Said an American clergyman—and inferentially, a defender of the Faith—“I have no sympathy with those old martyrs. The most charitable of us must confess that they were frightfully and disgustingly obstinate!”
We may forgive them for failing to win the approbation of latter-day sentimentalists when we reflect that but for this, their unamiable idiosyncrasy, neither Protestant England nor Protestant America would to-day exist, even in name. Not very long since, excavations under the sidewalk nearest to the cross-mark in this street revealed the existence here—as a similar accident had in front of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, in London—of a thick stratum of ashes. “Human ashes mixed with wood,” says the report of the discovery printed by an Antiquarian Society—“establishing beyond question that this was where the public burnings were held.” The inhumanity of sweeping such ashes into a heap by the wayside, as one might pile the refuse of a smelting-furnace, is almost as revolting to most people as the disgusting obstinacy of the consumed heretics. We saw another official record, of an earlier date, relative to this locality,—the bills sent by the Sheriff of Oxford to the Queen, after two “public burnings.” One headed—“To burn Latimer and Ridley” has seven items, including “wood-fagots, furze-fagots, chains, and staples,” accumulating into a total of £1, 5s. 9d. “To burn Cranmer” was a cheaper operation. “Furze and wood-fagots,” the carriage of these, and “2 laborers,” cost but “12s. 8d.” Ridley and Latimer suffered for their obstinacy, October 16, 1555; Cranmer in March of the next year.
The walks and drives in and about Oxford are exceedingly beautiful. The “Broad Walk,” in Christ Church Meadows, deserves the eulogiums lavished upon it by tongue and pen. The interlacing tracery of the elms, arched above the smooth, wide avenue; the glimpses to right and left of “sweet fields in living green;” clumps of superb oaks and pretty “pleasances;” the dark-gray towers, domes and spires of the city, and the ivied walls of private and public gardens; the Isis winding beneath willows and between meadows, and dotted, although it was the long vacation, with gliding boats,—all this, viewed in the clear, tender light of the “Queen’s weather” that still followed us on our journeyings, made up a picture we shall carry with us while memory holds dear and pleasant things.
When we go abroad again—(how often and easily the words slip from our lips!) we mean to give three weeks, instead of as many days, to Oxford.
“Honor bright, now!” said Caput, settling into his place, with the rest of us, in the railway carriage, after the last look from the windows upon the receding scene;—“when you say ‘Oxford’ do you think first of Alfred the Great; of Cœur de Lion, who was born there; of William the Conqueror, who had a tough battle to win it; of Cardinal Wolsey—or of Tom Brown?”
“That reminds me!” said Prima, serenely ignoring the query her elders laughingly declined to answer,—“we must get some sandwiches at Rugby. Everybody does.”
We did—all leaving the train to peep into the “Refreshment Room of Mugby Junction,” and quoting, sotto voce, from the sketch which, it is affirmed, has made this, in very truth, what Dickens wrote it down ironically—“the Model Establishment” of the line. “The Boy” has disappeared, or grown up. Mrs. Sniff,—“the one with the small waist buckled in tight in front, and with the lace cuffs at her wrists, which she puts on the edge of the counter and stands a-smoothing while the Public foams,”—has been supplanted by a tidy dame, cherry-cheeked and smiling. She filled our order with polite despatch, and, in her corps of willing assistants one searches uselessly for the “disdaineous females and ferocious old woman,” objurgated by the enraged foreigner; as vainly in the array of tempting edibles upon the counter for “stale pastry and sawdust sangwiches.” We had our railway carriage to ourselves, and, carrying our parcels thither, prepared to make merry.
“I need not explain to this assembly the ingredients and formation of the British Refreshment Sangwich,” began Prima, who knows Dickens better than she does the Catechism.
The sandwich of Rugby,—as revised—is put up by the half-dozen in neat white boxes, tied with ribbons, like choice confections. The ingredients are sweet, white bread, and juicy tongue or ham. The pastry is fresh and flaky, the cakes delicate and toothsome. We kept our sandwich-boxes as souvenirs.
We did not catch a sight of Banbury Cross, or of the young woman with bells on her toes who cantered through our nursery rhyme to that mythical goal. But we did supplement our Mugby Lunch by Banbury cakes, an indigestible and palatable compound.