From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.

Wadham College, though the lovely garden with its hoary walls starred by jasmine and its patriarchal cedars casting majestic shadows – a garden that rivals for charm even those of St. John's and Worcester and Exeter – has such a venerable air, is the youngest of all these. Its first stone was laid, on a site formerly occupied by a priory of Augustinian Friars, only six years before Shakespeare's death. In his later journeys he would not have failed to note the progress of its erection.

But if Shakespeare saw, as he rode through Oxford, almost all the colleges that may now be seen, he also saw much that has crumbled away into an irretrievable past. Not only were the various colleges, halls, priories, and friaries of the monastic orders still in visible ruin, but the great abbeys of Osney and of Rewley, the former one of the largest and richest in all England, still made the appeal of a beautiful desolation. No wonder that Shakespeare compared the naked branches of autumn, that wintry end of the season

"When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hangUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,"

to

"bare, ruined choirs."

If, as seems probable, the Arden sympathies lingered long with the Mother Church, if Shakespeare did not forget, even in those closing years when his homeward trips brought him to a Puritan household and an ever more Puritan town, the bitter fate of his kinsmen of Wilmcote and Wootton-Wawen, he must have been keenly alive to these ravages of the Reformation. Yet he had been some twenty years at the vortex of Elizabethan life, in the very seethe of London; he had witnessed many a wrong and many a tragedy; he was versed to weariness of heart in the "hostile strokes" that befall humanity, in all the varied

"throesThat nature's fragile vessel doth sustainIn life's uncertain voyage";

and he knew, no man better, that Right is not of one party, nor Truth of a single creed. He must have mused, as he took the air in Oxford streets after Mistress Davenant had served his supper, on the three great Protestant Martyrs of whose suffering some of the elder folk with whom he chatted had been eyewitnesses. The commemorative cross that may now be seen in front of Balliol, near the church of St. Mary Magdalen whose tower was a familiar sight to Shakespeare's eyes, displays in richly fretted niches the statues of "Thomas Cranmer, Nicolas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Prelates of the Church of England, who near this spot yielded their bodies to be burned." Most of all, his thought would have dwelt on Cranmer, that pathetic figure whose life was such a mingled yarn of good and evil. He had won the favour of Henry VIII by approving the divorce of Queen Catherine. He had beheld – and in some cases furthered – the downfalls of Sir Thomas More, of Anne Boleyn, of Wolsey, of Cromwell, of Catherine Howard, of Seymour, and of Somerset. He had stood godfather to Elizabeth and to Edward. He had watched over the death-bed of the tyrant; he had crowned that tyrant's frail young son as Edward VI. When by his adherence to the cause of Lady Jane Grey he had incurred sentence of treason, he was pardoned by Queen Mary. Yet this pardon only amounted to a transfer from the Tower of London to the Bocardo in Oxford, that prison-house over the North Gate from whose stone cells used to come down the hoarse cry of cold and hunger: "Pity the Bocardo birds." There were those still living in Oxford who could have told the dramatist, as he gazed up through the moonlight (for who does not?) to the pinnacled spire of St. Mary-the-Virgin, all the detail of those April days, only ten years before his birth, when Cranmer, with Ridley and Latimer, was brought into the church and bidden, before a hostile assemblage of divines, to justify the heresies of the new prayer-book. On the Tuesday Cranmer pleaded from eight till two; Ridley was heard on the Wednesday, and on the Thursday the aged Latimer, a quaint champion as he stood there "with a kerchief and two or three caps on his head, his spectacles hanging by a string at his breast, and a staff in his hand." On the Friday all three were condemned. After a year and a half of continued confinement, Archbishop Cranmer, whose irresolution was such that, from first to last, he wrote seven recantations, was made to look out from his prison window upon the tormented death of his friends. Then it was that the stanch old Latimer, bowed with the weight of fourscore years, but viewing the fagots undismayed, spake the never-forgotten words: "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." Cranmer's own end came six months later, on March 21, 1556. He was first brought to St. Mary's that he might publicly abjure his heresies. But at that desperate pass, no longer tempted by the hope of life, – for hope there was none, – his manhood returned to him with atoning dignity and force. Prison-wasted, in ragged gown, a man of sixty-seven years, he clearly avowed his Protestant faith, declaring that he had penned his successive recantations in fear of the pains of death, and adding: "Forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be first punished; for if I may come to the fire, it shall be the first burnt." And having so "flung down the burden of his shame," he put aside those who would still have argued with him and fairly ran to the stake,

"Outstretching flameward his upbraided hand."

