. It is as if he had stripped off the stately robe and the ducal
+cap, and shown the soul of Venice in the bare child of the lagoons. The
+"want of dignity" which some have censured in his scenes from the
+Gospels is in them just as it is in the Gospels themselves. Here, as
+there, the poetry lies in the strange, unearthly mingling of the
+commonest human life with the sublimest divine. In his 'Last Supper,' in
+San Giorgio Maggiore, the apostles are peasants; the low, mean life of
+the people is there, but hushed and transfigured by the tall standing
+figure of the Master who bends to give bread to the disciple by His
+side. And above and around crowd in the legions of heaven, cherubim and
+seraphim <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>mingling their radiance with the purer radiance from the halo
+of their Lord; while amid all this conflict of celestial light the
+twinkling candles upon the board burn on, and the damsel who enters
+bearing food, bathed as she is in the very glory of heaven, is busy,
+unconscious&mdash;a serving-maid, and nothing more.</p>
+
+<p>The older painters had seen something undivine in man; the colossal
+mosaic, the tall unwomanly Madonna, expressed the sense of the Byzantine
+artist that to be divine was to be unhuman. The Renascence, with little
+faith in God, had faith in man, but only in the might and beauty and
+knowledge of man. With Tintoret the common life of man is ever one with
+heaven. This was the faith which he flung on "acres of canvas" as
+ungrudgingly as apostle ever did, toiling and living as apostles lived
+and toiled. This was the faith he found in Old Testament and New, in
+saintly legend or in national history. In the 'Annunciation' at San
+Rocco a great bow of angels streaming either way from the ethereal Dove
+sweeps into a ruined hut, a few mean chairs its only furniture, the mean
+plaster dropping from the bare brick pilasters; without, Joseph at work
+unheeding, amid piles of worthless timber <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>flung here and there. So in
+the 'Adoration of the Magi' the mother wonders with a peasant's wonder
+at the jewels and gold. Again, the 'Massacre of the Innocents' is one
+wild, horror-driven rush of pure motherhood, reckless of all in its
+clutch at its babe. So in the splendour of his 'Circumcision' it is from
+the naked child that the light streams on the High Priest's brow, on the
+mighty robe of purple and gold held up by stately forms like a vast
+banner behind him. The peasant mother to whose poorest hut that first
+stir of child-life has brought a vision of angels, who has marvelled at
+the wealth of precious gifts which a babe brings to her breast, who has
+felt the sword piercing her own bosom also as danger threatened it, on
+whose mean world her child has flung a glory brighter than glory of
+earth, is the truest critic of Tintoret.</p>
+
+<p>What Shakespere was to the national history of England in his great
+series of historic dramas, his contemporary Tintoret was to the history
+of Venice. It was perhaps from an unconscious sense that her annals were
+really closed that the Republic began to write her history and her
+exploits in the series of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>paintings which covers the walls of the Ducal
+Palace. Her apotheosis is like that of the Roman Emperors; it is when
+death has fallen upon her that her artists raise her into a divine form,
+throned amid heavenly clouds and crowned by angel hands with the laurel
+wreath of victory. It is no longer St. Mark who watches over Venice, it
+is Venice herself who bends from heaven to bless boatman and senator. In
+the divine figure of the Republic with which Tintoret filled the central
+cartoon of the Great Hall every Venetian felt himself incarnate. His
+figure of 'Venice' in the Senate Hall is yet nobler; the blue sea-depths
+are cleft open, and strange ocean-shapes wave their homage and yet more
+unearthly forms dart up with tribute of coral and pearls to the feet of
+the Sea Queen as she sits in the silken state of the time with the
+divine halo around her. But if from this picture in the roof the eye
+falls suddenly on the fresco which fills the close of the room, we can
+hardly help reading the deeper comment of Tintoret on the glory of the
+State. The Sala del Consiglio is the very heart of Venice. In the double
+row of plain seats running round it sat her nobles; on the raised dais
+at the end, surrounded by the graver senators, sat her duke. One long
+fresco occupies the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>whole wall above the ducal seat; in the background
+the blue waters of the Lagoon with the towers and domes of Venice rising
+from them; around a framework of six bending saints; in front two
+kneeling Doges in full ducal robes with a black curtain of clouds
+between them. The clouds roll back to reveal a mighty glory, and in the
+heart of it the livid figure of a dead Christ taken from the cross. Not
+one eye of all the nobles gathered in council could have lifted itself
+from the figure of the Doge without falling on the figure of the dead
+Christ. Strange as the conception is it is hard to believe that in a
+mind so peculiarly symbolical as that of Tintoret the contrast could
+have been without a definite meaning. And if this be so, it is a meaning
+that one can hardly fail to read in the history of the time. The brief
+interval of peace and glory had passed away ere Tintoret's brush had
+ceased to toil. The victory of Lepanto had only gilded that disgraceful
+submission to the Turk which preluded the disastrous struggle in which
+her richest possessions were to be wrested from the Republic. The
+terrible plague of 1576 had carried off Titian. Twelve years after
+Titian Paul Veronese passed away. Tintoret, born almost at its opening,
+lingered till the very close of the century to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>see Venice sinking into
+powerlessness and infamy and decay. May not the figure of the dead
+Christ be the old man's protest against a pride in which all true
+nobleness and effort had ceased to live, and which was hurrying to so
+shameful a fall?</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>
+<h2>THE DISTRICT VISITOR.</h2>
+<br /><a name="THE_DISTRICT_VISITOR" id="THE_DISTRICT_VISITOR"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>THE DISTRICT VISITOR.</h2>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>It would be hard to define exactly the office and duties of the District
+Visitor. Historically she is the direct result of the Evangelical
+movement which marked the beginning of this century; the descendant of
+the "devout women not a few" who played, like Hannah More, the part of
+mothers in Israel to the Simeons and Wilberforces of the time. But the
+mere tract-distributor of fifty years ago has grown into a parochial and
+ecclesiastical force of far greater magnitude. The District Visitor of
+to-day is parson and almoner in one; the parochial censor of popular
+morals, the parochial instructor in domestic economy. She claims the
+same right as the vicar to knock at every door and obtain admission into
+every house. But once within it her scope of action is far larger than
+the parson's. To the spiritual influence of the tract or "the chapter"
+she adds the more secular and effective <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>power of the bread-ticket. "The
+way to the heart of the poor," as she pithily puts it, "lies through
+their stomachs." Her religious exhortations are backed by scoldings and
+fussiness. She is eloquent upon rags and tatters, and severe upon dirty
+floors. She flings open the window and lectures her flock on the
+advantages of fresh air. She hurries little Johnny off to school and
+gets Sally out to service. She has a keen nose for drains and a passion
+for clean hands and faces. What worries her most is the fatalism and
+improvidence of the poor. She is full of exhortations to "lay by" for
+the rainy day, and seductive in her praises of the Penny Bank. The whole
+life of the family falls within her supervision. She knows the wages of
+the husband and the occasional jobs of the wife. She inquires what there
+is for dinner and gives wise counsels on economical cookery. She has her
+theory as to the hour when children ought to be in bed, and fetches in
+Tommy, much weeping, from the last mud-pie of sunset. Only "the master"
+himself lies outside of her rule. Between the husband and the District
+Visitor there exists a sort of armed neutrality. Her visits are
+generally paid when he is at work. If she arrives when he happens to be
+at home, he calls for "missus," <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>and retires sheepishly to the 'Blue
+Boar.' The energetic Dorcas who fixes him in a corner gets little for
+her pains. He "supposes" that "missus" knows where and when the children
+go to school, and that "missus" may some day or other be induced to go
+to church. But the theory of the British labourer is that with his home
+or his family, their religion or their education, he has nothing
+personally to do. And so he has nothing to do with the District Visitor.
+His only demand is that she should let him alone, and the wise District
+Visitor soon learns, as parson and curate have long learnt, to let him
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>Like theirs, her work lies with wife and children, and as we have seen
+it is of far wider scope even here than the work of the clergy. But,
+fussy and dictatorial as she is, the District Visitor is as a rule more
+popular than the clergyman. In the first place, the parson is only doing
+a duty he is bound to do while the District Visitor is a volunteer. The
+parson, as the poor roughly say, is paid for it. Again, however
+simple-hearted and courteous he may be, he never gets very close home to
+the poor. Their life is not his life, nor their ways his ways. They do
+not understand <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>his refinement, his delicacy about interference, his
+gentlemanly reticence, his abhorrence of gossip and scandal. They are
+accustomed to be ordered about, to rough words, to gossip over their
+neighbours. And so the District Visitor is "more in their way," as they
+tell her. She is profuse of questions, routing out a thousand little
+details that no parson would ever know. She has little of the sensitive
+pride that hinders the vicar from listening to scandal, or of the manly
+objection to "telling tales" which hurries him out of the room when
+neighbour brings charges against neighbour. She is entirely unaffected
+by his scruples against interference with the conscience or religion of
+the poor. "Where do you go to church?" and "Why don't you go to church?"
+are her first stock questions in her cross-examination of every family.
+Her exhortations at the sick-bed have a somewhat startling
+peremptoriness about them. We can hardly wonder at the wish of a poor
+patient that she were a rich one, because then she could "die in peace,
+and have nobody to come in and pray over her." What irritates the
+District Visitor in cases where she has bestowed special religious
+attention is that people when so effectively prepared for death "won't
+die." But hard, practical action <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>such as this does not jostle against
+the feelings of the poor as it would against our own. Women especially
+forgive all because the District Visitor listens as well as talks. They
+could no more pour out their little budget of domestic troubles to the
+parson than to a being from another world. But the District Visitor is
+the recipient of all. The washerwoman stops her mangle to talk about the
+hard times and the rise of a halfpenny on the loaf. The matron next door
+turns up her sleeve to show the bruise her husband bestowed on her on
+his return from the 'Chequers.' She enters largely and minutely into the
+merits and defects of her partner's character, and protests with a
+subtle discrimination that "he's a good father when he ain't bothered
+with the children, and a good husband when he's off the drink." The old
+widow down the lane is waiting for "the lady" to write a letter for her
+to her son in Australia, and to see the "pictur," the cheap photograph
+of the grandchildren she has never seen or will see, that John has sent
+home. A girl home from her "place" wants the District Visitor to
+intercede with her mistress, and listens in all humility to a lecture on
+her giddiness and love of finery.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>The society in fact of the little alley is very much held together by
+the District Visitor. In her love of goody gossip she fulfils the office
+which in an Italian town is filled by the barber. She retails
+tittle-tattle for the highest ends. She relates Mrs. A.'s misdemeanour
+for the edification and correction of Mrs. B. She has the true version
+of the quarrel between Smith and his employer. She is the one person to
+whom the lane looks for accurate information as to the domestic
+relations of the two Browns, whose quarrels are the scandal of the
+neighbourhood. Her influence in fact over the poor is a strange mixture
+of good and evil, of real benevolence with an interference that saps all
+sense of self-respect, of real sympathy and womanly feeling with a good
+deal of womanly meddling, curiosity, and babble.</p>
+
+<p>But her influence on the parish at large is a far more delicate
+question. To the outer world a parish seems a sheer despotism. The
+parson prays, preaches, changes the order of service, distributes the
+parochial charities at his simple discretion. One of the great cries of
+the Church reformer is generally for the substitution of some
+constitutional system, some <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>congregational council, some lay
+co-operation, for this clerical tyranny. But no one in fact feels the
+narrow limits of his power more keenly than the parson himself. As the
+old French monarchy was a despotism tempered by epigrams, so the rule of
+a parish is a despotism tempered by parochial traditions, by the
+observation of neighbouring clergymen, by the suggestions of the squire,
+by the opposition of churchwardens, by the hints and regrets of
+"Constant Attendants," by the state of the pew-letting or the ups and
+downs of the offertory, by the influences of local opinion, by the
+censorship of the District Visitor. What the assembly of his "elders" is
+to a Scotch minister, the District Visitors' meeting is to the English
+clergyman. He has to prove in the face of a standing jealousy that his
+alms have been equally distributed between district and district. His
+selection of tracts is freely criticised. Mrs. A. regrets that her poor
+people have seen so little of their vicar lately. Mrs. B. is sorry to
+report the failure of her attempts to get her sheep to church, in face
+of the new Ritualistic developement, the processions, and the surplices.
+Mrs. C., whose forte is education, declines any longer to induce mothers
+to send their children to "such" a master. The curates <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>shudder as Mrs.
+D. laments their frequent absence from the Penny Bank, not that they can
+do any good there, but "we are always glad of the presence and sympathy
+of our clergy." The curates promise amendment of life. The vicar engages
+to look out for another schoolmaster, and be more diligent in his
+attentions to Muck Lane. A surreptitious supply of extra tickets to the
+ultra-Protestant appeases for the moment her wrath against the choir
+surplices. But the occasional screw of the monthly meeting is as nothing
+to the daily pressure applied by the individual District Visitor. At the
+bottom of every alley the vicar runs up against a parochial censor. The
+"five minutes' conversation" which the District Visitor expects as the
+reward of her benevolence becomes a perpetual trickle of advice,
+remonstrance, and even reproof. A strong-minded parson of course soon
+makes himself master of his District Visitors, but the ordinary vicar
+generally feels that his District Visitors are masters of him. The harm
+that comes of this feminine despotism is the feminine impress it leaves
+on the whole aspect of the parish. Manly preaching disappears before the
+disappointed faces the preacher encounters on Monday. A policy of
+expedients and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>evasions takes the place of any straightforward attempt
+to meet or denounce local evils. The vicar's time and energy are
+frittered away on a thousand little jealousies and envyings, his temper
+is tried in humouring one person and conciliating another, he learns to
+be cautious and reserved and diplomatic, to drop hints and suggestions,
+to become in a word the first District Visitor of his parish. He flies
+to his wife for protection, and finds in her the most effective buffer
+against parochial collisions. Greek meets Greek when the vicar's wife
+meets the District Visitor. But the vicar himself sinks into a parochial
+nobody, a being as sacred and as powerless as the Lama of Thibet.</p>
+
+<p>It was hardly to be expected that the progress of religion and
+charitable feeling should fail to raise up formidable rivals to the
+District Visitor. To the more ecclesiastical mind she is hardly
+ecclesiastical enough for the prominent part she claims in the parochial
+system. Her lace and Parisian bonnet are an abomination. She has a trick
+of being terribly Protestant, and her Protestantism is somewhat
+dictatorial. On the other hand, to the energetic organizer whose ideal
+of a parish is a well-oiled machine turning out piety <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>and charity
+without hitches or friction she is simply a parochial impediment. She
+has no system. Her visiting days are determined by somewhat eccentric
+considerations. Her almsgiving is regulated by no principle whatever.
+She carries silly likes and dislikes into her work among the poor. She
+rustles into wrath at any attempt to introduce order into her efforts,
+and regards it as a piece of ungrateful interference. She is always
+ready with threats of resignation, with petty suspicions of
+ill-treatment, with jealousies of her fellow-workers. We can hardly
+wonder that in ecclesiastical quarters she is retreating before the
+Sister of Mercy, while in the more organized parishes she is being
+superseded by the Deaconess. The Deaconess has nothing but contempt for
+the mere "volunteer" movement in charity. She has a strong sense of
+order and discipline, and a hatred of "francs-tireurs." Above all she is
+a woman of business. She is without home or child, and her time and
+labour are arranged with military precision. She has her theory of the
+poor and of what can be done for the poor, and she rides her hobby from
+morning to night with an equal contempt for the sentimental almsgiving
+of the District Visitor and for the warnings of the political economist.
+No <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>doubt an amazing deal of good is done, but it is done in a
+methodical fashion that is a little trying to ordinary flesh and blood.
+The parish is elaborately tabulated. The poor are grouped and ticketed.
+The charitable agencies of the parish are put in connection with the
+hospital and the workhouse. This case is referred to the dispensary,
+that to the overseer. The Deaconess prides herself on not being "taken
+in." The washerwoman finds that her "outdoor allowance" has been
+ascertained and set off against her share in the distribution of alms.
+The pious old woman who has played off the charity of the church against
+the charity of the chapel is struck off the list. The miserable creature
+who drags out existence on a bit of bread and a cup of tea is kindly but
+firmly advised to try "the house." Nothing can be wiser, nothing more
+really beneficial to the poor, than the work of the Deaconess, but it is
+a little dry and mechanical. The ill-used wife of the drunkard sighs
+after the garrulous sympathy of the District Visitor. The old gossip and
+dawdle have disappeared from the parochial charity, but with them has
+gone a good deal of the social contact, the sympathy of rich with poor,
+in which its chief virtue lay. The very vicar sighs after a little
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>human imperfection and irregularity as he reads the list of sick cases
+"to be visited this morning."</p>
+
+<p>The one lingering touch of feminine weakness in the Deaconess comes out
+in her relations with the clergy. The Deaconess is not a "Sister"&mdash;she
+is most precise in enforcing the distinction&mdash;but she is a woman with a
+difference. She has not retired from the world, but a faint flavour of
+the nun hangs about her. She has left behind all thought of coquetry,
+but she prefers to work with a married clergyman. Her delicacy can just
+endure a celibate curate, but it shrinks aghast from a bachelor
+incumbent. We know a case where a bishop, anxious to retain a Deaconess
+in a poor parish, was privately informed that her stay would depend on
+the appointment of a married clergyman to the vacant living. On the
+other hand, a married clergyman is as great a trial to the Sister of
+Mercy as an unmarried one to the Deaconess. The "Sister" idealizes the
+priesthood as she idealizes the poor. Their poverty is a misfortune;
+their improvidence an act of faith; their superstition the last ray of
+poetic religion lingering in this world of scepticism and commonplace.
+All the regularity and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>sense of order which exists in the Sister's mind
+is concentrated on her own life in the sisterhood; she is punctilious
+about her "hours," and lives in a perpetual tinkle of little bells. But
+in her work among the poor she revolts from system or organization. She
+hates the workhouse. She looks upon a guardian or an overseer as an
+oppressor of the poor. She regards theories of pauperism as something
+very wicked and irreligious, and lavishes her alms with a perfect faith
+that good must come of it. In a word, she is absolutely unwise, but
+there is a poetry in her unwisdom that contrasts strangely with the
+sensible prose of the Deaconess. While the one enters in her book of
+statistics the number of uneducated children, the other is trotting
+along the street with little Tommy in one hand and little Polly in the
+other on their way to the school. She has washed their faces and tidied
+their hair, and believes she has done service to little angels. Tommy
+and Polly are very far from being angels, but both sides are the happier
+for the romantic hypothesis. There is a good deal of romance and
+sentiment in the Sister's view of her work among the poor; but it is a
+romance that nerves her to a certain grandeur of soul. A London
+clergyman in whose district the black fever had broken out could get no
+nurses among the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span>panic-stricken neighbours. He telegraphed to a "Home,"
+and next morning he found a ladylike girl on her knees on the floor of
+the infected house, scrubbing, cleaning, putting the worn-out mother to
+bed, hushing the children, nursing quietly and thoroughly as few nurses
+could do. The fever was beaten, and the little heroine went off at the
+call of another telegram to charge another battery of death. It is this
+chivalrous poetic side that atones for the many follies of Sisterhoods;
+for the pauperism they introduce among the poor, the cliqueism of their
+inner life, the absurdities of their "holy obedience." Each of these
+charitable agencies in fact has its work to do, and does it in its own
+way. On paper there can be no doubt that the Sister of Mercy is the more
+attractive figure of the three. The incumbent of a heavy parish will
+probably turn with a smile to the more methodical labours of the
+Deaconess. But those who shrink alike from the idealism of one and the
+system of the other, who feel that the poor are neither angels nor
+wheels in a machine, and that the chief work to be done among them is
+the diffusion of kindly feeling and the drawing of class nearer to
+class, will probably prefer to either the old-fashioned District
+Visitor.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD.</h2>
+<br /><a name="THE_EARLY_HISTORY_OF_OXFORD" id="THE_EARLY_HISTORY_OF_OXFORD"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>To most Oxford men, indeed to the common visitor of Oxford, the town
+seems a mere offshoot of the University. Its appearance is altogether
+modern; it presents hardly any monument that can vie in antiquity with
+the venerable fronts of colleges and halls. An isolated church here and
+there tells a different tale; but the largest of its parish churches is
+best known as the church of the University, and the church of St.
+Frideswide, which might suggest even to a careless observer some idea of
+the town's greatness before University life began, is known to most
+visitors simply as Christchurch Chapel. In all outer seeming Oxford
+appears a mere assemblage of indifferent streets that have grown out of
+the needs of the University, and this impression is heightened by its
+commercial unimportance. The town has no manufacture or trade. It is not
+even, like Cambridge, a great agricultural <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>centre. Whatever importance
+it derived from its position on the Thames has been done away with by
+the almost total cessation of river navigation. Its very soil is in
+large measure in academical hands. As a municipality it seems to exist
+only by grace or usurpation of prior University privileges. It is not
+long since Oxford gained control over its own markets or its own police.
+The peace of the town is still but partially in the hands of its
+magistrates, and the riotous student is amenable only to university
+jurisdiction. Within the memory of living men the chief magistrate of
+the city on his entrance into office was bound to swear in a humiliating
+ceremony not to violate the privileges of the great academical body
+which reigned supreme within its walls.</p>
+
+<p>Historically the very reverse of all this is really the case. So far is
+the University from being older than the city that Oxford had already
+seen five centuries of borough life before a student appeared within its
+streets. Instead of its prosperity being derived from its connection
+with the University, that connection has probably been its commercial
+ruin. The gradual subjection both of markets and trade to the arbitrary
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>control of an ecclesiastical corporation was inevitably followed by
+their extinction. The University found Oxford a busy, prosperous
+borough, and reduced it to a cluster of lodging-houses. It found it
+among the first of English municipalities, and it so utterly crushed its
+freedom that the recovery of some of the commonest rights of
+self-government has only been brought about by recent legislation.
+Instead of the Mayor being a dependent on Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor,
+Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor have simply usurped the far older
+authority of the Mayor.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the struggle which ended in this usurpation is one of the
+most interesting in our municipal annals, and it is one which has left
+its mark not on the town only but on the very constitution and character
+of the conquering University. But to understand the struggle, we must
+first know something of the town itself. At the earliest moment, then,
+when its academic history can be said to open, at the arrival of the
+legist Vacarius in the reign of Stephen, Oxford stood in the first rank
+of English municipalities. In spite of antiquarian fancies, it is
+certain that no town had arisen on its site for centuries after the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>departure of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. The little
+monastery of St. Frideswide rises in the turmoil of the eighth century
+only to fade out of sight again without giving us a glimpse of the
+borough which gathered probably beneath its walls. The first definite
+evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English
+Chronicle which records its seizure by the successor of &AElig;lfred. But
+though the form of this entry shows the town to have been already
+considerable, we hear nothing more of it till the last terrible wrestle
+of England with the Dane, when its position on the borders of the
+Mercian and West-Saxon realms seems for the moment to have given it a
+political importance under &AElig;thelred and Cnut strikingly analogous to
+that which it acquired in the Great Rebellion. Of the life of its
+burgesses in this earlier period of Oxford life we know little or
+nothing. The names of its parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred,
+and St. Edmund, show how early church after church gathered round the
+earlier church of St. Martin. The minster of St. Frideswide, in becoming
+the later cathedral, has brought down to our own times the memory of the
+ecclesiastical origins to which the little borough owed its existence.
+But the men themselves are dim to us. Their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>town-meeting, their
+Portmannimote, still lives in shadowy fashion as the Freeman's Common
+Hall; their town-mead is still Port-meadow. But it is only by later
+charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage
+to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or
+judging and law-making in their busting, their merchant guild regulating
+trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or honey or
+marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats
+floating down the Thames towards London and paying the toll of a hundred
+herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon by the way.</p>
+
+<p>Of the conquest of Oxford by William the Norman we know nothing, though
+the number of its houses marked "waste" in the Survey seems to point to
+a desperate resistance. But the ruin was soon repaired. No city better
+illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of its new
+masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion
+of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. The
+architectural glory of the town in fact dates from the settlement of the
+Norman within its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span>walls. To the west of the town rose one of the
+stateliest of English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly
+less stately Abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the
+Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St. Frideswide
+reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathedral: the
+piety of the Norman earls rebuilt almost all the parish churches of the
+city and founded within their new castle walls the church of the canons
+of St. George.</p>
+
+<p>But Oxford does more than illustrate this outburst of industrial effort;
+it does something towards explaining its cause. The most characteristic
+result of the Conquest was planted in the very heart of the town in the
+settlement of the Jew. Here as elsewhere the Jewry was a town within a
+town, with its own language, its own religion and law, its peculiar
+commerce, its peculiar dress. The policy of our foreign kings secured
+each Hebrew settlement from the common taxation, the common justice, the
+common obligations of Englishmen. No city bailiff could penetrate into
+the square of little streets which lay behind the present Town-hall; the
+Church itself was powerless against the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>synagogue that rose in haughty
+rivalry beside the cloister of St. Frideswide. The picture which Scott
+has given us in 'Ivanhoe' of Aaron of York, timid, silent, crouching
+under oppression, accurately as it represents our modern notions of the
+position of his race during the Middle Ages, is far from being borne out
+by historical fact. In England at least the attitude of the Jew is
+almost to the end an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. His
+extortion was sheltered from the common law. His bonds were kept under
+the royal seal. A royal commission visited with heavy penalties any
+outbreak of violence against these "chattels" of the king. The thunders
+of the Church broke vainly on the yellow gaberdine of the Jew. In a
+well-known story of Eadmer's the Red King actually forbids the
+conversion of a Jew to the Christian faith: it was a poor exchange which
+would have robbed him of a valuable property and given him only a
+subject.</p>
+
+<p>At Oxford the attitude of the Jewry towards the national religion showed
+a marked consciousness of this royal protection. Prior Philip of St.
+Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew with the odd name of
+"Deus-cum-crescat," who stood at his door as the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>procession of the
+saint passed by, mocking at the miracles wrought at her shrine. Halting
+and then walking firmly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as if
+with palsy and then flinging open his fingers, the mocking Jew claimed
+gifts and oblations from the crowd who flocked to St. Frideswide's on
+the ground that such recoveries of limb and strength were quite as real
+as any Frideswide had wrought. But though sickness and death, in the
+prior's story, avenge the insult to his shrine, no earthly power,
+ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to meddle with
+"Deus-cum-crescat." The feud between the priory and the Jewry went on
+unchecked for a century more to culminate in a daring act of fanaticism
+on the Ascension-day of 1268. As the usual procession of scholars and
+citizens returned from St. Frideswide's, a Jew suddenly burst from the
+group of his comrades in front of the synagogue, and snatching the
+crucifix from its bearer trod it under foot. But even in presence of
+such an outrage as this the terror of the Crown shielded the Jewry from
+any burst of popular indignation. The sentence of the king condemned the
+Jews of Oxford to erect a cross of marble on the spot where the crime
+was committed; but even this was remitted in part, and a less offensive
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>place was allotted for the cross in an open plot by Merton College.</p>
+
+<p>With the Jewish settlement began the cultivation of physical science in
+Oxford. The Hebrew instruction, the Hebrew books which he found among
+its rabbis, were the means by which Roger Bacon penetrated to the older
+world of material research. A medical school which we find established
+there and in high repute during the twelfth century can hardly have been
+other than Jewish: in the operation for the stone, which one of the
+stories in the 'Miracles of St. Frideswide' preserves for us, we trace
+the traditional surgery which is still common in the East. But it is
+perhaps in a more purely material way that the Jewry at Oxford most
+directly influenced our academical history. There as elsewhere the Jew
+brought with him something more than the art or science which he had
+gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of
+wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet statelier abbeys, which
+followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral or
+conventual church, marks the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can
+study the earlier history of our great monastic <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>houses without finding
+the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial activity to which we
+owe the noblest of our minsters in the loans of the Jew. The bonds of
+many a great baron, the relics of many an abbey, lay pledged for
+security in the "Star-chamber" of the Jew.</p>
+
+<p>His arrival at Oxford is marked by the military and ecclesiastical
+erections of its Norman earls. But a result of his presence, which bore
+more directly on the future of the town, was seen in the remarkable
+developement of its domestic architecture. To the wealth of the Jew, to
+his need of protection against sudden outbursts of popular passion, very
+probably to the greater refinement of his social life, England owes the
+introduction of stone houses. Tradition attributes almost every instance
+of the earliest stone buildings of a domestic character to the Jew; and
+where the tradition can be tested, as at Bury St. Edmunds or Lincoln, it
+has proved to be in accordance with the facts. In Oxford nearly all the
+larger dwelling-houses which were subsequently converted into halls bore
+traces of their Jewish origin in their names, such as Moysey's Hall,
+Lombards', Jacob's Hall. It is a striking proof of the superiority <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>of
+the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian houses around them that each of
+the successive town-halls of the borough had, before their expulsion,
+been houses of Jews. Such houses were abundant in the town, not merely
+in the purely Jewish quarter on Carfax but in the lesser Jewry which was
+scattered over the parish of St. Aldate; and we can hardly doubt that
+this abundance of substantial buildings in the town was at least one of
+the causes which drew teachers and students within its walls.</p>
+
+<p>The same great event which flung down the Jewish settlement in the very
+heart of the English town bounded it to the west by the castle and the
+abbey of the conquerors. Oxford stood first on the line of great
+fortresses which, passing by Wallingford and Windsor to the Tower of
+London, guarded the course of the Thames. Its castellan, Robert D'Oilly,
+had followed William from Normandy and had fought by his side at Senlac.
+Oxfordshire was committed by the Conqueror to his charge; and he seems
+to have ruled it in rude, soldierly fashion, enforcing order, heaping up
+riches, tripling the taxation of the town, pillaging without scruple the
+older religious houses of the neighbourhood. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span>It was only by ruthless
+exaction such as this that the work which William had set him to do
+could be done. Money was needed above all for the great fortress which
+held the town. The new castle rose on the eastern bank of the Thames,
+broken here into a number of small streamlets, one of which served as
+the deep moat which encircled its walls. A well marked the centre of the
+wide castle-court; to the north of it on a lofty mound rose the great
+keep; to the west the one tower which remains, the tower of St. George,
+frowned over the river and the mill. Without the walls of the fortress
+lay the Bailly, a space cleared by the merciless policy of the
+castellan, with the church of St. Peter le Bailly which still marks its
+extent.</p>
+
+<p>The hand of Robert D'Oilly fell as heavily on the Church as on the
+townsmen. Outside the town lay a meadow belonging to the Abbey of
+Abingdon, which seemed suitable for the exercise of the soldiers of his
+garrison. The earl was an old plunderer of the Abbey; he had wiled away
+one of its finest manors from its Abbot Athelm; but his seizure of the
+meadow beside Oxford drove the monks to despair. Night and day they
+threw themselves weeping before the altar <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>of the two English saints
+whose names were linked to the older glories of their house. But while
+they invoked the vengeance of Dunstan and &AElig;thelwold on their plunderer,
+the earl, fallen sick, tossed fever-smitten on his bed. At last Robert
+dreamt that he stood in a vast court, one of a crowd of nobles gathered
+round a throne whereon sate a lady passing fair. Before her knelt two
+brethren of the abbey, weeping for the loss of their mead and pointing
+out the castellan as the robber. The lady bade Robert be seized, and two
+youths hurried him away to the field itself, seated him on the ground,
+piled burning hay around him, smoked him, tossed haybands in his face,
+and set fire to his beard. The earl woke trembling at the divine
+discipline; he at once took boat for Abingdon, and restored to the monks
+the meadow he had reft from them. His terror was not satisfied by the
+restitution of his plunder, and he returned to set about the restoration
+of the ruined churches within and without the walls of Oxford. The tower
+of St. Michael, the doorway of St. Ebbe, the chancel arch of Holywell,
+the crypt and chancel of St. Peter's-in-the-East, are fragments of the
+work done by Robert and his house. But the great monument of the
+devotion of the D'Oillys rose beneath the walls of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span>their castle.
+Robert, a nephew of the first castellan, had wedded Edith, a concubine
+of Henry I. The rest of the story we may tell in the English of Leland.
+"Edith used to walke out of Oxford Castelle with her gentlewomen to
+solace, and that oftentymes where yn a certen place in a tree, as often
+as she cam, a certain pyes used to gather to it, and ther to chattre,
+and as it were to spek on to her, Edyth much mervelyng at this matter,
+and was sumtyme sore ferid by it as by a wonder." Radulf, a canon of St.
+Frideswide's, was consulted on the marvel, and his counsel ended in the
+erection of the priory of Osney beneath the walls of the castle. The
+foundation of the D'Oillys became one of the wealthiest and largest of
+the English abbeys; but of its vast church and lordly abbot's house, the
+great quadrangle of its cloisters, the almshouses without its gate, the
+pleasant walks shaded with stately elms beside the river, not a trace
+remains. Its bells alone were saved at the Dissolution by their transfer
+to Christchurch.</p>
+
+<p>The military strength of the castle of the D'Oillys was tested in the
+struggle between Stephen and the Empress. Driven from London by a rising
+of its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>burghers at the very moment when the crown seemed within her
+grasp, Maud took refuge at Oxford. In the succeeding year Stephen found
+himself strong enough to attack his rival in her stronghold; his knights
+swam the river, fell hotly on the garrison which had sallied without the
+walls to meet them, chased them through the gates, and rushed pell-mell
+with the fugitives into the city. Houses were burnt and the Jewry
+sacked; the Jews, if tradition is to be trusted, were forced to raise
+against the castle the work that still bears the name of "Jews' Mount";
+but the strength of its walls foiled the efforts of the besiegers, and
+the attack died into a close blockade. Maud was however in Stephen's
+grasp, and neither the loss of other fortresses nor the rigour of the
+winter could tear the king from his prey. Despairing of relief the
+Empress at last resolved to break through the enemy's lines. Every
+stream was frozen and the earth covered with snow, when clad in white
+and with three knights in white garments as her attendants Maud passed
+unobserved through the outposts, crossed the Thames upon the ice, and
+made her way to Abingdon and the fortress of Wallingford.</p>
+
+<p>With the surrender which followed the military <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span>history of Oxford ceases
+till the Great Rebellion. Its political history had still to attain its
+highest reach in the Parliament of De Montfort. The great assemblies
+held at Oxford under Cnut, Stephen, and Henry III., are each memorable
+in their way. With the first closed the struggle between Englishman and
+Dane, with the second closed the conquest of the Norman, with the third
+began the regular progress of constitutional liberty. The position of
+the town, on the border between the England that remained to the
+West-Saxon kings and the England that had become the "Danelagh" of their
+northern assailants, had from the first pointed it out as the place
+where a union between Dane and Englishman could best be brought about.
+The first attempt was foiled by the savage treachery of &AElig;thelred the
+Unready. The death of Swegen and the return of Cnut to Denmark left an
+opening for a reconciliation, and Englishmen and Danes gathered at
+Oxford round the king. But all hope was foiled by the assassination of
+the Lawmen of the Seven Danish Boroughs, Sigeferth and Morcar, who fell
+at a banquet by the hand of the minister Eadric, while their followers
+threw themselves into the tower of St. Frideswide and perished in the
+flames that consumed it. The overthrow of the English <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>monarchy avenged
+the treason. But Cnut was of nobler stuff than &AElig;thelred, and his
+conquest of the realm was followed by the gathering of a new gemote at
+Oxford to resume the work of reconciliation which Eadric had
+interrupted. Englishman and Dane agreed to live together as one people
+under Eadgar's Law, and the wise government of the King completed in the
+long years of his reign the task of national fusion. The conquest of
+William set two peoples a second time face to face upon the same soil,
+and it was again at Oxford that by his solemn acceptance and
+promulgation of the Charter of Henry I. in solemn parliament Stephen
+closed the period of military tyranny, and began the union of Norman and
+Englishman into a single people. These two great acts of national
+reconciliation were fit preludes for the work of the famous assembly
+which has received from its enemies the name of "the Mad Parliament." In
+the June of 1258 the barons met at Oxford under earl Simon de Montfort
+to commence the revolution to which we owe our national liberties.
+Followed by long trains of men in arms and sworn together by pledges of
+mutual fidelity, they wrested from Henry III. the great reforms which,
+frustrated for the moment, have become the basis of our constitutional
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>system. On the "Provisions of Oxford" followed the regular
+establishment of parliamentary representation and power, of a popular
+and responsible ministry, of the principle of local self-government.</p>
+
+<p>From parliaments and sieges, from Jew and castellan, it is time to turn
+back to the humbler annals of the town itself. The first event that
+lifts it into historic prominence is its league with London. The
+"bargemen" of the borough seem to have already existed before the
+Conquest, and to have been closely united from the first with the more
+powerful guild, the "boatmen" or "merchants" of the capital. In both
+cases it is probable that the bodies bearing this name represented what
+in later language was known as the merchant guild of the town; the
+original association, that is, of its principal traders for purposes of
+mutual protection, of commerce, and of self-government. Royal
+recognition enables us to trace the merchant guild of Oxford from the
+time of Henry I.; even then indeed lands, islands, pastures already
+belonged to it, and amongst them the same "Port-meadow" or "Town-mead"
+so familiar to Oxford men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to Godstow,
+and which still remains the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>property of the freemen of the town. The
+connection between the two cities and their guilds was primarily one of
+traffic. Prior even to the Conquest, "in the time of King Eadward and
+Abbot Ordric," the channel of the river running beneath the walls of the
+Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up "that boats could scarce pass as
+far as Oxford." It was at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London
+and Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through the meadow to the
+south of his church, the two cities engaging that each barge should pay
+a toll of a hundred herrings on its passage during Lent. But the union
+soon took a constitutional form. The earliest charter of the capital
+which remains in detail is that of Henry I., and from the charter of his
+grandson we find a similar date assigned to the liberties of Oxford. The
+customs and exemptions of its burghers are granted by Henry II., "as
+ever they enjoyed them in the time of King Henry my grandfather, and in
+like manner as my citizens of London hold them." This identity of
+municipal privileges is of course common to many other boroughs, for the
+charter of London became the model for half the charters of the kingdom;
+what is peculiar to Oxford is the federal bond which in Henry II.'s time
+already <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span>linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt or contest
+about judgment in their own court the burgesses of Oxford were empowered
+to refer the matter to the decision of London, "and whatever the
+citizens of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed right."
+The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each city were assimilated
+by Henry's charter. "Of whatever matter they shall be put in plea, they
+shall deraign themselves according to the law and customs of the city of
+London and not otherwise, because they and the citizens of London are of
+one and the same custom, law, and liberty."</p>
+
+<p>In no two cities has municipal freedom experienced a more different fate
+than in the two that were so closely bound together. The liberties of
+London waxed greater and greater till they were lost in the general
+freedom of the realm: those of Oxford were trodden under foot till the
+city stood almost alone in its bondage among the cities of England. But
+it would have been hard for a burgher of the twelfth century, flushed
+with the pride of his new charter, or fresh from the scene of a
+coronation where he had stood side by side with the citizens of London
+and Winchester as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span>representing one of the chief cities of the realm, to
+have dreaded any danger to the liberties of his borough from the mob of
+half-starved boys who were beginning to pour year after year into the
+town. The wealthy merchant who passed the group of shivering students
+huddled round a teacher as poor as themselves in porch and doorway, or
+dropped his alms into the cap of the mendicant scholar, could hardly
+discern that beneath rags and poverty lay a power greater than the power
+of kings, the power for which Becket had died and which bowed Henry to
+penance and humiliation. On all but its eastern side indeed the town was
+narrowly hemmed in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The
+precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the castle, bounded
+it narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away to the little
+church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The
+Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed the southern
+horizon, held his leet court in the small hamlet of Grampound beyond the
+bridge. Nor was the whole space within its walls altogether subject to
+the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry, a town within a town,
+lay isolated and exempt from the common justice or law in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span>the very
+heart of the borough. Scores of householders, dotted over the various
+streets, were tenants of abbey or castle, and paid neither suit nor
+service to the city court. But within these narrow bounds and amidst
+these various obstacles the spirit of municipal liberty lived a life the
+more intense that it was so closely cabined and confined.</p>
+
+<p>It was in fact at the moment when the first Oxford students appeared
+within its walls that the city attained complete independence. The
+twelfth century, the age of the Crusades, of the rise of the scholastic
+philosophy, of the renewal of classical learning, was also the age of a
+great communal movement, that stretched from Italy along the Rh&ocirc;ne and
+the Rhine, the Seine and the Somme, to England. The same great revival
+of individual, human life in the industrial masses of the feudal world
+that hurried half Christendom to the Holy Land, or gathered hundreds of
+eager faces round the lecture-stall of Abelard, beat back Barbarossa
+from the walls of Alessandria and nerved the burghers of Northern France
+to struggle as at Amiens for liberty. In England the same spirit took a
+milder and perhaps more practical form, from the different social and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span>political conditions with which it had to deal. The quiet townships of
+Teutonic England had no traditions of a Roman past to lure them on, like
+the cities of Italy, into dreams of sovereignty. Their ruler was no
+foreign C&aelig;sar, distant enough to give a chance for resistance, but a
+king near at hand and able to enforce obedience and law. The king's
+peace shielded them from that terrible oppression of the medi&aelig;val
+baronage which made liberty with the cities of Germany a matter of life
+or death. The peculiarity of municipal life in fact in England is that
+instead of standing apart from and in contrast with the general life
+around it the progress of the English town moved in perfect harmony with
+that of the nation at large. The earlier burgher was the freeman within
+the walls, as the peasant-ceorl was the freeman without. Freedom went
+with the possession of land in town as in country. The citizen held his
+burgher's rights by his tenure of the bit of ground on which his
+tenement stood. He was the king's free tenant, and like the rural
+tenants he owed his lord dues of money or kind. In township or manor
+alike the king's reeve gathered this rental, administered justice,
+commanded the little troop of soldiers that the spot was bound to
+furnish in time of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span>war. The progress of municipal freedom, like that of
+national freedom, was wrought rather by the slow growth of wealth and of
+popular spirit, by the necessities of kings, by the policy of a few
+great statesmen, than by the sturdy revolts that wrested liberty from
+the French seigneur or the century of warfare that broke the power of
+the C&aelig;sars in the plain of the Po.</p>
+
+<p>Much indeed that Italy or France had to win by the sword was already the
+heritage of every English freeman within walls or without. The common
+assembly in which their own public affairs were discussed and decided,
+the borough-mote to which every burgher was summoned by the town-bell
+swinging out of the town-tower, had descended by traditional usage from
+the customs of the first English settlers in Britain. The close
+association of the burghers in the sworn brotherhood of the guild was a
+Teutonic custom of immemorial antiquity. Gathered at the guild supper
+round the common fire, sharing the common meal, and draining the guild
+cup, the burghers added to the tie of mere neighbourhood that of loyal
+association, of mutual counsel, of mutual aid. The regulation of
+internal trade, all lesser forms of civil jurisdiction, fell quietly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span>and without a struggle into the hands of the merchant guild. The rest
+of their freedom was bought with honest cash. The sale of charters
+brought money to the royal treasury, exhausted by Norman wars, by the
+herd of mercenaries, by Crusades, by the struggle with France. The towns
+bought first the commutation of the uncertain charges to which they were
+subject at the royal will for a fixed annual rent. Their purchase of the
+right of internal justice followed. Last came the privilege of electing
+their own magistrates, of enjoying complete self-government. Oxford had
+already passed through the earlier steps of this emancipation before the
+conquest of the Norman. Her citizens assembled in their Portmannimote,
+their free self-ruling assembly. Their merchant-guild leagued with that
+of London. Their dues to the Crown are assessed in Domesday at a fixed
+sum of honey and coin. The charter of Henry II. marks the acquisition by
+Oxford, probably at a far earlier date, of judicial and commercial
+freedom. Liberty of external commerce was given by the exception of its
+citizens from toll on the king's lands; the decision of either political
+or judicial affairs was left to their borough-mote. The highest point of
+municipal independence was reached when the Charter <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span>of John substituted
+a mayor of their own choosing for the mere bailiff of the Crown.</p>
+
+<p>It is hard in dry constitutional details such as these to realize the
+quick pulse of popular life that stirred such a community as Oxford.
+Only a few names, of street and lane, a few hints gathered from obscure
+records, enable one to see the town of the twelfth or thirteenth
+century. The church of St. Martin in the very heart of it, at the
+"Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four roads meet, was the centre of the
+city's life. The Town-mote was held in its church yard. Justice was
+administered by mayor and bailiff sitting beneath the low shed, the
+"penniless bench" of later times, without its eastern wall. Its bell
+summoned the burghers to counsel or to arms. Around the church lay the
+trade-guilds, ranged as in some vast encampment; Spicery and Vintnery to
+the south, Fish Street falling noisily down to the Bridge, the corn
+market occupying then as now the street which led to North-gate, the
+stalls of the butchers ranged in their "Butcher-row" along the road to
+the castle. Close beneath the church to the south-east lay a nest of
+huddled lanes broken by a stately synagogue and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span>traversed from time to
+time by the yellow gaberdine of the Jew, whose burying-place lay far
+away to the eastward on the site of the present Botanic Garden. Soldiers
+from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets; the bells of
+Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; long processions of pilgrims
+wound past the Jewry to the shrine of Saint Frideswide. It was a rough
+time, and frays were common enough,&mdash;now the sack of a Jew's house, now
+burgher drawing knife on burgher, now an outbreak of the young student
+lads, who grew every day in numbers and audacity. But as yet the town
+seemed well in hand. The clang of the city bell called every citizen to
+his door, the summons of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in
+hand and banners flying to enforce the king's peace. Order and freedom
+seemed absolutely secure, and there was no sign which threatened that
+century of disorder, of academical and ecclesiastical usurpation, which
+humbled the municipal freedom of Oxford to the dust.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span>
+<h2>THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS.</h2>
+<br /><a name="THE_HOME_OF_OUR_ANGEVIN_KINGS" id="THE_HOME_OF_OUR_ANGEVIN_KINGS"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>For those who possess historic tastes, slender purses, and an exemption
+from Alpine mania, few holidays are more pleasant than a lounge along
+the Loire. There is always something refreshing in the companionship of
+a fine river, and whatever one may think of its summer sands Loire
+through the spring and the autumn is a very fine river indeed. There is,
+besides, the pleasantest variety of scenery as one wanders along from
+the sombre granite of Brittany to the volcanic cinder-heaps of Auvergne.
+There is the picturesque contrast between the vast dull corn-flats to
+the north of the great river and the vines and acacias to the south.
+There is the same contrast in an ethnological point of view, for one is
+traversing the watershed that parts two different races, and enough of
+difference still remains in dialect and manner to sever the Acquitanian
+from the Frank. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span>And historically every day brings one across some
+castle or abbey or town that has been hitherto a mere name in the pages
+of Lingard or Sismondi, but which one actual glimpse changes into a
+living fact. There are few tracts of country indeed where the historical
+interest ranges equally over so long a space of time. The river which
+was the "revolutionary torrent" of Carrier had been the highway for the
+Northmen into the heart of Carolingian France. Saumur blends the tenth
+century and the sixteenth together in the names of Gelduin and Du
+Plessis; Chinon brings into contact the age of the Plantagenets and the
+age of Joan of Arc. From the mysterious dolmen and the legendary well to
+the stone that marks the fusillade of the heroes of La Vend&eacute;e there is a
+continuous chain of historic event in these central provinces. Every
+land has its pet periods of history, and the brilliant chapters of M.
+Michelet are hardly needed to tell us how thoroughly France identifies
+the splendour and infamy of the Renascence with the Loire. Blois,
+Amboise, Chenonceaux, embody still in the magnificence of their ruin the
+very spirit of Catherine de Medicis, of Francis, of Diana of Poitiers.
+To Englishmen the relics of an earlier period have naturally a greater
+charm. Nothing clears one's ideas <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span>about the character of the Angevin
+rule, the rule of Henry II. or Richard or John, so thoroughly as a
+stroll through Anjou.</p>
+
+<p>There the Angevin Counts are as vivid, as real, as the Angevin Kings are
+on English soil unreal and dim. Hardly a building in his realm preserves
+the memory of Henry II.; Richard is a mere visitor to English shores;
+Beaulieu alone and the graven tomb at Worcester enable us to realize
+John. But along the Loire these Angevin rulers meet us in river-bank and
+castle and bridge and town. Their names are familiar words still through
+the length and breadth of the land. At Angers men show you the vast
+hospital of Henry II., while the suburb around it is the creation of his
+son. And not only do the men come vividly before us, but they come
+before us in another and a fresher light. To us they are strangers and
+foreigners, stern administrators, exactors of treasure, tyrants to whose
+tyranny, sometimes just and sometimes unjust, England was destined to
+owe her freedom. But for Anjou the period of their rule was the period
+of a peace and fame and splendour that never came back save in the
+shadowy resurrection under King Ren&eacute;. Her soil is covered <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span>with
+monuments of their munificence, of their genuine care for the land of
+their race. Nine-tenths of her great churches, in the stern grandeur of
+their vaulting, their massive pillars, their capitals breaking into the
+exquisite foliage of the close of the century, witness to the pious
+liberality of sovereigns who in England were the oppressors of the
+Church, and who when doomed to endow a religious house in their realm
+did it by turning its inhabitants out of an already existing one and
+giving it simply a new name. As one walks along the famous Levee, the
+gigantic embankment along the Loire by which Henry saved the valley from
+inundation, or as one looks at his hospitals at Angers or Le Mans, it is
+hard not to feel a sympathy and admiration for the man from whom one
+shrinks coldly under the Martyrdom at Canterbury. There is a French side
+to the character of these Kings which, though English historians have
+disregarded it, is worth regarding if only because it really gave the
+tone to their whole life and rule. But it is a side which can only be
+understood when we study these Angevins in Anjou.</p>
+
+<p>To the English traveller Angers is in point of historic interest without
+a rival among the towns of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span>France. Rouen indeed is the cradle of our
+Norman dynasty as Angers of our Plantagenet dynasty; but the Rouen of
+the Dukes has almost vanished while Angers remains the Angers of the
+Counts. The physiognomy of the place&mdash;if we may venture to use the
+term&mdash;has been singularly preserved. Few towns have it is true suffered
+more from the destructive frenzy of the Revolution; gay boulevards have
+replaced "the flinty ribs of this contemptuous city," the walls which
+play their part in Shakspere's 'King John'; the noblest of its abbeys
+has been swept away to make room for a Prefecture; four churches were
+demolished at a blow to be replaced by the dreariest of squares; the
+tombs of its later dukes have disappeared from the Cathedral. In spite
+however of new faubourgs, new bridges, and new squares, Angers still
+retains the impress of the middle ages; its steep and narrow streets,
+its dark tortuous alleys, the fantastic woodwork of its houses, the
+sombre grimness of the slate-rock out of which the city is built, defy
+even the gay audacity of Imperialist prefects to modernize them. One
+climbs up from the busy quay along the Mayenne into a city which is
+still the city of the Counts. From Geoffry <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span>Greygown to John Lackland
+there is hardly one who has not left his name stamped on church or
+cloister or bridge or hospital. The stern tower of St. Aubin recalls in
+its founder Geoffry himself; the nave of St. Maurice, the choir of St.
+Martin's, the walls of Roncevray, the bridge over Mayenne, proclaim the
+restless activity of Fulc Nerra; Geoffry Martel rests beneath the ruins
+of St. Nicholas on its height across the river; beyond the walls to the
+south is the site of the burial place of Fulc Rechin; one can tread the
+very palace halls to which Geoffry Plantagenet led home his English
+bride; the suburb of Roncevray, studded with buildings of an exquisite
+beauty, is almost the creation of Henry Fitz-Empress and his sons.</p>
+
+<p>But, apart from its historical interest, Angers is a mine of treasure to
+the arch&aelig;ologist or the artist. In the beauty and character of its site
+it strongly resembles Le Mans. The river Mayenne comes down from the
+north, from its junction with the Sarthe, edged on either side by low
+ranges of <i>coteaux</i> which approaching it nearly on the west leave room
+along its eastern bank <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span>for vast level flats of marshy meadow land, cut
+through by white roads and long poplar-rows&mdash;meadows which in reality
+represent the old river-bed in some remote geological age before it had
+shrunk to its present channel. Below Angers the valley widens, and as
+the Mayenne coils away to Ponts de Ce it throws out on either side broad
+flats, rich in grass and golden flowers, and scored with rhines as
+straight and choked with water-weeds as the rhines of Somersetshire. It
+is across these lower meadows, from the base of the abbey walls of St.
+Nicholas, that one gets the finest view of Angers, the colossal mass of
+its castle, the two delicate towers of the Cathedral rising sharp
+against the sky, the stern belfry of St. Aubin. Angers stands in fact on
+a huge block of slate-rock, thrown forward from one of the higher
+plateaux which edge the marshy meadows, and closing up to the river in
+what was once a cliff as abrupt as that of Le Mans. Pleasant boulevards
+curve away in a huge semicircle from the river, and between these
+boulevards and the Mayenne lies the dark old town pierced by steep lanes
+and break-neck alleys. On the highest point of the block and approached
+by the steepest lane of all stands the Cathedral of St. Maurice, the
+tall slender towers of its western front <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span>and the fantastic row of
+statues which fill the arcade between them contrasting picturesquely
+enough with the bare grandeur of its interior, where the broad, low
+vaulting reminds us that we are on the architectural border of northern
+and southern Europe. St. Maurice is in the strictest sense the mother
+church of the town. M. Michelet has with singular lucklessness selected
+Angers as the type of a feudal city; with the one exception of the
+Castle of St. Louis it is absolutely without a trace of the feudal
+impress. Up to the Revolution it remained the most ecclesiastical of
+French towns. Christianity found the small Roman borough covering little
+more than the space on the height above the river afterwards occupied by
+the Cathedral precincts, planted its church in the midst of it,
+buttressed it to north and south with the great Merovingian Abbeys of
+St. Aubin and St. Serge, and linked them together by a chain of inferior
+foundations that entirely covered its eastern side. From the river on
+the south to the river on the north Angers lay ringed in by a belt of
+priories and churches and abbeys. Of the greatest of these, that of St.
+Aubin, only one huge tower remains, but fragments of it are still to be
+seen embedded in the buildings of the Prefecture&mdash;above <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span>all a
+Romanesque arcade, fretted with tangled imagery and apocalyptic figures
+of the richest work of the eleventh century. The Abbey of St. Serge
+still stands to the north of Angers; its vast gardens and fishponds
+turned into the public gardens of the town, its church spacious and
+beautiful with a noble choir that may perhaps recall the munificence of
+Geoffry Martel. Of the rivals of these two great houses two only remain.
+Portions of the Carolingian Church of St. Martin, built by the wife of
+Emperor Louis le Debonnaire, are now in use as a tobacco warehouse; the
+pretty ruin of Toussaint, not at all unlike our own Tintern, stands well
+cared for in the gardens of the Museum.</p>
+
+<p>But, interesting as these relics are, it is not ecclesiastical Angers
+that the English traveller instinctively looks for; it is the Angers of
+the Counts, the birthplace of the Plantagenets. It is only in their own
+capital indeed that we fully understand our Angevin Kings, that we fully
+realize that they were Angevins. To an English schoolboy Henry II. is
+little more than the murderer of Beket and the friend of Fair Rosamund.
+Even an English student finds it hard <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span>after all the labours of
+Professor Stubbs to lay hold of either Henry or his sons. In spite of
+their versatile ability and of the mark which they have left on our
+judicature, our municipal liberty, our political constitution, the first
+three Plantagenets are to most of us little more than dim shapes of
+strange manner and speech, hurrying to their island realm to extort
+money, to enforce good government, and then hurrying back to Anjou. But
+there is hardly a boy in the streets of Angers to whom the name of Henry
+Fitz-Empress is strange, who could not point to the ruins of his bridge
+or the halls of his Hospice, or tell of the great "Levee" by which the
+most beneficent of Angevin Counts saved the farmers' fields from the
+floods of the Loire. Strangers in England, the three first Plantagenets
+are at home in the sunny fields along the Mayenne. The history of Anjou,
+the character of the Counts, their forefathers, are the keys to the
+subtle policy, to the strangely-mingled temper of Henry and his sons.
+The countless robber-holds of the Angevin noblesse must have done much
+towards the steady resolve with which they bridled feudalism in their
+island realm. The crowd of ecclesiastical foundations that ringed in
+their Angevin capital hardly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span>failed to embitter, if not to suggest,
+their jealousy of the Church.</p>
+
+<p>Of the monuments of the Counts which illustrate our own history, the
+noblest, in spite of its name, is the Bishop's Palace to the north of
+the Cathedral. The residence of the Bishop was undoubtedly at first the
+residence of the Counts, and the tradition which places its transfer as
+far back as the days of Ingelger can hardly be traced to any earlier
+source than the local annalist of the seventeenth century. It is at
+least probable that the occupation of the Palace by the Bishop did not
+take place till after the erection of the Castle on the site of the
+original Ev&ecirc;ch&eacute; in the time of St. Louis; and this is confirmed by the
+fact that the well-known description of Angers by Ralph de Diceto places
+the Comitial Palace of the twelfth century in the north-east quarter of
+the town&mdash;on the exact site, that is, of the present episcopal
+residence. But if this identification be correct, there is no building
+in the town which can compare with it in historical interest for
+Englishmen. The chapel beneath, originally perhaps simply the
+substructure of the building, dates from the close of the eleventh
+century; the fine hall above, with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span>its grand row of windows looking out
+upon the court, from the earlier half of the twelfth. It was to the
+building as it actually stands therefore that Geoffry Plantagenet must
+have brought home his English bride, Maud the Empress, the daughter of
+our Henry I., along the narrow streets hung with gorgeous tapestries and
+filled with long trains of priests and burghers. To Angers that day
+represented the triumphant close of a hundred years' struggle with
+Normandy; to England it gave the line of its Plantagenet Kings.</p>
+
+<p>The proudest monuments of the sovereigns who sprang from this match, our
+Henry the Second and his sons, lie not in Angers itself but in the
+suburb across the river. The suburb seems to have originated in the
+chapel of Roncevray, the Roman-like masonry of whose exterior may date
+back as far as Fulc Nerra in the tenth century. But its real importance
+dates from Henry Fitz-Empress. It is characteristic of the temper and
+policy of the first of our Plantagenet Kings that in Anjou, as in
+England, no religious house claimed him as its founder. Here indeed the
+Papal sentence on his part in the murder of Archbishop Thomas compelled
+him to resort to the ridiculous <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span>trick of turning the canons out of
+Waltham to enable him to refound it as a priory of his own without cost
+to the royal exchequer. But in his Continental dominions he did not even
+stoop to the pretence of such a foundation. No abbey figured among the
+costly buildings with which he adorned his birthplace Le Mans. It was as
+if in direct opposition to the purely monastic feeling that he devoted
+his wealth to the erection of the Hospitals at Angers and Le Mans. It is
+a relief, as we have said&mdash;a relief which one can only get here&mdash;to see
+the softer side of Henry's nature represented in works of mercy and
+industrial utility. The bridge of Angers, like the bridges of Tours and
+Saumur, dates back to the first of the Count-Kings. Henry seems to have
+been the Pontifex Maximus of his day, while his care for the means of
+industrial communication points to that silent growth of the new
+mercantile class which the rule of the Angevins did so much to foster.
+But a memorial of him, hardly less universal, is the Lazar-house or
+hospital. One of the few poetic legends that break the stern story of
+the Angevins is the tale of Count Fulc the Good, how, journeying along
+Loire-side towards Tours, he saw just as the towers of St. Martin's rose
+before him in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span>distance a leper full of sores, who put by his offer
+of alms and desired to be borne to the sacred city. Amid the jibes of
+his courtiers the good count lifted him in his arms and carried him
+along bank and bridge. As they entered the town the leper vanished from
+their sight, and men told how Fulc had borne an angel unawares. Little
+of his ancestor's tenderness or poetry lingered in the practical
+utilitarian mind of Henry Fitz-Empress; but the simple Hospice in the
+fields by Le Mans or the grand Hospital of St. John in the suburb of
+Angers displayed an enlightened care for the physical condition of his
+people which is all the more striking that in him and his sons it had
+probably little connection with the usual motives of religious charity
+which made such works popular in the middle ages, but, like the rest of
+their administrative system, was a pure anticipation of modern feeling.
+There are few buildings more complete or more beautiful in their
+completeness than the Hospital of St. John; the vast hall with its
+double row of slender pillars, the exquisite chapel, trembling in the
+pure grace of its details on the very verge of Romanesque, the engaged
+shafts of the graceful cloister. The erection of these buildings
+probably went on through the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span>whole reigns of our three Angevin
+sovereigns, but the sterner and simpler hall called the Lazar-house
+beside with its three aisles and noble sweep of wide arches is clearly
+of the date of Henry alone. It was occupied when I visited it some years
+ago as a brewery, but never was brewer more courteous, more genuinely
+arch&aelig;ological, than its occupant. Throughout these central provinces
+indeed, as throughout Normandy, the enlightened efforts of the
+Government have awakened a respect for and pride in their national
+monuments which extends even to the poorest of the population. Few
+buildings of a really high class are now left to ruin and desecration as
+they were twenty years ago; unfortunately their rescue from the
+destruction of time is too often followed by the more destructive attack
+of the restorer. And in almost every town of any provincial importance
+one may obtain what in England it is simply ridiculous to ask for, a
+really intelligent history of the place itself and a fair description of
+the objects of interest which it contains.</p>
+
+<p>The broken ruins of the Pont de Treilles, the one low tower above the
+river Mayenne which remains of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span>walls around the suburb of
+Roncevray, show the price which Henry and his sons set on these costly
+buildings. They have a special interest in Angevin history, for they
+were the last legacy of the Counts to their capital. Across the river,
+at the south-west corner of the town itself, stands the huge fortress
+that commemorates the close of their rule, the castle begun by the
+French conqueror, Philip Augustus, and completed by his descendant St.
