There is a bronze statue of Palmerston standing in the Market Square of Romsey, unrecognisable to all who have been brought up on the conventional likenesses of “old Pam” that used to figure in Punch. We don’t expect the sculptor to give us the Palmerston of the rakishly cocked hat, with a straw in his mouth, but I fear it was with something very like disappointment that we regarded this very unsportsman-like effigy that stands, hatless, strawless, in a mild unjaunty attitude, with outstretched hand, in pose of eternal declamation.
XVI.
We left Romsey by the grateful shade of Broadlands, and entered the New Forest at the hamlet of Ower. Here close battalions of firs lined the way on either side, and continued with us past Coppithorne church, until we reached Cadnam—Cadnam, a ravelled-out settlement emerging insensibly from the Forest and merging again into its groves by equally easy and insensible stages. We plunged into thick glades where a deep hush prevailed in a secondary lighting, varied occasionally by a first-hand patch of sunlight, yellow upon the delicate grass as gold of Australian mintage. This was one of the oldest glades in the Forest, where giant boles proclaimed an age of centuries. Comparatively few of these oldsters remain, so constant and extensively has the woodman’s axe been swung. Perhaps these, too, are doomed. Let us hope they will last our time, but assuredly they will be accorded no more extended grace. When the land-agitators have had their way, when the Socialist shall have come in power, there will be a short way with forests, I promise you, as of everything else that cannot make out a prima facie case of immediate usefulness. The economic times that are coming when these little islands shall be so crowded that the lordly parks and gardens, the mazy forests, and heathy lands, will be cut up into allotments, or used for sites of Socialist barracks, will be more destructive than the days that witnessed Rome’s long agony, the irruption of the Goths, or the fanatic fury of our Puritan days. Art and letters, and all the graces of life will be swallowed up between the struggle for existence and the gloomy social tenets of the new Roundheads in our children’s children’s days. Who that early Victorian poet was I cannot now recall, that rejoiced in being born in our era, nor can I swear to the accuracy of the quotation, but his pæan ran thus, did it not?
“The joys of ancient times let others state:
I think it lucky I was born so late.”
Lucky enough, he is dead now. But were he alive, ’tis conceivable that, having an eye to signs and portents, he would say with me, “I think it lucky I was born so soon.”
Meanwhile, the objects most commonly met with in the New Forest are timber-wagons and New Forest ponies. The Forest, has a character of its own, with subsidiary traits and divagations that defy monotony. Ancient woods give place to modern plantations; beech succeeds to oak, and gloomy firs to either. Clearings and plantations, heaths and hamlets, and murmuring alleys of foliage, alternate for mile after mile, and moss-carpeted drives everywhere radiate from the orthodox highways.
This journey was not an exploration of the New Forest; these woodlands were but incidents in our itinerary; thus it was that we did not penetrate to Stony Cross and Rufus Stone, but kept straight ahead for Lyndhurst.
And Lyndhurst is as pretty a village as one could wish to see. It is the metropolis of the New Forest, if that portentous word is not too big to apply to this little gem of a place. Here come all them that would make a thorough exploration of the leafy alleys and dim recesses of these woodlands, and as it chances that the democratic taste inclines rather to the fearful joys of Ramsgate or Margate than to forest scenery, Lyndhurst wears an air aristocratic and exclusive, and its visitors are eminently “nice.” True, we saw a brakeful of bean-feasters pledging one another (the ladies as deep-drinking as the men) in pewter tankards outside the Crown Hotel, but if one swallow doesn’t make a summer, surely it must be allowed that one bean-feast does not convert Lyndhurst into a semblance of Rye House and Broxbourne.
