To take farewell of the College of Eton is usually to take farewell of the town, in which, as guide-books say, there is little interest; though, forsooth, interest may be wanting where we may find pleasure of the less exciting kind, not soon to die away. At least, there is in Eton unaffected substantiality of old-fashioned building, taking the form of its own age, and not stealing outward conceits from any other. Some of the houses of professional persons and private inhabitants, tutors and others, opposite the College, with its chestnut-trees, are staid, and even venerable. As Dickens said of the old unspoilt pier at Broadstairs, they have “no pretensions to architecture,” and are “immensely picturesque in consequence.” Hereabout is the well-stored shop of the librarian and publisher, never lacking custom in term-time. Eton College has its literary “organ,” and lives in hope of a Canning to immortalise pages which meanwhile are not deficient in sense and style, as how, indeed, should they be? In this publication are duly chronicled events which now are scarcely eventful, but which will make history some of these days. The doings in playground and on river, at football and cricket, rowing, swimming, and diving, are here registered, to the satisfaction of “wet bobs” and “dry bobs,” as the boys whose varying athletic tastes lead them in different directions are called. There is no house of public entertainment in Eton which is distinguished by the modernised term, hotel; but there are some decent inns, the most comfortable of which is reported to be the “Christopher.” It is a direct continuation of Eton into Windsor across the bridge connecting the Berkshire with the Buckinghamshire town, the town being to all intents and purposes one. Windsor Great Park—thus designated in distinction from the Home Park of 500 acres, which adjoins the Castle, and is the enclosure which contained Herne’s Oak—should now be seen. It is separated from the castle precincts by the high road, and by part of Windsor. Apportioned here and there to farms, it still comprises a clear area little short of 2,000 acres, forest-like in much of its scenery, and abounding in walks and drives, from which a herd of deer is a frequent addition to the regal beauty of the prospect. When, for purpose of ridicule and burlesque, the title Duke of Shoreditch finds its way into modern literature, it may be called to mind that the first man so dubbed was a Londoner named Barlow, who, at one of the great archery meetings held by Henry VIII. so excelled all the Buckinghamshire yeoman, that his Majesty forthwith gave him, half in pique, half in pleasantry, the mock style and honour. For three miles the Great Park is traversed by the elm-bordered avenue called the Long Walk, at the far end of which, set up high on an eminence known as Snow Hill, stands a colossal equestrian statue in lead, by Westmacott, of George III., in classic costume.
The fine perspective, with its countless noble trees, was planned by Charles II., and finished under William III. Only by accident, fortunate or unfortunate we hesitate to say, was it that the quaintly beautiful gate, built at Whitehall by Holbein, “with bricks of two colours, glazed, and disposed in a tesselated fashion,”[6] and taken down in 1759, did not take the place now occupied by the leaden statue of George III. The materials of the Tudor gate, carefully preserved, were brought hither by the Duke of Cumberland, with an intention which was frustrated by his mortal sickness. It was as well, after all, that a civic gate was not set up in a sylvan park, however stately. Transplanted monuments seldom, if ever, find congenial surroundings. The Duke of Devonshire, in quite recent years, declined the offer of the fine water-gate of York House, built for Duke Steenie by Inigo Jones; and there it stands to this day, elbowed into obscurity by the Thames Embankment. No Cavendish was ever yet so wanting in a sense of the fitness of things as not to feel that a river edifice, designed as a point of landing and embarking, would be out of place as a portal of a mansion in Piccadilly. Wherever Temple Bar may be erected, it will be an incongruity and an anachronism, serving only to turn men’s minds fretfully to the incongruous pile of maimed heraldry, portrait-sculpture, allegorical confusion, and vulgar commonplace, in stone and bronze, built up by Mr. Jones—Horace, not Inigo—in the middle of the road over against the Law Courts. Not as completed according to its original plan does the Long Walk in Windsor Great Park now appear. It was a walk, and nothing more, for Charles II. was a pedestrian. And as a walk it remained till 1710, at which time the carriage-road down the avenue was constructed, a new footpath having meanwhile been made for Queen Anne, which to this day retains its old title, the Queen’s Walk. Royal residences and olden sites, and monuments relating to royalty, distinguish Windsor Park and its neighbourhood.
