The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844

The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844
Various

Various

The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 / Volume 23, Number 4

A PILGRIMAGE TO PENSHURST

BY C. A. ALEXANDER

One of the admirers of Goëthe, commenting on his characteristic excellencies, has remarked that he is the most suggestive of writers. Were we to seek an epithet by which to describe the architectural remains and historical monuments of England, with reference to their impression on the mind of an observer, perhaps no better could offer itself than that which has been thus applied to the works of the great German. In the property of awakening reflection by bringing before the mind that series of events whose connection with the progress of modern civilization has been most direct and influential, and of recalling names which, to the American at least, sound like household words, they stand unrivalled. Our manners, our customs, our national constitution itself, may be said to have grown up beneath the shelter of these venerable structures, whose associations ally them in a manner scarcely less striking with those wider developments of social and political reason in which we believe the welfare of our species to be involved. Who is there, that, standing within ‘the great hall of William Rufus,’ can forget how often it has been the theatre of those mighty conflicts, in which, however slowly and reluctantly, error and prejudice have been compelled to relax their hold on the human mind? Dr. Johnson has spoken to us, in his usual stately phrase, of patriotism re-invigorated and of piety warmed amid the scenes of Marathon and Iona; but where is the Marathon which appeals to us so forcibly as the field consecrated by the blood of a Hamden or a Falkland? and where the Iona which is so eloquent with recollections as the walls which have echoed to the voices of a Ridley and a Barrow?

It is true indeed, that the recollections of many other lands, as associated with their monuments, lay much stronger hold upon the imagination than those of England. Of the former we might say that there was about them more of the element of poetry; of the latter, that they furnish an ampler share of materials for reflection. One great moral, ‘the comprehensive text of the Hebrew preacher,’ the invariable ‘vanity of vanities,’ is alike inscribed upon all the vestiges of human greatness. For the rest, a serene and touching beauty lingers around and hallows every relic which attests the hand of Phidias, or marks the country of Pericles and Epaminondas. No lapse of time, no process of decay, will ever wholly exorcise that spirit of stateliness and command which sits enthroned amid the ruins of the ‘Eternal City,’ as her own Marius once sate amid the ruins of a rival capital. But in all that regards a common standard of opinions, institutions and interests, and in the facility of reasoning as respects these, from the experience and practice of one time and people to those of another, we cannot but feel that a vast gulf has interposed between our own age and that which is commemorated by the monuments of Greece and Rome. The venerable genius of antiquity, seated among crumbling arches and broken columns, has but little to say to us respecting those questions which most deeply agitate and unceasingly perplex the busy and the thinking part of mankind at the present day. No response are we to expect from that quarter, concerning our bank-laws and our corn-laws; our systems of credit and of commerce; our endless disquisitions on the balance of power and of parties, on the rights of suffrage and of conscience. While we reserve to the theorist the privilege of adorning his theme by allusions to the polity of Lycurgus and Numa, we are sensible that the practical statesman who trusts himself to such examples will be constantly liable to be deluded by false parallels and imperfect analogies. A voice, like that which is said to have startled the mariner of old on the coasts of Ionia, and to have announced to him the cessation of oracles, comes to us from all the remains of pagan antiquity, warning us that the spirit of that ancient civilization has departed with its forms: and while it bids us look forward to a new destiny for the human race, it teaches us that the maxims and the oracles by which that destiny must be guided, are to be sought elsewhere than in the Republic of Plato and the grottos of Egeria.

Compared, then, with the monuments of classic antiquity, those of England claim the distinction of being associated with an order of things which is still existing and still in process of development: compared with those of the rest of christian Europe, they recall a progress, which, much more consistently than in other countries, has tended in the direction of popular rights and constitutional liberty. The reader of English history indeed has too often occasion to blush for the vices or mourn for the madness of his species, as the spectator who looks upon the grim fastnesses of the Tower, or into the gloomy purlieus of St. Giles’, will need but little else to remind him of the despotism and inequality which have pursued liberty into this her boasted and sea-girt retreat. But the Bastile, certainly, did not look in its day upon scenes of less flagrant atrocity than the ‘towers of Julius;’ while this advantage has always obtained in favor of the latter, that he who turned with disgust or terror from that image of despotic pride and violence, might behold at no great distance the piles of Westminster, the seats of law and legislation, where the irrepressible spirit of freedom in the bosom of the Commons was still nursing its resentment or muttering its remonstrances at seasons of the deepest gloom and depression. Henry VIII. might have heard that voice mingling with the groans of his victims; Charles II. could not altogether shut it out from the scenes of his midnight revel and debauchery. But no such hopeful contrast meets us in the features or the history of the neighboring continent. Democracy, it is true, the rough and hardy growth of the German forests, struck an earlier root and flourished at first with better promise there than in England. But this different fortune awaited it on the continent and the island; that in the former it was soon rooted out, and required in modern times the most violent and sanguinary efforts to reproduce it; in the latter it has constantly survived and struggled through every disaster toward a hopeful development. Such has been the different political fate of two branches of the great Teutonic family; let us observe whether some corresponding difference does not make itself manifest in the aspect of their respective countries.

