To my long long’d for harbour of delight.”
Dissipated Charles! devoted wife!
THE BANKS OF THE DOVE.
Leaving Beresford Dale, we come to many enticing passages on the Dove, troutful and leafy, where rock and water and woodland make combinations that are the despair of artists. Wolfscote Ravine, Narrow Dale, Cold Eaton, Alstonfield, Load Mill, and Mill Dale are but topographical expressions, but to those who know the Dove they cease to be words, and become scenes of enchantment. And now we are in the Dove Dale of the tourists and the trippers, the painters and the picnic parties, the fly-fishermen and the amateur photographers. The guide-books have done Dove Dale grievous injustice by “heaping Ossa upon Pelion” with such misleading epithets as “grand,” “majestic,” “stupendous,” “terrific,” “awful,” etc., ad nauseam. Dove Dale is only imposing by its surpassing loveliness, its perfect beauty. A romantic glen three miles long, narrow and winding, it is a dream of pretty scenery. Limestone cliffs close in the clear and voiceful water. Their precipitous sides are draped to the sky-line with a wealth and wonder of foliage, the white tors shining through the green gloom. The wooded slopes, rich with wild flowers, ferns, and mosses, just admit of a pathway by the water, which is now white and wavy with cascades, and now a dreamy calm in reflective pools. Each turn in this romantic valley has its surprise in scenery. A revelation awaits each step.
ILAM HALL.
Some of the impending crags have such an individual character that they are known by particular names, such as Sharplow Point, the Twelve Apostles, Tissington Spires, the Lion’s Head, the Watch Box, the Straits, the Sugar Loaf, the Church Rock, etc.; whilst perforations in the rock forming natural arches and caverns are entitled Dove Holes, Dove Dale Church, Grey Mare’s Stable, Reynard’s Cave, Reynard’s Kitchen, the Crescent, the Arched Gateway, the Amphitheatre, the Abbey, and so on. These limestone tors, standing out from their green setting, assume castellated shapes. Here they suggest a bastion, there a spire; now an assemblage of towers, anon a convent church.
Dove Dale possesses many literary associations apart from those attached to Izaak Walton and his “adopted son” Charles. Surly Samuel Johnson frequently visited his friend Dr. Taylor, the Ashbourne divine who made his will in favour of the Fleet Street philosopher, but who lived to preach his funeral sermon in Westminster Abbey. In Dove Dale Dr. Johnson discovered the Happy Valley of “Rasselas.” Morbid Jean Jacques Rousseau found a hospitable asylum at David Hume’s house at Wootton Hall. It was another sort of “asylum” to which he should have been admitted, for he quarrelled with his benefactor. In Dove Dale he wandered scattering the seeds of rare plants that still flourish, and pondering over his “Confessions,” the most introspective of autobiographies. Thomas Moore lived by the banks of the Dove, and his letters to Lord Byron abound with references to the “beauty spots” of the neighbourhood. He rented a little cottage at Mayfield, where he passed the early years of his married life, buried his first-born, wrote most of “Lalla Rookh,” and in “Those Evening Bells” swung into undying music the metallic chimes of Ashbourne Church. Congreve wrote several of his comedies at Ilam. Canning was one of Dove Dale’s devotees, and the reader will remember his political squib beginning—
“So down thy slope, romantic Ashbourne, glides