Brighton,
Thursday, 10 Jan., 1822.
Lewes is in a valley of the South Downs, this town is at eight miles’ distance, to the south south-west or thereabouts. There is a great extent of rich meadows above and below Lewes. The town itself is a model of solidity and neatness. The buildings all substantial to the very out-skirts; the pavements good and complete; the shops nice and clean; the people well-dressed; and, though last not least, the girls remarkably pretty, as, indeed, they are in most parts of Sussex; round faces, features small, little hands and wrists, plump arms, and bright eyes. The Sussex men, too, are remarkable for their good looks. A Mr. Baxter, a stationer at Lewes, showed me a farmer’s account book which is a very complete thing of the kind. The Inns are good at Lewes, the people civil and not servile, and the charges really (considering the taxes) far below what one could reasonably expect.—From Lewes to Brighton the road winds along between the hills of the South Downs, which, in this mild weather, are mostly beautifully green even at this season, with flocks of sheep feeding on them.—Brighton itself lies in a valley cut across at one end by the sea, and its extension, or Wen, has swelled up the sides of the hills and has run some distance up the valley.—The first thing you see in approaching Brighton from Lewes is a splendid horse-barrack on one side of the road, and a heap of low, shabby, nasty houses, irregularly built, on the other side. This is always the case where there is a barrack. How soon a Reformed Parliament would make both disappear! Brighton is a very pleasant place. For a wen remarkably so. The Kremlin, the very name of which has so long been a subject of laughter all over the country, lies in the gorge of the valley, and amongst the old houses of the town. The grounds, which cannot, I think, exceed a couple or three acres, are surrounded by a wall neither lofty nor good-looking. Above this rise some trees, bad in sorts, stunted in growth, and dirty with smoke. As to the “palace” as the Brighton newspapers call it, the apartments appear to be all upon the ground floor; and, when you see the thing from a distance, you think you see a parcel of cradle-spits, of various dimensions, sticking up out of the mouths of so many enormous squat decanters. Take a square box, the sides of which are three feet and a half, and the height a foot and a half. Take a large Norfolk-turnip, cut off the green of the leaves, leave the stalks 9 inches long, tie these round with a string three inches from the top, and put the turnip on the middle of the top of the box. Then take four turnips of half the size, treat them in the same way, and put them on the corners of the box. Then take a considerable number of bulbs of the crown-imperial, the narcissus, the hyacinth, the tulip, the crocus, and others; let the leaves of each have sprouted to about an inch, more or less according to the size of the bulb; put all these, pretty promiscuously, but pretty thickly, on the top of the box. Then stand off and look at your architecture. There! That’s “a Kremlin”! Only you must cut some church-looking windows in the sides of the box. As to what you ought to put into the box, that is a subject far above my cut.—Brighton is naturally a place of resort for expectants, and a shifty ugly-looking swarm is, of course, assembled here. Some of the fellows, who had endeavoured to disturb our harmony at the dinner at Lewes, were parading, amongst this swarm, on the cliff. You may always know them by their lank jaws, the stiffeners round their necks, their hidden or no shirts, their stays, their false shoulders, hips, and haunches, their half-whiskers, and by their skins, colour of veal kidney-suet, warmed a little, and then powdered with dirty dust.—These vermin excepted, the people at Brighton make a very fine figure. The trades-people are very nice in all their concerns. The houses are excellent, built chiefly with a blue or purple brick; and bow-windows appear to be the general taste. I can easily believe this to be a very healthy place: the open downs on the one side and the open sea on the other. No inlet, cove, or river; and, of course, no swamps.—I have spent this evening very pleasantly in a company of reformers, who, though plain tradesmen and mechanics, know I am quite satisfied, more about the questions that agitate the country, than any equal number of Lords.
Kensington,
Friday, 11 January, 1822.
