Suggesting old wines and old Tories.”
Remenham, a mile or so along the Berkshire shore, is typically Berkshire, but with a church still looking starkly new, as the result of “thorough restoration” in 1870. Its semicircular apse, really ancient, does not look it. The tower is of the Henley type, though smaller. Henley church tower, in fact, seems to have set a local fashion in such, for that of Hambleden conforms to the same design. Regatta Island, with its effective temple, marks the old starting-point of the races.
HENLEY-ON-THAMES.
Hambleden is on the Buckinghamshire side; a pretty village situated about one mile distant from the river along the lovely and retired valley of the Hamble. From it the widow of W. H. Smith, of the newspaper and library and bookstall business of W. H. Smith & Son, and of Greenlands, near Henley, takes her title of Viscountess Hambleden. Liberal, Radical, and Separatist journals were never tired of satirically referring to W. H. Smith, when a member of a Unionist Government, as “Old Morality,” deriving that term from the stand he took in the House of Commons upon his “duty to Queen and country.” His idea of his duty in those respects was exactly that of an average responsible business man. He had no axe to grind, no job to perpetrate; and that being so, the nickname of “Old Morality” was in effect a great deal more honourable than those satirists ever suspected. They, indeed, conferred upon him a brevet of which any one might well be proud, and incidentally covered themselves with shame, as men to whom a sense of rightness and of duty towards one’s sovereign and one’s native land was a subject for mirth. But of course these quips and cranks derived from the party notoriously friends of every country save their own.
In the very much restored church of Hambleden, among various tombs, is one in the chancel to Henry, son of the second Lord Sandys, with a quaint inscription, owning some nobility of thought:
“Nature cryeth on me so sore,
I cannot, Christ, be too fervent,