The Press. — London, England, 1858-12-04 00:00:00

1188 THE PRESS, DECEMBER 4, 1858. man in that relation to time from which no philosophy, whatever its pretensions, can wholly free itself, pursuing with idomitable resolution a preconceived design, deaf to the yearning instircts which compel His creatures to call upon Ilim. Yet this, forsooth, is a philosophical con• ception of the Deity! more worthy of enlightened reason than the human imagery of the Psalmist—" The eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and His ears are open to their prayers."—p. 17. We have not space for more. We trust this is enough to show the claim that these lectures have to the careful study of the Christian philo sopher. It is many years since a volume of such merit was offered to the public, and a calm persusal of itslcontents in print confirms us more and more in the admiration we conceived for them when we heard them from the lips of the gifted lecturer himself. If the munificent benefactions of good old Canon Bampton had produced no other fruit than these noble arguments against the tendencies of a false philosophy, founded on a wrong estimate of the power of the human mind, the wisdom of his bequest, and the choice of his trustees, would have been fully vindicated. A Handbook for !Travellers in Kent and Sussex. A Handbook for Travellers in Surrey, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. London : Murray. THE tourists who annually migrate to one or other of the watering-places that lie on the south coast, between the glaring and windy heights of the North Foreland and the soft Italian climate and dark sea-worn precipices of Falmouth or Dawlish,—when they are tired of watching the waves rippling over the sand, or of being " nearly caught " by the tide in rounding some treache rous headland,—when esplanades, second year's novels, and molluscous animals, alike become tiresome,—may now, thanks to Mr. Murray, hire their donkey or pony chair, or " tittupy " Brighton steed, and start to explore the interior of the country, with some chance of seeing the church, mansion, market-cross, or beacon-hill, of which they are in search, and with a reasonable prospect of leaving unnoticed no object of interest on the route. Few persons, we should imagine, who have much to do, whether as residents or travellers, with the southern counties, will fail to provide themselves with one or more of these useful volumes, which compress all reliable in formation into a moderate compass, treat all places with the same impartiality, and leave public-spirited town councillors and all other Little-Pedlingtonian celebrities to their natural oblivion. It would be difficult to prescribe beforehand what portion of England would present the most interesting study to a traveller or topographer, for each has its peculiar characteristics. Perhaps the student of local character and the student of antiquities would each be disposed to select a different region. The former would prefer loca lities where the old races still flourished with least admixture of a foreign element, and where, in agricultural districts at least, modern improve ments had made themselves least distinctly per ceptible ; and he would, therefore, choose the graziers of Yorkshire, the dales-men of Westmore land, the mountaineers of Wales, or the rough hill-men of Derbyshire and the Lancashire moors. But the antiquarian would bend his steps in a different direction. The part of England which lies nearest to the Continent has naturally suf fered more change than the northern and north western divisions, and here the influences of in vasion, conquest, migration, medieval industry, and modern social life have swept like floods over the land, each partly submerging the relics of its predecessors, and each leaving behind it some deposit of its own peculiar civilization. The Phoenicians in Cornwall, the ancient Britons all along the coast, the Romans in Kent and Sussex, —the barons of the middle ages wherever they could build a castle,—in the latter county the manufacturers of a subsequent period,—have all left their mark on the rocks, plains, hills, or forests of Southern England. the vastness of their intrenchments in the Devil's Dyke and in Mount Caburn near Lewes. The steep conical summits of the chalk hills near Andover in Hampshire still show, in their green slopes and deep fosses, where the sheep are peacefully feeding, relics of the long chain of fortresses that witnessed the struggle of the Belgte and the Celtic tribes for the dominion of the " Weald" and the " Gwent," and testify by their numerous barrows to the energy with which it was maintained. The ponderous stones of " Kit's Coity House "—the legendary resting place of the British chief Katigern,—that over look the windings of the Medway, are but the centre of one of those long avenues of monu ments, which, like Carnac in Brittany, formed the great cemetery of the Belgian settlers ; and the curious pits, filled to the top with flints, which line the brow of the neighbouring chalk hills, may still contain the bones of British chieftains. The Roman dominion left more civilized and not less durable traces. The vast extent and massive ramparts of Richborough, Reculver, and Lymue, inclosing many acres, and, though in ruin, still so solid as to seem rather the work of Nature herself than of men's hands ; the walls of Anderida, that yet command the low shore of Pevensey ; the walls of Portus Magnus at Dor chester, and of Clausentum at Bittern, near Southampton,—attest th est rength of their power ; —while at Silchester, Calleva, the ancient capital of the Segontiaci—once as large as old London, and still showing the lines of rectangular streets, and the seats of an oval amphitheatre in its green concentric circles,—witnesses to the firm hold and thorough colonization they had estab lished over the land. To the security and civilized nature of their sway, testimony is borne by the numerous villas and stations, which lined the Watling or Stane streets, or studded the valley of the Medway. The bricks and tiles from their walls often appear imbedded in the masonry of some of our more ancient churches ; while the degree of luxury which they implied is shown by such remains as the pavements at Bramdean and Bignor, where Medusa still stares with petrific visage, Hercules struggles with An tteus, Ganymede soars to heaven on his eagle, and Cupids fight with the net, trident, and shield of the gladiatorial arena. The prevalence of the Saxon rule in Sussex is shown by the terminations of names occurring on the south coast, such as Angmering, Tarring, &c.; and some remarkable Saxon churches, as Sompting, Swanscombe, and part of the church in Dover Castle, still remain ; but most of