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LEAMINGTON is in, and of itself, the pleasantest and stupidest town in England. It is a good place in which to sleep and eat and leave the children when the older members of the party desire to make all-day excursions. It is pretty, quiet, healthy, with clean, broad “parades” and shaded parks wherein perambulators are safe from runaway horses and reckless driving. There are countless shops for the sale of expensive fancy articles, notably china and embroidery; more lodging-houses than private dwellings and shops put together. There is a chabybeate spring—fabled to have tasted properly, i.e., chemically, “nasty,” once upon a time—enclosed in a pump-room. Hence “Leamington Spa,” one of the names of the town. And through the Jephson Gardens (supposed to be the Enchanted Ground whereupon Tennyson dreamed out his “Lotos-eaters”) flows the “high-complectioned Leam,” the sleepiest river that ever pretended to go through the motions of running at all. Hawthorne defines the “complexion” to be a “greenish, goose-puddly hue,” but, “disagreeable neither to taste nor smell.” We used to saunter in the gardens after dinner on fine evenings, to promote quiet digestion and drowsiness, and can recommend the prescription. There are churches in Leamington, “high” and “low,” or, as the two factions prefer to call themselves, “Anglican” and “Evangelical;” Nonconformist meeting-houses—Congregational, Wesleyan and Baptist; there are two good circulating libraries, and there is a tradition to the effect that living in hotels and lodgings here was formerly cheap. One fares tolerably there now—and pays for it.

We made Leamington our headquarters for six weeks, Warwickshire being a very mine of historic show-places, and the sleepy Spa easy of access from London, Oxford, Birmingham, and dozens of other cities we must see, while at varying distances of one, five, and ten miles lie Warwick Castle, Kenilworth, Stratford-on-Avon, Charlecote, the home of Sir Thomas Lucy (Justice Shallow), Stoneleigh Abbey—one of the finest country-seats in Great Britain—and Coventry.

The age of Warwick Castle is a mooted point. “Cæsar’s Tower,” ruder in construction than the remainder of the stupendous pile, is said to be eight hundred years old. It looks likely to last eight hundred more. The outer gate is less imposing than the entrance to some barn-yards I have seen, A double-leaved door, neither clean nor massive, was unbolted at our ring by a young girl, who told us that the “H’Earl was sick,” therefore, visitors were not admitted “h’arfter ’arf parst ten.” Once in the grounds, “they might stay so long h’as they were dispoged.”

It is impossible to caricature the dialect of the lower classes of the Mother Country. Even substantial tradesmen, retired merchants and their families who are living—and traveling—upon their money are, by turns, prodigal and niggardly in the use of the unfortunate aspirate that falls naturally into place with us; while servants who have lived for years in the “best families” appear to pride themselves upon the liberties they take with their h’s, mouthing the mutilated words with pomp that is irresistibly comic. We delighted to lay traps for our guides and coachmen, and the yeomen we encountered in walks and drives, by asking information on the subject of Abbeys, Inns, Earls, Horses, Halls, and Ages. In every instance they came gallantly up to our expectations, often transcended our most daring hopes. But we seldom met with a more satisfactory specimen in this line than the antique servitor that kept the lodge of Warwick Castle. She wore a black gown, short-waisted and short-skirted, a large cape of the same stuff, and what Dickens had taught us to call a “mortified” black bonnet of an exaggerated type. The cap-frill within flapped about a face that reminded us of Miss Cushman’s Meg Merrilies. Entering the lodge hastily, after the young woman who had admitted us had begun cataloguing the curiosities collected there, she put her aside with a sweep of her bony arm and an angry, guttural “Ach!” and began the solemnly circumstantial relation she must have rehearsed thousands of times. We beheld “H’earl Guy’s” breast-plate, his sword and battle-axe, the “ ’orn” of a dun cow slain by him, and divers other bits of old iron, scraps of pottery, etc. But the chef d’œuvre of the custodian was the oration above Sir Guy’s porridge-pot, a monstrous iron vessel set in the centre of the square chamber. Standing over it, a long poker poised in her hand, she enumerated with glowing gusto the ingredients of the punch brewed in the big kettle “when the present H’earl came h’of h’age,” glaring at us from the double pent-house of frill and bonnet. I forget the exact proportions, but they were somewhat in this order:

“H’eighteen gallons o’ rum. Fifteen gallons o’ brandy”—tremendous stress upon each liquor—“One ’undred pounds o’ loaf sugar. H’eleven ’undred lemmings, h’and fifty gallons h’of ’ot water! This h’identikle pot was filled h’and h’emptied, three times that day! H’I myself saw h’it!”

