# First Impressions of England and its People

Painted by W$^m$. Bonnar, R.S.A. Eng$^d$. by A. H. Ritchie.
Gould & Lincoln, Boston.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
OF
ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE.
BY
HUGH MILLER, AUTHOR OF THE "FOOT-PRINTS OF THE CREATOR," THE "OLD RED SANDSTONE," ETC.
"Do you not think a man may be the wiser — I had almost said the better — for going a hundred or two of miles?" — Gray's Letters.
BOSTON: GOULD AND LINCOLN, 59 WASHINGTON STREET. NEW YORK: SHELDON AND COMPANY. CINCINNATI: GEO. S. BLANCHARD. 1873.
TO THE READER.
Times have changed since our earlier British Novelists, when they sought to make the incidents lie thick in their fictions, gave them the form of a journey, and sent their heroes a travelling over England. The one-half of "Tom Jones," two-thirds of "Joseph Andrews," not a few of the most amusing chapters in "Roderick Random" and "Launcelot Greaves," and the whole of "Humphrey Clinker," are thrown into this form. They are works of English travels; and the adventures with which they are enlivened arise by the wayside.
It would be rather a difficult matter, in these later times, to make a novel out of an English tour. The country, measured by days' journeys, has grown nine-tenths smaller than it was in the times of Fielding and Smollett. The law has become too strong for Captain Macheath the highwayman, and the public too knowing for Mr Jenkinson the swindler. The journeyer by moonlight, who accidentally loses his road, stumbles on no "Hermit of the Hill," wrapped up in a grotesque dress of skins; but merely encounters instead, some suspicious gamekeeper, taking his night-rounds in ​behalf of the Squire's pheasants. When mill-dams give way during the rains, honest Mat Brambles do not discover, in consequence their affinity to devoted Humphrey Clinkers: there is merely a half-hour's stoppage of the train, barren of incident, save that the male passengers get out to smoke, while the ladies sit still. And as for the frequent tragedy of railway collision accidents, it has but little of the classic about it, and is more appropriately recorded in newspaper columns, struck off for the passing day, than in pages of higher pretensions, written for to-morrow. England has become a greatly less fertile field of adventure than when, according to the Angliæ Metropolis for 1690, the "weekly wagon of Richard Hamersly the carrier" formed the sole conveyance, for passengers who did not ride horses of their own, between Brumegham and the capital.
But though the age of personal adventure has to a certainty gone by, the age which has succeeded is scarcely less fertile in incident in a larger scale, and of a greatly more remarkable character. It would seem as if the same change which has abridged the area of the country had given condensation to its history. We are not only travelling, but also, as a people, living fast; and see revolutions which were formerly the slow work of ages matured in a few brief seasons. Opinion, during the last twenty years, has accomplished, though in a reverse order, the cycle of the two previous centuries. From the Reformation to the Revolution, the ecclesiastical reigned paramount in men's minds: from the Revolution to the breaking out of the first American war,—a quiet time in the main,— ​governments managed their business much through the medium of individual influence, little personal interests carried the day, and monarchs and ministers bulked large in the forefront of the passing events: from the first American war till the rise of Napoleon, the hot political delirium raged wide among the masses, and even statesmen of the old school learned to recognize the people as a power. Now, such, in effect, has been the cycle of the last twenty years. The reign of George the Fourth was also that of personal and party influence. With the accession of William the political fever again broke out, and swept the country in a greatly more alterative and irresistible form than at first. And now, here, in the times of Victoria, are we scarce less decidedly enveloped in the still thickening ecclesiastical element than our ancestors of the sixteenth century. If there be less of personal adventure in the England of the present day than in that of Queen Anne and the two first Georges, there is, as if to make amends, greatly more of incident in the history of the masses. It has been remarked by some students of the Apocalypse, that the course of the predicted events at first moves slowly, as, one after one, six of the seven seals are opened; that, on the opening of the seventh seal, the progress is so considerably quickened that the seventh period proves as fertile in events,—represented by the sounding of the seven trumpets,—as the foregoing six taken together; and that, on the sounding of the seventh trumpet, so great is the further acceleration, that there is an amount of incident condensed in this seventh part of the seventh period, equal, as in the former case, to that of all the previous six parts in one ​There are three cycles, it has been said, in the scheme,—cycle within cycle; the second comprised within a seventh portion of the first, and the third within a seventh portion of the second. Be this as it may, we may at least see something that exceedingly resembles it in that actual economy of change and revolution manifested in English history for the last two centuries. It would seem as if events, in their downward course, had come under the influence of that law of gravitation through which falling bodies increase in speed, as they descend, according to the squares of the distances.
Though there may be little to encounter in such a state of society, there must, of necessity, be a good deal to observe: the traveller may have few incidents to relate, and yet many appearances to describe. He finds himself in the circumstances of the mariner who sits listlessly in the calm and sunshine of a northern summer and watches the ever-changing aspect of some magnificent iceberg, as its sun-gilt pinnacles sharpen and attenuate, and its deep fissures widen and extend, and the incessant rush of the emancipated waters is heard to reëcho from amid the green light of the dim twilight caverns within. Society in England, in the present day, exists, like the thawing iceberg, in a transition state, and presents its consequent shiftings of aspect and changes of feature; and such is the peculiar degree of sensitiveness at which the government of the country has arrived,—partly, it would seem, from the fluctuating nature of the extended basis of representation on which it now rests—that, like some nervous valetudinarian, open to every ​influence of climate and the weather, there is scarce a change that can come over opinion, or affect the people in even their purely physical concerns, which does not more or less fully index itself in the statute-book. The autumn of 1845, in which I travelled over England, was ungenial and lowering, and I saw wheaten fields deeply tinged with brown,—an effect of the soaking rains,—and large tracts of diseased potatoes. A season equally bad, however, twenty years ago would have failed to influence the politics of the country. Its frequent storms might have desolated the fruits of the earth, but they would have made no impression on the Statutes at Large. But the storms of 1845 proved greatly more influential. They were included in the cycle of rapid change, and annihilated at once the Protectionist policy and party of the empire. And amid the fermenting components of English society there may be detected elements of revolution in their first causes, destined, apparently, to exercise an influence on public affairs at least not less considerable than the rains and tempests of the Autumn of Forty-Five. The growing Tractarianism of the National Church threatens to work greater changes than the bad potatoes; and the semi-infidel liberalism of the country, fast passing into an aggressive power, than the damaged corn.