THE ALBERT BRIDGE.
Our way now lies past Frogmore, and over the river again, by the Albert Bridge, to Southley, where we set our faces up-stream, going back a little on our course to visit Datchet. Another iron bridge, higher up—named the Victoria Bridge—would have taken us thither more directly; though we must then have missed the park and its scenic associations. But if it were only to see the Datchet of Shakespeare, the Datchet lane, and Datchet mead by which Ford’s men carried Falstaff to the river brink in the buck-basket, and there canted him into the water with the foul linen, we could as well have remained on the Berkshire shore. There might, indeed, have been a wooden bridge between Windsor and Datchet in Elizabethan days; but it is most likely that the name of Datchet, bridge or no bridge, applied to spots on both sides the river, and that Datchet Mead was a piece of low land between Windsor Home Park and the river. As such, it is mentioned by Mrs. S. C. Hall, who agrees with other writers in supposing that Falstaff and the foul linen were tilted, according to Mistress Ford’s injunctions, into the muddy ditch among the whitsters, close to Thames side. But Falstaff, both in his soliloquy at the “Garter” Inn, and in the account of the affair to “Master Brook,” distinctly says he was thrown into Thames, the shelving shore of which river saved him from drowning. The real Datchet on the Buckinghamshire side could not have been intended by Shakespeare, unless, by a poetical licence, he brought Datchet over to Windsor. The topographers and the Shakespearean annotators alike have been content to slur this point, leaving their readers to reconcile the doubts concerning which all modern authorities, or such as ought to be authorities, are silent. The nearest elucidation is yet afar off. We find it in a note by Malone on Dennis, who had objected to the probability of the circumstance of Falstaff’s having been carried to Datchet Mead, “which,” says Dennis, “is half a mile from Windsor.” This would refer, certainly, to a mead on the Berkshire side, and not in the parish of Datchet, in a county separated by the Thames. Mrs. Hall was doubtless right in placing Datchet Mead between the towing-path and Windsor Little Park; but it is a pity she was not more explicit. The muddy ditch named by Mistress Ford in the play was probably that which, being covered over in Queen Anne’s time, was used as a drain, and came to be called Hog Hole. It was destroyed when the embankment was raised to form a foundation for the Windsor side of Victoria Bridge. Both from this bridge and from its fellow, lower down, good views are obtained of Windsor Castle. At Datchet, no longer so pretty and picturesque as it was half a century ago, is an old church of Early English and Decorated styles, in which Queen Elizabeth’s printer, Christopher Barber, is buried; as also Lady Katherine Berkeley, daughter of Lord Mountjoy. Above Datchet, Izaak Walton used to fish, sometimes with his friend, Sir Henry Wotton, the provost of Eton before mentioned.
Albert Bridge, with its long, flattened, Tudor arch, spanning the river at one bound, bears a miniature resemblance to the design of the bridge at Westminster, and is light and elegant, though of a modern taste, which lacks the picturesqueness and simplicity of the old objects on the river. The span, however, adds safety to the navigation, especially in these times of steam-launches, the most unpopular and best-hated craft on the Thames. Like other ills, we have come to tolerate them for a certain one-sided convenience, esteemed by the selfish, the lazy, and the fast. All pleasant quiet on the river, as, indeed, on the shore, is a thing of long ago. Idlesse, dreamy solitude, could only be enjoyed by the few, and can never be enjoyed by them. In coupling, or rather in identifying the fast and the lazy, we may, by hasty thinkers, be suspected of a contradiction. There is none in what we have said. The lazy are often restless in their inert desire to be conveyed swiftly from place to place; for they have no energy for idling. To rush, screaming on, with their hands in their pockets, and no motion of their own, is the height of bliss to such people, and this is the enjoyment a steam-launch affords. Yet the unpopular vessel has a popularity of its own. Riverside folk in the mass, from the Duke of Westminster to the poorest toiler who profits by the Early-closing Movement and the Bank-holidays, all join in decrying the rowdy intruder—the “’Arry” of river craft. But “’Arry” is all-pervading, and multiplies himself with astonishing exuberance and rapidity. There is more of him every day; and there are more and more steam-launches, for all the outcry against them.
OLD WINDSOR LOCK.