+Louis. From the wide flats below Angers, where Mayenne rolls lazily on
+to the Loire, one looks up awed at the colossal mass which seems to
+dwarf even the minster beside it, at its dark curtains, its fosse
+trenched deep in the rock, its huge bastions chequered with iron-like
+bands of slate and unrelieved by art of sculptor or architect. It is as
+if the conquerors of the Angevins had been driven to express in this
+huge monument the very temper of the men from whom they reft Anjou,
+their grand, repulsive isolation, their dark pitiless power.</p>
+
+<p>It is a relief to turn from this castle to that southern fortress which
+the Counts made their home. A glance at the flat tame expanse of Anjou
+northward of the Loire explains at once why its sovereigns made their
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span>favourite sojourn in the fairer districts south of the river. There are
+few drives more enjoyable than a drive along the Vienne to the royal
+retreat of Chinon. The country is rich and noble, deep in grass and
+maize and corn, with meadows set in low broad hedgerows, and bare
+scratchy vineyards along the slopes. The road is lined with acacias,
+Tennyson's "milk-white bloom" hanging from their tender feathery boughs,
+and here beneath the hot sun of the South the acacia is no mere garden
+shrub but one of the finest and most graceful of trees. Everywhere along
+the broad sunlit river of Vienne nature is rich and lavish, and nowhere
+richer or more lavish than where, towering high on the scarped face of
+its own grey cliff above the street of brown little houses edged
+narrowly in between river and rock, stands the favourite home of our
+Angevin Kings.</p>
+
+<p>It is only in one or two points amidst the great mass of stately
+buildings which is known as the castle of Chinon that their hand can be
+traced now. The base of the Tour du Moulay, where tradition says the
+Grand Master of the Templars was imprisoned by Philippe le Bel, is a
+fine vault of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span>twelfth-century date, which may have been the work of
+Henry II., and can hardly be later than his sons. But something of its
+original character as a luxurious retreat lingers still in the purpose
+to which the ground within the walls has been devoted; it serves as a
+garden for the townsfolk of Chinon, and is full of pleasant shadowy
+walks and flowers, and gay with children's games and laughter. And
+whatever else may have changed, the same rich landscape lies around that
+Henry must have looked on when he rode here to die, as we look on it now
+from the deep recessed windows of the later hall where Joan of Arc stood
+before the disguised Dauphin. Beneath is the broad bright Vienne coming
+down in great gleaming curves from Isle-Bouchard, and the pretty spire
+of St. Maurice, Henry's own handiwork perhaps, soaring lightly out of
+the tangled little town at our feet. Beyond, broken with copse and
+hedgerow and cleft by the white road to Loudun, rise the slopes of
+Pavilly leading the eye round, as it may have led the dying eye of the
+king, to the dim blue reaches of the west where Fontevraud awaited him.</p>
+
+<p>No scene harmonizes more thoroughly than <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span>Fontevraud with the thoughts
+which its name suggests. A shallow valley which strikes away southward
+through a break in the long cliff-wall along the Loire narrows as it
+advances into a sterner gorge, rough with forest greenery. The grey
+escarpments of rock that jut from the sides of this gorge are pierced
+here and there with the peculiar cellars and cave-dwellings of the
+country, and a few rude huts which dot their base gather as the road
+mounts steeply through this wilder scenery into a little lane of
+cottages that forms the village of Fontevraud. But it is almost suddenly
+that the great abbey church round which the village grew up stands out
+in one colossal mass from the western hill-slope; and in its very
+solitude and the rock-like grandeur of its vast nave, its noble apse,
+its low central tower, there is something that marks it as a fit
+resting-place for kings. Nor does its present use as a prison-chapel jar
+much on those who have grown familiar with the temper of the early
+Plantagenets. At the moment of my visit the choir of convicts were
+practising the music of a mass in the eastern portion of the church,
+which with the transepts has now been set apart for divine service, and
+the wild grandeur of the music, unrelieved by any treble, seemed to
+express in a way <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span>that nothing else could the spirit of the Angevins.
+"From the devil we come, and to the devil we go," said Richard. In spite
+of the luckless restoration to which their effigies have been
+submitted&mdash;and no sight makes us long more ardently that the "Let it
+alone" of Lord Melbourne had wandered from politics into arch&aelig;ology&mdash;it
+is still easy to read in the faces of the two King-Counts the secret of
+their policy and their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait.
+Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic
+eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine
+somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is
+marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be
+in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in both there is the same
+look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's is a face of cultivation
+and refinement, but there is a strange severity in the small delicate
+mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted king which realizes
+the verdict of his day. To an historical student one glance at these
+faces as they lie here beneath the vault raised by their ancestor, the
+fifth Count Fulc, tells more than pages of chronicles; but Fontevraud is
+far from being of interest to historians <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span>alone. In its architectural
+detail, in its Romanesque work, and in its strangely beautiful
+cinque-cento revival of the Romanesque, in its cloister and Glastonbury
+kitchen, it is a grand study for the artist or the arch&aelig;ologist; but
+these are merits which it shares with other French minsters. To an
+English visitor it will ever find its chief attraction in the Tombs of
+the Kings.</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span>
+<h2>CAPRI.</h2>
+<br /><a name="CAPRI" id="CAPRI"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<br />
+<h2>CAPRI.</h2>
+
+<h2>I.</h2>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>We can hardly wonder at the love of artists for Capri, for of all the
+winter resorts of the South Capri is beyond question the most beautiful.
+Physically indeed it is little more than a block of limestone which has
+been broken off by some natural convulsion from the promontory of
+Sorrento, and changed by the strait of blue water which now parts it
+from the mainland into the first of a chain of islands which stretch
+across the Bay of Naples. But the same forces which severed it from the
+continent have given a grandeur and variety to its scenery which
+contrast in a strangely picturesque way with the narrowness of its
+bounds. There are few coast-lines which can rival in sublimity the
+coast-line around Capri; the cliff wall of sheer rock broken only twice
+by little dips which serve as landing-places for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span>the island, and
+pierced at its base by "blue grottoes" and "green grottoes" which have
+become famous from the strange play of light within their depths. The
+reader of Hans Andersen's 'Improvisatore' will remember one of these
+caverns as the scene of its closing adventure; but strange as Andersen's
+description is it is far less strange than the scene which he sketches,
+the deep blue light which turns the rocks into turquoise and emerald or
+the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in
+their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above
+the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern
+headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the
+South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to
+the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff wall hardly inferior in
+grandeur to that of the coast runs across the midst of the island,
+dividing it into an upper and a lower plateau, with no means of
+communication save the famous rock stairs, the "Steps of Anacapri," now,
+alas, replaced by a daring road which has been driven along the face of
+the cliff.</p>
+
+<p>The upper plateau of Anacapri is cold and without <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span>any striking points
+of scenery, but its huge mass serves as an admirable shelter to Capri
+below, and it is with Capri that the ordinary visitor is alone
+concerned. The first thing which strikes one is the smallness of the
+place. The whole island is only some four miles long and a mile and a
+half across, and, as we have seen, a good half of this space is
+practically inaccessible. But it is just the diminutive size of Capri
+which becomes one of its greatest charms. It would be hard in fact to
+find any part of the world where so much and such varied beauty is
+packed into so small a space. The visitor who lands from Naples or
+Sorrento mounts steeply up the slopes of a grand amphitheatre flanked on
+either side by the cliffs of St. Michael and Anacapri to the white line
+of the village on the central ridge with the strange Saracenic domes of
+its church lifted weirdly against the sky. Over the crest of this ridge
+a counter valley falls as steeply to the south till it reaches a plateau
+crowned with the grey mass of a convent, and then plunges over crag and
+cliff back again to the sea. To the east of these central valleys a
+steep rise of ground ends in the ruins of the Palace of Tiberius and the
+great headland which fronts the headland of Sorrento. Everywhere the
+forms of the scenery are on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span>the largest and boldest scale. The great
+conical Tors, Tuoro-grande and Tuoro-piccolo, the boldly scarped rock of
+Castiglione with its crown of medi&aelig;val towers, lead up the eye to the
+huge cliff wall of Anacapri, where, a thousand feet above, the white
+hermitage on Monte Solaro glimmers out fitfully from its screen of
+cloud.</p>
+
+<p>Among the broken heights to the east or in the two central valleys there
+are scores of different walks and a hundred different nooks, and each
+walk and nook has its own independent charm. Steeps clothed from top to
+bottom in the thick greenery of the lemon or orange; sudden breaks like
+that of Metromania where a blue strip of sea seems to have been
+cunningly let in among the rocks; backgrounds of tumbled limestone;
+slopes dusty grey with wild cactus; thickets of delightful greenery
+where one lies hidden in the dense scrub of myrtle and arbutus;
+olive-yards creeping thriftily up the hill-sides and over the cliffs and
+down every slope and into every rock-corner where the Caprese
+peasant-farmer can find footing; homesteads of grey stone with low domed
+Oriental roofs on which women sit spinning, their figures etched out
+against the sky; gardens where the writhed fig-trees stand barely
+waiting for the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span>foliage of the spring; nooks amidst broken boulders and
+vast fingers of rock with the dark mass of the carouba flinging its
+shade over them; heights from which one looks suddenly northward and
+southward over a hundred miles of sea&mdash;this is Capri. The sea is
+everywhere. At one turn its waters go flashing away unbroken by a single
+sail towards the far-off African coast where the Caprese boatmen are
+coral-fishing through the hot summer months; at another the eye ranges
+over the tumbled mountain masses above Amalfi to the dim sweep of coast
+where the haze hides the temples of P&aelig;stum; at another the Bay of Naples
+opens suddenly before us, Vesuvius and the blue deep of Castellamare and
+the white city-line along the coast seen with a strange witchery across
+twenty miles of clear air.</p>
+
+<p>The island is a paradise of silence for those to whom silence is a
+delight. One wanders about in the vineyards without a sound save the
+call of the vinedressers; one lies on the cliff and hears a thousand
+feet below the dreamy wash of the sea. There is hardly the cry of a bird
+to break the spell; even the girls who meet one with a smile on the
+hill-side smile quietly and gravely in the Southern fashion as they pass
+by. It <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span>is the stillest place that the sun shines on; but with all its
+stillness it is far from being a home of boredom. There are in fact few
+places in the world so full of interest. The artist finds a world of
+"studies" in its rifts and cliff walls, in the sailor groups along its
+beach and the Greek faces of the girls in its vineyards. The geologist
+reads the secret of the past in its abruptly tilted strata, in a deposit
+of volcanic ash, in the fossils and bones which Augustus set the fashion
+of collecting before geology was thought of. The historian and the
+arch&aelig;ologist have a yet wider field. Capri is a perfect treasure-house
+of Roman remains, and though in later remains the island is far poorer,
+the ruins of medi&aelig;val castles crown the heights of Castiglione and
+Anacapri, and the mother church of San Costanzo with its central dome
+supported on marble shafts from the ruins hard by is an early specimen
+of Sicilian or Southern Italian architecture. Perhaps the most
+remarkable touch of the South is seen in the low stone vaults which form
+the roofs of all the older houses of Capri, and whose upper surface
+serves as a terrace where the women gather in the sunshine in a way
+which brings home to one oddly the recollections of Syria and
+Jerusalem.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span>For loungers of a steadily uninquiring order however there are plenty of
+amusements of a lighter sort. It is hard to spend a day more pleasantly
+than in boating beneath the cliffs of Capri, bobbing for "cardinals,"
+cruising round the huge masses of the Faraglioni as they rise like
+giants out of the sea, dipping in and out of the little grottoes which
+stud the coast. On land there are climbs around headlands and
+"rock-work" for the adventurous, easy little walks with exquisite peeps
+of sea and cliff for the idle, sunny little nooks where the dreamer can
+lie buried in myrtle and arbutus. The life around one, simple as it is,
+has the colour and picturesqueness of the South. The girl faces which
+meet one on the hill-side are faces such as artists love. In the church
+the little children play about among the groups of mothers with orange
+kerchiefs on their heads and heavy silver rings on every finger. Strange
+processions with cowled faces and crucifix and banners borne aloft sweep
+into the piazza and up the church steps. Old women with Sibyl-like faces
+sit spinning at their doors. Maidens with water-jars on their heads
+which might have been dug up at Pompeii; priests with broad hats and
+huge cloaks; sailors with blue shirts and red girdles; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span>urchins who
+almost instinctively cry for a "soldo" and break into the Tarantella if
+you look at them; quiet, grave, farmer-peasants with the Phrygian cap;
+coral-fishers fresh from the African coast with tales of storm and
+tempest and the Madonna's help&mdash;make up group after group of Caprese
+life as one looks idly on, a life not specially truthful perhaps or
+moral or high-minded, but sunny and pleasant and pretty enough, and
+harmonizing in its own genial way with the sunshine and beauty around.</p>
+
+<p>Its rough inns, its want of English doctors, the difficulties of
+communication with the mainland from which its residents are utterly cut
+off in bad weather, make Capri an unsuitable resort for invalids in
+spite of a climate which if inferior to that of Catania is distinctly
+superior to that of either San Remo or Mentone. Those who remember the
+Riviera with no little gratitude may still shrink from the memory of its
+sharp transitions of temperature, the chill shade into which one plunges
+from the direct heat of its sun-rays, and the bitter cold of its winter
+nights. Out of the sun indeed the air of the Riviera towards Christmas
+is generally keen, and a cloudy day with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span>an east wind sweeping along
+the shore will bring back unpleasant reminiscences of the England one
+has left behind. Capri is no hotter perhaps in the sunshine, but it is
+distinctly warmer in the shade. The wraps and shawls which are a
+necessity of health at San Remo or Mentone are far less necessary in the
+South. One may live frankly in the open air in a way which would hardly
+be safe elsewhere, and it is just life in the open air which is most
+beneficial to invalids. It is this natural warmth which tells on the
+temperature of the nights. The sudden change at sunset which is the
+terror of the Riviera is far less perceptible at Capri; indeed the
+average night temperature is but two degrees lower than that of the day.
+The air too is singularly pure and invigorating, for the village and its
+hotels stand some four or five hundred feet above the sea, and there are
+some fairly level and accessible walks along the hill-sides. At San
+Remo, or in the eastern bay of Mentone, one purchases shelter by living
+in a teacup and the only chance of exercise lies in climbing up its
+sides. But it must fairly be owned that these advantages are accompanied
+by some very serious drawbacks. If Capri is fairly free from the bitter
+east wind of the Riviera, the Riviera is free <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span>from the stifling
+scirocco of Capri. In the autumn and in the earlier part of the winter
+this is sometimes almost intolerable. The wind blows straight from
+Africa, hot, dusty, and oppressive in a strange and almost indescribable
+way. All the peculiar clearness of the atmosphere disappears; one sees
+every feature of the landscape as one would see them through a raw
+autumn day in England. The presence of fine dust in the air&mdash;the dust of
+the African desert to which this effect is said to be owing&mdash;may perhaps
+account for the peculiar oppressiveness of the scirocco; certain it is,
+that after two days of it every nerve in the body seems set ajar.
+Luckily however it only lasts for three days and dies down into rain as
+the wind veers round to the west.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr style="width: 15%;" /><a name="CAPRI_AND_ITS_ROMAN_REMAINS" id="CAPRI_AND_ITS_ROMAN_REMAINS"></a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS.</h2>
+
+<h2>II.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Among the many charms of Capri must be counted the number and interest
+of its Roman remains. The whole island is in fact a vast Roman wreck.
+Hill-side and valley are filled with a mass of <i>d&eacute;bris</i> that brings home
+to one in a way which no detailed description can do the scale of the
+buildings with which it was crowded. At either landing-place huge
+substructures stretch away beneath the waves, the relics of moles, of
+arsenals, and of docks; a network of roads may still be traced which
+linked together the ruins of Imperial villas; every garden is watered
+from Roman cisterns; dig where he will, the excavator is rewarded by the
+discovery of vases, of urns, of fragments of sculpture, of mosaic
+pavements, of precious marbles. Every peasant has a handful of Roman
+coins to part with for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span>a few soldi. The churches of the island and the
+royal palaces of the mainland are full of costly columns which have been
+removed from the ruins of Capri; and the Museum of Naples is largely
+indebted for its treasures of statuary to the researches made here at
+the close of the last century. The main arch&aelig;ological interest of the
+island however lies not in fragments or "finds" such as these but in the
+huge masses of ruin which lie scattered so thickly over it. The Pharos
+which guided the Alexandrian corn-ships to Puteoli stands shattered on
+one of its headlands. The waves dash idly against an enormous fragment
+of the sea-baths of Tiberius. His palace-citadel still looks from the
+summit of a mighty cliff across the Straits of Sorrento. The Stairs of
+Anacapri, which in the absence of any other date to which it is possible
+to assign them, we are forced to refer to the same period of
+construction, hewn as they were to the height of a thousand feet in the
+solid rock, vied in boldness with almost any achievement of Roman
+engineering. The smallness of the space&mdash;for the lower part of the
+island within which these relics are crowded is little more than a mile
+and a half either way&mdash;adds to the sense of wonder which the size and
+number of these creations <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span>excite. All that remains too, it must be
+remembered, is the work of but a few years. There is no ground for
+believing that anything of importance was added after the death of
+Tiberius or begun before the old age of Augustus.</p>
+
+<p>We catch glimpses indeed of the history of the island long before its
+purchase by the aged Emperor. Its commanding position at the mouth of
+the great Campanian bay raised it into importance at a very early
+period. The Teleboes whom tradition named as its first inhabitants have
+left only a trace of their existence in the verse of Vergil; but in the
+great strife between the Hellenic and Tyrrhenian races for the
+commercial monopoly of Southern Italy Capri, like Sorrento, was seized
+as a naval station by the Etruscans, whose alliance with the
+Ph&oelig;nicians in their common war against the Greeks may perhaps explain
+the vague legends of a Semitic settlement on the island. The Hellenic
+victory of Cum&aelig; however settled the fate of Capri, as it settled the
+fate of the coast; and the island fell to the lot of Neapolis when the
+"new city" rose in the midst of the bay to which it has since given its
+name. The most enduring trace of its Greek <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span>colonization is to be found
+in the Greek type of countenance and form which endears Capri to
+artists; but like the cities of the mainland it preserved its Greek
+manners and speech long after it had passed with Neapolis into the grasp
+of Rome. The greater proportion of its inscriptions, even when dating
+from the Imperial period, are in Greek. Up to the time of Augustus
+however it played in Roman story but the humble part of lighting the
+great corn-fleet from Egypt through the Strait of Sorrento. Statius
+tells us of the joy with which the sailors welcomed the glare of its
+Pharos as they neared the land, the greeting they addressed to its
+cliff, while on the other hand they poured their libations to the
+goddess whose white temple gleamed from the headland of Sorrento. Its
+higher destinies began with a chance visit of Augustus when age and
+weakness had driven him to seek a summer retreat on the Campanian shore.
+A happy omen, the revival of a withered ilex at his landing, as well as
+the temperate air of the place itself so charmed the Emperor that he
+forced Naples to accept Ischia in exchange for it, and chose it as his
+favourite refuge from the excessive heat. Suetonius gives a pleasant
+gossiping picture of the old man's life in his short holidays there, his
+delight in idly listening <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span>to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian
+slave-boys as they played knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of
+the cool breeze which swept through his villa even in summer or of the
+cool plash of water from the fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity
+about the big fossil bones dug up in the island which he sent to Rome to
+be placed in the galleries of his house on the Palatine, his fun in
+quizzing the pedants who followed him by Greek verses of his own making.
+But in the midst of his idleness the indefatigable energy which marked
+the man was seen in the buildings with which Suetonius tells us he
+furnished the island, and the progress of which after his death may
+possibly have been the inducement which drew his successor to its
+shores.</p>
+
+<p>It is with the name of the second C&aelig;sar rather than of the first that
+Capri is destined to be associated. While the jests and Greek verses of
+Augustus are forgotten the terrible invective of Tacitus and the sarcasm
+of Juvenal recall the cruelties and the terrors of Tiberius. His
+retirement to Capri, although as we have seen in form but a carrying out
+of the purpose of Augustus, marks a distinct stage in the developement
+of the Empire. For ten years not Rome, but an obscure <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span>island off the
+Campanian coast became the centre of the government of the world. The
+spell of the Eternal City was suddenly broken, and it was never
+thoroughly restored. If Milan, Ravenna, Nicomedia, Constantinople,
+became afterwards her rivals or supplanters as the seat of empire, it
+was because Capri had led the way. For the first time too, as Dean
+Merivale has pointed out, the world was made to see in its bare
+nakedness the fact that it had a single master. All the disguises which
+Augustus had flung around his personal rule were cast aside; Senate,
+Consuls, the Roman people itself, were left contemptuously behind. A
+single senator, a few knights, a little group of Greek scholars, were
+all that accompanied Tiberius to Capri. The figure of the Emperor stood
+out bare and alone on its solitary rock. But, great as the change really
+was, the skill of Tacitus has thrown over the retirement of Tiberius a
+character of strangeness which, as we have said, hardly belongs to it.
+What in fact distinguished it from the retirement of Augustus to the
+same spot was simply the persistence of his successor in never returning
+to Rome.</p>
+
+<p>Capri in itself was nothing but a part of the great <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span>pleasure resort
+which Roman luxury created round the shores of the Bay of Naples. From
+its cliffs the Emperor could see through the pure, transparent air the
+villas and watering-places which fringed the coast from Misenum to
+Sorrentum, the groves and lakes of Bais&aelig;, the white line of Neapolis,
+Pompeii, and Herculaneum, the blue sea dappled with the painted sails of
+pleasure-boats as they wooed the summer air. The whole bay was a Roman
+Brighton, and the withdrawal of Tiberius from the world was much the
+same sort of withdrawal from the world as the seclusion of George IV. at
+the Pavilion. Of the viler pleasures which are commonly attributed to
+him in his retreat we need say nothing, for it is only by ingenious
+conjectures that any of the remains at Capri have been made to confirm
+them. The taste of Tiberius was as coarse as the taste of his fellow
+Romans, and the scenes which were common at Bai&aelig;&mdash;the drunkards
+wandering along the shore, the songs of the revellers, the
+drinking-toasts of the sailors, the boats with their gaudy cargo of
+noisy girls, the coarse jokes of the bathers among the rose-leaves which
+strewed the water&mdash;were probably as common in the revels at Capri. But
+for the more revolting details of the old man's life we have only <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span>the
+scandal of Rome to rely on, and scandal was easily quickened by the veil
+of solitude and secrecy which Tiberius flung around his retirement. The
+tale of his cruelties, of the fisherman tortured for having climbed the
+cliff which the Emperor deemed inaccessible, of criminals dashed into
+the sea down the steep of the "Salto di Timberio," rest on the gossip of
+Suetonius alone. But in all this mass of gossip there is little that
+throws any real light on the character of the island or of the buildings
+whose remains excite our interest there; we can only guess at its far
+wilder condition from a story which shows us the Imperial litter fairly
+brought to a standstill by the thick brushwood, and the wrath of
+Tiberius venting itself in a ruthless thrashing of the centurion who
+served as his guide. The story is curious because it shows that, in
+spite of the rapidity with which the Imperial work had been carried on,
+the island when Tiberius arrived was still in many parts hidden with
+rough and impenetrable scrub, and that the wonderful series of hanging
+gardens which turned almost the whole of it into a vast pleasure-ground
+was mainly of his own creation.</p>
+
+<p>It would of course be impossible to pass in review <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span>the numberless sites
+where either chance or research has detected traces of the work of
+Tiberius. "Duodecim villarum nominibus et molibus insederat," says
+Tacitus; and the sites of the twelve villas may in most cases be
+identified to-day, some basking in the sunshine by the shore, some
+placed in sheltered nooks where the cool sea-breeze tempered the summer
+heat, the grander ones crowning the summit of the hills. We can trace
+the docks of the Roman island, the grottoes still paved with mosaic
+which marks them as the scene of Imperial picnics, the terraces and
+arbours of the hanging gardens with the rock boldly cut away to make
+room for them, the system of roads which linked the villas together, the
+cisterns and aqueducts which supplied water, the buildings for the
+slaves of the household and for the legionaries who guarded the shore,
+the cemetery for the dead, the shrines and pavilions scattered about on
+the heights, and a small Mithraic temple hidden in the loveliest of the
+Caprese ravines. If we restore in fancy the scene to which these ruins
+belonged, fill the gardens with the fountains and statues whose
+fragments lie profusely scattered about, rear again the porticoes of
+marble columns, and restore the frescoes whose traces exist on the
+ruined walls, we shall form some <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span>inadequate conception of the luxury
+and grace which Tiberius flung around his retirement.</p>
+
+<p>By a singular piece of good fortune the one great wreck which towers
+above all the rest is the spot with which the Emperor himself is
+historically associated. Through the nine terrible months during which
+the conspiracy of Sejanus was in progress, he never left, Seutonius
+tells us, the Villa Jovis; and the villa still stands on a huge
+promontory, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, from which his eye could
+watch every galley that brought its news of good or ill from Misenum and
+from Rome. Few landscapes can compare in extent or beauty with the view
+on which Tiberius looked. The promontory of Massa lies across the blue
+reach of sea, almost as it seems under one's hand yet really a few miles
+off, its northern side falling in brown slopes dotted with white villas
+to the orange gardens of Sorrento, its southern rushing steeply down to
+the hidden bays of Amalfi and Salerno. To the right the distant line of
+Apennines, broken by the shadowy dip that marks the plain of P&aelig;stum,
+runs southward in a dim succession of capes and headlands; to the left
+the sunny bow of the Bay of Naples gleams <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span>clear and distinct through
+the brilliant air till Procida and Ischia lead the eye round again to
+the cliff of Anacapri with the busy little Marina at its feet. A tiny
+chapel in charge of a hermit now crowns the plateau which forms the
+highest point of the Villa Jovis; on three sides of the height the cliff
+falls in a sheer descent of more than a thousand feet to the sea, on the
+fourth the terrace walls are formed of fragments of brick and marble
+which recall the hanging gardens that swept downwards to the plain. The
+Villa itself lies partly hewn out of the sides of the steep rock, partly
+supported by a vast series of substructures whose arched vaults served
+as water-reservoirs and baths for the service of the house.</p>
+
+<p>In strength of site and in the character of its defences the palace was
+strictly what Pliny calls it, "Tiberii principis arx," but this was no
+special characteristic of the Villa Jovis. "Scias non villas esse sed
+castra," said Seneca of the luxurious villas on the coast of Bai&aelig;; it
+was as if the soldier element of the Roman nature broke out even amidst
+the patrician's idlest repose in the choice of a military site and the
+warlike strength of the buildings he erected on it. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span>Within however life
+seems to have been luxurious enough. The ruins of a theatre, whose
+ground-plan remains perfect, show that Tiberius combined more elegant
+relaxations with the coarse revels which are laid to his charge. Each
+passage is paved with mosaic, the walls still retain in patches their
+coloured stucco, and here and there in the small chambers we find traces
+of the designs which adorned them. It is however rather by the vast
+extent and huge size of the substructures than by the remains of the
+house itself that we can estimate the grandeur of the Villa Jovis; for
+here, as at the Baths near the Marina, the ruins have served as quarries
+for chapels and forts and every farmhouse in the neighbourhood. The
+Baths stand only second in grandeur to the Villa itself. The fall of the
+cliff has torn down fragment after fragment, but the half of an immense
+calidarium still stands like an apse fronting the sea, a grand sea-wall
+juts out into the waves, and at its base, like a great ship of stone in
+the midst of the water, lies still unbroken after eighteen hundred years
+the sea-bath itself. The roof has fallen in, the pillars are tumbled
+from its front, but the high walls, though undermined by the tide, still
+stand erect. On the cliff above, a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span>Roman fortress which must have
+resembled Burgh Castle in form and which has since served as a modern
+fort seems to have protected the Baths and the vast series of gardens
+which occupied the whole of the lower ground beneath the Stair of
+Anacapri, and whose boundary wall remains in a series of some twenty
+almost perfect arches.</p>
+
+<p>The importance of these remains has long been understood by the
+arch&aelig;ologists of Italy, and something of their ruin may be attributed to
+the extensive excavations made by the Government of Naples a hundred
+years ago. But far more of the terrible wreck is owing to the ravages of
+time. With the death of Tiberius Capri sinks suddenly out of sight. Its
+name had in fact become associated with infamy, and there is no real
+ground for supposing that it remained as the pleasure-isle of later
+Emperors. But the vast buildings can only slowly have mouldered into
+decay; we find its Pharos flaming under Domitian, and the exile of two
+Roman princesses, Crispina and Lucilla, by Commodus, proves that
+Imperial villas still remained to shelter them. It is to the period
+which immediately follows the residence of Tiberius that we may refer
+one <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span>of the most curious among the existing monuments of Capri, the
+Mithraic temple of Metromania. Its situation is singularly picturesque.
+A stair cut in the rock leads steeply down a rift in the magnificent
+cliffs to the mouth of a little cave, once shrouded by a portico whose
+fragments lie scattered among the cacti and wild thyme. Within the walls
+are lined with the characteristic reticulated Roman masonry, broken
+chambers and doorways on either side are blocked by <i>d&eacute;bris</i>, and two
+semicircular platforms rise one within the other to a niche in the
+furthest recess of the cave where the bas-relief of the Eastern deity
+which is now deposited in the Museum at Naples was found by the
+excavators. Beside it lay a stone with a Greek inscription so strangely
+pathetic that it must tell its own tale:&mdash;"Welcome into Hades, O noble
+deities&mdash;dwellers in the Stygian land&mdash;welcome me too, most pitiful of
+men, ravished from life by no judgment of the Fates, but by a death
+sudden, violent, the death-stroke of a wrath defiant of justice. But now
+I stood in the first rank beside my lord! now he has left me and my
+parents alike of hope! I am not fifteen, I have not reached my twentieth
+year, and&mdash;wretched I&mdash;I see no more the light! My name is Hypatus; but
+I pray my <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span>brother and my parents to weep for wretched ones no more."
+Conjecture has coupled this wail of a strange fate with the human
+sacrifices offered at the shrine of Mithras, and has seen in Hypatus a
+slave and favourite of Tiberius devoted by his master to the Eastern
+deity; but there is no ground whatever for either of the guesses.</p>
+
+<p>Such as it is however the death-cry of Hypatus alone breaks the later
+silence of Capri. The introduction of Christianity was marked by the
+rise of the mother church of San Costanzo, whose inner columns of giallo
+antico and cipollino were torn from the ruins of the Baths hard by, and
+from this moment we may trace the progress of destruction in each
+monument of the new faith. The sacrarium of San Stefano is paved with a
+mosaic of marbles from the Villa Jovis, and the chapel of St. Michael is
+erected out of a Roman building which occupied its site. We do not know
+when the island ceased to form a part of the Imperial estate, but the
+evidence of a charter of Gregory II., overlooked by the local
+topographers, shows that at the opening of the eighth century the
+"Insula Capre&aelig; cum monasterio St. Stefani" had passed like the rest <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span>of
+the Imperial property in the South to become part of the demesne of the
+Roman See. The change may have some relation to the subjection of Capri
+to the spiritual jurisdiction of Sorrento, of whose bishopric it formed
+a part till its own institution as a separate see in the tenth century.
+The name of the "Bishop of Quails," which attached itself to the prelate
+of Capri, points humorously to the chief source of his episcopal income,
+the revenue derived from the capture of the flocks of these birds who
+settle on the island in their two annual migrations in May and
+September. From the close of the ninth century, when the island passed
+out of the hands of Amalfi, it has followed the fortunes of the
+mainland; its ruin seems to have been completed by the raids of the
+Saracens from their neighbouring settlement on the coast of Lucania; and
+the two medi&aelig;val fortresses of Anacapri and Castiglione which bear the
+name of Barbarossa simply indicate that the Algerian pirate of the
+sixteenth century was the most dreaded of the long train of Moslem
+marauders who had made Capri their prey through the middle ages. Every
+raid and every fortress removed some monument of the Roman rule, and the
+fight which wrested the isle from Sir Hudson Lowe at the beginning of
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span>present century put the coping-stone on the work of destruction.
+But in spite of the ravages of time and of man enough has been left to
+give a special arch&aelig;ological interest to the little rock-refuge of
+Capri.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr style="width: 15%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span>
+<a name="THE_FEAST_OF_THE_CORAL-FISHERS" id="THE_FEAST_OF_THE_CORAL-FISHERS"></a>
+<br />
+<h2>THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<h2>III.</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The Caprese peasant has never had time to get the fact of winter fairly
+into his head. The cold comes year after year, but it comes in a brief
+and fitful way that sets our northern conceptions at defiance. The
+stranger who flies for refuge to the shores of the little island in
+November may find himself in a blaze of almost tropical sunshine. If a
+fortnight of dull weather at the opening of December raises hopes of an
+English Christmas they are likely to be swept away by a return of the
+summer glory for a month. Far away over the sea the crests of the
+Abruzzi range lift themselves white against the sky, but February has
+almost come before winter arrives, fitful, windy, rainy, but seldom
+cold, even when the mistral, so dreaded on the Riviera, comes sweeping
+down from the north. March ought by Caprese experience to be the
+difficult <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span>month; but "Marzo e pazzo," say the loungers in the little
+piazza, and sometimes even the "madness" of March takes the form of a
+delicious lunacy of unbroken sunshine. Corn is already rippling under
+the olives, leaf-buds run like little jets of green light along the
+brown vine-stems, the grey weird fig-branches are dotted with fruit,
+women are spinning again on the housetops, boys are playing with the
+birds they have caught in the myrtles, the bright shore across the bay
+is veiled in a summer haze, and winter is gone. It is hard to provide in
+English fashion against such a winter as this, and the Capri fisherman
+prefers to regard it as something abnormal, exceptional, to be borne
+with "pazienza" and a shrug of the shoulders. When the storm-wind blows
+he lounges in the sunny corner of the Piazza; when the rain comes he
+smokes at home or mends his nets under the picture of the Madonna and
+the Bambino; when the cold comes he sits passive and numbed till the
+cold goes. But he knows that the cold will go, and that the rain will
+pass, and that peace will settle down again on the sunny bay; and so
+instead of making a fuss about winter he looks on it as a casual little
+parenthesis in the business of life, intensely disagreeable but luckily
+brief. He sees <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span>no poetry in it, no beauty of bare wold and folded mist;
+he hears no music in it like the music of tinkling icicles so dear to
+Cowper's heart. Christmas itself isn't much of a festa in the South, and
+has none of the mystery and home pathos which makes it dear to
+Englishmen. There is the "presepio" in the church, there is the
+procession of the Wise Men at Epiphany-tide, but the only real break to
+the winter's dulness is the Feast of the Coral-Fishers.</p>
+
+<p>What with the poverty of the island and its big families it is hard to
+see how Capri could get along at all if it were not for the extra
+employment and earnings which are afforded by the coral-fishery off the
+African coast. Some hundred or two hundred young fellows leave the
+island every spring to embark at Torre del Greco in a detachment of the
+great coral fleet which musters at that port, at Genoa, or at Leghorn;
+and the Sunday before they start&mdash;generally one of the last Sundays in
+January&mdash;serves as the Feast of the Coral-Fishers. Long before daybreak
+the banging of big crackers rouses the island from its slumbers, and
+high mass is hardly over when a procession of strange picturesqueness
+streams out of church into the sunshine. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span>At its head come the
+"Daughters of Mary," some mere little trots, some girls of sixteen, but
+all clad in white, with garlands of flowers over their veils and girdles
+of red or blue. Behind come the fishermen, young sailor-boys followed by
+rough grizzled elders bearing candles like the girls before them, and
+then the village Brotherhood, fishers too, but clad in strange garments
+of grey, with black hoods covering their faces, and leaving nothing but
+the bright good-humoured eye to guide one under this sepulchral figure
+to the Giovanni or Beppino who was cracking jokes yesterday till the
+Blue Grotto rang again. Then beneath a great canopy upborne by the four
+elder fishers of the island, vested in gowns of "samite, mystic,
+wonderful"&mdash;somewhat like a doctor of music's gown in our unpoetic
+land&mdash;comes the Madonna herself, "La Madonna di Carmela," with a crown
+of gold on her head and a silver fish dangling from her fingers. It is
+the Madonna of Carmel who disputes with San Costanzo, the Saint of the
+mother-church below, the spiritual dominion of Capri. If he is the
+"Protector" of the island, she is its "Protectress." The older and
+graver sort indeed are faithful to their bishop-saint, and the loyalty
+of a vinedresser in the piazza remains unshaken even by the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span>splendour
+of the procession. "Yes, signore!" he replies to a sceptical Englishman
+who presses him hard with the glory of "the Protectress," "yes, signore,
+the Madonna is great for the fisher-folk; she gives them fish. But fish
+are poor things after all and bring little money. It is San Costanzo who
+gives us the wine, the good red wine which is the wealth of the island.
+And so this winter feast of the fishermen is a poor little thing beside
+our festa of San Costanzo in the May-time. For the image of our
+Protector is all of silver, and sometimes the bishop comes over from
+Sorrento and walks behind it, and we go all the way through the
+vineyards, and he blesses them, and then at nightfall we have
+'bombi'&mdash;not such as those of the Madonna," he adds with a quiet shrug
+of the shoulders, "but great bombi and great fireworks at the cost of
+the Municipio."</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, all the girls go with the fisher-folk in their love
+of the Madonna. "Ah yes, signore," laughs a maiden whose Greek face
+might have served Pheidias for a model, "San Costanzo is our protector,
+but he is old and the Madonna is young, so young and so pretty, signore,
+and she is <i>my</i> protectress." A <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span>fisherman backs up the feminine logic
+by a gird at the silver image which is evidently the strong point of the
+opposite party. The little commune is said to have borrowed a sum of
+money on the security of this work of art, and the fisherman is
+correspondingly scornful. "San Costanzo owes much, many danari, signore;
+and it is said," he whispers roguishly, "that if they don't pay pretty
+soon his creditors at Naples will send him to prison for the debt of the
+Municipio." But the Madonna has her troubles as well as the Saint. Her
+hair which has been dyed for the occasion has unhappily turned salmon
+colour by mistake; but the blunder has no sort of effect on the
+enthusiasm of her worshippers; on the canons who follow her in stiff
+copes, shouting lustily, or on the maidens and matrons who bring up the
+rear. Slowly the procession winds its way through the little town, now
+lengthening into a line of twinkling tapers as it passes through the
+narrow alleys which serve for streets, now widening out again on the
+hill-sides where the orange kerchiefs and silver ornaments of the
+Caprese women glow and flash into a grand background of colour in the
+sun. And then comes evening and benediction, and the fireworks, without
+which the procession would go for nothing, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span>catherine-wheels spinning in
+the Piazza, and big crackers bursting amidst a chorus of pretty outcries
+of terror and delight.</p>
+
+<p>Delight however ends with the festa, and the parting of the morning is a
+strange contrast in its sadness with this Sunday joy. The truth is that
+coral-fishing is a slavery to which nothing but sheer poverty drives the
+fishermen. From April to October their life is a life of ceaseless
+drudgery. Packed in a small boat without a deck, with no food but
+biscuit and foul water, touching land only at intervals of a month, and
+often deprived of sleep for days together through shortness of hands,
+the coral-fishers are exposed to a constant brutality from the masters
+of their vessels which is too horrible to bear description. Measured too
+by our English notions the pay of the men seems miserably inadequate to
+the toil and suffering which they undergo. Enough however remains to
+tempt the best of the Caprese fishermen to sea. Even a boy's earnings
+will pay his mother's rent. For a young man it is the only mode in which
+he can hope to gather a sum sufficient for marriage and his start in
+life. The early marriages so common at Naples and along the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span>adjoining
+coast are unknown at Capri, where a girl seldom weds before twenty and
+where the poorest peasant refuses the hand of his daughter to a suitor
+who cannot furnish a wedding settlement of some twenty pounds. Even with
+the modern rise of wages it is almost impossible for a lover to
+accumulate such a sum from the produce of his ordinary toil, and his one
+resource is the coral-fishery.</p>
+
+<p>The toil and suffering of the summer are soon forgotten when the young
+fisherman returns and adds his earnings to the little store of former
+years. When the store is complete, the ceremonial of a Caprese betrothal
+begins with "the embassy," as it is termed, of his mother to the parents
+of the future bride. Clad in her best array and holding in her hand 'the
+favourite nosegay of the island, a branch of sweet basil sprinkled with
+cinnamon powder and with a rose-coloured carnation in the midst of it,
+the old fishwife makes her way through the dark lanes to the vaulted
+room where her friends await her with a charming air of ignorance as to
+the errand on which she comes. Half an hour passes in diplomatic fence,
+in chat over the weather, the crops, or the price of macaroni, till at a
+given <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span>signal the girl herself leaves the room, and the "ambassadress"
+breaks out in praise of her good looks, her industry, and her good
+repute. The parents retort by praise of the young fisherman, compliments
+pass quickly into business, and a vow of eternal friendship between the
+families is sworn over a bottle of rosolio. The priest is soon called in
+and the lovers are formally betrothed for six months, a ceremony which
+was followed in times past by a new appearance of the ambassadress with
+the customary offering of trinkets from the lover to his promised
+spouse. This old Caprese custom has disappeared, but the girls still
+pride themselves on the number and value of their ornaments&mdash;the
+"spadella," or stiletto which binds the elaborately braided mass of
+their ebon hair; the circular gold earrings with inner circles of
+pearls; the gold chain or lac&eacute;tta, worn fold upon fold round the neck;
+the bunch of gold talismans suspended on the breast; the profusion of
+heavy silver rings which load every finger. The Sunday after her
+betrothal when she appears at High Mass in all her finery is the
+proudest day of a Capri girl's life; but love has few of the tenderer
+incidents which make its poetry in the North. There is no "lover's lane"
+in Capri, for a maiden may <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span>not walk with her betrothed save in presence
+of witnesses; and a kiss before marriage is, as "Auld Robin Gray" calls
+it, "a sin" to which no modest girl stoops. The future husband is in
+fact busy with less romantic matters; it is his business to provide bed
+and bedding, table and chairs, drawers and looking-glass, and above all
+a dozen gaudy prints from Naples of the Madonna and the favourite saints
+of the day. The bride provides the rest, and on the eve of the marriage
+the families meet once more to take an inventory of her contributions
+which remain her own property till her death. The morning's sun streams
+in upon the lovers as they kneel at the close of mass before the priest
+in San Stefano; all the boyhood of Capri is waiting outside to pelt the
+bridal train with "confetti" as it hurries amidst blushes and laughter
+across the Piazza; a dinner of macaroni and the island wine ends in a
+universal "tarantella," there is a final walk round the village at the
+close of the dance, and the coral-fisher reaps the prize of his toil as
+he leads his bride to her home.</p>
+
+<p>THE END.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<h4>LONDON:</h4><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span>
+<h4>PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS,</h4>
+<h4>STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.</h4>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h4>THIRTY-FOURTH THOUSAND.</h4><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+
+<h2>A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">By</span> JOHN RICHARD GREEN</h3>
+
+<h4><i>With Coloured Maps, Genealogical Tables, and Chronological<br />
+Annals. Crown 8vo., price 8s. 6d.</i></h4>
+
+<h4>MACMILLAN &amp; CO., LONDON.</h4>
+
+
+<p>"I thank you very much for sending me Mr. Green's book. I have read it
+with genuine admiration. It bears marks of great ability in many ways.
+There is a vast amount of research, great skill in handling and
+arranging the facts, a very pleasant and taking style, but chief of all
+a remarkable grasp of the subject&mdash;many-sided as it is in its unity and
+integrity&mdash;which makes it a work of real historical genius. I am sure I
+wish it all the success it deserves; and you are quite at liberty to
+give my opinion about it to any one who asks it."&mdash;<i>Extract from Letter
+of W. Stubbs, M.A., Regius Professor of Modern History, Oxford.</i></p>
+
+<p>"I think Mr. Green's 'Short History of the English People' admirably
+suited for students in the Universities and for the higher classes in
+schools. The object of the book, that of combining the history of the
+people with the history of the kingdom, is most successfully carried
+out, especially in the earlier part. It gives, I think, in the main, a
+true and accurate picture of the general course of English history. It
+displays throughout a firm hold on the subject, and a singularly wide
+range of thought and sympathy. As a composition, too, the book is clear,
+forcible, and brilliant. It is the most truly original book of the kind
+that I ever saw."&mdash;<i>Extract from Letter of Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L.,
+LL.D., &amp;c. &amp;c.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span>"Rightly taken, the History of England is one of the grandest human
+stories, and Mr. Green has so taken it that his book should delight the
+general reader quite as much as it delights the student."&mdash;<i>Extract from
+Letter of Professor Henry Morley.</i></p>
+
+<p>"To say that Mr. Green's book is better than those which have preceded
+it, would be to convey a very inadequate impression of its merits. It
+stands alone as the one general history of the country, for the sake of
+which all others, if young and old are wise, will be speedily and surely
+set aside. It is perhaps the highest praise that can be given to it,
+that it is impossible to discover whether it was intended for the young
+or for the old. The size and general look of the book, its vividness of
+narration, and its avoidance of abstruse argument would place it among
+school-books; but its fresh and original views, and its general
+historical power, are only to be appreciated by those who have tried
+their own hand at writing history, and who know the enormous
+difficulties of the task."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Mr. Samuel R. Gardiner</span> <i>in the
+Academy.</i></p>
+
+<p>"We know of no record of the whole drama of English history to be
+compared with it. We know of none that is so distinctly a work of
+genius.... Mr. Green's volume is a really wonderful production. There is
+a freshness and originality breathing from one end to the other, a charm
+of style, and a power, both narrative and descriptive, which lifts it
+altogether out of the class of books to which at first sight it might
+seem to belong. The range too of subject, and the capacity which the
+writer shows of dealing with so many different sides of English history,
+witness to powers of no common order.... The Early History is admirably
+done; the clear and full narrative which Mr. Green is able to put
+together of the earliest days of the English people is a wonderful
+contrast to the confused and pr&oelig;-scientific talk so common in most of
+the books which it is to be hoped that Mr. Green's volume will
+displace."&mdash;<i>Pall Mall Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<div class="tr">
+<p class="cen"><a name="TN"></a>Transcriber's Note:</p>
+
+Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the
+original<br /> document have been preserved.<br />
+<br />
+Typographical errors corrected in the text:<br />
+<br />
+Page  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;62&nbsp;  Cr&eacute;&ccedil;y changed to Cr&eacute;cy<br />
+Page  &nbsp;184&nbsp;  Cre&ccedil;y changed to Cr&eacute;cy<br />
+Page  &nbsp;186&nbsp;  Li&eacute;ge changed to Li&egrave;ge<br />
+Page  &nbsp;230&nbsp;  enterprize changed to enterprise<br />
+Page  &nbsp;237&nbsp;  liker changed to like<br />
+Page  &nbsp;243&nbsp;  Eigi changed to RigiM<br />
+Page  &nbsp;291&nbsp;  adminstrative changed to administrative<br />
+Page  &nbsp;302&nbsp;  immedietely changed to immediately<br />
+Page  &nbsp;374&nbsp;  connexion changed to connection<br />
+Page  &nbsp;404&nbsp;  Apennine changed to Apennines<br />
+Page  &nbsp;419&nbsp;  maccaroni changed to macaroni<br />
+Page  &nbsp;421&nbsp;  maccaroni changed to macaroni<br />
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Stray Studies from England and Italy, by 
+John Richard Greene
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Stray Studies from England and Italy, by
+John Richard Greene
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Stray Studies from England and Italy
+
+Author: John Richard Greene
+
+Release Date: June 20, 2008 [EBook #25855]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRAY STUDIES - ENGLAND AND ITALY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Barbara Kosker, Bill Tozier
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  STRAY STUDIES
+
+  FROM
+
+  ENGLAND AND ITALY.
+
+  BY
+
+  JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
+
+
+  LONDON:
+  MACMILLAN AND CO.
+  1876.
+
+  LONDON:
+  PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS,
+  STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+I have to thank the Editors of _Macmillan's Magazine_ and the _Saturday
+Review_ for allowing me to reprint most of the papers in this series. In
+many cases however I have greatly changed their original form. A few
+pages will be found to repeat what I have already said in my 'Short
+History.'
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                   PAGE
+
+  A BROTHER OF THE POOR                               1
+
+  SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE:--
+
+      I. CANNES AND ST. HONORAT                      31
+     II. CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE                     44
+    III. TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA             59
+     IV. THE WINTER RETREAT                          71
+      V. SAN REMO                                    79
+
+  THE POETRY OF WEALTH                               93
+
+  LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS                       107
+
+  CHILDREN BY THE SEA                               167
+
+  THE FLORENCE OF DANTE                             181
+
+  BUTTERCUPS                                        198
+
+  ABBOT AND TOWN                                    211
+
+  HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS                              241
+
+  AENEAS: A VERGILIAN STUDY                          257
+
+  TWO VENETIAN STUDIES:--
+
+      I. VENICE AND ROME                            289
+     II. VENICE AND TINTORETTO                      300
+
+  THE DISTRICT VISITOR                              313
+
+  THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD                       329
+
+  THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS                     359
+
+  CAPRI                                             383
+
+  CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS                       395
+
+  THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS                    414
+
+
+
+
+A BROTHER OF THE POOR.
+
+
+There are few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such
+as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in
+the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly
+a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the
+grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables
+of Knoll, the chime of a village clock falls faintly on the ear, but
+there is no voice or footfall of living thing to break the silence as I
+turn over leaf after leaf of the little book I have brought with me from
+the bustle of town to this still retreat, a book that is the record of a
+broken life, of a life "broken off," as he who lived it says of another,
+"with a ragged edge."
+
+It is a book that carries one far from the woodland stillness around
+into the din and turmoil of cities and men, into the misery and
+degradation of "the East-end,"--that "London without London," as some
+one called it the other day. Few regions are more unknown than the Tower
+Hamlets. Not even Mrs. Riddell has ventured as yet to cross the border
+which parts the City from their weltering mass of busy life, their
+million of hard workers packed together in endless rows of monotonous
+streets, broken only by shipyard or factory or huge breweries, streets
+that stretch away eastward from Aldgate to the Essex marshes. And yet,
+setting aside the poetry of life which is everywhere, there is poetry
+enough in East London; poetry in the great river which washes it on the
+south, in the fretted tangle of cordage and mast that peeps over the
+roofs of Shadwell or in the great hulls moored along the wharves of
+Wapping; poetry in the "Forest" that fringes it to the east, in the few
+glades that remain of Epping and Hainault,--glades ringing with the
+shouts of school-children out for their holiday and half mad with
+delight at the sight of a flower or a butterfly; poetry of the present
+in the work and toil of these acres of dull bricks and mortar where
+everybody, man woman and child, is a worker, this England without a
+"leisure class"; poetry in the thud of the steam-engine and the white
+trail of steam from the tall sugar refinery, in the blear eyes of the
+Spitalfields weaver, or the hungering faces of the group of labourers
+clustered from morning till night round the gates of the docks and
+watching for the wind that brings the ships up the river: poetry in its
+past, in strange old-fashioned squares, in quaint gabled houses, in grey
+village churches, that have been caught and overlapped and lost, as it
+were, in the great human advance that has carried London forward from
+Whitechapel, its limit in the age of the Georges, to Stratford, its
+bound in that of Victoria.
+
+Stepney is a belated village of this sort; its grey old church of St.
+Dunstan, buried as it is now in the very heart of East London, stood
+hardly a century ago among the fields. All round it lie tracts of human
+life without a past; but memories cluster thickly round "Old Stepney,"
+as the people call it with a certain fond reverence, memories of men
+like Erasmus and Colet and the group of scholars in whom the Reformation
+began. It was to the country house of the Dean of St. Paul's, hard by
+the old church of St. Dunstan, that Erasmus betook him when tired of the
+smoke and din of town. "I come to drink your fresh air, my Colet," he
+writes, "to drink yet deeper of your rural peace." The fields and hedges
+through which Erasmus loved to ride remained fields and hedges within
+living memory; only forty years ago a Londoner took his Sunday outing
+along the field path which led past the London Hospital to what was
+still the suburban village church of Stepney. But the fields through
+which the path led have their own church now, with its parish of dull
+straight streets of monotonous houses already marked with premature
+decay, and here and there alleys haunted by poverty and disease and
+crime.
+
+There is nothing marked about either church or district; their character
+and that of their people are of the commonest East-end type. If I ask my
+readers to follow me to this parish of St. Philip, it is simply because
+these dull streets and alleys were chosen by a brave and earnest man as
+the scene of his work among the poor. It was here that Edward Denison
+settled in the autumn of 1867, in the second year of the great "East
+London Distress." In the October of 1869 he left England on a fatal
+voyage from which he was never to return. The collection of his letters
+which has been recently printed by Sir Baldwyn Leighton has drawn so
+much attention to the work which lay within the narrow bounds of those
+two years that I may perhaps be pardoned for recalling my own memories
+of one whom it is hard to forget.
+
+A few words are enough to tell the tale of his earlier days. Born in
+1840, the son of a bishop, and nephew of the late Speaker of the House
+of Commons, Edward Denison passed from Eton to Christchurch, and was
+forced after quitting the University to spend some time in foreign
+travel by the delicacy of his health. His letters give an interesting
+picture of his mind during this pause in an active life, a pause which
+must have been especially distasteful to one whose whole bent lay from
+the first in the direction of practical energy. "I believe," he says in
+his later days, "that abstract political speculation is my _metier_;"
+but few minds were in reality less inclined to abstract speculation.
+From the very first one sees in him what one may venture to call the
+best kind of "Whig" mind, that peculiar temper of fairness and
+moderation which declines to push conclusions to extremes, and recoils
+instinctively when opinion is extended beyond its proper bound. His
+comment on Newman's 'Apologia' paints his real intellectual temper with
+remarkable precision. "I left off reading Newman's 'Apologia' before I
+got to the end, tired of the ceaseless changes of the writer's mind, and
+vexed with his morbid scruples--perhaps, too, having got a little out of
+harmony myself with the feelings of the author, whereas I began by being
+in harmony with them. I don't quite know whether to esteem it a blessing
+or a curse; but whenever an opinion to which I am a recent convert, or
+which I do not hold with the entire force of my intellect, is forced too
+strongly upon me, or driven home to its logical conclusion, or
+over-praised, or extended beyond its proper limits, I recoil
+instinctively and begin to gravitate towards the other extreme, sure to
+be in turn repelled by it also."
+
+I dwell on this temper of his mind because it is this practical and
+moderate character of the man which gives such weight to the very
+sweeping conclusions on social subjects to which he was driven in his
+later days. A judgment which condemns the whole system of Poor Laws, for
+instance, falls with very different weight from a mere speculative
+theorist and from a practical observer whose mind is constitutionally
+averse from extreme conclusions. Throughout however we see this
+intellectual moderation jostling with a moral fervour which feels
+restlessly about for a fitting sphere of action. "Real life," he writes
+from Madeira, "is not dinner-parties and small talk, nor even croquet
+and dancing." There is a touch of exaggeration in phrases like these
+which need not blind us to the depth and reality of the feeling which
+they imperfectly express, a feeling which prompted the question which
+embodies the spirit of all these earlier letters,--the question, "What
+is my work?"
+
+The answer to this question was found both within and without the
+questioner. Those who were young in the weary days of Palmerstonian rule
+will remember the disgust at purely political life which was produced by
+the bureaucratic inaction of the time, and we can hardly wonder that,
+like many of the finer minds among his contemporaries, Edward Denison
+turned from the political field which was naturally open to him to the
+field of social effort. His tendency in this direction was aided, no
+doubt, partly by the intensity of this religious feeling and of his
+consciousness of the duty he owed to the poor, and partly by that closer
+sympathy with the physical suffering around us which is one of the most
+encouraging characteristics of the day. Even in the midst of his
+outburst of delight at a hard frost ("I like," he says, "the bright
+sunshine that generally accompanies it, the silver landscape, and the
+ringing distinctness of sounds in the frozen air"), we see him haunted
+by a sense of the way in which his pleasure contrasts with the winter
+misery of the poor. "I would rather give up all the pleasures of the
+frost than indulge them, poisoned as they are by the misery of so many
+of our brothers. What a monstrous thing it is that in the richest
+country in the world large masses of the population should be condemned
+annually to starvation and death!" It is easy to utter protests like
+these in the spirit of a mere sentimentalist; it is less easy to carry
+them out into practical effort, as Edward Denison resolved to do. After
+an unsatisfactory attempt to act as Almoner for the Society for the
+Relief of Distress, he resolved to fix himself personally in the
+East-end of London, and study the great problem of pauperism face to
+face.
+
+His resolve sprang from no fit of transient enthusiasm, but from a sober
+conviction of the need of such a step. "There are hardly any residents
+in the East rich enough to give much money, or with enough leisure to
+give much time," he says. "This is the evil. Even the best disposed in
+the West don't like coming so far off, and, indeed, few have the time to
+spare, and when they do there is great waste of time and energy on the
+journey. My plan is the only really practicable one, and as I have both
+means, time, and inclination, I should be a thief and a murderer if I
+withheld what I so evidently owe." In the autumn of 1867 he carried out
+his resolve, and took lodgings in the heart of the parish which I
+sketched in the opening of this paper. If any romantic dreams had mixed
+with his resolution they at once faded away before the dull, commonplace
+reality. "I saw nothing very striking at Stepney," is his first comment
+on the sphere he had chosen. But he was soon satisfied with his choice.
+He took up in a quiet, practical way the work he found closest at hand.
+"All is yet in embryo, but it will grow. Just now I only teach in a
+night school, and do what in me lies in looking after the sick, keeping
+an eye upon nuisances and the like, seeing that the local authorities
+keep up to their work. I go to-morrow before the Board at the workhouse
+to compel the removal to the infirmary of a man who ought to have been
+there already. I shall drive the sanitary inspector to put the Act
+against overcrowding in force." Homely work of this sort grows on him;
+we see him in these letters getting boys out to sea, keeping school with
+little urchins,--"demons of misrule" who tried his temper,--gathering
+round him a class of working men, organizing an evening club for boys.
+All this, too, quietly and unostentatiously and with as little resort as
+possible to "cheap charity," as he used to call it, to the "doles of
+bread and meat which only do the work of poor-rates."
+
+So quiet and simple indeed was his work that though it went on in the
+parish of which I then had the charge it was some little time before I
+came to know personally the doer of it. It is amusing even now to
+recollect my first interview with Edward Denison. A vicar's Monday
+morning is never the pleasantest of awakenings, but the Monday morning
+of an East-end vicar brings worries that far eclipse the mere headache
+and dyspepsia of his rural brother. It is the "parish morning." All the
+complicated machinery of a great ecclesiastical, charitable, and
+educational organization has got to be wound up afresh, and set going
+again for another week. The superintendent of the Women's Mission is
+waiting with a bundle of accounts, complicated as only ladies' accounts
+can be. The churchwarden has come with a face full of gloom to consult
+on the falling off in the offertory. The Scripture-reader has brought
+his "visiting book" to be inspected, and a special report on the
+character of a doubtful family in the parish. The organist drops in to
+report something wrong in the pedals. There is a letter to be written to
+the inspector of nuisances, directing his attention to certain
+odoriferous drains in Pig-and-Whistle Alley. The nurse brings her
+sick-list and her little bill for the sick-kitchen. The schoolmaster
+wants a fresh pupil-teacher, and discusses nervously the prospects of
+his scholars in the coming inspection. There is the interest on the
+penny bank to be calculated, a squabble in the choir to be adjusted, a
+district visitor to be replaced, reports to be drawn up for the Bishop's
+Fund and a great charitable society, the curate's sick-list to be
+inspected, and a preacher to be found for the next church festival.
+
+It was in the midst of a host of worries such as these that a card was
+laid on my table with a name which I recognized as that of a young
+layman from the West-end, who had for two or three months past been
+working in the mission district attached to the parish. Now, whatever
+shame is implied in the confession, I had a certain horror of "laymen
+from the West-end." Lay co-operation is an excellent thing in itself,
+and one of my best assistants was a letter-sorter in the post-office
+close by; but the "layman from the West-end," with a bishop's letter of
+recommendation in his pocket and a head full of theories about "heathen
+masses," was an unmitigated nuisance. I had a pretty large experience of
+these gentlemen, and my one wish in life was to have no more. Some had a
+firm belief in their own eloquence, and were zealous for a big room and
+a big congregation. I got them the big room, but I was obliged to leave
+the big congregation to their own exertions, and in a month or two their
+voices faded away. Then there was the charitable layman, who pounced
+down on the parish from time to time and threw about meat and blankets
+till half of the poor were demoralized. Or there was the statistical
+layman, who went about with a note-book and did spiritual and economical
+sums in the way of dividing the number of "people in the free seats" by
+the number of bread tickets annually distributed. There was the layman
+with a passion for homoeopathy, the ritualistic layman, the layman with
+a mania for preaching down trades' unions, the layman with an
+educational mania. All however agreed in one point, much as they
+differed in others, and the one point was that of a perfect belief in
+their individual nostrums and perfect contempt for all that was already
+doing in the neighbourhood.
+
+It was with no peculiar pleasure therefore that I rose to receive this
+fresh "layman from the West"; but a single glance was enough to show me
+that my visitor was a man of very different stamp from his predecessors.
+There was something in the tall, manly figure, the bright smile, the
+frank winning address of Edward Denison that inspired confidence in a
+moment. "I come to learn, and not to teach," he laughed, as I hinted at
+"theories" and their danger; and our talk soon fell on a certain "John's
+Place," where he thought there was a great deal to be learned. In five
+minutes more we stood in the spot which interested him, an alley running
+between two mean streets, and narrowing at one end till we crept out of
+it as if through the neck of a bottle. It was by no means the choicest
+part of the parish: the drainage was imperfect, the houses miserable;
+but wretched as it was it was a favourite haunt of the poor, and it
+swarmed with inhabitants of very various degrees of respectability.
