From Gretna Green to Land's End Part 16

the old Bristol tars would call them--had touched the coast of North America. On his return the "Great Admiral" clad himself in silk and was a notable figure in the Bristol streets. Phantasmal though it all seems in a retrospect of centuries, many are the men who have drawn the gaze in these ever-moving thoroughfares,--William Canynges, "Merchant Royal,"

whose trade with the north of Europe probably exceeded that of any other merchant in England; Thomas Norton, fifteenth-century alchemist and dreamer, who believed that he had discovered both the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life; Captain Thomas James, for whom James's Bay is named, he whose search for the Northwest Pa.s.sage is one of the heroic chapters in the annals of the sea; the Reverend Richard Hakluyt, always deep in talk with some grizzled seaman; Captain Martin Pring, proud of the load of sa.s.safras he had brought back from Cape Cod; Colston the philanthropist, the local saint. Mere literary folk would have been embarra.s.sed by little enough attention as they went their quiet ways.

What was Chatterton to the trading, s.h.i.+pbuilding, s.h.i.+p-lading town but a bright-eyed Blue-Coat boy? And how those hard-headed merchants would have chuckled over the eager scheme of three penniless young poets, Coleridge, Southey, and Lovell, for founding a community on the Susquehanna--a river of melodious name and delightfully far away--where no one should labour more than two hours out of the twenty-four!

I have been in Bristol several times, but I remember the workaday old city as I saw it first. It was September weather, and College Green was strewn with sallow leaves that flitted and whispered continually like memories of the past. A few fat sheep were in possession, together with a statue of Queen Victoria and a Gothic cross. On the south of the Green, once the burial-ground of the abbey, stands the cathedral, the older portion, in contrast with the new, looking black and rough and ma.s.sy. The jewel of this building--which was one of the few abbey churches to profit by the Dissolution, in that Henry VIII was graciously pleased, establis.h.i.+ng the bishopric of Bristol, to raise it to cathedral rank--is its Norman chapter-house, a rectangular chamber wonderfully enriched with stone carvings and diaper work and interlaced arcades. Among the bishops on whom the silvery lights from the Jesse window, the great east window of the choir, have fallen, are Fletcher, father of the dramatist, and Trelawney of Cornish fame.

With a lingering look at the Norman archway known as College gate, whose elaborate mouldings are worn on the sea-wind side, but still distinct on the other, I crossed the Green to the Mayor's Chapel, a little Gothic church of peculiar beauty, with windows that are harmonies in gla.s.s, and with monuments, among which the burgess element is marked, so old and strange, yet so nave and natural, that the valour, love, and grief of a far past seem but held in slumber there. If the marble figures rise and talk together on All Saints'

Eve, it is a quaint but seemly a.s.semblage.

Bristol, even in the palmy days of her rum-trade and her slave-trade, was always singularly given to religion, and her churches are numerous,--St. Peter's, her mother-church, with an Early Norman tower, guarding the ashes of her hapless poet, Richard Savage, who died, a debtor, in Newgate prison hard by and was buried at his jailer's costs; St. Stephen's, whose turreted Perpendicular tower is one of the sights of the city; and many another; but supreme among them all,

"The pride of Bristowe and the Western londe,"

is St. Mary Radcliffe. This superb structure, ever since the day when Queen Bess called it "the fairest, the goodliest, and most famous parish-church in England," has gone on adding praise to praise. It is of ancient foundation, still observing, at Whitsuntide, the ceremony of rush-bearing, but it was rebuilt, in course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, by Mayor Canynges the grandfather and Mayor Canynges the grandson. It is a pity that their alabaster heads should be all scratched over with initials. It was in this church that Chatterton pretended to discover the ma.n.u.script poems of his invented monk Rowley; it was here that Coleridge and Southey wedded the ladies of their Pantisocratical choice; and every good American is expected to thrill at the sight of the armour, hanging from one of the piers, of the gallant admiral, Sir William Penn, a native of Bristol and the father of our Quaker.

