The view from the great hall looking on the river below is fixed in my mind. Don't miss it; and surely he who will climb to the top of Guy's Tower will have cause for thankfulness for many a year thereafter. You get a look at more of England there than is generally possible. I sympathize with Ruskin in his rage at the attempt to raise funds by subscription to mend the ravages of a recent fire in the castle. A Warwick in the rôle of a Belisarius begging for an obolus! If the king-maker could look upon this! But historical names are now often trailed in the dust in England; and it must be some consolation to him, wherever he may be, to know that the bearer of the title, if responsible for this, is no scion of the old stock.
Guy of Warwick.
The legend of Guy of Warwick, accepted as an historical fact by the early writers, has been relegated to the garret of monkish superstition, with the ribs of the dun cow and other once undoubted relics; but its romance will always lend an interest to the old castle and attract the traveller to the site of the hermitage on Guy's Cliff where the fabled hero died and was buried. You must not suppose that Guy's Tower had any connection with the original Guy, for the building dates only from the close of the fourteenth century, while the latter boasts an antiquity of nearly a thousand years. Indeed, we can place him to a dot, for the antiquary Rous is very precise in his statement. He says: "On the twelfth of June, 926, being the third year of the reign of Athelstan, a most terrible single combat took place between the champions of the kings of England and Denmark—Guy, Earl of Warwick, and Colebrand the Pagan, an African giant; through the mercy of God the Christian undertook the combat, being advised thereto by an angel; and the faithful servant of God and the Church fortunately vanquished the enemy of the whole realm of England."
Is it not dreadful to contemplate what might have been the consequences if Colebrand the African had got the upper hand of that faithful servant of God and the Church! But it was not to be. The Pagan had a lost fight from the start, for, though the chronicle does not expressly say so, it is very evident to the reflecting mind that Guy was backed throughout by the angel—a mean advantage which, but for the immensity of the stake, would have led any ordinary lover of fair play to side with the weaker party. But not so with the wily monks of those days. In their easy consciences the end justified the means, and so they glorified Guy as the champion of all that was good, and so sedulously trumpeted his fame that the Norman barons who succeeded to the ownership of the old Saxon stronghold saw their interest in adopting the victor as an ancestor. In time these Normans came to believe implicitly in the family tree with Guy at the root, just as some silly people pin their faith to the parchment evidences of the professional genealogists proving their descent from some fabulous hero who followed William and his crew from Normandy. They named their sons after Guy, called the tower his tower, and hung up his arms and armor in the great hall, while their wives and daughters worked his exploits in tapestry.
These proud descendants of a fabulous ancestor remind one of the general in the "Pirates of Penzance" who is found weeping at the tomb in the abbey belonging to the property he has purchased. When it is suggested to him that his tears are misplaced, he replies: "Sir, when I bought this property I bought this abbey and this tomb with its contents. I do not know whose ancestors these were, but I do know whose ancestors they are." And he falls to sobbing again, bound to have an ancestry of some kind, the more important the more to belittle himself by comparison. But the general is very English for all that. Tennyson's lines,
"Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere,
From yon blue heavens above us bent
The grand old gardener and his wife
Smile at the claims of long descent,"
are well known and repeated by the school children all over the land, but the grown men and women, entirely free from the weakness of trying to figure out a family tree of respectable antiquity, will be found unexpectedly small in this old land. Josh Billings settled the matter as far as Americans are concerned, for the malady is even more ridiculous in the New World. "We can't boast old family here," says he, "the country ain't long enough, unless a feller has Injun in him." That is what the lawyers call an estoppel, I take it.