+Costermongers abounded, strings of barrows were drawn up on the
+pavement, and the refuse of their stock lay rotting in the gutter.
+Drunken sailors and Lascars from the docks rolled along shouting to its
+houses of ill-fame. There was little crime, though one of the "ladies"
+of the alley was a well-known receiver of stolen goods, but there was a
+good deal of drunkenness and vice. Now and then a wife came plumping on
+to the pavement from a window overhead; sometimes a couple of viragoes
+fought out their quarrel "on the stones"; boys idled about in the
+sunshine in training to be pickpockets; miserable girls flaunted in
+dirty ribbons at nightfall at half-a-dozen doors.
+
+But with all this the place was popular with even respectable working
+people in consequence of the small size and cheapness of the houses--for
+there is nothing the poor like so much as a house to themselves; and the
+bulk of its population consisted of casual labourers, who gathered every
+morning round the great gates of the docks, waiting to be "called in" as
+the ships came up to unload. The place was naturally unhealthy,
+constantly haunted by fever, and had furnished some hundred cases in the
+last visitation of cholera. The work done among them in the "cholera
+time" had never been forgotten by the people, and, ill-famed as the
+place was, I visited it at all times of the day and night with perfect
+security. The apostle however of John's Place was my friend the
+letter-sorter. He had fixed on it as his special domain, and with a
+little aid from others had opened a Sunday-school and simple Sunday
+services in the heart of it. A branch of the Women's Mission was
+established in the same spot, and soon women were "putting by" their
+pence and sewing quietly round the lady superintendent as she read to
+them the stories of the Gospels.
+
+It was this John's Place which Edward Denison chose as the centre of his
+operations. There was very little in his manner to show his sense of
+the sacrifice he was making, though the sacrifice was in reality a great
+one. No one enjoyed more keenly the pleasures of life and society: he
+was a good oarsman, he delighted in outdoor exercise, and skating was to
+him "a pleasure only rivalled in my affection by a ride across country
+on a good horse." But month after month these pleasures were quietly put
+aside for his work in the East-end. "I have come to this," he says,
+laughingly, "that a walk along Piccadilly is a most exhilarating and
+delightful treat. I don't enjoy it above once in ten days, but therefore
+with double zest." What told on him most was the physical depression
+induced by the very look of these vast, monotonous masses of sheer
+poverty. "My wits are getting blunted," he says, "by the monotony and
+_ugliness_ of this place. I can almost imagine, difficult as it is, the
+awful effect upon a human mind of never seeing anything but the meanest
+and vilest of men and men's works, and of complete exclusion from the
+sight of God and His works,--a position in which the villager never is."
+But there was worse than physical degradation. "This summer there is not
+so very much actual suffering for want of food, nor from sickness. What
+is so bad is the habitual condition of this mass of humanity--its
+uniform mean level, the absence of anything more civilizing than a
+grinding organ to raise the ideas beyond the daily bread and beer, the
+utter want of education, the complete indifference to religion, with the
+fruits of all this--improvidence, dirt, and their secondaries, crime and
+disease."
+
+Terrible however as these evils were, he believed they could be met; and
+the quiet good sense of his character was shown in the way in which he
+met them. His own residence in the East-end was the most effective of
+protests against that severance of class from class in which so many of
+its evils take their rise. When speaking of the overcrowding and the
+official ill-treatment of the poor, he says truly: "These are the sort
+of evils which, where there are no resident gentry, grow to a height
+almost incredible, and on which the remedial influence of the mere
+presence of a gentleman known to be on the alert is inestimable." But
+nothing, as I often had occasion to remark, could be more judicious than
+his interference on behalf of the poor, or more unlike the fussy
+impertinence of the philanthropists who think themselves born "to
+expose" Boards of Guardians. His aim throughout was to co-operate with
+the Guardians in giving, not less, but greater effect to the Poor Laws,
+and in resisting the sensational writing and reckless abuse which aim at
+undoing their work. "The gigantic subscription lists which are regarded
+as signs of our benevolence," he says truly, "are monuments of our
+indifference."
+
+The one hope for the poor, he believed, lay not in charity, but in
+themselves. "Build school-houses, pay teachers, give prizes, frame
+workmen's clubs, help them to help themselves, lend them your brains;
+but give them no money, except what you sink in such undertakings as
+above." This is not the place to describe or discuss the more detailed
+suggestions with which he faced the great question of poverty and
+pauperism in the East-end; they are briefly summarized in a remarkable
+letter which he addressed in 1869 to an East-end newspaper:--"First we
+must so discipline and regulate our charities as to cut off the
+resources of the habitual mendicant. Secondly, all who by begging
+proclaim themselves destitute, must be taken at their word. They must be
+taken up and kept at penal work--not for one morning, as now, but for a
+month or two; a proportion of their earnings being handed over to them
+on dismissal, as capital on which to begin a life of honest industry.
+Thirdly, we must promote the circulation of labour, and obviate morbid
+congestions of the great industrial centres. Fourthly, we must improve
+the condition of the agricultural poor." Stern as such suggestions may
+seem, there are few who have really thought as well as worked for the
+poor without feeling that sternness of this sort is, in the highest
+sense, mercy. Ten years in the East of London had brought me to the same
+conclusions; and my Utopia, like Edward Denison's, lay wholly in a
+future to be worked out by the growing intelligence and thrift of the
+labouring classes themselves.
+
+But stern as were his theories, there is hardly a home within his
+district that has not some memory left of the love and tenderness of his
+personal charity. I hardly like to tell how often I have seen the face
+of the sick and dying brighten as he drew near, or how the little
+children, as they flocked out of school, would run to him, shouting his
+name for very glee. For the Sunday-school was soon transformed by his
+efforts into a day-school for children, whose parents were really
+unable to pay school-fees; and a large schoolroom, erected near John's
+Place, was filled with dirty little scholars. Here too he gathered round
+him a class of working men, to whom he lectured on the Bible every
+Wednesday evening; and here he delivered addresses to the dock-labourers
+whom he had induced to attend, of a nature somewhat startling to those
+who talk of "preaching down to the intelligence of the poor." I give the
+sketch of one of these sermons (on "Not forsaking the assembling of
+yourselves together") in his own words:--"I presented Christianity as a
+society; investigated the origin of societies, the family, the tribe,
+the nation, with the attendant expanded ideas of rights and duties; the
+common weal, the bond of union; rising from the family dinner-table to
+the sacrificial rites of the national gods; drew parallels with trades'
+unions and benefit clubs, and told them flatly they would not be
+Christians till they were communicants." No doubt this will seem to most
+sensible people extravagant enough, even without the quotations from
+"Wordsworth, Tennyson, and even Pope" with which his addresses were
+enlivened; but I must confess that my own experience among the poor
+agrees pretty much with Edward Denison's, and that I believe "high
+thinking" put into plain English to be more likely to tell on a
+dock-yard labourer than all the "simple Gospel sermons" in the world.
+
+His real power however for good among the poor lay not so much in what
+he did as in what he was. It is in no spirit of class self-sufficiency
+that he dwells again and again throughout these letters on the
+advantages to such a neighbourhood of the presence of a "gentleman" in
+the midst of it. He lost little, in the end he gained much, by the
+resolute stand he made against the indiscriminate almsgiving which has
+done so much to create and encourage pauperism in the East of London.
+The poor soon came to understand the man who was as liberal with his
+sympathy as he was chary of meat and coal tickets, who only aimed at
+being their friend, at listening to their troubles, and aiding them with
+counsel, as if he were one of themselves, at putting them in the way of
+honest work, at teaching their children, at protecting them with a
+perfect courage and chivalry against oppression and wrong. He
+instinctively appealed in fact to their higher nature, and such an
+appeal seldom remains unanswered. In the roughest costermonger there is
+a vein of real nobleness, often even of poetry, in which lies the whole
+chance of his rising to a better life. I remember, as an instance of the
+way in which such a vein can be touched, the visit of a lady, well known
+for her work in the poorer districts of London, to a low alley in this
+very parish. She entered the little mission-room with a huge basket,
+filled not with groceries or petticoats, but with roses. There was
+hardly one pale face among the women bending over their sewing that did
+not flush with delight as she distributed her gifts. Soon, as the news
+spread down the alley, rougher faces peered in at window and door, and
+great "navvies" and dock-labourers put out their hard fists for a
+rosebud with the shyness and delight of schoolboys. "She was a _real_
+lady," was the unanimous verdict of the alley; like Edward Denison she
+had somehow discovered that man does not live by bread alone, and that
+the communion of rich and poor is not to be found in appeals to the
+material but to the spiritual side of man.
+
+"What do you look on as the greatest boon that has been conferred on the
+poorer classes in later years?" said a friend to me one day, after
+expatiating on the rival claims of schools, missions, shoe-black
+brigades, and a host of other philanthropic efforts for their
+assistance. I am afraid I sank in his estimation when I answered,
+"Sixpenny photographs." But any one who knows what the worth of family
+affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of
+little portraits stuck over a labourer's fireplace, still gathering
+together into one the "home" that life is always parting--the boy that
+has "gone to Canada," the girl "out at service," the little one with the
+golden hair that sleeps under the daisies, the old grandfather in the
+country--will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies,
+social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family
+affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all
+the philanthropists in the world.
+
+It is easy indeed to resolve on "helping" the poor; but it is far less
+easy to see clearly how we can help them, what is real aid, and what is
+mere degradation. I know few books where any one who is soberly facing
+questions like these can find more help than in the "Letters" of Edward
+Denison. Broken and scattered as his hints necessarily appear, the main
+lines along which his thought moves are plain enough. He would
+discriminate between temporary, and chronic distress, between the
+poverty caused by a sudden revolution of trade and permanent destitution
+such as that of Bethnal Green. The first requires exceptional treatment;
+the second a rigid and universal administration of the Poor Laws. "Bring
+back the Poor Law," he repeats again and again, "to the spirit of its
+institution; organize a sufficiently elastic labour test, without which
+no outdoor relief to be given; make the few alterations which altered
+times demand, and impose every possible discouragement on private
+benevolence." The true cure for pauperism lies in the growth of thrift
+among the poor. "I am not drawing the least upon my imagination when I
+say that a young man of twenty could in five years, even as a
+dock-labourer, which is much the lowest employment and least well paid
+there is, save about L20. This is not exactly Utopia; it is within the
+reach of nearly every man, if quite at the bottom of the tree; but if it
+were of anything like common occurrence the destitution and disease of
+this life would be within manageable limits."
+
+I know that words like these are in striking contrast with the usual
+public opinion on the subject, as well as with the mere screeching over
+poverty in which sentimentalists are in the habit of indulging. But it
+is fair to say that they entirely coincide with my own experience. The
+sight which struck me most in Stepney was one which met my eyes when I
+plunged by sheer accident into the back-yard of a jobbing carpenter, and
+came suddenly upon a neat greenhouse with fine flowers inside it. The
+man had built it with his own hands and his own savings; and the sight
+of it had so told on his next-door neighbour--a cobbler, if I remember
+rightly--as to induce him to leave off drinking, and build a rival
+greenhouse with savings of his own. Both had become zealous florists,
+and thrifty, respectable men; but the thing which surprised both of them
+most was that they had been able to save at all.
+
+It is in the letters themselves however rather than in these desultory
+comments of mine that the story of these two years of earnest combat
+with the great problem of our day must be studied. Short as the time
+was, it was broken by visits to France, to Scotland, to Guernsey, and by
+his election as Member of Parliament for the borough of Newark. But
+even these visits and his new parliamentary position were meant to be
+parts of an effort for the regeneration of our poorer classes. His
+careful examination of the thrift of the peasantry of the Channel
+Islands, his researches into the actual working of the "Assistance
+Publique" in Paris, the one remarkable speech he delivered in Parliament
+on the subject of vagrancy, were all contributions to this great end. In
+the midst of these labours a sudden attack of his old disease forced him
+to leave England on a long sea-voyage, and within a fortnight of his
+landing in Australia he died at Melbourne. His portrait hangs in the
+school which he built, and rough faces as they gaze at it still soften
+even into tears as they think of Edward Denison.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
+
+
+
+I.
+
+CANNES AND ST. HONORAT.
+
+
+In a colloquial sort of way we talk glibly enough of leaving England,
+but England is by no means an easy country to leave. If it bids us
+farewell from the cliffs of Dover, it greets us again on the quay of
+Calais. It would be a curious morning's amusement to take a map of
+Europe, and mark with a dot of red the settlements of our lesser English
+colonies. A thousand Englands would crop up along the shores of the
+Channel or in quiet nooks of Normandy, around mouldering Breton castles
+or along the banks of the Loire, under the shadow of the Maritime Alps
+or the Pyrenees, beneath the white walls of Tunis or the Pyramids of the
+Nile. During the summer indeed England is everywhere--fishing in the
+fiords of Norway, sketching on the Kremlin, shooting brigands in
+Albania, yachting among the Cyclades, lion-hunting in the Atlas,
+crowding every steamer on the Rhine, annexing Switzerland, lounging
+through Italian galleries, idling in the gondolas of Venice. But even
+winter is far from driving England home again; what it really does is to
+concentrate it in a hundred little Britains along the sunny shores of
+the South. Each winter resort brings home to us the power of the British
+doctor. It is he who rears pleasant towns at the foot of the Pyrenees,
+and lines the sunny coasts of the Riviera with villas that gleam white
+among the olive groves. It is his finger that stirs the camels of
+Algeria, the donkeys of Palestine, the Nile boats of Egypt. At the first
+frosts of November the doctor marshals his wild geese for their winter
+flitting, and the long train streams off, grumbling but obedient, to the
+little Britains of the South.
+
+Of these little Britains none is more lovely than Cannes. The place is a
+pure creation of the health-seekers whose gay villas are thrown
+fancifully about among its sombre fir-woods, though the "Old Town," as
+it is called nowadays, remains clinging to its original height, street
+above street leading up to a big bare church of the Renascence period,
+to fragments of mediaeval walls and a great tower which crowns the summit
+of the hill. At the feet of this height lie the two isles of Lerins, set
+in the blue waters of the bay; on the east the eye ranges over the
+porphyry hills of Napoul to the huge masses of the Estrelles; landwards
+a tumbled country with bright villas dotted over it rises gently to the
+Alps. As a strictly winter resort Cannes is far too exposed for the more
+delicate class of invalids; as a spring resort it is without a rival.
+Nowhere is the air so bright and elastic, the light so wonderfully
+brilliant and diffused. The very soil, full of micaceous fragments,
+sparkles at our feet. Colour takes a depth as well as a refinement
+strange even to the Riviera; nowhere is the sea so darkly purple,
+nowhere are the tones of the distant hills so delicate and evanescent,
+nowhere are the sunsets so sublime. The scenery around harmonizes in its
+gaiety, its vivacity, its charm with this brightness of air and light.
+There is little of grandeur about it, little to compare in magnificence
+with the huge background of the cliffs behind Mentone or the mountain
+wall which rises so steeply from its lemon groves. But everywhere there
+is what Mentone lacks--variety, largeness, picturesqueness of contrast
+and surprise. Above us is the same unchanging blue as there, but here it
+overarches gardens fresh with verdure and bright with flowers, and
+houses gleaming white among the dark fir-clumps; hidden little ravines
+break the endless tossings of the ground; in the distance white roads
+rush straight to grey towns hanging strangely against the hill-sides; a
+thin snow-line glitters along the ridge of the Maritime Alps; dark
+purple shadows veil the recesses of the Estrelles.
+
+Nor is it only this air of cheerfulness and vivacity which makes Cannes
+so pleasant a spring resort for invalids; it possesses in addition an
+advantage of situation which its more sheltered rivals necessarily want.
+The high mountain walls that give their complete security from cold
+winds to Mentone or San Remo are simply prison walls to visitors who are
+too weak to face a steep ascent on foot or even on donkey-back, for
+drives are out of the question except along one or two monotonous roads.
+But the country round Cannes is full of easy walks and drives, and it is
+as varied and beautiful as it is accessible. You step out of your hotel
+into the midst of wild scenery, rough hills of broken granite screened
+with firs, or paths winding through a wilderness of white heath.
+Everywhere in spring the ground is carpeted with a profusion of
+wild-flowers, cistus and brown orchis, narcissus and the scarlet
+anemone; sometimes the forest scenery sweeps away, and leaves us among
+olive-grounds and orange-gardens arranged in formal, picturesque rows.
+And from every little height there are the same distant views of far-off
+mountains, or the old town flooded with yellow light, or islands lying
+gem-like in the dark blue sea, or the fiery hue of sunset over the
+Estrelles.
+
+Nor are these land-trips the only charm of Cannes. No one has seen the
+coast of Provence in its beauty who has not seen it from the sea. A sail
+to the isles of Lerins reveals for the first time the full glory of
+Cannes even to those who have enjoyed most keenly the large
+picturesqueness of its landscapes, the delicate colouring of its distant
+hills, the splendour of its sunsets. As one drifts away from the shore
+the circle of the Maritime Alps rises like the framework of some perfect
+picture, the broken outline of the mountains to the left contrasting
+with the cloud-capt heights above Turbia, snow-peaks peeping over the
+further slopes between them, delicate lights and shadows falling among
+the broken country of the foreground, Cannes itself stretching its
+bright line of white along the shore. In the midst of the bay, the
+centre as it were of this exquisite landscape, lie the two isles of
+Lerins. With the larger, that of St. Marguerite, romance has more to do
+than history, and the story of the "Man in the Iron Mask," who was so
+long a prisoner in its fortress, is fast losing the mystery which made
+it dear even to romance. The lesser and more distant isle, that of St.
+Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the
+starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its
+Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism
+of Egypt first penetrated into the West.
+
+The devotees whom the fame of Antony and of the Coenobites of the Nile
+had drawn in crowds to the East returned at the close of the fourth
+century to found similar retreats in the isles which line the coasts of
+the Mediterranean. The sea took the place of the desert, but the type of
+monastic life which the solitaries had found in Egypt was faithfully
+preserved. The Abbot of Lerins was simply the chief of some thousands of
+religious devotees, scattered over the island in solitary cells, and
+linked together by the common ties of obedience and prayer. By a curious
+concurrence of events the coenobitic life of Lerins, so utterly unlike
+the later monasticism of the Benedictines, was long preserved in a
+remote corner of Christendom. Patrick, the most famous of its scholars,
+transmitted its type of monasticism to the Celtic Church which he
+founded in Ireland, and the vast numbers, the asceticism, the loose
+organization of such abbeys as those of Bangor or Armagh preserved to
+the twelfth century the essential characteristics of Lerins. Nor is this
+all its historical importance. What Iona is to the ecclesiastical
+history of Northern England, what Fulda and Monte Cassino are to the
+ecclesiastical history of Germany and Southern Italy, that this Abbey of
+St. Honorat became to the Church of Southern Gaul. For nearly two
+centuries, and those centuries of momentous change, when the wreck of
+the Roman Empire threatened civilization and Christianity with ruin like
+its own, the civilization and Christianity of the great district between
+the Loire, the Alps, and the Pyrenees rested mainly on the Abbey of
+Lerins. Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the
+barbaric invaders who poured down on the Rhone and the Garonne, it
+exercised over Provence and Aquitaine a supremacy such as Iona till the
+Synod of Whitby exercised over Northumbria. All the more illustrious
+sees of Southern Gaul were filled by prelates who had been reared at
+Lerins; to Arles, for instance, it gave in succession Hilary, Caesarius,
+and Virgilius. The voice of the Church was found in that of its doctors;
+the famous rule of faith, "quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus,"
+is the rule of Vincent of Lerins; its monk Salvian painted the agony of
+the dying Empire in his book on the government of God; the long fight of
+semi-Pelagianism against the sterner doctrines of Augustin was chiefly
+waged within its bounds.
+
+Little remains to illustrate this earlier and more famous period of the
+monastic history of Lerins which extends to the massacre of its monks by
+Saracen pirates at the opening of the eighth century. The very look of
+the island has been changed by the revolutions of the last hundred
+years. It is still a mere spit of sand, edged along the coast with
+sombre pines; but the whole of the interior has been stripped of its
+woods by the agricultural improvements which are being carried on by the
+Franciscans who at present possess it, and all trace of solitude and
+retirement has disappeared. A well in the centre of the island and a
+palm-tree beside the church are linked to the traditional history of the
+founders of the abbey. Worked into the later buildings we find marbles
+and sculptures which may have been brought from the mainland, as at
+Torcello, by fugitives who had escaped the barbaric storm. A bas-relief
+of Christ and the Apostles, which is now inserted over the west gate of
+the church, and a column of red marble which stands beside it, belong
+probably to the earliest days of the settlement at Lerins. In the little
+chapels scattered over the island fragments of early sarcophagi,
+inscriptions, and sculpture have been industriously collected and
+preserved. But the chapels themselves are far more interesting than
+their contents. Of the seven which originally lined the shore, two or
+three only now remain uninjured; in these the building itself is either
+square or octagonal, pierced with a single rough Romanesque window, and
+of diminutive size. The walls and vaulting are alike of rough
+stonework. The chapels served till the Revolution as seven stations
+which were visited by the pilgrims to the island, but we can hardly
+doubt that in these, as in the Seven Chapels at Glendalough, we see
+relics of the earlier coenobitic establishment.
+
+The cloister of the abbey is certainly of a date later than the massacre
+of the monks, which took place according to tradition in the little
+square of wild greensward which lies within it; but the roughness of its
+masonry, the plain barrel roof, and the rude manner in which the low,
+gloomy vaulting is carried round its angles, are of the same character
+as in the usual tenth-century buildings of Southern Gaul. With the
+exception of the masonry of its side walls there is nothing in the
+existing remains of the abbey church itself earlier than its
+reconstruction at the close of the eleventh century. The building has
+been so utterly wrecked that little architectural detail is left; but
+the broad nave, with its narrow side aisles, the absence, as in the
+Aquitanian churches, of triforium and clerestory, and the shortness of
+the choir space, give their own individual mark to St. Honorat. Of the
+monastic buildings directly connected with the church only a few rooms
+remain, and these are destitute of any features of interest. They are
+at present used as an orphanage by the Franciscans whom the Bishop of
+Frejus, by whom the island was purchased some fifteen years ago, has
+settled there as an agricultural colony, and whose reverence for the
+relics around them is as notable as their courtesy to the strangers who
+visit them. If it is true that the island narrowly escaped being turned
+into a tea-garden and resort for picnics by some English speculators, we
+can only feel a certain glow of gratitude to the Bishop of Frejus. The
+brown train of the eleven brothers as we saw them pacing slowly beneath
+the great caroub-tree close to the abbey, or the row of boys blinking in
+the sunshine as they repeat their lesson to the lay-brother who acts as
+schoolmaster, jar less roughly on the associations of Lerins than the
+giggle of happy lovers or the pop of British champagne.
+
+There is little interest in the later story of St. Honorat, from the
+days of the Saracen massacre to its escape from conversion into a
+tea-garden. The appearance of the Moslem pirates at once robbed it of
+its old security, and the cessation of their attacks was followed by new
+dangers from the Genoese and Catalans who infested the coast in the
+fourteenth century. The isle was alternately occupied by French and
+Spaniards in the war between Francis and Charles V.; it passed under the
+rule of Commendatory abbots, and in 1789, when it was finally
+secularized, the four thousand monks of its earlier history had shrunk
+to four. Perhaps the most curious of all the buildings of Lerins is that
+which took its rise in the insecurity of its mediaeval existence. The
+Castle of Lerins, which lies on the shore to the south of the church, is
+at once a castle and an abbey. Like many of the great monasteries of the
+East, its first object was to give security to its inmates against the
+marauders who surrounded them. Externally its appearance is purely
+military; the great tower rises from its trench cut deep in the rock, a
+portcullis protects the gate, the walls are pierced with loopholes and
+crowned with battlements. But within, the arrangements, so far as it is
+possible to trace them in the present ruined state of the building, seem
+to have been purely monastic. The interior of the tower is occupied by a
+double-arched cloister, with arcades of exquisite first-pointed work,
+through which one looks down into the little court below. The visitor
+passes from this into the ruins of the abbot's chapel, to which the
+relics were transferred for security from the church of St. Honorat,
+and which was surrounded by the cells, the refectory, and the domestic
+buildings of the monks. The erection of the castle is dated in the
+twelfth century, and from this time we may consider the older abbey
+buildings around the church to have been deserted and left to ruin; but
+we can hardly grumble at a transfer which has given us so curious a
+combination of military and monastic architecture in the castle itself.
+
+Something of the feudal spirit which such a residence would be likely to
+produce appears in the abbot's relations with the little town of Cannes,
+which formed a part of his extensive lordship on the mainland. Its
+fishers were harassed by heavy tolls on their fishery, and the rights of
+first purchase in the market and forced labour were rigorously exacted
+by the monastic officers. It is curious to compare, as one's boat floats
+back across the waters of the bay, the fortunes of these serfs and of
+their lords.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE.
+
+
+Carnival in an ordinary little Italian town seems, no doubt, commonplace
+enough to those who have seen its glories in Rome--the crowded Corso,
+the rush of the maddened horses, the firefly twinklings of the
+Maccoletti. A single evening of simple fun, a few peasants laughing in
+the sunshine, a few children scrambling for bonbons, form an almost
+ridiculous contrast to the gorgeous outburst of revelry and colour that
+ushers in Lent at the capital. But there are some people after all who
+still find a charm in the simple and the commonplace, and to whom the
+everyday life of Italy is infinitely pleasanter than the stately
+ceremonial of Rome. At any rate the stranger who has fled from Northern
+winters to the shelter of the Riviera is ready to greet in the
+homeliest Carnival the incoming of spring. His first months of exile
+have probably been months of a little disappointment. He is far from
+having found the perpetual sunshine which poets and guide-books led him
+to hope for. He has shivered at Christmas just as he shivered at home,
+he has had his days of snowfall and his weeks of rain. If he is
+thoroughly British, he has growled and grumbled, and written to expose
+"the humbug of the sunny South" in the _Times_; if he is patient, he has
+jotted down day after day in his diary, and found a cold sort of
+statistical comfort in the discovery that the sunny days after all
+outnumbered the gloomy ones. The worst winter of the Riviera, he is
+willing to admit, would be a very mild winter at home, but still, after
+each concession to one's diary and common sense, there remains a latent
+feeling of disappointment and deception.
+
+But Carnival sweeps all this feeling away with the coming of the spring.
+From the opening of February week follows week in a monotony of warm
+sunshine. Day after day there is the same cloudless cope of blue
+overhead, the same marvellous colour in the sea, the same blaze of
+roses in the gardens, the same scent of violets in every lazy breath of
+air that wanders down from the hills. Every almond-tree is a mass of
+white bloom. The narcissus has found a rival along the terraces in the
+anemone, and already the wild tulip is preparing to dispute the palm of
+supremacy with both. It is the time for picnics, for excursions, for
+donkey-rides, for dreams beneath the clump of cypresses that shoot up
+black into the sky, for siestas beneath the olives. It is wonderful what
+a prodigious rush of peace and good temper follows on the first rush of
+spring. The very doctors of the winter resort shake hands with one
+another, the sermons of the chaplain lose their frost-bitten savour and
+die down into something like charity, scandal and tittle-tattle go to
+sleep in the sunshine. The stolid, impassive English nature blooms into
+a life strangely unlike its own. Papas forget their _Times_. Mammas
+forget their propriety. The stout British merchant finds himself astride
+of a donkey, and exchanging good-humoured badinage with the labourers in
+the olive-terraces. The Dorcas of Exeter Hall leaves her tracts at home,
+and passes without a groan the pictured Madonna on every wall. Carnival
+comes, and completes the wreck of the proprieties. The girls secure
+their window and pelt their black-bearded Professor in the street below
+without dread of a scolding on the "convenances." The impassive spinster
+whose voice never rises at home above the most polite whisper screams
+with delight at the first sugarplum that hits her, and furtively
+supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the war. "It is such
+fun, isn't it, papa?" shout the boys as they lean breathless over the
+balcony, laughing and pelting at the crowd that laughs and pelts back
+again. And papa, who "puts down" fairs in England, and wonders what
+amusement people can find in peepshows and merry-go-rounds, finds
+himself surprised into a "Very jolly, indeed!"
+
+It is the same welcome to the spring that gives its charm to the
+Carnival in the minds of the Italians themselves. To the priest of
+course Carnival is simply a farewell to worldly junketings and a welcome
+to Lent, but like every other Church festival it is flinging off its
+ecclesiastical disguise and donning among the people themselves its old
+mask as a sheer bit of nature-worship. The women still observe Lent, and
+their power as housekeepers forces its observance to a certain extent
+on their husbands and sons. The Italian shrugs his shoulders and submits
+in a humorous way to what is simply a bit of domestic discipline,
+revenges himself by a jest on the priesthood, and waits with his quiet
+"pazienza" till the progress of education shall have secured him a wife
+who won't grudge him his dinner. But Lent is no reality to him, and
+spring is a very real thing indeed. The winter is so short that the
+whole habit of his life and the very fabric of his home is framed on the
+apparent supposition that there is no such thing as winter at all. His
+notion of life is life in the open air, life in the sunshine. The
+peasant of the Cornice looks on with amazement at an Englishman tramping
+along in the rain. A little rainfall or a little snow keeps every
+labourer at home with a murmur of "cattivo Dio" between his teeth. A
+Scotchman or a Yorkshireman wraps his plaid around him and looks with
+contempt on an idle race who are "afraid of a sprinkle." But the peasant
+of North Italy is no more of an idler than the peasant of the Lowlands.
+The truth is, that both he and his home are absolutely unprepared for
+bad weather. His clothes are thin and scanty. His diet is low. The
+wonder is how he gets through a hard day's work on food which an
+English pauper would starve upon. He has no fireplace at home, and, if
+he had, he has no fuel. Wood is very dear, and coal there is none. If he
+gets wet through there is no hearth to dry himself or his clothes at.
+Cold means fever, and fever with low diet means death. Besides, there is
+little loss in staying at home on rainy days. In England or the Lowlands
+the peasant farmer who couldn't "bide a shower" would lose half the
+year, but a rainy day along the Cornice is so rare a thing that it makes
+little difference in the year's account.
+
+It is much the same with the townsman, the trader, the professional man.
+When work in the shop or office is over his life circles round the cafe.
+Society and home mean for him the chatty, gesticulating group of friends
+camped out round their little tables on the pavement under the huge
+awning that gives them shade. When winter breaks up the pleasant circle,
+and the dark, chilly evenings drive him, as we say, "home," he has no
+home to flee unto. He is not used to domestic life, or to conversation
+with his wife or his children. Above all there is no fire, no "hearth
+and home." Going home in fact means going to bed. An Italian doctor or
+an Italian lawyer knows nothing of the cosy evenings of the North, of
+the bright fire, the brighter chat round it, or the quiet book till
+sleep comes. Somebody has said truly enough that if a man wanted to see
+human life at its best he would spend his winters in England and his
+summers in Italy. We have so much winter that we have faced it, made a
+study of it, and beaten it. Our houses are a great nuisance in warm
+weather, but their thick walls and close-fitting windows and broad
+fireplaces are admirably adapted for cold. Italians, on the other hand,
+have so little winter that when the cold does come it is completely
+their master. The large, dark, cool rooms that are so grateful in July
+are simply ice-houses in December. The large windows are full of
+crevices and draughts. An ordinary Italian positively dreads a fire from
+his knowledge of the perils it entails in rooms so draughty as Italian
+rooms commonly are. He infinitely prefers to rub his blue little hands
+and wait till this inscrutable mystery of bad weather be overpast. But
+it is only the thought of what he suffers during the winter, short as it
+is in comparison with our own, that enables us to understand the ecstasy
+of his joy at the reappearance of the spring. Everybody meets everybody
+with greetings on the warmth and the sunshine. The mother comes down
+again to bask herself at every doorstep, and the little street is once
+more alive with chat and laughter. The very beggars exchange their whine
+for a more cheerful tone of insidious persuasion. The women sing as they
+jog down the hill-paths with the big baskets of olives on their heads.
+The old dispossessed friar slumbers happily by the roadside. The little
+tables come out on to the pavement, and the society of the place forms
+itself afresh into buzzing groups of energetic conversers. The
+dormouse-life of winter is over, and the spring and the Carnival has
+come.
+
+Carnival in a little Italian town, as we have said, is no very grand
+thing, and as a mere question of fun it is no doubt amusing only to
+people who are ready to be amused. And yet there is a quaint fascination
+in it as a whole, in the rows of old women with demure little children
+in their laps ranged on the stone seats along the bridge, the girls on
+the pavement, the grotesque figures dancing along the road, the
+harlequins, the mimic Capuchins, the dominoes with big noses, the
+carriages rolling along amidst a fire of sugarplums, the boys darting
+in and out and smothering one with their handfuls of flour, the sham
+cook with his pots and pans wreathed with vine-branches, the sham
+cavalier in theatrical cloak and trunk hose who dashes about on a pony,
+the solemn group tossing a doll to a church-like chant in a blanket, the
+chaff and violet bunches flung from the windows, the fun and life and
+buzz and colour of it all. It is something very different, one feels,
+from the common country fair of home. In the first place it is eminently
+picturesque. As one looks down from the balcony through a storm of
+sugarplums the eye revels in a perfect feast of colour. Even the
+russet-brown of every old woman's dress glows in the sunshine into a
+strange beauty. Every little touch of red or blue in the girls'
+head-dresses shines out in the intense light. As the oddly attired
+maskers dart in and out or whirl past in the dance the little street
+seems like a gay ribbon of shifting hues winding between its grey old
+houses with touches of fresh tints at every window and balcony. The
+crimson caps of the peasants stand out in bold relief against the dark
+green of the lemon-garden behind them. Overhead the wind is just
+stirring in the big pendant leaves of the two palm-trees in the centre
+of the street, and the eye once caught by them ranges on to the white
+mass of the town as it stands glowing on its hill-side and thence to the
+brown hilltops, and the intense blue of the sky.
+
+The whole setting of the scene is un-English, and the scene itself is as
+un-English as its setting. The fun, the enjoyment, is universal. There
+is nothing of the complicated apparatus which an English fair requires,
+none of the contrivances to make people laugh--the clowns, the
+cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and
+two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic
+photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds.
+And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless
+chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity
+and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An
+English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully
+hard work to amuse him. The peasant of Italy goes to Carnival to amuse
+himself and to amuse everybody else. He is full of joyousness and fun,
+and he wishes everybody to be as funny and as joyous as himself. He has
+no notion of doing his merriment by deputy. He claps his mask on his
+face or takes his bag of flour in his hand, and is himself the fun of
+the fair. His neighbour does precisely the same. The two farmers who
+were yesterday chaffering over the price of maize meet each other in
+Carnival as Punch and Harlequin. Every boy has his false nose or his
+squeaking whistle. The quiet little maiden whom you saw yesterday
+washing her clothes in the torrent comes tripping up the street with a
+mask on her face. The very mothers with their little ones in their laps
+throw in their contribution of smart speeches and merry taunts to the
+fun of the affair. It is wonderful how simple the elements of their
+amusement are and how perfectly they are amused. A little masquerading,
+a little dancing, a little pelting with flour and sugarplums, and
+everybody is as happy as possible.
+
+And it is a happiness that is free from any coarse intermixture. The
+badinage is childish enough, but it has none of the foul slang in which
+an English crowd delights to express its notions of humour. The girls
+bandy "chaff" with their disguised lovers, but the "chaff" is what their
+mothers might hear. There is none of the brutal horseplay of home.
+Harlequin goes by with his little bladder suspended from a string, but
+the dexterous little touch is a touch and no more. The tiny sugarplums
+rain like hail on one's face, but there is the fun of catching them and
+seeing the children hunt after them in the dust. The flour-pelting is
+the hardest to bear, but the annoyance is redeemed by the burst of
+laughter from the culprit and the bystanders. It is a rare thing to see
+anybody lose his temper. It is a yet rarer thing to see anybody drunk.
+The sulky altercations, the tipsy squabbles, of Northern amusements are
+unknown. The characteristic "prudence" of the Italian is never better
+displayed than in his merriment. He knows how far to carry his badinage.
+He knows when to have done with his fun. The tedious length of an
+English merry-making would be unintelligible to him; he doesn't care to
+spoil the day's enjoyment by making a night of it. A few hours of
+laughter satisfy him, and when evening falls and the sunshine goes, he
+goes with the sunshine.
+
+It is in the Carnival that one sees most conspicuously displayed that
+habit of social equality which is one of the special features of Italian
+life. Nothing is more unlike the social jealousy of the Frenchman, or
+the surly incivility with which a Lancashire operative thinks proper to
+show the world that he is as good a man as his master. In either case
+one feels the taint of a mere spirit of envious levelling, and a latent
+confession that the levelling process has still in reality to be
+accomplished. But the ordinary Italian has nothing of the leveller about
+him. The little town is proud of its Marchese and of the great palazzo
+that has entertained a King. It is a matter of public concern when the
+Count gambles away his patrimony. An Italian noble is no object of
+jealousy to his fellow-citizens, but then no one gives himself less of
+the airs of a privileged or exclusive caste. Cavour was a popular man
+because, noble as he was, he would smoke a cigar or stop for a chat with
+anybody. The Carnival brings out this characteristic of Italian manners
+amusingly enough. The mask, the disguise, levels all distinctions. The
+Count's whiskers are white with the flour just flung at him by the
+town-crier. The young nephews of the Baron are the two harlequins who
+are exchanging badinage with the group of country girls at the corner. A
+general pelting of sugarplums salutes the appearance of the Marchese's
+four-in-hand with the Marchese himself in an odd mufti on the box.
+
+Social equality is possible, because among rich and poor alike there is
+the same social ease. Barber or donkey-driver chats to you with a
+perfect frankness and unconsciousness of any need of reserve. In both
+rich and poor, too, there is the same social taste and refinement. The
+coarse dress of the peasant girl is worn with as native a dignity as the
+robe of a queen. An unconscious elegance breathes through the very
+disguises of the Carnival, grotesque as many of them are. The young
+fellow who has wreathed himself with flowers and vine-leaves shows a
+knowledge of colour and effect which an artist might envy him. But there
+is not one among the roughest of the peasants or of the townsfolk who
+has not that indescribable thing we call manner, or who would betray our
+insular awkwardness when we speak to a lord. And, besides this social
+equality, there is a family equality too. In England old people enjoy
+fun, but it is held to be indecorous in them to afford amusement to
+others. A Palmerston may be a jester at eighty, but the jest must never
+go beyond words. But in an Italian Carnival the old claim just as much a
+part in the fun as the young. Grandfathers and grandmothers think it the
+most natural thing in the world to turn out in odd costumes to give a
+good laugh to the grandchildren. Papa pops on the most comical mask he
+can find, and walks down the street arm-in-arm with his boy. In no
+country perhaps is the filial regard stronger than in Italy; nowhere do
+mothers claim authority so long over their sons. But this seems to be
+compatible with a domestic liberty and ease which would be impossible in
+the graver nations of the North. If once we laughed at our mother's
+absurdities a mother's influence would be gone. But an Italian will
+laugh and go on reverencing and obeying in a way we should never dream
+of. Altogether, it is wonderful how many sides of social life and
+national character find their illustration in a country carnival.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA.
+
+
+The view of Monaco, as one looks down on it from the mountain road which
+leads to Turbia, is unquestionably the most picturesque among all the
+views of the Riviera. The whole coast-line lies before us for a last
+look as far as the hills above San Remo, headland after headland running
+out into blue water, white little towns nestling in the depth of sunny
+bays or clinging to the brown hill-side, villas peeping white from the
+dark olive masses, sails gleaming white against the purple sea. The
+brilliancy of light, the purity and intensity of colour, the clear
+freshness of the mountain air, tempered as it is by the warm sun-glow,
+make the long rise from Mentone hard to forget. Mentone itself steals
+out again and again from under its huge red cliffs to look up at us; we
+pass by Roccabruna, half rock, half village, hanging high on the
+hill-side; we leave the orange groves beneath us studded with golden
+fruit; even the silvery wayward olives fail us, even the pines grow thin
+and stunted. At last the mountain rises bare above us with only a red
+rock jutting here and there from its ashen-coloured front. We reach the
+top, and right in our road rises a vast fragment of Roman masonry, the
+tower of Turbia, while, thousands of feet beneath, Monaco glows "like a
+gem" in its setting of dark blue sea. We are on the track of "The
+Daisy," and the verse of Tennyson's gay little poem comes back to us:--
+
+    What Roman strength Turbia showed
+    In ruin, by the mountain road;
+      How like a gem, beneath, the city
+    Of little Monaco basking glowed.
+
+Monaco stands on a promontory of rock which falls in bold cliffs into
+the sea; as one climbs to it from the bay one sees the citadel with its
+huge bastions frowning on the white buildings of the palace, the long
+line of grey, ivy-crested walls topping the cliffs, and above them the
+mass of the little town, broken by a single campanile and a few
+cypresses. Its situation at once marks the character of the place. It
+is the one town of the Riviera which, instead of lying screened in the
+hollow of some bay, as though eager to escape from pirate or Saracen,
+juts boldly out into the sea as if on the look-out for prey. Its grim
+walls, the guns still mounted and shot piled on its battlements, mark
+the pirate town of the past. At its feet, in trim square of hotel and
+gambling-house, with a smart Parisian look about it as if the whole had
+been just caught up out of the Boulevards and dropped on this Italian
+coast, lies the new Monaco, the pirate town of the present.
+
+Even the least among Italian cities yields so much of interest in its
+past that we turn with disappointment from the history of Monaco. The
+place has always been a mere pirate haunt, without a break of liberty or
+civic life; and yet there is a certain fascination in the perfect
+uniformity of its existence. The town from which Caesar sailed to Genoa
+and Rome vanished before the ravages of the Saracens, and the spot
+remained desert till it passed by Imperial cession to Genoa, and the
+Genoese Commune erected a fort which became a refuge alternately for its
+Guelf or Ghibelline exiles, its Spinolas or its Grimaldis. A church of
+fine twelfth-century work is the only monument which remains of this
+earlier time; at the opening of the fourteenth century Monaco passed
+finally to the Grimaldis, and became in their hands a haunt of
+buccaneers. Only one of their line rises into historic fame, and he is
+singularly connected with a great event in English history. Charles
+Grimaldi was one of the foremost leaders in the Italian wars of his day;
+he passed as a mercenary into the service of France in her combat with
+Edward III., and his seventy-two galleys set sail from Monaco with the
+fifteen thousand Genoese bowmen who appear so unexpectedly in the
+forefront of the battle of Crecy. The massacre of these forces drove him
+home again to engage in attacks on the Catalans and Venetians and
+struggles with Genoa, till the wealth which his piracy had accumulated
+enabled him to add Mentone and Roccabruna to his petty dominions. It is
+needless to trace the history of his house any further; corsairs,
+soldiers of fortune, trimming adroitly in the struggles of the sixteenth
+century between France and Spain, sinking finally into mere vassals of
+Louis XIV. and hangers-on at the French Court, the family history of the
+Grimaldis is one of treason and blood--brother murdering brother, nephew
+murdering uncle, assassination by subjects avenging the honour of
+daughters outraged by their master's lust.
+
+Of the town itself, as we have said, there is no history at all; it
+consists indeed only of a few petty streets streaming down the hill from
+the palace square. The palace, though spoilt by a gaudy modern
+restoration, is externally a fine specimen of Italian Renascence work,
+its court painted all over with arabesques of a rough Caravaggio order,
+while the State-rooms within have a thoroughly French air, as if to
+embody the double character of their occupants, at once Lords of Monaco
+and Ducs de Valentinois. The palace is encircled with a charming little
+garden, a bit of colour and greenery squeezed in, as it were, between
+cliff and fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red
+rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or
+across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with
+gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A
+bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political
+existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far more
+wonderful that, after all the annexations of late years, it should still
+remain an independent, though the smallest, principality in the world.
+But even the Grimaldis have not managed wholly to escape from the
+general luck of their fellow-rulers; Mentone and Roccabruna were ceded
+to France some few years back for a sum of four million francs, and the
+present lord of Monaco is the ruler of but a few streets and some two
+thousand subjects. His army reminds one of the famous war establishment
+of the older German princelings; one year indeed to the amazement of
+beholders it rose to the gigantic force of four-and-twenty men; but
+then, as we were gravely told by an official, "it had been doubled in
+consequence of the war." Idler and absentee as he is, the Prince is
+faithful to the traditions of his house; the merchant indeed sails
+without dread beneath the once dreaded rocks of the pirate haunt; but a
+new pirate town has risen on the shores of its bay. It is the pillage of
+a host of gamblers that maintains the heroic army of Monaco, that
+cleanses its streets, and fills the exchequer of its lord.
+
+There is something exquisitely piquant in the contrast between the
+gloomy sternness of the older robber-hold and the gaiety and
+attractiveness of the new. Nothing can be prettier than the gardens,
+rich in fountains and statues and tropical plants, which surround the
+neat Parisian square of buildings. The hotel is splendidly decorated and
+its _cuisine_ claims to be the best in Europe; there is a pleasant cafe;
+the doors of the Casino itself stand hospitably open, and strangers may
+wander without a question from hall to reading-room, or listen in the
+concert-room to an excellent band which plays twice a-day. The salon
+itself, the terrible "Hell" which one has pictured with all sorts of
+Dantesque accompaniments, is a pleasant room, gaily painted, with cosies
+all round it and a huge mass of gorgeous flowers in the centre. Nothing
+can be more unlike one's preconceived ideas than the gambling itself, or
+the aspect of the gamblers around the tables. Of the wild excitement,
+the frenzy of gain, the outbursts of despair which one has come prepared
+to witness, there is not a sign. The games strike the bystander as
+singularly dull and uninteresting; one wearies of the perpetual deal and
+turn-up of the cards at rouge-et-noir, of the rattle of the ball as it
+dances into its pigeonhole at roulette, of the monotonous chant of "Make
+your game, gentlemen," or "The game is made." The croupiers rake in
+their gains or poke out the winnings with the passive regularity of
+machines; the gamblers sit round the table with the vacant solemnity of
+undertakers. The general air of the company is that of a number of
+well-to-do people bored out of their lives, and varying their boredom
+with quiet nods to the croupier and assiduous prickings of little cards.
+
+The boredom is apparently greatest at rouge-et-noir, where the circle is
+more aristocratic and thousands can be lost and won in a night.
+Everybody looks tired, absent, inattentive; nobody takes much notice of
+his neighbour or of the spectators looking on; nobody cares to speak; a
+finger suffices to direct the croupier to push the stake on to the
+desired spot, a nod or a look to indicate the winner. The game goes on
+in a dull uniformity; nobody varies his stake; a few napoleons are added
+to or subtracted from the heaps before each as the minutes go on;
+sometimes a little sum is done on a paper beside the player; but there
+is the same impassive countenance, the same bored expression everywhere.
+Now and then one player gets quietly up and another sits quietly down.
+But there is nothing startling or dramatic, no frenzies of hope or
+exclamations of despair, nothing of the gambler of fiction with "his
+hands clasped to his burning forehead," and the like. To any one who is
+not fascinated by the mere look of rolls of napoleons pushed from one
+colour to another, or of gold raked about in little heaps, there is
+something very difficult to understand in the spell which a gaming-table
+exercises. Roulette is a little more amusing, as it is more intelligible
+to the looker-on. The stakes are smaller, the company changes oftener,
+and is socially more varied. There is not such a dead, heavy earnestness
+about these riskers of five-franc pieces as about the more desperate
+gamblers of rouge-et-noir; the outside fringe of lookers-on bend over
+with their stakes to back "a run of luck," and there is a certain quiet
+buzz of interest when the game seems going against the bank. There is
+always someone going and coming, over-dressed girls lean over and drop
+their stake and disappear, young clerks bring their quarter's salary,
+the casual visitor "doesn't mind risking a few francs" at roulette.
+
+But even the excitement of roulette is of the gravest and dullest order.
+The only player who seems to throw any kind of vivacity into his
+gambling is a gaudy little Jew with heavy watch-chain, who vibrates
+between one table and another, sees nothing of the game save the
+dropping his stake at roulette and then rushing off to drop another
+stake at rouge-et-noir, and finds time in his marches to spare a merry
+little word to a friend or two. But he is the only person who seems to
+know anybody. Men who sit by one another year after year never exchange
+a word. There is not even the air of reckless adventure to excite one.
+The player who dashes down his all on any part of the table and trusts
+to fortune is a mere creature of fiction; the gambler of fact is a
+calculator, a man of business, with a contempt for speculation and a
+firm belief in long-studied combination. Each has his little card, and
+ticks off the succession of numbers with the accuracy of a ledger. It is
+in the careful study of these statistics that each believes he discovers
+the secret of the game, the arrangement which, however it may be
+defeated for a time by inscrutable interference of ill-luck, must in the
+end, if there is any truth in statistics, be successful. One looks in
+vain for the "reckless gambler" one has read about and talked about, for
+"reckless" is the very last word by which one would describe the ring of
+business-like people who come day after day with the hope of making
+money by an ingenious dodge.
+
+Their talk, if one listens to it over the dinner-table, turns altogether
+on this business-like aspect of the question. Nobody takes the least
+interest in its romantic or poetic side, in the wonderful runs of luck
+or the terrible stories of ruin and despair which form the
+stock-in-trade of the novelist. The talk might be that of a conference
+of commercial travellers. Everybody has his infallible nostrum for
+breaking the bank; but everybody looks upon the prospect of such a
+fortune in a purely commercial light. The general opinion of the wiser
+sort goes against heavy stakes, and "wild play" is only talked about
+with contempt. The qualities held in honour, so far as we can gather
+from the conversation, are "judgment," which means a careful study of
+the little cards and a certain knowledge of mathematics, and
+"constancy"--the playing not from caprice but on a definite plan and
+principle. Nobody has the least belief in "luck." A winner is
+congratulated on his "science." The loser explains the causes of his
+loss. A portly person who announces himself as one of a company of
+gamblers who have invested an enormous capital on a theory of winning by
+means of low stakes and a certain combination excites universal
+interest. Most of the talkers describe themselves frankly as men of
+business. No doubt at Monaco, as elsewhere, there is the usual
+aristocratic fringe--the Russian prince who flings away an estate at a
+sitting, the half-blind countess from the Faubourg St. Germain, the
+Polish dancer with a score of titles, the English "milord." But the bulk
+of the players have the look and air of people who have made their money
+in trade. It is well to look on at such a scene, if only to strip off
+the romance which has been so profusely showered over it. As a matter of
+fact nothing is more prosaic, nothing meaner in tone, nothing more
+utterly devoid of interest, than a gambling-table. But as a question of
+profit the establishment of M. Blanc throws into the shade the older
+piracy of Monaco. The Venetian galleons, the carracks of Genoa, the
+galleys of Marseilles, brought infinitely less gold to its harbour than
+these two little groups of the fools of half a continent.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+THE WINTER RETREAT.
+
+
+It is odd, when one is safely anchored in a winter refuge to look back
+at the terrors and reluctance with which one first faced the sentence of
+exile. Even if sunshine were the only gain of a winter flitting, it
+would still be hard to estimate the gain. The cold winds, the icy
+showers, the fogs we leave behind us, give perhaps a zest not wholly its
+own to Italian sunshine. But the abrupt plunge into a land of warmth and
+colour sends a strange shock of pleasure through every nerve. The
+flinging off of wraps and furs, the discarding of greatcoats, is like
+the beginning of a new life. It is not till we pass in this sharp,
+abrupt fashion from the November of one side the Alps to the November of
+the other that we get some notion of the way in which the actual range
+and freedom of life is cramped by the "chill north-easters" in which
+Mr. Kingsley revelled. The unchanged vegetation, the background of dark
+olive woods, the masses of ilex, the golden globes of the orange hanging
+over the garden wall, are all so many distinct gains to an eye which has
+associated winter with leafless boughs and a bare landscape. One has
+almost a boyish delight in plucking roses at Christmas or hunting for
+violets along the hedges on New Year's Day. There are chill days of
+course, and chiller nights, but cold is a relative term and loses its
+English meaning in spots where snow falls once or twice in a year and
+vanishes before midday. The mere break of habit is delightful; it is
+like a laughing defiance of established facts to lounge by the seashore
+in the hot sun-glare of a January morning. And with this new sense of
+liberty comes little by little a freedom from the overpowering dread of
+chills and colds and coughs which only invalids can appreciate. It is an
+indescribable relief not to look for a cold round every corner. The
+"lounging" which becomes one's life along the Riviera or the Bay of
+Naples is only another name for the ease and absence of anxiety which
+the mere presence of constant sunshine gives to life.
+
+Few people, in fact, actually "lounge" less than the English exiles who
+bask in the sun of Italy. Their real danger lies in the perpetual
+temptation to over-exertion which arises from the sense of renewed
+health. Every village on its hilltop, every white shrine glistening high
+up among the olives, seems to woo one up the stony paths and the long
+hot climb to the summit. But the relief from home itself, the break away
+from all the routine of one's life, is hardly less than the relief from
+greatcoats. It is not till our life is thoroughly disorganized, till the
+grave mother of a family finds herself perched on a donkey, or the
+_habitue_ of Pall Mall sees himself sauntering along through the olive
+groves, that one realizes the iron bounds within which our English
+existence moves. Every holiday of course brings this home to one more or
+less, but the long holiday of a whole winter brings it home most of all.
+England and English ways recede and become unreal. Old prepossessions
+and prejudices lose half their force when sea and mountains part us from
+their native soil. It is hard to keep up our vivid interest in the
+politics of Little Pedlington, or to maintain our old excitement over
+the matrimonial fortunes of Miss Hominy. It becomes possible to
+breakfast without the last telegram and to go to bed without the news of
+a fresh butchery. One's real interest lies in the sunshine, in the
+pleasure of having sunshine to-day, in the hope of having sunshine
+to-morrow.
+
+But really to enjoy the winter retreat one must keep as much as possible
+out of the winter retreat itself. Few places are more depressing in
+their social aspects than these picturesque little Britains. The winter
+resort is a colony of squires with the rheumatism, elderly maidens with
+delicate throats, worn-out legislators, a German princess or two with a
+due train of portly and short-sighted chamberlains, girls with a hectic
+flush of consumption, bronchitic parsons, barristers hurried off circuit
+by the warning cough. The life of these patients is little more than the
+life of a machine. As the London physician says when he bids them
+"good-bye," "The nearer you can approach to the condition of a vegetable
+the better for your chances of recovery." All the delicious
+uncertainties and irregularities that make up the freedom of existence
+disappear. The day is broken up into a number of little times and
+seasons. Dinner comes at midday, and is as exact to its moment as the
+early breakfast or the "heavy tea." And between each meal there are
+medicines to be taken, inhalations to be gone through, the due hour of
+rest to be allotted to digestion, the other due hour to exercise.
+
+The air of the sick-room lingers everywhere about the place; one
+catches, as it were, the far-off hush of the Campo Santo. Life is
+reduced to its lowest expression; people exist rather than live. Every
+one remembers that every one else is an invalid. Voices are soft,
+conversation is subdued, visits are short. There is a languid, sickly
+sweetness in the very courtesy of society. Gaiety is simply regarded as
+a danger. Every hill is a temptation to too long and fatiguing a climb.
+No sunshine makes "the patient" forget his wraps. No coolness of
+delicious shade moves him to repose. His whole energy and watchfulness
+is directed to the avoidance of a chill. Life becomes simply
+barometrical. An east wind is the subject of public lamentation; the
+vast mountain range to the north is admired less for its wild grandeur
+than for the shelter it affords against the terrible mistral. Excitement
+is a word of dread. Distance itself takes something of the sharpness
+and vividness off from the old cares and interests of home. The very
+letters that reach the winter resort are doctored, and "incidents which
+might excite" are excluded by the care of correspondents: Mamma only
+hears of Johnny's measles when Johnny is running about again. The young
+scapegrace at Oxford is far too considerate to trouble his father,
+against the doctor's orders, with the mention of his failure in the
+schools. News comes with all colour strained and filtered out of it
+through the columns of 'Galignani.' The neologian heresy, the debate in
+Convocation which would have stirred the heart of the parson at home,
+fall flat in the shape of a brown and aged 'Times.' There are no
+"evenings out." The first sign of eve is the signal for dispersion
+homewards, and it is only from the safe shelter of his own room that the
+winter patient ventures to gaze on the perilous glories of the sunset.
+The evenings are in fact a dawdle indoors as the day has been a dawdle
+out, a little music, a little reading of the quiet order, a little chat,
+a little letter-writing, and an early to bed.
+
+It is this calm monotony of day after day at which the world of the
+winter resort deliberately aims, a life like that of the deities of
+Epicurus, untouched by the cares or interests of the world without. The
+very gaiety is of the same subdued and quiet order--drives,
+donkey-rides, picnics of the small and early type. An air of slow
+respectability pervades the place; the bulk of the colonists are people
+well-to-do, who can afford the expense of a winter away from home and of
+a villa at L150 the season. The bankrupt element of Boulogne, the
+half-pay element of Dinan or Avranches, is as rare on the Riviera as the
+loungers who rejoice in the many-changing toilets of Arcachon or
+Biarritz. The quiet humdrum tone of the parson best harmonises with that
+of the winter resort, and parsons of all sorts abound there.
+
+But the chaplain is not here, as in other little Britains, the centre of
+social life; he is superseded by the doctor. The winter resort in fact
+owes its origin to the doctor. The little village or the country town
+looks with awe upon the man who has discovered for it a future of
+prosperity, at whose call hosts of rich strangers come flocking from the
+ends of the earth, at whose bidding villas rise white among the olives,
+and parades stretch along the shore. "I found it a fishing hamlet," the
+doctor may say with Augustus, "and I leave it a city." It is amusing to
+see the awful submission which the city-builder expects in return. The
+most refractory of patients trembles at the threat of his case being
+abandoned. The doctor has his theories about situation. You are
+lymphatic, and are ordered down to the very edge of the sea; you are
+excitable, and must hurry from your comfortable lodgings to the highest
+nook among the hills. He has his theories about diet, and you sink
+obediently to milk and water. His one object of hostility and contempt
+is your London physician. He tears up his rival's prescriptions with
+contempt, he reverses the treatment. He sighs as you bid him farewell to
+return to advice which is so likely to prove fatal. The London
+physician, it is true, hints that though the oracle of the winter resort
+is a clever man he is also a quack. But a quack soars into a greatness
+beyond criticism when he creates cities and rules hundreds of patients
+with his nod.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+SAN REMO.
+
+
+San Remo, though youngest in date, bids fair to become the most popular
+of all the health resorts of the Riviera. At no other point along the
+coast is the climate so mild and equable. The rural quiet and repose of
+the place form a refreshing contrast with the Brighton-like gaiety of
+Nizza or Cannes; even Mentone looks down with an air of fashionable
+superiority on a rival almost destitute of promenades, and whose
+municipality sighs in vain for a theatre. To the charms of quiet and
+sunshine the place adds that of a peculiar beauty. The Apennines rise
+like a screen behind the amphitheatre of soft hills that enclose
+it--hills soft with olive woods, and dipping down into gardens of lemon
+and orange, and vineyards dotted with palms. An isolated spur juts out
+from the centre of the semicircle, and from summit to base of it tumbles
+the oddest of Italian towns, a strange mass of arches and churches and
+steep lanes, rushing down like a stone cataract to the sea. On either
+side of the town lie deep ravines, with lemon gardens along their
+bottoms, and olives thick along their sides. The olive is the
+characteristic tree of San Remo. As late as the sixteenth century the
+place was renowned for its palms; a palm tree stands on the civic
+escutcheon, and the privilege of supplying the papal chapel with palm
+branches in the week before Easter is still possessed by a family of San
+Remese. But the palm has wandered off to Bordighera, and the high price
+of oil during the early part of this century has given unquestioned
+supremacy to the olive. The loss is after all a very little one, for the
+palm, picturesque as is its natural effect, assumes any but picturesque
+forms when grown for commercial purposes, while the thick masses of the
+olive woods form a soft and almost luxurious background to every view of
+San Remo.
+
+What strikes one most about the place in an artistic sense is its
+singular completeness. It lies perfectly shut in by the circle of
+mountains, the two headlands in which they jut into the sea, and the
+blue curve of the bay. It is only by climbing to the summit of the Capo
+Nero or the Capo Verde that one sees the broken outline of the coast
+towards Genoa or the dim forms of the Estrelles beyond Cannes. Nowhere
+does the outer world seem more strangely far-off and unreal. But between
+headland and headland it is hardly possible to find a point from which
+the scene does not group itself into an exquisite picture with the white
+gleaming mass of San Remo for a centre. Small too as the space is, it is
+varied and broken by the natural configuration of the ground; everywhere
+the hills fall steeply to the very edge of the sea and valleys and
+ravines go sharply up among the olive woods. Each of these has its own
+peculiar beauty; in the valley of the Romolo for instance, to the west
+of the town, the grey mass of San Remo perched on a cliff-like steep,
+the rocky bed of the torrent below, the light and almost fantastic arch
+that spans it, the hills in the background with the further snow range
+just peeping over them, leave memories that are hard to forget. It is
+easy too for a good walker to reach sterner scenes than those
+immediately around; a walk of two hours brings one among the pines of
+San Romolo, an hour's drive plunges one into the almost Alpine scenery
+of Ceriana. But for the ordinary frequenters of a winter resort the
+chief attractions of the place will naturally lie in the warmth and
+shelter of San Remo itself. Protected as it is on every side but that of
+the sea, it is free from the dreaded mistral of Cannes and from the
+sharp frost winds that sweep down the torrent-bed of Nizza. In the
+earlier part of the first winter I spent there the snow, which lay thick
+in the streets of Genoa and beneath even the palms of Bordighera, only
+whitened the distant hilltops at San Remo. Christmas brought at last a
+real snowfall, but every trace of it vanished before the sun-glare of
+midday. From sunset to sunrise indeed the air is sometimes bitterly
+cold, but the days themselves are often pure summer days.
