Solent with thousands of lights. It is said indeed that, of late years, yachting begins to decline in fashion; that the expensive craft are allowed to take longer holidays, and that “Cowes week” is not filled with such a cloud of canvas. It may well be that our “smart set” find the winds and waves disturbing to the calculations of Bridge.
During Cowes’ water-carnival, some of the finest yachts afloat may still be seen at anchor off the R. Y. S. Clubhouse, standing out prominently on the sea-front, with its flagstaff and jetty, at which only members and officers of the navy are privileged to land, under the muzzles of a miniature battery brought from Virginia Water for holiday service. This building, whose glass gallery is the grand stand of yacht racing, has been adapted from the old castle of Henry VIII., in the seventeenth century used as a state prison. Here Sir William Davenant spent his hours of confinement in writing an heroic poem, Gondibert, which one fears to be hardly read nowadays, unless it makes part of prison libraries. There are some score cantos of it, filling eight score or so of folio pages; and this, as in the contemporary case of the bear and the fiddle, brings the story only to the middle, for as the author puts it in metaphors readily suggested at Cowes, “ ’tis high time to strike Sail, and cast Anchor (though I have run but half my Course) when at the helm I am threatened with Death, who, though he can visit us but once, seems troublesome, and even in the Innocent may beget such a gravity as diverts the Musick of Verse.”
The parade of Cowes runs on beyond the castle, past gardened villas, to open out as the Green, a strip of sward set with seats that make the pit of the open-air theatre for which the Solent is stage in its yacht-racing season. At the end of this is the point marked by a brick ivy-clad mansion called Egypt, why so called, one knows not, unless that the name, occurring elsewhere in England, seems sometimes connected with gipsy memories. Did one wish to go gipsying, this end of Cowes was once fairly well adapted for such purposes; but cottages of gentility keep on spreading along the sea edge.
At Egypt is the bathing beach, from which the sea wall extends onward towards a bank of wild shrubbery called the “Copse,” a miniature Undercliff, where, rooted in singularly tenacious mud, an almost impassable jungle offers scope for the adventurous imagination of youth. This is skirted by a rough path above the shore, where at morn and eve may be seen flesh and blood replicas of Frederick Walker’s “Bathers,” or of Mr Tuke’s “August Blue” scene, exhibited “without the formality of an apparatus,” as the Oxford man in Humphrey Clinker has it. As for the bathing-machines further back, a guide-book of his generation states that “from the manner in which they are constructed, and the position they occupy, a person may safely commit himself to the bosom of Neptune at almost any state of the tide.” Yet one may hint to strangers not desirous of committing themselves to Abraham’s bosom, that the currents run strong here, and that some parts of the shallow shore deepen suddenly.
One of the sandiest bathing-places on this shore is at Gurnard’s Bay, about two miles along, which has an hotel of its own and other beginnings of a seaside resort. This used to be a landing-place from the mainland; and here was the site of another Roman villa. The guide-books of a future generation may have more to say about Gurnard’s Bay; but I must ask the reader now to turn back to Cowes.
At the back of the town is its Church, built in the time of the Commonwealth, that did not much foster church architecture; and behind this stands the manorial mansion of Northwood Park in somewhat gloomy grounds opened by funereally classical gates. The older parish church is that of Northwood, some way inland, which itself, in its day, had been an offshoot of Carisbrooke. Northwood Park hived for a time the foreign nuns who lately swarmed to other quarters at Ryde. This mansion had long been looked on by true blue Protestants as a half-way house to Rome, when it was the home of William George Ward, a prominent name in the “Oxford Movement” that so much shifted the Anglican establishment’s centre of gravity. He went over to the Roman Church, and moved to another house near Totland Bay, where his neighbour Tennyson had warm words to say over his grave—
My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,
Most generous of all ultramontanes, Ward,
How subtle at tierce and quart of mind with mind,
How loyal in the following of thy Lord!
The chief hotels and lodging-houses are found on that part of the parade east of the “Squadron,” which at one time occupied the Gloucester Hotel. The crooked main street leads us to the river suburb of Mill Hill, and to the floating bridge by which the Medina is crossed to East Cowes. There has been talk of a tunnel here, as under broader channels; but the amphibious folk of this port are still content with their ferry.