It might have been readily anticipated that the maintenance of the popular right as a constitutional principle, operating through a long course of ages, would have produced not only a sturdy independence among the bulk of the English nation, but to some extent also, a local independence of the country as regards the capital and the court. It might have been foreseen, that instead of concentrating every separate ray of genius and renown into one grand halo around the throne, this habitual effort of the popular mind would have had a tendency to scatter those rays more equally over the land, making the green valley and the sequestered hamlet rejoice, each in the memory of its bard or hero. Such might have been our prognostic from the political condition of England as compared with that of the continent, and such will be found upon observation to have been the result. A French poet aptly describes the centralizing influences of his own capital as regards France, when he tells us that ‘at Paris people live, elsewhere they only vegetate.’ One great holocaust of talents, reputations and fortunes forever ascends there to the glory of the Grand Nation, absorbing every thing, assimilating every thing to itself, and leaving the country widowed of its interest and shorn of its appropriate graces. The poet, whose footsteps on the sunny plains of Provence would have long brightened in the traditions of its peasantry; the hero, whose name would have sufficed to confer undying interest on some old château of the Jura; the orator, whose leisure hours might have made some French Tusculum on the banks of the Loire forever fresh with the memory of associated honors; all these have alike hastened to Paris, identified themselves once for all with its crowds, and added whatever prestige might attend their own names through future ages to the already overshadowing prestige of that wonderful city. They point you there to the house where the great Corneille breathed his last; it is hard by the metropolitan church of St. Roche, and scarcely more than a bow-shot from the Tuilleries, as if the poet of Cinna and Polyeucte could not render up his breath in peace except in the neighborhood of those high dignitaries, into whose lips he had breathed while living so much of his own grandeur and elevation; but who reminds you of the hills of his native Normandy, or points you to the humble chamber or the peaceful valley where ‘gorgeous Tragedy in sceptred pall’ first swept before the eyes of his dawning fancy? No; if you would recall the memory of Corneille through the medium of places familiar with his presence when living, you must repair to the Hotel de Rambouillet, in one of the most noisy and unpoetic quarters of Paris.

Now with respect to England, all this is as nearly as possible reversed. The political influences spoken of before, operating no doubt with others of which it is unnecessary to speak, have acted dispersively on the sum of national reputations, and equitably allotted to almost every part of the fair island some parcenary share of fame, some hallowing memory, like a household genius, to preside over and endear its localities. London has not, like Paris, proved itself in this the insatiate Saturn of the national offspring. If you inquire, for instance, for memorials of the life and presence of Shakspeare, it is not probable, as in the case of Corneille, that you will be referred to the crowded streets and squares of the metropolis, though his active life was passed and his unrivalled fame achieved there; but far away to the west, where Nature received him on her flowery lap, beside his own Avon; in the shades where his genius first grew familiar with the shapes of beauty, sublimity, and terror, and whither he retired at last ‘to husband out life’s taper’ amid the common charities of home; to this spot it is that you must repair, if you would drink freshly of that well-spring of associations which hallows the footsteps of England’s immortal dramatist. In like manner, one might say, that it is not in the sumptuous galleries of Holland House, neighbored by the crowds and tumult of the parks, that the admirer of Addison would find it most easy to call up the image of the sage; but in that quiet meadow which he used to frequent on the banks of the Cheswell, when evening is gathering on the tops of the lofty elms and around the gray towers of Magdalen, how pleasing and unforced the effort which recalls him to our imaginations!

And so too of others. Gray has not made the country church-yard immortal in song alone, but has laid himself to rest with all the memories of that imperishable strain around him, beneath as green a sod as wraps the head of the humblest peasant for whom his muse implored ‘the passing tribute of a sigh.’ The pensive shade of Cowper beckons to the groves of Olney; and the melancholy ghost of Chatterton, (kindred to Cowper only in his woes and his genius,) has fled from the crowded thoroughfares of London, where he sank oppressed in the turmoil of life, to haunt forever, in the eyes of the dreaming enthusiast, those dim aisles of St. Mary Redcliffe in Bristol, whence he drew the spells which immortalized but could not preserve him. And thus will it be when the lights of to-day, the bards of living renown, shall have passed away, but not to be forgotten. No one will then think of tracing Wordsworth, or Moore, or Southey, amid the dusky lanes and glittering saloons of the metropolis, but the lakes of Cumberland and the bowers of Wiltshire will still rejoice in the ever-brightening honors of associated genius. Even the hardier spirits of the isle, whose destiny has called them to the rougher paths of life, to the battle-field or the senate, away from the haunts of nature and the Muse; even these have seldom failed, in the intervals of busier life, to remember the charms of the rural life of England, and in giving their more familiar hours to its enjoyments, have bequeathed to many a fair spot a heritage of memories more precious than wealth, and which the pilgrims of after ages will not willingly let perish.