the more curious are still, probably, buried beneath the soil ; though relics of glass and pottery,-- the cups out of which the Teutonic colonists drank, the ornaments wherewith they decked themselves, and the weapons they used in war, — have been dug out of the barrows of Osengal and Gilton. as it is P haps the " Forest Ridge; ' high and irregular tract countryof which stretche s up from Fairlight in a north the neighbourhood of Horshamwenthas dir ec t i on . to witnessed the .. most remarkable changes, both of ' civilization. Forming, as geologists te n l a l t u lir s, e p a ar l of the land first upheaved from the sea, once probably the play groun d of reptil e s it of 18 ap palling magnitude, of iguanodons and hylme. sauri, whose bones have b een discovered imbed ded in the soil of Tilgate Forest. Tropical p lants, with wavy branches, the f oo d of these • animals, covered the surfac e th a t lininesse now produces in many parts nothing but heath and wild j uniper. The details of the alteration s by which it enani b fit for the abode of man we h ave , o f course ,e means of knowing, but at an early period it no a. no doubt, covered with woods which , at a lat er stage of their growth or of that of their ,successors, sheltered and the the savage, with his wattl e d b ut painted skin, who immediately preceded first Roman invasion. But of the Roman dominion few, if any, traces are to be found immediately within its circuit. It formed, howe ver , we may imagine, the north-western outpost of the king dom which )Ella founded in 477, and looked over the marshes which then separated it from Kent to the next Saxon kingdom, with which, in that rude and dark period, before the introductio n o f Christianity by Wilfrid of York, there was b a t little intercourse.—The same hills, at a later time, witnessed the march of Harold's troops to their defeat at Hastings, and its trees probably yielded timber to form the lofty roofs Of the Abbey which the Conqueror erected as a thank-offering for his victory. But the district contained other productions besides timber to make it populous and important. In the bed of the . mighty river which, in the pre-historical period, was the bath of the mighty monsters of geology, vegetable and animal decomposition pro duced iron ore. At what period, however, this deposit was first worked is quite unknown. Roman relics and coins have been discovered in the cinder-beds which are formed from the scoria or refuse of the furnaces, but from the use of iron which Caesar mentions it is probable that the ore was to a certain extent worked by the earlier inhabitants . Whether the Saxons con tinued to work it is not so clear, the earliest mention of Sussex iron-works occurring in 1266, in a grant by which Henry 111. empowered the town of Lewes to tax the Weald iron for the repair of the walls after the battle. Edward 11., when he marched on his Scotch expedition, shod his horses with nails and shoes of Sussex iron. A cast-iron monumental slab of the fourteenth century remains in I3urwash Church, over the tomb of one "Joan Collins," probably an "iron mistress " of the period. Banded guns of wrought iron, of Henry Vl.'s time, now in the Tower, were made in Sussex ; and the first cast-iron and bored guns were made at Buxted, in the same county. Through the middle ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the woodland heights of Sussex, now so quiet and rural, puffed out smoke by day and flared to heaven at night, like Dudley or Wolverhampton, and the Sussex Dryads, whose trees had attracted the manufac turer, as coal does now, mourned, as Drayton says in his Polyolbion, with " grievous groans" for thein creasing destruction of their leafy honours. We are indebted to the Sussex iron for the balustrad es round St. Paul's, weighing about 200 tons , which were cast at the Gloucester furnace at Lamber burst. In 1724 the iron manufacture was con sidered the chief interest of the country; but the woods did not grow fast enough to supply the consumption, and it was found cheaper to make use of those districts where iron and inexhau stible fuel are found nearer together. Thus the Sussex ore began to be less and less disturbed, and the Ashburnham furnace (mark the name) —always celebrated for the excellence of its iron—was, la the last century, the last place at which the trade was carried on. . Then came the Norman conqueror, and how firmly he planted his foot, may be seen, not only from the buildings he has left—the stern square towers and low-browed arches which domi nate Rochester or Canterbury, or from mounds of irregular stonework at Pevensey or Guildford— but from the local territorial divisions which Sussex still preserves. In other counties, as Sir F. Palgrave (quoted in the Handbook) has pointed out, we find " hundreds " and " lathes," denoting irregular dispersion of tribes, and gradual consolidation of authority under various lords ; but in Sussex alone is any trace of systematic division apparent. The " rapes " which are pe culiar to it, and of which there are six, each ex tending from the northern border of the county to the coast, and having each a frontage, so to speak, towards the sea, show that the land was partitioned by actual measurement—by the rope,—and that the conquerors neglected in the process all the circumstances of occupation which might previously exist. Each rape has within it, generally not far from the shore, some strong military post, which formed the citadel of the district, as well as an available harbour at the southern extremity, forming a sort of high road to Normandy. Thus we find in East Sussex the rapes of Hastings, Lewes, and Pevensey; in West Sussex those of Arundel, Bramber, and Chichester ; and each of these appears in Domes day-book under a military commander. Of all the districts into which physical geo graphy would divide the southern counties, per- Both these volumes are in general com p iled with extreme accuracy. We have noticed, how ever, a few exceptions to this remark in the case of the Handbook for Surrey, which may as well be pointed out. At pp. ix. x. of the Introduc tory section, the architectural antiquities of the county are enume ; but, among these , there is no mention of H a m-house, or of Bay nards, though we learn front the descriptions in fin e routes where they occur that the one is " . a " old James I. mansion, which has been lade if Thus Kent at a very early period exported chalk to Zealand, and the pits whence it was dug, principally along the banks of the Thames and Medway, were afterwards supposed to be the lurking places where the Britons concealed themselves during the Danish ravages. British fortifications crown the heights of Cissbury and Chanctonbury in Sussex, and display