A WALK THROUGH SOMERSET. THE County of the Sumorsæte, although as a whole more pleasant than picturesque, contains fine incidents of scenery in the Quantock and Mendip Hills, and in the great forest of Exmoor. And its ecclesiastical antiquities are very fine, seeing that it is wealthy in cathedral cities : Bath and Wells are all its own, and of Bristol it claims a portion; while Glastonbury is unquestionably the oldest seat of that early Christianity in Britain whose actual origin is untraceable. Joseph of Arimathea is claimed as the founder of the faith in this island by local legendand even legends are sometimes true. Of that fine province which we call the West of England, Devon is certainly the most beautiful county, and Devonshire men are the most characteristic race; they have always been lovers of adventure from the days of Drake and Raleigh to the days of Colenso and the Kingsleys. The Somerset folk, dwelling in a quieter district, with no wild rivers like Tamar and Dart, with a muddy and sluggish sea upon their coasts, have always been cast in a more bovine mould. Bristol, however, years ago the second of England's cities and the capital of the West, has drawn to VOL. I. K itself a strong and restless life; the Bristolian still differs perceptibly from the dwellers in other cities, though not quite so much as when he rioted in Queen Square, and worried Sir Charles Wetherall. If Mr. Hussey Vivian's theory about coal-that is to be found almost everywhere—should turn out to be correct, England may yet find the men of the West taking again the lead, which they lost when the wealth of the coalfields concentrated manufacture in the North. A delicious morning of August, with a cool fresh breeze driving a few fleecy clouds over a light-blue sky, and I look once more from the railway station upon that pleasant city of Bath, crescent rising above crescent from the Avon. Twenty years or thereabouts must have passed since I set foot in Bath, though I have caught many a glimpse of it from the rail. William Beckford was alive in those days-the marvellous millionaire who wrote Vathek and astonished Byron. We used to see him riding slowly along the streets, followed by his groom with a bag of coppers for the poor; and whenever he dismounted, the groom transferred himself to his master's saddle, apparently to keep it warm. Well do I remember the sale after his death of his superb collection of things curious and beautiful. The old tower-builder, who had a passion for stony summits and far prospects, lies sarcophagised in red granite beside his last high edifice on Lansdown. But, alack! those two swift-flown decades have taken away more than the eccentric millionaire. Where are the pretty girls (Bath is famed for pretty girls) with whom I used to picnic long ago on those green heights around the city of thermal fountains? What a chill this great interval of time gives one, when reentering as a stranger a city wherein once were troops of welcoming friends! If we could meet again, I and some delicious little creature of eighteen or so with whom I carried on innocent flirtation, how uncomfortable we should feel! Youth is not at the helm now, or Pleasure at the prow; too probably, while Business steers, Caution is keeping a sharp look-out ahead for those confounded rocks of Insolvency. I recollect writing, when I dwelt on one of the Channel Cyclades, a reminiscent lyric, whence I propose to make a brief extract :— "City on the sinuous Avon Tranquil town from tumult free Memory, poetic artist, Loves to picture thee. Idly haunting crag and headland, Comes a weird and wandering echo Those Abbey chimes! They are indissolubly connected with my recollections of Bath. They are "bewildered chimes," like those mentioned by Wordsworth, and bewildering to the hearer. What queer old hymn-tune they play I forget; but often still do I hear it in my dreams, as when I lodged beside the ladder-carved western front. And to hear it again to-day is like travelling back a few years towards my joyous youth. One more stanza :— Sapient owlet of Athena Perches on their slender wrists. Critics love thee--politicians, Archæologists." As to poets, Walter Savage Landor, whose verse ran clearer than that of any English writer since Chaucer, was a lover of Bath; there also dwelt (and probably still dwells) one John Edmund Reade, who was the most remarkable of English poetasters before Mr. Tupper was discovered. Of him Landor wrote : "A crouching bear inopportunely bit Thy finger, Reade. It should have been ere thy first verse was writ- And that many of the daughters of Bath are tinged with blue is doubtless as true now as ever. It is the very city for the azure hose. Its life has a quaint quietude, amid which you may almost hear the simmer of the steaming waters which lie beneath its soil. It has no vigorous aspects of commerce and manufacture; it is not worried by a penny daily newspaper; it pleasantly blends " a youth of folly with an age of cards." Its pavements are a trifle too hot for sensitive feet, whence it is said there comes an abnormal development of the aboriginal ankle. But I saw some pretty ankles in Bath. I did not sleep there. For me, it is a haunted city, and I preferred getting beyond the reach of visions of the past. One or two sentimental pilgrimages I made to places which friendship had rendered sacred, or flirtation pleasant, to the remembrance; but it was as empty an affair as the endeavour of the monk, when they unburied SOMERSETSHIRE CIDER. 149 Queen Guinevere at Glastonbury, to seize a tress of her wondrous golden hair, which crumbled into impalpable dust at his touch. To quote Charles Lamb's melancholy music: 66 'All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." Wherefore, fortified by oysters and chablis at the York House, I started for Wells, along what was a portion of the old Roman Fosse way, from the north to Totnes. The road is rather a dull one, though it rises breezily over the downs: but at the old village of Stratton on the Fosse (the street-town on the Fosse) you turn to the right towards the Mendips, avoiding the dreary stocking-making town of Shepton Mallet. Here the aspect of affairs greatly improved. Somewhat weary-for twelve miles of a dull country are more tiresome than twenty of scenery crowded with sensations-I rested on a bench in front of the Old Down Inn, and drank some abominable cider. "Zummerzet zider" is a proverb for badness; and Somerset is almost as bad as Wiltshire in the matter of wayside inns. The Berkshire singlestick man in The Scouring of the White Horse, who had to hit his Somersetshire opponent five times on the head before he could draw blood, remarked: "You see, mates, there's no 'cumulation of blood belongs to thay cider-drinking chaps, as there does to we as drinks beer." The old gamester was right. Berkshire beer is wretched enough, except such home-brewed as I drank at Kingston Lisle; but Somerset cider is worse. By the way, the Berks people are crying out to have the White Horse re-scoured. Why doesn't the Member for Lambeth come down and do it? |