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

by William Dean Howells

The members of the Corporation were formerly the patrons of the living, and the mayor still has his seat in the church under the arms of the town, and doubtless that official had it in the older building before the fire,

THE BUSINESS CENTRE OF NORTHAMPTON

when the mayor was Lawrence Washington. In the wall is a tablet to the memory of a man who was born in the century when Lawrence was twice chosen chief magistrate of Northampton, and who died in the century when George Washington was twice chosen Chief Magistrate of the United States. John Bailes was a button-maker by trade, and if he links the memories of those far-parted Washingtons together, by force of longevity, it is with no merit of his, though it is recorded of him that “he had his hearing, Sight & Memory to ye last.” I leave more mystical inquirers to trace a relationship between the actual civilizations of Northampton and the United States in the presence, beside the church, of a house of refection, liquid rather than solid, calling itself the Geisha Café. If ever the ghost of the Merry Monarch comes to haunt his Roman effigy in the full-bottomed wig, it may humorously linger a moment at the door of the genial resort.

It is mainly through her churches that Northampton has her hold on the American patriot who is also a person of taste, as one must try to be in going from one church to another. The reader who could give as many days to them as I could give minutes, would have a proportional reward, whether from St. Peter’s, unsurpassed for the effect of its rich Norman; or from St. Sepulchre, with the rotunda which marks it one of the four churches remaining in England out of all those built during the Crusades in memory of the Holy Sepulchre. There are other old churches, but perhaps not dating back with these to the ten and eleven hundreds. One, which I cannot now identify, bears tragical witness to the rigor of the times in the scars on the masonry about the height of a man, where certain royalists were stood beside the portal to be shot. The wonder is that the grief ever goes out of such things, but it does, and they who died, and they who did them to death, have long been friends in their children’s children.

It is curious how everything becomes matter of æsthetic interest, if you give it time. We stood looking at the Queen’s Cross, near Northampton, which rises not so very far from the field of Naseby, and with our eyes on the wasted beauty of the shrine, we two Americans begun by a common impulse to say verses from Macaulay’s stalwart ballad of the battle. Our English companion, who was a cleric of high ritualistic type, listened unmoved by any conscience he might have had against the purport of the lines as we rolled them forth, and, for all we could see, he had the same quality of pleasure as ourselves in the adjuration to the Puritans to “bear up another minute” for the coming of “brave Oliver,” and in the supposed narrator’s abhorrence of “the man of blood,” whom brave Oliver presently put to rout.

But see, he turns, he flies! Shame on those cruel eyes
That bore to look on torture and that dare not look on war.

If he had a feeling as to our feeling, it was amusement that after two centuries and a half there should be any feeling about either party in the strife, and doubtless he did not take us too seriously.