Came home by the way of Cuckfield, Worth, and Red-Hill, instead of by Uckfield, Grinstead and Godstone, and got into the same road again at Croydon. The roads being nearly parallel lines and at no great distance from each other, the soil is nearly the same, with the exception of the fine oak country between Godstone and Grinstead, which does not go so far westward as my homeward bound road, where the land, opposite the spot just spoken of, becomes more of a moor than a clay, and though there are oaks, they are not nearly so fine as those on the other road. The tops are flatter; the side shoots are sometimes higher than the middle shoot; a certain proof that the tap-root has met with something that it does not like.—I see (Jan. 15) that Mr. Curteis has thought it necessary to state in the public papers, that he had nothing to do with my being at the dinner at Battle! Who the Devil thought he had? Why, was it not an ordinary; and had I not as much right there as he? He has said, too, that he did not know that I was to be at the dinner. How should he? Why was it necessary to apprise him of it any more than the porter of the inn? He has said, that he did not hear of any deputation to invite me to the dinner, and, “upon inquiry,” cannot find that there was any. Have I said that there was any invitation at all? There was; but I have not said so. I went to the dinner for my half-crown like another man, without knowing, or caring, who would be at it. But, if Mr. Curteis thought it necessary to say so much, he might have said a little more. He might have said, that he twice addressed himself to me in a very peculiar manner, and that I never addressed myself to him except in answer; and, if he had thought “inquiry” necessary upon this subject also, he might have found that, though always the first to speak or hold out the hand to a hard-fisted artisan or labourer, I never did the same to a man of rank or riches in the whole course of my life. Mr. Curteis might have said, too, that unless I had gone to the dinner, the party would, according to appearances, have been very select; that I found him at the head of one of the tables, with less than thirty persons in the room; that the number swelled up to about one hundred and thirty; that no person was at the other table; that I took my seat at it; and that that table became almost immediately crowded from one end to the other. To these Mr. Curteis, when his hand was in, might have added, that he turned himself in his chair and listened to my speech with the greatest attention; that he bade me, by name, good night, when he retired; that he took not a man away with him; and that the gentleman who was called on to replace him in the chair (whose name I have forgotten) had got from his seat during the evening to come and shake me by the hand. All these things Mr. Curteis might have said; but the fact is, he has been bullied by the base newspapers, and he has not been able to muster up courage to act the manly part, and which, too, he would have found to be the wise part in the end. When he gave the toast “more money and less taxes,” he turned himself towards me, and said, “That is a toast that I am sure you approve of, Mr. Cobbett.” To which I answered, “It would be made good, Sir, if members of Parliament would do their duty.”—I appeal to all the gentlemen present for the truth of what I say. Perhaps Mr. Curteis, in his heart, did not like to give my health. If that was the case, he ought to have left the chair, and retired. Straight forward is the best course; and, see what difficulties Mr. Curteis has involved himself in by not pursuing it! I have no doubt that he was agreeably surprised when he saw and heard me. Why not say then: “After all that has been said about Cobbett, he is a devilish pleasant, frank, and clever fellow, at any rate.”—How much better this would have been, than to act the part that Mr. Curteis has acted.——The Editors of the Brighton Chronicle and Lewes Express have, out of mere modesty, I dare say, fallen a little into Mr. Curteis’s strain. In closing their account (in their paper of the 15th) of the Lewes Meeting, they say that I addressed the company at some length, as reported in their Supplement published on Thursday the 10th. And then they think it necessary to add: “For OURSELVES, we can say, that we never saw Mr. Cobbett until the meeting at Battle.” Now, had it not been for pure maiden-like bashfulness, they would, doubtless, have added, that when they did see me, they were profuse in expressions of their gratitude to me for having merely named their paper in my Register a thing, which, as I told them, I myself had forgotten. When, too, they were speaking, in reference to a speech made in the Hall, of “one of the finest specimens of oratory that has ever been given in any assembly,” it was, without doubt, out of pure compassion for the perverted taste of their Lewes readers, that they suppressed the fact, that the agent of the paper at Lewes sent them word, that it was useless for them to send any account of the meeting, unless that account contained Mr. Cobbett’s speech; that