Her greedy gloating upon the minutest elements of the potent compound was elfish and almost terrible. It was like—

“Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,”—

the harsh gutturals and suspended iron bar heightening the haggish resemblance. The pot, she proceeded to relate, was “six ’undred years h’old,” and bringing down the poker upon and around the edge, evolving slow gratings and rumblings that crucified our least sensitive nerves, “h’is this h’our without ’ole h’or crack h’as H’I can h’answer for h’and testify!”

The entire exhibition was essentially dramatic and effectively ridiculous. She accepted our gratuity with the same high tragedy air and posed herself above the chaldron for an entering party of visitors.

We sauntered up to the castle along a curving drive between a steep bank overrun with lush ivy and a wall covered with creepers, and overhung by fine old trees. Birds sang in the branches and hopped across the road, the green shade bathed our eyes refreshingly after the glare of the flint-strewn highway outside of the gates. It was a forest dingle, rather than the short avenue to the grandest ancient castle in Three Kingdoms. A broad expanse of turf stretching before the front of the mansion is lost as far as the eye can reach in avenues and plantations of trees. Among these are cedars of Lebanon, brought by crusading Earls from the Holy Land, still vigorously supplying by new growth the waste of centuries. Masses of brilliant flowers relieved the verdure of the level sward, fountains leaped and tinkled in sunny glades, and cut the shadow of leafy vistas with the flash of silver blades. In the principal conservatory stands the celebrated Warwick Vase, brought hither from Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. Ladders were reared against the barbican wall of great height and thickness, close by Guy’s Tower (erected in 1394). Workmen mounted upon these were scraping mosses and dirt from the interstices of the stones and filling them with new cement. No pains nor expense is spared to preserve the magnificent fortress from the ravages of time and climate. From the foundation of the Castle until now, the family of Warwick, in some of its ramifications—or usurpations—has been in occupation of the demesne and is still represented in the direct line of succession by the present owner. The noble race has battled more successfully with revolution and decay in behalf of house and ancestral home than have most members of the British Peerage whose lineage is of equal antiquity and note.

Opposite the door by which we entered the Great Hall, was a figure of a man on horseback, rider and steed as large as life. The complete suit of armor of the one and the caparisons of the other, were presented by Queen Elizabeth to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, her handsome master-of-horse. From this moment until we quitted the house, we were scarcely, for a moment, out of sight of relics of the parvenu favorite.

It is difficult to appreciate that real people, made of flesh, blood, and sensibilities akin to those of the mass of humankind, live out their daily lives, act out their true characters, indulge in “tiffs” and “makings up,” and have “a good time generally,” in these great houses to which the public are so freely admitted. Neither lives nor homes seem to be their individual and distinctive property. They must be tempted, at times, to doubts of the proprietorship of their own thoughts and enjoy the right of private opinion by stealth.

One thing helped me to picture a social company of friends grouped comfortably, even cozily, in this mighty chamber, the pointed rafters of which met so far above us that the armorial bearings carved between them upon the ceiling were indistinct to near-sighted eyes; where the walls were covered with suits of armor, paintings by renowned masters, and treasures of virtu in furniture and ornament thronged even such spaciousness as that in which the bewildered visitor feels for a moment lost. A great fireplace, with carved oaken mantel, mellow-brown with years, and genuine fire-dogs of corresponding size, yawned in the wall near Leicester’s effigy. Beside this was a stout rack, almost as large as a four-post bedstead, full of substantial logs, each at least five feet long. There must have been a cord of seasoned wood heaped irregularly within bars and cross-pieces. Some was laid ready for lighting in the chimney, kindlings under it. A match was all that was needed to furnish a roaring fire. That would be a feature in the old feudal hall. An antique settle, covered with crimson, stood invitingly near the hearth. One sitting upon it had a view of the lawn sloping down to the river, and the umbrageous depths of the woods beyond; of the jutting end and one remaining pier of the old bridge on the hither bank, the trailing ivy pendants drooping to touch the Avon that mirrored castle-towers, trees, the broken masonry of one bridge and the solid, gray length of the other. In fancying who might have sat here on cool autumn days, looking dreamily from the red recesses of the fireplace to the tranquil picture framed by the window; who walked at twilight upon the polished floor over the sheen of the leaping blaze upon the dark wood; who talked, face to face, heart with heart, about the hearth on stormy winter nights—I had let the others move onward in the lead of the maid-servant who was appointed to show us around. One gets so tired of the sing-song iteration of names and dates that she is well-pleased to let acres of painted canvas, the dry inventory of beds and stools, tables and candlesticks, the list of lords, artists and grandees gabbled over in hashed English, seasoned with pert affectations, slip unheeded by her ears. We accounted it great gain when we were suffered to enjoy in our own way a single picture or a relic that unlocked for us a treasure-closet of memory and fancy.