On my first visit, I righteously went on bustop out to Clifton, the breathing-place of Bristol, viewed the great gra.s.sy upland, with the Avon flowing muddily through a deep gorge, paced the boasted Suspension Bridge that spans the gorge, and finally, by way of tribute to "Evelina" and "Humphrey Clinker," followed "the zigzag"

down to the Hotwells, whose glory as a spa is now departed. But of all that one may see in or about Bristol, nothing so impresses the mind as the big, plain, serious old town itself. It has been out-distanced in commerce and in manufacture by those giant upstarts, Liverpool and Manchester, yet it is still patiently pus.h.i.+ng on in its accustomed track. So absorbed in business routine does it seem that one almost forgets that it has ever had other than practical interests,--that the "Lyrical Ballads" found their publisher here,--but gives one's self over to the latent romance of commerce and of trade. One wanders through Corn Street and Wine Street and Christmas Street, by Bakers'

Hall and Spicers' Hall and Merchant Venturers' Hall, and--for the tidal Avon is navigable even for vessels of large tonnage--is ever freshly astonished, as Pope was astonished, to behold "in the middle of the street, as far as you can see, hundreds of s.h.i.+ps, their masts as thick as they can stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising sight imaginable."

The last great city in our summer path was Exeter, whose greatness is of the past. Exeter is, like Bristol, a county of itself, and yet stands, in a true sense, as the capital of Devons.h.i.+re. It is, moreover, the heart of the whole West Country. "In Exeter," says Mr.

Norway, a Cornishman, "all the history of the West is bound up--its love of liberty, its independence, its pa.s.sionate resistance to foreign conquerors, its devotion to lost causes, its loyalty to the throne, its pride, its trade, its maritime adventure,--all these many strands are twined together in that bond which links West Countrymen to Exeter. There is no incident in their past history which does not touch her. Like them she was unstained by heathendom, and kept her faith when the dwellers in less happy cities further north were p.r.i.c.ked to the wors.h.i.+p of Thor and Odin at the point of Saxon spears.

Like them she fought valiantly against the Norman Conqueror, and when she fell their cause fell with her. And since those days what a host of great and stirring incidents have happened here, from Perkin Warbeck beating on the gates with his rabble of brave Cornishmen, to William of Orange going in high state to the cathedral, welcomed already as a deliverer to that throne which it lay almost with Exeter to give or to withhold."

Exeter impresses the stranger to-day merely as a prosperous county-town, a pleasant cathedral city, yet in the reign of Stephen it was ranked for importance next after London, York, and Winchester, supplanting Lincoln, once the holder of the fourth place, from which it was soon itself to be dislodged by Bristol. But Exeter, seated on the hill where, in dim, wild ages a band of Britons built them a rude stronghold, beside the stream up whose reddened waters the vessels of Roman and Saxon and Dane have fought their way, does not forget. So faithful is her memory, indeed, that still the vicar of Pinhoe, a village almost in her suburbs, receives every year a handful of s.h.i.+ning silver pieces in recognition of a deed of daring performed by a long-ago predecessor in his holy office. When the West Countrymen, bent on driving out the Danes, were in the thick of a hard fight there at Pinhoe, their supply of arrows fell short, and this plucky priest, girding up his gown, dodged through the enemy to the citadel, bringing back--so schoolboyish were those old battles--a bundle of feathered shafts that might have saved the day. But although the Danes triumphed, Exeter has paid an annual reward of sixteen s.h.i.+llings to the vicar of Pinhoe ever since--a period of some nine hundred years.

We rendered, of course, our first homage to the cathedral, rejoicing in the oft-praised symmetries of the interior and, hardly less, in the tender colour-tones that melted, blues into greys, and fawns into creams, with the softening of the light. The cathedral library contains that treasure of our literature, the Exeter Book, an anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry, "one great English book of divers things, song-wise wrought," left by the will of Bishop Leofric, who died in 1072, to "Saint Peter's minster in Exeter where his bishop-stool is." Miles Coverdale, translator of the Bible, was bishop here in Tudor times, and Sir Jonathan Trelawney, transferred from the poorer see of Bristol, held for eighteen years Exeter's episcopal throne,--a "bishop-stool" most magnificently fas.h.i.+oned. This Trelawney was one of the "Seven Bishops" who clashed with James II and were thrown into prison. His home was in Cornwall, and the famous song, which may owe its present form to the Rev. R. S. Hawker, the eccentric vicar of Morwenstow, thunders the wrath of the West Country:

"And have they fixed the where and when?