The university church, this beautiful St. Mary's, has other memories. From its pulpit Wyclif proclaimed such daring doctrines that Lincoln College was founded to refute them, – Lincoln, which came to number among its Fellows John Wesley and to shelter those first Methodist meetings, the sessions of his "Holy Club." In St. Mary's choir rests the poor bruised body of Amy Robsart. The spiral-columned porch was erected by Laud's chaplain, and its statue of the Virgin and Child so scandalised the Puritans that they pressed it into service for one of their articles of impeachment directed against the doomed archbishop.

What could the thronging student life of Oxford have meant to the author of "Hamlet"? Of his careless young teachers in stage-craft – so soon his out-distanced rivals – Lyly and Peele and Lodge would have been at home beside the Isis and the Cherwell, as Greene and Nash and Marlowe by the Cam; but Shakespeare – did those fluttering gowns, those gaudy-hooded processions, stir in him more than a stranger's curiosity? The stern day of that all-learned Master of Balliol, Dr. Jowett, who stiffened examinations to a point that would have dismayed Shakespeare's contemporaries, save, perhaps, the redoubtable Gabriel Harvey, was still in the far future; the magnificent New Schools, with their dreaded viva voces, had not yet come; the Rhodes Scholarships were beyond the dream-reach of even a Raleigh or a Spenser; but academic tests and academic pomps there were. The Old Schools Quadrangle, not quite complete, had been building in a leisurely way since 1439 and was in regular use, though the Divinity School, whose arched, groined, boss-studded roof is one of the beauties of Oxford, had nearly suffered wreck, in the brief reign of Edward VI, at the hands of that class of theological reformers who have a peculiar aversion to stained glass. The exercises of the Encaenia Shakespeare would have heard, if he ever chanced to hear them, in St. Mary's, but half a century after his death they were transferred to the new Sheldonian Theatre. In St. Mary's, which was not only "Learning's receptacle" but also "Religion's parke," these exercises, the Acts, naturally took the form of disputations concerning "wingy mysteries in divinity." When they passed out from the church to an unconsecrated edifice, political and social themes, still treated in scholastic Latin, were added, but even so the entertainment was of the dullest. Professional fun-makers, successors of the mediæval minstrels, had to be called in to enliven the occasion with a peppering of jests, but these became so scurrilous that the use of hired buffoons was forbidden by Convocation. Then the resourceful undergraduates magnanimously came forward, volunteering to take this delicate duty upon themselves, and manfully have they discharged it to this day. These young Oxonians have developed the normal undergraduate gift for sauce into an art that even knows the laws of proportion and restraint. The limits allowed them are of the broadest, but only twice in living memory has their mischief gone so far as to break up the assemblage.

The threefold business of the annual Encaenia is to confer honorary degrees, to listen to the prize compositions, and to hear an address delivered by the Public Orator in commemoration of Founders and Benefactors, with comment on current events. On the one occasion when I was privileged to be present, the hour preceding the entrance of the academic procession was the liveliest of all. The lower galleries were reserved for guests, but the upper, the Undergraduates' Gallery, was packed with students in cap and gown, who promptly began to badger individuals chosen at whim from the throng of men standing on the floor.

"I don't like your bouquet, sir. It's too big for your buttonhole. If the lady wouldn't mind – "

The offending roses disappeared in a general acclaim of "Thank you, sir," and the cherubs aloft pounced on another victim. The unfortunates so thrust into universal notice usually complied with the request, whatever it might be, as quickly as possible, eager to escape into obscurity, but a certain square-jawed Saxon wearing a red tie put up a stubborn resistance until all the topmost gallery was shouting at him, and laughing faces were turned upon him from every quarter of the house.

"Take off that red tie, sir."

"Indeed, sir, you don't look pretty in it."

"It doesn't go well with your blushes."

"Will you take off that tie, sir?"

"It's not to our cultured taste, sir."