The reader will find in the following pages, as from these remarks he may be led to anticipate, scarce any personal anecdote or adventure: they here and there record a brief dialogue by the way-side, or in some humble lodging-house, and here and there a solitary stroll through a wood, or a thoughtful lounge in a quarry; but ​there is considerably more of eye and ear in them,—of things seen and heard,—than of aught else. They index, however, not much of what he might be led equally to expect,—those diagnostic symptoms impressed on the face of society, that indicate the extensive changes, secular and ecclesiastical, which seem so peculiarly characteristic of the time. The journey of which they form a record was undertaken purely for purposes of relaxation, in that state of indifferent health, and consequent languor, which an over-strain of the mental faculties usually induces, and in which, like the sick animal that secludes itself from the herd, man prefers walking apart from his kind, to seeking them out in the bustle and turmoil of active life, there to note peculiarities of aspect or character, like an adventurous artist taking sketches amid the heat of a battle. They will, however, lead the reader who accompanies me in my rambles considerably out of the usual route of the tourist, into sequestered corners, associated with the rich literature of England, or amid rocks and caverns, in which the geologist finds curious trace of the history of the country as it existed during the long cycles of the bygone creations. I trust I need scarce apologize to the general reader for my frequent transitions from the actual state of things to those extinct states which obtained in what is now England, during the geologic periods. The art, so peculiar to the present age, of deciphering the ancient hieroglyphics sculptured on the rocks of our country, is gradually extending from the few to the many: it will be comparatively a common accomplishment half a generation hence; and when the hard names of the science shall ​have become familiar enough no longer to obscure its poetry, it will be found that what I have attempted to do will be done, proportionally to their measure of ability, by travellers generally. In hazarding the prediction, I build on the fact, that it is according to the intellectual nature of man to delight in the metaphor and the simile,—in pictures of the past and dreams of the future,—in short, in whatever introduces amid one set of figures palpable to the senses another visible but to the imagination, and thus blends the idea, with the actual, like some fanciful allegorist, sculptor, or painter who mixes up with his groups of real personages qualities and dispositions embodied in human form,—angelic virtues with wings growing out of their shoulders, and brutal vices furnished with tails and claws. And it is impossible, such being the mental constitution of the species, to see the events of other creations legibly engraved all around, as with an iron pen, on the face of nature, without letting the mind loose to expatiate on those historic periods to which the record so graphically refers. The geologist in our own country feels himself in exactly the circumstances of the traveller who journeys amid the deserts of Sinai, and sees the front of almost every precipice roughened with antique inscriptions of which he has just discovered the key,—inscriptions that transport him from the silence and solitude of the present, to a darkly remote past, when the loneliness of the wilderness was cheered by the white glitter of unnumbered tents, and the breeze, as it murmured by, went laden with the cheerful hum of a great people.
It may be judged, I am afraid, that to some of the localities I ​devoted too much and to some too little time, in proportion to the degree of interest which attached to them. The Leasowes detained me considerably longer than Stratford-on-Avon; and I oftener refer to Shenstone than to Shakespeare. It will, I trust, be found, however, that I was influenced in such cases by no suspicious sympathy with the little and the mediocre; and that, if I preferred at times the less fertile to the richer and better field, it has been simply, not because I failed to estimate their comparative values, but because I found a positive though scanty harvest awaiting me on the one, and on the other the originally luxuriant swathe cut down and carried away, and but a vacant breadth of stubble left to the belated gleaner. Besides, it is not in his character as a merely tasteful versifier, but as a master in the art of developing the beauties of landscape, that I have had occasion to refer to Shenstone. He is introduced to the reader as the author of the Leasowes,—a work which cost him more thought and labor than all his other compositions put together, and which the general reader, who has to prosecute his travels by the fire-side, can study but at second hand,—as it now exists in sketches such as mine, or as it existed, at the death of its author, in the more elaborate description of Dodsley. It is thus not to a minor poet that I have devoted a chapter or two, but to a fine rural poem, some two or three hundred acres in extent, that cannot be printed, and that exists nowhere in duplicate.
It does matter considerably in some things that a man's cradle should have been rocked to the north of the Tweed; and as I have been at less pains to suppress in my writings the peculiarities of the ​Scot and the Presbyterian than is perhaps common with my country-folk and brother Churchmen, the Englishman will detect much in these pages to remind him that mine was rocked to the north of the Tweed very decidedly. I trust, however, that if he deem me in the main a not ill-natured companion, he may feel inclined to make as large allowances for the peculiar prejudices of my training as he sees me making on most occasions for the peculiar prejudices of his; that he may forgive me my partialities to my own poor country, if they do not greatly warp my judgment nor swallow up my love for my kind; that he may tolerate my Presbyterianism, if he find it rendering a reason for its preferences, and not very bigoted in its dislikes; and, in short, that we may part friends, not enemies, if he can conclude, without over-straining his charity, that I have communicated fairly, and in no invidious spirit, my First Impressions of England and its People.
CONTENTS.