It is to one of these provincial retreats, (if such they may be called, when the migratory habits of society are rendering them daily more known and frequented) that the foregoing remarks are designed to lead the attention of the indulgent reader.

‘The southern district of Kent,’ says Gibbon, ‘which borders on Sussex and the sea, was formerly overspread with the great forest Anderida; and even now retains the denomination of the Weald, or Woodland.’ On the verge of this region, now diversified with the traces of civilization and culture, and at the distance of some thirty miles from London, stands Penshurst, for many generations the domain and seat of the illustrious family of Sydney. The mansion is of that class termed castellated houses, as retaining some of the features of the feudal castle, but accommodated to the more secure and less circumspect usages of a later age. In itself, it presents perhaps no very striking example of the merits or defects of its class, but it claims a much higher distinction in having been the birth-place and paternal home of Sir Philip Sydney.

To what name can we point which is more brightly adorned than his with all the accomplishments of the soldier, the courtier and the scholar? Still rises upon the memory through the mists of three centuries that touching legend of Zutphen, where the wounded hero waived from his lips the cup of water because it was more needed by the dying comrade at his side; and the pure morality and lofty chivalry which animate the ‘Arcadia,’ still bear witness to us of the personal merit of this pride and ornament of the English court. His sagacious but selfish mistress, Elizabeth, once stood, we are told, between him and the proffered crown of Poland, as being loth to part (so she expressed herself,) with him who was ‘the jewel of her time.’ She is reported too to have denied him on another occasion the permission which he earnestly sought, of connecting his fame and fortunes with those trans-atlantic enterprises which were already beginning to crown with success and distinction the efforts of such men as Drake and Frobisher. This last is a field of adventure upon which we must still regret that Sir Philip was not allowed to enter. The New World was then no less the region for romantic enterprise than profitable exertion, although the explorers of these distant climes had too often sunk the generosity of the soldier in the rapacity of the spoiler. In Sir Philip Sydney the world of Columbus would have had a visitor of a different order. To the courage of Smith and the accomplishments of Raleigh he would have added a spirit of honor and moderation peculiarly his own, and we should still have delighted to trace the impressions of his genius and virtue in the early annals of our continent. But his fate was destined to a different scene; and his career, though thus limited by a jealous sovereign and an early death, has left little which we can reasonably deplore but its brevity; while that brevity itself throws around his character the last touches of romantic interest, and assigns him the not unenviable lot of having carried off the rewards of age without its infirmities, and borne a maturity of honors into the safe asylum of a premature grave:

‘Invida quem Lachesis raptum,
Dum numerat palmas, credidit esse senem.’

In this age of literary and multifarious pilgriming, it cannot be unacceptable to propose an excursion to a mansion dignified by its associations with such a name. Neither is it a slight recreation to him who has been confined for weeks and months within the dusky enclosures of London, to break his bounds and emerge into the breathing fields of Surry and Kent. The father of English poetry, and poet of English pilgrims, Chaucer himself, stands ready to accompany us for at least a small portion of our route: it was along the road on which we enter, that he conducted, ages ago, those pilgrims to the shrine of Canterbury who still live in his verses; and we may glance at the Tabard Inn whence they set forth, and indulge our fancy with the thought of their quaint equipments, while we betake ourselves to the modern ‘hostelrie’ of the Elephant and Castle, and commit our persons to the modern comforts of an English coach. Alas! for the fickleness of a world which changes its idols almost as often and as easily as its fashions. Time was when we should have found this great highway strewn with devotees hurrying to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket. But now, though we might detect, no doubt, in the throng around us, the counterpart of each individual whom Chaucer committed to his living canvass; of the knight who ‘loved chevalrie’ and the Frankelein ‘who loved wine;’ of the young squire ‘with his locks in presse,’ and the fair lady who

——‘of her smiling was ful simple and coy,
Her gretest oathe n’as but by Seint Eloy;’

all as intent as of old upon objects not less fleeting, and changed in little but the fashion of their attire; now there is none so poor as to do reverence to the martyr-prelate for the sake of those merits which were once thought a sufficient covering for the sins of countless followers.