"It's the only one he's got."

"Dear sir, please take it off."

"It gives me the eye-ache, sir."

"Have you paid for it yet?"

"Was there anybody in the shop when you bought it?"

"Are you wearing it for an advertisement?"

"Hush-h! She gave it to him."

"Oh, SHE put it on for him."

"You're quite right, sir. Don't take it off."

"We can sympathize with young romance, sir."

"Be careful of it, sir."

"Wear it till your dying day."

"It's the colour of her hair."

But by this time the poor fellow's face was flaming, and he jerked off the tie and flung it to the floor amid thunders of derisive applause.

Then the Undergraduate Gallery turned its attention to the organist, who in all the hubbub was brilliantly going through the numbers of his program.

"Will you kindly tell us what you're playing, Mr. Lloyd?"

"We don't care for classical music ourselves."

"'Auld Lang Syne,' if you please."

The organ struck into "Auld Lang Syne," and the lads sprang up and sang it lustily with hands clasped in the approved Scotch fashion.

"'Rule, Britannia,' Mr. Lloyd."

Again he obliged them and was rewarded by a rousing cheer, followed by cheers for the Varsity and the ladies, groans for the Proctors, who are the officers of discipline, and barks for their assistants, the so-called Bulldogs. In the midst of this yelping chorus the great doors were flung wide, and an awesome file of dignitaries, in all the blues and purples, pinks and scarlets, of their various degrees, paced slowly up the aisle, escorting their distinguished guests, savants of several nations, and headed by the Vice-Chancellor, whose array outwent Solomon in all his glory.

The top gallery was on its feet, but not in reverence. The organ-march was drowned in the roar of lusty voices greeting the Head of the University thus:

"Oh, whist, whist, whist!Here comes the bogie man.Now go to bed, you Baby,You Tommy, Nell, and Dan.Oh, whist, whist, whist!He'll catch ye if he can;And all the popsies, wopsies, wop,Run for the bogie man."

The uproar was no whit diminished when presently the Vice-Chancellor was seen to be making an address.

"Who wrote it for you, sir?"

"Oh, that's shocking bad Latin."

"Jam! What kind of jam?"

"It's just what you said to those other blokes last year."

"It's always the same thing."

"It's all blarney."

"The guests wish you were done, sir."

"You may sit down, sir."

But the Vice-Chancellor, unperturbed, kept on with his inaudible oratory to its natural end.

A professor of illustrious name was next to rise, throwing up a laughing look at the boys, whose tumult bore him down after the first few sentences. What matter? It was idle to pretend that that great audience could follow Latin speeches. They were all to go into print, and he who would and could might read them at his ease. The phrase that undid this genial personage was clarior luce.

"Oh, oh, sir! Lucy who?"

"Clare or Lucy? Try for both, sir."

"We'll surely tell your wife, sir."

"A sad example to our youth, sir."

"You shock our guest from Paris, sir."

The prize English essayist was hardly allowed to recite the first paragraph of his production.

"Very nice."

"But a great bore."

"It's not as good as mine."

"That'll do, sir."

"The Vice-Chancellor is gaping, sir."

"Three cheers for the lady who jilted the Senior Proctor!"

Under the storm of enthusiasm evoked by this happy suggestion, the English essayist gave place to the Greek poet, a rosy-cheeked stripling who stood his ground barely two minutes.

"Aren't you very young, my dear?"

"Will some kind lady kiss him for his mother?"

The English prize poem, the Newdigate, founded by Sir Roger Newdigate of the George Eliot country, was heard through with a traditional attention and respect, though the poet's delivery came in for occasional criticism.

"You're too singsong, sir."

"Please give him the key, Mr. Lloyd."

Even those few world-famed scholars and statesmen on whom the University was conferring the high distinction of her D. C. L. were showered with merry impudence, as one by one they advanced to receive the honour, though there were no such lucky shots of wit as have signalised, on different occasions, at Oxford or at Cambridge, the greeting of certain popular poets. Holmes was asked from the gallery if he had come in the one-hoss shay, and Longfellow, wearing the gorgeous vestments of his new dignity, was hailed by a cry: "Behold the Red Man of the West." Even the Laureate, whose prophet locks were flung back from his inspired brow somewhat more wildly than their wont, was assailed by a stentorian inquiry:

"Did your mother call you early, call you early, Alfred dear?"

