Marlow town is well within sight from Bisham. It is very much more picturesque at a distance than it is found to be when arrived near at hand; and the graceful stone spire of its church is found to be really a portion of a very clumsy would-be Gothic building erected in the Batty-Langley style, about 1835. A fine old Norman and later building was destroyed to make way for this; and now the present church is in course of being replaced, in sections, by another, as the funds to that end come in. An interesting monument in the draughty lobby of the present building commemorates Sir Myles Hobart, of Harleyford, who, when Member of Parliament for Marlow, in 1628, distinguished himself by his sturdy opposition to the King’s illegal demands; and with his own hands, on a memorable occasion, locked the door of the House of Commons, to secure the debate on tonnage and poundage from interruption. For this he suffered three years’ imprisonment.
The monument, shamefully “skied” on the wall of this lobby, was removed from the old church. Hobart met his death in 1652 by accident, the four horses in his carriage running away down Holborn Hill, and upsetting it. A curious little sculpture on the lower part of the monument represents this happening, and shows one of the wheels broken. The monument is further interesting as having been erected by Parliament; the first to be voted of any of a now lengthy series.
FROM THE MONUMENT TO SIR MYLES HOBART, GREAT MARLOW.
A THAMES REGATTA.
In the vestry, leading out of this lobby, among a number of old prints hung round the walls, is an old painting of a naked boy, with bow and arrow, his skin spotted all over, leopard-like, with brown spots. This represents the once-famous “Spotted Negro Boy,” a supposed native of the Caribbean Islands, who formed a very attractive feature of Richardson’s Show in the first decade of the nineteenth century. We shall probably not be far wrong in suspecting Mr. William Richardson of a Barnum-like piece of showman humbug in putting this child forward as a “Negro Boy.” The boy, one cannot help thinking, was sufficiently English, but was a freak, suffering from that dreadful skin disease, ichthyosis serpentina. He lies buried in the churchyard.
There are a few literary associations in Marlow town, and by journeying from the riverside and along the lengthy High Street, to where that curious building, the old Crown Hotel, stands, facing down the long thoroughfare, you may come presently to the houses that enshrine them. Turning here to the left you are in West Street, otherwise the Henley road, and passing the oddly named “Quoiting Square,” there in the quaintly pretty old Albion House next door to the old Grammar School, lived Shelley in 1817. A tablet on the coping, like a tombstone, records the fact. He divided his time between writing the Revolt of Islam, and in visiting the then degraded, poverty-stricken lower orders of the town and talking nonsense to them. As no report of his conversations survives, we can only wonder if they were as bad as the turgid nonsense of that poem. Does any one nowadays ever read the Revolt of Islam, or know why Islam did it, or if, in so doing, it succeeded? In short, it will take a great deal of argument to convince the world that Shelley was not the Complete Prig of his age, and in truth the house is much more delightful and interesting for itself than for this association. In Shelley’s time it was very much larger than now, and comprised the two or three other small houses which have been divided from it.