As the great eastern artery of London, the road which we have thus far followed begins to distribute its living mass into the successive provincial avenues which diverge from it, we find ourselves included in that portion of the throng, whom the pursuit of health or pleasure conducts toward Tonbridge.[1 - This route leads, among other villages, through that of Sevenoaks, famous as the place where Jack Cade and his rabble overthrew the forces of Stafford, in the very same year, (1450,) when Faust and Gutenberg set up the first press in Germany, and long, therefore, before Cade could have justly complained, as Shakspeare has made him do, that the Lord Say had ‘caused printing to be used’ in England, and ‘built a paper-mill.’ But who taxes the sun for his spots or Shakspeare for anachronisms? He who was born to exhaust and imagine worlds, cannot of course be denied some innocent liberties with chronology. The village in question, however, is more interesting to travellers from being in the vicinity of Knole, the fine old seat of the dukes of Dorset. The stranger is led here through long galleries garnished with furniture of the time of Elizabeth and hung with portraits which at every step recall names of the deepest historical interest. Who can ever forget that which hangs or hung over the door of Lady Betty Germaine’s chamber? It is Milton in the bloom of manhood, and the immortal epic seems to be just dawning on those mild and pensive features. One chamber, of sumptuous appointments remains, (so runs the legend,) as it was last tenanted by James I., no head less sapient or august having been since permitted to press the pillow. In another every thing stands as it was arranged for the reception of the second James, who forfeited, it seems, a luxurious lodging at Knole at the same time that he forfeited his crown. The name of Lady Betty Germaine, Swift’s friend and correspondent, connects the place with all the celebrities of the reign of Queen Anne. On emerging from the building we view the magnificent groves of the park, fit haunt for nightingales, though Becket is said to have driven them by an anathema from the neighborhood, because their songs interrupted his nocturnal meditations. But the memory of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, (once proprietor of Knole,) the best poet of his time, and ‘the immediate father-in-verse of Spenser,’ sufficiently redresses the stigma of so churlish a proscription, and the nightingales may well claim perpetual franchise under sanction of a name to which the ancient inscription would apply:Λί δὲ τεαὶ ζώουσιν ἀηδονες, ἡσιν ὁ παντωνἁρπακτὴρ Αὶδης ουκ επὶ χεῖρα βαλεὶ.Yet live thy nightingales of song: on thoseForgetfulness her hand shall ne’er impose.] The high and level country which under the name of ‘Downs’[2 - Dunum or Duna, sigifieth a hill or higher ground, whence Downs, which cometh of the old French word dun. Coke Lit. 235.] forms the northern and western boundary of Kent, sinks by a sudden and steep declivity on its eastern edge; which edge the geologists tell us was once washed by a primeval ocean, and is still seamed by the ineffaceable traces of its currents and storms. For ourselves it forms a vantage-ground from which we seem to look at one glance over almost the whole of that fair province which stretches nearly to the continent, and lifts the white cliffs of Albion above the surges of the British channel. We think of the day when the standard bearer of the tenth legion bore the eagle of Cæsar to the shore amid the cries of the opposing Britons; and of the still more signal day when Augustine displayed the cross before the eyes of the softened and repentant Saxons. We think too of the beings with whose memories Shakspeare has peopled this portion of the Isle; of Lear and Cordelia, of Edgar, Gloster, and Kent; of that night of horrors upon the stormy heath, and that scene of unutterable tenderness and heart-break on the sands of Dover. Unbidden, as we gaze over the fair and varied prospect, the words of the same great dramatist rise to our lips, in his appropriation of the sentiments and language of the first conqueror of Britain:

‘Kent in the commentaries Cæsar writ,
Is termed the civil’st place of all this isle;
Sweet is the country because full of riches,
The people liberal, active, valiant, wealthy.’

But the riches of Kent must be spoken of with due limitations. Those geological changes and formations before alluded to, which have marked the track of wealth across the British islands by deposits of mineral coal, as clearly as if it had been traced in sunbeams, have bequeathed no such sources of sub-terrene affluence to Kent. Nor has nature been more than parsimonious (to say the least) with respect to the superficial qualities of its soil. We have only, however, to cast our eyes on a topographical chart of Kent, to see how beneficently these disadvantages are balanced by considerations of a different sort. Washed along a vast line of coast by the ocean, and bordered to an equal or greater extent by the Thames; penetrated by the navigable Medway, and watered by such fertilizing streams as the Eden and the Ton; traversed through its whole length by that ancient highway of Dover, which figured in the itineraries of the Romans, and which still conveys much of the ceaseless intercourse between England and the Continent; its coast studded with towers and harbors; its interior sprinkled with hamlets, parks, cities, and baronial residences; claiming, finally, to be the episcopal head and fountain of ecclesiastical dignity for the whole British empire; we can readily see how Kent may vindicate to itself the praise conveyed in the lines of Shakspeare as the abode of a liberal, active, valiant, and even wealthy people.

