Oakham is a goodly and pleasant town, the chief and capital of Rutlandshire. It has the ruins of an old castle in its midst, and several interesting antiquities and customs. It, too, has its unique speciality or prerogative. I was told that every person of title driving through the town, or coming to reside within the jurisdiction of its bye-laws, must leave his card to the authorities in the shape of a veritable horse-shoe. It is said that the walls of the old town hall are hung with these iron souvenirs of distinguished visits; thus constituting a museum that would be instructive to a farrier or blacksmith, as well as to the antiquarian.
From Oakham I walked to Melton Mowbray, a cleanly, good-looking town in Leicestershire, situated on the little river Eye. One cannot say exactly in regard to Rutlandshire what an Englishman once said to the authorities of a pigmy Italian duchy, who ordered him to leave it in twenty-four hours. “I only require fifteen minutes,” said cousin John, with a look and tone which Jonathan could not imitate. This rural county is to the shire-family of England what Rhode Island is to the American family of States—the smallest, but not least, in several happy characteristics.
I spent a quiet Sabbath in Melton Mowbray; attended divine service in the old parish church and listened to two extemporaneous sermons full of simple and earnest teaching, and delivered in a conversational tone of voice. Here, too, the parish church was seated in the midst of the great congregation which had long ceased to listen to the call of its Sabbath bells. It was a beautiful and touching arrangement of the olden time to erect the House of Prayer in the centre of “God’s Acre,” that the shadow of its belfry and the Sabbath voice of its silvery bells might float for centuries over the family circles lying side by side in their long homes around the sanctuary. There was a good and tender thought in making up this sabbath society of the living and the dead; in planting the narrow pathway between the two Sions with the white milestones of generations that had travelled it in ages gone, leaving here and there words of faith, hope and admonition to those following in their footsteps. It is one of the contingencies of “higher civilization” that this social economy of the churchyard, that linked present and past generations in such touching and instructive companionship, has been suspended and annulled.
Melton Mowbray has also a very respectable individuality. It is a great centre for the scarlet-coated Nimrods who scale hedges and ditches, in well-mounted squadrons, after a fox preserved at great expense and care to become the victim of their valor. But this is a small and frivolous distinction compared with its celebrated manufacture of pork-pies. It bids fair to become as famous for them as Banbury is for buns. I visited the principal establishment for providing the travelling and picnicking world with these very substantial and palatable portables. I went under the impulse of that uneasy, suspicious curiosity to peer into the forbidden mysteries of the kitchen which generally brings no satisfaction when gratified, and which often admonishes a man not only to eat what is set before him without any questions for conscience sake, but also for the sake of the more delicate and exacting sensibilities of the stomach. I must confess my first visit to this, the greatest pork-pie factory in the world, savored a little of the anxiety to know the worst, instead of the best, in regard to the solid materials and lighter ingredients which entered into the composition of these suspiciously cheap luxuries. There were points also connected with the process of their elaboration which had given me an undefinable uneasiness in the refreshment rooms of a hundred railway stations. I was determined to settle these moot points once for all. So I entered the establishment with an eye of as keen a speculation as an exciseman’s searching a building for illicit distillery, and I came out of it a more charitable and contented man. All was above board, fair and clean. The meat was fresh and good. The flour was fine and sweet; the butter and lard would grace the neatest housewife’s larder; the forms on which the pies were moulded were as pure as spotless marble. The men and boys looked healthy and bright; their hands were smooth and clean, and their aprons white as snow. Not one of them smoked or took snuff at his work. I saw every process and implement employed in the construction of these pies for the market; the great tubs of pepper and spice, the huge ovens, the cooling racks, the packing room; in a word, every department and feature of the establishment. And the best thing that I can say of it is this: that I shall eat with better satisfaction and relish hereafter the pies bearing the brand of Evans, of Melton Mowbray, than I ever did before. The famous Stilton cheese is another speciality of this quiet and interesting town, or of its immediate neighborhood. So, putting the two articles of luxury and consumption together, it is rather ahead of Banbury with its cakes.
On Monday, August 11th, I resumed my walk northward, and passed through a very highly cultivated and interesting section. About the middle of the afternoon, I reached Broughton Hill, and looked off upon the most beautiful and magnificent landscape I have yet seen in England. It was the Belvoir Vale; and it would be worth a hundred miles’ walk to see it, if that was the only way to reach it. It lay in a half-moon shape, the base line measuring apparently about twenty miles in length. As I sat upon the high wall of this valley, that overlooks it on the south, I felt that I was looking upon the most highly-finished piece of pre-Raphaelite artistry that could be found in the world,—the artistry of the plough, glorious and beautiful with the unconscious and involuntary pictures which patient human labor paints upon the canvas of Nature. Never did I see the like before. If Turner had the shaping of the ground entirely for an artistic purpose, it could not have been more happily formed for a display of agricultural pictures. What might be called the physical vista made the most perfect hemiorama I ever looked upon. The long, high, wooded ridge, including Broughton Hill, eclipsed, as it were, just half the disk of a circle twenty miles in diameter, leaving the other half in all the glow and glory that Nature and that great blind painter, Agricultural Industry, could give to it. The valley with its foot against this mountainous ridge, put out its right arm and enfolded to its bosom a little, beautiful world of its own of about fifty miles girth. In this embrace were included hundreds of softly-rounded hills, with their intervening valleys, villages, hamlets, church spires and towers, plantations, groves, copses and hedge-row trees, grouped by sheer accident as picturesquely as Turner himself could have arranged them. The elevation of the ridge on which I sat softened down all these distant hills, so that they looked only like little undulating risings by which the valley gently ascended to the blue rim of the horizon on the north.