+
+What gives a special charm to San Remo, as to the other health-stations
+along the Cornice, is the fact that winter and spring are here the
+season of flowers. Roses nod at one over the garden-walls, violets peep
+shyly out along the terraces, a run uphill brings one across a bed of
+narcissus. It is odd to open one's window on a January morning and count
+four-and-twenty different kinds of plants in bloom in the garden below.
+But even were flowers absent, the character of the vegetation excludes
+from northern eyes the sense of winter. The bare branches of the
+fig-tree alone remind one that "summer is over and gone." Every
+homestead up the torrent-valleys is embosomed in the lustrous foliage of
+its lemon gardens. Every rivulet is choked with maiden-hair and delicate
+ferns. The golden globes of the orange are the ornament of every garden.
+The dark green masses of the olive, ruined by strong winds into sheets
+of frosted silver, are the background of the whole. And right in front
+from headland to headland lie the bright waters of the Mediterranean,
+rising and sinking with a summer's swell, and glancing with a thousand
+colours even in the gloomiest weather.
+
+The story of San Remo begins with Saracenic inroads from Corsica and
+Sardinia in the ninth century, to which Nizza, Oneglia, and Genoa owed
+their walls. But before this time the wild Ligurian coast had afforded
+hermitages to the earlier bishops of Genoa; to Siro who became its
+apostle, to Romolo who was destined to give his name to the territory of
+the town. San Romolo is indeed its invariable designation till the
+fifteenth century, and it has been conjectured that its present name is
+owing to no fanciful punning on Romulus and Remus but to a popular
+contraction of its full ecclesiastical title, "Sancti Romuli in eremo."
+It was in this "waste," left without inhabitants by the Saracenic
+inroads, that Theodulf, bishop of Genoa, settled a little agricultural
+colony round the Carolingian fort and lands which, though within the
+feudal jurisdiction of the Counts of Ventimiglia, were the property of
+his see. Two centuries passed quietly over the little town ere the
+sudden rise of the Consulate here, as at Genoa and Milan, gave it
+municipal liberty. The civil authority of the bishops passed to the
+communal Parliament, the free assembly of the citizens in the church of
+San Stefano; all civil administration, even the right of peace and war,
+or of alliance, was exercised with perfect freedom from episcopal
+intervention. The rights of the bishop in fact were reduced to the
+nomination of the judicial magistrates of the town and the reception of
+certain fees; rights which were subsequently sold to the Dorias, and
+transferred by the Dorias to the Republic of Genoa.
+
+This great communal revolution, itself a result of the wave of feeling
+produced by the Crusades, left its characteristic mark in the armorial
+bearings of the town, the Crusaders' Palm upon its shield. While its
+neighbours, Ventimiglia and Albenga, sank into haunts of a feudal
+noblesse, San Remo became a town of busy merchants, linked by treaties
+of commerce with the trading cities of the French and Italian coasts.
+The erection of San Siro marked the wealth and devotion of its citizens.
+Ruined as it is, like all the churches of the Riviera, by the ochre and
+stucco of a tasteless restoration, San Siro still retains much of the
+characteristic twelfth-century work of its first foundation. The
+alliance of the city with Genoa was that of a perfectly free State. The
+terms of the treaty which was concluded between the two Republics in
+1361 in the Genoese basilica of San Lorenzo are curious as illustrating
+the federal relations of Italian States. It was in effect little more
+than a judicial and military convention. Internal legislation, taxation,
+rights of independent warfare, peace, and alliance were left wholly in
+the power of the free commune. San Remo was bound to contribute ships
+and men for service in Genoese warfare, but in return its citizens
+shared the valuable privileges of those of Genoa in all parts of the
+world. Genoa, as purchaser of the feudal rights of its lords, nominated
+the podesta and other judicial officers, but these officers were bound
+to administer the laws passed or adopted by the commune. The red cross
+of Genoa was placed above the palm tree of San Remo on the shield of the
+Republic; and on these terms the federal relations of the two States
+continued without quarrel or change for nearly four hundred years.
+
+The town continued to prosper till the alliance of Francis I. with the
+Turks brought the scourge of the Moslem again on the Riviera. The
+"Saracen towers" with which the coast is studded tell to this day the
+tale of the raids of Barbarossa and Dragut. The blow fell heavily on San
+Remo. The ruined quarter beneath its wall still witnesses to the heathen
+fury. San Siro, which lay without the walls, was more than once
+desecrated and reduced to ruin. A special officer was appointed by the
+town to receive contributions for the ransom of citizens carried off by
+the corsairs of Algiers or Tunis. These terrible razzias, which went on
+to the very close of the last century, have left their mark on the
+popular traditions of the coast. But the ruin which they began was
+consummated by the purposeless bombardment of San Remo by an English
+fleet during the war of the Austrian Succession, and by the perfidy with
+which Genoa crushed at a single blow the freedom she had respected for
+so many centuries. The square Genoese fort near the harbour commemorates
+the extinction of the liberty of San Remo in 1729. The French revolution
+found the city ruined and enslaved, and the gratitude of the citizens
+for their deliverance by Buonaparte was shown by a sacrifice which it is
+hard to forgive them. A row of magnificent ilexes, which stretched along
+the ridge from the town to San Romolo, is said to have been felled for
+the construction of vessels for the French navy.
+
+Some of the criticism which has been lavished on San Remo is fair and
+natural enough. To any one who has been accustomed to the exquisite
+scenery around Cannes its background of olives seems tame and
+monotonous. People who are fond of the bustle and gaiety of Nizza or
+Mentone in their better days can hardly find much to amuse them in San
+Remo. It is certainly quiet, and its quiet verges upon dulness. A more
+serious drawback lies in the scarcity of promenades or level walks for
+weaker invalids. For people with good legs, or who are at home on a
+donkey, there are plenty of charming walks and rides up into the hills.
+But it is not everybody who is strong enough to walk uphill or who cares
+to mount a donkey. Visitors with sensitive noses may perhaps find reason
+for growls at the mode of cultivation which is characteristic of the
+olive groves. The town itself and the country around is, like the bulk
+of the Riviera, entirely without architectural or archaeological
+interest. There is a fine castle within a long drive at Dolceacqua, and
+a picturesque church still untouched within a short one at Ceriana, but
+this is all. Beneficial as the reforms of Carlo Borromeo may have been
+to the religious life of the Cornice, they have been fatal to its
+architecture. On the other hand, any one with an artistic eye and a
+sketch-book may pass his time pleasantly enough at San Remo. The
+botanist may revel day after day in new "finds" among its valleys and
+hill-sides. The rural quiet of the place delivers one from the
+fashionable bustle of livelier watering-places, from the throng of
+gorgeous equipages that pour along the streets of Nice, or from picnics
+with a host of flunkeys uncorking the champagne.
+
+The sunshine, the colour, the beauty of the little town, secure its
+future. The time must soon come when the whole coast of the Riviera will
+be lined with winter resorts; but we can hardly hope that any will
+surpass the happy blending of warmth and interest and repose which makes
+the charm of San Remo.
+
+
+
+
+THE POETRY OF WEALTH.
+
+
+There is one marvellous tale which is hardly likely to be forgotten so
+long as men can look down from Notre Dame de la Garde on the sunny
+beauty of Marseilles. Even if the rest of Dumas' works sink into
+oblivion, the sight of Chateau d'If as it rises glowing from the blue
+waters of the Mediterranean will serve to recall the wonders of 'Monte
+Christo.' But the true claim of the book to remembrance lies not in its
+mere command over the wonderful but in the peculiar sense of wonder
+which it excites. It was the first literary attempt to raise the mere
+dead fact of money into the sphere of the imagination, and to reveal the
+dormant poetry of wealth. There has as yet been only a single age in the
+world's history when wealth has told with any force upon the imagination
+of men. Unpoetic as the Roman mind essentially was, the sudden burst
+upon it of the accumulated riches of the older world kindled in
+senators and proconsuls a sense of romance which, wild and extravagant
+as it seems, has in some of its qualities found no parallel since. The
+feast of Lucullus, the gluttony of Heliogabalus, the sudden upgrowth of
+vast amphitheatres, the waste of millions on the sport of a day, the
+encounters of navies in the mimic warfare of the Coliseum, are the
+freaks of gigantic children tossing about wildly the slowly-hoarded
+treasures of past generations; but they are freaks which for the first
+time revealed the strange possibilities which lay in the future of
+wealth.
+
+It is hard to say whether such a time will ever return. No doubt the
+world is infinitely richer now than it was in the time of the Romans,
+and no doubt too there are at least a dozen people in London alone whose
+actual income far exceeds that of the wealthiest of proconsuls. But the
+wealth of the modern capitalist is a wealth which has grown by slow
+accumulations, a wealth which has risen almost insensibly into its
+enormous mass, and the vastness of which its owner has never had brought
+home to him with the same sort of shock as that which Lucullus must have
+felt when he fronted the treasures of Mithridates, or Clive when he
+threaded his way among the sacks of jewels in the royal vaults of
+Moorshedabad. So far indeed is wealth from stimulating the imagination
+nowadays that a banker is the very type of the unimaginative man, and
+the faintest suspicion of genius is enough to render a financier an
+object of suspicion to the money market. But it is conceivable in the
+odd freaks of things that we may yet see the advent of the
+Poet-Capitalist. It is almost impossible to say what new opportunities
+the possession of fabulous resources might not add to the fancy of a
+dreamer or to the speculations of a philanthropist. It is not till after
+a little thought that we realize how materially the course of human
+progress is obstructed by sheer want of money at critical moments, or
+how easily the sum of human happiness might be increased by the sudden
+descent of a golden shower on the right people at the right time.
+
+There are dreams which men have been dreaming for generation after
+generation which require nothing for their realization but the
+appearance of such a capitalist as we have imagined. To take what may
+seem perhaps an odd instance, just because it is an odd instance, let us
+remember what a wonderful amount of hope and anticipation has been
+thrown by a great religious party into the restoration of the Jews.
+Rightly or wrongly, it is the one theme which sends a throb of
+excitement through the life of quiet parsonages and kindles a new fire
+even in the dreariest May meetings at Exeter Hall. But in point of
+actual fact there is not the slightest necessity to await any great
+spiritual revolution for the accomplishment of such a dream if its
+accomplishment were really desirable. A league of Evangelical bankers
+who fully believed in the prophecies they are so fond of quoting could
+turn the wildest fancies of Dr. Cumming into sober earnest with very
+little trouble indeed. Any emigration agent would undertake the
+transport of Houndsditch bodily to Joppa; the bare limestone uplands of
+Judaea could be covered again with terraces of olive and vine at
+precisely the same cost of money and industry as is still required to
+keep up the cultivation of the Riviera; and Mr. Fergusson would furnish
+for a due consideration plans and estimates for a restoration of the
+Temple on Zion. We are not suggesting such a scheme as an opportunity
+for investing money to any great profit, but it is odd to live in a
+world of wealthy people who believe firmly that its realization would
+make this world into a little heaven below and yet never seem to feel
+that they have the means of bringing it about in their cheque-books. Or
+to take a hardly less odd instance, but one which has actually been
+brought a little nearer to practical realization. Some time ago a body
+of Welsh patriots determined to save the tongue and literature of the
+Cymry from extinction by founding a new Welsh nation on the shores of
+Patagonia. Nothing but Welsh was to be spoken, none but Welsh books were
+to be read, and the laws of the colony were to be an amalgam of the
+codes of Moses and of Howel the Good. The plan failed simply because its
+originators were poor and unable to tide over the first difficulties of
+the project. But conceive an ardent capitalist with a passion for
+nationalities embracing such a cause, and at the cost of a few hundreds
+of thousands creating perhaps a type of national life which might
+directly or indirectly affect the future of the world. Such a man might
+secure himself a niche in history at less cost and with less trouble
+than he could obtain a large estate and a share in the commission of the
+peace for a midland county.
+
+But there is no need to restrict ourselves simply to oddities, although
+oddities of this sort acquire a grandeur of their own at the touch of
+wealth. The whole field of social experiment lies open to a great
+capitalist. The one thing required, for instance, to render the squalor
+and misery of our larger towns practically impossible would be the
+actual sight of a large town without squalor or misery; and yet if
+Liverpool were simply handed over to a great philanthropist with the
+income of half-a-dozen Dukes of Westminster such a sight might easily be
+seen. Schemes of this sort require nothing but what we may term the
+poetic employment of capital for their realization. It is strange that
+no financial hero makes his appearance to use his great money-club to
+fell direr monsters than those which Hercules encountered, and by the
+creation of a city at once great, beautiful, and healthy to realize the
+conception of the Utopia and the dream of Sir Thomas More. Or take a
+parallel instance from the country. Those who have watched the issues of
+the co-operative system as applied to agriculture believe they see in it
+the future solution of two of our greatest social difficulties--those,
+we mean, which spring from the increasing hardships of the farmer's
+position, and those which arise from the terrible serfage of the rural
+labourer. But the experiments which have been as yet carried on are on
+too small a scale either to produce any influence on the labour market
+as a whole, or to make that impression on the public imagination which
+could alone raise the matter into a "question of the day." What is
+wanted is simply that two or three dukes should try the experiment of
+peasant co-operation on a whole county, and try it with a command of
+capital which would give the experiment fair play. Whether it succeeded
+or not, such an attempt would have a poetic and heroic aspect of a
+different order from the usual expenditure of a British peer.
+
+Or we may turn to a wholly different field, the field of art. We are
+always ready to cry out against "pot boilers" as we wander through the
+galleries of the Academy, and to grumble at the butchers' bills and
+bonnet bills which stand between great artists and the production of
+great works. But the butchers' bills and bonnet bills of all the forty
+Academicians might be paid by a great capitalist without any deep dip
+into his money bags, and a whole future opened to English art by the
+sheer poetry of wealth. There are hundreds of men with special faculties
+for scientific inquiry who are at the present moment pinned down to the
+daily drudgery of the lawyer's desk or the doctor's consulting-room by
+the necessities of daily bread. A Rothschild who would take a score of
+natural philosophers and enable them to apply their whole energies to
+investigation would help forward science as really as Newton himself, if
+less directly. But there are even direct ways in which wealth on a
+gigantic scale might put out a poetic force which would affect the very
+fortunes of the world. There are living people who are the masters of
+twenty millions; and twenty millions would drive a tunnel under the
+Straits of Dover. If increased intercourse means, as is constantly
+contended, an increase of friendship and of mutual understanding among
+nations, the man who devoted a vast wealth to linking two peoples
+together would rise at once to the level of the great benefactors of
+mankind. An opportunity for a yet more direct employment of the
+influence of wealth will some day or other be found in the field of
+international politics. Already those who come in contact with the
+big-wigs of the financial world hear whispers of a future when the
+destinies of peoples are to be decided in bank parlours, and questions
+of peace and war settled, not by the diplomatist and statesman, but by
+the capitalist. But as yet these are mere whispers, and no European
+Gould has risen up to "finance" Downing Street into submission, or to
+meet the boldest move of Prince Bismarck by a fall of the Stock
+Exchange. Of all the schemes however which we have suggested, this is
+probably the nearest to practical realization. If not we ourselves, our
+children at any rate may see International Congresses made possible by a
+few people quietly buttoning their breeches-pockets, and the march of
+"armed nations" arrested by "a run for gold."
+
+Taking however men as they are, it is far more wonderful that no one has
+hit on the enormous field which wealth opens for the developement of
+sheer downright mischief. The sense of mischief is a sense which goes
+quietly to sleep as soon as childhood is over from mere want of
+opportunity. The boy who wants to trip up his tutor can easily find a
+string to tie across the garden walk; but when one has got beyond the
+simpler joys of childhood strings are not so easy to find. To carry out
+a practical joke of the Christopher Sly sort we require, as Shakespere
+saw, the resources of a prince. But once grant possession of unlimited
+wealth, and the possibilities of mischief rise to a grandeur such as
+the world has never realized. The Erie Ring taught us a little of what
+capital might do in this way, but in the Erie Ring capital was fettered
+by considerations of profit and loss. Throw these considerations
+overboard and treat a great question in the spirit of sheer mischief,
+and the results may be simply amazing. Conceive, for instance, a
+capitalist getting the railways round London into his power, and then in
+sheer freak stopping the traffic for a single day. No doubt the day
+would be a short one, but even twelve hours of such a practical joke
+would bring about a "Black Monday" such as England has never seen. But
+there would be no need of such an enormous operation to enable us to
+realize the power of latent mischief which the owner of great wealth
+really possesses. An adroit operator might secure every omnibus and
+every cab in the metropolis and compel us to paddle about for a week in
+the mud of November before the loss was replaced.
+
+It is quite possible indeed that gigantic mischief of this sort may find
+its sphere in practical politics. Already Continental Governments watch
+with anxiety the power which employers possess of bringing about a
+revolution by simply closing their doors and throwing thousands of
+unemployed labourers on the street; but it is a power which in some
+degree or other capital will always possess, and any one who remembers
+the assistance which Reform derived from the Hyde Park rows will see at
+once that mischief on the large scale might be made in this way an
+important factor in political questions.
+
+Ambition has yet a wider sphere of action than even mischief in this
+poetic use of wealth. A London preacher recently drew pointed attention
+to the merely selfish use of their riches by great English nobles, and
+contrasted it with the days when Elizabeth's Lords of the Council
+clubbed together to provide an English fleet against the Armada, or the
+nobles of Venice placed their wealth on every great emergency at the
+service of the State. But from any constitutional point of view there is
+perhaps nothing on which we may more heartily congratulate ourselves
+than on the blindness which hides from the great capitalists of England
+the political power which such a national employment of their wealth
+would give them--a blindness which is all the more wonderful in what is
+at once the wealthiest and the most political aristocracy which the
+world has ever seen. What fame the mere devotion of a quarter of a
+million to public uses may give to a quiet merchant the recent example
+of Mr. Peabody abundantly showed. But the case of the Baroness Burdett
+Coutts is yet more strictly to the point. The mere fact that she has
+been for years credited with a wide and unselfish benevolence has given
+her a power over the imagination of vast masses of the London poor which
+no one who is not really conversant with their daily life and modes of
+thinking could for an instant imagine. Her bounty is enlarged in the
+misty air of the slums of Wapping or Rotherhithe to colossal dimensions,
+and the very quietness and unobtrusiveness of her work gives it an air
+of mystery which tells like romance on the fancy of the poor.
+
+It was characteristic of the power which such a use of wealth may give
+that the mobs who smashed the Hyde Park railings stopped to cheer before
+the house of Lady Burdett Coutts. Luckily none of our political nobles
+has ever bethought himself of the means by which the great Roman leaders
+rose habitually to influence or won over the labouring masses by "panem
+et Circenses." But a nobler ambition might find its field in a large
+employment of wealth for public ends of a higher sort. Something of the
+old patrician pride might have spurred the five or six great Houses who
+own half London to construct the Thames Embankment at their own cost,
+and to hand it over free from the higglings of Mr. Gore to the people at
+large. Even now we may hear of some earl whose rent-roll is growing with
+fabulous rapidity as coming forward to relieve the Treasury by the offer
+of a National Gallery of Art, or checkmating the jobbers of South
+Kensington by the erection of a National Museum. It seems to be easy
+enough for peer after peer to fling away a hundred thousand at Newmarket
+or Tattersall's, and yet a hundred thousand would establish in the
+crowded haunts of working London great "Conservatoires" where the finest
+music might be brought to bear without cost on the coarseness and
+vulgarity of the life of the poor. The higher drama may be perishing in
+default of a State subvention, but it never seems to enter any one's
+head that there are dozens of people among those who grumbled at the
+artistic taste of Mr. Ayrton who could furnish such a subvention at the
+present cost of their stable. As yet however we must be content, we
+suppose, with such a use of wealth as 'Lothair' brings to the front--the
+purely selfish use of it carried to the highest pitch which selfishness
+has ever reached. Great parks and great houses, costly studs and costly
+conservatories, existence relieved of every hitch and discomfort--these
+are the outlets which wealth has as yet succeeded in finding. For nobler
+outlets we must wait for the advent of the Poet-Capitalist.
+
+
+
+
+LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS.
+
+
+A little higher up the river, but almost opposite to the huge mass of
+the Houses of Parliament, lies a broken, irregular pile of buildings, at
+whose angle, looking out over the Thames, is one grey weatherbeaten
+tower. The broken pile is the archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth; the grey
+weatherbeaten building is its Lollards' Tower. From this tower the
+mansion itself stretches in a varied line, chapel and guard-room and
+gallery and the stately buildings of the new house looking out on the
+terrace and garden; while the Great Hall, in which the library has now
+found a home, is the low picturesque building which reaches southward
+along the river to the gate.
+
+The story of each of these spots will interweave itself with the thread
+of our narrative as we proceed; but I would warn my readers at the
+outset that I do not purpose to trace the history of Lambeth in itself,
+or to attempt any architectural or picturesque description of the place.
+What I attempt is simply to mark in incident after incident which has
+occurred within its walls the relation of the House to the Primates whom
+it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the
+literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm.
+
+Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better than the site of
+the house itself. It is doubtful whether we can date the residence of
+the Archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, which was then a manor house
+of the see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the
+Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice of the spot as
+there was a significance in the date at which the choice was made. So
+long as the political head of the English people ruled, like AElfred or
+AEthelstan or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English
+people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the
+Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the
+Kings finally to Westminster that the Archbishops were permanently
+drawn to their suffragan's manor house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave
+a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national history
+which opened with the Conquest the Church was called to play a part
+greater than she had ever known before. Hitherto the Archbishop had been
+simply the head of the ecclesiastical order--a representative of the
+moral and spiritual forces on which government was based. The Conquest,
+the cessation of the great Witenagemots in which the nation, however
+imperfectly, had till then found a voice, turned him into a Tribune of
+the People.
+
+Foreigner though he might be, it was the Primate's part to speak for the
+conquered race the words it could no longer utter. He was in fact the
+permanent leader (to borrow a modern phrase) of a Constitutional
+Opposition; and in addition to the older religious forces which he
+wielded he wielded a popular and democratic force which held the new
+King and the new baronage in check. It was he who received from the
+sovereign whom he crowned the solemn oath that he would rule not by his
+own will, but according to the customs, or as we should say now, the
+traditional constitution of the realm. It was his to call on the people
+to declare whether they chose him for their king, to receive the
+thundered "Ay, ay," of the crowd, to place the priestly unction on
+shoulder and breast, the royal crown on brow. To watch over the
+observance of the covenant of that solemn day, to raise obedience and
+order into religious duties, to uphold the custom and law of the realm
+against personal tyranny, to guard amid the darkness and brutality of
+the age those interests of religion, of morality, of intellectual life
+which as yet lay peacefully together beneath the wing of the
+Church,--this was the political office of the Primate in the new order
+which the Conquest created, and it was this office which expressed
+itself in the site of the house that fronted the King's house over
+Thames.
+
+From the days of Archbishop Anselm therefore to the days of Stephen
+Langton, Lambeth only fronted Westminster as the Archbishop fronted the
+King. Synod met over against Council; the clerical court of the one
+ruler rivalled in splendour, in actual influence, the baronial court of
+the other. For more than a century of our history the great powers which
+together were to make up the England of the future lay marshalled over
+against each other on either side the water.
+
+With the union of the English people and the sudden arising of English
+freedom which followed the Great Charter this peculiar attitude of the
+Archbishops passed necessarily away. When the people itself spoke again,
+its voice was heard not in the hall of Lambeth but in the Chapter-house
+which gave a home to the House of Commons in its earlier sessions at
+Westminster. From the day of Stephen Langton the nation has towered
+higher and higher above its mere ecclesiastical organization, till the
+one stands dwarfed beside the other as Lambeth now stands dwarfed before
+the mass of the Houses of Parliament. Nor was the religious change less
+than the political. In the Church as in the State the Archbishops
+suddenly fell into the rear. From the days of the first English
+Parliament to the days of the Reformation they not only cease to be
+representatives of the moral and religious forces of the nation but
+stand actually opposed to them. Nowhere is this better brought out than
+in their house beside the Thames. The political history of Lambeth lies
+spread over the whole of its site, from the gateway of Morton to the
+garden where we shall see Cranmer musing on the fate of Anne Boleyn. Its
+ecclesiastical interest on the other hand is concentrated in a single
+spot. We must ask our readers therefore to follow us beneath the
+groining of the Gate-House into the quiet little court that lies on the
+river-side of the hall. Passing over its trim grass-plot to a doorway at
+the angle of Lollards' Tower, and mounting a few steps, they will find
+themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a
+single small window looking out towards the Thames. The chamber is at
+the base of Lollards' Tower; in the centre stands a huge oaken pillar,
+to which the room owes its name of the "Post-room," and to which
+somewhat mythical tradition asserts Lollards to have been tied when they
+were "examined" by the whip. On its western side a doorway of the purest
+Early English work leads us directly into the palace Chapel.
+
+It is strange to stand at a single step in the very heart of the
+ecclesiastical life of so many ages, within walls beneath which the men
+in whose hands the fortunes of English religion have been placed from
+the age of the Great Charter till to-day have come and gone; to see the
+light falling through the tall windows with their marble shafts on the
+spot where Wyclif fronted Sudbury, on the lowly tomb of Parker, on the
+stately screen-work of Laud, on the altar where the last sad communion
+of Sancroft originated the Nonjurors. It is strange to note the very
+characteristics of the building itself, marred as it is by modern
+restoration, and to feel how simply its stern, unadorned beauty, the
+beauty of Salisbury and of Lincoln, expressed the very tone of the
+Church that finds its centre there.
+
+And hardly less strange is it to recall the odd, roystering figure of
+the Primate to whom, if tradition be true, it owes this beauty. Boniface
+of Savoy was the youngest of three brothers out of whom their niece
+Eleanor, the queen of Henry the Third, was striving to build up a
+foreign party in the realm. Her uncle Amadeus was richly enfeoffed with
+English lands; the Savoy Palace in the Strand still recalls the
+settlement and the magnificence of her uncle Peter. For this third and
+younger uncle she grasped at the highest post in the State save the
+Crown itself. "The handsome Archbishop," as his knights loved to call
+him, was not merely a foreigner as Lanfranc and Anselm had been
+foreigners--strange in manner or in speech to the flock whom they
+ruled--he was foreign in the worst sense: strange to their freedom,
+their sense of law, their reverence for piety. His first visit set
+everything on fire. He retreated to Lyons to hold a commission in the
+Pope's body-guard, but even Innocent was soon weary of his tyranny. When
+the threat of sequestration recalled him after four years of absence to
+his see, his hatred of England, his purpose soon to withdraw again to
+his own sunny South, were seen in his refusal to furnish Lambeth.
+Certainly he went the wrong way to stay here. The young Primate brought
+with him Savoyard fashions, strange enough to English folk. His armed
+retainers, foreigners to a man, plundered the City markets. His own
+archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground a prior who opposed his
+visitation. It was the Prior of St. Bartholomew's by Smithfield; and
+London, on the King's refusal to grant redress, took the matter into her
+own hands. The City bells swung out, and a noisy crowd of citizens were
+soon swarming beneath the walls of the palace, shouting threats of
+vengeance.
+
+For shouts Boniface cared little. In the midst of the tumult he caused
+the sentences of excommunication which he had fulminated to be legally
+executed in the chapel of his house. But bravado like this soon died
+before the universal resentment, and "the handsome Archbishop" fled
+again to Lyons. How helpless the successor of Augustine really was was
+shown by a daring outrage perpetrated in his absence. Master Eustace,
+his official, had thrown into prison the Prior of St. Thomas's Hospital
+for some contempt of court; and the Prior's diocesan, the Bishop of
+Winchester, a prelate as foreign and lawless as Boniface himself, took
+up the injury as his own. A party of his knights appeared before the
+house at Lambeth, tore the gates from their hinges, set Master Eustace
+on horseback, and carried him off to the episcopal prison at Farnham. At
+last Boniface bowed to submission, surrendered the points at issue,
+recalled his excommunications, and was suffered to return. He had learnt
+his lesson well enough to remain from that time a quiet, inactive man,
+with a dash of continental frugality and wit about him. Whether he built
+the chapel or no, he would probably have said of it as he said of the
+Great Hall at Canterbury, "My predecessors built, and I discharge the
+debt for their building. It seems to me that the true builder is the man
+that pays the bill."
+
+But Boniface never learnt to be an Englishman. When under the guidance
+of Earl Simon of Montfort the barons wrested the observance of their
+Charter from the King the Primate of England found shelter in a fresh
+exile. The Church had in fact ceased to be national. The figure of the
+first Reformer, as he stands on the chapel floor, is in itself the
+fittest comment on the age in which the chapel was built, an age when
+the interests of popular liberty and of intellectual freedom had sheered
+off from the church which had so long been their protector. With them
+the moral and spiritual life of the people sheered off too. The vast
+ecclesiastical fabric rested in the days of Archbishop Sudbury solely on
+its wealth and its tradition. Suddenly a single man summed up in himself
+the national, the mental, the moral power it had lost, and struck at the
+double base on which it rested. Wyclif, the keenest intellect of his
+day, national and English to the very core, declared its tradition
+corrupt and its wealth antichrist. The two forces that above all had
+built up the system of mediaeval Christianity, the subtlety of the
+schoolman, the enthusiasm of the penniless preacher, united to strike it
+down.
+
+It is curious to mark how timidly the Primate of the day dealt with such
+a danger as this. Sudbury was acting in virtue of a Papal injunction,
+but he acted as though the shadow of the terrible doom that was awaiting
+him had already fallen over him. He summoned the popular Bishop of
+London to his aid ere he cited the Reformer to his judgment-seat. It was
+not as a prisoner that Wyclif appeared in the chapel: from the first his
+tone was that of a man who knew that he was secure. He claimed to have
+the most favourable construction put upon his words; then, availing
+himself of his peculiar subtlety of interpretation, he demanded that
+where they might bear two meanings his judges should take them in an
+orthodox sense. It was not a noble scene--there was little in it of
+Luther's "Here stand I--I can none other;" but both sides were in fact
+acting a part. On the one hand the dead pressure of ecclesiastical
+fanaticism was driving the Primate into a position from which he sought
+only to escape; on the other Wyclif was merely gaining time--"beating
+step," as men say--with his scholastic formulae. What he looked for soon
+came. There was a rumour in the City that Papal delegates were sitting
+in judgment on the Reformer, and London was at once astir. Crowds of
+angry citizens flocked round the archiepiscopal house, and already there
+was talk of attacking it when a message from the Council of Regency
+commanded a suspension of all proceedings in the case. Sudbury dismissed
+his prisoner with a formal injunction, and the day was for ever lost to
+the Church.
+
+But if in Sudbury the Church had retreated peaceably before Wyclif, it
+was not from any doubt of the deadly earnestness of the struggle that
+lay before her. Archbishop Chichele's accession to the primacy was the
+signal for the building of Lollards' Tower. Dr. Maitland has shown that
+the common name rests on a mere error, and that the Lollards' Tower
+which meets us so grimly in the pages of Foxe was really a western tower
+of St. Paul's. But, as in so many other instances, the popular voice
+showed a singular historical tact in its mistake; the tower which
+Chichele raised marked more than any other in the very date of its
+erection the new age of persecution on which England was to enter. From
+a gateway in the northern side of the Post-room worn stone steps lead up
+to a dungeon in which many a prisoner for the faith must have lain. The
+massive oaken door, the iron rings bolted into the wall, the one narrow
+window looking out over the river, tell their tale as well as the broken
+sentences scratched or carved around. Some are mere names; here and
+there some light-pated youngster paying for his night's uproar has
+carved his dice or his "Jesus kep me out of all il compane, Amen." But
+"Jesus est amor meus" is sacred, whether Lollard or Jesuit graved it in
+the lonely prison hours, and not less sacred the "Deo sit gratiarum
+actio" that marks perhaps the leap of a martyr's heart at the news of
+the near advent of his fiery deliverance. It is strange to think, as one
+winds once more down the stairs that such feet have trodden, how soon
+England answered to the challenge that Lollards' Tower flung out over
+the Thames. The white masonry had hardly grown grey under the buffetings
+of a hundred years ere Lollard was no longer a word of shame, and the
+reformation that Wyclif had begun sat enthroned within the walls of the
+chapel where he had battled for his life.
+
+The attitude of the primates indeed showed that sooner or later such a
+reformation was inevitable. From the moment when Wyclif stood in
+Lambeth Chapel the Church sank ecclesiastically as well as politically
+into non-existence. It survived merely as a vast landowner, whilst its
+primates, after a short effort to resume their older position as real
+heads of their order, dwindled into ministers and tools of the Crown.
+The Gate-tower of the house, the grand mass of brickwork, whose dark red
+tones are (or, alas! were till a year or two since) so exquisitely
+brought out by the grey stone of its angles and the mullions of its
+broad arch-window, recalls an age--that of its builder, Archbishop
+Morton--when Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of the
+crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler elements of political
+life. It was raised from this degradation by the efforts of a primate to
+whose merits justice has hardly as yet been done. First in date among
+the genuine portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury which hang round
+the walls of the Guard-room at Lambeth is the portrait of Archbishop
+Warham. The plain, homely old man's face still looks down on us line for
+line as the "seeing eye" of Holbein gazed on it three centuries ago. "I
+instance this picture," says Mr. Wornum, in his life of the painter, "as
+an illustration that Holbein had the power of seeing what he looked on,
+and of perfectly transferring to his picture what he saw." Memorable in
+the annals of art as the first of that historic series which brings home
+to us as no age has ever been brought home to eyes of aftertime the age
+of the English Reformation, it is even more memorable as marking the
+close of the great intellectual movement which the Reformation swept
+away.
+
+It was with a letter from Erasmus in his hands that Hans Holbein stood
+before the aged Archbishop, still young as when he sketched himself at
+Basel with the fair, frank, manly face, the sweet gentle mouth, the
+heavy red cap flinging its shade over the mobile, melancholy brow. But
+it was more than the "seventy years" that he has so carefully noted
+above it that the artist saw in the Primate's face; it was the still,
+impassive calm of a life's disappointment. Only ten years before, at the
+very moment when the painter first made his entry into Basel, Erasmus
+had been forwarding to England the great work in which he had recalled
+theologians to the path of sound biblical criticism. "Every lover of
+letters," the great scholar wrote sadly, after the old man had gone to
+his rest,--"Every lover of letters owes to Warham that he is the
+possessor of my 'Jerome';" and with an acknowledgment of the Primate's
+bounty such as he alone in Christendom could give the edition bore in
+its forefront his memorable dedication to the Archbishop. That Erasmus
+could find protection for such a work in Warham's name, that he could
+address him with a conviction of his approval in words so bold and
+outspoken as those of his preface, tell us how completely the old man
+sympathized with the highest tendencies of the New Learning.
+
+Of the Renascence, that "new birth" of the world--for I cling to a word
+so eminently expressive of a truth that historians of our day seem
+inclined to forget or to deny--of that regeneration of mankind through
+the sudden upgrowth of intellectual liberty, Lambeth was in England the
+shrine. With the Reformation which followed it Lambeth, as we shall see,
+had little to do. But the home of Warham was the home of the revival of
+letters. With a singular fitness, the venerable library which still
+preserves their tradition, ousted from its older dwelling-place by the
+demolition of the cloister, has in modern days found refuge in the Great
+Hall, the successor and copy of that hall where the men of the New
+Learning, where Colet and More and Grocyn and Linacre gathered round the
+table of Warham.
+
+It was with Grocyn that Erasmus rowed up the river to the Primate's
+board. Warham addressed a few kindly words to the poor scholar before
+and after dinner, and then drawing him aside into a corner of the hall
+(his usual way when he made a present to any one) slipped into his hand
+an acknowledgment for the book and dedication he had brought with him.
+"How much did the Archbishop give you?" asked his companion as they
+rowed home again. "An immense amount!" replied Erasmus, but his friend
+saw the discontent on his face, and drew from him how small the sum
+really was. Then the disappointed scholar burst into a string of
+indignant questions: was Warham miserly, or was he poor, or did he
+really think such a present expressed the value of the book? Grocyn
+frankly blurted out the true reason for Warham's economy in his shrewd
+suspicion that this was not the first dedication that had been prefixed
+to the 'Hecuba,' and it is likely enough that the Primate's suspicion
+was right. At any rate, Erasmus owns that Grocyn's sardonic comment, "It
+is the way with you scholars," stuck in his mind even when he returned
+to Paris, and made him forward to the Archbishop a perfectly new
+translation of the 'Iphigenia.'
+
+Few men seem to have realized more thoroughly than Warham the new
+conception of an intellectual and moral equality before which the old
+social distinctions were to vanish away. In his intercourse with this
+group of friends he seems utterly unconscious of the exalted station
+which he occupied in the eyes of men. Take such a story as Erasmus tells
+of a visit of Dean Colet to Lambeth. The Dean took Erasmus in the boat
+with him, and read as they rowed along a section called 'The Remedy for
+Anger' in his friend's popular 'Handbook of the Christian Soldier.' When
+they reached the hall however Colet plumped gloomily down by Warham's
+side, neither eating nor drinking nor speaking in spite of the
+Archbishop's good-humoured attempt to draw him into conversation. It was
+only by starting the new topic of a comparison of ages that the
+Archbishop was at last successful; and when dinner was over Colet's
+ill-temper had utterly fled. Erasmus saw him draw aside an old man who
+had shared their board, and engage in the friendliest greeting. "What a
+fortunate fellow you are!" began the impetuous Dean, as the two friends
+stepped again into their boat; "what a tide of good-luck you bring with
+you!" Erasmus, of course, protested (one can almost see the
+half-earnest, half-humorous smile on his lip) that he was the most
+unfortunate fellow on earth. He was at any rate a bringer of good
+fortune to his friends, the Dean retorted; one friend at least he had
+saved from an unseemly outbreak of passion. At the Archbishop's table,
+in fact, Colet had found himself placed opposite to an uncle with whom
+he had long waged a bitter family feud, and it was only the singular
+chance which had brought him thither fresh from the wholesome lessons of
+the 'Handbook' that had enabled the Dean to refrain at the moment from
+open quarrel, and at last to get such a full mastery over his temper as
+to bring about a reconciliation with his kinsman. Colet was certainly
+very lucky in his friend's lessons, but he was perhaps quite as
+fortunate in finding a host so patient and good-tempered as Archbishop
+Warham.
+
+Primate and scholar were finally separated at last by the settlement of
+Erasmus at Basel, but the severance brought no interruption to their
+friendship. "England is my last anchor," Erasmus wrote bitterly to a
+rich German prelate; "if that goes, I must beg." The anchor held as long
+as Warham lived. Years go by, but the Primate is never tired of new
+gifts and remembrances to the brave, sensitive scholar at whose heels
+all the ignorance and bigotry of Europe was yelping. Sometimes indeed he
+was luckless in his presents; once he sent a horse to his friend, and,
+in spite of the well-known proverb about looking such a gift in the
+mouth, got a witty little snub for his pains. "He is no doubt a good
+steed at bottom," Erasmus gravely confesses, "but it must be owned he is
+not over-handsome; however he is at any rate free from all mortal sins,
+with the trifling exception of gluttony and laziness! If he were only a
+father confessor now! he has all the qualities to fit him for
+one--indeed, he is only _too_ prudent, modest, humble, chaste, and
+peaceable!" Still, admirable as these characteristics are, he is not
+quite the nag one expected. "I fancy that through some knavery or
+blundering on your servant's part, I must have got a different steed
+from the one you intended for me. In fact, now I come to remember, I had
+bidden my servant not to accept a horse except it were a good one; but
+I am infinitely obliged to you all the same." Even Warham's temper must
+have been tried as he laughed over such a letter as this; but the
+precious work of art which Lambeth contains proves that years only
+intensified their friendship. It was, as we have seen, with a letter of
+Erasmus in his hands, that on his first visit to England Holbein
+presented himself before Warham; and Erasmus responded to his friend's
+present of a copy of this portrait by forwarding a copy of his own.
+
+With the Reformation in its nobler and purer aspects Lambeth--as we have
+said--had little to do. Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Alasco, gathered there
+for a moment round Cranmer, but it was simply as a resting-place on
+their way to Cambridge, to Oxford, and to Austin Friars. Only one of the
+symbols of the new Protestantism has any connection with it; the
+Prayer-Book was drawn up in the peaceful seclusion of Otford. The party
+conferences, the rival martyrdoms of the jarring creeds, took place
+elsewhere. The memories of Cranmer which linger around Lambeth are
+simply memories of degradation, and that the deepest degradation of all,
+the degradation of those solemn influences which the Primacy embodies
+to the sanction of political infamy. It is fair indeed to remember the
+bitterness of Cranmer's suffering. Impassive as he seemed, with a face
+that never changed and sleep seldom known to be broken, men saw little
+of the inner anguish with which the tool of Henry's injustice bent
+before that overmastering will. But seldom as it was that the silent
+lips broke into complaint the pitiless pillage of his see wrung
+fruitless protests even from Cranmer. The pillage had began on the very
+eve of his consecration, and from that moment till the king's death
+Henry played the part of sturdy beggar for the archiepiscopal manors.
+Concession followed concession, and yet none sufficed to purchase
+security. The Archbishop lived in the very shadow of death. At one time
+he heard the music of the royal barge as it passed Lambeth, and hurried
+to the waterside to greet the King. "I have news for you my chaplain!"
+Henry broke out with his rough laugh as he drew Cranmer on board: "I
+know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent!" and pulling a paper from
+his sleeve he showed him his denunciation by the prebendaries of his own
+cathedral. At another time he was summoned from his bed, and crossed the
+river to find Henry pacing the gallery at Whitehall and to hear that on
+the petition of the Council the King had consented to his committal to
+the Tower. The law of the Six Articles parted him from wife and child.
+"Happy man that you are" Cranmer groaned to Alexander Ales, whom with
+his wonted consideration for others he had summoned to Lambeth to warn
+him of his danger as a married priest; "happy man that you are that you
+can escape! I would that I could do the same. Truly my see would be no
+hindrance to me."
+
+The bitter words must have recalled to Ales words of hardly less
+bitterness which he had listened to on a visit to Lambeth years before.
+If there was one person upon earth whom Cranmer loved it was Anne
+Boleyn. When the royal summons had called him to Lambeth to wait till
+the time arrived when his part was to be played in the murder of the
+Queen his affection found vent in words of a strange pathos. "I loved
+her not a little," he wrote to Henry in fruitless intercession, "for the
+love which I judged her to bear towards God and His Gospel. I was most
+bound to her of all creatures living." So he wrote, knowing there was
+wrong to be done towards the woman he loved, wrong which he alone could
+do, and knowing too that he would stoop to do it. The large garden
+stretched away northward from his house then as now, but then thick, no
+doubt, with the elm rows that vanished some thirty years back as the
+great city's smoke drifted over them, and herein the early morning (it
+was but four o'clock) Ales, who had found sleep impossible and had
+crossed the river in a boat to seek calm in the fresh air and stillness
+of the place, met Cranmer walking. On the preceding day Anne had gone
+through the mockery of her trial, but to the world outside the little
+circle of the court nothing was known, and it was in utter
+unconsciousness of this that Ales told the Archbishop he had been roused
+by a dream of her beheading. Cranmer was startled out of his usual calm.
+"Don't you know then," he asked after a moment's silence, "what is to
+happen to-day?" Then raising his eyes to heaven he added with a wild
+burst of tears, "She who has been Queen of England on earth will this
+day become a queen in heaven!" Some hours afterwards the Queen stood
+before him as her judge, and passed back to the Tower and the block.
+
+Cranmer was freed by his master's death from this helplessness of
+terror only to lend himself to the injustice of the meaner masters who
+followed Henry. Their enemies were at least his own, and, kindly as from
+many instances we know his nature to have been, its very weakness made
+him spring eagerly in such an hour of deliverance at the opportunity of
+showing his power over those who so long held him down. On charges of
+the most frivolous nature Bishop Gardiner and Bishop Bonner were
+summoned before the Archbishop at Lambeth, deposed from their sees, and
+flung into prison. It is only the record of their trials, as it still
+stands in the pages of Foxe, that can enable us to understand the
+violence of the reaction under Mary. Gardiner with characteristic
+dignity confined himself to simply refuting the charges brought against
+him and protesting against the injustice of the court. But the coarser,
+bull-dog nature of Bonner turned to bay. By gestures, by scoff, by plain
+English speech he declared again and again his sense of the wrong that
+was being done. A temper naturally fearless was stung to bravado by the
+sense of oppression. As he entered the hall at Lambeth he passed
+straight by the Archbishop and his fellow-commissioners, still keeping
+his cap on his head as though in unconsciousness of his presence. One
+who stood by plucked his sleeve, and bade him do reverence. Bonner
+turned laughingly round and addressed the Archbishop, "What, my Lord,
+are you here? By my troth I saw you not." "It was because you would not
+see," Cranmer sternly rejoined. "Well," replied Bonner, "you sent for
+me: have you anything to say to me?" The charge was read. The Bishop had
+been commanded in a sermon to acknowledge that the acts of the King
+during his minority were as valid as if he were of full age. The command
+was flatly in contradiction with existing statutes, and the Bishop had
+no doubt disobeyed it.
+
+But Bonner was too adroit to make a direct answer to the charge. He
+gained time by turning suddenly on the question of the Sacrament; he
+cited the appearance of Hooper as a witness in proof that it was really
+on this point that he was brought to trial, and he at last succeeded in
+arousing Cranmer's love of controversy. A reply of almost incredible
+profanity from the Archbishop, if we may trust Foxe's report, rewarded
+Bonner's perseverance in demanding a statement of his belief. The Bishop
+was not slow to accept the advantage he had gained. "I am right sorry to
+hear your Grace speak these words," he said, with a grave shake of his
+head, and Cranmer was warned by the silence and earnest looks of his
+fellow-commissioners to break up the session.
+
+Three days after, the addition of Sir Thomas Smith, the bitterest of
+Reformers, to the number of his assessors emboldened Cranmer to summon
+Bonner again. The court met in the chapel, and the Bishop was a second
+time commanded to reply to the charge. He objected now to the admission
+of the evidence of either Hooper or Latimer on the ground of their
+notorious heresy. "If that be the law," Cranmer replied hastily, "it is
+no godly law." "It is the King's law used in the realm," Bonner bluntly
+rejoined. Again Cranmer's temper gave his opponent the advantage. "Ye be
+too full of your law," replied the angry Primate; "I would wish you had
+less knowledge in that law and more knowledge in God's law and of your
+duty!" "Well," answered the Bishop with admirable self-command, "seeing
+your Grace falleth to wishing, I can also wish many things to be in your
+person." It was in vain that Smith strove to brush away his objections
+with a contemptuous "You do use us thus to be seen a common lawyer."
+"Indeed," the veteran canonist coolly retorted; "I knew the law ere you
+could read it!" There was nothing for it but a second adjournment of the
+court. At its next session all parties met in hotter mood. The Bishop
+pulled Hooper's books on the Sacrament from his sleeve and began reading
+them aloud. Latimer lifted up his head, as he alleged, to still the
+excitement of the people who crowded the chapel; as Bonner believed, to
+arouse a tumult. Cries of "Yea, yea," "Nay, nay," interrupted Bonner's
+reading. The Bishop turned round and faced the throng, crying out in
+humorous defiance, "Ah! Woodcocks! Woodcocks!" The taunt was met with
+universal laughter, but the scene had roused Cranmer's temper as well as
+his own. The Primate addressed himself to the people, protesting that
+Bonner was called in question for no such matter as he would persuade
+them. Again Bonner turned to the people with "Well now, hear what the
+Bishop of London saith for his part," but the commissioners forbade him
+to speak more. The court was at last recalled to a quieter tone, but
+contests of this sort still varied the proceedings as they dragged their
+slow length along in chapel and hall.
+
+At last Cranmer resolved to make an end. Had he been sitting simply as
+Archbishop, he reminded Bonner sharply, he might have expected more
+reverence and obedience from his suffragan. As it was, "at every time
+that we have sitten in commission you have used such unseemly fashions,
+without all reverence or obedience, giving taunts and checks as well
+unto us, with divers of the servants and chaplains, as also unto certain
+of the ancientest that be here, calling them fools and daws, with such
+like, that you have given to the multitude an intolerable example of
+disobedience." "You show yourself to be a meet judge!" was Bonner's
+scornful reply. It was clear he had no purpose to yield. The real matter
+at issue, he contended, was the doctrine of the Sacrament, and from the
+very courtroom he sent his orders to the Lord Mayor to see that no
+heretical opinions were preached before him. At the close of the trial
+he once more addressed Cranmer in solemn protest against his breach of
+the law. "I am sorry" he said "that I being a bishop am thus handled at
+your Grace's hand, but more sorry that you suffer abominable heretics to
+practise as they do in London and elsewhere--answer it as you can!" Then
+bandying taunts with the throng, the indomitable bishop followed the
+officers to the Marshalsea.
+
+From the degradation of scenes like these Lambeth was raised to new
+dignity and self-respect by the primacy of Parker. His consecration in
+the same chapel which had witnessed Wyclif's confession was the triumph
+of Wyclif's principles, the close of that storm of the Reformation, of
+that Catholic reaction, which ceased alike with the accession of
+Elizabeth. But it was far more than this. It was in itself a symbol of
+the Church of England as it stands to-day, of that quiet illogical
+compromise between past and present which Parker and the Queen were to
+mould into so lasting a shape. Every circumstance of the service marked
+the strange contrasts which were to be blended in the future of the
+English Church. The zeal of Edward the Sixth's day had dashed the
+stained glass from the casements of Lambeth; the zeal of Elizabeth's day
+was soon to move, if it had not already moved, the holy table into the
+midst of the chapel. But a reaction from the mere iconoclasm and
+bareness of Calvinistic Protestantism showed itself in the tapestries
+hung for the day along the eastern wall and in the rich carpet which was
+spread over the floor. The old legal forms, the old Ordination Service
+reappeared, but in their midst came the new spirit of the Reformation,
+the oath of submission to the royal supremacy, the solemn gift no
+longer of the pastoral staff but of the Bible. The very dress of the
+four consecrating bishops showed the same confusion. Barlow, with the
+Archbishop's chaplains who assisted him in the office of the Communion,
+wore the silken copes of the older service; Scory and Hodgskins the fair
+linen surplice of the new. Yet more noteworthy was the aged figure of
+Coverdale, "Father Coverdale," as men used affectionately to call him,
+the well-known translator of the Bible, whose life had been so hardly
+wrung by royal intercession from Mary. Rejecting the very surplice as
+Popery, in his long Genevan cloak he marks the opening of the Puritan
+controversy over vestments which was to rage so fiercely from Parker on
+to Laud.
+
+The library of Parker, though no longer within its walls, is memorable
+in the literary history of Lambeth as the first of a series of such
+collections made after his time by each successive Archbishop. Many of
+these indeed have passed away. The manuscripts of Parker form the glory
+of Corpus College, Cambridge; the Oriental collections of Laud are among
+the most precious treasures of the Bodleian. In puerile revenge for his
+fall Sancroft withdrew his books from Lambeth, and bequeathed them to
+Emmanuel College. The library which the munificence of Tenison
+bequeathed to his old parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields has been
+dispersed by a shameless act of Vandalism within our own memories. An
+old man's caprice deposited the papers of Archbishop Wake at Christ
+Church. But the treasures thus dispersed are, with the exception of the
+Parker MSS., far surpassed by the collections that remain. I cannot
+attempt here to enter with any detail into the nature of the history of
+the archiepiscopal library. It owes its origin to Archbishop Bancroft,
+it was largely supplemented by his successor Abbot, and still more
+largely after a long interval by the book-loving Primates Tenison and
+Secker. The library of 30,000 volumes still mainly consists of these
+collections, though it has been augmented by the smaller bequests of
+Sheldon and Cornwallis and in a far less degree by those of later
+Archbishops. One has at any rate the repute of having augmented it
+during his primacy simply by a treatise on gout and a book about
+butterflies. Of the 1,200 volumes of manuscripts and papers, 500 are due
+to Bancroft and Abbot, the rest mainly to Tenison, who purchased the
+Carew Papers, the collections of Wharton, and the Codices that bear his
+name. If Wake left his papers to Christ Church in dread of the
+succession of Bishop Gibson the bequest of Gibson's own papers more than
+made up the loss. The most valuable addition since Gibson's day has been
+that of the Greek Codices collected in the East at the opening of this
+century by Dr. Carlyle.
+
+The importance of Parker's primacy however was political and
+ecclesiastical rather than literary. The first Protestant Archbishop was
+not the man to stoop to servility like Cranmer, nor was Elizabeth the
+queen to ask such stooping. But the concordat which the two tacitly
+arranged, the policy so resolutely clung to in spite of Burleigh and
+Walsingham, was perhaps a greater curse both to nation and to Church
+than the meanness of Cranmer. The steady support given by the Crown to
+the new ecclesiastical organization which Parker moulded into shape was
+repaid by the conversion of every clergyman into the advocate of
+irresponsible government. It was as if publicly to ratify this concordat
+that the Queen came in person to Lambeth in the spring of 1573. On
+either side the chapel in that day stood a greater and lesser cloister.
+The last, which lay on the garden side, was swept away by the
+demolitions of the eighteenth century, the first still fills the space
+between chapel and hall but has been converted into domestic offices by
+the "restoration" of our own. Even Mr. Blore might have spared the
+cloisters from whose gallery on the side towards the Thames Elizabeth
+looked down on the gay line of nobles and courtiers who leaned from the
+barred windows beneath and on the crowd of meaner subjects who filled
+the court, while she listened to Dr. Pearce as he preached from a pulpit
+set by the well in the midst. At its close the Queen passed to dinner in
+the Archbishop's chamber of presence, while the noble throng beneath
+followed Burleigh and Lord Howard to the hall whose oaken roof told
+freshly of Parker's hand. At four the short visit was over, and
+Elizabeth again on her way to Greenwich. But, short as it was, it marked
+the conclusion of a new alliance between Church and State out of which
+the Ecclesiastical Commission was to spring.
+
+Such an alliance would have been deadly for English religion as for
+English liberty had not its strength been broken by the obstinate
+resistance in wise as well as unwise ways of the Puritan party. There
+are few more interesting memorials of the struggle which followed than
+the 'Martin Marprelate' tracts which still remain in the collection at
+Lambeth, significantly scored in all their more virulent passages by the
+red pencil of Archbishop Whitgift. But the story of that controversy
+cannot be told here, though it was at Lambeth, as the seat of the High
+Commission, that it was really fought out. More and more it parted all
+who clung to liberty from the Church, and knit the episcopate in a
+closer alliance with the Crown. When Elizabeth set Parker at the head of
+the new Ecclesiastical Commission, half the work of the Reformation was
+in fact undone.
+
+Under Laud this great engine of ecclesiastical tyranny was perverted to
+the uses of civil tyranny of the vilest kind. Under Laud the clerical
+invectives of a Martin Marprelate deepened into the national fury of
+'Canterburie's Doom.' With this political aspect of his life we have not
+now to deal; what Lambeth Chapel brings out with singular vividness is
+the strange audacity with which the Archbishop threw himself across the
+strongest religious sentiments of his time. Men noted as a fatal omen
+the accident that marked his first entry into Lambeth; the overladen
+ferry-boat upset in the crossing, and though horses and servants were
+saved the Primate's coach remained at the bottom of the Thames. But no
+omen brought hesitation to that bold, narrow mind. His first action, he
+tells us himself, was the restoration of the chapel, and, as Laud
+managed it, restoration was the simple undoing of all that the
+Reformation had done.
+
+"I found the windows so broken, and the chapel lay so nastily," he wrote
+long after in his Defence, "that I was ashamed to behold, and could not
+resort unto it but with some disdain." With characteristic energy the
+Archbishop aided with his own hands in the repair of the windows, and
+racked his wits "in making up the history of those old broken pictures
+by help of the fragments of them, which I compared with the story." In
+the east window his glazier was scandalized at being forced by the
+Primate's express directions to "repair and new make the broken
+crucifix." The holy table was set altar-wise against the wall, and a
+cloth of arras hung behind it embroidered with the history of the Last
+Supper. The elaborate woodwork of the screen, the richly-embroidered
+copes of the chaplains, the silver candlesticks, the credence-table,
+the organ and the choir, the genuflexions to the altar, recalled the
+elaborate ceremonial of the Royal Chapel.
+
+High-handed however as the Archbishop's course had been, he felt dimly
+the approaching wreck. At the close of 1639 he notes in his diary a
+great storm that broke even the boats of the Lambeth watermen to pieces
+as they lay before his gate. A curious instance of his gloomy
+prognostications still exists among the relics in the library--a quarry
+of greenish glass, once belonging to the west window of the gallery of
+Croydon, and removed when that palace was rebuilt. On the quarry Laud
+has written with his signet-ring in his own clear, beautiful hand,
+"Memorand. Ecclesiae de Micham, Cheme, et Stone cum aliis fulgure
+combustae sunt. Januar. 14, 1638-9. Omen avertat Deus."
+
+The omen was far from averted. The Scottish war, the Bellum Episcopale,
+the Bishops' War, as men called it, was soon going against the King.
+Laud had been the chief mover in the war, and it was against Laud that
+the popular indignation at once directed itself. On the 9th of May he
+notes in his diary: "A paper posted upon the Royal Exchange, animating
+'prentices to sack my house on the Monday following." On that Monday
+night the mob came surging up to the gates. "At midnight my house was
+beset with 500 of these rascal routers," notes the indomitable little
+prelate. He had received notice in time to secure the house, and after
+two hours of useless shouting the mob rolled away. Laud had his revenge;
+a drummer who had joined in the attack was racked mercilessly, and then
+hanged and quartered. But retaliation like this was useless. The
+gathering of the Long Parliament sounded the knell of the sturdy little
+minister who had ridden England so hard. At the close of October he is
+in his upper study--it is one of the pleasant scholarly touches that
+redeem so much in his life--"to see some manuscripts which I was sending
+to Oxford. In that study hung my picture taken by the life" (the picture
+is at Lambeth still), "and coming in I found it fallen down upon the
+face and lying on the floor, the string being broken by which it was
+hanged against the wall. I am almost everyday threatened with my ruin in
+parliament. God grant this be no omen." On the 18th of December he was
+in charge of the gentleman-usher of the Lords on impeachment of high
+treason. In his company the Archbishop returned for a few hours to see
+his house for the last time, "for a book or two to read in, and such
+papers as pertained to my defence against the Scots;" really to burn,
+says Prynne, most of his privy papers. There is the first little break
+in the boldness with which till now he has faced the popular ill-will,
+the first little break too of tenderness, as though the shadow of what
+was to come were softening him, in the words that tell us his last
+farewell: "I stayed at Lambeth till the evening, to avoid the gaze of
+the people. I went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the day
+(Ps. 93 and 94) and cap. 50 of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me
+worthy of it, and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge hundreds of
+my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my
+house. For which I bless God and them."
+
+So Laud vanished into the dark December night never to return. The house
+seems to have been left unmolested for two years. Then "Captain Browne
+and his company entered my house at Lambeth to keep it for public
+service." The troopers burst open the door "and offered violence to the
+organ," but it was saved for the time by the intervention of their
+captain. In 1643 the zeal of the soldiers could no longer be restrained.
+Even in the solitude and terror of his prison in the Tower Laud still
+feels the bitterness of the last blow at the house he held so dear. "May
+1. My chapel windows defaced and the steps torn up." But the crowning
+bitterness was to come. If there were two men living who had personal
+wrongs to avenge on the Archbishop, they were Leighton and Prynne. It
+can only have been as a personal triumph over their humbled persecutor
+that the Parliament appointed the first custodian of Lambeth and gave
+Prynne the charge of searching the Archbishop's house and chambers for
+materials in support of the impeachment. Of the spirit in which Prynne
+executed his task, the famous 'Canterburie's Doom,' with the Breviat of
+Laud's life which preceded it, still gives pungent evidence. By one of
+those curious coincidences that sometimes flash the fact upon us through
+the dust of old libraries, the copy of this violent invective preserved
+at Lambeth is inscribed on its fly-leaf with the clear, bold "Dum spiro
+spero, C.R." of the King himself. It is hard to picture the thoughts
+that must have passed through Charles's mind as he read the bitter
+triumphant pages that told how the man he had twice pilloried and then
+flung into prison for life had come out again, as he puts it brutally,
+to "unkennel that fox," his foe.
+
+Not even the Archbishop's study with its array of Missals and Breviaries
+and Books of Hours, not even the gallery with its "superstitious
+pictures," the three Italian masterpieces that he hurried as evidence to
+the bar of the House of Lords, so revealed to this terrible detective
+"the rotten, idolatrous heart" of the Primate as the sight of the
+chapel. It was soon reduced to simplicity. We have seen how sharply even
+in prison Laud felt the havoc made by the soldiery. But worse
+profanation was to follow. In 1648 the house passed by sale to the
+regicide Colonel Scott; the Great Hall was at once demolished, and the
+chapel turned into the dining-room of the household. The tomb of Parker
+was levelled with the ground; and if we are to believe the story of the
+royalists, the new owner felt so keenly the discomfort of dining over a
+dead man's bones that the remains of the great Protestant primate were
+disinterred and buried anew in an adjoining field.