Nor is this flattering ascription of personal qualities unsupported by the facts of its local history. To the great Roman conqueror the inhabitants of this part of Britain opposed a resistance, which taught him, as he indirectly confesses, to look back with many a wistful glance toward the coast where he had left his transports, but ill-assured against the ocean or the enemy. Against the Norman conqueror, likewise, when all the rest of the island had yielded implicitly to his sway and to the substitution of feudal for native usages, the people of Kent still made good their old hereditary law of Gavelkind. More than once in after times, stung by oppression or inflamed by zeal, they have drawn together in a spirit of tumultuous resistance, and borne their remonstrances to the very gates of the national capital. Connecting this history and character with their maritime position, we are led to apply a remark which our American historian Prescott has generalized from the circumstances of a people not dissimilarly situated. ‘The sea-board,’ says that admirable writer, ‘would seem to be the natural seat of liberty. There is something in the very presence, in the atmosphere of the ocean, which invigorates not only the physical but the moral energies of man.’ Or as Wordsworth has expressed the same idea, with an extension of it, no less just than poetical, to another class of natural objects:

‘Two voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,
They were thy chosen music, Liberty!’

It has already been said that our route lay toward Tonbridge. True, those celebrated wells lie somewhat beyond Penshurst, yet few pilgrims will fail to visit them; and it may be permitted to glance aside from our immediate object to glean a very few observations from the customs of this fashionable watering-place. But the American visitor must not expect to meet at a watering-place in England precisely that aggregate of circumstances which goes to form his idea of the pleasures and privileges of one in his own country. There are restraints imposed by the circumstances of these elder lands, their necessity more than their choice, which must still at first sight appear forbidding and superfluous to the inhabitant of a new one. The rigid barriers of ceremony; the appearance of studied isolation and exclusiveness; the monotonous movement of the great social machine, organized to its minutest details, and regulated through all its processes; these at first may lead the visitor from the New World to suppose that he has fallen upon some region of persevering formality, where all is frost and show, perpetual glitter and unmeaning barrenness. But pierce these formal barriers of etiquette, dissolve by the requisite appliances this superficial frost-work of the English circles, and none, it is believed, will have any just reason to complain of coldness and reserve. By the social barriers spoken of, are not meant the distinctions of rank in European society, or the conventional observances by which they are guarded, for these do not constitute in fact the points of repulsion by which a stranger is apt to be encountered. Still less do they mean those mental habits of suspicion, mystery and indirectness, which may infect communities as well as individuals. For these there is neither extenuation nor excuse. Rousseau has finely said: ‘Le premier pas vers le vice est de mettre du mystere aux actions innocentes; et quiconque aime à se cacher, a tôt ou tard raison de se cacher. Un seul précepte de morale peut tenir lieu de tous les autres, c’est celui-ci: Ne fais, ni ne dis jamais rien que tu ne veuilles que tout le monde voie et entende. J’ai toujours regardé comme le plus estimable des hommes ce Romain qui voulait que sa maison fût construite de manière qu’on vît tout ce qui s’y faisait.’ Whether the Englishman would be the first or the last to submit himself to this crucial test of living in a transparent house, we do not feel called upon to decide. The barriers, of which some justification has been attempted, are merely those formal observances by which society aims to protect itself from the intrusion of the unworthy and designing; which all must perceive to be in some degree necessary, even to personal independence; and which common-sense teaches us must be of greater extent and more rigorous application in a crowded capital than a country village, in an English Almacks than an American drawing-room. No one will deny that these barriers are high and strictly guarded in England; but it would be unreasonable to impute as a fault what is a dictate of prudence, or to infer that coldness and incivility must of course lurk under forms which have been manifestly imposed by the necessity of constant circumspection.