And shall Trelawney die?

Here's twenty thousand Cornishmen Will know the reason why."

And speaking of vicars, the most hurried tourist should cast a glance up to the red tower of St. Thomas' church, for the sake of another clergyman who dared brave a king. The vicar of St. Thomas was conspicuous in the West Country rebellion against the reformed service, involving the use of an English prayer-book, introduced by law in 1549. The men of Devon and, even more, the men of Cornwall, who understood the English hardly better than the Latin, looked upon this new form of wors.h.i.+p as "but a Christmas game" and could not "abide to hear of any other religion than as they were first nuzled in." This Exeter vicar went on chanting the Latin liturgy and wearing his old vestments, so that, for his contumacy, he was hanged "in his popish apparel" from a gallows erected on top of his own church-tower.

Of the secular buildings in Exeter, we visited the fine-fronted guildhall in High Street and Mol's Coffee House in the Cathedral Yard.

The custodian of the guildhall proudly pointed out the beauties of its fifteenth-century carvings, and hospitably invited us to try on the gorgeous robes of the civic dignitaries and sit in their great chairs of fretted oak, but we contented ourselves with viewing the various treasures of the old burgh on exhibition there,--gold chains of office, silver salvers and loving-cups, a huge, two-handed sword that long since drank its last draught of blood in the fierce grip of Edward IV, a portrait of the Stuart princess who, when Charles I and Queen Henrietta were in sore straits, had been born and sheltered at Exeter, and many another memento of an eventful and honourable past.

We went away rapt in visions of those blithe Midsummer Eves when all the Exeter guilds, preceded by a mounted band consisting of Mayor and Alderman and Council, made the circuit of the city walls, the image of St. Peter borne before the Fishmongers, that of St. Luke before the Painters, and every other trade in like manner preceded by its especial patron saint; but Mol's Coffee House called up a later picture of

"Sir Francis Drake, and Martin Frobisher, John Hawkins, and your other English captains,"

who, with their Devons.h.i.+re countrymen, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Richard Grenville, Sir Walter Raleigh, used to meet in the oak-panelled hall of this Tudor mansion for such high, adventurous talk as must have made the wine sparkle in their cups.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A DEVON COTTAGE]

We were a little tired in Exeter, I remember, but instead of prying out from the west wall of the cathedral, as we would have done three hundred years ago, a bit of "Peter-stone" to cure our ailments, we took a blissful drive up the Exe,--such a trickle of a stream just then that only regard for the coachman's feelings restrained us from making fun of it,--through the tranquil beauty of Devons.h.i.+re lanes, by thatched cottage and lordly park and one dreamy little church after another, each with its special feature of pinnacled tower, or Saxon font, or quaint old pew, or frieze of angel frescoes. We pa.s.sed a modest almshouse, perhaps the bequest of husband and wife for the maintenance of four widows or two married couples. At all events, the inscription beneath a portrait head in relief ran:

"Grudge not my laurell.

Rather blesse that Power Which made the death of two The life of fowre."

Every mile of Devons.h.i.+re has its charm, not to be mapped out in advance, but freshly discovered by each new lover of the moorland and the sea, of soft air and the play of shadows, of folklore and tradition, of the memory of heroes. Those who cannot know fair Devon in actual presence may find her at her best in the romances of Kingsley and Blackmore and Phillpotts. The s.h.i.+re abounds in sea-magic.

The south coast, with its wealth of sheltered bays and tempting inlets, has so mild and equable a climate that its dreamy windings have become dotted with winter resorts as well as watering-places.

Lyme Regis, on the edge of Dorset, Sidmouth and Exmouth and Dawlish, Teignmouth, whence Keats dated his "Endymion," and fas.h.i.+onable Torquay are perhaps the most in favour, but all the sh.o.r.e is warm and wonderful in colour, set as it is with wave-washed cliffs that glisten ruddy and white and rose-pink in the sun. These s.h.i.+ning headlands, about which beat the wild white wings of seagulls, are haunted by legends wilder yet. Half-way between Dawlish and Teignmouth are two red sandstone pillars, the statelier with its top suggestive of a tumbled wig, the lower standing at a deferential tilt. In these are shut the sinful souls of an East Devon clergyman and his clerk, who longed too eagerly, in the hope of their own preferment, for the death of a Bishop of Exeter.

