LITMIR.BIZ

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and probably had still in mind and in nostrils when he wrote the scent of the fish-cellars and the fish-offal which to this day go largely towards making up the bouquet of most of the smaller Cornish fishing-ports.

      Still, as in Leland’s time, goes the little brook, running down from the tremendously hilly background “into the Severn Se betwixt 2 Hylles,” and still the harbour remains, from the mariner’s point of view, “a pore Havenet, of no certaine Salvegarde,” winding, as it does, in the shape of a double S, between gigantic rocky headlands, and most difficult of approach or exit. It will thus be guessed, and guessed rightly, that, although poor as a harbour, Boscastle is a place of commanding picturesqueness. Its Cornish atmosphere, too, confers upon it another distinction. In the romantic mind of the novelist the district is “pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the waters, the bloom, of dark purple cast, that seems to exhale from the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the twilight of a night vision.”

      But it is not always like that at Boscastle. There are days of bright sunshine, when the sea is in colour something between a sapphire and an opal, when the cliffs reveal unexpected hues and the sands of Trebarrow—the “Trebarwith Strand” of the novel—shine golden, in contrast with the dark slaty headland of Willapark Point—the “cliff without a name” where Elfride, the owner of that pair of blue eyes, saves the prig, Henry Knight, by the singular expedient none other than the author of the Wessex novels would have conceived. The average reader may perhaps be allowed his opinion that it had been better for Elfride had she saved her underclothing and allowed Knight to drop from his precarious hand-hold on the cliff’s edge into the sea below waiting for him.

      The town of “St. Launce’s” mentioned in the book is of course Launceston, and “Endelstow” is the village of St. Juliot’s.

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX

      But, to have done with these preliminary triflings in the marches of the Hardy Country, let us consider in what way the Londoner may best come to a thoroughgoing exploration of this storied land. On all counts—by force of easy access, and by its ancient circumstance—Winchester is indicated. “The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, afore-time capital of Wessex,” stands at the gate of this literary country and hard by the confines of the New Forest, to which by tradition and history it is closely akin. At one in feeling with that hoary hunting preserve, it is itself modern in but little measure, and loves to linger upon memories of the past. Here the Saxon and the Norman are not merely historical counters with which, to the ideas of unimaginative students, the dusty game of history was played; but do, by the presence of their works, make the least impressionable feel that they were creatures of blood and fibre, strong to rule, to make and unmake nations; groping darkly in superstition, without doubt, but perceiving the light, distant and dim, and striving with all the strength of their strong natures to win toward it. They fought as sturdily for Christianity as they had done for paganism, and were not—it really seems necessary to insist upon it—creatures of parchment and the wax of which seals are sealed; but lived as human a life as ourselves, and loved and hated, and despaired and triumphed, just as keenly, nay, with perhaps even greater keenness, than any Edwardian liege of this twentieth century. Still runs the Itchen, bright and clear as when the Romans came and the Saxons followed, to be in their turn ousted in governance by the Norman-French; and still, although this England of ours be yet overlorded by the relics of Norman domination, it is the broad-shouldered, level-headed, stolid, and long-suffering Saxon who peoples Winchester and Wessex, and in him that ancient kingdom, although unknown to modern political geographies, survives.

      Sweet and gracious city, I love you for old association and for your intrinsic worth, alike. Changing, although ever so slowly, with the years, your developments make, not as elsewhere, for black bitterness of heart and vain regrets for the things of sweet savour and good report, swept away into the dustheaps and potsherds of “progress,” but for content and happy assent. In these later years, for example, it has occurred to Winchester to honour Alfred, the great Wessex king, warrior and lawgiver, born at Wantage, warring over all southern England, ruling at Winchester, dead at Faringdon in A.D. 901, and buried here in a spot still shown, in the long desecrated Hyde Abbey. That is a noble, heroic-sized bronze effigy of him, erected in 1901, to commemorate the millenary of this hero-king, and one in thorough keeping with Winchester’s ancient dignity.

      Near by, where its imposing bulk is reared up against the giant background of St. Giles’s Hill, you may still see and hear the Itchen rushing furiously under the old City Mill by Soke Bridge, where dusty millers have ground corn for a thousand years. Released from the mill-leat, the stream regains its placid temper and wanders suavely along daisy-dappled meads to St. Cross, and so at last to lose itself in Southampton Water; still fishful all the way, as in the days of old Izaak Walton himself, who lies in the south transept of the cathedral yonder, and has a sanctified place in these liberal-minded times in a tabernacle of the restored reredos, in the glorious company of the apostles, the saints, kings and bishops, who form a very mixed concourse in that remarkable structure. I fear that if they were all brought to life and introduced to one another, they would not form the happiest of families.

      But that’s as may be. From this vantage-point by King Alfred’s statue—or “Ælfred,” as the inscription learnedly has it, to the confusion of the unscholarly—you may see, as described in Tess, “the sloping High Street, from the West Gateway to the mediæval cross, and from the mediæval cross to the bridge”; but you can only make out a portion of the squat, low Norman tower of the cathedral itself; for here, instead of being beckoned afar by lofty spire, you have to seek that ancient fane, and, diligently inquiring, at last find it. Best it is to come to the cathedral by way of that aforesaid mediæval cross in the High Street, hard by the curiously overhanging penthouse shops, and under a low-browed entry, which, to the astonishment of the stranger, instead of conducting into a backyard, brings one into the cathedral close, a lovely parklike space of trim lawns, ancient lime avenues, and noble old residences of cathedral dignitaries with nothing to do and exceedingly good salaries for doing it. It has been remarked, with an innocent, childlike wonder, that some sixty per cent. of the famous men whose careers are included in the Dictionary of National Biography were the sons of clergymen. No wonder at all, I take it, in this, for it is merely nature’s compensating swing of the pendulum. The parents, living a life of repose, have been storing up energy for the use of their offspring, and thus our greatest empire-makers and men of action, and some of our greatest scoundrels too, have derived from beneath the benignant shadow of the Church.

      That squat, heavy Norman tower just now spoken of has a history to its squatness—a history bound up with the tragical death of Rufus. The grave of the Red King in the cathedral forms the colophon of a tragical story whose inner history has never been, and never will be, fully explained; but by all the signs and portents that preceded the ruthless king’s death at Stoney Cross, where his heart was pierced by the glanced arrow said to have been aimed at the wild red deer by Walter Tyrrell, it should seem that the clergy were more intimately connected with that “accident” than was seemly, even in the revengeful and bloodstained ecclesiastics of that time. It must not be forgotten that the king had despoiled the Church and the Church’s high dignitaries with a thorough and comprehensive spoliation, nor can it be blinked that certain of them had denounced him and prophesied disaster with an exactness of imagery possible only to those who had prepared the fulfilment of their boding prophecies. “Even now,” said one, “the arrow of retribution is fixed, the bow is stretched.” This was not metaphor, merely: they prophesied who had with certainty prepared fulfilment. And when the thing was consummated and the body of the Red King was buried in the choir beneath the original central tower, the ruin in which that tower fell, seven years later, was not, according to clerical opinion, due to faulty construction and the insufficient support given

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