The age of Warwick Castle is a mooted point. “Cæsar’s Tower,” ruder in construction than the remainder of the stupendous pile, is said to be eight hundred years old. It looks likely to last eight hundred more. The outer gate is less imposing than the entrance to some barn-yards I have seen, A double-leaved door, neither clean nor massive, was unbolted at our ring by a young girl, who told us that the “H’Earl was sick,” therefore, visitors were not admitted “h’arfter ’arf parst ten.” Once in the grounds, “they might stay so long h’as they were dispoged.”
It is impossible to caricature the dialect of the lower classes of the Mother Country. Even substantial tradesmen, retired merchants and their families who are living—and traveling—upon their money are, by turns, prodigal and niggardly in the use of the unfortunate aspirate that falls naturally into place with us; while servants who have lived for years in the “best families” appear to pride themselves upon the liberties they take with their h’s, mouthing the mutilated words with pomp that is irresistibly comic. We delighted to lay traps for our guides and coachmen, and the yeomen we encountered in walks and drives, by asking information on the subject of Abbeys, Inns, Earls, Horses, Halls, and Ages. In every instance they came gallantly up to our expectations, often transcended our most daring hopes. But we seldom met with a more satisfactory specimen in this line than the antique servitor that kept the lodge of Warwick Castle. She wore a black gown, short-waisted and short-skirted, a large cape of the same stuff, and what Dickens had taught us to call a “mortified” black bonnet of an exaggerated type. The cap-frill within flapped about a face that reminded us of Miss Cushman’s Meg Merrilies. Entering the lodge hastily, after the young woman who had admitted us had begun cataloguing the curiosities collected there, she put her aside with a sweep of her bony arm and an angry, guttural “Ach!” and began the solemnly circumstantial relation she must have rehearsed thousands of times. We beheld “H’earl Guy’s” breast-plate, his sword and battle-axe, the “’orn” of a dun cow slain by him, and divers other bits of old iron, scraps of pottery, etc. But the chef d’œuvre of the custodian was the oration above Sir Guy’s porridge-pot, a monstrous iron vessel set in the centre of the square chamber. Standing over it, a long poker poised in her hand, she enumerated with glowing gusto the ingredients of the punch brewed in the big kettle “when the present H’earl came h’of h’age,” glaring at us from the double pent-house of frill and bonnet. I forget the exact proportions, but they were somewhat in this order:
“H’eighteen gallons o’ rum. Fifteen gallons o’ brandy”—tremendous stress upon each liquor—“One ’undred pounds o’ loaf sugar. H’eleven ’undred lemmings, h’and fifty gallons h’of ’ot water! This h’identikle pot was filled h’and h’emptied, three times that day! H’I myself saw h’it!”
Her greedy gloating upon the minutest elements of the potent compound was elfish and almost terrible. It was like—
“Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,”—
the harsh gutturals and suspended iron bar heightening the haggish resemblance. The pot, she proceeded to relate, was “six ’undred years h’old,” and bringing down the poker upon and around the edge, evolving slow gratings and rumblings that crucified our least sensitive nerves, “h’is this h’our without ’ole h’or crack h’as H’I can h’answer for h’and testify!”
The entire exhibition was essentially dramatic and effectively ridiculous. She accepted our gratuity with the same high tragedy air and posed herself above the chaldron for an entering party of visitors.
We sauntered up to the castle along a curving drive between a steep bank overrun with lush ivy and a wall covered with creepers, and overhung by fine old trees. Birds sang in the branches and hopped across the road, the green shade bathed our eyes refreshingly after the glare of the flint-strewn highway outside of the gates. It was a forest dingle, rather than the short avenue to the grandest ancient castle in Three Kingdoms. A broad expanse of turf stretching before the front of the mansion is lost as far as the eye can reach in avenues and plantations of trees. Among these are cedars of Lebanon, brought by crusading Earls from the Holy Land, still vigorously supplying by new growth the waste of centuries. Masses of brilliant flowers relieved the verdure of the level sward, fountains leaped and tinkled in sunny glades, and cut the shadow of leafy vistas with the flash of silver blades. In the principal conservatory stands the celebrated Warwick Vase, brought hither from Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. Ladders were reared against the barbican wall of great height and thickness, close by Guy’s Tower (erected in 1394). Workmen mounted upon these were scraping mosses and dirt from the interstices of the stones and filling them with new cement. No pains nor expense is spared to preserve the magnificent fortress from the ravages of time and climate. From the foundation of the Castle until now, the family of Warwick, in some of its ramifications—or usurpations—has been in occupation of the demesne and is still represented in the direct line of succession by the present owner. The noble race has battled more successfully with revolution and decay in behalf of house and ancestral home than have most members of the British Peerage whose lineage is of equal antiquity and note.
Opposite the door by which we entered the Great Hall, was a figure of a man on horseback, rider and steed as large as life. The complete suit of armor of the one and the caparisons of the other, were presented by Queen Elizabeth to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, her handsome master-of-horse. From this moment until we quitted the house, we were scarcely, for a moment, out of sight of relics of the parvenu favorite.