Further down the coast the health seekers and holiday folk are somewhat less in evidence. The old, cliff-climbing town of Brixham, where William of Orange landed, goes fis.h.i.+ng for a livelihood.

Dartmouth, not so joyous to-day as when Coeur de Lion gathered there the fleet that was to win for Christendom the Holy Sepulchre, not so turbulent as when Chaucer suspected his wild-bearded seaman, little better than a pirate, of hailing from that port, not so adventurous as when one John Davis, of Sandridge on the Dart, sailed out from her blue harbour with his two small vessels, the Sunnes.h.i.+ne and the Moons.h.i.+ne, to seek a pa.s.sage to China by way of the Polar sea, is mainly occupied in the training of mids.h.i.+pmen. A steamer trip up the Dart, that sudden and dangerous stream of neighbourhood dread

--"River of Dart, river of Dart, Every year thou claimest a heart"--

brings us to Totnes, where, on the high authority of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the first king of the Britons, Brutus, grandson of the pious aeneas, made his landing.

"Here I am, and here I res', And this town shall be called Totnes."

The Brutus Stone, on which the Trojan first set foot, is shown in irrefutable proof of this event. In the course of the trip, the steamer pa.s.ses Greenway House, where Sir Humphrey Gilbert was born and where, it is claimed, the potato first sprouted in English soil.

But the most momentous of all these southern ports, Plymouth, wears an aspect worthy of its renown. The spell of the briar-rose has not choked its growth, although the glamour of a glorious past enhances its present greatness. As we gazed from Plymouth Hoe, a lofty crescent on the sea-front, with a magnificent outlook across the long granite break-water and the Sound alive with all manner of s.h.i.+pping, past the Eddystone Light to the Atlantic, our thoughts, even while recognising the prosperity of this modern naval station, flew back to those brave old times when the steep streets and the high bluff rang not only with the gruff hails of bronzed sea-captains,

"dogs of an elder day Who sacked the golden ports,"

but with the merry quips and laughter of the gay young blades who loved to ruffle it before the Devon belles.

"How Plymouth swells with gallants! how the streets Glister with gold! You cannot meet a man But trikt in scarf and feather."

Sumptuous ocean liners call at Plymouth now; the terrible war-s.h.i.+ps of England ride that ample roadstead; but we remembered the gallant little crafts of yore, the Dreadnought and the Defiance, the Swiftsure, the Lion, the Rainbow, the Nonpareil, the Pelican, the Victory, and the Elizabeth. It was from Plymouth that Drake, "fellow-traveller of the Sunn," put forth on the voyage that circ.u.mnavigated the globe, and here he was playing at bowls when on the Hoe was raised the cry that the Spanish Armada had been sighted.

But not all the galleons of Spain could flurry "Franky Drake."

"Drake nor devil nor Spaniard feared; Their cities he put to the sack; He singed His Catholic Majesty's beard, And harried his s.h.i.+ps to wrack.

He was playing at Plymouth a rubber of bowls When the great Armada came, But he said, 'They must wait their turn, good souls;'

And he stooped and finished the game."

His statue presides over the broad esplanade, looking steadily seaward,--a sight that put us again to quoting Newbolt:

"Drake, he's in his hammock an' a thousand mile away, (Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?) Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay, An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe.

Yarnder lumes the island, yarnder lie the s.h.i.+ps, Wi' sailor lads a-dancin' heel-an'-toe, An' the sh.o.r.e-lights flas.h.i.+n', an' the night-tide das.h.i.+n', He sees it arl so plainly as he saw et long ago.

"Drake he was a Devon man, an' ruled the Devon seas, (Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?) Rovin' tho' his death fell, he went wi' heart at ease, An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe.

'Take my drum to England, hang et by the sh.o.r.e, Strike et when your powder's runnin' low; If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven, An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.'"