Duly impressed with these considerations, the stranger will be less disposed to complain when arriving at any place of fashionable resort in England; at Tonbridge, for instance, one of the most aristocratic; he finds himself consigned to the solitary comfort of his own apartments, without the prospect of any of those periods of social reünion, which elsewhere tend so strongly to break down the barriers of reserve and facilitate the process of introduction and acquaintance. Cardinal de Retz has told us, that the dinner-bell never fails to disperse a mob in France, and if English travellers are to be believed, it seldom fails to bring one together in an American hotel; but as a social summons, no such tocsin breaks the uniformity of the English ménage. The traveller may dine indeed in the public room, but it is at a separate table, on his separate repast; he is served with what viands, at what hour, he pleases, but no contiguity of position or interchange of friendly offices can remove the impalpable but impassable partition which divides him from his neighbors. He feels something of the air of the penitentiary in the very refinements of his luxurious hostelrie. But these are incidents not without their attendant advantages. If the stranger is thus separated from his fellows, he is at least saved, in turn, from the attempts of fraud, and the contact of impertinence. This is, in fact, the meaning of such arrangements, and if not exactly palatable, they are at any rate protective. But there are restrictions with regard to the fairer part of creation, and his correspondence with them, which admit of no such topics of comfort and alleviation. We nowhere find it stated, by what steps it is permitted to the English suitor to proceed from the distant bow to the morning call, always in the presence of the mother, the aunt, or other watchful guardian; and thence by regular gradations to the heart and hand of the object of his wishes. But it is enough for our stranger to know, that whatever may be the laws of strategy, provided for such cases in other lands, here it is necessary to begin his approaches with the father, and to lay his lines of earliest circumvallation around the watchful mother. These distant out-works must be mastered before there is the slightest chance of communicating even a summons to the citadel. English travellers, therefore, express surprise at the artless confidence with which unmarried ladies in America commit themselves to the solitary chat with a comparative stranger, take his hand or his arm after a few hours’ acquaintance, and expose themselves to the surprise of a declaration before the extent of his means or the respectability of his connexion have been discussed and settled. Between the merits of these different modes of procedure, the present writer has neither the wish nor the ability to arbitrate. They have their growth in such widely different states of society, that the reformer must be bold who should attempt to transpose or change them. It is sufficient for our present purpose to remark, that if the visitor at Tonbridge should have failed to make those preliminary advances just spoken of, his pleasures here, as an admirer of female loveliness, will most probably be limited to seeing the fair creatures ride on diminutive donkeys (such is the custom of Tonbridge) to the wells, there to drink the chalybeate and promenade the pantiles. But what then? If he have not the entrée of society, the charms of nature and the attractions of English scenery are spread before him. His guide-book will tell him of grotesque rocks upon lonely heaths where Druids may have worshipped; and of Bayham Abbey, with its mouldering walls and ‘antiquary ivy,’ which still attests amidst its ruins the luxury and wealth of its ancient masters. He may look in one direction over the broad lands and towering spires of Eridge Castle, or turning in another, soon lose amidst the recollections of Penshurst and in the homage which the heart renders to departed virtue, all sense of the vexatious forms and frivolous though perhaps inseparable distinctions of modern society.

Approaching Penshurst from Tonbridge, we alight at the ancient church which stands in close contiguity with the family mansion. A ramble amidst its graves, a walk through its solemn aisles, a moment’s pause among its darkened monuments, seems to be but a suitable preparation for our farther researches. It is scarcely possible to enter one of these venerable religious edifices of the old world, which form so striking a feature in its scenery, without feeling in some degree an impression as if the dim and solemn fane were peopled with shadows; as if indistinct forms were beckoning along its lonely aisles, or waiting the stranger’s approach in its deep and vaulted recesses. The building is not always of great extent, (this of Penshurst is not so,) but the impression seems to be the result not more of the solemn style of the building and its accessories, than of the admirable harmony which they preserve with the recollections and associations of all around them. Hence it may well be doubted whether, if we could transport one of these time-honored structures to our own land, with all its architectural peculiarities, it would have for us exactly the meaning or the charms which it possesses at home. Our career is as yet too brief, our land too full of the sounds of enterprise and excitement; our interest lies too largely and exclusively in the present and the future. The dawning light and the keen air of morning (sœvus equis oriens anhelis) are not, as represented by the poets, more uncongenial to the spectral shapes of night, than the recent origin and energetic action of our rising country to the dim traditions and mouldering memories which have grown incorporate with the weather-stains and damps of these hoary sanctuaries. At Penshurst in particular, so complete is this harmony between the ideal and the actual, and so strongly does it bring before us the image of the past, that it might seem no unnatural incident of our reverie, were the grave and reverend knight, the ancient head of the Sydneys and patron of the church, once more to enter with his retinue from the neighboring mansion and take his seat in the family chancel. But of that honored name nothing remains to Penshurst except the memory, and those fading inscriptions which inform us that they who slumber here bore it irreproachably in life, and have long since ceased from their earthly labors. Among these, however, we look in vain for the name of Sir Philip Sydney. He fell in a foreign land, and his country, we are told, mourned for him with a loud and poignant lamentation. His remains were afterward transferred to Saint Paul’s, where the ruin which fell at a later period upon the great national temple involved also the memorial of Sir Philip Sydney. But it matters less, since the achievements of his pen and sword have made all places where the name of England comes, his monument, and every heart which is alive to honor, a sanctuary for his memory.

