The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 13, No. 366, April 18, 1829

Along the line of darkling portrait pours,
And warms the polish'd oak or ponderous beam.

X.
Hark! from the depths beneath that proud saloon
The water's moan comes fitful and subdued,
Where in mild glory yon triumphant moon
Smiles on the arch that nobly spans the flood—
And here have kings and hoary statesmen gazed,
When spring with garlands deck'd the vale below,
Or when the waning year had lightly razed
The banks where Avon's lingering fountains flow.

XI.
And did no minstrel greet the courtly throng?
Did no fair flower of English loveliness
On timid lute sustain some artless song,
Her meek brow bound with smooth unbraided tress?
For Music knew not yet the stately guise,
Content with simplest notes to touch the soul,
Not from her choirs as when loud anthems rise,
Or when she bids orchestral thunders roll!

XII.
Here too the deep and fervent orison
Hath matron whisper'd for her absent lord,
Peril'd in civil wars, that shook the throne,
When every hand in England, clench'd the sword:—
And here, as tales and chronicles agree,
If tales and chronicles be deem'd sincere,
Fair Warwick's heiress smiled at many a plea
Of puissant Thane, or Norman cavalier.

XIII.
Or dost thou sigh for theme of classic lore
Midst arms and moats, and battlements and towers?
Behold the Vase! that, erst on Anio's shore,
Hath found a splendid home in Warwick's bowers:
To British meads ere yet the Saxon came,
The pomp of senates swept its pedestal,
And kings of many an Oriental name
Have seen its shadow, and are perish'd all!

XIV.
Haply it stood on that illustrious ground
Where circling columns once, in sculptur'd pride,
With fine volute or wreath'd acanthus crown'd,
Rear'd some light roof by Anio's plunging tide;
There, in the brightness of the votive fane
To rural or to vintage gods addrest,
Those vine clad symbols of Pan's peaceful reign
Amidst dark pines their sacred seats possess'd.

XV.
Or, did it break with soft and silvery shower
The silence of some marble solitude,
Where Adrian, at the fire fly's glittering hour,
Of rumour'd worlds to come the doubts review'd?
Go mark his tomb!—in that sepulchral mole
Scowls the fell bandit:—from its towering height
Old Tiber's flood reflects the girandole,
Midst bells, and shouts, and rockets' arrowy flight!

XVI.
Warwick, farewell! Long may thy fortunes stand,
And sires of sires hold rule within thy walls,
Thy streaming banners to the breeze expand,
And the heart's griefs pass lightly o'er thy halls!
May happier bards, on Avon's sedgy shore,
Sustain on nobler lyre thy poet's vow,
And all thy future lords (what can they more?)
Wear the green laurels of thy fame, as now!

NOTES

One of the towers of Warwick Castle is complimented with the name of Guy's Tower; certain ponderous armour and utensils preserved in the lodge are also attributed to Guy; nobody, in short, thinks of Guy without Warwick, or of Warwick without Guy; "Arms and the Man" ought to have been emblazoned on the castle banner; and why should I hesitate to say, that one of the most amiable of children perpetuates the heroic name within its walls? Had this renowned adventurer been ambitious of patriarchal honours, his descendants might have extended the ancestral renown, and have furnished many a ballad of those good old times; but when the Saxon Ulysses had returned from his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and made an end of Colbrand and the Dun Cow, his fancy was to take alms in disguise from his own fair lady, at his own castle gate, and then retire (tous les goúts sont respectables) to a certain hole or cave called Guy's Cliff, where he amused himself (in the intervals of rheumatism) for the rest of his natural life in counting his beads and ruminating on his sins, which, as he was a great traveller and a hero, might have been considerable.