Drifting dreamily then in the wake of the crowd, I halted between an original portrait of Charles I. and one of his namesake and successor, trying, for the twentieth time, to reconcile the fact of the strong family likeness with the pensive beauty of the father and the coarse ugliness of the son, when strident tones projected well through the nose apprised me that the Traveling American had arrived and was on duty. The maid had waited in the Great Hall to collect a party of ten before beginning the tour. Workmen were hammering somewhere upon or about the vaulted roof, and the woman’s explanations were sometimes drowned by the reverberation. We were not chagrined by the loss. We had guide-books and catalogues, and each had some specific object of interest in view or quest. The Traveling American, benevolent to a nuisance, tall, black-eyed and bearded, with an oily ripple of syllables betraying the training of camp-meeting or political campaign, took up the burden of the girl’s parrot-talk and rolled it over to us, not omitting to inter-lard it with observations deprecatory, appreciative, and critical.

“Original portrait of Henry VIII., by a cotemporary artist—name not known. Holbein—most likely! He was always painting the old tyrant. Considered a very excellent likeness. Although nobody living is authority upon that point. Over the door, two portraits. Small heads, you see, hardly larger than cabinet pictures—of Mary and Anne Boleyn. Which is which—did you say, my dear? Oh! the one to the left is Anne, Henry’s second wife. Supplanted poor old Kate of Arragon, you remember. What a run of Kates the ugly Blue-beard had! Anne is a pretty, modest-looking girl. The wonder is how she could have married that fat beer-guzzler over yonder, king or no king. Let me see! Didn’t he want to marry Mary, too? ‘Seems to me there is some such story. And she said ‘No, thank you!’ Hers is a nice face, but she isn’t such a beauty as her sister.”

Ad infinitum—and from the outset, ad nauseam, to all except the four ladies of his party. They tittered and nudged one another at each witticism, and looked at us for answering tokens of sympathy. We pressed the maid onward since we were not allowed to precede her; tarried in the rear of the procession as nearly out of ear-shot as might be. But the armory is a succession of narrow rooms, and a pause at the head of the train in the last of the series brought about a “block” of the two parties. Upon a table was a lump of faded velvet and tarnished gold lace, frayed and almost shapeless.

T. A. (beamingly). “The saddle upon which Queen Elizabeth rode, on the occasion of her memorable visit to Kenilworth. She had just given Kenilworth to Leicester, you remember, as a love-token. He was a Warwick (!); so the saddle has naturally remained in the family. An interesting and perfectly authenticated relic. Elizabeth invented side-saddles, as you are all aware. This was manufactured to order. It is something to see the saddle on which Queen Elizabeth rode. And on such an occasion! It makes an individual, as it were—thrill! Clara! where are you, my dear.” A pretty little girl came forward, blushingly. “Put your hand upon it, my child! Now—you can tell them all at home you have had your hand upon the place where Queen Elizabeth sat on!”

“Is there no pound in Warwick for vagrant donkeys?” muttered Lex, a youth in our section of the company.

He had been abroad but three weeks, and the species, if not the genus, was a novelty to him. Nor had we, when as strange to the sight and habits of the creature as was he, any adequate prevision of the annoyance he would become—what a spot, in his ubiquity and irrepressibleness, upon our feasts of sight-seeing. Caput had, as usual, a crumb of consolation for himself and for us when we had shaken ourselves free from our country-people at the castle-door by taking a different route from theirs through the grounds.

“At any rate, he knew who Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth were, and was not altogether ignorant of Leicester and Kenilworth. We need not be utterly ashamed of him. Only—we will wait until he has been to look at the Warwick Vase before we go in. I can live without hearing its history from his lips.”