+
+The story of the library is a more certain one. From the days of
+Bancroft to those of Laud it had remained secure in the rooms over the
+great cloister where Parker's collection had probably stood before it
+passed to Cambridge. There in Parker's day Foxe had busied himself in
+work for the later editions of his 'Acts and Monuments;' even in the
+present library one book at least bears his autograph and the marginal
+marks of his use. There the great scholars of the seventeenth century,
+with Selden among them, had carried on their labours. The time was now
+come when Selden was to save the library from destruction. At the sale
+of Lambeth the Parliament ordered the books and manuscripts to be sold
+with the house. Selden dexterously interposed. The will of its founder,
+Bancroft, he pleaded, directed that in case room should not be found for
+it at Lambeth his gift should go to Cambridge; and the Parliament,
+convinced by its greatest scholar, suffered the books to be sent to the
+University.
+
+When the Restoration brought the Stuart home again, it flung Scott into
+the Tower and set Juxon in the ruined, desecrated walls. Of the deeper
+thoughts that such a scene might have suggested few probably found
+their way into the simple, limited mind of the new primate. The whole
+pathos of Juxon's position lay in fact in his perfect absorption in the
+past. The books were reclaimed from their Cambridge Adullam. The chapel
+was rescued from desecration, and the fine woodwork of screen and stalls
+replaced as Laud had left them. The demolition of the hall left him a
+more serious labour, and the way in which he entered on it brought
+strikingly out Juxon's temper. He knew that he had but a few years to
+live, and he set himself but one work to do before he died, the
+replacing everything in the state in which the storm of the rebellion
+had found it. He resolved therefore not only to rebuild the hall but to
+rebuild it precisely as it had stood before it was destroyed. It was in
+vain that he was besieged by the remonstrances of "classical"
+architects, that he was sneered at even by Pepys as "old-fashioned";
+times had changed and fashions had changed, but Juxon would recognize no
+change at all. He died ere the building was finished, but even in death
+his inflexible will provided that his plans should be adhered to. The
+result has been a singularly happy one. It was not merely that the
+Archbishop has left us one of the noblest examples of that strange yet
+successful revival of Gothic feeling of which the staircase of Christ
+Church Hall, erected at much about the same time, furnishes so exquisite
+a specimen. It is that in his tenacity to the past he has preserved the
+historic interest of his hall. Beneath the picturesque woodwork of the
+roof, in the quiet light that breaks through the quaint mullions of its
+windows, the student may still recall without a jar the figures which
+make Lambeth memorable, figures such as those of Warham and Erasmus, of
+Grocyn and Colet and More. Unhappily there was a darker side to this
+conservatism. The Archbishops had returned like the Bourbons, forgetting
+nothing and having learned hardly anything. If any man could have
+learned the lesson of history it was Juxon's successor, the hard
+sceptical Sheldon, and one of the jottings in Pepys' Diary shows us what
+sort of lesson he had learned. Pepys had gone down the river at noon to
+dine with the Archbishop in company with Sir Christopher Wren, "the
+first time," as he notes, "that I ever was there, and I have long longed
+for it." Only a few days before he had had a terrible disappointment,
+for "Mr. Wren and I took boat, thinking to dine with my Lord of
+Canterbury, but when we came to Lambeth the gate was shut, which is
+strictly done at twelve o'clock, and nobody comes in afterwards, so we
+lost our labour." On this occasion Pepys was more fortunate. He found "a
+noble house and well furnished with good pictures and furniture, and
+noble attendance in good order, and a great deal of company, though an
+ordinary day, and exceeding good cheer, nowhere better or so much that
+ever I think I saw." Sheldon with his usual courtesy gave his visitors
+kindly welcome, and Pepys was preparing to withdraw at the close of
+dinner when he heard news which induced him to remain. The almost
+incredible scene that followed must be told in his own words:--"Most of
+the company gone, and I going, I heard by a gentleman of a sermon that
+was to be there; and so I stayed to hear it, thinking it to be serious,
+till by-and-by the gentleman told me it was a mockery by one Cornet
+Bolton, a very gentlemanlike man, that behind a chair did pray and
+preach like a Presbyter Scot, with all the possible imitation in
+grimaces and voice. And his text about the hanging up their harps upon
+the willows; and a serious, good sermon too, exclaiming against bishops
+and crying up of my good Lord Eglington till it made us all burst. But
+I did wonder to hear the Bishop at this time to make himself sport with
+things of this kind; but I perceive it was shown to him as a rarity, and
+he took care to have the room door shut; but there were about twenty
+gentlemen there, infinitely pleased with the 'novelty.'"
+
+It was "novelties" like these that led the last of the Stuarts to his
+fatal belief that he could safely defy a Church that had so severed
+itself from the English religion in doing the work of the Crown. The pen
+of a great historian has told for all time the Trial of the Seven
+Bishops, and though their protest was drawn up at Lambeth I may not
+venture to tell it here. Of all the seven in fact Sancroft was probably
+the least inclined to resistance, the one prelate to whom the cheers of
+the great multitude at their acquittal brought least sense of triumph.
+
+No sooner indeed was James driven from the throne than the Primate fell
+back into the servile king-worship of an England that was passing away.
+Within the closed gates of Lambeth he debated endlessly with himself and
+with his fellow-bishops the questions of "de jure" and "de facto" right
+to the crown. Every day he sheered further and further from the actual
+world around him. Newton, who was with him at Lambeth when it was
+announced that the Convention had declared the throne vacant, found that
+Sancroft's thoughts were not with England or English freedom--they were
+concentrated on the question whether James's child were a supposititious
+one or no. "He wished," he said, "they had gone on a more regular method
+and examined into the birth of the young child. There was reason," he
+added, "to believe he was not the same as the first, which might easily
+be known, for he had a mole on his neck." The new Government bore long
+with the old man, and Bancroft for a time seems really to have wavered.
+He suffered his chaplains to take the oaths and then scolded them
+bitterly for praying for William and Mary. He declined to take his seat
+at the Council board, and yet issued his commission for the consecration
+of Burnet. At last his mind was made up and the Government on his final
+refusal to take the oath of allegiance had no alternative but to declare
+the see vacant.
+
+For six months Bancroft was still suffered to remain in his house,
+though Tillotson was nominated as his successor. With a perfect
+courtesy, worthy of the saintly temper which was his characteristic,
+Tillotson waited long at the deprived Archbishop's door desiring a
+conference. But Sancroft refused to see him. Evelyn found the old man in
+a dismantled house, bitter at his fall. "Say 'nolo,' and say it from the
+heart," he had replied passionately to Beveridge when he sought his
+counsel on the offer of a bishopric. Others asked whether after refusing
+the oaths they might attend worship where the new sovereigns were prayed
+for. "If they do," answered Sancroft, "they will need the Absolution at
+the end as well as at the beginning of the service." In the answer lay
+the schism of the Nonjurors, and to this schism Sancroft soon gave
+definite form. On Whitsunday the new Church was started in the
+archiepiscopal Chapel. The throng of visitors was kept standing at the
+palace gate. No one was admitted to the Chapel but some fifty who had
+refused the oaths. The Archbishop himself consecrated: one Nonjuror
+reading the prayers, another preaching. A formal action of ejectment was
+the answer to this open defiance, and on the evening of its decision in
+favour of the Crown Sancroft withdrew quietly by boat over Thames to
+the Temple. He was soon followed by many who, amidst the pettiness of
+his public views, could still realize the grandeur of his self-devotion.
+To one, the Earl of Aylesbury, the Archbishop himself opened the door.
+His visitor, struck with the change of all he saw from the pomp of
+Lambeth, burst into tears and owned how deeply the sight affected him.
+"O my good lord," replied Sancroft, "rather rejoice with me, for now I
+live again."
+
+With Sancroft's departure opens a new age of Lambeth's ecclesiastical
+history. The Revolution which flung him aside had completed the work of
+the great Rebellion in sweeping away for ever the old pretensions of the
+primates to an autocracy within the Church of England. But it seemed to
+have opened a nobler prospect in placing them at the head of the
+Protestant Churches of the world. In their common peril before the great
+Catholic aggression, which found equal support at Paris and Vienna, the
+Reformed communities of the Continent looked for aid and sympathy to the
+one Reformed Church whose position was now unassailable. The
+congregations of the Palatinate appealed to Lambeth when they were
+trodden under foot beneath the horse-hoofs of Turenne. The same appeal
+came from the Vaudois refugees in Germany, the Silesian Protestants, the
+Huguenot churches that still fought for existence in France, the
+Calvinists of Geneva, the French refugees who had forsaken their sunny
+homes in the south for the Gospel and God. In the dry letter-books on
+the Lambeth shelves, in the records of bounty dispensed through the
+Archbishop to the persecuted and the stranger, in the warm and cordial
+correspondence with Lutheran and Calvinist, survives a faint memory of
+the golden visions which filled Protestant hearts after the accession of
+the great Deliverer. "The eyes of the world are upon us," was Tenison's
+plea for union with Protestants at home. "All the Reformed Churches are
+in expectation of something to be done which may make for union and
+peace." When a temper so cold as Tenison's could kindle in this fashion
+it is no wonder that more enthusiastic minds launched into loftier
+expectations--that Leibnitz hoped to see the union of Calvinist and
+Lutheran accomplished by a common adoption of the English Liturgy, that
+a High Churchman like Nicholls revived the plan, which Cranmer had
+proposed and Calvin had supported, of a general council of Protestants
+to be held in England. One by one such visions faded before the
+virulence of party spirit, the narrowness and timidity of Churchmen, the
+base and selfish politics of the time. Few men had higher or more
+spiritual conceptions of Christian unity than Tenison; yet the German
+translation of our Liturgy, stamped with the royal monogram of King
+Frederick, which still exists in the library, reminds us how in mere
+jealousy of a Tory triumph Tenison flung away the offer of a union with
+the Church of Prussia. The creeping ambition of Dubois foiled whatever
+dreams Archbishop Wake may have entertained of a union with the Church
+of France.
+
+From the larger field of political and ecclesiastical history we may
+turn again ere we close to the narrower limits of the Lambeth Library.
+The storm which drove Sancroft from his house left his librarian, Henry
+Wharton, still bound to the books he loved so well. Wharton is one of
+those instances of precocious developement which are rarer in the sober
+walks of historical investigation than in art. It is a strange young
+face that we see in the frontispiece to his sermons, the impression of
+its broad, high brow and prominent nose so oddly in contrast with the
+delicate, feminine curves of the mouth, and yet repeated in the hard,
+concentrated gaze of the large, full eyes which look out from under the
+enormous wig. Wharton was the most accomplished of Cambridge students
+when he quitted the University at twenty-two to aid Cave in his
+'Historia Litteraria.' But the time proved too exciting for a purely
+literary career. At Tenison's instigation the young scholar plunged into
+the thick of the controversy which had been provoked by the aggression
+of King James, and his vigour soon attracted the notice of Sancroft. He
+became one of the Archbishop's chaplains, and was presented in a single
+year to two of the best livings in his gift. With these however save in
+his very natural zeal for pluralities he seems to have concerned himself
+little. It was with the library which now passed into his charge that
+his name was destined to be associated. Under him its treasures were
+thrown liberally open to the ecclesiastical antiquaries of his day--to
+Hody, to Stillingfleet, to Collier, to Atterbury, and to Strype, who was
+just beginning his voluminous collections towards the illustration of
+the history of the sixteenth century. But no one made so much use of the
+documents in his charge as Wharton himself. In them, no doubt, lay the
+secret of his consent to take the oath, to separate from his earlier
+patron, to accept the patronage of Tenison. But there was no permanent
+breach with Sancroft; on his deathbed the Archbishop committed to him
+the charge of editing Laud's papers, a charge redeemed by his
+publication of the 'Troubles and Trials' of the Archbishop in 1694.
+
+But this with other labours were mere by-play. The design upon which his
+energies were mainly concentrated was "to exhibit a complete
+ecclesiastical history of England to the Reformation," and the two
+volumes of the 'Anglia Sacra,' which appeared during his life, were
+intended as a partial fulfilment of this design. Of these, as they now
+stand, the second is by far the more valuable. The four archiepiscopal
+biographies by Osbern, the three by Eadmer, Malmesbury's lives of
+Aldhelm and Wulstan, the larger collection of works by Giraldus
+Cambrensis, Chaundler's biographies of Wykeham and Bekington, and the
+collection of smaller documents which accompanied these, formed a more
+valuable contribution to our ecclesiastical history than had up to
+Wharton's time ever been made. The first volume contained the chief
+monastic annals which illustrated the history of the sees whose
+cathedrals were possessed by monks; those served by canons regular or
+secular were reserved for a third volume, while a fourth was to have
+contained the episcopal annals of the Church from the Reformation to the
+Revolution.
+
+The last however was never destined to appear, and its predecessor was
+interrupted after the completion of the histories of London and St.
+Asaph by the premature death of the great scholar. In 1694 Battely
+writes a touching account to Strype of his interview with Wharton at
+Canterbury:--"One day he opened his trunk and drawers, and showed me his
+great collections concerning the state of our Church, and with a great
+sigh told me his labours were at an end, and that his strength would not
+permit him to finish any more of that subject." Vigorous and healthy as
+his natural constitution was he had worn it out with the severity of his
+toil. He denied himself refreshment in his eagerness for study, and sat
+over his books in the bitterest days of winter till hands and feet were
+powerless with the cold. At last nature abruptly gave way, his last
+hopes of recovery were foiled by an immoderate return to his old
+pursuits, and at the age of thirty-one Henry Wharton died a quiet
+scholar's death. Archbishop Tenison stood with Bishop Lloyd by the grave
+in Westminster, where the body was laid "with solemn and devout anthems
+composed by that most ingenious artist, Mr. Harry Purcell;" and over it
+were graven words that tell the broken story of so many a student
+life:--"Multa ad augendam et illustrandam rem literariam conscripsit;
+plura moliebatur."
+
+The library no longer rests in those quiet rooms over the great cloister
+in which a succession of librarians, such as Gibson and Wilkins and
+Ducarel, preserved the tradition of Henry Wharton. The 'Codex' of the
+first, the 'Concilia' of the second, and the elaborate analysis of the
+Canterbury Registers which we owe to the third are, like Wharton's own
+works, of primary importance to the study of English ecclesiastical
+history. It was reserved for our own day to see these memories swept
+away by the degradation of the cloister into a kitchen yard and a
+scullery; but the Great Hall of Archbishop Juxon, to which by a happy
+fortune the books were transferred, has seen in Dr. Maitland and
+Professor Stubbs keepers whose learning more than rivals the learning of
+Wharton himself. It is not without significance that this great library
+still lies open to the public as a part and a notable part of the palace
+of the chief prelate of the English Church. Even if Philistines abound
+in it the spirit and drift of the English Church have never been wholly
+Philistine. It has managed somehow to reflect and represent the varying
+phases of English life and English thought; it has developed more and
+more a certain original largeness and good-tempered breadth of view;
+amidst the hundred jarring theories of itself and its position which it
+has embraced at one time or another it has never stooped to the mere
+"pay over the counter" theory of Little Bethel. Above all it has as yet
+managed to find room for almost every shade of religious opinion; and it
+has answered at once to every national revival of taste, of beauty, and
+of art.
+
+Great as are the faults of the Church of England, these are merits which
+make men who care more for the diffusion of culture than for the
+propagation of this shade or that shade of religious opinion shrink from
+any immediate wish for her fall. And they are merits which spring from
+this, that she is still a learned Church, not learned in the sense of
+purely theological or ecclesiastical learning, but a Church which is
+able to show among its clergy men of renown in every branch of
+literature, critical, poetical, historical, or scientific. How long this
+distinction is to continue her own it is hard to say; there are signs
+indeed in the theological temper which is creeping over the clergy that
+it is soon to cease. But the spirit of intelligence, of largeness of
+view, of judicious moderation, which is so alien from the theological
+spirit, can still look for support from the memories of Lambeth.
+Whatever its influence may have been, it has not grown out of the noisy
+activity of theological "movement." Its strength has been to sit still
+and let such "movements" pass by. It is by a spirit the very opposite of
+theirs--a spirit of conciliation, of largeness of heart, that it has won
+its power over the Church. None of the great theological impulses of
+this age or the last, it is sometimes urged, came out of Lambeth. Little
+of the theological bitterness, of the controversial narrowness of this
+age or the last, it may fairly be answered, has ever entered its gates.
+Of Lambeth we may say what Matthew Arnold says of Oxford, that many as
+are its faults it has never surrendered itself to ecclesiastical
+Philistines. In the calm, genial silence of its courts, its library, its
+galleries, in the presence of its venerable past, the virulence, the
+petty strife, the tumult of religious fanaticism finds itself hushed.
+Amongst the storm of the Wesleyan revival, of the Evangelical revival,
+of the Puseyite revival, the voice of Lambeth has ever pleaded for a
+truth simpler, larger, more human than theirs. Amid the deafening
+clamour of Tractarian and anti-Tractarian disputants both sides united
+in condemning the silence of Lambeth. Yet the one word that came from
+Lambeth will still speak to men's hearts when all their noisy
+disputations are forgotten. "How," a prelate, whose nearest relative had
+joined the Church of Rome, asked Archbishop Howley, "how shall I treat
+my brother?" "As a brother," was the Archbishop's reply.
+
+
+
+
+CHILDREN BY THE SEA.
+
+
+Autumn brings its congresses--scientific, ecclesiastical,
+archaeological--but the prettiest of autumnal congresses is the
+children's congress by the sea. It is like a leap from prose into poetry
+when we step away from Associations and Institutes, from stuffy
+lecture-rooms and dismal sections, to the strip of sand which the
+children have chosen for their annual gathering. Behind us are the great
+white cliffs, before us the reach of grey waters with steamers and their
+smoke-trail in the offing and waves washing lazily in upon the shore.
+And between sea and cliff are a world of little creatures, digging,
+dabbling, delighted. What strikes us at first sight is the number of
+them. In ordinary life we meet the great host of children in detail, as
+it were; we kiss our little ones in the morning, we tumble over a
+perambulator, we dodge a hoop, we pat back a ball. Child after child
+meets us, but we never realize the world of children till we see it
+massed upon the sands. Children of every age, from the baby to the
+schoolboy; big children and tiny children, weak little urchins with pale
+cheeks and plump little urchins with sturdy legs; children of all
+tempers, from the screeching child in arms to the quiet child sitting
+placid and gazing out of large grey eyes; gay little madcaps paddling at
+the water's edge; busy children, idle children, children careful of
+their dress, hoydens covered with sand and seaweed, wild children,
+demure children--all are mustered in the great many-coloured camp
+between the cliffs and the sea.
+
+It is their holiday as it is ours, but what is a mere refreshment to us
+is life to them. What a rapture of freedom looks up at us out of the
+little faces that watch us as we thread our way from group to group! The
+mere change of dress is a revolution in the child's existence. These
+brown-holland frocks, rough sunshades, and sandboots, these clothes that
+they may wet and dirty and tear as they like, mean deliverance from
+endless dressings--dressings for breakfast and dressings for lunch,
+dressings to go out with mamma and dressings to come down to dessert--an
+escape from fashionable little shoes and tight little hats and stiff
+little flounces that it is treason to rumple. There is an inexpressible
+triumph in their return at eventide from the congress by the sea,
+dishevelled, bedraggled, but with no fear of a scolding from nurse. Then
+too there is the freedom from "lessons." There are no more of those
+dreadful maps along the wall, no French exercises, no terrible
+arithmetic. The elder girls make a faint show of keeping up their
+practising, but the goody books which the governess packed carefully at
+the bottom of their boxes remain at the bottom unopened. There is no
+time for books, the grave little faces protest to you; there is only
+time for the sea. That is why they hurry over breakfast to get early to
+the sands, and are moody and restless at the length of luncheon. It is a
+hopeless business to keep them at home; they yawn over picture-books,
+they quarrel over croquet, they fall asleep over draughts. Home is just
+now only an interlude of sleeping or dining in the serious business of
+the day.
+
+The one interest of existence is in the sea. Its novelty, its vastness,
+its life, dwarf everything else in the little minds beside it. There is
+the endless watching for the ships, the first peep at the little dot on
+the horizon, the controversies as it rises about its masts or its flag,
+the questions as to where it is coming from and where it is going to.
+There is the endless speculation on the tide, the doubt every morning
+whether it is coming in or going out, the wonder of its perpetual
+advance or retreat, the whispered tales of children hemmed in between it
+and the cliffs, the sense of a mysterious life, the sense of a
+mysterious danger. Above all there is the sense of a mysterious power.
+The children wake as the wind howls in the night, or the rain dashes
+against the window panes, to tell each other how the waves are leaping
+high over the pier and ships tearing to pieces on reefs far away. So
+charming and yet so terrible, the most playful of playfellows, the most
+awful of possible destroyers, the child's first consciousness of the
+greatness and mystery of the world around him is embodied in the sea.
+
+It is amusing to see the precision with which the children's congress
+breaks up into its various sections. The most popular and important is
+that of the engineers. The little members come toddling down from the
+cliffs with a load of implements, shouldering rake and spade, and
+dangling tiny buckets from their arms. One little group makes straight
+for its sand-hole of yesterday, and is soon busy with huge heaps and
+mounds which are to take the form of a castle. A crowing little urchin
+beside is already waving the Union Jack which is ready to crown the
+edifice, if the Fates ever suffer it to be crowned. Engineers of less
+military taste are busy near the water's edge with an elaborate system
+of reservoirs and canals, and greeting with shouts of triumph the
+admission of the water to miniature little harbours. A corps of
+absolutely unscientific labourers are simply engaged in digging the
+deepest hole they can, and the blue nets over their sunshades are alone
+visible above the edge of the excavation. It is delightful to watch the
+industry, the energy, the absolute seriousness and conviction of the
+engineers. Sentries warn you off from the limits of the fortress; you
+are politely asked to "please take care," as your clumsy foot strays
+along the delicate brink of the canal. Suggestions that have a
+mechanical turn about them, hints on the best way of reaching the water
+or the possibility of a steeper slope for the sand-walls, are listened
+to with attention and respect. You are rewarded by an invitation which
+allows you to witness the very moment when the dyke is broken and the
+sea admitted into basin and canal, or the yet more ecstatic moment when
+the Union Jack waves over the completed castle.
+
+Indolence and adventure charm the dabblers, as industry absorbs the
+engineers. The sands are of all earthly spots the most delightful; but a
+greater delight than any earthly spot can afford awaits the dabbler in
+the sea. It is mostly the girls who dabble; the gaiety and frolic suit
+them better than the serious industry of castles and canals. Deliverance
+from shoes and stockings, the first thrill of pleasure and surprise at
+the cool touch of the water, the wild rush along the brim, the dainty
+advance till the sea covers the little ankles, the tremulous waiting
+with an air of defiance as the wave deepens round till it touches the
+knee, the firm line with which the dabblers grasp hand in hand and face
+the advancing tide, the sudden panic, the break, the disorderly flight,
+the tears and laughter, the run after the wave as it retreats again, the
+fresh advance and defiance--this is the paradise of the dabbler. Hour
+after hour, with clothes tucked round their waist and a lavish display
+of stout little legs, the urchins wage their mimic warfare with the
+sea. Meanwhile the scientific section is encamped upon the rocks. With
+torn vestments and bruised feet the votaries of knowledge are peeping
+into every little pool, detecting mussel-shells, picking up seaweed,
+hunting for anemones. A shout of triumph from the tiny adventurer who
+has climbed over the rough rock-shelf announces that he has secured a
+prize for the glass jar at home, where the lumps of formless jelly burst
+into rosy flowers with delicate tendrils waving gently round them for
+food. A cry of woe tells of some infantile Whymper who has lost his hold
+on an Alpine rock-edge some six inches high. Knowledge has its
+difficulties as well as its dangers, and the difficulty of forming a
+rock-section in the face of the stern opposition of mothers and nurses
+is undoubtedly great. Still, formed it is, and science furnishes a
+goodly company of votaries and martyrs to the congress by the sea.
+
+But of course the naval section bears away the palm. It is for the most
+part composed of the elder boys and of a few girls who would be boys if
+they could. Its members all possess a hopeless passion for the sea, and
+besiege their mothers for promises that their future life shall be that
+of middies. They wear straw hats and loose blue shirts, and affect as
+much of the sailor in their costume as they can. Each has a boat, or as
+they call it a "vessel," and the build and rig of these vessels is a
+subject of constant discussion and rivalry in the section. Much critical
+inquiry is directed to the propriety of Arthur's jib, or the necessity
+of "ballasting" or pouring a little molten lead into Edward's keel. The
+launch of a new vessel is the event of the week. The coast-guardsman is
+brought in to settle knotty questions of naval architecture and
+equipment, and the little seamen listen to his verdicts, his yarns, the
+records of his voyages, with a wondering reverence. They ask knowingly
+about the wind and the prospects of the weather; they submit to his
+higher knowledge their theories as to the nature and destination of each
+vessel that passes; they come home with a store of naval phrases which
+are poured recklessly out over the tea-table. The pier is a favourite
+haunt of the naval section. They delight in sitting on rough coils of
+old rope. Nothing that is of the sea comes amiss to them. "I like the
+smell of tar," shouts a little enthusiast. They tell tales among
+themselves of the life of a middie and the fun of the "fo-castle," and
+watch the waves leaping up over the pier-head with a wild longing to
+sing 'Rule Britannia.' Every ship in the offing is a living thing to
+them, and the appearance of a man-of-war sends them sleepless to bed.
+
+There is but one general meeting of the children's congress, and that is
+in front of the bathing-machines. Rows of little faces wait for their
+turn, watching the dash of the waves beneath the wheels, peeping at the
+black-robed figures who are bobbing up and down in the sea, half longing
+for their dip, half shrinking as the inevitable moment comes nearer and
+nearer, dashing forward joyously at last as the door opens and the
+bathing woman's "Now, my dear," summons them to the quaint little box.
+One lingers over the sight as one lingers over a bed of flowers. There
+is all the fragrance, the colour, the sweet caprice, the wilfulness, the
+delight of childhood in the tiny figures that meet us on the return from
+their bath, with dancing eyes and flushed cheeks and hair streaming over
+their shoulders. What a hero the group finds in the urchin who never
+cries! With what envy they regard the big sister who never wants to come
+out of the water! It is pleasant to listen to their prattle as they
+stroll over the sands with a fresh life running through every vein, to
+hear their confession of fright at the first dip, their dislike of
+putting their head under water, their chaff of the delicate little
+sister who "will only bathe with mamma." Mammas are always good-humoured
+by the sea; papas come out of their eternal newspaper and toss the wee
+brats on their shoulders, uncles drop down on the merry little group
+with fresh presents every day. The restraint, the distance of home
+vanishes with the practical abolition of the nursery and the schoolroom.
+Home, schoolroom, nursery, all are crammed together in the little
+cockleshell of a boat where the little ones are packed round father and
+mother and tossing gaily over the waves. What endless fun in the rising
+and falling, the creaking of the sail, the gruff voice of the boatman,
+the sight of the distant cliffs, the flock of sea-gulls nestling in the
+wave-hollows! The little ones trail their hands in the cool water and
+fancy they see mermaids in the cool green depths. The big boy watches
+the boatman and studies navigation. The little brother dips a hook now
+and then in a fond hope of whiting. The tide has come in ere they
+return, and the little voyagers are lifted out, tired and sleepy, in
+the boatman's arms, to dream that night of endless sailings over endless
+seas.
+
+It is a terrible morning that brings the children news of their recall
+to the smoke and din of town. They wander for a last visit down to the
+beach, listen for the last time to the young bandit in his Spanish
+sombrero who charms the nursery-maids with lays of love, club their
+pence for a last interview with the itinerant photographer. It is all
+over; the sands are thinner now, group after group is breaking up,
+autumn is dying into winter, and rougher winds are blowing over the sea.
+But the sea is never too rough for the little ones. With hair blown
+wildly about their faces they linger disconsolately along the brink,
+count the boats they shall never see again, make pilgrimages to the rock
+caves to tell its separate story of enjoyment in each of them, and fling
+themselves with a last kiss on the dear, dear sands! Then they shoulder
+their spade and rake, and with one fond look at the cliffs turn their
+backs on the sea. But the sea is with them still, even when the crowded
+train has whirled them far from waves that the white gull skims over.
+They have their tales of it to tell to their governess, their memories
+of it to count over before they fall asleep, their dreams of it as they
+lie asleep, their hopes of seeing it again when weary winter and spring
+and summer have at last slipped away. They listen to stories of wrecks,
+and find a halfpenny for the sham sailor who trolls his ballads in the
+street. Now and then they look lovingly at the ships and the
+sand-buckets piled away in the play-cupboard. So with one abiding
+thought at their little hearts the long days glide away till autumn
+finds them again children by the sea.
+
+
+
+
+THE FLORENCE OF DANTE.
+
+
+The one story in the history of the modern world which rivals in
+concentrated interest the story of Athens is the story of Florence in
+the years just before and after the opening of the fourteenth
+century--the few years, that is, of its highest glory in freedom, in
+letters, in art. Never since the days of Pericles had such a varied
+outburst of human energy been summed up in so short a space.
+Architecture reared the noble monuments of the Duomo and Santa Croce.
+Cimabue revolutionized painting, and then "the cry was Giotto's."
+Italian poetry, preluded by the canzonets of Guido Cavalcanti and his
+rivals, rose to its fullest grandeur in the 'Commedia' of Dante. Italian
+prose was born in the works of Malaspina and Dino. Within, the
+Florentines worked out patiently and bravely amidst a thousand obstacles
+the problem of free and popular government. Without, they covered sea
+and land with their commerce; their agents supplied the Papal treasury,
+while private firms were already beginning that career of vast foreign
+loans which at a later time enabled the victor of Crecy to equip his
+armies with Florentine gold.
+
+We can only realize the attitude of Florence at this moment by its
+contrast with the rest of Europe. It was a time when Germany was sinking
+down into feudal chaos under the earlier Hapsburgs. The system of
+despotic centralization invented by St. Louis and perfected by Philippe
+le Bel was crushing freedom and vigour out of France. If Parliamentary
+life was opening in England, literature was dead, and a feudalism which
+had become embittered by the new forms of law which the legal spirit of
+the age gave it was pressing harder and harder on the peasantry. Even in
+Italy Florence stood alone. The South lay crushed beneath the oppression
+of its French conquerors. In the North the earlier communal freedom had
+already made way for the rule of tyrants when it was just springing into
+life in the city by the Arno. For it is noteworthy that of all the
+cities of Italy Florence is the most modern. Genoa and Pisa had been
+rivals in commercial activity a hundred years before the merchants of
+Florence were known out of Tuscany. Sicily had caught the gift of song
+from the Provencal troubadours half a century before the Florentine
+singers. Too insignificant to share in the great struggle of the Empire
+and the Papacy, among the last to be divided into Guelph and Ghibelline,
+Florence emerged into communal greatness when that of Milan or Bologna
+was already in decay.
+
+The City of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh
+vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became
+living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative
+poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and
+Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so
+grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni
+sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful
+struggle. His 'Chronicle' indeed has been roughly attacked of late by
+the sweeping scepticism of German critics, but the attack has proved an
+unsuccessful one. The strongest evidence of its genuineness indeed lies
+in the impression of a distinct personality which is left on us by a
+simple perusal of the 'Chronicle' itself. Some of its charm no doubt
+rises from the naive simplicity of Dino's story-telling. With him and
+with his contemporaries, Malaspina, Dante, and Villani, Italian prose
+begins; and we can hardly fancy a better training in style for any young
+Italian than to be brought face to face in Dino with the nervous
+picturesque accents that marked the birth of his mother-tongue. But the
+charm is more one of character than one of style. Throughout we feel the
+man, a man whose temper is so strongly and clearly marked in its
+contrast with so reflective a temper as Villani's that the German theory
+which makes his chronicle a mere cento from the later work hardly needs
+discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the dramatic force, the
+tenderness of Froissart, but it is a nobler and more human tenderness; a
+pity not for the knight only, but for knight and burgher as well. The
+sham tinsel of chivalry which flutters over the pages of the gay Canon
+of Liege is exchanged in Dino for a manly patriotism, a love of civic
+freedom, of justice, of religion. In his quiet way he is a great artist.
+There is an Herodotean picturesqueness as well as an Herodotean
+simplicity in such a picture as that of Dante's first battle-field, the
+Florentine victory of Campaldino:--
+
+     "On the appointed day the men of Florence advanced their
+     standards to go into the enemies' land, and passed by
+     Casentino along an ill road where, had the enemy found them,
+     they had received no little damage; but such was not the will
+     of God. And they came near to Bibbiena, at a place called
+     Campaldino where was the enemy, and there they halted in array
+     of battle. The captains of war sent the light-armed foot to
+     the front; and each man's shield, with a red lily on a white
+     ground, was stretched out well before him. Then the Bishop,
+     who was short-sighted, asked, 'Those there: what walls be
+     they?' They answered him, 'The shields of the enemy.' Messer
+     Barone de' Mangiadori da San Miniato, a chevalier frank and
+     well skilled in deeds of arms, gathered his men-at-arms
+     together and said to them, 'My masters, in Tuscan wars men
+     were wont to conquer by making a stout onset, and that lasted
+     but a while, and few men died, for it was not in use to kill.
+     Now is the fashion changed, and men conquer by holding their
+     ground stoutly, wherefore I counsel you that ye stand firm and
+     let them assault you.' And so they settled to do. The men of
+     Arezzo made their onset with such vigour and so great force
+     that the body of the Florentines fell back not a little. The
+     fight was hard and keen. Messer Corso Donati with a brigade of
+     the men of Pistoja charged the enemy in flank; the quarrels
+     from the crossbows poured down like rain; the men of Arezzo
+     had few of them, and were withal charged in flank where they
+     were exposed; the air was covered with clouds, and there was a
+     very great dust. Then the footmen of Arezzo set themselves to
+     creep under the bellies of the horses, knife in hand, and
+     disembowelled them, and some of them penetrated so far that in
+     the very midst of the battalion were many dead of either part.
+     Many that were counted of great prowess were shown vile that
+     day, and many of whom none spoke word won honour.... The men
+     of Arezzo were broken, not by cowardice or little prowess, but
+     by the greater number of their enemies were they put to the
+     rout and slain. The soldiers of Florence that were used to
+     fighting slew them; the villeins had no pity."
+
+"Pity" is almost the characteristic word of Dino Compagni--pity alike
+for foe or friend; for the warriors of Arezzo or the starved-out
+patriots of Pistoja as well as for the heroes of his own Florence; pity
+for the victims of her feuds, and even for the men who drove them into
+exile; pity, most of all, for Florence herself. We read his story indeed
+at first with a strange sense of disappointment and surprise. To the
+modern reader the story of Florence in the years which Dino covers is
+above all the story of Dante. As the 'Chronicle' jots patiently down the
+hopes and fears, the failures and successes of the wiser citizens in
+that struggle for order and good government which brought Dante to his
+long exile, we feel ourselves standing in the very midst of events out
+of which grew the threefold Poem of the After-World and face to face
+with the men who front us in the 'Inferno' and 'Paradise.' But this is
+not the world Dino stands in. Of what seem to us the greater elements of
+the life around him he sees and tells us nothing. Of art or letters his
+'Chronicle' says never a word. The name of Dante is mentioned but once
+and then without a syllable of comment. It is not in Dante that Dino
+interests himself: his one interest, his one passion is Florence.
+
+And yet as we read page after page a new interest in the story grows on
+us, the interest that Dino himself felt in the tragedy around him. Our
+sympathies go with that earnest group of men to which he belonged, men
+who struggled honestly to reconcile freedom and order in a State torn
+with antipathies of the past, with jealousies and ambitions and feuds of
+the present. The terrible sadness of the 'Divina Commedia' becomes more
+intelligible as we follow step by step the ruin of those hopes for his
+country which Dante entertained as well as Dino. And beyond this
+interest there is the social picture of the Florence of the fourteenth
+century itself, its strange medley of past and present, the old world of
+feudalism jostling with the new world of commerce, the trader elbowing
+the noble and the artisan the trader, an enthusiastic mystical devotion
+jealous of the new classicalism or the scepticism of men like Guido
+Cavalcanti, the petty rivalries of great houses alternating with large
+schemes of public policy, the tenderest poetry with brutal outrage and
+lust, the art of Giotto with the slow, patient bloodthirst of the
+vendetta.
+
+What was the cause--the question presses on us through every page of
+Dino or of Dante--what was the cause of that ruin which waited in
+Florence as in every Italian city on so short a burst of freedom? What
+was it that foiled alike the counsel of statesmen and the passionate
+love of liberty in the people at large? What was it which drove Dante
+into exile and stung the simple-hearted Dino into a burst of eloquent
+despair? The answer--if we set aside the silly talk about "democracy"
+and look simply at the facts themselves--is a very simple one. The ruin
+of Florentine liberty, like the ruin of liberty elsewhere throughout
+Italy, lay wholly with its _noblesse_. It was equally perilous for an
+Italian town to leave its nobles without the walls or to force them to
+reside within. In their own robber-holds or their own country estates
+they were a scourge to the trader whose wains rolled temptingly past
+their walls. Florence, like its fellow Italian States, was driven to the
+demolition of the feudal castles, and to enforcing the residence of
+their lords within its own civic bounds. But the danger was only brought
+nearer home. Excluded by civic jealousy, wise or unwise, from all share
+in municipal government, their huge palazzi rose like fortresses in
+every quarter of the city. Within them lay the noble, a wild beast all
+the fiercer for his confinement in so narrow a den, with the old tastes,
+hatreds, preferences utterly unchanged, at feud as of old with his
+fellow-nobles, knit to them only by a common scorn of the burghers and
+the burgher life around them, stung to madness by his exclusion from all
+rule in the commonwealth, bitter, revengeful, with the wilfulness of a
+child, shameless, false, unprincipled.
+
+The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and
+Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its
+nobility. Buondelmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo
+Giantrufetti, passes beneath a palace of the Donati at whose window
+stands Madonna Aldruda with her two fair daughters. Seeing him pass by
+Aldruda calls aloud to him, pointing with her finger to the damsel by
+her side. "Whom have you taken to wife?" she says, "This is the wife I
+kept for you." The damsel pleased the youth, but his troth bound him,
+and he answered, "I can wed none other, now at any rate!" "Yes," cried
+Aldruda, "for I will pay the penalty for thee." "Then will I have her,"
+said Buondelmonte. "Cosa fatta capo ha," was the famous comment of the
+outraged house--"stone dead has no fellow"--and as Dino puts it, in the
+most ordinary way in the world, "they settled to kill him the day he
+was to have married the damsel, and so they did." "Kill, kill," echoes
+everywhere through the story of these Florentine nobles. Assassination
+is an event of every day. Corso Donati sends murderers to kill an enemy
+among the Cerchi. Guido Cavalcanti strives to stab Corso in the back as
+he passes him. Where the dagger fails, they try poison without scruple.
+The best of them decline a share in a murder much as an Irish peasant
+may decline a share in an agrarian outrage, with a certain delicacy and
+readiness to stand by and see it done. When the assassination of the
+Bishop of Arezzo was decided on, Guglielmo da Pazzi, who was in the
+counsel, protested "he would have been content had it been done without
+his knowledge, but were the question put to him he might not be guilty
+of his blood."
+
+Among such men even Corso Donati towers into a certain grandeur:--
+
+     "Knight he was of great valour and renown, gentle of blood and
+     manners, of a most fair body even to old age, comely in
+     figure, with delicate features, and a white skin; a pleasing,
+     prudent, and eloquent speaker; one who ever aimed at great
+     ends; friend and comrade of great lords and nobles; a man too
+     of many friends and great fame throughout all Italy. Foe he
+     was of the people and its leaders; the darling of soldiers,
+     full of evil devices, evil-hearted, cunning."
+
+Such was the man who drove Dante into exile:--
+
+     "Who for his pride was called 'Il Barone,' so that when he
+     passed through the land many cried 'Viva Il Barone!' and the
+     land seemed all his own."
+
+He stood not merely at the head of the Florentine nobility, but at the
+head of the great Guelph organization which extended from city to city
+throughout Tuscany--a league with its own leaders, its own policy, its
+own treasure. In the attempt to seize this treasure for the general
+service of the State the most popular of Florentine leaders, Giano della
+Bella, had been foiled and driven into exile. An honest attempt to
+secure the peace of the city by the banishment of Corso and his friends
+brought about the exile of Dante. It is plain that powerless as they
+were before the united forces of the whole people the nobles were strong
+enough by simply biding their time and availing themselves of popular
+divisions to crush one opponent after another. And yet the struggle
+against them was one of life and death for the city. No atom of the new
+civilization, the new spirit of freedom or humanity, seems to have
+penetrated among them. Behind the gloomy walls of their city fortresses
+they remained the mere murderous tyrants of a brutal feudalism. "I
+counsel, lords, that we free ourselves from this slavery," cried Berto
+Frescobaldi to his brother nobles in the church of San Jacopo; "let us
+arm ourselves and run on to the Piazza, and there kill friend and foe
+alike as many as we find, so that neither we nor our children be ever
+subject to them more." Those who, like Sismondi, censure the sternness
+of the laws which pressed upon the nobles forget what wild beasts they
+were intended to hold down. Their outbreaks were the blind outbreaks of
+mere ruffians. The victory of Corso over Dante and the wiser citizens
+was followed by a carnival of bloodshed, firing of houses, pillage and
+lawlessness which wrings from Dino curses as bitter as those of the
+'Inferno.'
+
+From the hopeless task of curbing the various elements of disorder by
+the single force of each isolated city the wiser and more patriotic
+among the men of that day turned in despair to the Empire. Guelph and
+Ghibelline, Papalist and Imperialist, were words which as Dante saw had
+now lost their old meaning. In the twelfth century the Emperor was at
+once the foe of religion and the one obstacle to the rising freedom of
+the towns. In the fourteenth that freedom had either perished by its own
+excesses, or, as at Florence, was strong enough to defy even an Imperial
+assailant. Religion found its bitterest enemy in such a Pope as Boniface
+VIII., or the church over which he ruled. Whatever might have been its
+fortune under happier circumstances, the great experiment of democratic
+self-government, of free and independent city-states, had failed,
+whether from the wars of city with city, or from the civil feuds that
+rent each in sunder. The papacy could furnish no centre of union; its
+old sanctity was gone, its greed and worldliness weakened it every day.
+On the other hand, the remembrance of the tyranny of Barbarossa, of the
+terrible struggle by which the peace of Constance had been won, had
+grown faint and dim in the course of years. It was long since Italy had
+seen an Emperor at all.
+
+But the old Ghibellinism had recovered new vigour from an unlooked-for
+quarter. As the revival of the Roman law had given an artificial
+prestige to the Empire in the twelfth century, so the revival of
+classical literature threw a new halo around it in the fourteenth. To
+Dante, penetrated with the greater Latin authors, Henry of Luxemburg is
+no stranger from over the Alps, but the descendant of the Augustus whom
+his own Vergil had loved and sung. The same classical feeling tells on
+Dino. With him Florence is "the daughter of Rome." The pages of Sallust
+and of Livy have stirred him to undertake her annals. "The remembrance
+of ancient histories has long spurred my mind to write the events, full
+of danger yet reaching to no prosperous end, that this noble city,
+daughter of Rome, has encountered." It was the same sense that united
+with his own practical appreciation of the necessities of the time in
+his impatient longing for the intervention of the new Emperor. As Prior,
+Dino had acted the part of a brave and honest man, striving to
+conciliate party with party, refusing to break the law, chased at last
+with the rest of the magistracy from the Palace of the Signory by the
+violence of Corso Donati and the nobles. If he did not share Dante's
+exile, he had at any rate acted with Dante in the course of policy
+which brought that penalty on him. Both were Priors together in 1300;
+both have the same passionate love of Florence, the same haughty disdain
+of the factions that tore it to pieces. If the appeal of Dino to his
+fellows in Santa Trinita is less thrilling than the verse of Dante, it
+has its own pathetic force:--"My masters, why will ye confound and undo
+so good a city? Against whom do ye will to fight? Against your brethren?
+What victory will ye gain?--none other than weeping!" The words fell on
+deaf ears, and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, and exile forced
+Dino to look to the stranger. There is something strangely touching in
+the dry, passionless way in which he tracks Henry of Luxemburg from city
+to city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here and there
+in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the Emperor finds. The weary
+waiting came to nothing. Dino leaves us still looking for Henry's
+coming; Dante tells us of the death that dashed all hope to the ground.
+Even in the hour of his despair the poet could console himself by
+setting his "divino Arrigo" in the regions of the blest. What comfort
+the humble chronicler found whose work we have been studying none can
+know.
+
+
+
+
+BUTTERCUPS.
+
+
+It is not the least debt we owe to the holidays that they give us our
+buttercups back again. Few faces have stirred us with a keener touch of
+pity through the whole of the season than the face of the pale, awkward
+girl who slips by us now and then on the stairs, a face mutinous in
+revolt against its imprisonment in brick and mortar, dull with the
+boredom of the schoolroom, weary of the formal walk, the monotonous
+drive, the inevitable practice on that hated piano, the perpetual round
+of lessons from the odd creatures who leave their odder umbrellas in the
+hall. It is amazingly pleasant to meet the same little face on the lawn,
+and to see it blooming with new life at the touch of freedom and fresh
+air. It blooms with a sense of individuality, a sense of power. In the
+town the buttercup was nobody, silent, unnoticed, lost in the bustle and
+splendour of elder sisterdom. Here among the fields and the hedges she
+is queen. Her very laugh, the reckless shout that calls for mamma's
+frown and dooms the governess to a headache, rings out like a claim of
+possession. Here in her own realm she rushes at once to the front, and
+if we find ourselves enjoying a scamper over the common or a run down
+the hill-side, it is the buttercup that leads the way.
+
+All the silent defiance of her town bondage vanishes in the chatty
+familiarities of home. She has a story about the elm and the pond, she
+knows where Harry landed the trout last year, she is intimate with the
+keeper, and hints to us his mysterious hopes about the pheasants. She is
+great in short cuts through the woods, and has made herself wondrous
+lurking-places which she betrays under solemn promises of secrecy. She
+is a friend of every dog about the place, and if the pony lies nearest
+to her heart her lesser affections range over a world of favourites. It
+is hard to remember the pale, silent, schoolgirl of town in the vivid,
+chatty little buttercup who hurries one from the parrot to the pigeon,
+from the stables to the farm, and who knows and describes the merits of
+every hound in the kennels.
+
+It is natural enough, that the dethroned beauties who meet us at
+luncheon should wonder at our enthusiasm for nymphs of bread-and-butter,
+and ask with a certain severity of scorn the secret of our happy
+mornings. The secret is simply that the buttercup is at home, and that
+with the close of her bondage comes a grace and a naturalness that take
+her out of the realms of bread-and-butter. However difficult it may be
+for her maturer rivals to abdicate, it is the buttercup in fact who
+gives the tone to the holidays. There is a subtle contagion about
+pleasure, and it is from her that we catch the sense of largeness and
+liberty and physical enjoyment that gives a new zest to life. She laughs
+at our moans about sunshine as she laughs at our moans about mud, till
+we are as indifferent to mud and sunshine as she is herself. The whole
+atmosphere of our life is in fact changed, and it is amusing to
+recognize how much of the change we owe to the buttercup.
+
+It is impossible perhaps to be whirled in this fashion out of the
+whisperings and boredoms of town without longing to know a little more
+of the pretty magician who works this wonderful transformation scene.
+But it is no easy matter to know much of the buttercup. Her whole charm
+lies in her freedom from self-consciousness; she has a reserved force of
+shyness behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of
+shyness. Her character in fact is one of which it is easier to feel the
+beauty than to analyse or describe it. Like all transitional phases,
+girlhood is full of picturesque inequalities, strange slumbers of one
+faculty and stranger developements of another; full of startling
+effects, of contrasts and surprises, of light and shade, that no other
+phase of life affords. Unconsciously month after month drifts the
+buttercup on to womanhood; consciously she lives in the past of the
+child. She comes to us trailing clouds of glory--as Wordsworth
+sings--from her earlier existence, from her home, her schoolroom, her
+catechism. The girl of twenty summers whose faith has been wrecked by
+clerical croquet looks with amazement on the implicit faith which the
+buttercup retains in the clergy. Even on the curate, shy and awkward as
+he is, she looks as on a being sacred and ineffable. Perhaps his very
+shyness and awkwardness creates a sympathy between the two, and rouses a
+keener remorse for her yawns under his sermons and a keener gratitude
+for the heavenly generosity with which he bestowed on her the
+confirmation ticket. Free as she is from fancies, her conception of the
+daily life of her clergyman shows amusingly enough that she can attain a
+very fair pitch of idealism. We remember the story of a certain parson
+of our acquaintance who owned to a meek little buttercup his habit of
+carrying a book in his pocket for reading in leisure hours. "Ah, yes,"
+replied the eager little auditor, with a hush of real awe in her
+voice--"the Bible, of course! Unluckily," it was the _Physiologie du
+Gout_.
+
+Still more does the sister of a couple of seasons wonder at the ardour
+and fidelity of buttercup friendships. In after-life men have friends
+and women have lovers. The home and the husband and the child absorb the
+whole tenderness of a woman where they only temper and moderate the old
+external affections of her spouse. But then girl-friendship is a much
+more vivid and far more universal thing than friendship among boys. The
+one means, in nine cases out of ten, an accident of neighbourhood in
+school that fades with the next remove, or a partnership in some
+venture, or a common attachment to some particular game. But the school
+friendship of a girl is a passionate idolatry and devotion of friend
+for friend. Their desks are full of little gifts to each other. They
+have pet names that no strange ear may know, and hidden photographs that
+no strange eye may see. They share all the innocent secrets of their
+hearts, they are fondly interested in one another's brothers, they plan
+subtle devices to wear the same ribbons and to dress their hair in the
+same fashion. No amount of affection ever made a boy like the business
+of writing his friend a letter in the holidays, but half the charm of
+holidays to a girl lies in the letters she gets and the letters she
+sends. Nothing save friendship itself is more sacred to girlhood than a
+friend's letter; nothing more exquisite than the pleasure of stealing
+from the breakfast-table to kiss it and read it, and then tie it up with
+the rest that lie in the nook that nobody knows but the one pet brother.
+The pet brother is as necessary an element in buttercup life as the
+friend. He is generally the dullest, the most awkward, the most silent
+of the family group. He takes all this sisterly devotion as a matter of
+course, and half resents it as a matter of boredom. He is fond of
+informing his adorer that he hates girls, that they are always kissing
+and crying, and that they can't play cricket. The buttercup rushes away
+to pour out her woes to her little nest in the woods, and hurries back
+to worship as before. Girlhood indeed is the one stage of feminine
+existence in which woman has brothers. Her first season out digs a gulf
+between their sister and "the boys" of the family that nothing can fill
+up. Henceforth the latter are useful to get tickets for her, to carry
+her shawls, to drive her to Goodwood or to Lord's. In the mere fetching
+and carrying business they sink into the general ruck of cousins,
+grumbling only a little more than cousins usually do at the luck that
+dooms them to hew wood and draw water for the belle of the season. But
+in the pure equality of earlier days the buttercup shares half the games
+and all the secrets of the boys about her, and brotherhood and
+sisterhood are very real things indeed.
+
+Unluckily the holidays pass away, and the buttercup passes away like the
+holidays. There is a strange humour about the subtle gradations by which
+girlhood passes out of all this free, genial, irreflective life into the
+self-consciousness, the reserve, the artificiality of womanhood. It is
+the sudden discovery of a new sense of enjoyment that first whirls the
+buttercup out of her purely family affections. She laughs at the worship
+of her new adorer. She is as far as Dian herself from any return of it;
+but the sense of power is awakened, and she has a sort of Puckish pride
+in bringing her suitor to her feet. Nobody is so exacting, so
+capricious, so uncertain, so fascinating as a buttercup, because no one
+is so perfectly free from love. The first touch of passion renders her
+more exacting and more charming than ever. She resents the suspicion of
+a tenderness whose very novelty scares her, and she visits her
+resentment on her worshipper. If he enjoys a kind farewell overnight, he
+atones for it by the coldest greeting in the morning. There are days
+when the buttercup runs amuck among her adorers, days of snubbing and
+sarcasm and bitterness. The poor little bird beats savagely against the
+wires that are closing her round. And then there are days of pure
+abandon and coquetry and fun. The buttercup flirts, but she flirts in
+such an open and ingenuous fashion that nobody is a bit the worse for
+it. She tells you the fun she had overnight with that charming young
+fellow from Oxford, and you know that to-morrow she will be telling that
+hated Guardsman what fun she has had with you. She is a little dazzled
+with the wealth and profusion of the new life that is bursting on her,
+and she wings her way from one charming flower to another with little
+thought of more than a sip from each. Then there is a return of pure
+girlhood, days in which the buttercup is simply the buttercup again.
+Flirtations are forgotten, conquests are abandoned, brothers are
+worshipped with the old worship; and we start back, and rub our eyes,
+and wonder whether life is all a delusion, and whether this pure
+creature of home and bread-and-butter is the volatile, provoking little
+puss who gave our hand such a significant squeeze yesterday.
+
+But it is just this utterly illogical, unreasonable, inconsequential
+character that gives the pursuit of the buttercup its charm. There is a
+pleasure in this irregular warfare, with its razzias and dashes and
+repulses and successes and skirmishes and flights, which we cannot get
+out of the regular operations of the sap and the mine. We sympathize
+with the ingenious gentleman who declined to study astronomy on the
+ground of his dislike to the sun for the monotonous regularity of its
+daily rising and setting. There is something delightfully cometary about
+the affection of the buttercup. Any experienced strategist in the art of
+getting married will tell us the exact time within which her elder
+sister may be reduced, and sketch for us a plan of the campaign. But the
+buttercup lies outside of the rules of war. She gives one the pleasure
+of adoration in its purest and most ideal form, and she adds to this the
+pleasure of _rouge et noir_. One feels in the presence of a buttercup
+the possibility of combining enjoyments which are in no other sphere
+compatible with each other--the delight, say, of a musing over 'In
+Memoriam' with the fiercer joys of the gaming-table. And meanwhile the
+buttercup drifts on, recking little of us and of our thoughts, into a
+world mysterious and unknown to her. Tones of deeper colour flush the
+pure white light of her dawn, and announce the fuller day of womanhood.
+And with the death of the dawn the buttercup passes insensibly away. The
+next season steals her from us; it is only the holidays that give her to
+us, and dispel half our conventionality, our shams, our conceit with the
+laugh of the buttercup.
+
+
+
+
+ABBOT AND TOWN.
+
+
+The genius of a great writer of our own days has made Abbot Sampson of
+St. Edmunds the most familiar of mediaeval names to the bulk of
+Englishmen. By a rare accident the figure of the silent, industrious
+Norfolk monk who at the close of Henry the Second's reign suddenly found
+himself ruler of the wealthiest, if not the greatest, of English abbeys
+starts out distinct from the dim canvas of the annals of his house.
+Annals indeed in any strict sense St. Edmunds has none; no national
+chronicle was ever penned in its _scriptorium_ such as that which flings
+lustre round its rival, St. Albans; nor is even a record of its purely
+monastic life preserved such as that which gives a local and
+ecclesiastical interest to its rival of Glastonbury. One book alone the
+abbey has given us, but that one book is worth a thousand chronicles. In
+the wandering, gossipy pages of Jocelyn of Brakeland the life of the
+twelfth century, so far as it could penetrate abbey walls, still glows
+distinct for us round the figure of the shrewd, practical, kindly,
+imperious abbot who looks out, a little travestied perhaps, from the
+pages of Mr. Carlyle.
+
+It is however to an incident in this abbot's life, somewhat later than
+most of the events told so vividly in 'Past and Present,' that I wish to
+direct my readers' attention. A good many eventful years had passed by
+since Sampson stood abbot-elect in the court of King Henry; it was from
+the German prison where Richard was lying captive that the old abbot was
+returning, sad at heart, to his stately house. His way lay through the
+little town that sloped quietly down to the abbey walls, along the
+narrow little street that led to the stately gate-tower, now grey with
+the waste of ages, but then fresh and white from the builder's hand. It
+may have been in the shadow of that gateway that a group of townsmen
+stood gathered to greet the return of their lord, but with other
+business on hand besides kindly greeting. There was a rustling of
+parchment as the alderman unfolded the town-charters, recited the brief
+grants of Abbots Anselm and Ording and Hugh, and begged from the Lord
+Abbot a new confirmation of the liberties of the town.
+
+As Sampson paused a moment--he was a prudent, deliberate man in all his
+ways--he must have read in the faces of all the monks who gathered round
+him, in the murmured growl that monastic obedience just kept within
+bounds, very emphatic counsel of refusal. On the other hand there was
+the alderman pleading for the old privileges of the town--for security
+of justice in its own town-mote, for freedom of sale in its market, for
+just provisions to enforce the recovery of debts--the simple, efficient
+liberty that stood written in the parchment with the heavy seals--the
+seals of Anselm and Ording and Hugh. "Only the same words as your
+predecessor used, Lord Abbot, simply the same words"--and then came the
+silvery jingle of the sixty marks that the townsmen offered for their
+lord's assent. A moment more and the assent was won, "given pleasantly
+too," the monks commented bitterly, as "murmuring and grunting," to use
+their own emphatic phrase, they led Sampson to the chapter-house. But
+murmurings and gruntings broke idly against the old abbot's imperious
+will. "Let the brethren murmur," he flashed out when one of his friends
+told him there was discontent in the cloister at his dealings with the
+townsmen; "let them blame me, and say among themselves what they will. I
+am their father and abbot. So long as I live I will not give mine honour
+to another."
+
+The words were impatient, wilful enough; but it was the impatience of a
+man who frets at the blindness of others to what is clear and evident to
+his own finer sense. The shrewd, experienced eye of the old Churchman
+read with a perfect sagacity the signs of the times. He had just stood
+face to face in his German prison with one who, mere reckless soldier as
+he seemed, had read them as clearly, as sagaciously as himself. When
+History drops her drums and trumpets and learns to tell the story of
+Englishmen, it will find the significance of Richard, not in his crusade
+or in his weary wars along the Norman border, but in his lavish
+recognition of municipal life. When, busy with the preparations for his
+Eastern journey, the King sold charter after charter to the burgesses of
+his towns, it seemed a mere outburst of royal greed, a mere carrying out
+of his own bitter scoff that he would have sold London itself could he
+have found a purchaser. But the hard cynical words of the Angevins were
+veils which they flung over political conceptions too large for the
+comprehension of their day. Richard was in fact only following out the
+policy which had been timidly pursued by his father, which was to find
+its fullest realization under John.
+
+The silent growth and elevation of the English people was the real work
+of their reigns, and in this work the boroughs led the way. Unnoticed
+and despised, even by the historian of to-day, they had alone preserved
+the full tradition of Teutonic liberty. The right of self-government,
+the right of free speech in free parliament, the right of equal justice
+by one's peers,--it was these that the towns had brought safely across
+the ages of Norman rule, these that by the mouth of traders and
+shop-keepers asked recognition from the Angevin kings. No liberty was
+claimed in the Great Charter for the realm at large which had not in
+borough after borough been claimed and won beforehand by plain burgesses
+whom the "mailed barons" who wrested it from their king would have
+despised. That out of the heap of borough-charters which he flung back
+to these townsmen that Charter was to be born, Richard could not know;
+but that a statesman so keen and far-sighted as he really was could have
+been driven by mere greed of gold, or have been utterly blind to the
+real nature of the forces to which he gave legal recognition, is
+impossible. We have no such pithy hints of what was passing in his mind
+as we shall find Abbot Sampson dropping in the course of our story. But
+Richard can hardly have failed to note what these hints proved his
+mitred counsellor to have noted well--the silent revolution which was
+passing over the land, and which in a century and a half had raised
+serfs like those of St. Edmunds into freeholders of a town.
+
+It is only in such lowly records as those which we are about to give
+that we can follow the progress of that revolution. But simple as the
+tale is there is hardly better historic training for a man than to set
+him frankly in the streets of a quiet little town like Bury St. Edmunds,
+and bid him work out the history of the men who lived and died there. In
+the quiet, quaintly-named streets, in the town-mead and the
+market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the ruffed and
+furred brasses of its burghers in the church, lies the real life of
+England and Englishmen, the life of their home and their trade, their
+ceaseless, sober struggle with oppression, their steady, unwearied
+battle for self-government. It is just in the pettiness of its details,
+in its commonplace incidents, in the want of marked features and
+striking events, that the real lesson of the whole story lies. For two
+centuries this little town of Bury St. Edmunds was winning liberty for
+itself, and yet we hardly note as we pass from one little step to
+another little step how surely that liberty was being won. It is hard
+indeed merely to catch a glimpse of the steps. The monks were too busy
+with royal endowments and papal grants of mitre and ring, too full of
+their struggles with arrogant bishops and encroaching barons, to tell us
+how the line of tiny hovels crept higher and higher from the abbey gate
+up the westerly sunlit slope. It is only by glimpses that we catch sight
+of the first steps towards civic life, of market and market-toll, of
+flax-growing and women with distaffs at their door, of fullers at work
+along the abbey-stream, of gate-keepers for the rude walls, of
+town-meetings summoned in old Teutonic fashion by blast of horn.
