"Crabbed age and youth cannot live together."
Am I crabbed age?
Well, this long digression ought to bring me on as far as Winchester, where we came yesterday afternoon, late. We should have been earlier (though our start was delayed by our guests' preparations), but Ellaline was fascinated by the pretty village of Twyford. You remember it? She'd been reading it up in a guide-book, and would stop for a look at the place where the Fair Fitzherbert was said to have been married to her handsome prince, later George IV. I can't recall hearing that story, though certainly Mrs. Fitzherbert's relations lived near; but I knew Pope was sent down from school there because of a satire he wrote on the master, and that Franklin visited and wrote in Twyford.
It was after four when I turned the car round that sharp corner which swings you into the Market Square of what is to me the grandest and most historic town of England. Why, it is England! Didn't the Romans get their Venta Belgarum, which finally developed into Winta-ceaster and Winchester, from the far older Celtic name for an important citadel? Wasn't there a Christian church before the days of Arthur, my alleged ancestor? Wasn't the cathedral begun by the father of Ælfred on the foundations of that poor church as well as those of a Roman temple? Wasn't it here that the name of Anglia—England—was bestowed on the United Kingdoms, and wasn't it from Winchester that Ælfred sent out the laws that made him and England "Great"?
Ellaline delights in the fact that the said Roman temple was Apollo's, as well as Concord's, she having named my car Apollo, and the Sun God being her favourite mythological deity at the moment. Apropos of mythology, by the way, she was rather amusing this morning on the subject of Icarus, who, she contends, was the pioneer of sporting travel. If he didn't have "tire trouble," said she, he had the nearest equivalent when his wax wings melted.
I should have enjoyed playing cicerone in Winchester, knowing and loving the place as I do, if it hadn't been for Dick Burden's air of thinking such knowledge as mine quite the musty-fusty luggage of the old fogy. There's no use pretending it didn't rub me up the wrong way!
Yesterday after arriving, Emily clamoured for tea, so we attempted no further sightseeing, but drove straight to this delightful old hotel, which was once a nunnery, and has still the nunnery garden, loved by the more enterprising of cathedral rooks. Or are they the nuns come back in disguise? This, you'll guess, is Ellaline's idea.
On the way here, however, there was the beautiful City Cross in the High Street. It would have been a disgrace not to stop for a look at it, even though we could return; and Ellaline was most enthusiastic. She doesn't know much about these things (how could she)? but she feels by instinct the beauty of all that is really fine; whereas Mrs. Senter, though maybe better instructed, is more blasée. Indeed, though she admires the right things, she is essentially the modern woman, whose interest is all in the present and future. I can't imagine her reading history for the sheer joy of it, as the child would and evidently has. Mrs. Senter would prefer a French novel; but it would have to be well written. She would accept no trash. She has an elastic mind, I must say, and appeared satisfactorily shocked when I told her how the Cross would have been chopped up by Paving Commissioners in the eighteenth century if the people hadn't howled for its salvation.
The same sort of fellows did dump Ælfred and his queen out of their comfortable stone coffins, you know, to use the stone. Brutes! What was St. Swithin thinking of to let them do it? A mercy it didn't occur to some commission to take down Stonehenge. They could have made a lot of streets with that.
In the Market Place, too, there was the ancient Fair of Winchester to think of, the fair that had no rival except Beaucaire; and I had been telling them all, on the way into the town, how the woods round the city used to swarm with robbers, hoping to plunder the rich merchants from far countries. Altogether, I fancy even Dick was somewhat impressed by the ancient as well as modern importance of Winchester by the time we drove to the hotel.