Let us then pass on to that venerable mansion which having witnessed many of the incidents of his life may still be considered the lasting memorial of his virtues. Before us rises a building irregular in its design, but presenting an extensive line of front, in which square towers and pointed gables, connected by walls of unequal height, succeed each other with that sort of caprice which is common in mansions of the same age. Entering through a spacious gate-way, we cross a quadrangular court, and gain access by an unfurnished passage to the great hall, which formed the distinguishing feature of the feudal homestead. In the vast extent of this apartment we perceive an image of the pride which gloried more in the number of its retainers than in the luxury or refinement of its accommodations. Oaken tables, and benches of the same homely material, stretched from side to side, show that our ancestors required but rude accessories to recommend to them the substantial enjoyments of their mighty repasts. Through lofty windows strengthened by mullions and decorated with intricate carvings, the light streams softened by neither blind nor curtain. The middle of the hall is occupied by a spacious hearth, around which gathered the friends and followers of the noble house; and the fire-utensils which still remain, and which seem destined for the consumption of entire forests, intimate that the household gods which presided here dealt in no stinted or penurious economy. There was scarcely need of flue or chimney, for the smoke curling up among the interlacing rafters of the roof, might long gather in its ample cavity without threatening those below with serious inconvenience. It is curious to observe that when at length so obvious a contrivance as the chimney grew into more general use, its introduction was opposed by much the same sort of arguments as have in other ages resisted the encroachments of change and novelty. A moralist of the times has left us his recorded opinion, that nothing but agues and catarrhs had followed the abandonment of that old and genial practice which planted the fire in the middle of the room and left the smoke to spread its sable canopy aloft. Another peculiarity in this picture of ancient manners was the slightly-raised platform called the daïs, at the farther extremity of the hall, which reminds us of the distinction that was preserved even in the hours of convivial relaxation, between the family of the lord and its dependents. Nor was this distinction in general one of place alone: in most of the wealthy and noble houses of the period, it portended a corresponding distinction in the quality of the food. Hence in the homely times in which Ben Jonson has apostrophized Penshurst, it is mentioned as an honorable instance of the hospitality of its owner, that

——‘there each guest might eat,
Without his fear, and of the lord’s own meat;
Where the same beer, board, and self-same wine,
That is his lordship’s, shall be also mine.’

‘A strange topic of praise,’ remarks Gifford, ‘to those who are unacquainted with the practice of those times; but in fact the liberal mode of hospitality here recorded was almost peculiar to this noble person. The great dined at long tables, (they had no other in their vast halls,) and permitted many guests to sit down with them; but the gradations of rank and fortune were rigidly maintained, and the dishes grew visibly coarser as they receded from the head of the table.’ To sit below the salt, is a phrase with which the romances of Scott have made us familiar, and which originated, it seems, in the custom of placing a large salt-cellar near the middle of the table, not more for convenience than with reference to the distribution of the guests.

The same spirit which presided over the appointments of this stately hall extended itself to the other apartments and remoter details of the household. Every where there is the same reference to the power and even the supervision of the lord, manifested in the long suites of rooms which open upon each other, (the hall just mentioned is commanded by a small window opening from a superior and adjacent apartment,) as if to give the master at one glance a view of the number and a knowledge of the pursuits of the inmates. The ideas of the architects of that age seem to have been limited in their object, to realizing an image of the great feudal principle of preëminence and protection on the one side, submissiveness and reliance on the other. Hence designs and arrangements so little consistent with the privacy and personal independence which we regard at present as indispensable to every scheme of domestic accommodation. But these artists were not limited alone by a defective conception of the objects of their art; they were also embarrassed in its execution by the unequal manner in which the different branches of it had been cultivated and improved. It is doubtless a remark which will admit of very general application, that the arts which may be made subservient to embellishment and magnificence, have always far outstripped those which only conduce to comfort and convenience. The savage paints his body with gorgeous colors, who wants a blanket to protect him from the cold; and nations have heaped up pyramids to enhance their sense of importance, who have dwelt contentedly in dens and caves of the earth. Something of the same incongruity may be remarked at Penshurst, and other English mansions of the same age and order; where we sometimes ascend to galleries of inestimable paintings over steps roughly hewn with the axe, and look upon ceilings of the most exquisite and elaborate carving suspended over floors which have never had the benefit of the joiner’s plane.

In the tastes, too, and personal habits of that elder period, contrasts of a not less striking nature might be easily pointed out. We may doubt, for instance, whether beauty will ever array itself in apparel of more cost and profusion than that in which the high-born dames of Wresill and Penshurst swept through their stately apartments. Grandeur will never make its presence felt by a greater weight of ceremony, nor ever extend a more watchful and provident care to all the equipage of rank and ostentation. Flattery, we may safely assert, will never offer its incense in a more seductive form, than when it borrowed the pencil of Holbein and the lyre of Spenser. Yet these persons were the same who trode upon floors strewn with rushes, and deemed it a point of nicety and refinement if these were changed sufficiently often to prevent the soiling of their clothes. They are the same who dined without forks, and thought pewter dishes too great a luxury to be used in common by the highest nobility; who transported their ladies on pillions for want of coaches, and themselves struggled through mire for want of pavements; who, with a knowledge of the manufacture of glass, and possessed beyond ourselves of an exquisite skill in coloring it, were yet too frugal or careless to use it freely in lighting their houses. It was an age when the sick were plied with such delicate restoratives as ‘mummy and the flesh of hedge-hogs,’ and tables loaded with such dainties as cranes, lapwings, sea-gulls, bitterns and curlews. Such is the unequal progress which is often maintained in habits of undistinguishing luxury and habits of genuine refinement; so great the difference between a state of society which aims at the gratification of pride, and one which contents itself with diffusing comfort and promoting security.

