Two miles through field and woodland, and we are at Kenilworth. Wise were the monks when they settled down in that green valley. Very quaint is the village that clusters round the old church; traditions of monastic and baronial times linger there; the exteriors of several of the antique houses made me wish to catch a glimpse of the interiors and their inhabitants, which I was not lucky enough to do. They are just the sort of houses where a good dinner and a bottle of rare port is the order of the day. The end of the village near the church is quite another affair; instead of seeming coeval with the castle and the priory, it appears to have sprung up simultaneously with the railway-station. Extremes meet at Kenilworth: in these modern villas you would expect to find no inhabitant less active than a commercial traveller; in the old houses at the other end you would hardly be startled by an interview with Sir Walter Raleigh or rare Ben Jonson.
Of course I ought to describe Kenilworth Castle; but I cannot do it, that’s a fact; besides which, the thing has been done a hundred times. It is a glorious ruin; and as one lies on the turf on a summer day in the shadow of its grey stonework, watching the flying clouds, and the choughs in the ivy, and the little river shimmering through the meadows, and the immoveable old towers decaying in their stately strength, there descends upon the spirit a mystic and unutterable feeling, worth more than all the poetry ever written, ay, or all the claret ever pressed from Bordeaux grapes.
Avon winds back into Stoneleigh Park after leaving Kenilworth, and passes the little village of Ashow, where I tasted the juiciest mulberries I ever ate,--blood-ripe as those wherewith the laughing Naiad Ægle stained the temples of Silenus. Cool and peaceful is that pleasant village, where Avon murmurs softly amid reedy islets. Passing onward, we see a cross upon a wooded hill: there poor Piers Gaveston was beheaded, some five centuries and a half ago. There is a capitally written inscription on the cross. Somewhat farther is Milverton Church, with a quaint wooden tower: they say it is not worth while to build a stone one, as the lightning strikes it so often. But Guy’s Cliff!
Perhaps I had better let those three words stand as sole suggestion of what that exquisite residence is. The strange legend of Guy of Warwick, vanquisher of Colbrand the Dane, and of the Dun Cow, hovers around this delightful old place. But I don’t know whether Mr. Bertie Percy’s poetic dwelling is not surpassed by the mill close thereto.
Few places I have seen dwell in my memory like this beautiful old mill, surrounded by a wealth of water, a luxury of leafage. If there be mills in fairy-land, they are built on this pattern. If the miller’s daughter, “so dear, so dear” to the Laureate that he plagiarized from Anacreon for her sake, had any actual existence, it must have been at a mill like this of Guy’s Cliff.
I scarce dare approach Warwick after Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reaction from a fast, loud, vulgar, sordid life, makes the most refined and poetic natures of America dreamers of dreams. Such, with especial emphasis, was Hawthorne. To him the ideal was more real than reality. What visions he saw in Warwick, where the great castle “floats double” in the lucid Avon; where a strange old-world tranquillity broods over the famous Earl of Leicester’s antique hospital! After Windsor (and I do not forget Alnwick), I think Warwick the noblest castellated building in England. Built into the solid rock, it overhangs Avon with a wild sublimity. As you look down from the windows of the great hall upon the river far beneath, you think that thus may Guinevere and Lancelot have looked, when the angry Queen cast into the water the nine great diamonds, while the doomed barge bore to her burial the lily maid of Astolat. Why over that old broken bridge, green with the ivy of a thousand years, may not the blameless King have passed, and Merlin the sage, and Tristram of Lyonnesse, leading Iseult of Ireland? Who knows? Are these things fables? Are ye enchanters, Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold?