he, the agent, could have sold a hundred papers that morning, if they had contained Mr. Cobbett’s speech; but could not sell one without it. I myself, by mere accident, heard this message delivered to a third person by their agent at Lewes. And, as I said before, it must have been pure tenderness towards their readers that made the editors suppress a fact so injurious to the reputation of those readers in point of taste! However, at last, these editors seem to have triumphed over all feelings of this sort; for, having printed off a placard, advertising their Supplement, in which placard no mention was made of me, they, grown bold all of a sudden, took a painting brush, and in large letters put into their placard, “Mr. Cobbett’s Speech at Lewes;” so that, at a little distance, the placard seemed to relate to nothing else; and there was “the finest specimen of oratory” left to find its way into the world under the auspices of my rustic harangue. Good God! What will this world come to! We shall, by-and-bye, have to laugh at the workings of envy in the very worms that we breed in our bodies!—The fast-sinking Old Times news-paper, its cat-and-dog opponent the New Times, the Courier, and the Whig-Lawyer Tramper, called the “Traveller;” the fellows who conduct these vehicles; these wretched fellows, their very livers burning with envy, have hasted to inform their readers, that “they have authority to state that Lord Ashburnham and Mr. Fuller were not present at the dinner at Battle where Cobbett’s health was drunk.” These fellows have now “authority” to state, that there were no two men who dined at Battle, that I should not prefer as companions to Lord Ashburnham and Mr. Fuller, commonly called “Jack Fuller,” seeing that I am no admirer of lofty reserve, and that, of all things on earth, I abhor a head like a drum, all noise and emptiness. These scribes have also “authority” to state, that they amuse me and the public too by declining rapidly in their sale from their exclusion of my country lectures, which have only begun. In addition to this The Tramper editor has “authority” to state, that one of his papers of 5th Jan. has been sent to the Register-office by post, with these words written on it: “This scoundrel paper has taken no notice of Mr. Cobbett’s speech.” All these papers have “authority” to state beforehand, that they will insert no account of what shall take place, within these three or four weeks, at Huntingdon, at Lynn, at Chichester, and other places where I intend to be. And, lastly, the editors have full “authority” to state, that they may employ, without let or molestation of any sort, either private or public, the price of the last number that they shall sell in the purchase of hemp or ratsbane, as the sure means of a happy deliverance from their present state of torment.
HUNTINGDON JOURNAL: THROUGH WARE AND ROYSTON, TO HUNTINGDON.
Royston,
Monday morning, 21st Jan., 1822.
Came from London, yesterday noon, to this town on my way to Huntingdon. My road was through Ware. Royston is just within the line (on the Cambridgeshire side), which divides Hertfordshire from Cambridgeshire. On this road, as on almost all the others going from it, the enormous Wen has swelled out to the distance of about six or seven miles.—The land till you come nearly to Ware which is in Hertfordshire, and which is twenty-three miles from the Wen, is chiefly a strong and deep loam, with the gravel a good distance from the surface. The land is good wheat-land; but I observed only three fields of Swedish turnips in the 23 miles, and no wheat drilled. The wheat is sown on ridges of great width here-and-there; sometimes on ridges of ten, at others on ridges of seven, on those of five, four, three, and even two, feet wide. Yet the bottom is manifestly not very wet generally; and that there is not a bottom of clay is clear from the poor growth of the oak trees. All the trees are shabby in this country; and the eye is incessantly offended by the sight of pollards, which are seldom suffered to disgrace even the meanest lands in Hampshire or Sussex. As you approach Ware the bottom becomes chalk of a dirtyish colour, and, in some parts, far below the surface. After you quit Ware, which is a mere market town, the land grows by degrees poorer; the chalk lies nearer and nearer to the surface, till you come to the open common-fields within a few miles of Royston. Along here the land is poor enough. It is not the stiff red loam mixed with large blue-grey flints, lying upon the chalk, such as you see in the north of Hampshire; but a whitish sort of clay, with little yellow flattish stones amongst it; sure signs of a hungry soil. Yet this land bears wheat sometimes.—Royston is at the foot of this high poor land; or, rather in a dell, the open side of which looks towards the North. It is a common market town. Not mean, but having nothing of beauty about it; and having on it, on three of the sides out of the four, those very ugly things, common-fields, which have all the nakedness, without any of the smoothness, of Downs.
Huntingdon,
Tuesday morning, 22nd Jan., 1822.