It was an excellent standpoint on which to balance Nature and Human Industry; to estimate their separate and joint work upon that vast landscape. A few centuries ago, perhaps about the time that the Mayflower sighted Plymouth Rock, this valley, now so indescribably beautiful, was almost in the state of nature. Wolves and wild boars may have been prowling about in the woods and tangled thickets that covered this ridge back for several leagues. Bushes, bogs and briers, and coarse prairie grass roughened the bottom of this valley; matted heather, furze, broom and clumps of shrubby trees, all those hills and uplands arising in the background to the northward horizon. This declining sun, and the moon and stars that will soon follow in the pathway of its chariot, like a liveried cortege, shone upon that scene with all the light they will give this day and night. The rain and dew, and all the genial ministries of the seasons, did their unaided best to make it lovely and beautiful. The sweetest singing-birds of England came and tried to cheer its solitude with their happy voices. The summer breezes came with their softest breath, whispering through brake, bush and brier the little speeches of Nature’s life. The summer bees came and filled all those heather-purpled acres with their industrial lays, and sang a merry song in the door of every wild-flower that gave them the petalled honey of its heart. All the trained and travelling industrials and all the sweet influences of Nature came and did all they could without man’s help to make this great valley most delightful to the eye. But the wolves still prowled and howled; the briers grew rough and rank; the grass, coarse and thin; the heathered hills were oozy and cold in their watery beds; the clumpy, shrubby trees wore the same ragged coats of moss; and no feature of the scene mended for the better from year to year.
Then came the great Blind Painter, with his rude, iron pencils, to the help of Nature. He came with the Axe, Plough and Spade, her mightiest allies. With these he had driven wild Druidic Paganism back mile by mile from England’s centre; back into her dark fastnesses. With the Axe, Spade and Plough he chased the foul beasts and barbarisms from the island. Two centuries long was he in painting this Beautiful Valley. Nature ground and mixed the colors for him all the while, for he was blind. He was poor; often cold and hungry, and his children, with blue fingers and pale, silent eyes, sometimes asked for bread in winter he could not give. He lived in a low cottage, small, damp and dark, and laid him down at night upon a bed of straw. He could not read; and his thoughts of human life and its hereafter were few and small. He had no taste for music, and seldom whistled at his work. He wore a coarse garment, of ghostly pattern, called a smock-frock. His hat just rounded his head to a more globular and mindless form. His shoes were as heavy as a horse’s with iron nails. He had no eye nor taste for colors. If all the trees, if all the crops of grain, grass and roots on which he wrought his life long, had come out in brickdust and oil, it would have been all the same to him, if they had sold as high in the market, and beer and bread had been as cheap for the uniformity. And yet he was the Turner of this great painting. He is the artist that has made England a gallery of the finest agricultural pictures in the world. And in no country in Christendom is High Art so appreciated to such pecuniary patronage and valuation as here. In none is the genius of the Pencil so treasured, so paid, and almost worshipped as here. The public and private galleries of Britain hold pictures that would buy every acre of the island at the price current of it when Elizabeth was queen. One of Turner’s landscapes would pay for a whole Highland county at its valuation when Mary held her first court at Holyrood.
I sit here and look off upon this largest, loveliest picture the Blind Painter has given to England. I note his grouping of the ivy-framed fields, of every size and form, panelling the gently-rounded hills, and all the soft slopes down to the foot of the valley; the silvery, ripe barley against the dark-green beans; the rich gold of the wheat against the smooth, blue-dashed leaves of the mangel wurzel or rutabaga; the ripening oats overlooking a foreground of vividly green turnips, with alternations of pasture and meadow land, hedges running in every direction, plantations, groves, copses sprinkled over the whole vista, as if the whole little world, clear up to the soft, blue fringe of the horizon, were the design and work of a single artist. And this, and ten thousand pictures of the same genius, were the work of the Briarean-handed BLIND PAINTER, who still wears a smock-frock and hob-nailed shoes, and lives in a low, damp cottage, and dines on bread and cheese among the golden sheaves of harvest!
O, Mother England! thou that knightest the artists while living, and buildest their sepulchres when dead; thou that honorest to such stature of praise the plagiarists upon Nature, and clothest the copyists of patient Labor’s pictures in such purple and fine linen; thou whose heart is softening to the sweet benevolences of Christian charity in so many directions,—wilt thou not think, with a new sentiment of kindness and sympathy, on this Blind Painter, who has tapestried the hills and valleys of thy island with an artistry that angels might look upon with admiration and wonder!
Wilt thou not build him a better cottage to live in?