It would be easy, no doubt, to draw from this sketch of ancient manners many reflections consoling to our own sense of superior comfort and discernment. But the subject is susceptible of being viewed under aspects not so flattering yet more instructive. Who is there gross enough to pride himself on superior wisdom because Kepler believed that the earth was a vast animal which breathed and reasoned, or to claim the palm of comparative merit because Sir Thomas More listened to the babbling of a pretended prophetess, and Luther waged what he considered no visionary but actual combats with the powers of darkness. If then we have dwelt on the defects of an age when civilization was still struggling with the remains of barbarism, it is to foster no spirit of vain exultation: it is rather to turn with increased pleasure from those stains which disfigure the picture, to the contemplation of the more prominent and brilliant figures which occupy the fore-ground. We remember that upon times thus backward in many of the refinements of life, and scarcely yet freed from the dregs of medi-œval darkness, genius and virtue have thrown a lustre by their presence, not merely sufficient to retrieve them from our scorn, but to make them in some respects the object of our admiration and even envy. Perhaps, if it were submitted to our choice to take our places at will in any circle which genius and merit have ever dignified and adorned, none could justly claim our preference over that of Penshurst, at the time when Sir Philip Sydney sate there in the same group with his lovely sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and with Edmund Spenser, the poet of ‘the Faërie Queen.’ Of the first of these eminent persons, it is enough to say, that his own age conceded to him the style of ‘the Incomparable,’ and that posterity has amply ratified the title. The second is known to us by that affectionate tribute of her brother’s love, which has identified the name of the Countess of Pembroke with his principal work; nor will the latest readers of English literature be forgetful of one whose memory Jonson has embalmed in the sweetest inscription that ever flowed from a poet’s pen. Of Spenser, the last but not least illustrious of the honored group, it is only necessary to say, that as he shared the hospitality, so he has not left unsung the praises of Penshurst. Where is the circle which shall again combine so many claims to our admiration and respect? What age shall presume to vaunt itself for genius or for virtue above the age of Sydney and of Spenser?

Later times have added to the social and literary lustre of Penshurst. It has been still farther illustrated by the talents and fame of Algernon Sydney, whose name never fails to awaken the sympathies of every friend of liberty for his honorable labors and unhappy fate. It has numbered among its guests and its eulogists such men as Jonson, Waller, and Southey; finally, even in our own time it has seen its horizon momently illuminated by the brief but dazzling splendors of the poet Shelly. This last was of the lineage of Sydney, and shared the talents and proud integrity, but not the wisdom and milder virtues of his house. It only remains to say, that the dwelling and estate of the Sydneys has passed into other hands, but finds, it would seem, in Lord De Lisle a proprietor not insensible to the worth nor regardless of the memory of his far-famed predecessors.

Thus the remarks intended, draw to an end. We leave the halls of Penshurst, and the gates of that venerated mansion close behind us forever. Even thus did they close ages ago upon him, the light and honor of that ancient house, who, leaving it in the glow of health, in the pride of manly beauty, in the aspirations of a high but not a haughty spirit, was destined never to cross that paternal threshold more. The blessings that went with him have mouldered on the lips that pronounced them; the tears that mourned his fall have dried upon the lids from which they streamed; all who knew and loved, all who watched and wept for Sir Philip Sydney are silent in the dust to which he himself has long been gathered. Yet does not his spirit commune with ours as we tread the halls once familiar with his presence, or gaze upon those all but animated portraits which Penshurst still numbers among the richest of its treasures? Does nothing survive here of so much honor, so much courtesy, so much courage, to elevate us by its example and to inspire us with new hope, ere we turn again to tread the toilsome mazes of the world? Let the acknowledgments of all those who with no unworthy or unreflecting spirit have traced these paths, reply; or rather let the answer embody itself in the words of a poet, who, while expressing his own sense of the merits of Sydney, has but given a suitable expression to sentiments which find an echo in every bosom:

‘Are days of old familiar to thy mind,
Oh reader? Hast thou let the midnight hour
Pass unperceiv’d, whilst thou in fancy lived
With high-born beauties and enamor’d chiefs,
Sharing their hopes, and with a breathless joy,
Whose expectation touched the verge of pain,
Following their dangerous fortunes? If such lore
Has ever thrill’d thy bosom, thou wilt tread
As with a pilgrim’s reverential thoughts
The groves of Penshurst. Sydney here was born,
Sydney, than whom no gentler, braver man
His own delightful genius ever feign’d,
Illustrating the vales of Arcady,
With courteous courage and with loyal loves.
Upon his natal day an acorn here
Was planted; it grew up a stately oak,
And in the beauty of its strength it stood
And flourished, when his perishable part
Had mouldered dust to dust. That stately oak
Itself hath perished now, but Sydney’s fame