A notable race have been the Warwicks in English legends and history, for scores of generations. Princely in magnificence; doughty in war; in love, ardent; in ambition, measureless. Under Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, and Guelph, they have never lacked a man to stand near the throne and maintain worthily their dignity. But, in the long avenue of stateliness there are heads loftier than their fellows. Once in an age, one has stood grandly apart, absorbent of such active interest and living sympathy as we cannot bestow upon family or clan.

As at Carisbrooke, Charles Stuart and his hapless daughter are continually present to our imagination; and the grandmother, whose head, like his, rolled in the sawdust of an English scaffold, glides a pale, lovely shade with us through the passages of Holyrood; as at Kenilworth, we think of Elizabeth, the guest, more than of Leicester, the host, and in Trinity Church at Coventry, pass carelessly by painted windows exquisite in modern workmanship, to seek in an obscure aisle the patched fragment of glass that commemorates the chaste Godiva’s sacrifice for her people—so there was for us one Lord of Warwick Castle, one Hero of Warwickshire. I shall confess to so many sentimental weaknesses, so many historical heresies in the course of this volume, that I may as well divulge this pampered conceit frankly and without apology.

For us—foremost and pre-eminent among the mighty men of the house of Warwick who have “found their hands” for battle and for statecraft since the foundations of Cæsar’s Tower were laid, stands Earl Guy, Goliath and Paladin of the line. Of his deeds of valor, authentic and mythical, the witch at the Lodge has much to tell—the traditionary lore of the district, more.

“I am not Samson, nor Sir Guy, nor Colbrand,”

Shakspeare makes a man of the people say. Sir Guy overthrew and slew the giant Colbrand in the year 926, according to Dugdale. Is not the story of this and a hundred other feats of arms recorded in the “Booke of the most victoryous Prince Guy of Warwick”? When he fell in love with the Lady Lettice—(or Phillis—traditions disagree about the name), the fairest maiden in the kingdom, she set him on to perform other prodigies of valor in the hope of winning her hand. In joust and in battle-field, at home and afar, he wore her colors in his helmet and her image in his heart.

“She appoynted unto Earl Guy many and grievous tasks, all of which he did. And soe in tyme it came to pass that he married her.”

They lived in Warwick Castle, a fortress then, in reality, and of necessity, for a few peaceful years. How many we do not know, only that children were born unto them, and that Lettice, laying aside the naughtiness of early coquetry, grew gentler, more lovable and more fond each day, while Earl Guy waxed silent and morose under the pressure of a mysterious burden, never shared with the wife he adored and had periled his soul to win. Suddenly and secretly he withdrew to the cell of a holy hermit who lived but three miles away, and was lost to the world he had filled with rumors of “derring-doing.” The Countess Lettice, distracted by grief at the disappearance of her lord, and the failure of her efforts to trace the direction of his flight, without a misgiving that while her detectives—who must have been of the dullest—scoured land and sea in search of the missing giant, he was hidden within sight of the turret-windows of Guy’s Tower—withdrew into the seclusion of her castle and gave herself up to works of piety and benevolence. Guy’s children had her tenderest care; next to them her poor tenantry. Upon stated days of the week a crowd of these pensioners presented themselves at her gates and were fed by her servants. Among them came for—some say, twenty, others, forty years, a beggar, bent in figure, with muffled features, in rags, and unaccompanied by so much as a dog, who silently received his dole of the Countess’s charity and went his way challenged by none. We hope, in hearing it, that the Lady Lettice, her fair face the lovelier for the chastening of her great grief, sometimes showed herself to the waiting petitioners. If she did, weeping had surely dulled her vision that she did not recognize Earl Guy under his labored disguise, for he was a Saul even among brawny Saxons and the semi-barbarous islanders. If the eremite had such chance glimpses of his love, they were the only earthly consolation vouchsafed him in the tedious life of mortification and prayer. While Lettice, in her bower among her maidens, prayed for his return, refusing all intercourse with the gay world, her husband divided his time between the cave where he dwelt alone and the oratory of the hermit-monk where he spent whole days in supplication, prone upon the earth.