STANZA III

The following interesting passage is copied from a book of ordinary occurrence, in which it is cited without stating the authority. It is more than doubtful if any other nobleman in the kingdom, at that time or since, has projected or executed so much on his own property as the late Earl of Warwick:—

"I purchased a magnificent collection of pictures by Vandyke, Rubens, &c. The marbles are not equalled, perhaps, in the kingdom. I made a noble approach to the castle through a solid rock, built a porter's lodge, and founded a library full of books, some valuable and scarce, all well chosen. I made an armoury, and built walls round the court and pleasure gardens. I built a noble green-house, and filled it with beautiful plants. I placed in it a vase, considered the finest remain of Grecian art, for its size and beauty. I made a noble lake, from 3 to 600 feet broad, and a mile long. I planted trees, now worth 100,000l., besides 100 acres of ash. I built a stone bridge of 105 feet in span, every stone from 2,000 to 3,800 lbs in weight. The weight of the first tier on the centre was estimated at 1,000 tons. I gave the bridge to the town with no toll on it. I will not enumerate a great many other things done by me. Let Warwick Castle speak for itself."

STANZA X

There is a feeling of respect inspired by ancient buildings of importance. Such a castle as Warwick, which has lodged a succession of generations of the most opposite characters—at one time the "dulcis et quieti animi vir, et qui, cougruo suis moribus studio, vitam egit et clausit;" at another by the assassin of Piers de Gaveston, the king's favourite, "whose head he cut off upon Blacklow Hill, and gave the friars preachers the charge of his body, inasmuch as he had called the said earl the Black Dog of Arderne"—is not to be approached as one visits a handsome stone house of Palladian architecture!—such a house we know can never have been the scene either of council or conspiracy; within such walls there can never have been "latens odium inter regem et proceres, et præsecipuè inter comitem de Warwick et adhærentes ejusdem."

As to the river and its swans. I have learned from the bard to whom it has been long since consecrated, (although he may not have had the right of fishing in it when alive,) that "discretion is the better part of valour."

If I were to describe the walks, I should only say that they were contrived, as all walks ought to be, to let in the sun or to shut him out by turns. Here you rejoice in the fulness of his meridian strength, and here in the shadows of various depth and intensity, which a well disposed and happily contrasted sylvan population knows how to effect. The senatorial oak, the spreading sycamore, the beautiful plane, (which I never see without recollecting the channel of the Asopus and the woody sides of Oeta,) the aristocratic pine running up in solitary stateliness till it equal the castle turrets—all these, and many more, are admirably intermingled and contrasted, in plantations which establish, as every thing in and about the castle does, the consummate taste of the late earl, although it must be admitted he had the finest subjects to work upon, from the happy disposition of the ground. I shall never forget the first time I walked over them; a pheasant occasionally shifting his quarters at my intrusion, and making his noisy way through an ether so clear, so pure, so motionless, that the broad leaves subsided, rather than fell to the ground, without the least disturbance; the tall grey chimneys just breathing their smoke upon the blue element, which they scarcely stained; every green thing was beginning to wear the colour of decay, and many a tint of yellow, deepening into orange, made me sensible that "there be tongues in trees," if not "good in every thing." But Montaigne says nothing is useless, not even inutility itself.

STANZA XIII

This superb work of antiquity must indeed be seen, to be sufficiently estimated: the great failure of that branch of the fine arts which is employed to represent all the rest, is in the inadequate idea of size which it must necessarily give where the objects to be represented are large.

The marble vases now extant are, of course, comparatively few in number, and this is, perhaps, excepting the Medicean, the finest of them all. The best representations of it are those in Piranesi, three in number. One great, and conspicuous beauty of this vase consists in the elegantly formed handles, and in the artful insertion of the extreme branches of the vine-stems which compose them, into its margin, where they throw off a rich embroidery of leaves and fruit. A lion's skin, with the head and claws attached, form a sort of drapery, and the introduction of the thyrsus, the lituus, and three bacchanalian masks on each side, complete the embellishments. The capacity of this vase is 103 gallons, its diameter 9 feet, its pedestal of course modern. It was discovered in 1770, in the draining of a mephitic lake within the enclosure of the Villa Adriana, called Laga di Pantanello. Lord Warwick had reason to be proud of his vase, which had this peculiarity, that, whereas almost every other object of art in the kingdom has been catalogued and sold over and over again, this vase passed (after a sufficiently long parenthesis of time) immediately from the gardens of Adrian to his own!

Blackwood's Magazine.

Manners & Customs of all Nations