A Walk from London to John O'Groat's / With Notes by the Way

by Elihu Burritt

This one-mindedness, this one-man power of conception and execution gives to the Duke of Devonshire’s palace at Chatsworth an interest and a value that probably do not attach to any other private establishment in England. In this felicitous characteristic it stands out in remarkable prominence and in striking contrast with nearly all the other baronial halls of the country. It is the parlor pier-glass of the present century. It reflects the two images in vivid apposition—the brilliant civilization of this last, unfinished age in which we live and the life of bygone centuries; that is, if Haddon Hall shows its face in it, or if you have the features of that antiquity before your eyes when you look into the Chatsworth mirror. The whole of this magnificent establishment bears the impress of the nineteenth century, inside and outside. The architecture, sculpture, carving, paintings, engravings, furniture, libraries, conservatories, flowers, shrubberies and rockeries all bear and honor the finger-prints of modern taste and art. In no casket in England, probably, have so many jewels of this century’s civilization been treasured for posterity as in this mansion on the little meandering Derwent. If England has no grand National Gallery like the French Louvre, she has works of art that would fill fifty Louvres, collected and treasured in these quiet private halls, embosomed in green parks and plantations, from one end of the land to the other. And in no other country are the private treasure-houses of genius so accessible to the public as in this. They doubtless act as educational centres for refining the habits of the nation; exerting an influence that reaches and elevates the homes of the people, cultivating in them new perceptions of beauty and comfort; diffusing a taste for embowering even humble cottages in shrubbery; making little flower-fringed lawns, six feet by eight or less; rockeries and ferneries, and artificial ruins of castles or abbeys of smaller dimensions still.

In passing through the galleries and gardens of Chatsworth you will recognise the originals of many works of art which command the admiration of the world. The most familiar to the American visitor will probably be the great painting of the Bolton Abbey Scene, the engravings of which are so numerous and admired on both sides of the Atlantic. But there is the original of a greater work, which has made the wonder of the age. It is the original of the Great Crystal Palace of 1851, and the mother of all the palaces of the same structure which have been or will be erected in time past or to come. Here it diadems at Chatsworth the choice plants and flowers of all the tropics; presenting a model which needed only expansion, and some modifications, to furnish the reproduction that delighted the world in Hyde Park in 1851.

I was pleasantly impressed with one feature of the economy that ruled at Chatsworth. Although there were between one and two thousand deer flecking the park, it was utilised to the pasture of humbler and more useful animals. Over one hundred poor people’s cows were feeding demurely over its vast extent, even to the gilded gates of the palace. They are charged only £2 for the season; which is very moderate, even cheaper than the stony pasturage around the villages of New England. I noticed a flock of Spanish sheep, black-and-white, looking like a drove of Berkshire hogs, and seemingly clothed with bristles instead of wool. They are kept rather as curiosities than for use.

Chatsworth, with all its treasures and embodiments of wealth, art and genius, with an estate continuous in one direction for about thirty miles, is but one of the establishments of the Duke of Devonshire. He owns a palace on the Thames that might crown the ambition of a German prince. He also counts in his possessions old abbeys, baronial halls, parks and towns that once were walled, and still have streets called after their gates. If any country is to have a personage occupying such a position, it is well to have a considerable number of the same class, to yeomanise such an aristocracy—to make each feel that he has his peers in fifty others. Otherwise an isolated duke would have to live and move outside the pale of human society; a proud, haughty entity dashing about, with not even a comet’s orbit nor any fixed place in the constellation of a nation’s communities. It is of great necessity to him, independent of political considerations, that there is a House of Peers instituted, in which he may find his social level; where he may meet his equals in considerable numbers, and feel himself but a man.

CHAPTER XV.

SHEFFIELD AND ITS INDIVIDUALITY—THE COUNTRY, ABOVE GROUND AND UNDER GROUND—WAKEFIELD AND LEEDS—WHARF VALE—FARNLEY HALL—HARROGATE; RIPLEY CASTLE; RIPON; CONSERVATISM OF COUNTRY TOWNS—FOUNTAIN ABBEY; STUDLEY PARK—RIEVAULX ABBEY—LORD FAVERSHAM’S SHORT-HORN STOCK.

From Chatsworth I went on to Sheffield, crossing a hilly moorland belonging to the Duke of Rutland, and containing 10,000 acres in one solid block. It was all covered with heather, and kept in this wild, bleak condition for game. Here and there well-cultivated farms, as it were, bit into this cold waste, rescuing large, square morsels of land, and making them glow with the warm flush and glory of luxuriant harvests; thus showing how such great reaches of desert may be made to blossom like the rose under the hand of human labor.

Here is Sheffield, down here, sweltering, smoking, and sweating, with face like the tan, under the walls of these surrounding hills. Here live and labor Briareus and Cyclops of modern mythology. Here they—

Swing their heavy sledge,
With measured beats and slow;
Like the sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.

Here live the lineal descendants of Thor, christianised to human industries. Here the great hammer of the Scandinavian Thunderer descended, took nest, and hatched a brood of ten thousand little iron beetles for beating iron and steel into shapes and uses that Tubal Cain never dreamed of. Here you may hear their clatter night and day upon a thousand anvils. O, Vale of Vulcan! O, Valley of Knives! Was ever a boy put into trousers, in either hemisphere, that did not carry in the first pocket made for him one of thy cheap blades? Did ever a reaper in the Old World or New cut and bind a sheaf of grain, who did not wield one of thy famous sickles? All Americans who were boys forty years ago, will remember three English centres of peculiar interest to them. These were Sheffield, Colebrook Dale, and Paternoster Row. There was hardly a house or log cabin between the Penobscot and the Mississippi which could not show the imprint of these three places, on the iron tea-kettle, the youngest boy’s Barlow knife, and his younger sister’s picture-book. To the juvenile imagination of those times, Sheffield was a huge jack-knife, Colebrook Dale a porridge-pot, and Paternoster Row a psalm-book, each in the generative case. How we young reapers used to discuss the comparative merits and meanings of those mysterious letters on our sickles, B.Y and I.R! What were they? Were they beginnings of words, or whole words themselves? Did they stand for things, qualities, or persons? “Mine is a By sickle; mine is an Ir one. Mine is the best,” says the last, “for it has the finest teeth and the best curve.” That was our boys’ talk in walking through the rye, with bent backs and red faces, a little behind our fathers; who cut a wider work to enable us to keep near them.