CHESTER CASTLE
heart in the study of realistic fiction. What I do personally know is that at a certain point of our drive a groom came riding one of his cultivated colts, so highly strung that it took fright at our harmless fly, and escaped by us in a flash of splendid terror that left my own responsive nerves vibrating.
From time to time notices to the public “earnestly requested” the visitor not to trespass or deface, instead of sternly forbidding him with a threat of penalties. They know how to do these things in England, and when our monopolists, corporate or individual, have come more generally to fence themselves away from their fellow-citizens they will learn how gracefully to entreat the traveller not to abuse the privileges of a visit to their grounds. Whether they will ever posit themselves in a landscape with the perfect pride of circumstance proper to a great English nobleman’s place, no one can say; and if I mention that there was a whole outlying village of picturesque and tasteful houses appropriated to the immediate dependants of this nobleman, it is less with the purpose of instructing some future oil-king or beef-baron in the niceties of state, than of simply letting the reader know that we drove back to Chester by a different way from that we came by.
As for the palace of the nobleman, which did not call itself a palace, it was disappointing, just as Niagara is disappointing if you come to it with vague preconceptions of another sort of majesty. I myself was disappointed in the Castle of Chester, which one would naturally expect to be Norman, “or at least Early English,” but which one finds a low two-story edifice of Georgian architecture enclosing a parade-ground, with a main gate in the form of a Greek portico and a side entrance disguised as a small classic temple. But the castle is in the definite taste of a self-justified epoch, and consoles you with the belated Georgian—the Fourth Georgian—surviving into our own century not so very long after its universal acceptance. One could not build a castle in any other than classic terms in 1829, and I dare say that forty years later it would have been impossible to build an ancestral seat in any other style than the Victorian Gothic-Tudor-Mansard which now glasses its gables, roofs, and finials with so much satisfaction in the silvery sheet of water at its feet. The finest thing about it is that the nobleman who imagined or commanded it was of the same name and surname as the Norman baron whom William the Conqueror appointed to hold Chester for him, when he had reduced it after a tedious siege, and to curb the wild Welsh of the dim hills we saw afar.
I am not good at descriptions of landscape-gardening, but I like all the formalities of cropt lawns and clipt trees, and I would fain have the reader, if I could, stand with me at the window within the house which gives the best sight of these glories. That exterior part of the interior which is shown to the public in great houses seems wastefully rather than tastefully splendid. The life of the place could hardly be inferred from it; but there was a touch of gentle intimacy in the photograph, lying on one of the curiously costly tables, of the fair and sweet young girl who had lately become the lady of all that magnificence. She looked like so many another pretty creature in any land or clime that it was difficult to realize her state even with the help of the awed flunky who was showing the stranger through. He was of an imagination which admitted nothing ignoble in its belongings, so that in passing a certain bust with the familiar broken nose of the master he respectfully murmured, “Sir Michael Hangelo.”
“Who?” the stranger joyfully demanded, wishing to make very sure of the precious fact; and the good soul repeated,
“Sir Michael Hangelo, sir.”