A charming afterthought, showing that the justices could descend from Imperial heights to domestic levels, was the placing of a pair of stocks at the base.

In 1762 it was thought necessary to have another shy at the venerable relic, and evidence long remained of it, in another tablet, with the words, “Again repaired and restored in the second year of King George the Third, and of our Lord 1762.” The combination of loyalty and piety is rich indeed.

Again, in 1832 a restoration was effected, at a cost of £300. Happily, no more tablets were affixed, and more happily still, the existing ones were removed. Further, in 1884, the restorations of earlier years were re-restored at a cost of £320. The shattered cross crowning the structure, destroyed at some remote period, has never been replaced.

XVIII

Whatever the truth of the old saying that the traveller might know, by the smell of the leather and the noise of the lapstones, when he was within a mile of Northampton, it scarcely holds good now, for although bootmaking, the ancient and distinctive trade of the town, is still its great staple industry, and is, as every one knows, infinitely larger and more important than ever before, it is scarcely to be distinguished at this distance.

NORTHAMPTON

Of course, as everywhere, the distant view of the town is nowadays largely a prospect of gasometers, and unless the traveller already knew of Northampton’s bootmaking trade he might, entering by the London Road and Cotton End, well believe he was come to a town of breweries, another Burton-on-Trent: for there, beside the railway level-crossing and the river Nene, stands the great brewery of Phipps & Co.

“Northampton on the Nene”: that is a piece of school geography not readily forgotten, but, however greatly that information may bulk in the memory, both by reason of its alliteration and being so early insisted upon, the river Nene is not, truth to tell, so very much in evidence. The uninstructed might suppose it to be a canal, and a dirty one at that.

It is not a prepossessing entrance, this narrow street of old and grimy, but not ancient, houses and third-rate shops, that leads up into the town, but many surprises await the explorer who, primed with armchair knowledge, sets out upon the road to correct his reading by his own observation. Such an one would find that only strangers speak of “Northampton” as spelled, giving full value to the “North.” To the townspeople it is “N’Thampton.” Each style seems quaint to those who favour the other.

The stranger would expect to find Northampton, as a factory town, a place of squalor and grime; but coming here, and emerging into the market-place from the not very pleasing entrance, his expectations are utterly shattered. There are few towns of the size of Northampton—whose population is now considerably over 89,000—that are so bright and clean, and prosperous-looking, as this; and the stranger, to whom its Radical politics are familiar, and to whom its choice for many years of such Parliamentary representatives as Mr. Henry Labouchere and Bradlaugh argued (reasonably or not I will not declare) brutality and atheism, is pleasurably surprised at not finding the ancient and beautiful churches of the town become “temples of Reason,” lecture-halls, or other things in the secular way. Nor does he perceive, as he had half-anticipated, scowling Radical-Atheists engaged in violence, or shouting insults after the clergy and every person with a good coat upon his back. The picture thus drawn seems farcical, but it does by no means belie the ideas of a great many people who have never been in Northampton and instinctively form a picture of it from tales of its ancient election turbulence and from its choice of representatives in modern times. Northampton is nothing like that: dignity and beauty characterise its chief streets, and municipal effort so long ago as 1864 sought to beautify the town with a splendid Guildhall. Poetry springs—albeit unconsciously—even in the breasts of its Town Councillors and Poor Law Guardians: where none would seek it. Sir William Gilbert makes Bunthorne suspect, in Patience, that