+
+It is the Great Survey of the Conqueror that gives us our first clear
+peep at the town. Much that had been plough-land in the time of the
+Confessor was covered with houses under the Norman rule. No doubt the
+great abbey-church of stone that Abbot Baldwin was raising amidst all
+the storm of the Conquest drew its craftsmen and masons to mingle with
+the ploughers and reapers of the broad domain. The troubles of the time
+too did their part here as elsewhere; the serf, the fugitive from
+justice or his lord, the trader, the Jew, would naturally seek shelter
+under the strong hand of St. Edmund. On the whole the great house looked
+kindly on a settlement which raised the value of its land and brought
+fresh pence to the cellarer. Not a settler that held his acre for a year
+and a day but paid his pence to the treasury and owned the abbot for his
+lord. Not a serf but was bound to plough a rood of the abbot's land, to
+reap in the abbot's harvest field, to fold his sheep in the abbey folds,
+to help bring the annual catch of eels from the abbey-waters. Within the
+four crosses that bounded the abbot's domain, land and water were his;
+the cattle of the townsmen paid for their pasture on the common; if the
+fullers refused the loan of their cloth, the cellarer would withhold the
+use of the stream, and seize their looms wherever he found them.
+Landlord's rights passed easily as ever into landlord's wrongs. No toll,
+for instance, might be levied on a purchaser of produce from the abbey
+farms, and the house drove better bargains than its country rivals.
+First-purchase was a privilege even more vexatious, and we can catch the
+low growl of the customers as they waited with folded hands before shop
+and stall till the buyers of the Lord Abbot had had their pick of the
+market. But there was little chance of redress, for if they growled in
+the town-mote there were the abbot's officers before whom the meeting
+must be held; and if they growled to their alderman, he was the abbot's
+nominee and received the symbol of office, the mot-horn, the town-horn,
+at his hands.
+
+By what process these serfs of a rural hamlet had grown into the busy
+burgesses whom we saw rustling their parchments and chinking their
+silver marks in the ears of Abbot Sampson in Richard's time, it is hard
+to say. Like all the greater revolutions of society, this advance was a
+silent one. The more galling and oppressive instances of serfdom seem to
+have slipped unconsciously away. Some, like the eel-fishery, were
+commuted for an easy rent; others, like the slavery of the fullers and
+the toll of flax, simply disappeared. No one could tell when the
+retainers of the abbey came to lose their exemption from local taxation
+and to pay the town penny to the alderman like the rest of the
+burgesses. "In some way, I don't know how,"--as Jocelyn grumbles about
+just such an unnoted change,--by usage, by omission, by downright
+forgetfulness, here by a little struggle, there by a little present to a
+needy abbot, the town won freedom. But progress was not always
+unconscious, and one incident in the history of Bury St. Edmunds,
+remarkable if only regarded as marking the advance of law, is yet more
+remarkable as indicating the part which a new moral sense of human right
+to equal justice was to play in the general advance of the realm.
+
+The borough, as we have seen, had preserved the old English right of
+meeting in full assembly of the townsmen for government and law. In the
+presence of the burgesses justice was administered in the old English
+fashion, and the accused acquitted or condemned by the oath of his
+neighbours, the "compurgators," out of whom our jury was to grow. Rough
+and inadequate as such a process seems to us, it insured substantial
+justice; the meanest burgher had his trial by his peers as thoroughly as
+the belted earl. Without the borough bounds however the system of the
+Norman judicature prevailed. The rural tenants who did suit and service
+at the cellarer's court were subject to the "judicial duel" which the
+Conqueror had introduced. In the twelfth century however the strong
+tendency to national unity told heavily against judicial inequality, and
+the barbarous injustice of the foreign system became too apparent even
+for the baronage or the Church to uphold it. "Kebel's case," as a lawyer
+would term it, brought the matter to an issue at Bury St. Edmunds. In
+the opinion of his neighbours Kebel seems to have been guiltless of the
+robbery with which he had been charged; but he was "of the cellarer's
+fee," and subject to the feudal jurisdiction of his court. The duel went
+against him and he was hung just without the gates. The taunts of the
+townsmen woke the farmers to a sense of their wrong. "Had Kebel been a
+dweller within the borough," said the burgesses, "he would have got his
+acquittal from the oaths of his neighbours, as our liberty is." The
+scandal at last moved the convent itself to action. The monks were
+divided in opinion, but the saner part determined that their tenants
+"should enjoy equal liberty" with the townsmen. The cellarer's court was
+abolished; the franchise of the town was extended to the rural
+possessions of the abbey; the farmers "came to the toll-house, and were
+written in the alderman's roll, and paid the town-penny."
+
+A moral revolution like this is notable at any time, but a change
+wrought avowedly "that all might enjoy equal liberty" is especially
+notable in the twelfth century. Cases like Kebel's were everywhere
+sounding the knell of feudal privilege and of national division, long
+before freedom fronted John by the sedges of Runnymede. Slowly and
+fitfully through the reign of his father the new England which had grown
+out of conquered and conquerors woke to self-consciousness. It was this
+awakening that Abbot Sampson saw and noted with his clear, shrewd eyes.
+To him, we can hardly doubt, the revolt of the town-wives, for instance,
+was more than a mere scream of angry women. The "rep-silver," the
+commutation for that old service of reaping in the abbot's fields, had
+ceased to be exacted from the richer burgesses. At last the poorer sort
+refused to pay. Then the cellarer's men came seizing gate and stool by
+way of distress till the women turning out, distaff in hand, put them
+ignominiously to flight. Sampson had his own thoughts about the matter,
+saw perhaps that the days of inequality were over, that in the England
+that was coming there would be one law for rich and poor. At any rate he
+quietly compromised the question for twenty shillings a year.
+
+The convent was indignant. "Abbot Ording, who lies there," muttered an
+angry monk, as he pointed to the tomb in the choir, "would not have done
+this for five hundred marks of silver." That their abbot should
+capitulate to a mob of infuriated town-wives was too much for the
+patience of the brotherhood. All at once they opened their eyes to the
+facts which had been going on unobserved for so many long years. There
+was their own town growing, burgesses encroaching on the market space,
+settlers squatting on their own acre with no leave asked, aldermen who
+were once only the abbey servants taking on themselves to give
+permission for this and that, tradesmen thriving and markets increasing,
+and the abbey never one penny the richer for it all. It was quite time
+that Abbot Sampson should be roused to do his duty, and to do it in very
+sharp fashion indeed. However we will let one of the monks tell his own
+tale in his own gossiping way:--
+
+"In the tenth year of Abbot Sampson's abbacy we monks, after full
+deliberation in chapter, laid our formal plaint before the abbot in his
+court. We said that the rents and revenues of all the good towns and
+boroughs in England were steadily growing and increasing to the
+enrichment of their lords, in every case save in that of our town of St.
+Edmund. The customary rent of L40 which it pays never rises higher. That
+this is so we imputed solely to the conduct of the townspeople, who are
+continually building new shops and stalls in the market-place without
+any leave of the convent" (abbey-land though it was). "The only
+permission, in fact, which they ask is that of their alderman, an
+officer who himself was of old times a mere servant of our sacrist, and
+bound to pay into his hands the yearly rent of the town, and removable
+at his pleasure."
+
+Never, Jocelyn evidently thinks, was a case plainer; but into the
+justice or injustice of it the burgesses refused sturdily to enter. When
+they were summoned to make answer they pleaded simple possession. "They
+were in the King's justice, and no answer would they make concerning
+tenements which they and their fathers had held in peace for a year and
+a day." Such answer would in fact, they added, be utterly contrary to
+the freedom of the town. No plea could have been legally more complete
+as none could have been more provoking. The monks turned in a rage upon
+the abbot, and simply requested him to eject their opponents. Then they
+retired angrily into the chapter-house, and waited in a sort of white
+heat to hear what the abbot would do. This is what Sampson did. He
+quietly bade the townsmen wait; then he "came into chapter just like one
+of ourselves, and told us privily that he would right us as far as he
+could, but that if he were to act it must be by law. Be the case right
+or wrong, he did not dare eject without trial his free men from land and
+property which they had held year after year; in fact, if he did so, he
+would at once fall into the King's justice. At this moment in came the
+townsfolk into the chapter-house, and offered to compromise the matter
+for an annual quit rent of a hundred shillings. This offer we refused.
+We preferred a simple adjournment of our claim in the hope that in some
+other abbot's time we might get all back again."
+
+Notwithstanding his many very admirable qualities, in fact, this present
+abbot was on these municipal points simply incorrigible. Was it quite by
+an oversight, for instance, that in Sampson's old age, "in some way, I
+don't quite know how, the new alderman of the town got chosen in other
+places than in chapter, and without leave of the house,"--in simple
+town-motes, that is, and by sheer downright delegation of power on the
+part of his fellow-burgesses? At any rate it was by no oversight that
+Sampson granted his charter on the day he came back from Richard's
+prison, when "we monks were murmuring and grumbling" in his very ear!
+And yet was the abbot foolish in his generation? This charter of his
+ranks lineally among the ancestors of that Great Charter which his
+successor was first to unroll on the altar-steps of the choir (we can
+still measure off the site in the rough field by the great piers of the
+tower arch that remain) before the baronage of the realm. At any rate,
+half a century after that scene in chapter, the new England that Sampson
+had foreseen came surging stormily enough against the abbey gates.
+Later abbots had set themselves sturdily against his policy of
+concession and conciliation; and riots, lawsuits, royal commissions,
+mark the troubled relations of Town and Abbey under the first two
+Edwards. Under the third came the fierce conflict of 1327.
+
+On the 25th of January in that year the townsmen of Bury St. Edmunds,
+headed by Richard Drayton, burst into the Abbey. Its servants were
+beaten off, the monks driven into choir, and dragged thence with their
+prior (for the abbot was away in London) to the town prison. The abbey
+itself was sacked; chalices, missals, chasubles, tunicles, altar
+frontals, the books of the library, the very vats and dishes of the
+kitchen, all disappeared. Chattels valued at L10,000, L500 worth of
+coin, 3000 "florins,"--this was the abbey's estimate of its loss. But
+neither florins nor chasubles were what their assailants really aimed
+at. Their next step shows what were the grievances which had driven the
+burgesses to this fierce outbreak of revolt. They were as much personal
+as municipal. The gates of the town indeed were still in the abbot's
+hands. He had succeeded in enforcing his claim to the wardship of
+orphans born within his domain. From claims such as these the town could
+never feel itself safe so long as mysterious charters from Pope and
+King, interpreted yet more mysteriously by the wit of the new lawyer
+class, were stored in the abbey archives. But the archives contained
+other and yet more formidable documents. The religious houses,
+untroubled by the waste of war, had profited more than any landowners by
+the general increase of wealth. They had become great proprietors,
+money-lenders to their tenants, extortionate as the Jew whom they had
+banished from the land. There were few townsmen of St. Edmund who had
+not some bond laid up in the abbey registry. Nicholas Fowke and a band
+of debtors had a covenant lying there for the payment of 500 marks and
+fifty casks of wine. Philip Clopton's mark bound him to discharge a debt
+of L22; a whole company of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors in
+a bond for no less a sum than L10,000. The new spirit of commercial
+enterprise, joined with the troubles of the time, seems to have thrown
+the whole community into the abbot's hands.
+
+It was from the troubles of the time that the burghers looked for
+escape; and the general disturbance which accompanied the deposition of
+Edward II. seems to have quickened their longing into action. Their
+revolt soon disclosed its practical aims. From their prison in the town
+the trembling prior and his monks were brought back to their own
+chapter-house. The spoil of their registry--the papal bulls and the
+royal charters, the deeds and bonds and mortgages of the townsmen--were
+laid before them. Amidst the wild threats of the mob, they were forced
+to execute a grant of perfect freedom and of a guild to the town, and a
+full release to their debtors. Then they were left masters of the ruined
+house. But all control over the town was gone. Through spring and summer
+no rent or fine was paid. The bailiffs and other officers of the abbey
+did not dare to show their faces in the streets. Then news came that the
+abbot was in London, appealing for aid to King and Court, and the whole
+county was at once on fire. A crowd of rustics, maddened at the thought
+of revived claims of serfage, of interminable suits of law which had
+become a tyranny, poured into the streets of the town. From thirty-two
+of the neighbouring villages the priests marched at the head of their
+flocks to this new crusade. Twenty thousand in number, so men guessed,
+the wild mass of men, women, and children rushed again on the abbey. For
+four November days the work of destruction went on unhindered, whilst
+gate, stables, granaries, kitchen, infirmary, hostelry, went up in
+flames. From the wreck of the abbey itself the great multitude swept
+away too the granges and barns of the abbey farms. The monks had become
+vast agricultural proprietors: 1,000 horses, 120 oxen, 200 cows, 300
+bullocks, 300 hogs, 10,000 sheep were driven off for spoil, and as a
+last outrage, the granges and barns were burnt to the ground. L60,000,
+the justiciaries afterwards decided, would hardly cover the loss.
+
+Weak as was the government of Mortimer and Isabella, there never was a
+time in English history when government stood with folded hands before a
+scene such as this. The appeal of the abbot was no longer neglected; a
+royal force quelled the riot and exacted vengeance for this breach of
+the King's peace. Thirty carts full of prisoners were despatched to
+Norwich; twenty-four of the chief townsmen, thirty-two of the village
+priests, were convicted as aiders and abettors. Twenty were at once
+summarily hung. But with this first vigorous effort at repression the
+danger seemed again to roll away. Nearly 200 persons remained indeed
+under sentence of outlawry, and for five weary years their case dragged
+on in the King's courts. At last matters ended in a lawless, ludicrous
+outrage. Out of patience and irritated by repeated breaches of promise
+on the abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses seized him as he lay in his
+manor of Chevington, robbed, bound and shaved him, and carried him off
+to London. There he was hurried from street to street, lest his
+hiding-place should be detected, till opportunity offered for his
+shipping off to Brabant. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope himself,
+levelled their excommunications against the perpetrators of this daring
+outrage in vain.
+
+The prison of their victim was at last discovered; he was released and
+brought home. But the lesson seems to have done good. The year 1332 saw
+a concordat arranged between the Abbey and Town. The damages assessed by
+the royal justiciaries, a sum enormous now but incredible then, were
+remitted, the outlawry was reversed, the prisoners were released. On the
+other hand, the deeds were again replaced in the archives of the abbey,
+and the charters which had been extorted from the trembling monks were
+formally cancelled. In other words, the old process of legal oppression
+was left to go on. The spirit of the townsmen was, as we shall see,
+crushed by the failure of their outbreak of despair. It was from a new
+quarter that help was for a moment to come. No subject is more difficult
+to treat, as nothing is more difficult to explain, than the communal
+revolt which shook the throne of Richard II., and the grievances which
+prompted it. But one thing is clear; it was a revolt against oppression
+which veiled itself under the form of law. The rural tenants found
+themselves in a mesh of legal claims--old services revived, old dues
+enforced, endless suits in the King's courts grinding them again to
+serfage. Oppression was no longer the rough blow of the rough baron; it
+was the delicate, ruthless tyranny of the lawyer-clerk.
+
+Prior John of Cambridge, who, in the vacancy of the abbot, was now in
+charge of the house, was a man skilled in all the arts of his day. In
+sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists
+pronounced him the superior of Orpheus, of Nero, of one yet more
+illustrious but, save in the Bury cloisters, more obscure, the Breton
+Belgabred. He was a man "industrious and subtle;" and subtlety and
+industry found their scope in suit after suit with the farmers and
+burgesses around. "Faithfully he strove," says his monastic eulogist,
+"with the villeins of Bury for the rights of his house." The townsmen he
+owned as his foes, his "adversaries;" but it was the rustics who were
+especially to show how memorable a hate he had won. It was a perilous
+time in which to win men's hate. We have seen the private suffering of
+the day, but nationally too England was racked with despair and the
+sense of wrong; with the collapse of the French war, with the ruinous
+taxation, with the frightful pestilence that had swept away half the
+population; with the iniquitous labour-laws that, in the face of such a
+reduction, kept down the rate of wages in the interest of the landlords;
+with the frightful law of settlement that, to enforce this wrong,
+reduced at a stroke the free labourer again to a serfage from which he
+has yet fully to emerge. That terrible revolution of social sentiment
+had begun which was to turn law into the instrument of the basest
+interests of a class, which was with the Statute of Labourers and the
+successive labour-regulations that followed to create pauperism, and
+with pauperism to create that hatred of class to class which hangs like
+a sick dream over us to-day. The earliest, the most awful instance of
+such a hatred was gathering round Prior John, while at his manor-house
+of Mildenhall he studied his parchments and touched a defter lute than
+Nero or the Breton Belgabred. In a single hour hosts of armed men arose,
+as it were, out of the earth. Kent gathered round Wat Tyler; in Norfolk,
+in Essex, fifty thousand peasants hoisted the standard of Jack Straw. It
+was no longer a local rising or a local grievance, no longer the old
+English revolution headed by the baron and priest. Priest and baron were
+swept away before this sudden storm of national hate. The howl of the
+great multitude broke roughly in on the delicate chanting of Prior John.
+He turned to fly, but his own serfs betrayed him, judged him in rude
+mockery of the law that had wronged them, condemned him, killed him.[1]
+Five days the corpse lay half-stripped in the open field, none daring to
+bury it--so ran the sentence of his murderers--while the mob poured
+unresisted into Bury. The scene was like some wild orgy of the French
+Revolution than any after-scenes in England. Bearing the prior's head on
+a lance before them through the streets, the frenzied throng reached at
+last the gallows where the head of Cavendish, the chief justice, stood
+already impaled, and pressing the cold lips together, in fierce mockery
+of the old friendship between the two, set them side by side.
+
+Another head soon joined them. The abbey gates had been burst open, the
+cloister was full of the dense maddened crowd, howling for a new victim,
+John Lackenheath. Warden of the barony as he was, few knew him as he
+stood among the group of trembling monks; there was still amidst this
+outburst of frenzy the dread of a coming revenge, and the rustic who had
+denounced him had stolen back silent into the crowd. But if Lackenheath
+resembled the French nobles in the hatred he had roused, he resembled
+them also in the cool contemptuous courage with which they fronted
+death. "I am the man you seek," he said, stepping forward; and in a
+moment, with a mighty roar of "Devil's son! monk! traitor!" he was swept
+to the gallows and his head hacked from his shoulders. Then the crowd
+rolled back again to the abbey-gate and summoned the monks before them.
+They told them that now for a long time they had oppressed their
+fellows, the burgesses of Bury; wherefore they willed that in the sight
+of the Commons they should forthwith surrender their bonds and their
+charters. The monks brought the parchments to the market-place; many
+which might have served the purposes of the townsmen they swore they
+could not find. The Commons disbelieved them, and bade the burgesses
+inspect the documents. But the iron had entered too deeply into these
+men's souls. Not even in their hour of triumph could they shake off
+their awe of the trembling black-robed masters who stood before them. A
+compromise was patched up. The charters should be surrendered till the
+popular claimant of the abbacy should confirm them. Then, unable to do
+more, the great crowd ebbed away.
+
+Common history tells the upshot of the revolt; the despair when in the
+presence of the boy-king Wat Tyler was struck down by a foul treason;
+the ruin when the young martial Bishop of Norwich came trampling in upon
+the panic-stricken multitude at Barton. Nationally the movement had
+wrought good; from this time the law was modified in practice, and the
+tendency to reduce a whole class to serfage was effectually checked. But
+to Bury it brought little but harm. A hundred years later the town again
+sought freedom in the law-courts, and again sought it in vain. The abbey
+charters told fatally against mere oral customs. The royal council of
+Edward IV. decided that "the abbot is lord of the whole town of Bury,
+the sole head and captain within the town." All municipal appointments
+were at his pleasure, all justice in his hands. The townsmen had no
+communal union, no corporate existence. Their leaders paid for riot and
+insult by imprisonment and fine.
+
+The dim, dull lawsuit was almost the last incident in the long struggle,
+the last and darkest for the town. But it was the darkness that goes
+before the day. Fifty years more and abbot and abbey were swept away
+together, and the burghers were building their houses afresh with the
+carved ashlar and the stately pillars of their lord's house. Whatever
+other aspects the Reformation may present, it gave at any rate
+emancipation to the one class of English to whom freedom had been
+denied, the towns that lay in the dead hand of the Church. None more
+heartily echoed the Protector's jest, "We must pull down the rooks'
+nests lest the rooks may come back again," than the burghers of St.
+Edmunds. The completeness of the Bury demolitions hangs perhaps on the
+long serfdom of the town, and the shapeless masses of rubble that alone
+recall the graceful cloister and the long-drawn aisle may find their
+explanation in the story of the town's struggles. But the story has a
+pleasanter ending. The charter of James--for the town had passed into
+the King's hands as the abbot's successor--gave all that it had ever
+contended for, and crowned the gift by the creation of a mayor. Modern
+reform has long since swept away the municipal oligarchy which owed its
+origin to the Stuart king. But the essence of his work remains; and in
+its mayor, with his fourfold glory of maces borne before him, Bury sees
+the strange close of the battle waged through so many centuries for
+simple self-government.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] To one who knows what frightful cruelty and oppression may lie in
+simple legal phrases, the indignant sentence in which Walsingham tells
+his death is the truest comment on the scene: "Non tam villanorum
+praedictae villae de Bury, suorum adversariorum, sed propriorum servorum et
+nativorum arbitrio simul et judicio addictus morti."
+
+
+
+
+HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS.
+
+
+When the snow has driven everybody home again from the Oberland and the
+Rigi and all the Swiss hotel-keepers have resumed their original dignity
+as Landammans of their various cantons, it is a little amusing to
+reflect how much of the pleasure of one's holiday has been due to one's
+own countrymen. It is not that the Englishman abroad is particularly
+entertaining, for the Frenchman is infinitely more vivacious; nor that
+he is peculiarly stolid, for he yields in that to most of the German
+students who journey on the faith of a nightcap and a pipe; or that he
+is especially boring, for every American whom one meets whips him easily
+in boredom. It is that he is so nakedly and undisguisedly English. We
+never see Englishmen in England. They are too busy, too afraid of Mrs.
+Grandy, too oppressed with duties and responsibilities and insular
+respectabilities and home decencies to be really themselves. They are
+forced to dress decently, to restrain their temper, to affect a little
+modesty; there is the pulpit to scold them, and the 'Times' to give them
+something to talk about, and an infinite number of grooves and lines and
+sidings along which they can be driven in a slow and decent fashion, or
+into which as a last resort they can be respectably shunted. But grooves
+and lines end with the British Channel. The true Englishman has no awe
+for 'Galignani'; he has a slight contempt for the Continental chaplain.
+He can wear what hat he likes, show what temper he likes, and be
+himself. It is he whose boots tramp along the Boulevards, whose snore
+thunders loudest of all in the night train, who begins his endless growl
+after "a decent dinner" at Basle, and his endless contempt for "Swiss
+stupidity" at Lucerne. We track him from hotel to hotel, we meet him at
+station after station, we revel in the chase as coat after coat of the
+outer man peels away and the inner Englishman stands more plainly
+revealed. But it is in the hotels of the higher mountains that we first
+catch the man himself.
+
+There is a sort of snow-line of nations, and nothing amazes one more in
+a run through the Alps than to see how true the various peoples among
+their visitors are to their own specific level. As a rule the Frenchman
+clings to the road through the passes, the American pauses at the end of
+the mule-track, the German stops at the chalet in the pine-forest. It is
+only at the Alpine _table d'hote_, with a proud consciousness of being
+seven thousand feet above the sea-level, that one gets the Englishman
+pure. It is a very odd sensation, in face of the huge mountain-chains,
+and with the glacier only an hour's walk overhead, to find one's self
+again in a little England, with the very hotel-keeper greeting one in
+one's native tongue, and the guides exchanging English oaths over their
+trinkgelt. Cooped up within four walls one gets a better notion of the
+varieties, the lights and shadows, of home-life than one gets in Pall
+Mall. The steady old Indian couple whose climb is so infinitely slow and
+sure, the Oxford freshman who comes blooming up the hill-side to declare
+Titiens beautiful and to gush over the essays of Frederick Robertson,
+the steady man of business who does his Alps every summer, the jaded
+London curate who lingers with a look of misery round the stove, the
+British mother, silken, severe, implacable as below, the British maiden
+sitting alone in the rock-clefts and reviewing the losses and gains of
+the last season--all these are thrown together in an odd jumble of rank
+and taste by the rain, fog, and snowdrift which form some two-thirds of
+the pleasures of the Alps. But, odd as the jumble is, it illustrates in
+a way that nothing else does some of the characteristics of the British
+nation, and impresses on one in a way that one never forgets the real
+native peculiarities of Englishmen.
+
+In the first place, no scene so perfectly brings out the absolute
+vacuity of the British mind when one can get it free from the
+replenishing influences of the daily paper. Alpine talk is the lowest
+variety of conversation, as the common run of Alpine writing is the
+lowest form of literature. It is in fact simply drawing-room talk as
+drawing-room talk would be if all news, all scandal, all family details
+were suddenly cut off. In its way it throws a pleasant light on English
+education and on the amount of information about other countries which
+it is considered essential to an English gentleman to possess. The
+guardsman swears that the Swiss are an uneducated nation, with a
+charming unconsciousness that their school system is without a rival in
+Europe; the young lady to one's right wonders why such nice people
+should be republicans; the Cambridge man across the table exposes the
+eccentricity of a friend who wished to know in what canton he was
+travelling; the squire with the pink and white daughters is amazed at
+the absence of police. In the very heart of the noblest home of liberty
+which Europe has seen our astonishing nation lives and moves with as
+contented and self-satisfied an ignorance of the laws, the history, the
+character of the country or its people, as if Switzerland were
+Timbuctoo. Still, even sublime ignorance such as this is better than to
+listen to the young thing of thirty-five summers, with her drivel about
+William Tell; and one has always the resource of conceiving a Swiss
+party tramping about England with no other notion of Englishmen than
+that they are extortionate hotel-keepers, or of the English Constitution
+than that it is democratic and absurd, or of English history than that
+Queen Eleanor sucked the poison from her husband's arm.
+
+The real foe of life over an Alpine table is that weather-talk, raised
+to its highest power, which forms nine-tenths of the conversation. The
+beautiful weather one had on the Rigi, the execrable weather one had at
+the Furca, the unsettled weather one had on the Lake of Thun; the
+endless questions whether you have been here and whether you have been
+there; the long catechism as to the insect-life and the tariff of the
+various hotels; the statements as to the route by which they have come,
+the equally gratuitous information as to the route by which they shall
+go; the "oh, so beautiful" of the gusher in ringlets, the lawyer's
+"decidedly sublime," the monotonous "grand, grand" of the man of
+business; the constant asseveration of all as to every prospect which
+they have visited that they never have seen such a beautiful view in
+their life--form a cataract of boredom which pours down from morn to
+dewy eve. It is in vain that one makes desperate efforts to procure
+relief, that the inventive mind entraps the spinster into discussion
+over ferns, tries the graduate on poetry, beguiles the squire towards
+politics, lures the Indian officer into a dissertation on coolies, leads
+the British mother through flowery paths of piety towards the new
+vacancies in the episcopal bench. The British mother remembers a bishop
+whom she met at Lucerne, the Indian officer gets back by the Ghauts to
+the Schreckhorn, the graduate finds his way again through 'Manfred' to
+the precipices. In an instant the drone recommences, the cataract pours
+down again, and there is nothing for it but to wander out on the terrace
+of six feet by four, and wonder what the view would be if there were no
+fog.
+
+But even a life like this must have its poetry and its hero, and at
+seven thousand feet above the sea-level it is very natural to find one's
+poetry in what would be dull enough below. The hero of the Bell Alp or
+the OEggischorn is naturally enough the Alpine Clubbist. He has
+hurried silent and solitary through the lower country, he only blooms
+into real life at the sight of "high work." It is wonderful how lively
+the little place becomes as he enters it, what a run there is on the
+landlord for information as to his projects, what endless consultations
+of the barometer, what pottering over the pages of 'Peaks, Passes, and
+Glaciers.' How many guides will he take, has he a dog, will he use the
+rope, what places has he done before?--a thousand questions of this sort
+are buzzing about the room as the hero sits quietly down to his dinner.
+The elderly spinster remembers the fatal accident of last season, and
+ventures to ask him what preparations he has made for the ascent. The
+hero stops his dinner politely, and shows her the new little box of
+lip-salve with which he intends to defy the terrors of the Alps. To say
+the truth, the Alpine climber is not an imaginative man. With him the
+climb which fills every bystander with awe is "a good bit of work, but
+nothing out of the way you know." He has never done this particular
+peak, and so he has to do it; but it has been too often done before to
+fill him with any particular interest in the matter. As to the ascent
+itself, he sets about planning it as practically as if he were planning
+a run from London to Lucerne. We see him sitting with his guides,
+marking down the time-table of his route, ascertaining the amount of
+meat and wine which will be required, distributing among his followers
+their fair weights of blankets and ropes. Then he tells us the hour at
+which he shall be back to-morrow, and the file of porters set off with
+him quietly and steadily up the hill-side. We turn out and give him a
+cheer as he follows, but the thought of the provisions takes a little of
+the edge off our romance. Still, there is a great run that evening on
+'Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers,' and a constant little buzz round the
+fortunate person who has found the one record of an ascent of this
+particular peak.
+
+What is it which makes men in Alpine travel-books write as men never
+write elsewhere? What is the origin of a style unique in literature,
+which misses both the sublime and the ridiculous, and constantly hops
+from tall-talk to a mirth feeble and inane? Why is it that the senior
+tutor, who is so hard on a bit of bad Latin, plunges at the sight of an
+Alp into English inconceivable, hideous? Why does page after page look
+as if it had been dredged with French words through a pepper-castor? Why
+is the sunrise or the scenery always "indescribable," while the appetite
+of the guides lends itself to such reiterated description? These are
+questions which suggest themselves to quiet critics, but hardly to the
+group in the hotel. They have found the hole where the hero is to snatch
+a few hours of sleep before commencing the ascent. They have followed
+him in imagination round the edge of the crevasses. All the old awe and
+terror that disappeared in his presence revive at the eloquent
+description of the _arete_. There is a gloom over us as we retire to bed
+and think of the little company huddled in their blankets, waiting for
+the dawn. There is a gloom over us at breakfast as the spinster recalls
+one "dreadful place where you look down five thousand feet clear." The
+whole party breaks up into little groups, who set out for high points
+from which, the first view of the returning hero will be caught.
+Everybody comes back certain they have seen him, till the landlord
+pronounces that everybody has mistaken the direction in which he must
+come. At last there is a distant _jodel_, and in an hour or so the hero
+arrives. He is impassive and good-humoured as before. When we crowd
+around him for the tidings of peril and adventure, he tells us, as he
+told us before he started, that it is "a good bit of work, but nothing
+out of the way." Pressed by the spinster, he replies, in the very words
+of 'Peaks and Passes,' that the sunrise was "indescribable," and then,
+like the same inspired volume, enlarges freely on the appetite of his
+guides. Then he dines, and then he tells us that what he has really
+gained from his climb is entire faith in the efficacy of his little box
+for preventing all injury from sun or from snow. He is a little proud,
+too, to have done the peak in twenty minutes less time than Jones, and
+at ten shillings less cost. Altogether, it must be confessed, the Alpine
+Clubbist is not an imaginative man. His one grief in life seems to be
+the failure of his new portable cooking apparatus, and he pronounces
+"Liebig's Extract" to be the great discovery of the age. But such as he
+is, solid, practical, slightly stupid, he is the hero of the Alpine
+hotel.
+
+At such an elevation the religious developement of the British mind
+becomes strangely jerky and irregular. The arrival of Sunday is suddenly
+revealed to the group round the breakfast-table by the severity with
+which the spinster's eye is fixed on an announcement over the stove that
+the English service in the hotel is at ten o'clock. But the announcement
+is purely speculative. The landlord "hopes" there will be service, and
+plunges again into the kitchen. Profane sounds of fiddling and dancing
+reach the ear from an outbuilding where the guides and the maids are
+celebrating the day by a dance. The spinster is in earnest, but the
+insuperable difficulty lies in the non-existence of a parson. The Indian
+civilian suggests that we should adopt the naval usage, and that the
+senior layman read prayers. But the attorney is the senior layman, and
+he objects to such a muddling of the professions. The young Oxford
+undergraduate tells his little tale of a service on board ship where the
+major, unversed in such matters, began with the churching service, and
+ended with the office for the burial of the dead. Then he withers
+beneath the stony stare of the British mother, who is reading her
+"lessons" in the corner. At last there is a little buzz of excitement,
+and every eye is fixed upon the quiet-looking traveller in a brown
+shooting-coat and a purple tie, who is chipping his egg and imbibing his
+coffee in silence and unconsciousness. The spinster is sure that the
+stranger is Mr. Smith. The attorney doubts whether such a remarkable
+preacher would go about in such a costume. The British mother solves the
+whole difficulty by walking straight up to him, and with an eye on the
+announcement in question, asking point-blank whether she has the
+pleasure of addressing that eminent divine. Smith hesitates, and is
+lost. His egg and coffee disappear. The table is cleared, and the chairs
+arranged with as little regard to comfort as may be. The divine retires
+for the sermon which--prescient of his doom--he has slipped into his
+valise. The landlord produces two hymn-books of perfectly different
+origins, and some time is spent in finding a hymn which is common to
+both. When the time comes for singing it, the landlord joins in with a
+fine but wandering bass, catching an English word here and there as he
+goes along. The sermon is as usual on the Prodigal Son, and the Indian
+civilian nods at every mention of "going into a far country," as a topic
+specially appropriate for the occasion. But the divine is seen no more.
+His cold becomes rapidly serious, and he takes to his bed at the very
+hour of afternoon service. The British maiden wanders out to read
+Tennyson in the rock-clefts, and is wonder-struck to come upon the
+unhappy sufferer reading Tennyson in the rock-clefts too. After all, bed
+is not good for a cold, and the British Sunday is insufferable, and
+poetry is the expression of the deepest and most sacred emotions. This
+is the developement which religion takes with a British maiden and a
+British parson in regions above the clouds.
+
+
+
+
+AENEAS:
+
+A VERGILIAN STUDY.
+
+
+In the revival side by side of Homeric and Vergilian study it is easy to
+see the reflection of two currents of contrasted sentiment which are
+telling on the world around us. A cry for simpler living and simpler
+thinking, a revolt against the social and intellectual perplexities in
+which modern life loses its direct and intensest joys, a craving for a
+world untroubled by the problems that weigh on us, express themselves as
+vividly in poems like the 'Earthly Paradise' as in the return to the
+Iliad. The charm of Vergil on the other hand lies in the strange
+fidelity with which across so many ages he echoes those complex thoughts
+which make the life of our own. Vergil is the Tennyson of the older
+world; his power, like that of the laureate, lies in the sympathy with
+which he reflects the strength and weakness of his time, its humanity,
+its new sense of human brotherhood, its pitifulness, its moral
+earnestness, its high conception of the purpose of life and the dignity
+of man, its attitude of curious but condescending interest towards the
+past, its vast dreams of a future, embodied by the one poet in the vague
+dreamland of 'Locksley Hall,' by the other in the enduring greatness of
+Rome.
+
+From beginning to end the AEneid is a song of Rome. Throughout it we feel
+ourselves drawing nearer and nearer to that sense of the Roman greatness
+which filled the soul of Vergil; with him in verse after verse "tendimus
+in Latium." Nowhere does the song rise to a higher grandeur than when
+the singer sings the majesty of that all-embracing empire, the wide
+peace of the world beneath its sway. But the AEneid is no mere outburst
+of Roman pride. To Vergil the time in which he lived was at once an end
+and a beginning, a close of the long struggles which had fitted Rome to
+be the mistress of the world, an opening of her new and mightier career
+as a reconciler and leader of the nations. His song is broken by divine
+prophecies, not merely of Roman greatness, but of the work Rome had to
+do in warring down the rebels against her universal sway, in showing
+clemency to the conquered, in binding hostile peoples together, in
+welding the nations into a new human race. The AEneid is a song of the
+future rather than of the present or past, a song not of pride but of
+duty. The work that Rome has done points throughout to the nobler work
+which Rome has yet to do. And in the very forefront of this dream of the
+future Vergil sets the ideal of the new Roman by whom this mighty task
+shall be wrought, the picture of one who by loyalty to a higher purpose
+had fitted himself to demand loyalty from those whom he ruled, one who
+by self-mastery had learned to be master of men.
+
+It is this thought of self-mastery which is the key to the AEneid. Filled
+as he is with a sense of the greatness of Rome, the mood of Vergil seems
+constantly to be fluctuating between a pathetic consciousness of the
+toils and self-devotion, the suffering and woe, that run through his
+national history and the final greatness which they bought. His poem
+draws both these impressions together in the figure of AEneas. AEneas is
+the representative of that "piety," that faith in his race and in his
+destiny, which had drawn the Roman from his little settlement on the
+hills beside Tiber to a vast empire "beyond the Garamantians and the
+Indians." All the endurance, the suffering, the patriotism, the
+self-devotion of generation after generation is incarnate in him. It is
+by his mouth that in the darkest hours of national trial Roman seems to
+say to Roman, "O passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem." It is to
+this "end" that the wanderings of AEneas, like the labours of consul and
+dictator, inevitably tend, and it is the firm faith in such a close that
+gives its peculiar character to the pathos of the AEneid.
+
+Rome is before us throughout, "per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in
+Latium." It is not as a mere tale of romance that we follow the
+wanderings of "the man who first came from Trojan shores to Italy." They
+are the sacrifice by which the father of the Roman race wrought out the
+greatness of his people, the toils he endured "dum conderet urbem."
+"Italiam quaero patriam" is the key-note of the AEneid, but the Quest of
+AEneas is no self-sought quest of his own. "Italiam non sponte sequor,"
+he pleads as Dido turns from him in the Elysian Fields with eyes of
+speechless reproach. He is the chosen instrument of a Divine purpose
+working out its ends alike across his own buffetings from shore to shore
+or the love-tortures of the Phoenician Queen. The memorable words that
+AEneas addresses to Dares, "Cede Deo," "bend before a will higher as well
+as stronger than thine own," are in fact the faith of his own career.
+
+But it is in this very submission to the Divine order that he himself
+soars into greatness. The figure of the warrior who is so insignificant
+in the Homeric story of the fight around Troy becomes that of a hero in
+the horror of its capture. AEneas comes before us the survivor of an
+immense fall, sad with the sadness of lost home and slaughtered friends,
+not even suffered to fall amidst the wreck, but driven forth by voices
+of the Fates to new toils and a distant glory. He may not die; his
+"moriamur" is answered by the reiterated "Depart" of the gods, the "Heu,
+fuge!" of the shade of Hector. The vision of the great circle of the
+gods fighting against Troy drives him forth in despair to a life of
+exile, and the carelessness of despair is over him as he drifts from
+land to land. "Sail where you will," he cries to his pilot, "one land
+is as good as another now Troy is gone." More and more indeed as he
+wanders he recognizes himself as the agent of a Divine purpose, but all
+personal joy in life has fled. Like Dante he feels the bitterness of
+exile, how hard it is to climb another's stairs, how bitter to eat is
+another's bread. Here and there he meets waifs and strays of the great
+wreck, fugitives like himself, but who have found a refuge and a new
+Troy on foreign shores. He greets them, but he may not stay. At last the
+very gods themselves seem to give him the passionate love of Dido, but
+again the fatal "Depart" tears him from her arms. The chivalrous love of
+Pallas casts for a moment its light and glory round his life, but the
+light and glory sink into gloom again beneath the spear of Turnus. AEneas
+is left alone with his destiny to the very end, but it is a destiny that
+has grown into a passion that absorbs the very life of the man.
+
+        "Italiam magnam Grynaeus Apollo,
+    Italiam Lyciae jussere capessere sortes.
+    Hic amor, haec patria est!"
+
+It is in the hero of the Idylls and not in the hero of the Iliad that we
+find the key to such a character as this. So far is Vergil from being
+the mere imitator of Homer that in spite of his close and loving study
+of the older poem its temper seems to have roused him only to poetic
+protest. He recoils from the vast personality of Achilleus, from that
+incarnate "wrath," heedless of divine purposes, measuring itself boldly
+with the gods, careless as a god of the fate and fortunes of men. In the
+face of this destroyer the Roman poet sets a founder of cities and
+peoples, self-forgetful, patient, loyal to a divine aim, calm with a
+Roman calmness, yet touched as no Roman had hitherto been touched with
+pity and tenderness for the sorrows of men. The one poem is a song of
+passion, a mighty triumph of the individual man, a poem of human energy
+in defiant isolation. The other is an epic of social order, of a divine
+law manifesting itself in the fortunes of the world, of the bonds which
+link man to his fellow men, a song of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
+reverence, of "piety."
+
+It is in realizing the temper of the poem that we realize the temper of
+its hero. AEneas is the Arthur of the Vergilian epic, with the same
+absorption of all individuality in the nobleness of his purpose, the
+same undertone of melancholy, the same unearthly vagueness of outline
+and remoteness from the meaner interests and passions of men. As the
+poet of our own day has embodied his ideal of manhood in the king, so
+Vergil has embodied it in the hero-founder of his race. The temper of
+AEneas is the highest conception of human character to which the old
+world ever attained. The virtues of the Homeric combatants are there:
+courage, endurance, wisdom in council, eloquence, chivalrous friendship,
+family affection, faith to plighted word; but with these mingle virtues
+unknown to Hector or Achilleus, temperance, self-control, nobleness and
+unselfishness of aim, loyalty to an inner sense of right, the piety of
+self-devotion and self-sacrifice, refinement of feeling, a pure and
+delicate sense of the sweetness of woman's love, pity for the fallen and
+the weak.
+
+In the Homeric picture Achilleus sits solitary in his tent, bound as it
+were to the affections of earth by the one tie of his friendship for
+Patroclos. No figure has ever been painted by a poet's pen more terrible
+in the loneliness of its wrath, its sorrow, its revenge. But from one
+end of his song to the other Vergil has surrounded AEneas with the ties
+and affections of home. In the awful night with which his story opens
+the loss of Creusa, the mocking embrace in which the dead wife flies
+from his arms, form his farewell to Troy. "Thrice strove I there to
+clasp my arms about her neck,"--everyone knows the famous lines:--
+
+    "Thrice I essayed her neck to clasp,
+    Thrice the vain semblance mocked my grasp,
+    As wind or slumber light."
+
+Amid all the terror of the flight from the burning city the figure of
+his child starts out bright against the darkness, touched with a
+tenderness which Vergil seems to reserve for his child-pictures.[2] But
+the whole escape is the escape of a family. Not merely child and wife,
+but father and household accompany AEneas. Life, he tells them when they
+bid him leave them to their fate, is worthless without them; and the
+"commune periclum, una salus" runs throughout all his wanderings. The
+common love of his boy is one of the bonds that link Dido with AEneas,
+and a yet more exquisite touch of poetic tenderness makes his affection
+for Ascanius the one final motive for his severance from the Queen. Not
+merely the will of the gods drives him from Carthage, but the sense of
+the wrong done to his boy.[3] His friendship is as warm and constant as
+his love for father or child. At the two great crises of his life the
+thought of Hector stirs a new outpouring of passionate regret. It is the
+vision of Hector which rouses him from the slumber of the terrible night
+when Troy is taken; the vision of the hero not as glorified by death,
+but as the memory of that last pitiful sight of the corpse dragged at
+the chariot wheels of Achilleus had stamped it for ever on the mind of
+his friend. It is as though all recollection of his greatness had been
+blotted out by the shame and terror of his fall ("quantum mutatus ab
+illo Hectore!"), but the gory hair and the mangled form only quicken the
+passionate longing of AEneas.[4] The tears, the "mighty groan," burst
+forth again as in the tapestry of the Sidonian temple he sees pictured
+anew the story of Hector's fall. In the hour of his last combat the
+thought of his brother-in-arms returns to him, and the memory of Hector
+is the spur to nobleness and valour which he bequeaths to his boy.
+
+But throughout it is this refinement of feeling, this tenderness and
+sensitiveness to affection, that Vergil has loved to paint in the
+character of AEneas. To him Dido's charm lies in her being the one
+pitying face that has as yet met his own. Divine as he is, the child,
+like Achilleus, of a goddess, he broods with a tender melancholy over
+the sorrows of his fellow-men. "Sunt lacrymae rerum et mentem mortalia
+tangunt," are words in which Sainte-Beuve has found the secret of the
+AEneid; they are at any rate the key to the character of AEneas. Like the
+poet of our own days, he longs for "the touch of a vanished hand, and
+the sound of a voice that is still."[5] He stands utterly apart from
+those epical heroes "that delight in war." The joy in sheer downright
+fighting which rings through Homer is wholly absent from the AEneid.
+Stirring and picturesque as is "The gathering of the Latin Clans,"
+brilliant as is the painting of the last combat with Turnus, we feel
+everywhere the touch of a poet of peace. Nothing is more noteworthy than
+the careful exclusion of the Roman cruelty, the Roman ambition, from the
+portrait of AEneas. Vergil seems to protest in his very hero against the
+poetic compulsion that drags him to the battle-field. On the eve of his
+final triumph, AEneas
+
+                          "incusat voce Latinum;
+    Testaturque deos iteram se ad proelia cogi."
+
+Even when host is marshalled against host the thought of reconciliation
+is always kept steadily to the front, and the bitter cry of the hero
+asks in the very hour of the combat why bloodshed should divide peoples
+who are destined to be one.
+
+It is the conflict of these two sides of the character of AEneas, the
+struggle between this sensitiveness to affection and his entire
+absorption in the mysterious destiny to which he is called, between his
+clinging to human ties and his readiness to forsake all and follow the
+divine voice which summons him, the strife in a word between love and
+duty, which gives its meaning and pathos to the story of AEneas and Dido.
+Attractive as it undoubtedly is, the story of Dido is in the minds of
+nine modern readers out of ten fatal to the effect of the AEneid as a
+whole. The very beauty of the tale is partly the cause of this. To the
+schoolboy and to thousands who are schoolboys no longer the poem is
+nothing more than the love story of the Trojan leader and the Tyrian
+queen. Its human interest ends with the funeral fires of Dido, and the
+books which follow are read merely as ingenious displays of the
+philosophic learning, the antiquarian research, and the patriotism of
+Vergil. But the story is yet more directly fatal in the way in which it
+cuts off the hero himself from modern sympathies. His desertion of Dido
+makes, it has been said, "an irredeemable poltroon of him in all honest
+English eyes." Dryden can only save his character by a jest, and
+Rousseau damns it with an epigram. Mr. Keble supposes that in the
+interview among the Shades the poet himself intended the abasement of
+his hero, and Mr. Gladstone has capped this by a theory that Vergil
+meant to draw his readers' admiration, not to AEneas but to Turnus.
+
+It is wiser perhaps to turn from the impressions of Vergil's critics to
+the impression which the story must have left in the mind of Vergil
+himself. It is surely needless to assume that the first of poetic
+artists has forgotten the very rudiments of his art in placing at the
+opening of his song a figure which strips all interest from his hero.
+Nor is it needful to believe that such a blunder has been unconscious,
+and that Vergil has had to learn the true effect of his episode on the
+general texture of his poem from the reader of to-day. The poet who
+paints for us the character of Dido must have felt, ere he could have
+painted it, that charm which has ever since bewitched the world. Every
+nerve in Vergil must have thrilled at the consummate beauty of this
+woman of his own creation, her self-abandonment, her love, her
+suffering, her despair. If he deliberately uses her simply as a foil to
+the character of AEneas it is with a perception of this charm infinitely
+deeper and tenderer than ours. But he does use her as a foil. Impulse,
+passion, the mighty energies of unbridled will are wrought up into a
+figure of unequalled beauty, and then set against the true manhood of
+the founder and type of Rome, the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
+self-control.
+
+To the stoicism of Vergil, steadied by a high sense of man's worth and
+work in the world, braced to patience and endurance for noble ends,
+passion--the revolt of the individual self against the world's
+order--seemed a light and trivial thing. He could feel and paint with
+exquisite delicacy and fire the charm of woman's utter love; but woman
+with all her loveliness wanted to him the grandeur of man's higher
+constancy to an unselfish purpose, "varium et mutabile semper foemina."
+Passion on the other hand is the mainspring of modern poetry, and it is
+difficult for us to realize the superior beauty of the calmer and vaster
+ideal of the poets of old. The figure of Dido, whirled hither and
+thither by the storms of warring emotions, reft even of her queenly
+dignity by the despair of her love, degraded by jealousy and
+disappointment to a very scold, is to the calm, serene figure of AEneas
+as modern sculpture, the sculpture of emotion, is to the sculpture of
+classic art. Each, no doubt, has its own peculiar beauty, and the work
+of a true criticism is to view either from its own standpoint and not
+from the standpoint of its rival. But if we would enter into the mind of
+Vergil we must view Dido with the eyes of AEneas and not AEneas with the
+eyes of Dido.
+
+When Vergil first sets the two figures before us, it is not on the
+contrast but on the unity of their temper and history that he dwells.
+Touch after touch brings out this oneness of mood and aim as they drift
+towards one another. The same weariness, the same unconscious longing
+for rest and love, fills either heart. It is as a queen, as a Dian
+over-topping her nymphs by the head, that Dido appears on the scene,
+distributing their task to her labourers as a Roman Cornelia distributed
+wool to her house-slaves, questioning the Trojan strangers who sought
+her hospitality and protection. It is with the brief, haughty tone of a
+ruler of men that she bids them lay by their fears and assures them of
+shelter. Around her is the hum and stir of the city-building, a scene in
+which the sharp, precise touches of Vergil betray the hand of the
+town-poet. But within is the lonely heart of a woman. Dido, like AEneas,
+is a fugitive, an exile of bitter, vain regrets. Her husband, "loved
+with a mighty love," has fallen by a brother's hand; and his ghost, like
+that of Creusa, has driven her in flight from her Tyrian fatherland.
+Like AEneas too she is no solitary wanderer; she guides a new colony to
+the site of the future Carthage as he to the site of the future Rome.
+When AEneas stands before her, it is as a wanderer like herself. His
+heart is bleeding at the loss of Creusa, of Helen, of Troy. He is
+solitary in his despair. He is longing for the touch of a human hand,
+the sound of a voice of love. He is weary of being baffled by the
+ghostly embraces of his wife, by the cloud that wraps his mother from
+his view. He is weary of wandering, longing with all the old-world
+intensity of longing for a settled home. "O fortunati quorum jam moenia
+surgunt," he cries as he looks on the rising walls of Carthage. His
+gloom has been lightened indeed by the assurance of his fame which he
+gathers from the pictures of the great Defence graven on the walls of
+the Tyrian temple. But the loneliness and longing still press heavily on
+him when the cloud which has wrapt him from sight parts suddenly
+asunder, and Dido and AEneas stand face to face.
+
+Few situations in poetry are more artistic than this meeting of AEneas
+and the Queen in its suddenness and picturesqueness. A love born of pity
+speaks in the first words of the hero,[6] and the reply of Dido strikes
+the same sympathetic note.[7] But the fervour of passion is soon to
+supersede this compassionate regard. Love himself in the most exquisite
+episode of the AEneid takes the place of Ascanius; while the Trojan boy
+lies sleeping on Ida, lapped on Earth's bosom beneath the cool mountain
+shade, his divine "double" lies clasped to Dido's breast, and pours his
+fiery longings into her heart. Slowly, unconsciously, the lovers draw
+together. The gratitude of AEneas is still at first subordinate to his
+quest. "Thy name and praise shall live," he says to Dido, "whatever
+lands call me." In the same way, though the Queen's generosity has shown
+itself in her first offer to the sailors ("urbem quam statuo vestra
+est"), it is still generosity and not passion. Passion is born in the
+long night through which, with Eros still folded in her arms, Dido
+listens to the "Tale of Troy."
+
+The very verse quickens with the new pulse of love. The preface of the
+AEneid, the stately introduction that fortells the destinies of Rome and
+the divine end to which the fates were guiding AEneas, closes in fact
+with the appearance of Dido. The poem takes a gayer and lighter tone.
+The disguise and recognition of Venus as she appears to her son, the
+busy scene of city-building, the sudden revelation of AEneas to the
+Queen, have the note of exquisite romance. The honey-sweet of the
+lover's tale, to use the poet's own simile,[8] steals subtly on the
+graver epic. Step by step Vergil leads us on through every stage of
+pity, of fancy, of reverie, of restlessness, of passion, to the fatal
+close. None before him had painted the thousand delicate shades of
+love's advance; none has painted them more tenderly, more exquisitely
+since. As the Queen listens to the tale of her lover's escape she
+showers her questions as one that could never know enough.
+
+    "Multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa."
+
+Her passion feeds through sleepless nights on the recollection of his
+look, on the memory of his lightest words. Even the old love of Sychaeus
+seems to revive in and blend with this new affection.[9] Her very
+queenliness delights to idealize her lover, to recognize in the hero
+before whom she falls "one of the race of the gods." For a while the
+figure of Dido is that of happy, insatiate passion. The rumours of war
+from the jealous chieftains about her fall idly on her ear. She hovers
+round her hero with sweet observances of love, she hangs at his side the
+jewelled sword and the robe of Tyrian purple woven by her queenly hands.
+
+But even in the happiest moments of his story the consummate art of the
+poet has prepared for the final catastrophe. Little words, like
+"misera," "infelix," "fati nescia," sound the first undertones of a woe
+to come, even amidst the joy of the first meeting or the glad tumult of
+the hunting-scene. The restlessness, the quick alternations of feeling
+in the hour of Dido's triumph, prepare us for the wild swaying of the
+soul from bitterest hate to pitiful affection in the hour of her agony.
+She is the first in the sensitiveness of her passion to catch the change
+in AEneas, and the storm of her indignation sweeps away the excuses of
+her lover, as the storm of her love had swept away his earlier resolve.
+All dignity, all queenliness breaks before the "fury of a woman
+scorned." She dashes herself against the rooted purpose of AEneas as the
+storm-winds, to use Vergil's image, dash themselves from this quarter
+and that against the rooted oak. The madness of her failure drives her
+through the streets like a Maenad in the nightly orgies of Cithaeron; she
+flies at last to her chamber like a beast at bay, and gazes out
+distracted at the Trojan shipmen putting off busily from the shores. Yet
+ever and again the wild frenzy-bursts are broken by notes of the old
+pathetic tenderness. In the midst of her taunts and menaces she turns
+with a woman's delicacy to protest against her own violence, "heu,
+furiis incensa feror!" She humbles herself even to pray for a little
+respite, if but for a few hours.[10] She pleads her very loneliness; she
+catches as it were from AEneas the thought of the boy whose future he had
+pleaded as one cause of his departure and finds in it a plea for pity.
+
+Sometimes her agony is too terrible for speech; she can only answer with
+those "speechless eyes" with which her shade was once more to meet AEneas
+in the Elysian fields. But her wonderful energy forbids her to lie, like
+weaker women, crushed in her despair. She hurries her sister to the feet
+of her lover that nothing may be left untried. From the first she stakes
+her life on the issue; it is as one "about to die" that she prays AEneas
+not to leave her. When all has failed and hope itself deserts her the
+weariness of life gathers round and she "tires of the sight of day."
+
+Never have the mighty energies of unbridled human will been wrought up
+into a form of more surpassing beauty; never have they been set more
+boldly and sharply against the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
+self-control. If the tide of Dido's passion sweeps away for the moment
+the consciousness of a divine mission which has borne AEneas to the
+Tyrian shore, the consciousness lies still in the very heart of the man
+and revives at the new call of the gods. The call bids him depart at
+once; and without a struggle he "burns to depart." He stamps down and
+hides within the deep recesses of his heart the "care" that the wild
+entreaties of the woman he loved arouse within him; the life that had
+swung for an hour out of its course returns to its old bearings; once
+more Italy and his destiny become aim and fatherland, "hic amor, haec
+patria est." AEneas bows to the higher will, and from that moment all
+that has turned him from his course is of the past. Dido becomes a part
+of his memory as of the things that were.[11]
+
+AEneas is as "resolute to depart" as Dido is "resolute to die." And in
+both the resolve lifts the soul out of its lower passion-life into a
+nobler air. The queen rises into her old queenliness as she passes
+"majestic to the grave;" and her last curse as the Tyrian ships quit
+her shore is no longer the wild imprecation of a frenzied woman; it is
+the mighty curse of the founder of a people calling down on the Roman
+race ages of inextinguishable hate. "Fight shore with shore: fight sea
+with sea!" is the prophecy of that struggle with Carthage which all but
+wrecked for a moment the destinies of Rome. But Vergil saw in the
+character of Dido herself a danger to Rome's future far greater than the
+sword of Hannibal. His very sense of the grandeur of Rome's destinies
+frees him from the vulgar self-confidence of meaner men. Throughout his
+poem he is haunted by the memories of civil war, by the sense of
+instability which clings to men who have grown up in the midst of
+revolutions. The grandest picture in the AEneid reflects the terror of
+that hour of suspense when the galleys of Augustus jostled against the
+galleys of Antony. From that moment, as Vergil's prescience foresaw, the
+dangers of Rome were to spring from a single source. Passion, greed,
+lawless self-seeking, personal ambition, the decay of the older Roman
+sense of unselfish duty, of that "pietas" which subordinated the
+interest of the individual man to the common interest of the state, this
+was henceforth to be the real enemy of Rome. More and more, as the Roman
+peace drew the world together, the temper of the East, the temper which
+Vergil has embodied in his sketch of Dido, would tell and tell fatally
+on the temper of the West. Orontes--to borrow Juvenal's phrase--was
+already flowing into Tiber, and the sterner virtues of the conquerors
+were growing hourly more distasteful beside the variety, the geniality,
+the passionate flush and impulse of the conquered.
+
+It was their common sense of this danger which drew together Vergil and
+the Emperor. It is easy to see throughout his poem what critics are
+accustomed to style a compliment to Augustus. But the loving admiration
+and reverence of Vergil had no need to stoop to the flattery of
+compliment. To him Augustus was in a deep and true sense the realization
+of that ideal Roman whom his song was meant to set in the forefront of
+Rome. When Antony in the madness of his enchantment forgot the high
+mission to which Rome was called, the spell had only been broken by the
+colder "piety" of Caesar. To Vergil Augustus was the founder of a new
+Rome, the AEneas who after long wanderings across the strife of civil war
+had brought her into quiet waters and bound warring factions into a
+peaceful people. Vergil felt, as even we can feel so many ages later,
+the sense of a high mission, the calm silent recognition of a vast work
+to be done, which lifted the cold, passionless Imperator into greatness.
+It was the bidding of Augustus that had called him from his "rustic
+measure" to this song of Borne, and the thought of Augustus blended,
+whether he would or not, with that Rome of the future which seemed
+growing up under his hands. Unlike too as Vergil was to the Emperor,
+there was a common undertone of melancholy that drew the two men
+together. The wreck of the older faiths, the lingering doubt whether
+good was after all the strongest thing in the world, whether "the gods"
+were always on the side of justice and right, throws its gloom over the
+noblest passages of the AEneid. It is the same doubt, hardened by the
+temper of the man into a colder and more mocking scepticism, that sounds
+in the "plaudite et valete" of the deathbed of Augustus. The Emperor had
+played his part well, but it was a part that he could hardly persuade
+himself was real. All that wisdom and power could do had been done, but
+Augustus had no faith in the great fabric he had reared. Vergil drew
+faith in the fortunes of Rome from his own enthusiasm, but to him too
+the moral order of the world brought only the melancholy doubt of
+Hamlet. Everywhere we feel "the pity on't." The religious theory of the
+universe, the order of the world around him, jars at every step with his
+moral faith. AEneas is the reflection of a time out of joint. Everywhere
+among good men there was the same moral earnestness, the same stern
+resolve after nobleness and grandeur of life, and everywhere there was
+the same inability to harmonize this moral life with the experience of
+the world.
+
+A noble stoicism breathes in the character of AEneas, the virtue of the
+virtuous man, refined and softened by a poet's pitifulness, heightened
+above all by the lingering doubt whether there were any necessary
+connection between virtue and the divine order of things around it.
+
+    "Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid
+    Usquam Justitia est et mens sibi conscia recti,
+    Praemia digna ferant!"
+
+The words glow, so to speak, with moral earnestness, but through them we
+feel the doubt whether, after all, uprightness and a good conscience
+were really the object of a divine care. Heaven had flown further off
+from earth than in the days of the Iliad. The laws of the universe, as
+time had revealed them, the current of human affairs, the very might of
+the colossal Empire in which the world of civilization found itself
+prisoned, all seemed to be dwarfing man. Man remained, the sad stern
+manhood of the Stoic, the spirit that breathes through the character of
+AEneas, enduring, baffled, yet full of a faith that the very storms that
+drove him from sea to sea were working out some mysterious and divine
+order. Man was greater than his fate:--
+
+         "Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur,
+    Quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est."
+
+There is the same sad Cato-like stoicism in the words with which AEneas
+addresses himself to his final combat:--
+
+    "Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
+    Fortunam ex aliis."
+
+But the "dis aliter visum" meets us at every step. Ripheus is the most
+just and upright among the warriors of Troy, but he is the first to
+fall. An inscrutable mystery hangs around the order of the world. Men of
+harder, colder temper shrug their shoulders, and like Augustus repeat
+their "vanitas vanitatum" with a smile of contempt at the fools who take
+life in earnest. Nobler and more sensitive souls like that of Vergil
+carry about with them "the pity of it." It is this melancholy that
+flings its sad grace over the verse of the AEneid. We close it as we
+close the Idylls with the King's mournful cry in our ears. But the Roman
+stoicism is of harder and manlier stuff than the chivalrous spiritualism
+of Arthur. The ideal of the old world is of nobler, sterner tone than
+the ideal of the new. Even with death and ruin around him, and the
+mystery of the world darkening his soul, man remains man and master of
+his fate. The suffering and woe of the individual find amends in the
+greatness and welfare of the race. We pity, the wandering of AEneas, but
+his wanderings found the city. The dream of Arthur vanishes as the dark
+boat dies into a dot upon the mere; the dream of AEneas becomes Rome.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2]                     "Dextrae se parvus Iulus
+    Implicuit, sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis."