The conferring of degrees upon Oxford students takes place – at irregular intervals, but not infrequently – in the Convocation House. Into a long, narrow room, dignitaries grouped at the top and candidates at the bottom, with guests seated in rows on either side, sweeps the Vice-Chancellor in his gorgeous red and white. He is preceded by the mace-bearer and followed by two Proctors. Taking the place of honour, he reads a page or two of Latin, lifting his cap – the Proctors raising theirs in solemn unison – whenever the word Dominus occurs. The lists of candidates for the various degrees are then read, and the Proctors, at the end of each list, rise simultaneously, march a few steps down the hall, wheel with military precision, and, like the King of France, march back again. These apparently wayward promenades are supposed to give opportunity for tradesmen with unpaid bills to imperil a candidate's degree by plucking the Proctor's gown. The Oxford tradesmen have not availed themselves of this privilege for a century or so, but the term plucked is only too familiar. With many bows and much Latin, even with kneeling that the Vice-Chancellor may tap the learned pates with a Testament, the higher degrees are conferred. Each brand-new doctor withdraws into the robing-room, where his waiting friends eagerly divest him of his old plumage and trick him out in gayer hood and more voluminous gown. So arrayed, he returns for a low bow to the Vice-Chancellor, who touches his own mortar-board in response. The larger company of candidates for the first degree come forward in groups, each head of a college presenting his own men, and these are speedily made into bachelors.

Out of that student multitude have come – not all, be it confessed, with degrees – many of England's greatest. Glorious phantoms haunt by moonlight the Gothic shadows of High Street. The gallant Lovelace, the resolute Pym, Admiral Blake, Sir Philip Sidney, Francis Beaumont, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Sir Thomas Browne, Dr. Johnson, Dean Swift, Wellington, Peel, Gladstone, Adam Smith, Hamilton, Locke, Hobbes, Blackstone, Newman, Manning, Stanley, Maurice, Faber, Heber, Clough, Jeremy Taylor, Whitfield, the Wesleys, the Arnolds, – and this is but the beginning of a tale that can never be told. Yet Oxford, "Adorable Dreamer" though she be,

"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,"

has not done as well by her poets as by the rest of her brood. With all her theology, she did not make a churchman out of Swinburne, nor a saint of Herrick, and as for Landor and Shelley, her eyes were holden and she cast them forth.

Of Shakespeare, an alien figure crossing the path of her gowned and hooded doctors, or watching her "young barbarians all at play" – for Oxford lads knew how to play before ever "Eights Week" was thought of – she seems to have remembered nothing save that he stood godfather to his landlady's baby-boy, little William Davenant, in the old Saxon church of St. Michael's. Oxford let him pay his reckoning at the Crown and go his way unnoted. He was none of hers. Even now, when his name is blazoned on rows upon rows of volumes in window after window of Broad Street, I doubt if the Oxford dons would deem Shakespeare capable of editing his own works.

"Where were you bred?And how achieved you these endowments, whichYou make more rich to owe?"

One would like to fancy that Duke Humphrey's library, beautiful as a library of Paradise, made the poet welcome; but the King's Commissioners had despoiled it in 1550, and more than half a century went by before, toward the close of Shakespeare's life, Sir Thomas Bodley had refounded and refitted it as The Bodleian.

Yet the grey university city, "spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age," – how could she have failed deeply to impress the sensitive spirit of that disregarded wayfarer? Although she had suffered so grievously under the flail of the Reformation, although she was destined to become the battered stronghold of Charles I, the voice within her gates was, and is, not the battle-cry, but the murmurous voice of meditation and dream and prayer. As we enter into the sanctuary of her grave beauty, personal chagrins and the despair of our own brief mortality fall away. The unending life of human thought is here, enduring, achieving, advancing, with its constant miracle of resurrection out of the old form into the new.

COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY

Of the counties occupying the Severn basin, three form, in continuation with Cheshire, the Welsh border, – Shropshire, Hereford, and Monmouth. Shropshire, together with the West Midland counties of Worcester and Gloucester, is traversed by the mother stream, but Hereford and Monmouth lie in their respective vales of the tributary Wye and Usk, and Warwickshire, already noted, in the broad basin of the Avon.

