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

by William Dean Howells

On one shore were ranks of warehouses, and on the other, the wild variety of taverns and haunts of crude pleasure, embracing many places for the enjoyment of strong waters, such as everywhere in the world attract the foot wandering ashore at the end of a sea-leg. Their like may have allured that Anglicized Venetian, John Cabot, when he returned from finding Newfoundland, and left his ship to enjoy the ten pounds which Henry VII. had handsomely sent him for that purpose, as an acknowledgment of his gift of a continent. It is not to be supposed that there were then so many and so

CLIFTON, FROM ASHTON MEADOWS

large shops as now intersperse the pleasure-resorts in the port of Bristol; I question whether Cabot, if he had strained his eyes over-seas by looking out for new hemispheres, could have found there a whole building lettered over with the signs of an optician, and I do not yet see just why such a semi-scientist should so abound there now. But I shall always be sorry I did not go to him to replace the eye-glasses I had broken, instead of poorly driving to the shop of an optician in one of the best city streets. It was a very handsome street full of shops, such as gave a due notion of the sufficiency of Bristol to all demands of wealth and ease, and I got an excellent pair of glasses; but if I had bought my glasses in the port, I might perhaps have seen the whole strenuous past of the famous place through them, and even “stared at the Pacific” with the earliest of her circumnavigating sons. However, we cannot do everything, and we did not even see that day the cathedral which St. Mary Redcliffe so much surpasses, for anything we know to the contrary. We could and did see the beautiful Norman gateway of the Abbey, which it is no treason to our favorite church to allow she has none to equal, and passing under its sumptuously carven arches into the cathedral we arrived at the side of the regretful verger. He bade us note that the afternoon service was going on, and how the Elder Lady Chapel with its grotesque sculptures in the mediæval taste, which used to have fun in the decoration of sacred places with all sorts of mocking fancies, was impossible to us at the moment.

But the Bristol cathedral is not one of the famous English cathedrals, and our regret was tempered by this fact, though the verger’s was not. I tried to appease him with a promise to come again, which I should like nothing better than to keep, and then we drove off. We were visiting almost without a plan this storied and noble city, which so much merited to be carefully and intelligently seen, and it was by mere grace of chance that we now happened upon one of the most interesting houses in it. In the graveyard of St. Peter’s church the hapless poet, Richard Savage, who was buried at the cost of the jailer of the debtors’ prison where he died, and we must have passed the tablet to his memory in finding our unheeding way to St. Peter’s Hospital behind the church. This is one of the most splendid survivals of the statelier moods of the past in that England which is full of its records. A noted alchemist built it, whether for his dwelling or whether for the mystic uses of his art, in the thirteen-hundreds, but it is gabled and timbered now in the fashion of the sixteenth century, and serves as the official home of the Bristol Board of Guardians. Once it belonged to a company of merchant adventurers, and their ships used to float up to its postern-gate, and show their spars through the leaden sash of its windows, still kept in their primal picturesqueness. The whole place within is a wonder of carven mantels and friezes and ceilings; and so sound that it might well hold its own for yet five hundred years longer.

It was the first of those mediæval houses which gave us a sense of English comfort hardly yet surpassed in modern English interiors; and here first we noted the devotion of the English themselves to the monuments of their past. The Americans who visit objects of interest on the continent are apt to find themselves equalling in number, if not outnumbering their fellow-Anglo-Saxons of English birth; but in England they are a most insignificant minority. The English are not merely globe-trotters, they are most incessant travellers in their own island. They are always going and coming in it, and as often for pleasure as business, apparently. At any rate the American who proposes coming into a private heritage of the past when he visits his ancestral country finds himself constantly intruded upon by the modern natives, who seem to think they have as good right to it as he. This is very trying when he does not think them half so interesting as himself, or half so intelligently appreciative. He may be the most dissident of dissenters, the most outrageously evangelical of low-churchmen, but when he is pushed by a clerical-looking family of English country folk, father, mother, sister-in-law, and elderly and younger daughters, almost out of hearing of the vergeress’s traditions of St. Peter’s Hospital, he cannot help feeling himself debarred of most of the rights established by our Revolution. It is perhaps a confusion of emotions; but it will be a generous confusion if he observes, amidst his resentment, the listless inattention of the young girl, dragged at the heels of her family, and imaginably asking herself if this is their notion of the promised holiday, the splendid gayety of the long-looked-for visit to Bristol!

Before my own visit to that city my mind was much on a young Welsh girl whose feet used to be light in its streets, more than a hundred years ago, and who used in her garb of Quaker grandmother to speak of her childhood days there. She had come an orphan from Glamorganshire, to the care of an aunt and uncle at Bristol, and there she grew up, and one day she met a young Welshman from Breconshire who had come on some affair of his father’s woollen-mills to the busy town. She was walking in the fields, and when they passed, and she looked back at him, she found he was looking back at her; and perhaps if it were not for this surprising coincidence, some other hand than mine might now be writing this page. In her Bristol days she did not wear the white kerchief crossed at her neck above the gown of Quaker drab, nor the cap hiding the gray hair, but some youthful form of the demure dress in which one could better fancy her tripping across the field and looking back, in the path where she still pauses, in a dear and gentle transmutation of girlhood and grandmotherhood.

It might have been over the very field where she walked that we drove out to the suburb of Clifton, where Bristol mostly lives. It is the more beautiful Allegheny City of a less unbeautiful Pittsburg, but otherwise it bears the same relation to Bristol as the first of these American towns bears to the last. Nobody dwells in Bristol who can dwell in Clifton, and Clifton has not only the charm of pleasant houses and gardens, with public parks and promenades, and schools and colleges, and museums and galleries, as well as almost a superabundance of attractive hotels, but it is in the midst of nature as grand as that of the Niagara River below the falls. The Avon’s currents and tides flow between cliffs, spanned by Brunel’s exquisite and awful suspension-bridge, that rise thickly and wildly wooded on one side, and on the other, built over to its stupendous verge with shapes of the stately and dignified architecture, civic and domestic, which characterizes English towns. The American invader draws a panting breath of astonishment in the presence of scenery which eclipses his native landscape in savage grandeur as much as in civilized loveliness, and meekly wonders, on his way through that mighty gorge of the Avon, how he could have come to England with the notion that she was soft and tame in her most spectacular moods. He does not call upon the