Certain delightful English towns, with glimpses of the pleasant country between

by William Dean Howells

Of our subsequent afternoon in Bristol, what remains after this lapse of time except a pleasing impression? We chose a wet day because there were no dry days to choose from. But a wet day of the English spring is commonly better than it promises, and this one made several unexpected efforts to be fine, and repeatedly succeeded. Bristol is no nearer Bath than Wells is, but there are no changes, and we arrived in half an hour and drove at once through the rather uninteresting streets to the beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe. There we found the verger (or perhaps one should say the sexton) as ready to receive us, having just finished mopping the floor, as if he had been expecting us from

BRISTOL HARBOR AND DRAWBRIDGE

the foundation of the church in the thirteenth century. One has not often such a welcome, even from a verger, and I make this occasion to say that few things add more to the comfort of sight-seeing travel than an appreciative verger. He imparts a quality of his church or cathedral to the sight-seer, who feels himself Early English or at least Perpendicular Gothic under his flattering ministrations, and he supplements the dry facts of the guide-book with those agreeable touches of fable which really give life to history.

St. Mary Redcliffe is so rich in charming associations, however, as scarcely to need the play of the sacristan’s imagination for the adornment of her past. She is easily, as Queen Elizabeth so often-quotedly said, “the fairest, the goodliest, and most famous parish church in England,” and is more beautiful and interesting than the cathedral of her city, if not more graceful in form and lovely in detail than any other church in Europe. One scarcely knows which of her claims on the reader’s interest to mention first, but perhaps if the reader has a feeling heart for genius and sorrow he will care most for St. Mary Redcliffe because Chatterton lies buried in her shadow. Or, if he is not buried there, but at St. Andrews, Holborn, in London, as Peter Cunningham claims, there is at least his monument at St. Mary’s Redcliffe to give validity to the verger’s favorite story. The bishop forbade the poor suicide to be buried in the church-yard, and he was interred in a space just outside; but later the vestry bought this lot and enclosed it with the rest, and so beat the bishop on his own consecrated ground. I could not give a just sense of how much the verger triumphed in this legend, but apparently he could not have been prouder of it if he had invented it. He pointed out, at no great remove, a house in or near which Chatterton was born; and he must have taken it for granted that we knew the boy had pretended to find the MS. of his poems in an old chest in the muniment-room, over the beautiful porch of the church, for he did not mention it. He was probably so absorbed in the interest which Chatterton conferred upon St. Mary Redcliffe that he did not think to remind us that both Coleridge and Southey were married in the church. Southey was born in Bristol, and they both formed part of a little transitory provincial literary centre, which flourished there before the rise of the Lake School under the fostering faith of Joseph Cottle, the publisher, himself an epic poet of no mean area.

But St. Mary Redcliffe has peculiar claims upon the reverence of Americans from its monument of Admiral Penn, father of him who founded the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The formidable old sailor’s gauntlets, cuirass, and helmet hang upon the wall above the monument, and near by is the rib of a whale which John Cabot is said to have slain in Labrador. Less endearing associations for us, and less honorable to the city are those of the slave-trade which Bristol long carried on to her great gain and shame. Slavery was common there, not only in the Saxon and Norman days, but practically far down the centuries into the eighteenth. In the earlier times youths and maidens were roped together and offered for sale in the market; people sold their own children abroad; and in the later times, Bristol prospered so greatly in the exportation of young men and women to the colonies, that when this slavery was finally put an end to, it was found just to compensate her merchants and ship-owners in the sum of nearly a million dollars for their loss in the redemptioners whom they used to carry out and sell for their passage-money.

In the strange contemporaneity of the worst and the best things Bristol grew in grace; beautiful churches rose, and then her people fought the fight out of Romanism into Protestantism; in the civil war she held for the Parliament against the King, and was taken by Rupert and retaken by Cromwell. A hundred years after, the great religious awakening to be known as Methodism, began in and about Bristol. Whitefield preached to the miners at Kingswood, and then Wesley, whose help he had invoked, came and preached to all classes, in the town and out, moving them so powerfully to seek salvation, that many who heard him fell down in swounds and fits, and “roared for the disquietness of their hearts,” while tens of thousands were less dramatically saved from their sins. Yet another hundred years and the spirit miraculously responded to the constant prayer of George Müller for means to found the Orphanages, which witness the wonder at this day to any tourist willing to visit them. Without one specific or personal appeal, alms to the amount of three million dollars flowed in upon him, and helped him do his noble work.

Riches abounded more and more in Bristol, but the city continued almost to the nineteenth century in a mediæval inconvenience, discomfort, and squalor. A horse and cart could not pass through her tortuous streets, and trucks drawn by dogs transported her merchandise; down to 1820 heavy wagons were not permitted for fear of damaging the arches of the sewers, and sledges were used. All the same, there was from the beginning a vehement and powerful spirit of enterprise, and Bristol is connected with our own history not only by the voyages of the Cabots to our savage northern shores in the fifteenth century, but by the venture of the Great Western, which, in 1838, made the first steam passage of the Atlantic Ocean. In honor of the relations established by her mariners between the old world and the new, I over-ruled our driver’s genteel reluctance from the seafaring quarter of the town, and had him take us to as much of the port of Bristol as possible. I am not sure that I found the points from which either the Matthew sailed for America in 1497, or the Great Western in 1838, but I am sure that nothing more picturesque could have rewarded my vague search. Among the craft skirting the long quays there was every type of vessel except the Atlantic liner which had originated there; but the steamers, which looked coast-wise and river-going, contributed their full share to the busy effect. This for the moment was intensified by the interest which a vast crowd of people were taking in the raising of a sunken barge. Their multitude helped to embarrass our progress through the heaps of merchandise, and piles of fish, and coils of chain and cordage, and trucks backing and filling; but I would not have had them away, and I only wish I knew, as they must later have known, whether that barge was got up in good shape.