Poor, tortured, ignorant soul! grand in remorse and in penance as in war and in love! He confessed often to the monk, seldom speaking to him at other times. The priest kept faithfully the dread secrets confided to him. His absolution, if he granted it, did not ease the burdened soul. The end came when the long exile had dried up life and spirit. From his death-bed Earl Guy sent to his wife, by the hand of one of her hinds, a ring she had given him in the days of their wedded joy, “praying her, for Jesu’s sake to visit the wretch from whom it came.” He died in her faithful arms. They were buried, side by side, near his cave.

This is still pointed out to visitors—a darksome recess, partly natural, enlarged by burrowing hands—perhaps by those of the “victoryous Prince Guy.”

I drew from the Leamington Library, one Saturday afternoon, a queer little book, prepared under the auspices of a local archæological society, and treating at some length of recent discoveries in Guy’s Cave by an eminent professor of the comparatively new science of classic archæology. Far up in one corner he had uncovered rude cuttings in the rock, and with infinite patience and ingenuity, obtained an impression of them. The surface of the stone is friable; the letters are such clumsy Runic characters as a warrior of the feudal age would have made had he turned his thoughts to penmanship. The language is a barbarous Anglo-Saxon. But they have made out Lettice’s name, twice repeated, and in another place, Guy’s. This last is appended to a line of prayer for “relief from this heavy”—or “grievous”—“load.”

I read the treatise aloud that evening, excited and triumphant.

“Now, who dare ridicule us for believing in Prince Guy?”

“It all fits in too well,” said candid Prima, sorrowfully.

But the local savans do not discredit the discovery on that account. We drove out to Guy’s Cliff the next afternoon to attend service in the family chapel of the Percys, whose handsome mansion is built hard by. The stables are hewn out of the same rocky ridge in which Guy dug his cell. The chapel occupies the site of the old oratory. The bell was tinkling for the hour of worship as we entered the porch. It is a pretty little building, of gray stone, as are the surrounding offices, and on this occasion was tolerably well filled with servants and tenants of “the Family.” In a front slip sat the worshippers from the Great House—an old lady in widow’s mourning, who was, we were told, Lady Percy, and three portly British matrons, simple in attire and devout in demeanor. A much more august personage, pursy and puffing behind a vast red waistcoat, whom we supposed to be Chief Butler on week days and verger on Sabbath, assigned to us a seat directly back of the ladies, and, what was of more consequence in our eyes, in a line with a niche in which stands a gigantic statue of Earl Guy. This was set up on the site of the oratory, two hundred years after his death, by the first of the Plantagenets, Henry II.

“Our lord, the King, has each day a school for right well-lettered men,” says a chronicler of his reign. “Hence, his conversation that he hath with them is busy discussing of questions. None is more honest than our king in speaking, ne in alms largess. Therefore, as Holy Writ saith, we may say of him—‘His name is a precious ointment, and the alms of him all the church shall take.’ ”

Whether as an erudite antiquarian, or as a pious son of the church he caused this statue to be placed here, History, nor its elder sister, Tradition informs us. We may surmise shrewdly, and less charitably, that repentant visitings of conscience touching his marital infidelities, or the scandal of Fair Rosamond, or peradventure, the desire to appease the manes of the murdered Becket had something to do with the offering. The effigy was thrown down in the ruin of the oratory in the Civil Wars, and for many years, lay forgotten in the rubbish. The Percys have raised it with reverent hands, and set it—sadly broken and defaced—in the place of honor in their chapel.

There was charming incongruity in the aspect of the towering gray figure, with one uplifted arm from which sword or battle-axe has fallen, and the appointments and occupants of the temple. The head is much disfigured, worn away, more than shattered. But there is majesty in the outlines and attitude. Our eyes strayed to it oftener, dwelt upon it longer, than on the fresh-colored face of the spruce Anglican who intoned the service and read a neat little homily upon the 51st Psalm, prefaced by a modest mention of David’s sin in the matter of Uriah the Hittite. From what depth of blood-guiltiness had our noble recluse entreated deliverance in a day when blood weighed lightly upon the souls of brave men?

The Sabbath light flowed through the stained windows of the chancel and bathed in blessing, the feet of the graven figure; the lifted arm menaced no more, but signified supplication as we prayed:

“Spare Thou those who confess their sins!”

—was tossed aloft in thanksgiving in the last hymn:—

“O Paradise, O Paradise!

Who doth not crave for rest?

Who would not seek the happy land

Where they that love are blest?

Where loyal hearts and true

Stand ever in the light,

All rapture through and through,

In God’s most holy sight.”