The soldiers at the barracks are kept in better order than that Scots regiment that proved such a curse and corruption to the quiet Wight parishes in Oglander’s time. He represents them as billeted in the Island “because they should not run away, being constrained for the most part to serve contrary to their wills”—volunteers, as he elsewhere calls them “a proud, beggarly nation, and I hope we shall never be troubled with the like [again], especially the red-shanks, or the Highlanders, being as barbarous in nature as their clothes.” These strangers, “insolent by reason of their unanimous holding together,” brought about so many “inconveniences,” murders, rapes, robberies, and so forth, that when at length they were shipped off to the siege of La Rochelle, after being reviewed by Charles on Arreton Down, the worthy knight can record how “we were free from our Egyptian thraldom, or like Spain from the Moors, for since the Danish slavery never were these Islanders so oppressed.” In the outspoken fashion of his day, he notes how the Scots left behind them a considerable strain of northern blood, which may have been not altogether an evil for a too closely connected neighbourhood, where, if all tales are true, marrying in and in has generated a good deal of physical and mental feebleness.
Keats, who seems to have written part of Endymion at Carisbrooke, denounces the barracks at Parkhurst as a “nest of debauchery.” But at the worst, they may have been an Arcadian nook compared to that East India Company’s recruits depôt near Ryde, described by Scott, in The Surgeon’s Daughter, as a gaol of adventurous scum of society swept together by crimps and kidnappers. Sir Walter must have visited or at least coasted “the shore of that beautiful island, which he who once sees never forgets,” when in 1807 he stayed with his friend Stewart Rose at Gundimore on the Hampshire coast. Since his day, the Island has seen various samples of Highland soldiers, and found them not too barbarous either in dress or manners.
By Parkhurst there is a pleasant way to Gurnard Bay, the nearest bathing-place on the coast. Cowes, under half a dozen miles off, may be gained by roads on either side the river, or by boat when the tide serves. The well-shod and wary explorer might trace the Medina upwards through the Downs, and among the peaty bogs of the “Wilderness” on to its obscure source behind the Undercliff. On either side the “quarried downs of Wight” offer fine airy walks with valley villages for goal, or such points as the ancient British settlement, whose pit dwellings may be traced by an antiquary’s eye in the hollow below Rowborough Downs, near the road leading south from Carisbrooke. On the other side of the Medina, by St George’s Down, is mounted the ridge of chalk stretching to Brading and Bembridge.
In fact Newport, too much neglected by tourists, unless as a halting-place, would make an excellent station for visiting the whole Island. I must be content with taking the reader on by the central railway to the Undercliff. This goes out from Newport with the line to Sandown, threading the Downs into the Yar Valley; then at Merston Junction it turns off towards the southern heights swelling up beyond Godshill station. But one must not forget to mention Shide, on the outskirts of Newport, not only as a station for its golf-links on Pan Down, but as a spot in wider touch with the world than any other on the Island, for here Dr John Milne, F.R.S., has his Seismological Observatory, if that be a fit title for an installation of instruments by which earthquakes, thousands of miles away, are recorded long before they get into newspapers—some indeed that never get into further notice, spending their force at the bottom of the sea or in wildernesses beyond the ken of “our own correspondent.”
Godshill is one of the prettiest of the Island villages, claiming its name from that oft-told legend of supernatural interference with the building of a church, which by miraculous power was moved to its present site on an eminence, where it holds up its tower as a conspicuous landmark. This church is often visited both for the prospect from it, and for its architectural merits and interesting memorials. Besides a sixteenth century altar tomb of Sir John Leigh and monuments of the Worsley family, it contains a specimen of their once famous art collection in a picture of Daniel in the Lion’s Den, said to be in part by Rubens, or at least after his style. An older patron is recorded by a tablet praising one of the benefactors of the Newport Grammar School.
Here lies the mortal part of Richard Gard,
While his freed spirit meets with heaven’s reward;
His gifts endowed the schools, the needy raised
And by the latest memory will be praised.
And may our Isle be filled with such a name,
And be like him whom virtue clothed with fame;
Blessed with the poor, the scholars too were blest
Through such a donor that is gone to rest.
A strange commentary on the truthfulness of epitaphs is the account of that late lamented given by his contemporary Oglander, declaring him the knavish son of a French refugee, whose father, Pierre Garde, had been executed for treason in his own country. An extract on this head makes a good specimen of Sir John’s random jottings, that open such curious peeps into the state of his native Island at that date. One takes the liberty of correcting his spelling; but the style seems past mending.
Richard, the father, was a notable sly fellow, dishonest and given to filching; he brought some tricks out of France with him. Vide—he would steal a cow, and putting a loaf of bread hot out of the oven on her horns, make her horns so supple that they would turn any way he pleased, so as to disfigure the beast that the owner might not know her again. Many other shifts he had, being a man of no great conscience, by which means he recovered some wealth, and died. His sons, Richard and Peter, did not degenerate; Richard was as crafty a knave as any (except his brother) in a whole country; he was good at reading and understanding of old evidences, whereby he got many into his hands, and so forced the owners to a composition. He was indifferently skilled in law, a most penurious base fellow, and of little religion; he died about 1616, and in his will gave Richard, the eldest son of Peter, the better part of his estate, having no children of his