In previous summers we had explored, to some extent, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire and the picturesque Wye valley, but we were, except for glimpses from the railway, strangers to Shropshire, and so dropped off the train at Shrewsbury, in a Saturday twilight, with but moderate expectation. Had not the judicious Baedeker instructed us that "not more than half a day need be devoted to Shrewsbury"? What happened was that we lost our hearts to the beautiful old town and lingered there nearly a week without finding time, even so, to do a third of the tourist duty laid down in what a guileless Florentine has called "the red prayer-book of the foreigners." But we would gladly have stayed months longer and listened for the moonlight talk between that lofty Norman castle, "builte in such a brave plot that it could have espyed a byrd flying in every strete," and those fine old houses of the Salop black-and-white whose "curious sculptures and carvings and quirks of architecture" gave such pleasure to Hawthorne. Surely here, in this city of many memories, "a stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer it."

Shrewsbury is but a little city, – one of the local proverbs runs: "We don't go by size, or a cow would catch a hare," – but its architectural grace and a certain joyousness of open-air life more French than English endow it with rare charm. It won a fitting praise from its own Tudor poet, Thomas Churchyard:

"Now Shrewsbury shall be honoured (as it ought);The seate deserves a righte greate honour heere;That wallèd town is sure so finely wrought,It glads itself, and beautifies the sheere."

Fortunate in situation, Shrewsbury is enthroned upon twin hills almost surrounded by the Severn. As one of the warders of the Welsh border, it was stoutly fortified, and enough of the old wall remains to make a pleasant promenade. On the only land approach, an isthmus barely three hundred yards broad, stands the square red keep of the castle. The slender spire of St. Mary's is a landmark far and wide. St. Alkmund's, with a sister spire, has a tradition that reaches back to Æthelfreda, daughter of Alfred the Great. Old St. Chad's, a noble church in the days of Henry III, has swayed and sunk into a fragment that serves as chapel for the cemetery where some of the first Salopian families take their select repose. The towered Abbey Church is of venerable dignity, with battered monuments of cross-legged knight and chaliced priest, and a meek, bruised, broken effigy supposed to represent that fiery founder of the abbey, first Earl of Shrewsbury and builder of the castle, Roger de Montgomery, second in command at Hastings to William the Conqueror.

The first known name of Shrewsbury was The Delight, and by that name it may well be remembered of those who have wandered through Wyle Cop and Butchers' Row, past the Raven tavern where Farquhar wrote "The Recruiting Officer" and the old half-timbered house where Richmond, soon to be Henry VII, lodged on his way to Bosworth Field. There are steep streets that, as the proverb has it, go "uphill and against the heart," but carven gables and armorial bearings and mediæval barge-boards tempt one on. There are wild and fierce associations, as that of the Butter Market, where at the High Cross poor Prince David of Wales – who must have had nine lives – after being dragged through the town at a horse's tail, was "hanged, burned and quartered," but in the main it is a city of gracious memories. Its Grammar School, an Edward VI foundation, which in the seventeenth century boasted four masters, six hundred scholars, and a "hansome library," counts on its roll of alumni Charles Darwin, the most famous native of Shrewsbury, the poet Faber, Philip Sidney and his fidus Achates, Fulke Greville, whose tomb in St. Mary's Church at Warwick bears the inscription that he was "Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Counsellour to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney." It was in 1564, that starry year in English literary annals, that the two lads entered the school. Sidney's father was then Lord President of Wales – one of the best she ever had – and resident at Ludlow Castle, from whose splendid halls Sir Henry and Lady Mary wrote most wise and tender letters to their "little Philip." He must have profited by these, for in after years Fulke Greville extolled him as the paragon of schoolboys:

"Of his youth I will report no other wonder than this, though I lived with him and knew him from a child, yet I never knew him other than a man, with such staidness of mind, lovely and familiar gravity, as carried grace and reverence above great years; his talk ever of knowledge and his very play tending to enrich his mind so that even his teachers found something in him to observe and learn above that which they had usually read or taught."

The school, still flourishing, is now housed in new buildings across the Severn, opposite the Quarry, a spacious park with