As the great eastern artery of London, the road which we have thus far followed begins to distribute its living mass into the successive provincial avenues which diverge from it, we find ourselves included in that portion of the throng, whom the pursuit of health or pleasure conducts toward Tonbridge.[1] The high and level country which under the name of ‘Downs’[2] forms the northern and western boundary of Kent, sinks by a sudden and steep declivity on its eastern edge; which edge the geologists tell us was once washed by a primeval ocean, and is still seamed by the ineffaceable traces of its currents and storms. For ourselves it forms a vantage-ground from which we seem to look at one glance over almost the whole of that fair province which stretches nearly to the continent, and lifts the white cliffs of Albion above the surges of the British channel. We think of the day when the standard bearer of the tenth legion bore the eagle of Cæsar to the shore amid the cries of the opposing Britons; and of the still more signal day when Augustine displayed the cross before the eyes of the softened and repentant Saxons. We think too of the beings with whose memories Shakspeare has peopled this portion of the Isle; of Lear and Cordelia, of Edgar, Gloster, and Kent; of that night of horrors upon the stormy heath, and that scene of unutterable tenderness and heart-break on the sands of Dover. Unbidden, as we gaze over the fair and varied prospect, the words of the same great dramatist rise to our lips, in his appropriation of the sentiments and language of the first conqueror of Britain:
‘Kent in the commentaries Cæsar writ,
Is termed the civil’st place of all this isle;
Sweet is the country because full of riches,
The people liberal, active, valiant, wealthy.’
But the riches of Kent must be spoken of with due limitations. Those geological changes and formations before alluded to, which have marked the track of wealth across the British islands by deposits of mineral coal, as clearly as if it had been traced in sunbeams, have bequeathed no such sources of sub-terrene affluence to Kent. Nor has nature been more than parsimonious (to say the least) with respect to the superficial qualities of its soil. We have only, however, to cast our eyes on a topographical chart of Kent, to see how beneficently these disadvantages are balanced by considerations of a different sort. Washed along a vast line of coast by the ocean, and bordered to an equal or greater extent by the Thames; penetrated by the navigable Medway, and watered by such fertilizing streams as the Eden and the Ton; traversed through its whole length by that ancient highway of Dover, which figured in the itineraries of the Romans, and which still conveys much of the ceaseless intercourse between England and the Continent; its coast studded with towers and harbors; its interior sprinkled with hamlets, parks, cities, and baronial residences; claiming, finally, to be the episcopal head and fountain of ecclesiastical dignity for the whole British empire; we can readily see how Kent may vindicate to itself the praise conveyed in the lines of Shakspeare as the abode of a liberal, active, valiant, and even wealthy people.
Nor is this flattering ascription of personal qualities unsupported by the facts of its local history. To the great Roman conqueror the inhabitants of this part of Britain opposed a resistance, which taught him, as he indirectly confesses, to look back with many a wistful glance toward the coast where he had left his transports, but ill-assured against the ocean or the enemy. Against the Norman conqueror, likewise, when all the rest of the island had yielded implicitly to his sway and to the substitution of feudal for native usages, the people of Kent still made good their old hereditary law of Gavelkind. More than once in after times, stung by oppression or inflamed by zeal, they have drawn together in a spirit of tumultuous resistance, and borne their remonstrances to the very gates of the national capital. Connecting this history and character with their maritime position, we are led to apply a remark which our American historian Prescott has generalized from the circumstances of a people not dissimilarly situated. ‘The sea-board,’ says that admirable writer, ‘would seem to be the natural seat of liberty. There is something in the very presence, in the atmosphere of the ocean, which invigorates not only the physical but the moral energies of man.’ Or as Wordsworth has expressed the same idea, with an extension of it, no less just than poetical, to another class of natural objects:
‘Two voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,