+
+    "His steps scarce matching with my stride."
+
+Mr. Conington's translation hardly renders the fond little touch of the
+Vergilian phrase, a phrase only possible to a lover of children.
+
+[3] "Me puer Ascanius, capitisque injuria cari,
+    Quem regno Hesperiae fraudo et fatalibus arvis."
+
+[4]           "Quibus Hector ab oris
+    Expectate venis?"
+
+[5]           "Cur dextrae jungere dextram
+    Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"
+
+[6] "O sola infandos Trojae miserata labores."
+
+[7] "Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco."
+
+[8] "Fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella."
+
+[9] "Agnosco veteris vestigia ammae."
+
+[10] "Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori,
+     Dum mea me victam doceat fortuna dolere."
+
+[11] "Nec me meminisse pigebit Elissae."
+
+
+
+
+TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+VENICE AND ROME.
+
+
+It is the strangeness and completeness of the contrast which makes one's
+first row from Venice to Torcello so hard to forget. Behind us the great
+city sinks slowly into a low line of domes and towers; around us, dotted
+here and there over the gleaming surface, are the orange sails of
+trailing market-boats; we skirt the great hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose
+boatmen bandy _lazzi_ and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a
+lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of
+brown sedge and brushwood, the tower of Torcello rises sharply against
+the sky. There is something weird and unearthly in the suddenness with
+which one passes from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred
+with soft lines of violet light and broken with reflections of wall and
+bell-tower, into this presence of desolation and death. A whole world
+seems to part those dreary flats broken with lifeless inlets, those
+patches of sodden fields flung shapelessly among sheets of sullen water,
+from the life and joy of the Grand Canal. And yet really to understand
+the origin of Venice, those ages of terror and flight and exile in which
+the Republic took its birth, we must study them at Torcello. It was from
+the vast Alpine chain which hangs in the haze of midday like a long dim
+cloud-line to the north that the hordes of Hun and Goth burst on the
+Roman world. Their path lay, along the coast trending round to the west,
+where lost among little villages that stand out white in the distant
+shadow lie the sites of Heraclea and Altinum. Across these grey shallows
+cut by the blue serpentine windings of deeper channels the Romans of the
+older province of Venetia on the mainland fled before Attila or
+Theodoric or Alboin to found the new Venetia of the lagoon. Eastward
+over Lido the glimmer of the Adriatic recalls the long centuries of the
+Pirate war, that, struggle for life which shaped into their after-form
+the government and destinies of the infant state. Venice itself, the
+crown and end of struggle and of flight, lies over shining miles of
+water to the south. But it is here that one can best study the story of
+its birth; it is easier to realize those centuries of exile and
+buffeting for life amid the dreary flats, the solitude, the poverty of
+Torcello than beneath the gleaming front of the Ducal Palace or the
+mosaics of St. Mark.
+
+Here in fact lies the secret of Venetian history, the one key by which
+it is possible to understand the strange riddle of the Republic. For
+thirteen centuries Venice lay moored as it were off the coast of Western
+Europe, without political analogue or social parallel. Its patriciate,
+its people, its government were not what government or people or
+patriciate were in other countries of Western Christendom. The
+difference lay not in any peculiar institutions which it had developed,
+or in any novel form of social or administrative order which it had
+invented, but in the very origin of the State itself. We see this the
+better if we turn from Venice to our own homeland. The same age saw the
+birth of the two great maritime Powers of modern Europe, for the
+settlements of the English in Britain cover the same century with those
+of the Roman exiles in the Venetian Lagoon. But the English
+colonization was the establishment of a purely Teutonic State on the
+wreck of Rome, while the Venetian was the establishment of a purely
+Roman State in the face of the Teuton. Venice in its origin was simply
+the Imperial province of Venetia floated across to the islands of the
+shore. Before the successive waves of the northern inroad the citizens
+of the coast fled to the sandbanks which had long served them as gardens
+or merchant-ports. The "Chair of Attila," the rough stone seat beside
+the church of San Fosco, preserves the memory of one destroyer before
+whom a third part of the people of Altinum fled to Torcello and the
+islands around. Their city--even materially--passed with them. The new
+houses were built from the ruins of the old. The very stones of Altinum
+served for the "New Altinum" which arose on the desolate isle, and
+inscriptions, pillars, capitals came in the track of the exiles across
+the lagoon to be worked into the fabric of its cathedral.
+
+Neither citizens nor city were changed even in name. They had put out
+for security a few miles to sea, but the sandbanks on which they landed
+were still Venetia. The fugitive patricians were neither more nor less
+citizens of the imperial province because they had fled from Padua or
+Altinum to Malamocco or Torcello. Their political allegiance was still
+due to the Empire. Their social organization remained unaffected by the
+flight. So far were they from being severed from Rome, so far from
+entertaining any dreams of starting afresh in the "new democracy" which
+exists in the imagination of Daru and his followers, that the one boast
+of their annalists is that they are more Roman than the Romans
+themselves. Their nobles looked with contempt on the barbaric blood
+which had tainted that of the Colonnas or the Orsini, nor did any
+Isaurian peasant ever break the Roman line of Doges as Leo broke the
+line of Roman Emperors. Venice--as she proudly styled herself in after
+time--was "the legitimate daughter of Rome." The strip of sea-board from
+the Brenta to the Isonzo was the one spot in the Empire from the Caspian
+to the Atlantic where foot of barbarian never trod. And as it rose, so
+it set. From that older world of which it was a part the history of
+Venice stretched on to the French Revolution untouched by Teutonic
+influences. The old Roman life which became strange even to the Capitol
+lingered unaltered, unimpaired, beside the palace of the duke. The
+strange ducal cap, the red ducal slippers, the fan of bright feathers
+borne before the ducal chair, all came unchanged from ages when they
+were the distinctions of every great officer of the Imperial State. It
+is startling to think that almost within the memory of living men Venice
+brought Rome--the Rome of Ambrose and Theodosius--to the very doors of
+the Western world; that the living and unchanged tradition of the Empire
+passed away only with the last of the Doges. Only on the tomb of Manin
+could men write truthfully, "Hic jacet ultimus Romanorum."
+
+It is this simple continuance of the old social organization which the
+barbarians elsewhere overthrew that explains the peculiar character of
+the Venetian patriciate. In all other countries of the West the new
+feudal aristocracy sprang from the Teutonic invaders. In Italy itself
+the nobles were descendants of Lombard conquerors, or of the barons who
+followed Emperor after Emperor across the Alps. Even when their names
+and characters had alike been moulded into Southern form, the "Seven
+Houses" of Pisa boasted of their descent from the seven barons of
+Emperor Otto. But the older genealogies of the senators whose names
+stood written in the Golden Book of Venice ran, truly or falsely, not to
+Teutonic but to Roman origins. The Participazii, the Dandoli, the
+Falieri, the Foscari, told of the flight of their Roman fathers before
+the barbarian sword from Pavia, Gaeta, Fano, Messina. Every quarter of
+Italy had given its exiles, but above all the coast round the head of
+the Gulf from Ravenna to Trieste. It was especially a flight and
+settlement of nobles. As soon as the barbaric hordes had swept away to
+the South the farmer or the peasant would creep back to his fields and
+his cabin and submit to the German master whom the conquest had left
+behind it. But the patrician had filled too great a place in the old
+social order to stoop easily to the new. He remained camped as before in
+his island-refuge, among a crowd of dependents, his fishermen, his
+dock-labourers. Throughout the long ages which followed, this original
+form of Venetian society remained unchanged. The populace of dependents
+never grew into a people. To the last fisherman and gondolier clung to
+the great houses of which they were the clients, as the fishers of
+Torcello had clung to the great nobles of Altinum. No difference of
+tradition or language or blood parted them. Tradition, on the contrary,
+bound them together. No democratic agitator could appeal from the
+present to the past, as Rienzi invoked the memories of the Tribunate
+against the feudal tyranny of the Colonnas. In Venice the past and
+present were one. The patrician of Venice simply governed the State as
+his fathers, the curials of Padua or Aquileia, had governed the State
+ten centuries before him.
+
+It is this unity of Venetian society which makes Venetian history so
+unlike the history of other Italian towns, and to which Venice owes the
+peculiar picturesqueness and brightness which charms us still in its
+decay. Elsewhere the history of mediaeval Italy sprang from the
+difference of race and tradition between conquered and conquerors,
+between Lombard noble and Italian serf. The communal revolt of the
+twelfth century, the democratic constitutions of Milan or of Bologna,
+were in effect a rising of race against race, the awakening of a new
+people in the effort to throw off the yoke of the stranger. The huge
+embattled piles which flung their dark shadows over the streets of
+Florence tell of the ceaseless war between baronage and people. The
+famous penalty by which some of the democratic communes condemned a
+recreant cobbler or tinker to "descend" as his worst punishment "into
+the order of the _noblesse_," tells of the hate and issue of the
+struggle between them. But no trace of struggle or of hate breaks the
+annals of Venice. There is no people, no democratic Broletto, no Hall of
+the Commune. And as there was no "people," so in the mediaeval sense of
+the word there was no "baronage." The nobles of Venice were not Lombard
+barons but Roman patricians, untouched by feudal traditions or by the
+strong instinct of personal independence which created feudalism. The
+shadow of the Empire is always over them, they look for greatness not to
+independent power or strife, but to joint co-operation in the government
+of the State. Their instinct is administrative, they shrink from
+disorder as from a barbaric thing, they are citizens, and nobles only
+because they are citizens. Of this political attitude of its patricians
+Venice is itself the type. The palaces of Torcello or Rialto were
+houses, not of war, but of peace; no dark masses of tower and wall, but
+bright with marbles and frescoes, and broken with arcades of fretted
+masonry.
+
+Venice, in a word, to her very close was a city of nobles, the one
+place in the modern world where the old senatorial houses of the fifth
+century lived and ruled as of old. But it was a city of Roman nobles.
+Like the Teutonic passion for war the Teutonic scorn of commerce was
+strange and unknown to the curial houses of the Italian municipalities,
+as it had been strange and unknown to the greatest houses of Rome. The
+Senator of Padua or Aquileia, of Concordia, Altinum, or Ravenna, had
+always been a merchant, and in his new refuge he remained a merchant
+still. Venice was no "crowd of poor fishermen," as it has been sometimes
+described, who were gradually drawn to wider ventures and a larger
+commerce. The port of Aquileia had long been the emporium of a trade
+which reached northwards to the Danube and eastward to Byzantium. What
+the Roman merchants of Venetia had been at Aquileia they remained at
+Grado. The commerce of Altinum simply transferred itself to Torcello.
+The Paduan merchants passed to their old port of Rialto. Vague and
+rhetorical as is the letter of Cassiodorus, it shows how keen was the
+mercantile activity of the State from its beginning. Nothing could be
+more natural, more continuous in its historical developement; nothing
+was more startling, more incomprehensible to the new world which had
+grown up in German moulds. The nobles of Henry VIII.'s Court could not
+restrain their sneer at "the fishermen of Venice," the stately
+patricians who could look back from merchant-noble to merchant-noble
+through ages when the mushroom houses of England were unheard of. Only
+the genius of Shakspere seized the grandeur of a social organization
+which was still one with that of Rome and Athens and Tyre. The merchant
+of Venice is with him "a royal merchant." His "argosies o'ertop the
+petty traffickers." At the moment when feudalism was about to vanish
+away, the poet comprehended the grandeur of that commerce which it
+scorned and the grandeur of the one State which had carried the nobler
+classic tradition across ages of brutality and ignorance. The great
+commercial State, whose merchants are nobles, whose nobles are Romans,
+rises in all its majesty before us in the 'Merchant of Venice.'
+
+
+
+
+
+TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+VENICE AND TINTORETTO.
+
+
+The fall of Venice dates from the League of Cambray, but her victory
+over the crowd of her assailants was followed by half a century of peace
+and glory such as she had never known. Her losses on the mainland were
+in reality a gain, enforcing as they did the cessation of that policy of
+Italian aggression which had eaten like a canker into the resources of
+the State and drawn her from her natural career of commerce and
+aggrandizement on the sea. If the political power of Venice became less,
+her political influence grew greater than ever. The statesmen of France,
+of England, and of Germany studied in the cool, grave school of her
+Senate. We need only turn to 'Othello' to find reflected the universal
+reverence for the wisdom of her policy and the order of her streets. No
+policy, however wise, could indeed avert her fall. The Turkish
+occupation of Egypt and the Portuguese discovery of a sea route round
+the Cape of Good Hope were destined to rob the Republic of that trade
+with the East which was the life-blood of its commerce. But, though the
+blow was already dealt, its effects were for a time hardly discernible.
+On the contrary, the accumulated wealth of centuries poured itself out
+in an almost riotous prodigality. A new Venice, a Venice of loftier
+palaces, of statelier colonnades, rose under Palladio and Sansovino
+along the line of its canals. In the deep peace of the sixteenth
+century, a peace unbroken even by religious struggles (for Venice was
+the one State exempt from the struggle of the Reformation), literature
+and art won their highest triumphs. The press of the Aldi gave for the
+first time the masterpieces of Greek poetry to Europe. The novels of
+Venice furnished plots for our own drama, and became the origin of
+modern fiction. Painting reached its loftiest height in Giorgione,
+Titian, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese.
+
+The greatest of colourists sprang from a world of colour. Faded, ruined
+as the city is now, the frescoes of Giorgione swept from its palace
+fronts by the sea-wind, its very gondoliers bare and ragged, the glory
+of its sunsets alone remains vivid as of old. But it is not difficult to
+restore the many-hued Venice out of which its painters sprang. There are
+two pictures by Carpaccio in the Accademia which bring back vividly its
+physical aspect. The scene of the first, the 'Miracle of the Patriarch
+of Grado' as it is called, lies on the Grand Canal immediately in front
+of the Rialto. It is the hour of sunset, and darker-edged clouds are
+beginning to fleck the golden haze of the west which still arches over
+the broken sky-line, roof and turret and bell-tower and chimneys of
+strange fashion with quaint conical tops. The canal lies dusk in the
+eventide, but the dark surface throws into relief a crowd of gondolas,
+and the lithe, glowing figures of their gondoliers. The boats themselves
+are long and narrow as now, but without the indented prora which has
+become universal; the sumptuary law of the Republic has not yet robbed
+them of colour, and instead of the present "coffin" we see canopies of
+gaily-hued stuffs supported on four light pillars. The gondolier himself
+is commonly tricked out in almost fantastic finery; red cap with long
+golden curls flowing down over the silken doublet, slashed hose, the
+light dress displaying those graceful attitudes into which the rower
+naturally falls. On the left side of the canal its white marble steps
+are crowded with figures of the nobler Venetian life; a black robe here
+or there breaking the gay variety of golden and purple and red and blue,
+while in the balcony above a white group of clergy, with golden
+candlesticks towering overhead, are gathered round the daemoniac whose
+cure forms the subject of the picture.
+
+But the most noteworthy point in it is the light it throws on the
+architectural aspect of Venice at the close of the fifteenth century. On
+the right the houses are wholly of mediaeval type, the flat
+marble-sheeted fronts pierced with trefoil-headed lights; one of them
+splendid with painted arabesques dipping at its base into the very
+waters of the canal and mounting up to enwreathe in intricate patterns
+the very chimney of the roof. The left is filled by a palace of the
+early Renascence, but the change of architectural style, though it has
+modified the tone and extent of colour, is far from dismissing it
+altogether. The flat pilasters which support the round arches of its
+base are sheeted with a delicately-tinged marble; the flower-work of
+their capitals and the mask enclosed within it are gilded like the
+continuous billet moulding which runs round in the hollow of each arch,
+while the spandrils are filled in with richer and darker marbles, each
+broken with a central medallion of gold. The use of gold indeed seems a
+"note" of the colouring of the early Renascence; a broad band of gold
+wreathes the two rolls beneath and above the cornice, and lozenges of
+gold light up the bases of the light pillars in the colonnade above. In
+another picture of Carpaccio, the 'Dismissal of the Ambassadors,' one
+sees the same principles of colouring extended to the treatment of
+interiors. The effect is obtained partly by the contrast of the lighter
+marbles with those of deeper colour or with porphyry, partly by the
+contrast of both with gold. Everywhere, whether in the earlier buildings
+of mediaeval art or in the later efforts of the Renascence, Venice seemed
+to clothe itself in robes of Oriental splendour, and to pour over
+Western art before its fall the wealth and gorgeousness of the East.
+
+Of the four artist-figures who--in the tradition of Tintoret's
+picture--support this "Golden Calf" of Venice, Tintoret himself is the
+one specially Venetian. Giorgione was of Castel Franco; Titian came from
+the mountains of Cadore; Paolo from Verona. But Jacopo Robusti, the
+"little dyer," the Tintoretto, was born, lived, and died in Venice. His
+works, rare elsewhere, crowd its churches, its palaces, its galleries.
+Its greatest art-building is the shrine of his faith. The school of San
+Rocco has rightly been styled by Mr. Ruskin "one of the three most
+precious buildings in the world"; it is the one spot where all is
+Tintoret. Few contrasts are at first sight more striking than the
+contrast between the building of the Renascence which contains his forty
+masterpieces and the great mediaeval church of the Frari which stands
+beside it. But a certain oneness after all links the two buildings
+together. The Friars had burst on the caste spirit of the middle age,
+its mere classification of brute force, with the bold recognition of
+human equality which ended in the socialism of Wyclif and the Lollards.
+Tintoret found himself facing a new caste-spirit in the Renascence, a
+classification of mankind founded on aesthetic refinement and
+intellectual power; and it is hard not to see in the greatest of his
+works a protest as energetic as theirs for the common rights of men.
+Into the grandeur of the Venice about him, her fame, her wealth, her
+splendour, none could enter more vividly. He rises to his best painting,
+as Mr. Ruskin has observed, when his subjects are noble--doges, saints,
+priests, senators clad in purple and jewels and gold. But Tintoret is
+never quite Veronese. He cannot be untrue to beauty, and the pomps and
+glories of earth are beautiful to him; but there is a beauty too in
+earth, in man himself. The brown half-naked gondolier lies stretched on
+the marble steps which the Doge in one of his finest pictures has
+ascended. It is as if he had stripped off the stately robe and the ducal
+cap, and shown the soul of Venice in the bare child of the lagoons. The
+"want of dignity" which some have censured in his scenes from the
+Gospels is in them just as it is in the Gospels themselves. Here, as
+there, the poetry lies in the strange, unearthly mingling of the
+commonest human life with the sublimest divine. In his 'Last Supper,' in
+San Giorgio Maggiore, the apostles are peasants; the low, mean life of
+the people is there, but hushed and transfigured by the tall standing
+figure of the Master who bends to give bread to the disciple by His
+side. And above and around crowd in the legions of heaven, cherubim and
+seraphim mingling their radiance with the purer radiance from the halo
+of their Lord; while amid all this conflict of celestial light the
+twinkling candles upon the board burn on, and the damsel who enters
+bearing food, bathed as she is in the very glory of heaven, is busy,
+unconscious--a serving-maid, and nothing more.
+
+The older painters had seen something undivine in man; the colossal
+mosaic, the tall unwomanly Madonna, expressed the sense of the Byzantine
+artist that to be divine was to be unhuman. The Renascence, with little
+faith in God, had faith in man, but only in the might and beauty and
+knowledge of man. With Tintoret the common life of man is ever one with
+heaven. This was the faith which he flung on "acres of canvas" as
+ungrudgingly as apostle ever did, toiling and living as apostles lived
+and toiled. This was the faith he found in Old Testament and New, in
+saintly legend or in national history. In the 'Annunciation' at San
+Rocco a great bow of angels streaming either way from the ethereal Dove
+sweeps into a ruined hut, a few mean chairs its only furniture, the mean
+plaster dropping from the bare brick pilasters; without, Joseph at work
+unheeding, amid piles of worthless timber flung here and there. So in
+the 'Adoration of the Magi' the mother wonders with a peasant's wonder
+at the jewels and gold. Again, the 'Massacre of the Innocents' is one
+wild, horror-driven rush of pure motherhood, reckless of all in its
+clutch at its babe. So in the splendour of his 'Circumcision' it is from
+the naked child that the light streams on the High Priest's brow, on the
+mighty robe of purple and gold held up by stately forms like a vast
+banner behind him. The peasant mother to whose poorest hut that first
+stir of child-life has brought a vision of angels, who has marvelled at
+the wealth of precious gifts which a babe brings to her breast, who has
+felt the sword piercing her own bosom also as danger threatened it, on
+whose mean world her child has flung a glory brighter than glory of
+earth, is the truest critic of Tintoret.
+
+What Shakespere was to the national history of England in his great
+series of historic dramas, his contemporary Tintoret was to the history
+of Venice. It was perhaps from an unconscious sense that her annals were
+really closed that the Republic began to write her history and her
+exploits in the series of paintings which covers the walls of the Ducal
+Palace. Her apotheosis is like that of the Roman Emperors; it is when
+death has fallen upon her that her artists raise her into a divine form,
+throned amid heavenly clouds and crowned by angel hands with the laurel
+wreath of victory. It is no longer St. Mark who watches over Venice, it
+is Venice herself who bends from heaven to bless boatman and senator. In
+the divine figure of the Republic with which Tintoret filled the central
+cartoon of the Great Hall every Venetian felt himself incarnate. His
+figure of 'Venice' in the Senate Hall is yet nobler; the blue sea-depths
+are cleft open, and strange ocean-shapes wave their homage and yet more
+unearthly forms dart up with tribute of coral and pearls to the feet of
+the Sea Queen as she sits in the silken state of the time with the
+divine halo around her. But if from this picture in the roof the eye
+falls suddenly on the fresco which fills the close of the room, we can
+hardly help reading the deeper comment of Tintoret on the glory of the
+State. The Sala del Consiglio is the very heart of Venice. In the double
+row of plain seats running round it sat her nobles; on the raised dais
+at the end, surrounded by the graver senators, sat her duke. One long
+fresco occupies the whole wall above the ducal seat; in the background
+the blue waters of the Lagoon with the towers and domes of Venice rising
+from them; around a framework of six bending saints; in front two
+kneeling Doges in full ducal robes with a black curtain of clouds
+between them. The clouds roll back to reveal a mighty glory, and in the
+heart of it the livid figure of a dead Christ taken from the cross. Not
+one eye of all the nobles gathered in council could have lifted itself
+from the figure of the Doge without falling on the figure of the dead
+Christ. Strange as the conception is it is hard to believe that in a
+mind so peculiarly symbolical as that of Tintoret the contrast could
+have been without a definite meaning. And if this be so, it is a meaning
+that one can hardly fail to read in the history of the time. The brief
+interval of peace and glory had passed away ere Tintoret's brush had
+ceased to toil. The victory of Lepanto had only gilded that disgraceful
+submission to the Turk which preluded the disastrous struggle in which
+her richest possessions were to be wrested from the Republic. The
+terrible plague of 1576 had carried off Titian. Twelve years after
+Titian Paul Veronese passed away. Tintoret, born almost at its opening,
+lingered till the very close of the century to see Venice sinking into
+powerlessness and infamy and decay. May not the figure of the dead
+Christ be the old man's protest against a pride in which all true
+nobleness and effort had ceased to live, and which was hurrying to so
+shameful a fall?
+
+
+
+
+THE DISTRICT VISITOR.
+
+
+It would be hard to define exactly the office and duties of the District
+Visitor. Historically she is the direct result of the Evangelical
+movement which marked the beginning of this century; the descendant of
+the "devout women not a few" who played, like Hannah More, the part of
+mothers in Israel to the Simeons and Wilberforces of the time. But the
+mere tract-distributor of fifty years ago has grown into a parochial and
+ecclesiastical force of far greater magnitude. The District Visitor of
+to-day is parson and almoner in one; the parochial censor of popular
+morals, the parochial instructor in domestic economy. She claims the
+same right as the vicar to knock at every door and obtain admission into
+every house. But once within it her scope of action is far larger than
+the parson's. To the spiritual influence of the tract or "the chapter"
+she adds the more secular and effective power of the bread-ticket. "The
+way to the heart of the poor," as she pithily puts it, "lies through
+their stomachs." Her religious exhortations are backed by scoldings and
+fussiness. She is eloquent upon rags and tatters, and severe upon dirty
+floors. She flings open the window and lectures her flock on the
+advantages of fresh air. She hurries little Johnny off to school and
+gets Sally out to service. She has a keen nose for drains and a passion
+for clean hands and faces. What worries her most is the fatalism and
+improvidence of the poor. She is full of exhortations to "lay by" for
+the rainy day, and seductive in her praises of the Penny Bank. The whole
+life of the family falls within her supervision. She knows the wages of
+the husband and the occasional jobs of the wife. She inquires what there
+is for dinner and gives wise counsels on economical cookery. She has her
+theory as to the hour when children ought to be in bed, and fetches in
+Tommy, much weeping, from the last mud-pie of sunset. Only "the master"
+himself lies outside of her rule. Between the husband and the District
+Visitor there exists a sort of armed neutrality. Her visits are
+generally paid when he is at work. If she arrives when he happens to be
+at home, he calls for "missus," and retires sheepishly to the 'Blue
+Boar.' The energetic Dorcas who fixes him in a corner gets little for
+her pains. He "supposes" that "missus" knows where and when the children
+go to school, and that "missus" may some day or other be induced to go
+to church. But the theory of the British labourer is that with his home
+or his family, their religion or their education, he has nothing
+personally to do. And so he has nothing to do with the District Visitor.
+His only demand is that she should let him alone, and the wise District
+Visitor soon learns, as parson and curate have long learnt, to let him
+alone.
+
+Like theirs, her work lies with wife and children, and as we have seen
+it is of far wider scope even here than the work of the clergy. But,
+fussy and dictatorial as she is, the District Visitor is as a rule more
+popular than the clergyman. In the first place, the parson is only doing
+a duty he is bound to do while the District Visitor is a volunteer. The
+parson, as the poor roughly say, is paid for it. Again, however
+simple-hearted and courteous he may be, he never gets very close home to
+the poor. Their life is not his life, nor their ways his ways. They do
+not understand his refinement, his delicacy about interference, his
+gentlemanly reticence, his abhorrence of gossip and scandal. They are
+accustomed to be ordered about, to rough words, to gossip over their
+neighbours. And so the District Visitor is "more in their way," as they
+tell her. She is profuse of questions, routing out a thousand little
+details that no parson would ever know. She has little of the sensitive
+pride that hinders the vicar from listening to scandal, or of the manly
+objection to "telling tales" which hurries him out of the room when
+neighbour brings charges against neighbour. She is entirely unaffected
+by his scruples against interference with the conscience or religion of
+the poor. "Where do you go to church?" and "Why don't you go to church?"
+are her first stock questions in her cross-examination of every family.
+Her exhortations at the sick-bed have a somewhat startling
+peremptoriness about them. We can hardly wonder at the wish of a poor
+patient that she were a rich one, because then she could "die in peace,
+and have nobody to come in and pray over her." What irritates the
+District Visitor in cases where she has bestowed special religious
+attention is that people when so effectively prepared for death "won't
+die." But hard, practical action such as this does not jostle against
+the feelings of the poor as it would against our own. Women especially
+forgive all because the District Visitor listens as well as talks. They
+could no more pour out their little budget of domestic troubles to the
+parson than to a being from another world. But the District Visitor is
+the recipient of all. The washerwoman stops her mangle to talk about the
+hard times and the rise of a halfpenny on the loaf. The matron next door
+turns up her sleeve to show the bruise her husband bestowed on her on
+his return from the 'Chequers.' She enters largely and minutely into the
+merits and defects of her partner's character, and protests with a
+subtle discrimination that "he's a good father when he ain't bothered
+with the children, and a good husband when he's off the drink." The old
+widow down the lane is waiting for "the lady" to write a letter for her
+to her son in Australia, and to see the "pictur," the cheap photograph
+of the grandchildren she has never seen or will see, that John has sent
+home. A girl home from her "place" wants the District Visitor to
+intercede with her mistress, and listens in all humility to a lecture on
+her giddiness and love of finery.
+
+The society in fact of the little alley is very much held together by
+the District Visitor. In her love of goody gossip she fulfils the office
+which in an Italian town is filled by the barber. She retails
+tittle-tattle for the highest ends. She relates Mrs. A.'s misdemeanour
+for the edification and correction of Mrs. B. She has the true version
+of the quarrel between Smith and his employer. She is the one person to
+whom the lane looks for accurate information as to the domestic
+relations of the two Browns, whose quarrels are the scandal of the
+neighbourhood. Her influence in fact over the poor is a strange mixture
+of good and evil, of real benevolence with an interference that saps all
+sense of self-respect, of real sympathy and womanly feeling with a good
+deal of womanly meddling, curiosity, and babble.
+
+But her influence on the parish at large is a far more delicate
+question. To the outer world a parish seems a sheer despotism. The
+parson prays, preaches, changes the order of service, distributes the
+parochial charities at his simple discretion. One of the great cries of
+the Church reformer is generally for the substitution of some
+constitutional system, some congregational council, some lay
+co-operation, for this clerical tyranny. But no one in fact feels the
+narrow limits of his power more keenly than the parson himself. As the
+old French monarchy was a despotism tempered by epigrams, so the rule of
+a parish is a despotism tempered by parochial traditions, by the
+observation of neighbouring clergymen, by the suggestions of the squire,
+by the opposition of churchwardens, by the hints and regrets of
+"Constant Attendants," by the state of the pew-letting or the ups and
+downs of the offertory, by the influences of local opinion, by the
+censorship of the District Visitor. What the assembly of his "elders" is
+to a Scotch minister, the District Visitors' meeting is to the English
+clergyman. He has to prove in the face of a standing jealousy that his
+alms have been equally distributed between district and district. His
+selection of tracts is freely criticised. Mrs. A. regrets that her poor
+people have seen so little of their vicar lately. Mrs. B. is sorry to
+report the failure of her attempts to get her sheep to church, in face
+of the new Ritualistic developement, the processions, and the surplices.
+Mrs. C., whose forte is education, declines any longer to induce mothers
+to send their children to "such" a master. The curates shudder as Mrs.
+D. laments their frequent absence from the Penny Bank, not that they can
+do any good there, but "we are always glad of the presence and sympathy
+of our clergy." The curates promise amendment of life. The vicar engages
+to look out for another schoolmaster, and be more diligent in his
+attentions to Muck Lane. A surreptitious supply of extra tickets to the
+ultra-Protestant appeases for the moment her wrath against the choir
+surplices. But the occasional screw of the monthly meeting is as nothing
+to the daily pressure applied by the individual District Visitor. At the
+bottom of every alley the vicar runs up against a parochial censor. The
+"five minutes' conversation" which the District Visitor expects as the
+reward of her benevolence becomes a perpetual trickle of advice,
+remonstrance, and even reproof. A strong-minded parson of course soon
+makes himself master of his District Visitors, but the ordinary vicar
+generally feels that his District Visitors are masters of him. The harm
+that comes of this feminine despotism is the feminine impress it leaves
+on the whole aspect of the parish. Manly preaching disappears before the
+disappointed faces the preacher encounters on Monday. A policy of
+expedients and evasions takes the place of any straightforward attempt
+to meet or denounce local evils. The vicar's time and energy are
+frittered away on a thousand little jealousies and envyings, his temper
+is tried in humouring one person and conciliating another, he learns to
+be cautious and reserved and diplomatic, to drop hints and suggestions,
+to become in a word the first District Visitor of his parish. He flies
+to his wife for protection, and finds in her the most effective buffer
+against parochial collisions. Greek meets Greek when the vicar's wife
+meets the District Visitor. But the vicar himself sinks into a parochial
+nobody, a being as sacred and as powerless as the Lama of Thibet.
+
+It was hardly to be expected that the progress of religion and
+charitable feeling should fail to raise up formidable rivals to the
+District Visitor. To the more ecclesiastical mind she is hardly
+ecclesiastical enough for the prominent part she claims in the parochial
+system. Her lace and Parisian bonnet are an abomination. She has a trick
+of being terribly Protestant, and her Protestantism is somewhat
+dictatorial. On the other hand, to the energetic organizer whose ideal
+of a parish is a well-oiled machine turning out piety and charity
+without hitches or friction she is simply a parochial impediment. She
+has no system. Her visiting days are determined by somewhat eccentric
+considerations. Her almsgiving is regulated by no principle whatever.
+She carries silly likes and dislikes into her work among the poor. She
+rustles into wrath at any attempt to introduce order into her efforts,
+and regards it as a piece of ungrateful interference. She is always
+ready with threats of resignation, with petty suspicions of
+ill-treatment, with jealousies of her fellow-workers. We can hardly
+wonder that in ecclesiastical quarters she is retreating before the
+Sister of Mercy, while in the more organized parishes she is being
+superseded by the Deaconess. The Deaconess has nothing but contempt for
+the mere "volunteer" movement in charity. She has a strong sense of
+order and discipline, and a hatred of "francs-tireurs." Above all she is
+a woman of business. She is without home or child, and her time and
+labour are arranged with military precision. She has her theory of the
+poor and of what can be done for the poor, and she rides her hobby from
+morning to night with an equal contempt for the sentimental almsgiving
+of the District Visitor and for the warnings of the political economist.
+No doubt an amazing deal of good is done, but it is done in a
+methodical fashion that is a little trying to ordinary flesh and blood.
+The parish is elaborately tabulated. The poor are grouped and ticketed.
+The charitable agencies of the parish are put in connection with the
+hospital and the workhouse. This case is referred to the dispensary,
+that to the overseer. The Deaconess prides herself on not being "taken
+in." The washerwoman finds that her "outdoor allowance" has been
+ascertained and set off against her share in the distribution of alms.
+The pious old woman who has played off the charity of the church against
+the charity of the chapel is struck off the list. The miserable creature
+who drags out existence on a bit of bread and a cup of tea is kindly but
+firmly advised to try "the house." Nothing can be wiser, nothing more
+really beneficial to the poor, than the work of the Deaconess, but it is
+a little dry and mechanical. The ill-used wife of the drunkard sighs
+after the garrulous sympathy of the District Visitor. The old gossip and
+dawdle have disappeared from the parochial charity, but with them has
+gone a good deal of the social contact, the sympathy of rich with poor,
+in which its chief virtue lay. The very vicar sighs after a little
+human imperfection and irregularity as he reads the list of sick cases
+"to be visited this morning."
+
+The one lingering touch of feminine weakness in the Deaconess comes out
+in her relations with the clergy. The Deaconess is not a "Sister"--she
+is most precise in enforcing the distinction--but she is a woman with a
+difference. She has not retired from the world, but a faint flavour of
+the nun hangs about her. She has left behind all thought of coquetry,
+but she prefers to work with a married clergyman. Her delicacy can just
+endure a celibate curate, but it shrinks aghast from a bachelor
+incumbent. We know a case where a bishop, anxious to retain a Deaconess
+in a poor parish, was privately informed that her stay would depend on
+the appointment of a married clergyman to the vacant living. On the
+other hand, a married clergyman is as great a trial to the Sister of
+Mercy as an unmarried one to the Deaconess. The "Sister" idealizes the
+priesthood as she idealizes the poor. Their poverty is a misfortune;
+their improvidence an act of faith; their superstition the last ray of
+poetic religion lingering in this world of scepticism and commonplace.
+All the regularity and sense of order which exists in the Sister's mind
+is concentrated on her own life in the sisterhood; she is punctilious
+about her "hours," and lives in a perpetual tinkle of little bells. But
+in her work among the poor she revolts from system or organization. She
+hates the workhouse. She looks upon a guardian or an overseer as an
+oppressor of the poor. She regards theories of pauperism as something
+very wicked and irreligious, and lavishes her alms with a perfect faith
+that good must come of it. In a word, she is absolutely unwise, but
+there is a poetry in her unwisdom that contrasts strangely with the
+sensible prose of the Deaconess. While the one enters in her book of
+statistics the number of uneducated children, the other is trotting
+along the street with little Tommy in one hand and little Polly in the
+other on their way to the school. She has washed their faces and tidied
+their hair, and believes she has done service to little angels. Tommy
+and Polly are very far from being angels, but both sides are the happier
+for the romantic hypothesis. There is a good deal of romance and
+sentiment in the Sister's view of her work among the poor; but it is a
+romance that nerves her to a certain grandeur of soul. A London
+clergyman in whose district the black fever had broken out could get no
+nurses among the panic-stricken neighbours. He telegraphed to a "Home,"
+and next morning he found a ladylike girl on her knees on the floor of
+the infected house, scrubbing, cleaning, putting the worn-out mother to
+bed, hushing the children, nursing quietly and thoroughly as few nurses
+could do. The fever was beaten, and the little heroine went off at the
+call of another telegram to charge another battery of death. It is this
+chivalrous poetic side that atones for the many follies of Sisterhoods;
+for the pauperism they introduce among the poor, the cliqueism of their
+inner life, the absurdities of their "holy obedience." Each of these
+charitable agencies in fact has its work to do, and does it in its own
+way. On paper there can be no doubt that the Sister of Mercy is the more
+attractive figure of the three. The incumbent of a heavy parish will
+probably turn with a smile to the more methodical labours of the
+Deaconess. But those who shrink alike from the idealism of one and the
+system of the other, who feel that the poor are neither angels nor
+wheels in a machine, and that the chief work to be done among them is
+the diffusion of kindly feeling and the drawing of class nearer to
+class, will probably prefer to either the old-fashioned District
+Visitor.
+
+
+
+
+THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD.
+
+
+To most Oxford men, indeed to the common visitor of Oxford, the town
+seems a mere offshoot of the University. Its appearance is altogether
+modern; it presents hardly any monument that can vie in antiquity with
+the venerable fronts of colleges and halls. An isolated church here and
+there tells a different tale; but the largest of its parish churches is
+best known as the church of the University, and the church of St.
+Frideswide, which might suggest even to a careless observer some idea of
+the town's greatness before University life began, is known to most
+visitors simply as Christchurch Chapel. In all outer seeming Oxford
+appears a mere assemblage of indifferent streets that have grown out of
+the needs of the University, and this impression is heightened by its
+commercial unimportance. The town has no manufacture or trade. It is not
+even, like Cambridge, a great agricultural centre. Whatever importance
+it derived from its position on the Thames has been done away with by
+the almost total cessation of river navigation. Its very soil is in
+large measure in academical hands. As a municipality it seems to exist
+only by grace or usurpation of prior University privileges. It is not
+long since Oxford gained control over its own markets or its own police.
+The peace of the town is still but partially in the hands of its
+magistrates, and the riotous student is amenable only to university
+jurisdiction. Within the memory of living men the chief magistrate of
+the city on his entrance into office was bound to swear in a humiliating
+ceremony not to violate the privileges of the great academical body
+which reigned supreme within its walls.
+
+Historically the very reverse of all this is really the case. So far is
+the University from being older than the city that Oxford had already
+seen five centuries of borough life before a student appeared within its
+streets. Instead of its prosperity being derived from its connection
+with the University, that connection has probably been its commercial
+ruin. The gradual subjection both of markets and trade to the arbitrary
+control of an ecclesiastical corporation was inevitably followed by
+their extinction. The University found Oxford a busy, prosperous
+borough, and reduced it to a cluster of lodging-houses. It found it
+among the first of English municipalities, and it so utterly crushed its
+freedom that the recovery of some of the commonest rights of
+self-government has only been brought about by recent legislation.
+Instead of the Mayor being a dependent on Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor,
+Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor have simply usurped the far older
+authority of the Mayor.
+
+The story of the struggle which ended in this usurpation is one of the
+most interesting in our municipal annals, and it is one which has left
+its mark not on the town only but on the very constitution and character
+of the conquering University. But to understand the struggle, we must
+first know something of the town itself. At the earliest moment, then,
+when its academic history can be said to open, at the arrival of the
+legist Vacarius in the reign of Stephen, Oxford stood in the first rank
+of English municipalities. In spite of antiquarian fancies, it is
+certain that no town had arisen on its site for centuries after the
+departure of the Roman legions from the isle of Britain. The little
+monastery of St. Frideswide rises in the turmoil of the eighth century
+only to fade out of sight again without giving us a glimpse of the
+borough which gathered probably beneath its walls. The first definite
+evidence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the English
+Chronicle which records its seizure by the successor of AElfred. But
+though the form of this entry shows the town to have been already
+considerable, we hear nothing more of it till the last terrible wrestle
+of England with the Dane, when its position on the borders of the
+Mercian and West-Saxon realms seems for the moment to have given it a
+political importance under AEthelred and Cnut strikingly analogous to
+that which it acquired in the Great Rebellion. Of the life of its
+burgesses in this earlier period of Oxford life we know little or
+nothing. The names of its parishes, St. Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred,
+and St. Edmund, show how early church after church gathered round the
+earlier church of St. Martin. The minster of St. Frideswide, in becoming
+the later cathedral, has brought down to our own times the memory of the
+ecclesiastical origins to which the little borough owed its existence.
+But the men themselves are dim to us. Their town-meeting, their
+Portmannimote, still lives in shadowy fashion as the Freeman's Common
+Hall; their town-mead is still Port-meadow. But it is only by later
+charters or the record of Domesday that we see them going on pilgrimage
+to the shrines of Winchester, or chaffering in their market-place, or
+judging and law-making in their busting, their merchant guild regulating
+trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax or honey or
+marshalling his troop of burghers for the king's wars, their boats
+floating down the Thames towards London and paying the toll of a hundred
+herrings in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon by the way.
+
+Of the conquest of Oxford by William the Norman we know nothing, though
+the number of its houses marked "waste" in the Survey seems to point to
+a desperate resistance. But the ruin was soon repaired. No city better
+illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of its new
+masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion
+of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. The
+architectural glory of the town in fact dates from the settlement of the
+Norman within its walls. To the west of the town rose one of the
+stateliest of English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly
+less stately Abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the
+Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St. Frideswide
+reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathedral: the
+piety of the Norman earls rebuilt almost all the parish churches of the
+city and founded within their new castle walls the church of the canons
+of St. George.
+
+But Oxford does more than illustrate this outburst of industrial effort;
+it does something towards explaining its cause. The most characteristic
+result of the Conquest was planted in the very heart of the town in the
+settlement of the Jew. Here as elsewhere the Jewry was a town within a
+town, with its own language, its own religion and law, its peculiar
+commerce, its peculiar dress. The policy of our foreign kings secured
+each Hebrew settlement from the common taxation, the common justice, the
+common obligations of Englishmen. No city bailiff could penetrate into
+the square of little streets which lay behind the present Town-hall; the
+Church itself was powerless against the synagogue that rose in haughty
+rivalry beside the cloister of St. Frideswide. The picture which Scott
+has given us in 'Ivanhoe' of Aaron of York, timid, silent, crouching
+under oppression, accurately as it represents our modern notions of the
+position of his race during the Middle Ages, is far from being borne out
+by historical fact. In England at least the attitude of the Jew is
+almost to the end an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. His
+extortion was sheltered from the common law. His bonds were kept under
+the royal seal. A royal commission visited with heavy penalties any
+outbreak of violence against these "chattels" of the king. The thunders
+of the Church broke vainly on the yellow gaberdine of the Jew. In a
+well-known story of Eadmer's the Red King actually forbids the
+conversion of a Jew to the Christian faith: it was a poor exchange which
+would have robbed him of a valuable property and given him only a
+subject.
+
+At Oxford the attitude of the Jewry towards the national religion showed
+a marked consciousness of this royal protection. Prior Philip of St.
+Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew with the odd name of
+"Deus-cum-crescat," who stood at his door as the procession of the
+saint passed by, mocking at the miracles wrought at her shrine. Halting
+and then walking firmly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as if
+with palsy and then flinging open his fingers, the mocking Jew claimed
+gifts and oblations from the crowd who flocked to St. Frideswide's on
+the ground that such recoveries of limb and strength were quite as real
+as any Frideswide had wrought. But though sickness and death, in the
+prior's story, avenge the insult to his shrine, no earthly power,
+ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to meddle with
+"Deus-cum-crescat." The feud between the priory and the Jewry went on
+unchecked for a century more to culminate in a daring act of fanaticism
+on the Ascension-day of 1268. As the usual procession of scholars and
+citizens returned from St. Frideswide's, a Jew suddenly burst from the
+group of his comrades in front of the synagogue, and snatching the
+crucifix from its bearer trod it under foot. But even in presence of
+such an outrage as this the terror of the Crown shielded the Jewry from
+any burst of popular indignation. The sentence of the king condemned the
+Jews of Oxford to erect a cross of marble on the spot where the crime
+was committed; but even this was remitted in part, and a less offensive
+place was allotted for the cross in an open plot by Merton College.
+
+With the Jewish settlement began the cultivation of physical science in
+Oxford. The Hebrew instruction, the Hebrew books which he found among
+its rabbis, were the means by which Roger Bacon penetrated to the older
+world of material research. A medical school which we find established
+there and in high repute during the twelfth century can hardly have been
+other than Jewish: in the operation for the stone, which one of the
+stories in the 'Miracles of St. Frideswide' preserves for us, we trace
+the traditional surgery which is still common in the East. But it is
+perhaps in a more purely material way that the Jewry at Oxford most
+directly influenced our academical history. There as elsewhere the Jew
+brought with him something more than the art or science which he had
+gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of
+wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet statelier abbeys, which
+followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral or
+conventual church, marks the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can
+study the earlier history of our great monastic houses without finding
+the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial activity to which we
+owe the noblest of our minsters in the loans of the Jew. The bonds of
+many a great baron, the relics of many an abbey, lay pledged for
+security in the "Star-chamber" of the Jew.
+
+His arrival at Oxford is marked by the military and ecclesiastical
+erections of its Norman earls. But a result of his presence, which bore
+more directly on the future of the town, was seen in the remarkable
+developement of its domestic architecture. To the wealth of the Jew, to
+his need of protection against sudden outbursts of popular passion, very
+probably to the greater refinement of his social life, England owes the
+introduction of stone houses. Tradition attributes almost every instance
+of the earliest stone buildings of a domestic character to the Jew; and
+where the tradition can be tested, as at Bury St. Edmunds or Lincoln, it
+has proved to be in accordance with the facts. In Oxford nearly all the
+larger dwelling-houses which were subsequently converted into halls bore
+traces of their Jewish origin in their names, such as Moysey's Hall,
+Lombards', Jacob's Hall. It is a striking proof of the superiority of
+the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian houses around them that each of
+the successive town-halls of the borough had, before their expulsion,
+been houses of Jews. Such houses were abundant in the town, not merely
+in the purely Jewish quarter on Carfax but in the lesser Jewry which was
+scattered over the parish of St. Aldate; and we can hardly doubt that
+this abundance of substantial buildings in the town was at least one of
+the causes which drew teachers and students within its walls.
+
+The same great event which flung down the Jewish settlement in the very
+heart of the English town bounded it to the west by the castle and the
+abbey of the conquerors. Oxford stood first on the line of great
+fortresses which, passing by Wallingford and Windsor to the Tower of
+London, guarded the course of the Thames. Its castellan, Robert D'Oilly,
+had followed William from Normandy and had fought by his side at Senlac.
+Oxfordshire was committed by the Conqueror to his charge; and he seems
+to have ruled it in rude, soldierly fashion, enforcing order, heaping up
+riches, tripling the taxation of the town, pillaging without scruple the
+older religious houses of the neighbourhood. It was only by ruthless
+exaction such as this that the work which William had set him to do
+could be done. Money was needed above all for the great fortress which
+held the town. The new castle rose on the eastern bank of the Thames,
+broken here into a number of small streamlets, one of which served as
+the deep moat which encircled its walls. A well marked the centre of the
+wide castle-court; to the north of it on a lofty mound rose the great
+keep; to the west the one tower which remains, the tower of St. George,
+frowned over the river and the mill. Without the walls of the fortress
+lay the Bailly, a space cleared by the merciless policy of the
+castellan, with the church of St. Peter le Bailly which still marks its
+extent.
+
+The hand of Robert D'Oilly fell as heavily on the Church as on the
+townsmen. Outside the town lay a meadow belonging to the Abbey of
+Abingdon, which seemed suitable for the exercise of the soldiers of his
+garrison. The earl was an old plunderer of the Abbey; he had wiled away
+one of its finest manors from its Abbot Athelm; but his seizure of the
+meadow beside Oxford drove the monks to despair. Night and day they
+threw themselves weeping before the altar of the two English saints
+whose names were linked to the older glories of their house. But while
+they invoked the vengeance of Dunstan and AEthelwold on their plunderer,
+the earl, fallen sick, tossed fever-smitten on his bed. At last Robert
+dreamt that he stood in a vast court, one of a crowd of nobles gathered
+round a throne whereon sate a lady passing fair. Before her knelt two
+brethren of the abbey, weeping for the loss of their mead and pointing
+out the castellan as the robber. The lady bade Robert be seized, and two
+youths hurried him away to the field itself, seated him on the ground,
+piled burning hay around him, smoked him, tossed haybands in his face,
+and set fire to his beard. The earl woke trembling at the divine
+discipline; he at once took boat for Abingdon, and restored to the monks
+the meadow he had reft from them. His terror was not satisfied by the
+restitution of his plunder, and he returned to set about the restoration
+of the ruined churches within and without the walls of Oxford. The tower
+of St. Michael, the doorway of St. Ebbe, the chancel arch of Holywell,
+the crypt and chancel of St. Peter's-in-the-East, are fragments of the
+work done by Robert and his house. But the great monument of the
+devotion of the D'Oillys rose beneath the walls of their castle.
+Robert, a nephew of the first castellan, had wedded Edith, a concubine
+of Henry I. The rest of the story we may tell in the English of Leland.
+"Edith used to walke out of Oxford Castelle with her gentlewomen to
+solace, and that oftentymes where yn a certen place in a tree, as often
+as she cam, a certain pyes used to gather to it, and ther to chattre,
+and as it were to spek on to her, Edyth much mervelyng at this matter,
+and was sumtyme sore ferid by it as by a wonder." Radulf, a canon of St.
+Frideswide's, was consulted on the marvel, and his counsel ended in the
+erection of the priory of Osney beneath the walls of the castle. The
+foundation of the D'Oillys became one of the wealthiest and largest of
+the English abbeys; but of its vast church and lordly abbot's house, the
+great quadrangle of its cloisters, the almshouses without its gate, the
+pleasant walks shaded with stately elms beside the river, not a trace
+remains. Its bells alone were saved at the Dissolution by their transfer
+to Christchurch.
+
+The military strength of the castle of the D'Oillys was tested in the
+struggle between Stephen and the Empress. Driven from London by a rising
+of its burghers at the very moment when the crown seemed within her
+grasp, Maud took refuge at Oxford. In the succeeding year Stephen found
+himself strong enough to attack his rival in her stronghold; his knights
+swam the river, fell hotly on the garrison which had sallied without the
+walls to meet them, chased them through the gates, and rushed pell-mell
+with the fugitives into the city. Houses were burnt and the Jewry
+sacked; the Jews, if tradition is to be trusted, were forced to raise
+against the castle the work that still bears the name of "Jews' Mount";
+but the strength of its walls foiled the efforts of the besiegers, and
+the attack died into a close blockade. Maud was however in Stephen's
+grasp, and neither the loss of other fortresses nor the rigour of the
+winter could tear the king from his prey. Despairing of relief the
+Empress at last resolved to break through the enemy's lines. Every
+stream was frozen and the earth covered with snow, when clad in white
+and with three knights in white garments as her attendants Maud passed
+unobserved through the outposts, crossed the Thames upon the ice, and
+made her way to Abingdon and the fortress of Wallingford.
+
+With the surrender which followed the military history of Oxford ceases
+till the Great Rebellion. Its political history had still to attain its
+highest reach in the Parliament of De Montfort. The great assemblies
+held at Oxford under Cnut, Stephen, and Henry III., are each memorable
+in their way. With the first closed the struggle between Englishman and
+Dane, with the second closed the conquest of the Norman, with the third
+began the regular progress of constitutional liberty. The position of
+the town, on the border between the England that remained to the
+West-Saxon kings and the England that had become the "Danelagh" of their
+northern assailants, had from the first pointed it out as the place
+where a union between Dane and Englishman could best be brought about.
+The first attempt was foiled by the savage treachery of AEthelred the
+Unready. The death of Swegen and the return of Cnut to Denmark left an
+opening for a reconciliation, and Englishmen and Danes gathered at
+Oxford round the king. But all hope was foiled by the assassination of
+the Lawmen of the Seven Danish Boroughs, Sigeferth and Morcar, who fell
+at a banquet by the hand of the minister Eadric, while their followers
+threw themselves into the tower of St. Frideswide and perished in the
+flames that consumed it. The overthrow of the English monarchy avenged
+the treason. But Cnut was of nobler stuff than AEthelred, and his
+conquest of the realm was followed by the gathering of a new gemote at
+Oxford to resume the work of reconciliation which Eadric had
+interrupted. Englishman and Dane agreed to live together as one people
+under Eadgar's Law, and the wise government of the King completed in the
+long years of his reign the task of national fusion. The conquest of
+William set two peoples a second time face to face upon the same soil,
+and it was again at Oxford that by his solemn acceptance and
+promulgation of the Charter of Henry I. in solemn parliament Stephen
+closed the period of military tyranny, and began the union of Norman and
+Englishman into a single people. These two great acts of national
+reconciliation were fit preludes for the work of the famous assembly
+which has received from its enemies the name of "the Mad Parliament." In
+the June of 1258 the barons met at Oxford under earl Simon de Montfort
+to commence the revolution to which we owe our national liberties.
+Followed by long trains of men in arms and sworn together by pledges of
+mutual fidelity, they wrested from Henry III. the great reforms which,
+frustrated for the moment, have become the basis of our constitutional
+system. On the "Provisions of Oxford" followed the regular
+establishment of parliamentary representation and power, of a popular
+and responsible ministry, of the principle of local self-government.
+
+From parliaments and sieges, from Jew and castellan, it is time to turn
+back to the humbler annals of the town itself. The first event that
+lifts it into historic prominence is its league with London. The
+"bargemen" of the borough seem to have already existed before the
+Conquest, and to have been closely united from the first with the more
+powerful guild, the "boatmen" or "merchants" of the capital. In both
+cases it is probable that the bodies bearing this name represented what
+in later language was known as the merchant guild of the town; the
+original association, that is, of its principal traders for purposes of
+mutual protection, of commerce, and of self-government. Royal
+recognition enables us to trace the merchant guild of Oxford from the
+time of Henry I.; even then indeed lands, islands, pastures already
+belonged to it, and amongst them the same "Port-meadow" or "Town-mead"
+so familiar to Oxford men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to Godstow,
+and which still remains the property of the freemen of the town. The
+connection between the two cities and their guilds was primarily one of
+traffic. Prior even to the Conquest, "in the time of King Eadward and
+Abbot Ordric," the channel of the river running beneath the walls of the
+Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up "that boats could scarce pass as
+far as Oxford." It was at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London
+and Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through the meadow to the
+south of his church, the two cities engaging that each barge should pay
+a toll of a hundred herrings on its passage during Lent. But the union
+soon took a constitutional form. The earliest charter of the capital
+which remains in detail is that of Henry I., and from the charter of his
+grandson we find a similar date assigned to the liberties of Oxford. The
+customs and exemptions of its burghers are granted by Henry II., "as
+ever they enjoyed them in the time of King Henry my grandfather, and in
+like manner as my citizens of London hold them." This identity of
+municipal privileges is of course common to many other boroughs, for the
+charter of London became the model for half the charters of the kingdom;
+what is peculiar to Oxford is the federal bond which in Henry II.'s time
+already linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt or contest
+about judgment in their own court the burgesses of Oxford were empowered
+to refer the matter to the decision of London, "and whatever the
+citizens of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed right."
+The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each city were assimilated
+by Henry's charter. "Of whatever matter they shall be put in plea, they
+shall deraign themselves according to the law and customs of the city of
+London and not otherwise, because they and the citizens of London are of
+one and the same custom, law, and liberty."
+
+In no two cities has municipal freedom experienced a more different fate
+than in the two that were so closely bound together. The liberties of
+London waxed greater and greater till they were lost in the general
+freedom of the realm: those of Oxford were trodden under foot till the
+city stood almost alone in its bondage among the cities of England. But
+it would have been hard for a burgher of the twelfth century, flushed
+with the pride of his new charter, or fresh from the scene of a
+coronation where he had stood side by side with the citizens of London
+and Winchester as representing one of the chief cities of the realm, to
+have dreaded any danger to the liberties of his borough from the mob of
+half-starved boys who were beginning to pour year after year into the
+town. The wealthy merchant who passed the group of shivering students
+huddled round a teacher as poor as themselves in porch and doorway, or
+dropped his alms into the cap of the mendicant scholar, could hardly
+discern that beneath rags and poverty lay a power greater than the power
+of kings, the power for which Becket had died and which bowed Henry to
+penance and humiliation. On all but its eastern side indeed the town was
+narrowly hemmed in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The
+precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the castle, bounded
+it narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away to the little
+church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The
+Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed the southern
+horizon, held his leet court in the small hamlet of Grampound beyond the
+bridge. Nor was the whole space within its walls altogether subject to
+the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry, a town within a town,
+lay isolated and exempt from the common justice or law in the very
+heart of the borough. Scores of householders, dotted over the various
+streets, were tenants of abbey or castle, and paid neither suit nor
+service to the city court. But within these narrow bounds and amidst
+these various obstacles the spirit of municipal liberty lived a life the
+more intense that it was so closely cabined and confined.
+
+It was in fact at the moment when the first Oxford students appeared
+within its walls that the city attained complete independence. The
+twelfth century, the age of the Crusades, of the rise of the scholastic
+philosophy, of the renewal of classical learning, was also the age of a
+great communal movement, that stretched from Italy along the Rhone and
+the Rhine, the Seine and the Somme, to England. The same great revival
+of individual, human life in the industrial masses of the feudal world
+that hurried half Christendom to the Holy Land, or gathered hundreds of
+eager faces round the lecture-stall of Abelard, beat back Barbarossa
+from the walls of Alessandria and nerved the burghers of Northern France
+to struggle as at Amiens for liberty. In England the same spirit took a
+milder and perhaps more practical form, from the different social and
+political conditions with which it had to deal. The quiet townships of
+Teutonic England had no traditions of a Roman past to lure them on, like
+the cities of Italy, into dreams of sovereignty. Their ruler was no
+foreign Caesar, distant enough to give a chance for resistance, but a
+king near at hand and able to enforce obedience and law. The king's
+peace shielded them from that terrible oppression of the mediaeval
+baronage which made liberty with the cities of Germany a matter of life
+or death. The peculiarity of municipal life in fact in England is that
+instead of standing apart from and in contrast with the general life
+around it the progress of the English town moved in perfect harmony with
+that of the nation at large. The earlier burgher was the freeman within
+the walls, as the peasant-ceorl was the freeman without. Freedom went
+with the possession of land in town as in country. The citizen held his
+burgher's rights by his tenure of the bit of ground on which his
+tenement stood. He was the king's free tenant, and like the rural
+tenants he owed his lord dues of money or kind. In township or manor
+alike the king's reeve gathered this rental, administered justice,
+commanded the little troop of soldiers that the spot was bound to
+furnish in time of war. The progress of municipal freedom, like that of
+national freedom, was wrought rather by the slow growth of wealth and of
+popular spirit, by the necessities of kings, by the policy of a few
+great statesmen, than by the sturdy revolts that wrested liberty from
+the French seigneur or the century of warfare that broke the power of
+the Caesars in the plain of the Po.
+
+Much indeed that Italy or France had to win by the sword was already the
+heritage of every English freeman within walls or without. The common
+assembly in which their own public affairs were discussed and decided,
+the borough-mote to which every burgher was summoned by the town-bell
+swinging out of the town-tower, had descended by traditional usage from
+the customs of the first English settlers in Britain. The close
+association of the burghers in the sworn brotherhood of the guild was a
+Teutonic custom of immemorial antiquity. Gathered at the guild supper
+round the common fire, sharing the common meal, and draining the guild
+cup, the burghers added to the tie of mere neighbourhood that of loyal
+association, of mutual counsel, of mutual aid. The regulation of
+internal trade, all lesser forms of civil jurisdiction, fell quietly
+and without a struggle into the hands of the merchant guild. The rest
+of their freedom was bought with honest cash. The sale of charters
+brought money to the royal treasury, exhausted by Norman wars, by the
+herd of mercenaries, by Crusades, by the struggle with France. The towns
+bought first the commutation of the uncertain charges to which they were
+subject at the royal will for a fixed annual rent. Their purchase of the
+right of internal justice followed. Last came the privilege of electing
+their own magistrates, of enjoying complete self-government. Oxford had
+already passed through the earlier steps of this emancipation before the
+conquest of the Norman. Her citizens assembled in their Portmannimote,
+their free self-ruling assembly. Their merchant-guild leagued with that
+of London. Their dues to the Crown are assessed in Domesday at a fixed
+sum of honey and coin. The charter of Henry II. marks the acquisition by
+Oxford, probably at a far earlier date, of judicial and commercial
+freedom. Liberty of external commerce was given by the exception of its
+citizens from toll on the king's lands; the decision of either political
+or judicial affairs was left to their borough-mote. The highest point of
+municipal independence was reached when the Charter of John substituted
+a mayor of their own choosing for the mere bailiff of the Crown.
+
+It is hard in dry constitutional details such as these to realize the
+quick pulse of popular life that stirred such a community as Oxford.
