CHARLCOTE
“Farewell, proud, vain, false, treacherous world, we have seen enough of thee;
We value not what thou canst say of we.”
One marvels how in this sheltered corner John Gibbs found the world’s breath so rude.
MEADOWSWEET
On the other hand, upon Sir Thomas Lucy the world has been hard indeed, identifying him with Justice Shallow. His portrait hangs in the hall where Shakespeare was not tried for deer-stealing. Isaac Oliver painted it; and though men have forgotten Isaac Oliver, yet will we never, for he was a master. The knight’s embroidered robe is right Holbein; but the knight’s subtle, beautiful face is more. It teaches with convincing sincerity what manner of being a gentleman was in “the spacious days of great Elizabeth;” and the lesson is the more humiliating because men have during three centuries accepted the coarse mask of Justice Shallow for the truth.
The house holds many fine paintings; notably a Titian, “Samson and the Lion,” that rests against the yellow silk hangings of the drawing-room, and is worth a far pilgrimage to see; and a Velasquez, set (immoderately high) above the library book-shelves. So that too soon we were out in the sunlight again and paddling down to Alveston.
We floated by flat meadows, islands of sedge, long lines of willows; by “the high bank called Old Town, where, perhaps, men and women, with their joys and sorrows, once abided;” but now the rabbits only colonize it, under the quiet alders; by Alveston, where we found boats, and a boat-house covered with “snowball” berries; by the mill and its weeping-willows; and below, by devious loops, to Hatton Rock, that the picnickers from Stratford know—a steep bank of marl covered with hawthorn, hazel, elder, and trailing knots of brambles. In June this is a very flowery spot. The slope is clothed with creamy elder blossoms, and on the river’s bank opposite are wild rose-bushes dropping their petals, pink and white, on forget-me-nots, wild blue geranium, and meadow-rue. Over its stony bed the current, in omne volubilis ævum, keeps for our dull ears the music that it made for Shakespeare, if we could but hear. For somewhere along these banks the Stratford boy spied the Muse’s naked feet moving.