Immediately upon quitting Royston, you come along, for a considerable distance, with enclosed fields on the left and open common-fields on the right. Here the land is excellent. A dark, rich loam, free from stones, on chalk beneath at a great distance. The land appears, for a mile or two, to resemble that at and near Faversham in Kent, which I have before noticed. The fields on the left seem to have been enclosed by Act of Parliament; and they certainly are the most beautiful tract of fields that I ever saw. Their extent may be from ten to thirty acres each. Divided by quick-set hedges, exceedingly well planted and raised. The whole tract is nearly a perfect level. The cultivation neat, and the stubble heaps, such as remain out, giving a proof of great crops of straw, while, on land with a chalk bottom, there is seldom any want of a proportionate quantity of grain. Even here, however, I saw but few Swedish turnips, and those not good. Nor did I see any wheat drilled; and observed that, in many parts, the broad-cast sowing had been performed in a most careless manner, especially at about three miles from Royston, where some parts of the broad lands seemed to have had the seed flung along them with a shovel, while other parts contained only here and there a blade; or, at least, were so thinly supplied as to make it almost doubtful whether they had not been wholly missed. In some parts the middles only of the ridges were sown thickly. This is shocking husbandry. A Norfolk or a Kentish farmer would have sowed a bushel and a half of seed to the acre here, and would have had a far better plant of wheat.—About four miles, I think it is, from Royston you come to the estate of Lord Hardwicke. You see the house at the end of an avenue about two miles long, which, however, wants the main thing, namely, fine and lofty trees. The soil here begins to be a very stiff loam at top; clay beneath for a considerable distance; and, in some places, beds of yellow gravel with very large stones mixed in it. The land is generally cold; a great deal of draining is wanted; and yet the bottom is such as not to be favourable to the growth of the oak, of which sort I have not seen one handsome tree since I left London. A grove, such as I saw at Weston in Herefordshire, would, here, be a thing to attract the attention of all ranks and all ages. What, then, would they say, on beholding a wood of Oaks, Hickories, Chestnuts, Walnuts, Locusts, Gum-trees, and Maples in America!—Lord Hardwicke’s avenue appears to be lined with Elms chiefly. They are shabby. He might have had ash; for the ash will grow anywhere; on sand, on gravel, on clay, on chalk, or in swamps. It is surprising that those who planted these rows of trees did not observe how well the ash grows here! In the hedge-rows, in the plantations, everywhere the ash is fine. The ash is the hardiest of all our large trees. Look at trees on any part of the sea coast. You will see them all, even the firs, lean from the sea breeze, except the ash. You will see the oak shaved up on the side of the breeze. But the ash stands upright, as if in a warm woody dell. We have no tree that attains a greater height than the ash; and certainly none that equals it in beauty of leaf. It bears pruning better than any other tree. Its timber is one of the most useful; and as underwood and fire-wood it far exceeds all others of English growth. From the trees of an avenue like that of Lord Hardwicke a hundred pounds worth of fuel might, if the trees were ash, be cut every year in prunings necessary to preserve the health and beauty of the trees. Yet, on this same land, has his lordship planted many acres of larches and firs. These appear to have been planted about twelve years. If instead of these he had planted ash, four years from the seed bed and once removed; had cut them down within an inch of the ground the second year after planting; and had planted them at four feet apart, he would now have had about six thousand ash-poles, on an average twelve feet long, on each acre of land in his plantation; which, at three-halfpence each, would have been worth somewhere nearly forty pounds an acre. He might now have cut the poles, leaving about 600 to stand upon an acre to come to trees; and while these were growing to timber, the underwood would, for poles, hoops, broom-sticks, spars, rods, and faggots, have been worth twenty-five or thirty pounds an acre every ten years. Can beggarly stuff, like larches and firs, ever be profitable to this extent? Ash is timber, fit for the wheelwright, at the age of twenty years, or less. What can you do with a rotten fir thing at that age?