+Only a few names, of street and lane, a few hints gathered from obscure
+records, enable one to see the town of the twelfth or thirteenth
+century. The church of St. Martin in the very heart of it, at the
+"Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four roads meet, was the centre of the
+city's life. The Town-mote was held in its church yard. Justice was
+administered by mayor and bailiff sitting beneath the low shed, the
+"penniless bench" of later times, without its eastern wall. Its bell
+summoned the burghers to counsel or to arms. Around the church lay the
+trade-guilds, ranged as in some vast encampment; Spicery and Vintnery to
+the south, Fish Street falling noisily down to the Bridge, the corn
+market occupying then as now the street which led to North-gate, the
+stalls of the butchers ranged in their "Butcher-row" along the road to
+the castle. Close beneath the church to the south-east lay a nest of
+huddled lanes broken by a stately synagogue and traversed from time to
+time by the yellow gaberdine of the Jew, whose burying-place lay far
+away to the eastward on the site of the present Botanic Garden. Soldiers
+from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets; the bells of
+Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; long processions of pilgrims
+wound past the Jewry to the shrine of Saint Frideswide. It was a rough
+time, and frays were common enough,--now the sack of a Jew's house, now
+burgher drawing knife on burgher, now an outbreak of the young student
+lads, who grew every day in numbers and audacity. But as yet the town
+seemed well in hand. The clang of the city bell called every citizen to
+his door, the summons of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in
+hand and banners flying to enforce the king's peace. Order and freedom
+seemed absolutely secure, and there was no sign which threatened that
+century of disorder, of academical and ecclesiastical usurpation, which
+humbled the municipal freedom of Oxford to the dust.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS.
+
+
+For those who possess historic tastes, slender purses, and an exemption
+from Alpine mania, few holidays are more pleasant than a lounge along
+the Loire. There is always something refreshing in the companionship of
+a fine river, and whatever one may think of its summer sands Loire
+through the spring and the autumn is a very fine river indeed. There is,
+besides, the pleasantest variety of scenery as one wanders along from
+the sombre granite of Brittany to the volcanic cinder-heaps of Auvergne.
+There is the picturesque contrast between the vast dull corn-flats to
+the north of the great river and the vines and acacias to the south.
+There is the same contrast in an ethnological point of view, for one is
+traversing the watershed that parts two different races, and enough of
+difference still remains in dialect and manner to sever the Acquitanian
+from the Frank. And historically every day brings one across some
+castle or abbey or town that has been hitherto a mere name in the pages
+of Lingard or Sismondi, but which one actual glimpse changes into a
+living fact. There are few tracts of country indeed where the historical
+interest ranges equally over so long a space of time. The river which
+was the "revolutionary torrent" of Carrier had been the highway for the
+Northmen into the heart of Carolingian France. Saumur blends the tenth
+century and the sixteenth together in the names of Gelduin and Du
+Plessis; Chinon brings into contact the age of the Plantagenets and the
+age of Joan of Arc. From the mysterious dolmen and the legendary well to
+the stone that marks the fusillade of the heroes of La Vendee there is a
+continuous chain of historic event in these central provinces. Every
+land has its pet periods of history, and the brilliant chapters of M.
+Michelet are hardly needed to tell us how thoroughly France identifies
+the splendour and infamy of the Renascence with the Loire. Blois,
+Amboise, Chenonceaux, embody still in the magnificence of their ruin the
+very spirit of Catherine de Medicis, of Francis, of Diana of Poitiers.
+To Englishmen the relics of an earlier period have naturally a greater
+charm. Nothing clears one's ideas about the character of the Angevin
+rule, the rule of Henry II. or Richard or John, so thoroughly as a
+stroll through Anjou.
+
+There the Angevin Counts are as vivid, as real, as the Angevin Kings are
+on English soil unreal and dim. Hardly a building in his realm preserves
+the memory of Henry II.; Richard is a mere visitor to English shores;
+Beaulieu alone and the graven tomb at Worcester enable us to realize
+John. But along the Loire these Angevin rulers meet us in river-bank and
+castle and bridge and town. Their names are familiar words still through
+the length and breadth of the land. At Angers men show you the vast
+hospital of Henry II., while the suburb around it is the creation of his
+son. And not only do the men come vividly before us, but they come
+before us in another and a fresher light. To us they are strangers and
+foreigners, stern administrators, exactors of treasure, tyrants to whose
+tyranny, sometimes just and sometimes unjust, England was destined to
+owe her freedom. But for Anjou the period of their rule was the period
+of a peace and fame and splendour that never came back save in the
+shadowy resurrection under King Rene. Her soil is covered with
+monuments of their munificence, of their genuine care for the land of
+their race. Nine-tenths of her great churches, in the stern grandeur of
+their vaulting, their massive pillars, their capitals breaking into the
+exquisite foliage of the close of the century, witness to the pious
+liberality of sovereigns who in England were the oppressors of the
+Church, and who when doomed to endow a religious house in their realm
+did it by turning its inhabitants out of an already existing one and
+giving it simply a new name. As one walks along the famous Levee, the
+gigantic embankment along the Loire by which Henry saved the valley from
+inundation, or as one looks at his hospitals at Angers or Le Mans, it is
+hard not to feel a sympathy and admiration for the man from whom one
+shrinks coldly under the Martyrdom at Canterbury. There is a French side
+to the character of these Kings which, though English historians have
+disregarded it, is worth regarding if only because it really gave the
+tone to their whole life and rule. But it is a side which can only be
+understood when we study these Angevins in Anjou.
+
+To the English traveller Angers is in point of historic interest without
+a rival among the towns of France. Rouen indeed is the cradle of our
+Norman dynasty as Angers of our Plantagenet dynasty; but the Rouen of
+the Dukes has almost vanished while Angers remains the Angers of the
+Counts. The physiognomy of the place--if we may venture to use the
+term--has been singularly preserved. Few towns have it is true suffered
+more from the destructive frenzy of the Revolution; gay boulevards have
+replaced "the flinty ribs of this contemptuous city," the walls which
+play their part in Shakspere's 'King John'; the noblest of its abbeys
+has been swept away to make room for a Prefecture; four churches were
+demolished at a blow to be replaced by the dreariest of squares; the
+tombs of its later dukes have disappeared from the Cathedral. In spite
+however of new faubourgs, new bridges, and new squares, Angers still
+retains the impress of the middle ages; its steep and narrow streets,
+its dark tortuous alleys, the fantastic woodwork of its houses, the
+sombre grimness of the slate-rock out of which the city is built, defy
+even the gay audacity of Imperialist prefects to modernize them. One
+climbs up from the busy quay along the Mayenne into a city which is
+still the city of the Counts. From Geoffry Greygown to John Lackland
+there is hardly one who has not left his name stamped on church or
+cloister or bridge or hospital. The stern tower of St. Aubin recalls in
+its founder Geoffry himself; the nave of St. Maurice, the choir of St.
+Martin's, the walls of Roncevray, the bridge over Mayenne, proclaim the
+restless activity of Fulc Nerra; Geoffry Martel rests beneath the ruins
+of St. Nicholas on its height across the river; beyond the walls to the
+south is the site of the burial place of Fulc Rechin; one can tread the
+very palace halls to which Geoffry Plantagenet led home his English
+bride; the suburb of Roncevray, studded with buildings of an exquisite
+beauty, is almost the creation of Henry Fitz-Empress and his sons.
+
+But, apart from its historical interest, Angers is a mine of treasure to
+the archaeologist or the artist. In the beauty and character of its site
+it strongly resembles Le Mans. The river Mayenne comes down from the
+north, from its junction with the Sarthe, edged on either side by low
+ranges of _coteaux_ which approaching it nearly on the west leave room
+along its eastern bank for vast level flats of marshy meadow land, cut
+through by white roads and long poplar-rows--meadows which in reality
+represent the old river-bed in some remote geological age before it had
+shrunk to its present channel. Below Angers the valley widens, and as
+the Mayenne coils away to Ponts de Ce it throws out on either side broad
+flats, rich in grass and golden flowers, and scored with rhines as
+straight and choked with water-weeds as the rhines of Somersetshire. It
+is across these lower meadows, from the base of the abbey walls of St.
+Nicholas, that one gets the finest view of Angers, the colossal mass of
+its castle, the two delicate towers of the Cathedral rising sharp
+against the sky, the stern belfry of St. Aubin. Angers stands in fact on
+a huge block of slate-rock, thrown forward from one of the higher
+plateaux which edge the marshy meadows, and closing up to the river in
+what was once a cliff as abrupt as that of Le Mans. Pleasant boulevards
+curve away in a huge semicircle from the river, and between these
+boulevards and the Mayenne lies the dark old town pierced by steep lanes
+and break-neck alleys. On the highest point of the block and approached
+by the steepest lane of all stands the Cathedral of St. Maurice, the
+tall slender towers of its western front and the fantastic row of
+statues which fill the arcade between them contrasting picturesquely
+enough with the bare grandeur of its interior, where the broad, low
+vaulting reminds us that we are on the architectural border of northern
+and southern Europe. St. Maurice is in the strictest sense the mother
+church of the town. M. Michelet has with singular lucklessness selected
+Angers as the type of a feudal city; with the one exception of the
+Castle of St. Louis it is absolutely without a trace of the feudal
+impress. Up to the Revolution it remained the most ecclesiastical of
+French towns. Christianity found the small Roman borough covering little
+more than the space on the height above the river afterwards occupied by
+the Cathedral precincts, planted its church in the midst of it,
+buttressed it to north and south with the great Merovingian Abbeys of
+St. Aubin and St. Serge, and linked them together by a chain of inferior
+foundations that entirely covered its eastern side. From the river on
+the south to the river on the north Angers lay ringed in by a belt of
+priories and churches and abbeys. Of the greatest of these, that of St.
+Aubin, only one huge tower remains, but fragments of it are still to be
+seen embedded in the buildings of the Prefecture--above all a
+Romanesque arcade, fretted with tangled imagery and apocalyptic figures
+of the richest work of the eleventh century. The Abbey of St. Serge
+still stands to the north of Angers; its vast gardens and fishponds
+turned into the public gardens of the town, its church spacious and
+beautiful with a noble choir that may perhaps recall the munificence of
+Geoffry Martel. Of the rivals of these two great houses two only remain.
+Portions of the Carolingian Church of St. Martin, built by the wife of
+Emperor Louis le Debonnaire, are now in use as a tobacco warehouse; the
+pretty ruin of Toussaint, not at all unlike our own Tintern, stands well
+cared for in the gardens of the Museum.
+
+But, interesting as these relics are, it is not ecclesiastical Angers
+that the English traveller instinctively looks for; it is the Angers of
+the Counts, the birthplace of the Plantagenets. It is only in their own
+capital indeed that we fully understand our Angevin Kings, that we fully
+realize that they were Angevins. To an English schoolboy Henry II. is
+little more than the murderer of Beket and the friend of Fair Rosamund.
+Even an English student finds it hard after all the labours of
+Professor Stubbs to lay hold of either Henry or his sons. In spite of
+their versatile ability and of the mark which they have left on our
+judicature, our municipal liberty, our political constitution, the first
+three Plantagenets are to most of us little more than dim shapes of
+strange manner and speech, hurrying to their island realm to extort
+money, to enforce good government, and then hurrying back to Anjou. But
+there is hardly a boy in the streets of Angers to whom the name of Henry
+Fitz-Empress is strange, who could not point to the ruins of his bridge
+or the halls of his Hospice, or tell of the great "Levee" by which the
+most beneficent of Angevin Counts saved the farmers' fields from the
+floods of the Loire. Strangers in England, the three first Plantagenets
+are at home in the sunny fields along the Mayenne. The history of Anjou,
+the character of the Counts, their forefathers, are the keys to the
+subtle policy, to the strangely-mingled temper of Henry and his sons.
+The countless robber-holds of the Angevin noblesse must have done much
+towards the steady resolve with which they bridled feudalism in their
+island realm. The crowd of ecclesiastical foundations that ringed in
+their Angevin capital hardly failed to embitter, if not to suggest,
+their jealousy of the Church.
+
+Of the monuments of the Counts which illustrate our own history, the
+noblest, in spite of its name, is the Bishop's Palace to the north of
+the Cathedral. The residence of the Bishop was undoubtedly at first the
+residence of the Counts, and the tradition which places its transfer as
+far back as the days of Ingelger can hardly be traced to any earlier
+source than the local annalist of the seventeenth century. It is at
+least probable that the occupation of the Palace by the Bishop did not
+take place till after the erection of the Castle on the site of the
+original Eveche in the time of St. Louis; and this is confirmed by the
+fact that the well-known description of Angers by Ralph de Diceto places
+the Comitial Palace of the twelfth century in the north-east quarter of
+the town--on the exact site, that is, of the present episcopal
+residence. But if this identification be correct, there is no building
+in the town which can compare with it in historical interest for
+Englishmen. The chapel beneath, originally perhaps simply the
+substructure of the building, dates from the close of the eleventh
+century; the fine hall above, with its grand row of windows looking out
+upon the court, from the earlier half of the twelfth. It was to the
+building as it actually stands therefore that Geoffry Plantagenet must
+have brought home his English bride, Maud the Empress, the daughter of
+our Henry I., along the narrow streets hung with gorgeous tapestries and
+filled with long trains of priests and burghers. To Angers that day
+represented the triumphant close of a hundred years' struggle with
+Normandy; to England it gave the line of its Plantagenet Kings.
+
+The proudest monuments of the sovereigns who sprang from this match, our
+Henry the Second and his sons, lie not in Angers itself but in the
+suburb across the river. The suburb seems to have originated in the
+chapel of Roncevray, the Roman-like masonry of whose exterior may date
+back as far as Fulc Nerra in the tenth century. But its real importance
+dates from Henry Fitz-Empress. It is characteristic of the temper and
+policy of the first of our Plantagenet Kings that in Anjou, as in
+England, no religious house claimed him as its founder. Here indeed the
+Papal sentence on his part in the murder of Archbishop Thomas compelled
+him to resort to the ridiculous trick of turning the canons out of
+Waltham to enable him to refound it as a priory of his own without cost
+to the royal exchequer. But in his Continental dominions he did not even
+stoop to the pretence of such a foundation. No abbey figured among the
+costly buildings with which he adorned his birthplace Le Mans. It was as
+if in direct opposition to the purely monastic feeling that he devoted
+his wealth to the erection of the Hospitals at Angers and Le Mans. It is
+a relief, as we have said--a relief which one can only get here--to see
+the softer side of Henry's nature represented in works of mercy and
+industrial utility. The bridge of Angers, like the bridges of Tours and
+Saumur, dates back to the first of the Count-Kings. Henry seems to have
+been the Pontifex Maximus of his day, while his care for the means of
+industrial communication points to that silent growth of the new
+mercantile class which the rule of the Angevins did so much to foster.
+But a memorial of him, hardly less universal, is the Lazar-house or
+hospital. One of the few poetic legends that break the stern story of
+the Angevins is the tale of Count Fulc the Good, how, journeying along
+Loire-side towards Tours, he saw just as the towers of St. Martin's rose
+before him in the distance a leper full of sores, who put by his offer
+of alms and desired to be borne to the sacred city. Amid the jibes of
+his courtiers the good count lifted him in his arms and carried him
+along bank and bridge. As they entered the town the leper vanished from
+their sight, and men told how Fulc had borne an angel unawares. Little
+of his ancestor's tenderness or poetry lingered in the practical
+utilitarian mind of Henry Fitz-Empress; but the simple Hospice in the
+fields by Le Mans or the grand Hospital of St. John in the suburb of
+Angers displayed an enlightened care for the physical condition of his
+people which is all the more striking that in him and his sons it had
+probably little connection with the usual motives of religious charity
+which made such works popular in the middle ages, but, like the rest of
+their administrative system, was a pure anticipation of modern feeling.
+There are few buildings more complete or more beautiful in their
+completeness than the Hospital of St. John; the vast hall with its
+double row of slender pillars, the exquisite chapel, trembling in the
+pure grace of its details on the very verge of Romanesque, the engaged
+shafts of the graceful cloister. The erection of these buildings
+probably went on through the whole reigns of our three Angevin
+sovereigns, but the sterner and simpler hall called the Lazar-house
+beside with its three aisles and noble sweep of wide arches is clearly
+of the date of Henry alone. It was occupied when I visited it some years
+ago as a brewery, but never was brewer more courteous, more genuinely
+archaeological, than its occupant. Throughout these central provinces
+indeed, as throughout Normandy, the enlightened efforts of the
+Government have awakened a respect for and pride in their national
+monuments which extends even to the poorest of the population. Few
+buildings of a really high class are now left to ruin and desecration as
+they were twenty years ago; unfortunately their rescue from the
+destruction of time is too often followed by the more destructive attack
+of the restorer. And in almost every town of any provincial importance
+one may obtain what in England it is simply ridiculous to ask for, a
+really intelligent history of the place itself and a fair description of
+the objects of interest which it contains.
+
+The broken ruins of the Pont de Treilles, the one low tower above the
+river Mayenne which remains of the walls around the suburb of
+Roncevray, show the price which Henry and his sons set on these costly
+buildings. They have a special interest in Angevin history, for they
+were the last legacy of the Counts to their capital. Across the river,
+at the south-west corner of the town itself, stands the huge fortress
+that commemorates the close of their rule, the castle begun by the
+French conqueror, Philip Augustus, and completed by his descendant St.
+Louis. From the wide flats below Angers, where Mayenne rolls lazily on
+to the Loire, one looks up awed at the colossal mass which seems to
+dwarf even the minster beside it, at its dark curtains, its fosse
+trenched deep in the rock, its huge bastions chequered with iron-like
+bands of slate and unrelieved by art of sculptor or architect. It is as
+if the conquerors of the Angevins had been driven to express in this
+huge monument the very temper of the men from whom they reft Anjou,
+their grand, repulsive isolation, their dark pitiless power.
+
+It is a relief to turn from this castle to that southern fortress which
+the Counts made their home. A glance at the flat tame expanse of Anjou
+northward of the Loire explains at once why its sovereigns made their
+favourite sojourn in the fairer districts south of the river. There are
+few drives more enjoyable than a drive along the Vienne to the royal
+retreat of Chinon. The country is rich and noble, deep in grass and
+maize and corn, with meadows set in low broad hedgerows, and bare
+scratchy vineyards along the slopes. The road is lined with acacias,
+Tennyson's "milk-white bloom" hanging from their tender feathery boughs,
+and here beneath the hot sun of the South the acacia is no mere garden
+shrub but one of the finest and most graceful of trees. Everywhere along
+the broad sunlit river of Vienne nature is rich and lavish, and nowhere
+richer or more lavish than where, towering high on the scarped face of
+its own grey cliff above the street of brown little houses edged
+narrowly in between river and rock, stands the favourite home of our
+Angevin Kings.
+
+It is only in one or two points amidst the great mass of stately
+buildings which is known as the castle of Chinon that their hand can be
+traced now. The base of the Tour du Moulay, where tradition says the
+Grand Master of the Templars was imprisoned by Philippe le Bel, is a
+fine vault of twelfth-century date, which may have been the work of
+Henry II., and can hardly be later than his sons. But something of its
+original character as a luxurious retreat lingers still in the purpose
+to which the ground within the walls has been devoted; it serves as a
+garden for the townsfolk of Chinon, and is full of pleasant shadowy
+walks and flowers, and gay with children's games and laughter. And
+whatever else may have changed, the same rich landscape lies around that
+Henry must have looked on when he rode here to die, as we look on it now
+from the deep recessed windows of the later hall where Joan of Arc stood
+before the disguised Dauphin. Beneath is the broad bright Vienne coming
+down in great gleaming curves from Isle-Bouchard, and the pretty spire
+of St. Maurice, Henry's own handiwork perhaps, soaring lightly out of
+the tangled little town at our feet. Beyond, broken with copse and
+hedgerow and cleft by the white road to Loudun, rise the slopes of
+Pavilly leading the eye round, as it may have led the dying eye of the
+king, to the dim blue reaches of the west where Fontevraud awaited him.
+
+No scene harmonizes more thoroughly than Fontevraud with the thoughts
+which its name suggests. A shallow valley which strikes away southward
+through a break in the long cliff-wall along the Loire narrows as it
+advances into a sterner gorge, rough with forest greenery. The grey
+escarpments of rock that jut from the sides of this gorge are pierced
+here and there with the peculiar cellars and cave-dwellings of the
+country, and a few rude huts which dot their base gather as the road
+mounts steeply through this wilder scenery into a little lane of
+cottages that forms the village of Fontevraud. But it is almost suddenly
+that the great abbey church round which the village grew up stands out
+in one colossal mass from the western hill-slope; and in its very
+solitude and the rock-like grandeur of its vast nave, its noble apse,
+its low central tower, there is something that marks it as a fit
+resting-place for kings. Nor does its present use as a prison-chapel jar
+much on those who have grown familiar with the temper of the early
+Plantagenets. At the moment of my visit the choir of convicts were
+practising the music of a mass in the eastern portion of the church,
+which with the transepts has now been set apart for divine service, and
+the wild grandeur of the music, unrelieved by any treble, seemed to
+express in a way that nothing else could the spirit of the Angevins.
+"From the devil we come, and to the devil we go," said Richard. In spite
+of the luckless restoration to which their effigies have been
+submitted--and no sight makes us long more ardently that the "Let it
+alone" of Lord Melbourne had wandered from politics into archaeology--it
+is still easy to read in the faces of the two King-Counts the secret of
+their policy and their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait.
+Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic
+eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine
+somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is
+marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be
+in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in both there is the same
+look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's is a face of cultivation
+and refinement, but there is a strange severity in the small delicate
+mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted king which realizes
+the verdict of his day. To an historical student one glance at these
+faces as they lie here beneath the vault raised by their ancestor, the
+fifth Count Fulc, tells more than pages of chronicles; but Fontevraud is
+far from being of interest to historians alone. In its architectural
+detail, in its Romanesque work, and in its strangely beautiful
+cinque-cento revival of the Romanesque, in its cloister and Glastonbury
+kitchen, it is a grand study for the artist or the archaeologist; but
+these are merits which it shares with other French minsters. To an
+English visitor it will ever find its chief attraction in the Tombs of
+the Kings.
+
+
+
+
+CAPRI.
+
+I.
+
+
+We can hardly wonder at the love of artists for Capri, for of all the
+winter resorts of the South Capri is beyond question the most beautiful.
+Physically indeed it is little more than a block of limestone which has
+been broken off by some natural convulsion from the promontory of
+Sorrento, and changed by the strait of blue water which now parts it
+from the mainland into the first of a chain of islands which stretch
+across the Bay of Naples. But the same forces which severed it from the
+continent have given a grandeur and variety to its scenery which
+contrast in a strangely picturesque way with the narrowness of its
+bounds. There are few coast-lines which can rival in sublimity the
+coast-line around Capri; the cliff wall of sheer rock broken only twice
+by little dips which serve as landing-places for the island, and
+pierced at its base by "blue grottoes" and "green grottoes" which have
+become famous from the strange play of light within their depths. The
+reader of Hans Andersen's 'Improvisatore' will remember one of these
+caverns as the scene of its closing adventure; but strange as Andersen's
+description is it is far less strange than the scene which he sketches,
+the deep blue light which turns the rocks into turquoise and emerald or
+the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in
+their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above
+the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern
+headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the
+South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to
+the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff wall hardly inferior in
+grandeur to that of the coast runs across the midst of the island,
+dividing it into an upper and a lower plateau, with no means of
+communication save the famous rock stairs, the "Steps of Anacapri," now,
+alas, replaced by a daring road which has been driven along the face of
+the cliff.
+
+The upper plateau of Anacapri is cold and without any striking points
+of scenery, but its huge mass serves as an admirable shelter to Capri
+below, and it is with Capri that the ordinary visitor is alone
+concerned. The first thing which strikes one is the smallness of the
+place. The whole island is only some four miles long and a mile and a
+half across, and, as we have seen, a good half of this space is
+practically inaccessible. But it is just the diminutive size of Capri
+which becomes one of its greatest charms. It would be hard in fact to
+find any part of the world where so much and such varied beauty is
+packed into so small a space. The visitor who lands from Naples or
+Sorrento mounts steeply up the slopes of a grand amphitheatre flanked on
+either side by the cliffs of St. Michael and Anacapri to the white line
+of the village on the central ridge with the strange Saracenic domes of
+its church lifted weirdly against the sky. Over the crest of this ridge
+a counter valley falls as steeply to the south till it reaches a plateau
+crowned with the grey mass of a convent, and then plunges over crag and
+cliff back again to the sea. To the east of these central valleys a
+steep rise of ground ends in the ruins of the Palace of Tiberius and the
+great headland which fronts the headland of Sorrento. Everywhere the
+forms of the scenery are on the largest and boldest scale. The great
+conical Tors, Tuoro-grande and Tuoro-piccolo, the boldly scarped rock of
+Castiglione with its crown of mediaeval towers, lead up the eye to the
+huge cliff wall of Anacapri, where, a thousand feet above, the white
+hermitage on Monte Solaro glimmers out fitfully from its screen of
+cloud.
+
+Among the broken heights to the east or in the two central valleys there
+are scores of different walks and a hundred different nooks, and each
+walk and nook has its own independent charm. Steeps clothed from top to
+bottom in the thick greenery of the lemon or orange; sudden breaks like
+that of Metromania where a blue strip of sea seems to have been
+cunningly let in among the rocks; backgrounds of tumbled limestone;
+slopes dusty grey with wild cactus; thickets of delightful greenery
+where one lies hidden in the dense scrub of myrtle and arbutus;
+olive-yards creeping thriftily up the hill-sides and over the cliffs and
+down every slope and into every rock-corner where the Caprese
+peasant-farmer can find footing; homesteads of grey stone with low domed
+Oriental roofs on which women sit spinning, their figures etched out
+against the sky; gardens where the writhed fig-trees stand barely
+waiting for the foliage of the spring; nooks amidst broken boulders and
+vast fingers of rock with the dark mass of the carouba flinging its
+shade over them; heights from which one looks suddenly northward and
+southward over a hundred miles of sea--this is Capri. The sea is
+everywhere. At one turn its waters go flashing away unbroken by a single
+sail towards the far-off African coast where the Caprese boatmen are
+coral-fishing through the hot summer months; at another the eye ranges
+over the tumbled mountain masses above Amalfi to the dim sweep of coast
+where the haze hides the temples of Paestum; at another the Bay of Naples
+opens suddenly before us, Vesuvius and the blue deep of Castellamare and
+the white city-line along the coast seen with a strange witchery across
+twenty miles of clear air.
+
+The island is a paradise of silence for those to whom silence is a
+delight. One wanders about in the vineyards without a sound save the
+call of the vinedressers; one lies on the cliff and hears a thousand
+feet below the dreamy wash of the sea. There is hardly the cry of a bird
+to break the spell; even the girls who meet one with a smile on the
+hill-side smile quietly and gravely in the Southern fashion as they pass
+by. It is the stillest place that the sun shines on; but with all its
+stillness it is far from being a home of boredom. There are in fact few
+places in the world so full of interest. The artist finds a world of
+"studies" in its rifts and cliff walls, in the sailor groups along its
+beach and the Greek faces of the girls in its vineyards. The geologist
+reads the secret of the past in its abruptly tilted strata, in a deposit
+of volcanic ash, in the fossils and bones which Augustus set the fashion
+of collecting before geology was thought of. The historian and the
+archaeologist have a yet wider field. Capri is a perfect treasure-house
+of Roman remains, and though in later remains the island is far poorer,
+the ruins of mediaeval castles crown the heights of Castiglione and
+Anacapri, and the mother church of San Costanzo with its central dome
+supported on marble shafts from the ruins hard by is an early specimen
+of Sicilian or Southern Italian architecture. Perhaps the most
+remarkable touch of the South is seen in the low stone vaults which form
+the roofs of all the older houses of Capri, and whose upper surface
+serves as a terrace where the women gather in the sunshine in a way
+which brings home to one oddly the recollections of Syria and
+Jerusalem.
+
+For loungers of a steadily uninquiring order however there are plenty of
+amusements of a lighter sort. It is hard to spend a day more pleasantly
+than in boating beneath the cliffs of Capri, bobbing for "cardinals,"
+cruising round the huge masses of the Faraglioni as they rise like
+giants out of the sea, dipping in and out of the little grottoes which
+stud the coast. On land there are climbs around headlands and
+"rock-work" for the adventurous, easy little walks with exquisite peeps
+of sea and cliff for the idle, sunny little nooks where the dreamer can
+lie buried in myrtle and arbutus. The life around one, simple as it is,
+has the colour and picturesqueness of the South. The girl faces which
+meet one on the hill-side are faces such as artists love. In the church
+the little children play about among the groups of mothers with orange
+kerchiefs on their heads and heavy silver rings on every finger. Strange
+processions with cowled faces and crucifix and banners borne aloft sweep
+into the piazza and up the church steps. Old women with Sibyl-like faces
+sit spinning at their doors. Maidens with water-jars on their heads
+which might have been dug up at Pompeii; priests with broad hats and
+huge cloaks; sailors with blue shirts and red girdles; urchins who
+almost instinctively cry for a "soldo" and break into the Tarantella if
+you look at them; quiet, grave, farmer-peasants with the Phrygian cap;
+coral-fishers fresh from the African coast with tales of storm and
+tempest and the Madonna's help--make up group after group of Caprese
+life as one looks idly on, a life not specially truthful perhaps or
+moral or high-minded, but sunny and pleasant and pretty enough, and
+harmonizing in its own genial way with the sunshine and beauty around.
+
+Its rough inns, its want of English doctors, the difficulties of
+communication with the mainland from which its residents are utterly cut
+off in bad weather, make Capri an unsuitable resort for invalids in
+spite of a climate which if inferior to that of Catania is distinctly
+superior to that of either San Remo or Mentone. Those who remember the
+Riviera with no little gratitude may still shrink from the memory of its
+sharp transitions of temperature, the chill shade into which one plunges
+from the direct heat of its sun-rays, and the bitter cold of its winter
+nights. Out of the sun indeed the air of the Riviera towards Christmas
+is generally keen, and a cloudy day with an east wind sweeping along
+the shore will bring back unpleasant reminiscences of the England one
+has left behind. Capri is no hotter perhaps in the sunshine, but it is
+distinctly warmer in the shade. The wraps and shawls which are a
+necessity of health at San Remo or Mentone are far less necessary in the
+South. One may live frankly in the open air in a way which would hardly
+be safe elsewhere, and it is just life in the open air which is most
+beneficial to invalids. It is this natural warmth which tells on the
+temperature of the nights. The sudden change at sunset which is the
+terror of the Riviera is far less perceptible at Capri; indeed the
+average night temperature is but two degrees lower than that of the day.
+The air too is singularly pure and invigorating, for the village and its
+hotels stand some four or five hundred feet above the sea, and there are
+some fairly level and accessible walks along the hill-sides. At San
+Remo, or in the eastern bay of Mentone, one purchases shelter by living
+in a teacup and the only chance of exercise lies in climbing up its
+sides. But it must fairly be owned that these advantages are accompanied
+by some very serious drawbacks. If Capri is fairly free from the bitter
+east wind of the Riviera, the Riviera is free from the stifling
+scirocco of Capri. In the autumn and in the earlier part of the winter
+this is sometimes almost intolerable. The wind blows straight from
+Africa, hot, dusty, and oppressive in a strange and almost indescribable
+way. All the peculiar clearness of the atmosphere disappears; one sees
+every feature of the landscape as one would see them through a raw
+autumn day in England. The presence of fine dust in the air--the dust of
+the African desert to which this effect is said to be owing--may perhaps
+account for the peculiar oppressiveness of the scirocco; certain it is,
+that after two days of it every nerve in the body seems set ajar.
+Luckily however it only lasts for three days and dies down into rain as
+the wind veers round to the west.
+
+
+
+
+CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS.
+
+II.
+
+
+Among the many charms of Capri must be counted the number and interest
+of its Roman remains. The whole island is in fact a vast Roman wreck.
+Hill-side and valley are filled with a mass of _debris_ that brings home
+to one in a way which no detailed description can do the scale of the
+buildings with which it was crowded. At either landing-place huge
+substructures stretch away beneath the waves, the relics of moles, of
+arsenals, and of docks; a network of roads may still be traced which
+linked together the ruins of Imperial villas; every garden is watered
+from Roman cisterns; dig where he will, the excavator is rewarded by the
+discovery of vases, of urns, of fragments of sculpture, of mosaic
+pavements, of precious marbles. Every peasant has a handful of Roman
+coins to part with for a few soldi. The churches of the island and the
+royal palaces of the mainland are full of costly columns which have been
+removed from the ruins of Capri; and the Museum of Naples is largely
+indebted for its treasures of statuary to the researches made here at
+the close of the last century. The main archaeological interest of the
+island however lies not in fragments or "finds" such as these but in the
+huge masses of ruin which lie scattered so thickly over it. The Pharos
+which guided the Alexandrian corn-ships to Puteoli stands shattered on
+one of its headlands. The waves dash idly against an enormous fragment
+of the sea-baths of Tiberius. His palace-citadel still looks from the
+summit of a mighty cliff across the Straits of Sorrento. The Stairs of
+Anacapri, which in the absence of any other date to which it is possible
+to assign them, we are forced to refer to the same period of
+construction, hewn as they were to the height of a thousand feet in the
+solid rock, vied in boldness with almost any achievement of Roman
+engineering. The smallness of the space--for the lower part of the
+island within which these relics are crowded is little more than a mile
+and a half either way--adds to the sense of wonder which the size and
+number of these creations excite. All that remains too, it must be
+remembered, is the work of but a few years. There is no ground for
+believing that anything of importance was added after the death of
+Tiberius or begun before the old age of Augustus.
+
+We catch glimpses indeed of the history of the island long before its
+purchase by the aged Emperor. Its commanding position at the mouth of
+the great Campanian bay raised it into importance at a very early
+period. The Teleboes whom tradition named as its first inhabitants have
+left only a trace of their existence in the verse of Vergil; but in the
+great strife between the Hellenic and Tyrrhenian races for the
+commercial monopoly of Southern Italy Capri, like Sorrento, was seized
+as a naval station by the Etruscans, whose alliance with the Phoenicians
+in their common war against the Greeks may perhaps explain the vague
+legends of a Semitic settlement on the island. The Hellenic victory of
+Cumae however settled the fate of Capri, as it settled the fate of the
+coast; and the island fell to the lot of Neapolis when the "new city"
+rose in the midst of the bay to which it has since given its name. The
+most enduring trace of its Greek colonization is to be found in the
+Greek type of countenance and form which endears Capri to artists; but
+like the cities of the mainland it preserved its Greek manners and
+speech long after it had passed with Neapolis into the grasp of Rome.
+The greater proportion of its inscriptions, even when dating from the
+Imperial period, are in Greek. Up to the time of Augustus however it
+played in Roman story but the humble part of lighting the great
+corn-fleet from Egypt through the Strait of Sorrento. Statius tells us
+of the joy with which the sailors welcomed the glare of its Pharos as
+they neared the land, the greeting they addressed to its cliff, while on
+the other hand they poured their libations to the goddess whose white
+temple gleamed from the headland of Sorrento. Its higher destinies began
+with a chance visit of Augustus when age and weakness had driven him to
+seek a summer retreat on the Campanian shore. A happy omen, the revival
+of a withered ilex at his landing, as well as the temperate air of the
+place itself so charmed the Emperor that he forced Naples to accept
+Ischia in exchange for it, and chose it as his favourite refuge from the
+excessive heat. Suetonius gives a pleasant gossiping picture of the old
+man's life in his short holidays there, his delight in idly listening
+to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played
+knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept
+through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the
+fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug
+up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of
+his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed
+him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness
+the indefatigable energy which marked the man was seen in the buildings
+with which Suetonius tells us he furnished the island, and the progress
+of which after his death may possibly have been the inducement which
+drew his successor to its shores.
+
+It is with the name of the second Caesar rather than of the first that
+Capri is destined to be associated. While the jests and Greek verses of
+Augustus are forgotten the terrible invective of Tacitus and the sarcasm
+of Juvenal recall the cruelties and the terrors of Tiberius. His
+retirement to Capri, although as we have seen in form but a carrying out
+of the purpose of Augustus, marks a distinct stage in the developement
+of the Empire. For ten years not Rome, but an obscure island off the
+Campanian coast became the centre of the government of the world. The
+spell of the Eternal City was suddenly broken, and it was never
+thoroughly restored. If Milan, Ravenna, Nicomedia, Constantinople,
+became afterwards her rivals or supplanters as the seat of empire, it
+was because Capri had led the way. For the first time too, as Dean
+Merivale has pointed out, the world was made to see in its bare
+nakedness the fact that it had a single master. All the disguises which
+Augustus had flung around his personal rule were cast aside; Senate,
+Consuls, the Roman people itself, were left contemptuously behind. A
+single senator, a few knights, a little group of Greek scholars, were
+all that accompanied Tiberius to Capri. The figure of the Emperor stood
+out bare and alone on its solitary rock. But, great as the change really
+was, the skill of Tacitus has thrown over the retirement of Tiberius a
+character of strangeness which, as we have said, hardly belongs to it.
+What in fact distinguished it from the retirement of Augustus to the
+same spot was simply the persistence of his successor in never returning
+to Rome.
+
+Capri in itself was nothing but a part of the great pleasure resort
+which Roman luxury created round the shores of the Bay of Naples. From
+its cliffs the Emperor could see through the pure, transparent air the
+villas and watering-places which fringed the coast from Misenum to
+Sorrentum, the groves and lakes of Baisae, the white line of Neapolis,
+Pompeii, and Herculaneum, the blue sea dappled with the painted sails of
+pleasure-boats as they wooed the summer air. The whole bay was a Roman
+Brighton, and the withdrawal of Tiberius from the world was much the
+same sort of withdrawal from the world as the seclusion of George IV. at
+the Pavilion. Of the viler pleasures which are commonly attributed to
+him in his retreat we need say nothing, for it is only by ingenious
+conjectures that any of the remains at Capri have been made to confirm
+them. The taste of Tiberius was as coarse as the taste of his fellow
+Romans, and the scenes which were common at Baiae--the drunkards
+wandering along the shore, the songs of the revellers, the
+drinking-toasts of the sailors, the boats with their gaudy cargo of
+noisy girls, the coarse jokes of the bathers among the rose-leaves which
+strewed the water--were probably as common in the revels at Capri. But
+for the more revolting details of the old man's life we have only the
+scandal of Rome to rely on, and scandal was easily quickened by the veil
+of solitude and secrecy which Tiberius flung around his retirement. The
+tale of his cruelties, of the fisherman tortured for having climbed the
+cliff which the Emperor deemed inaccessible, of criminals dashed into
+the sea down the steep of the "Salto di Timberio," rest on the gossip of
+Suetonius alone. But in all this mass of gossip there is little that
+throws any real light on the character of the island or of the buildings
+whose remains excite our interest there; we can only guess at its far
+wilder condition from a story which shows us the Imperial litter fairly
+brought to a standstill by the thick brushwood, and the wrath of
+Tiberius venting itself in a ruthless thrashing of the centurion who
+served as his guide. The story is curious because it shows that, in
+spite of the rapidity with which the Imperial work had been carried on,
+the island when Tiberius arrived was still in many parts hidden with
+rough and impenetrable scrub, and that the wonderful series of hanging
+gardens which turned almost the whole of it into a vast pleasure-ground
+was mainly of his own creation.
+
+It would of course be impossible to pass in review the numberless sites
+where either chance or research has detected traces of the work of
+Tiberius. "Duodecim villarum nominibus et molibus insederat," says
+Tacitus; and the sites of the twelve villas may in most cases be
+identified to-day, some basking in the sunshine by the shore, some
+placed in sheltered nooks where the cool sea-breeze tempered the summer
+heat, the grander ones crowning the summit of the hills. We can trace
+the docks of the Roman island, the grottoes still paved with mosaic
+which marks them as the scene of Imperial picnics, the terraces and
+arbours of the hanging gardens with the rock boldly cut away to make
+room for them, the system of roads which linked the villas together, the
+cisterns and aqueducts which supplied water, the buildings for the
+slaves of the household and for the legionaries who guarded the shore,
+the cemetery for the dead, the shrines and pavilions scattered about on
+the heights, and a small Mithraic temple hidden in the loveliest of the
+Caprese ravines. If we restore in fancy the scene to which these ruins
+belonged, fill the gardens with the fountains and statues whose
+fragments lie profusely scattered about, rear again the porticoes of
+marble columns, and restore the frescoes whose traces exist on the
+ruined walls, we shall form some inadequate conception of the luxury
+and grace which Tiberius flung around his retirement.
+
+By a singular piece of good fortune the one great wreck which towers
+above all the rest is the spot with which the Emperor himself is
+historically associated. Through the nine terrible months during which
+the conspiracy of Sejanus was in progress, he never left, Seutonius
+tells us, the Villa Jovis; and the villa still stands on a huge
+promontory, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, from which his eye could
+watch every galley that brought its news of good or ill from Misenum and
+from Rome. Few landscapes can compare in extent or beauty with the view
+on which Tiberius looked. The promontory of Massa lies across the blue
+reach of sea, almost as it seems under one's hand yet really a few miles
+off, its northern side falling in brown slopes dotted with white villas
+to the orange gardens of Sorrento, its southern rushing steeply down to
+the hidden bays of Amalfi and Salerno. To the right the distant line of
+Apennines, broken by the shadowy dip that marks the plain of Paestum,
+runs southward in a dim succession of capes and headlands; to the left
+the sunny bow of the Bay of Naples gleams clear and distinct through
+the brilliant air till Procida and Ischia lead the eye round again to
+the cliff of Anacapri with the busy little Marina at its feet. A tiny
+chapel in charge of a hermit now crowns the plateau which forms the
+highest point of the Villa Jovis; on three sides of the height the cliff
+falls in a sheer descent of more than a thousand feet to the sea, on the
+fourth the terrace walls are formed of fragments of brick and marble
+which recall the hanging gardens that swept downwards to the plain. The
+Villa itself lies partly hewn out of the sides of the steep rock, partly
+supported by a vast series of substructures whose arched vaults served
+as water-reservoirs and baths for the service of the house.
+
+In strength of site and in the character of its defences the palace was
+strictly what Pliny calls it, "Tiberii principis arx," but this was no
+special characteristic of the Villa Jovis. "Scias non villas esse sed
+castra," said Seneca of the luxurious villas on the coast of Baiae; it
+was as if the soldier element of the Roman nature broke out even amidst
+the patrician's idlest repose in the choice of a military site and the
+warlike strength of the buildings he erected on it. Within however life
+seems to have been luxurious enough. The ruins of a theatre, whose
+ground-plan remains perfect, show that Tiberius combined more elegant
+relaxations with the coarse revels which are laid to his charge. Each
+passage is paved with mosaic, the walls still retain in patches their
+coloured stucco, and here and there in the small chambers we find traces
+of the designs which adorned them. It is however rather by the vast
+extent and huge size of the substructures than by the remains of the
+house itself that we can estimate the grandeur of the Villa Jovis; for
+here, as at the Baths near the Marina, the ruins have served as quarries
+for chapels and forts and every farmhouse in the neighbourhood. The
+Baths stand only second in grandeur to the Villa itself. The fall of the
+cliff has torn down fragment after fragment, but the half of an immense
+calidarium still stands like an apse fronting the sea, a grand sea-wall
+juts out into the waves, and at its base, like a great ship of stone in
+the midst of the water, lies still unbroken after eighteen hundred years
+the sea-bath itself. The roof has fallen in, the pillars are tumbled
+from its front, but the high walls, though undermined by the tide, still
+stand erect. On the cliff above, a Roman fortress which must have
+resembled Burgh Castle in form and which has since served as a modern
+fort seems to have protected the Baths and the vast series of gardens
+which occupied the whole of the lower ground beneath the Stair of
+Anacapri, and whose boundary wall remains in a series of some twenty
+almost perfect arches.
+
+The importance of these remains has long been understood by the
+archaeologists of Italy, and something of their ruin may be attributed to
+the extensive excavations made by the Government of Naples a hundred
+years ago. But far more of the terrible wreck is owing to the ravages of
+time. With the death of Tiberius Capri sinks suddenly out of sight. Its
+name had in fact become associated with infamy, and there is no real
+ground for supposing that it remained as the pleasure-isle of later
+Emperors. But the vast buildings can only slowly have mouldered into
+decay; we find its Pharos flaming under Domitian, and the exile of two
+Roman princesses, Crispina and Lucilla, by Commodus, proves that
+Imperial villas still remained to shelter them. It is to the period
+which immediately follows the residence of Tiberius that we may refer
+one of the most curious among the existing monuments of Capri, the
+Mithraic temple of Metromania. Its situation is singularly picturesque.
+A stair cut in the rock leads steeply down a rift in the magnificent
+cliffs to the mouth of a little cave, once shrouded by a portico whose
+fragments lie scattered among the cacti and wild thyme. Within the walls
+are lined with the characteristic reticulated Roman masonry, broken
+chambers and doorways on either side are blocked by _debris_, and two
+semicircular platforms rise one within the other to a niche in the
+furthest recess of the cave where the bas-relief of the Eastern deity
+which is now deposited in the Museum at Naples was found by the
+excavators. Beside it lay a stone with a Greek inscription so strangely
+pathetic that it must tell its own tale:--"Welcome into Hades, O noble
+deities--dwellers in the Stygian land--welcome me too, most pitiful of
+men, ravished from life by no judgment of the Fates, but by a death
+sudden, violent, the death-stroke of a wrath defiant of justice. But now
+I stood in the first rank beside my lord! now he has left me and my
+parents alike of hope! I am not fifteen, I have not reached my twentieth
+year, and--wretched I--I see no more the light! My name is Hypatus; but
+I pray my brother and my parents to weep for wretched ones no more."
+Conjecture has coupled this wail of a strange fate with the human
+sacrifices offered at the shrine of Mithras, and has seen in Hypatus a
+slave and favourite of Tiberius devoted by his master to the Eastern
+deity; but there is no ground whatever for either of the guesses.
+
+Such as it is however the death-cry of Hypatus alone breaks the later
+silence of Capri. The introduction of Christianity was marked by the
+rise of the mother church of San Costanzo, whose inner columns of giallo
+antico and cipollino were torn from the ruins of the Baths hard by, and
+from this moment we may trace the progress of destruction in each
+monument of the new faith. The sacrarium of San Stefano is paved with a
+mosaic of marbles from the Villa Jovis, and the chapel of St. Michael is
+erected out of a Roman building which occupied its site. We do not know
+when the island ceased to form a part of the Imperial estate, but the
+evidence of a charter of Gregory II., overlooked by the local
+topographers, shows that at the opening of the eighth century the
+"Insula Capreae cum monasterio St. Stefani" had passed like the rest of
+the Imperial property in the South to become part of the demesne of the
+Roman See. The change may have some relation to the subjection of Capri
+to the spiritual jurisdiction of Sorrento, of whose bishopric it formed
+a part till its own institution as a separate see in the tenth century.
+The name of the "Bishop of Quails," which attached itself to the prelate
+of Capri, points humorously to the chief source of his episcopal income,
+the revenue derived from the capture of the flocks of these birds who
+settle on the island in their two annual migrations in May and
+September. From the close of the ninth century, when the island passed
+out of the hands of Amalfi, it has followed the fortunes of the
+mainland; its ruin seems to have been completed by the raids of the
+Saracens from their neighbouring settlement on the coast of Lucania; and
+the two mediaeval fortresses of Anacapri and Castiglione which bear the
+name of Barbarossa simply indicate that the Algerian pirate of the
+sixteenth century was the most dreaded of the long train of Moslem
+marauders who had made Capri their prey through the middle ages. Every
+raid and every fortress removed some monument of the Roman rule, and the
+fight which wrested the isle from Sir Hudson Lowe at the beginning of
+the present century put the coping-stone on the work of destruction.
+But in spite of the ravages of time and of man enough has been left to
+give a special archaeological interest to the little rock-refuge of
+Capri.
+
+
+
+
+THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS.
+
+III.
+
+
+The Caprese peasant has never had time to get the fact of winter fairly
+into his head. The cold comes year after year, but it comes in a brief
+and fitful way that sets our northern conceptions at defiance. The
+stranger who flies for refuge to the shores of the little island in
+November may find himself in a blaze of almost tropical sunshine. If a
+fortnight of dull weather at the opening of December raises hopes of an
+English Christmas they are likely to be swept away by a return of the
+summer glory for a month. Far away over the sea the crests of the
+Abruzzi range lift themselves white against the sky, but February has
+almost come before winter arrives, fitful, windy, rainy, but seldom
+cold, even when the mistral, so dreaded on the Riviera, comes sweeping
+down from the north. March ought by Caprese experience to be the
+difficult month; but "Marzo e pazzo," say the loungers in the little
+piazza, and sometimes even the "madness" of March takes the form of a
+delicious lunacy of unbroken sunshine. Corn is already rippling under
+the olives, leaf-buds run like little jets of green light along the
+brown vine-stems, the grey weird fig-branches are dotted with fruit,
+women are spinning again on the housetops, boys are playing with the
+birds they have caught in the myrtles, the bright shore across the bay
+is veiled in a summer haze, and winter is gone. It is hard to provide in
+English fashion against such a winter as this, and the Capri fisherman
+prefers to regard it as something abnormal, exceptional, to be borne
+with "pazienza" and a shrug of the shoulders. When the storm-wind blows
+he lounges in the sunny corner of the Piazza; when the rain comes he
+smokes at home or mends his nets under the picture of the Madonna and
+the Bambino; when the cold comes he sits passive and numbed till the
+cold goes. But he knows that the cold will go, and that the rain will
+pass, and that peace will settle down again on the sunny bay; and so
+instead of making a fuss about winter he looks on it as a casual little
+parenthesis in the business of life, intensely disagreeable but luckily
+brief. He sees no poetry in it, no beauty of bare wold and folded mist;
+he hears no music in it like the music of tinkling icicles so dear to
+Cowper's heart. Christmas itself isn't much of a festa in the South, and
+has none of the mystery and home pathos which makes it dear to
+Englishmen. There is the "presepio" in the church, there is the
+procession of the Wise Men at Epiphany-tide, but the only real break to
+the winter's dulness is the Feast of the Coral-Fishers.
+
+What with the poverty of the island and its big families it is hard to
+see how Capri could get along at all if it were not for the extra
+employment and earnings which are afforded by the coral-fishery off the
+African coast. Some hundred or two hundred young fellows leave the
+island every spring to embark at Torre del Greco in a detachment of the
+great coral fleet which musters at that port, at Genoa, or at Leghorn;
+and the Sunday before they start--generally one of the last Sundays in
+January--serves as the Feast of the Coral-Fishers. Long before daybreak
+the banging of big crackers rouses the island from its slumbers, and
+high mass is hardly over when a procession of strange picturesqueness
+streams out of church into the sunshine. At its head come the
+"Daughters of Mary," some mere little trots, some girls of sixteen, but
+all clad in white, with garlands of flowers over their veils and girdles
+of red or blue. Behind come the fishermen, young sailor-boys followed by
+rough grizzled elders bearing candles like the girls before them, and
+then the village Brotherhood, fishers too, but clad in strange garments
+of grey, with black hoods covering their faces, and leaving nothing but
+the bright good-humoured eye to guide one under this sepulchral figure
+to the Giovanni or Beppino who was cracking jokes yesterday till the
+Blue Grotto rang again. Then beneath a great canopy upborne by the four
+elder fishers of the island, vested in gowns of "samite, mystic,
+wonderful"--somewhat like a doctor of music's gown in our unpoetic
+land--comes the Madonna herself, "La Madonna di Carmela," with a crown
+of gold on her head and a silver fish dangling from her fingers. It is
+the Madonna of Carmel who disputes with San Costanzo, the Saint of the
+mother-church below, the spiritual dominion of Capri. If he is the
+"Protector" of the island, she is its "Protectress." The older and
+graver sort indeed are faithful to their bishop-saint, and the loyalty
+of a vinedresser in the piazza remains unshaken even by the splendour
+of the procession. "Yes, signore!" he replies to a sceptical Englishman
+who presses him hard with the glory of "the Protectress," "yes, signore,
+the Madonna is great for the fisher-folk; she gives them fish. But fish
+are poor things after all and bring little money. It is San Costanzo who
+gives us the wine, the good red wine which is the wealth of the island.
+And so this winter feast of the fishermen is a poor little thing beside
+our festa of San Costanzo in the May-time. For the image of our
+Protector is all of silver, and sometimes the bishop comes over from
+Sorrento and walks behind it, and we go all the way through the
+vineyards, and he blesses them, and then at nightfall we have
+'bombi'--not such as those of the Madonna," he adds with a quiet shrug
+of the shoulders, "but great bombi and great fireworks at the cost of
+the Municipio."
+
+On the other hand, all the girls go with the fisher-folk in their love
+of the Madonna. "Ah yes, signore," laughs a maiden whose Greek face
+might have served Pheidias for a model, "San Costanzo is our protector,
+but he is old and the Madonna is young, so young and so pretty, signore,
+and she is _my_ protectress." A fisherman backs up the feminine logic
+by a gird at the silver image which is evidently the strong point of the
+opposite party. The little commune is said to have borrowed a sum of
+money on the security of this work of art, and the fisherman is
+correspondingly scornful. "San Costanzo owes much, many danari, signore;
+and it is said," he whispers roguishly, "that if they don't pay pretty
+soon his creditors at Naples will send him to prison for the debt of the
+Municipio." But the Madonna has her troubles as well as the Saint. Her
+hair which has been dyed for the occasion has unhappily turned salmon
+colour by mistake; but the blunder has no sort of effect on the
+enthusiasm of her worshippers; on the canons who follow her in stiff
+copes, shouting lustily, or on the maidens and matrons who bring up the
+rear. Slowly the procession winds its way through the little town, now
+lengthening into a line of twinkling tapers as it passes through the
+narrow alleys which serve for streets, now widening out again on the
+hill-sides where the orange kerchiefs and silver ornaments of the
+Caprese women glow and flash into a grand background of colour in the
+sun. And then comes evening and benediction, and the fireworks, without
+which the procession would go for nothing, catherine-wheels spinning in
+the Piazza, and big crackers bursting amidst a chorus of pretty outcries
+of terror and delight.
+
+Delight however ends with the festa, and the parting of the morning is a
+strange contrast in its sadness with this Sunday joy. The truth is that
+coral-fishing is a slavery to which nothing but sheer poverty drives the
+fishermen. From April to October their life is a life of ceaseless
+drudgery. Packed in a small boat without a deck, with no food but
+biscuit and foul water, touching land only at intervals of a month, and
+often deprived of sleep for days together through shortness of hands,
+the coral-fishers are exposed to a constant brutality from the masters
+of their vessels which is too horrible to bear description. Measured too
+by our English notions the pay of the men seems miserably inadequate to
+the toil and suffering which they undergo. Enough however remains to
+tempt the best of the Caprese fishermen to sea. Even a boy's earnings
+will pay his mother's rent. For a young man it is the only mode in which
+he can hope to gather a sum sufficient for marriage and his start in
+life. The early marriages so common at Naples and along the adjoining
+coast are unknown at Capri, where a girl seldom weds before twenty and
+where the poorest peasant refuses the hand of his daughter to a suitor
+who cannot furnish a wedding settlement of some twenty pounds. Even with
+the modern rise of wages it is almost impossible for a lover to
+accumulate such a sum from the produce of his ordinary toil, and his one
+resource is the coral-fishery.
+
+The toil and suffering of the summer are soon forgotten when the young
+fisherman returns and adds his earnings to the little store of former
+years. When the store is complete, the ceremonial of a Caprese betrothal
+begins with "the embassy," as it is termed, of his mother to the parents
+of the future bride. Clad in her best array and holding in her hand 'the
+favourite nosegay of the island, a branch of sweet basil sprinkled with
+cinnamon powder and with a rose-coloured carnation in the midst of it,
+the old fishwife makes her way through the dark lanes to the vaulted
+room where her friends await her with a charming air of ignorance as to
+the errand on which she comes. Half an hour passes in diplomatic fence,
+in chat over the weather, the crops, or the price of macaroni, till at a
+given signal the girl herself leaves the room, and the "ambassadress"
+breaks out in praise of her good looks, her industry, and her good
+repute. The parents retort by praise of the young fisherman, compliments
+pass quickly into business, and a vow of eternal friendship between the
+families is sworn over a bottle of rosolio. The priest is soon called in
+and the lovers are formally betrothed for six months, a ceremony which
+was followed in times past by a new appearance of the ambassadress with
+the customary offering of trinkets from the lover to his promised
+spouse. This old Caprese custom has disappeared, but the girls still
+pride themselves on the number and value of their ornaments--the
+"spadella," or stiletto which binds the elaborately braided mass of
+their ebon hair; the circular gold earrings with inner circles of
+pearls; the gold chain or lacetta, worn fold upon fold round the neck;
+the bunch of gold talismans suspended on the breast; the profusion of
+heavy silver rings which load every finger. The Sunday after her
+betrothal when she appears at High Mass in all her finery is the
+proudest day of a Capri girl's life; but love has few of the tenderer
+incidents which make its poetry in the North. There is no "lover's lane"
+in Capri, for a maiden may not walk with her betrothed save in presence
+of witnesses; and a kiss before marriage is, as "Auld Robin Gray" calls
+it, "a sin" to which no modest girl stoops. The future husband is in
+fact busy with less romantic matters; it is his business to provide bed
+and bedding, table and chairs, drawers and looking-glass, and above all
+a dozen gaudy prints from Naples of the Madonna and the favourite saints
+of the day. The bride provides the rest, and on the eve of the marriage
+the families meet once more to take an inventory of her contributions
+which remain her own property till her death. The morning's sun streams
+in upon the lovers as they kneel at the close of mass before the priest
+in San Stefano; all the boyhood of Capri is waiting outside to pelt the
+bridal train with "confetti" as it hurries amidst blushes and laughter
+across the Piazza; a dinner of macaroni and the island wine ends in a
+universal "tarantella," there is a final walk round the village at the
+close of the dance, and the coral-fisher reaps the prize of his toil as
+he leads his bride to her home.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+  LONDON:
+  PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS,
+  STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
+
+
+
+
+  THIRTY-FOURTH THOUSAND.
+
+  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
+
+  BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN
+
+  _With Coloured Maps, Genealogical Tables, and Chronological
+  Annals. Crown 8vo., price 8s. 6d._
+
+  MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON.
+
+"I thank you very much for sending me Mr. Green's book. I have read it
+with genuine admiration. It bears marks of great ability in many ways.
+There is a vast amount of research, great skill in handling and
+arranging the facts, a very pleasant and taking style, but chief of all
+a remarkable grasp of the subject--many-sided as it is in its unity and
+integrity--which makes it a work of real historical genius. I am sure I
+wish it all the success it deserves; and you are quite at liberty to
+give my opinion about it to any one who asks it."--_Extract from Letter
+of W. Stubbs, M.A., Regius Professor of Modern History, Oxford._
+
+"I think Mr. Green's 'Short History of the English People' admirably
+suited for students in the Universities and for the higher classes in
+schools. The object of the book, that of combining the history of the
+people with the history of the kingdom, is most successfully carried
+out, especially in the earlier part. It gives, I think, in the main, a
+true and accurate picture of the general course of English history. It
+displays throughout a firm hold on the subject, and a singularly wide
+range of thought and sympathy. As a composition, too, the book is clear,
+forcible, and brilliant. It is the most truly original book of the kind
+that I ever saw."--_Extract from Letter of Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L.,
+LL.D., &c. &c._
+
+"Rightly taken, the History of England is one of the grandest human
+stories, and Mr. Green has so taken it that his book should delight the
+general reader quite as much as it delights the student."--_Extract from
+Letter of Professor Henry Morley._
+
+"To say that Mr. Green's book is better than those which have preceded
+it, would be to convey a very inadequate impression of its merits. It
+stands alone as the one general history of the country, for the sake of
+which all others, if young and old are wise, will be speedily and surely
+set aside. It is perhaps the highest praise that can be given to it,
+that it is impossible to discover whether it was intended for the young
+or for the old. The size and general look of the book, its vividness of
+narration, and its avoidance of abstruse argument would place it among
+school-books; but its fresh and original views, and its general
+historical power, are only to be appreciated by those who have tried
+their own hand at writing history, and who know the enormous
+difficulties of the task."--MR. SAMUEL R. GARDINER _in the Academy._
+
+"We know of no record of the whole drama of English history to be
+compared with it. We know of none that is so distinctly a work of
+genius.... Mr. Green's volume is a really wonderful production. There is
+a freshness and originality breathing from one end to the other, a charm
+of style, and a power, both narrative and descriptive, which lifts it
+altogether out of the class of books to which at first sight it might
+seem to belong. The range too of subject, and the capacity which the
+writer shows of dealing with so many different sides of English history,
+witness to powers of no common order.... The Early History is admirably
+done; the clear and full narrative which Mr. Green is able to put
+together of the earliest days of the English people is a wonderful
+contrast to the confused and proe-scientific talk so common in most of
+the books which it is to be hoped that Mr. Green's volume will
+displace."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+
+
+    +----------------------------------------------------+
+    |            Transcriber's Note:                     |
+    |                                                    |
+    | Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the       |
+    | original document have been preserved.             |
+    |                                                    |
+    | Typographical errors corrected in the text:        |
+    |                                                    |
+    | Page   62  Crecy changed to Crecy                  |
+    | Page  184  Crecy changed to Crecy                  |
+    | Page  186  Liege changed to Liege                  |
+    | Page  230  enterprize changed to enterprise        |
+    | Page  237  liker changed to like                   |
+    | Page  243  Eigi changed to Rigi                    |
+    | Page  291  adminstrative changed to administrative |
+    | Page  302  immedietely changed to immediately      |
+    | Page  374  connexion changed to connection         |
+    | Page  404  Apennine changed to Apennines           |
+    | Page  419  maccaroni changed to macaroni           |
+    | Page  421  maccaroni changed to macaroni           |
+    +----------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Stray Studies from England and Italy, by
+John Richard Greene
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