Primitive character of the country
in certain districts of Great Britain.—Connection
between the features of surrounding scenery and the
mental and moral inclinations of man, after the fashion
of all sound ethnological historians.—A
charioteer, to whom an experience of British
laws suggests an ingenious mode of arresting the progress
of Roman Papacy, carries Lionel Haughton and his
fortunes to a place which allows of description
and invites repose.
In safety, but with naught else rare enough, in a
railway train, to deserve commemoration, Lionel reached
the station to which he was bound. He there inquired
the distance to Fawley Manor House; it was five miles.
He ordered a fly, and was soon wheeled briskly along
a rough parish road, through a country strongly contrasting
the gay river scenery he had so lately quitted,—quite
as English, but rather the England of a former race
than that which spreads round our own generation like
one vast suburb of garden-ground and villas.
Here, nor village nor spire, nor porter’s lodge
came in sight. Rare even were the cornfields;
wide spaces of unenclosed common opened, solitary
and primitive, on the road, bordered by large woods,
chiefly of beech, closing the horizon with ridges
of undulating green. In such an England, Knights
Templars might have wended their way to scattered
monasteries, or fugitive partisans in the bloody Wars
of the Roses have found shelter under leafy coverts.
The scene had its romance, its beauty-half savage,
half gentle-leading perforce the mind of any cultivated
and imaginative gazer far back from the present day,
waking up long-forgotten passages from old poets.
The stillness of such wastes of sward, such deeps
of woodland, induced the nurture of revery, gravely
soft and lulling. There, Ambition might give
rest to the wheel of Ixion, Avarice to the sieve of
the Danaids; there, disappointed Love might muse on
the brevity of all human passions, and count over
the tortured hearts that have found peace in holy meditation,
or are now stilled under grassy knolls. See where,
at the crossing of three roads upon the waste, the
landscape suddenly unfolds, an upland in the distance,
and on the upland a building, the first sign of social
man. What is the building? only a silenced windmill,
the sails dark and sharp against the dull leaden sky.
Lionel touched the driver,—“Are we
yet on Mr. Darrell’s property?” Of the
extent of that property he had involuntarily conceived
a vast idea.
“Lord, sir, no; we be two miles from Squire
Darrell’s. He han’t much property
to speak of hereabouts. But he bought a good
bit o’ land, too, some years ago, ten or twelve
mile t’ other side o’ the county.
First time you are going to Fawley, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Ah! I don’t mind seeing you afore;
and I should have known you if I had, for it is seldom
indeed I have a fare to Fawley old Manor House.
It must be, I take it, four or five years ago sin’
I wor there with a gent, and he went away while I
wor feeding the horse; did me out o’ my back
fare. What bisness had he to walk when he came
in my fly? Shabby.”
