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THE traveller who would enter into the full charm of "Shakspere's country" is recommended to start from the quaint and ancient city of Coventry, and to pursue the high road to Warwick, taking Kenilworth in his way. There is scarcely a walk in England more perfect in its own kind of beauty than the five miles from Coventry to Kenilworth. A wide, well-kept road follows, almost in a straight line, the undulations of the hills. Soon after leaving the city, a broad, flower-enamelled coppice, open to the road, is reached; then the hedgerows are flanked on both sides with noble elms, forming a stately avenue, through which glimpses are ever and anon obtained of purple wood-crested hills in the distance. Broad rolling pastures, and cornfields, rich in promise, stretch away on either hand; the grassy road-side and high hedge-banks, showing the deep red subsoil of the sandstone, or variegated clays of the red marls, are bright with wild flowers, and the air is musical with the song of birds. Travellers are few; the railway scream in the distance, to the left, suggests that all who are in a hurry to reach their destination have taken another route; if it be holiday time, parties of young men on Coventry bicycles are sure to flash past; but it is our delight to linger and enjoy. We are, as Thomas Fuller says, in the "Medi-terranean" part of England; and English scenery nowhere displays a more characteristic charm.
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Kenilworth old church and the castle at length are reached; the latter, a stately ruin. The visitor will duly note Cæsar's Tower, the original keep, with its walls, in some parts, sixteen feet thick; then the remains of the magnificent banqueting hall, built by John of Gaunt, and, lastly, the dilapidated towers erected by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, one part of which bears the name of poor Amy Robsart. No officious cicerone is likely to offer his services; a trifling gate-fee opens the place freely to all, either to rest on the greensward, or to climb the battered ramparts; to survey, at one view, the ancient moat, the castle garden, the tilt-yard, where knights met in mimic battle; the bed of the lake, where sea-fights were imitated for a monarch's sport—in short, the impressive memorials of a fashion in life and act that have long since yielded to nobler things. "The massy ruins," says Sir Walter Scott, "only serve to show what their splendour once was, and to impress on the musing visitor the transitory value of human possessions, and the happiness of those who enjoy a humble lot in industrious contentment." There are other lessons, too, national, as well as individual; and we turn away from old Kenilworth with thankfulness that the ruins of the nineteenth century will at least tell to our descendants no tales of feudal tyranny, of royal murders, or of sanguinary civil strife.