The Earl of Warwick’s courtesy throws the castle open to the public two or three days a week. Rumour says that the late Earl’s housekeeper, whose monument may be seen in Warwick Church, left her master sixty thousand pounds, accumulated by visitors’ fees! At the very gateway you are met by wonders,--an iron porridge-pot of the great Sir Guy, holding a hogshead or two, I suppose. The old knight must have had a rare appetite for breakfast. There is also his sword, a gigantic weapon, which I defy Jacob Omnium to wield with both hands. As for the contents of the castle, I will not say a word about them; though of historical portraits, Vandykes and Rubenses, there is a fine collection. I commend the traveller upon looking out upon Avon from those wondrous rooms, to call back, if he can, the heroic and poetic times when it was possible to build such a castle; when it seemed fit habitation for those who dwelt in it,--for Neville the Kingmaker, to wit, who fills a marvellous page, brilliant with gold and stained with blood, in England’s history; and who well deserved to be found in Shakespeare’s peerless portrait-gallery.
Warwick town is very quaint, and has two old-fashioned hostelries, the Warwick Arms and the Woolpack, at either of which a hungry and thirsty traveller will find ample refreshment of the right sort. From the top of Warwick Church tower there is a magnificent view over a rich country. The church’s chief glory is the Beauchamp Chapel, just 400 years old, a perfect poem in stone, an absolute triumph of the good old artist-workmen, who find no rivals in the days when artists are never workmen, and workmen never artists. Its dead inhabitant was last of the Beauchamp Earls, and that crowned saint, Henry VI., conferred the earldom upon the Kingmaker; thus commencing the third line of its holders, for the first Earl was a Newburgh, or Neuburg, of the Conqueror’s creation; then, two centuries later, it passed through a female to the Beauchamps; two centuries more, and the last Beauchamp was succeeded by a Nevil; on Nevil’s death, “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence” had the earldom, whose son, last of the Plantagenets, ended the fourth line, when he and Perkin Warbeck died on Tower Hill; next came the Dudleys, creatures of Henry VIII., the elder of whom, Lady Jane Grey’s father-in-law and worst enemy, is better known as Duke of Northumberland; then Lord Rich, whose great grand-son married Cromwell’s daughter, was created Earl of Warwick by James I.; and finally George II. conferred the title on Greville, Earl Brooke, ancestor of the present Earl. Thus six families at least have held this famous earldom.
The traveller will of course turn aside to Leamington, town of fashion and frivolity, about a mile and a half from the poetic stream. Leamington owes its existence, as anything beyond a village, to one Dr. Jephson, who hit on the brilliant notion that the mineral waters of the place would cure all possible diseases. A great hotel sprang up, the Regent, which for years was a kind of hospital for Dr. Jephson’s patients. This medical genius is quite deified in the town. There are pleasant gardens dedicated to him, to which none are admitted save subscribers of a guinea, or something of the sort. It is a downright apotheosis (or apodiabolosis) of physic. But other causes concurred to bring Leamington into the first rank of pleasure towns: there is capital hunting in the neighbourhood, and a first-rate pack of hounds. It is almost the metropolis of archery, a pastime which young ladies wisely patronize, since a pretty girl cannot look prettier than in her toxophilite costume of Lincoln-green. Nothing can be more beautiful than the walk by the margin of Avon through Lord Warwick’s park. After passing through several pleasant villages, full of Warwickshire quaintness, we reach Charlecote House, the seat of the Lucy family. It has always appeared to me that Haydon more admirably than any man expressed the feeling which is produced in poetic minds by the places sacred to Shakespeare. Painting under the stress of a noble ambition, with the sad certainty that the age could not perceive his greatness, had injured his health; instead of joining “the vulgar idlers at a watering-place” he sought change of scene at Stratford. How the man enjoyed it, and how vigorously he depicts his enjoyment! “To Charlecote,” says he, “I walked as fast as my legs could carry me, and crossing the meadow, entered the immortalized park by a back pathway. Trees, gigantic and umbrageous, at once announce the growth of centuries: while I was strolling on, I caught a distant view of the old red-bricked house, in the same style and condition as when Shakespeare lived; and on going close to the river-side, came at once on two enormous old willows, with a large branch across the stream, such as Ophelia hung to. Every blade of grass, every daisy and cowslip, every hedge-flower and tuft of tawny earth, every rustling, ancient and enormous tree which curtains the sunny park with its cool shadows, between which the sheep glitter on the emerald green in long lines of light, every ripple of the river with its placid tinkle,