“The Loddon slow, with verdant alders crowned,”
is found in that exquisite backwater, the Patrick Stream, where a picture of surpassing beauty is seen at every turn. By a long, winding course, fringed richly with rushes, and overhung with lovely trees, the Patrick Stream wanders through meadow lands and finally emerges into the Thames again, just below Shiplake Lock. By dint of making this long but delightful détour, and thus avoiding Shiplake Lock, it is possible to do the Thames Conservancy out of one of those many threepences for which it has so insatiable an appetite.
Shiplake, on the Oxfordshire bank, is the place where Tennyson was married, but the church has been largely rebuilt since then. The windows are mostly filled with ancient glass brought from the abbey of St. Bertin, at St. Omer. Shiplake Mill, once a picturesque feature, is now, at this time of writing, a squalid heap of ruins.
Wargrave, on the Berkshire side, is said to have once been a market-town, and it is now growing again so rapidly that a town it will soon be once more. Its houses crowd together on the banks, where the George and Dragon Inn stands, giving upon the slipway to the water: all looking out upon the spacious Oxfordshire meadows. The sign of the George and Dragon Inn—a double-sided one—painted by G. D. Leslie, R.A., and J. E. Hodgson, R.A., in 1874, shows St. George on one side, as we are accustomed to see him on the reverse of coins, engaged in slaying the dragon; and on the other, the monster duly slain, the saint is refreshing himself with a noble tankard of ale.
WARGRAVE CHURCH.
Wargrave church has been restored extensively, and its tower is of red brick, and not ancient; but it forms, for all that, a very charming picture. Here we may see a tablet to the memory of that remarkable prig, Thomas Day, the author of that egregious work for the manufacture of other prigs, Sandford and Merton. He was born about 1748, and died 1789. Of his good and highly moral life there can be no doubt; but moral philosophers are rarely personæ gratæ in a naughty and frivolous world. We fight shy of them, and of all instructive and improving persons, and make light of their works; and if nowadays we read Sandford and Merton at all, it is for the purpose of extracting some satirical amusement from the pompous verbiage of the Reverend Mr. Barlow, and from the respective “wickedness” and goodness of Tommy and the exemplary Harry.
Among Thomas Day’s peculiar views was that by a proper method of education (i.e. a method invented by himself) there was scarcely anything that could not be accomplished. He certainly began courageously, about the age of twenty-one, by choosing two girls, each about twelve years of age, whom he proposed to educate after his formula, and then to marry the most suitable of them. He, however, did not carry this plan so far as the marrying of either. It is not clear whom we should congratulate: the girls or their eccentric guardian, who at last met his death from the kick of a horse which resented the entirely novel philosophical principles on which he was training it.