Down they went to the inn door, where the fresh team was standing. By the time the horses had been got out of the coach, old Barker, who had turned back, looking anything but pleasant, was upon them.
“Good morning, Mr. Barker, sir,” said Tom, with all the impudence he could command. “Did you ever see a young gentleman take a coach steadier down a hill? ’Pon my word, sir, he could not have done it better. He’s a pupil of mine, sir, and I’m blessed if he did not do it capital; don’t you think he did, sir, for you seed him?” “Hum,” said old Barker; “you know it’s all against the laws. Supposing anything happened, what then?” “Well, sir, I did not expect anything would happen, with such horses as these of yours; there’s no better four horses, sir, betwixt London and Stamford; and as for those wheelers, why, they’ll hold anything.” This, of course, was pouring balm into old Barker’s wounds, which seemed to heal pretty quickly, and he put on a pleasanter face, and said, “Well, Hennesy, you know I don’t like ‘gentlemen coachmen,’ and, above all things, very young ones. Don’t you do it again.”
Was Hennesy grateful? Not at all; for, when they had driven away, he said, “Well, he was wonderful civil for him,” and added that if he could only catch him lying drunk in the road, he would run over his neck and kill him, “blessed if he wouldn’t!”
This bold and independent fellow, like many another coachman, came down in the world when railways drove the coaches off the main roads, and was reduced to driving a pair-horse coach between Cambridge and Huntingdon.
More picturesque than the “White Hart” is the “Wellington,” which composes so finely with the red-brick tower of the church, at the further end of the village street, where the road abruptly forks. It is a street of all kinds and sizes of houses, mostly old and pleasingly grouped.
But Welwyn has other claims upon the tourist. It was the home for many years of Young, author of the once-popular Night Thoughts. Who reads that sombre work now? He was rector here from 1730 until 1765, when he died, but lives as a warning to those who inevitably identify an author with his books. His work, The Complaint, or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, is dour reading, but he was so little of a sombre man that we find him not infrequently in the company of, and a fellow spirit among, the convivial men of his time. This was only a product of his “sensibility,” that curious quality peculiar to the eighteenth century, and did not necessarily prove him a weeping philosopher. He had, indeed, a mental agility which could with ease fly from the most depressing disquisitions on the silent tomb, to the proper compounding of a stiff jorum of punch. Young, on his appointment to Welwyn, married Lady Elizabeth (“Betty”) Lee, daughter of the Earl of Lichfield. He found the rectory too small (or perhaps not good enough for her ladyship), and so purchased a more imposing house called the “Guessons”—anciently the “Guest House” of some abbey. With it he bought land, and planted the lime-tree avenue which still remains a memorial of him. There is a votive urn here, erected by Mr. Johnes-Knight, a succeeding rector; but probably the most enduring memorial of Young is the very first line of the Night Thoughts, the fine expression:—
“Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.”
No one reads Young nowadays, and so every one who sees this, one of the most hackneyed of quotations, ascribes it to Shakespeare. Alas, poor Young!