It is hard to put by those visions of the Armada days even to think of Sir Walter Raleigh's tragic return to Plymouth and the block, his high heart foiled at last in its long quest for the golden city of Manoa; and I hardly dare confess that we quite forgot to hunt out the special nook whence the Mayflower, with her incredible load of furniture and ancestors, set sail to found another Plymouth on a bleaker sh.o.r.e.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FAL]

The northern coast of Devons.h.i.+re, with its more bracing air, is no less enchanting than the southern. Charles Kingsley, born under the brow of Dartmoor, has lavished on North Devon raptures of filial praise, but the scenes of "Westward Ho!" fully bear out his glowing paragraphs. It is years ago that I pa.s.sed an August in Clovelly, but the joy of it lingers yet. Nothing that I have ever seen on this our starry lodging-place, with its infinite surprises of beauty, resembles that white village climbing the cleft of a wooded cliff, its narrow street only a curving slope, a steep pa.s.sage here and there smoothed into steps, where donkeys and pedestrians rub amiable shoulders. At a turn in this cobbled stairway, your gaze, which has been held between two lines of the quaintest little houses, all diversified with peaks and gables, porches and balconies, window displays of china and pots of flowering vines, suddenly falls to a tiny harbour, a pier built out from the natural rock and hung with fis.h.i.+ng-nets, a tangle of red-sailed boats, and a pebbly beach from which we used to watch the sunset flus.h.i.+ng sea and cliffs. The five hundred dwellers in this hanging hamlet must all be of a kin, for Clovelly lads, we were told by our landlady, never do well if they marry outside the combe.

Kindest of gossips! She tucked us away as best she could in such bits of rooms that, like Alice in Wonderland, we had to thrust one foot up chimney and one arm out of the window among the fuchsias and geraniums that make nothing, in Clovelly, of growing to a height of twenty feet.

She would put us up wonderful luncheons of duck sandwiches and heather-honey and lime-water delicately flavoured from the old whiskey bottles into which it was poured, when we were starting out on those long walks to which North Devon air and views allure the laziest. Sometimes we followed the Hobby Drive, a wooded avenue along the top of the cliff, where for considerable distances a wall of n.o.ble timber, beech and oak and chestnut, glistening hollies and red-berried rowans, would shut out the view, and again the foliage would open and the eye could range across an opal sea to Lundy Island. On other days we would stroll through Clovelly Court to the summit of White Cliff, known as Gallantry Bower, whence one may look at choice far out over blowing woods or tossing waves. The towering trees of the park, trees that Will Carey may have climbed, are so ancient now that ferns and mosses grow on their decaying branches. Once we picked our way over the s.h.i.+ngles to Bucks Mill, gathering only to drop again handfuls of the curiously flecked and banded pebbles. The water seemed to have as many colours as they, tans and russets and copper-tints innumerable, with s.h.i.+fting gleams of turquoise and of beryl. Bucks Mill is a fis.h.i.+ng-hamlet of some one hundred and fifty souls, representing two original families, one of which, "the Browns," a swarthy and pa.s.sionate race, is said to descend from Spanish sailors wrecked off the coast when gale and billow sided with England against the hapless Armada.

Another day we walked to Stoke, seven miles thither and seven miles back, to see the Saxon church raised by the Countess Elgitha in grat.i.tude for the escape from s.h.i.+pwreck of her husband, Earl G.o.dwin.

All the way we were pa.s.sing cottages that seemed to have strayed out of an artist's portfolio. Their rosy walls of Devons.h.i.+re cob--the reddish mud of the region mixed with pebbles--were more than half hidden by the giant fuchsias and clambering honeysuckles. Even the blue larkspur would grow up to the thatch. Too often our road was shut in by hedges and we trudged along as in a green tunnel roofed with blue. Dahlias and hydrangias, poppies, hollyhocks and roses filled the cottage dooryards and gardens with ma.s.ses of bloom. We asked a woman smiling in her vine-wreathed doorway how near we were to Hartland.

"Win the top of yon hill," she said, "and you'll soon slip away into it." So we slipped away and were refreshed in another cottage doorway by two gla.s.ses of skim-milk for a penny. We found a grave old church at Stoke, with legions of rooks wheeling about the ma.s.sive tower which has so long been a beacon for storm-tossed mariners. The white-bearded verger, whose rolling gait betrayed the sailor, read to us in stentorian tones, punctuated with chuckles, an epitaph which, in slightly varied form, we had seen elsewhere in Devon:

"Here lies I at the church door.

Here lies I because I's poor.

The farther in, the more to pay; But here lies I as well as they."