Where shall that land, that spot of earth be found?
Art thou a man? a patriot? look around;
Oh, thou shalt find, howe’er thy footsteps roam,
That land thy country, and that spot thy home.
Mr. Editor,—As your Table Book may be considered an extensively agreeable and entertaining continuation of your Every-Day Book, allow me a column, wherein, without wishing to draw attention too frequently to one subject, I would recur again to the contributions of your correspondent, in vol. ii. page 1371, of the Every-Day Book, my observations at page 1584, and his notices at page 1606. Your “Old Correspondent” is, I presume, a native of this part of the country. He tells us, page 1608, that his ancestors came from the Priory; in another place, that he is himself an antiquarian; and, if I am not much mistaken in the signatures, you have admitted his poetical effusions in some of your numbers. Assuming these to be facts, he will enter into the feeling conveyed by the lines quoted at the head of this article, and agree with me in this observation, that every man who writes of the spot, or the county so endeared, should be anxious that truth and fiction should not be so blended together as to mislead us (the inhabitants) who read your miscellany; and that we shall esteem it the more, as the antiquities, the productions, and the peculiarities of this part of our county are noticed in a proper manner.
As your correspondent appears to have been anxious to set himself right with regard to the inaccuracies I noticed in his account of Clack, &c., I will point out that he is still in error in one slight particular. When he visits this county again, he will find, if he should direct his footsteps towards Malmsbury and its venerable abbey, (now the church,) the tradition is, that the boys of a school, kept in a room that once existed over the antique and curious entrance to the abbey, revolted and killed their master. Mr. Moffatt, in his history of Malmsbury, (ed. 1805,) has not noticed this tradition.
Excuse my transcribing from that work, the subjoined “Sonnet to the Avon,” and let me express a hope that your correspondent may also favour us with some effusions in verse upon that stream, the scene of warlike contests when the boundary of the Saxon kingdom, or upon other subjects connected with our local history.
Upon this river, meandering through a fine and fertile tract of country, Mr. Moffatt, after noticing the earlier abbots of Malmsbury, adds, “The ideas contained in the following lines were suggested by the perusal of the history of the foundation of Malmsbury abbey:
“Sonnet to the Avon.
“Reclined beside the willow shaded stream,
On which the breath of whispering zephyr plays,
Let me, O Avon, in untutor’d lays
Assert thy fairest, purest, right to fame.
What tho’ no myrtle bower thy banks adorn,
Nor sportive Naiads wanton in thy waves;
No glittering sands of gold, or coral caves,
Bedeck the channel by thy waters worn:
Yet thou canst boast of honours passing these,
For when fair science left her eastern seat,
Ere Alfred raised her sons a fair retreat,
Where Isis’ laurels tremble in the breeze;
’Twas there, near where thy curling streamlet flows,
E’en in yon dell, the Muses found repose.”