——This estate of Lord Hardwicke appears to be very large. There is a part which is, apparently, in his own hands, as, indeed, the whole must soon be, unless he give up all idea of rent, or, unless he can choack off the fundholder or get again afloat on the sea of paper-money. In this part of his land there is a fine piece of Lucerne in rows at about eighteen inches distant from each other. They are now manuring it with burnt-earth mixed with some dung; and I see several heaps of burnt-earth hereabouts. The directions for doing this are contained in my Year’s Residence, as taught me by Mr. William Gauntlet, of Winchester.—The land is, all along here, laid up in those wide and high ridges, which I saw in Gloucestershire, going from Gloucester to Oxford, as I have already mentioned. These ridges are ploughed back or down; but they are ploughed up again for every sowing.—At an Inn near Lord Hardwicke’s I saw the finest parcel of dove-house pigeons I ever saw in my life.—Between this place and Huntingdon is the village of Caxton, which very much resembles almost a village of the same size in Picardy, where I saw the women dragging harrows to harrow in the corn. Certainly this village resembles nothing English, except some of the rascally rotten boroughs in Cornwall and Devonshire, on which a just Providence seems to have entailed its curse. The land just about here does seem to be really bad. The face of the country is naked. The few scrubbed trees that now-and-then meet the eye, and even the quick-sets, are covered with a yellow moss. All is bleak and comfortless; and, just on the most dreary part of this most dreary scene, stands almost opportunely, “Caxton Gibbet,” tendering its friendly one arm to the passers-by. It has recently been fresh-painted, and written on in conspicuous characters, for the benefit, I suppose, of those who cannot exist under the thought of wheat at four shillings a bushel.—Not far from this is a new house, which, the coachman says, belongs to a Mr. Cheer, who, if report speaks truly, is not, however, notwithstanding his name, guilty of the sin of making people either drunkards or gluttons. Certainly the spot, on which he has built his house, is one of the most ugly that I ever saw. Few spots have everything that you could wish to find; but this, according to my judgment, has everything that every man of ordinary taste would wish to avoid.—The country changes but little till you get quite to Huntingdon. The land is generally quite open, or in large fields. Strong, wheat-land, that wants a good deal of draining. Very few turnips of any sort are raised; and, of course, few sheep and cattle kept. Few trees, and those scrubbed. Few woods, and those small. Few hills, and those hardly worthy of the name. All which, when we see them, make us cease to wonder, that this country is so famous for fox-hunting. Such it has doubtless been in all times, and to this circumstance Huntingdon, that is to say, Huntingdun, or Huntingdown, unquestionably owes its name; because down does not mean unploughed land, but open and unsheltered land, and the Saxon word is dun.—When you come down near to the town itself, the scene suddenly, totally, and most agreeably, changes. The River Ouse separates Godmanchester from Huntingdon, and there is, I think, no very great difference in the population of the two. Both together do not make up a population of more than about five thousand souls. Huntingdon is a slightly built town, compared with Lewes, for instance. The houses are not in general so high, nor made of such solid and costly materials. The shops are not so large and their contents not so costly. There is not a show of so much business and so much opulence. But Huntingdon is a very clean and nice place, contains many elegant houses, and the environs are beautiful. Above and below the bridge, under which the Ouse passes, are the most beautiful, and by far the most beautiful, meadows that I ever saw in my life. The meadows at Lewes, at Guildford, at Farnham, at Winchester, at Salisbury, at Exeter, at Gloucester, at Hereford, and even at Canterbury, are nothing, compared with those of Huntingdon in point of beauty. Here are no reeds, here is no sedge, no unevennesses of any sort. Here are bowling-greens of hundreds of acres in extent, with a river winding through them, full to the brink. One of these meadows is the race-course; and so pretty a spot, so level, so smooth, so green, and of such an extent I never saw, and never expected to see. From the bridge you look across the valleys, first to the West and then to the East; the valleys terminate at the foot of rising ground, well set with trees, from amongst which church spires raise their heads here-and-there. I think it would be very difficult to find a more delightful spot than this in the world. To my fancy (and every one to his taste) the prospect from this bridge far surpasses that from Richmond Hill.—All that I have yet seen of Huntingdon I like exceedingly. It is one of those pretty, clean, unstenched, unconfined places that tend to lengthen life and make it happy.