Nor is the throng which fills the Bristol streets wholly prosaic in its aspect, for the quaint garb of ancient charities holds its own against the modern tailor. Such troops of charity-children taking their solemn walks! Such long lines of boys in corduroy, such streams of girls in pug bonnets, stuff gowns and white aprons, as pour forth from the schools and almshouses to be found in every quarter of the city! The Colston boys are less frequently seen, because the school has been removed to one of the suburbs, yet now and then one of their odd figures meets the eye. They wear a muffin cap of blue cloth with a yellow band around it and a yellow ball on its apex; a blue cloth coat with a long plaited skirt; a leathern belt, corduroy knee-breeches and yellow worsted stockings. Just such, in outside garb, was Chatterton a century ago, and thus he is represented on his monument near Redcliff church.
You are perhaps gazing skyward at some lordly campanile when a sudden rush of feet and hum of voices comes around the corner, and the dark street is all aglow. These are the Red Maids, who walk the earth in scarlet gowns, set off by white aprons: they owe the bright hues of their existence to Alderman Whitson, who died in 1628, leaving funds to the mayor, burgesses and commonalty of the city of Bristol, "to the use and intent that they should therewith provide a fit and convenient dwelling-house for the abode of one grave, painful and modest woman of good life and conversation, and for forty poor women-children (whose parents, being freemen and burgesses of the said city, should be deceased or decayed); that they should therein admit the said woman and forty poor women-children, and cause them to be there kept and maintained, and also taught to read English and to sew and do some other laudable work toward their maintenance; ... and should cause every one of the said children to go and be apparelled in red cloth, and to give their attendance on the said woman, to attend and wait before the mayor and aldermen, their wives and others their associates, to hear sermons on the Sabbath and festival days, and other solemn meetings of the said mayor and aldermen and their wives," etc. etc. These maids are admitted between the ages of eight and ten, and at eighteen are placed at service.
Other aspects of Bristol are brought out in Pope's description of it in a letter to Mrs. Martha Blount.[1] After describing his drive from Bath and his crossing the bridge into Bristol, he continues: "From thence you come to a key along the old wall, with houses on both sides, and in the middle of the street, as far as you can see, hundreds of ships, their masts as thick as they can stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising sight imaginable. This street is fuller of them than the Thames from London Bridge to Deptford, and at certain times only the water rises to carry them out; so that at other times a long street full of ships in the middle and houses on both sides looks like a dream." ... "The city of Bristol is very unpleasant, and no civilized company in it; only, the collector of the customs would have brought me acquainted with merchants of whom I hear no great character. The streets are as crowded as London, but the best image I can give you of it is, 'tis as if Wapping and Southwark were ten times as big, or all their people ran into London. Nothing is fine in it but the square, which is larger than Grosvenor Square, and well builded, with a very fine brass statue in the middle of King William on horseback; and the key, which is full of ships, and goes round half the square. The College Green is pretty and (like the square) set with trees. There is a cathedral, very neat, and nineteen parish churches."
It is quite as curious to note what Pope omits as what he mentions. He is much taken with a commonplace square, and with the mingling of ships and houses (which is truly effective), but the modern traveller would find the chief beauty of the city in its Gothic architecture, to which Pope gives one line—"a cathedral, very neat, and nineteen parish churches." Let the visitor ascend any one of the hills which overhang Bristol, and a beautiful scene at once bursts upon his view: this is due to the pre-eminent beauty of the church-towers, the great stone lilies of the fifteenth century soaring above the dingy town; each,
For holy service built, with high disdain
Surveys this lower stage of earthly gain;