The Express.
London, England, 1864-09-05 00:00:00

INAUGURATION OF THE STATUE OF SIR
GEORGE OORNEWALL LEWIS AT HEREFORD.

(rug ono owe 1111.011•111.)
HEREFORD, EUTORDAT, Seer. 3.
The ancient and quiet town of Hereford will have
need of a long season of repose after the successive
excitements through which its inhabitants have
passed during the present week. First, they had
the musical festival, which brought down all the
" county people," and a great many of the London
people, with all the available musical talent in the
kingdom, not to speak of all the critics, to des-
cant learnedly thereon ; and then, whilst all
this was drawing to a termination, whilst
the ladies and the brow. were still gyrat-
ing to the music of "lutes and soft re-
corders" at the wind-up dance in the Shire-
hall, Mr. Mayor and the corporation were pre-
paring and organiaing and arranging for the solemn
inauguration of the statue of their deceased friend
and former chief steward, and for the reception of
the Prime Minister of England, who had promised
to perform the most distinguished part in the
historical and interesting ceremony. •
Hereford has the reputation of being one of the
most old-fashioned towns in England, but it is
speedily getting rid of all grounds for a reputation
of antiquity. The railway has gradually infused
the life-blood of the great commercial centres into
the dull old border town, and now the new and
smart bonsai may be seen hustling, as it were, the
old tumbledown ones in every street, like the seven'
ages of man and woman at a pic-roc, whilst even
the venerable cathedral has been sedulously scraped
and cleaned, and all that appearance of " hoar
antiquity" which foolish people prize as they
do the crust on the 1820 port, has been
removed from choir and chancel, from
clerestory and monumental brass, and noseless
effigy of dead crusader, until all looks as trim and
as spruce as a new market-house on its opening
day, or the great metropolitan sewers on the
auspicious occasion when the Commissioners held
high festival underground. Hereford, therefore,
looked gay and excited, and incomprehensible, on
the day preceding the solemn inauguration of the
statue of the dead statesman. The zeal of the cor-
porate body had developed itself in an energetic
posting of placards and inscriptions on wall
and gate, on street door and in shop win-
dow, all bearing more or less ou the coining
great event, and all being complimentary, more
or less, to the distinguished nobleman who
was so soon to be their guest. " Palmerston and
civil and religious liberty" appeared side by aide
with "Don't forget the fireworks ;" " Welcome to
the great statesman of progress" cross read on the
walla with "If you want your photograph, go to
Pousty ;'' and " Peace, plenty and Palmerston, "
divided the spectators' attention with " House-
keepers who are possessed of fags are requested to
display them." The crowds that assembled round
these various pants of interest were enormous—for
Hereford, and included every variety of the border
races. The soft dialect of the west, which seems
to be entirely based on the final letter of the alpha-
bet, might be distinguished in animated discourse
with the sharp semitones of the Welsh invasion ;
and there was not wanting a large mix-
ture of the metropolitan accent, sarcastic-
ally intimating the speaker's conviction that
nothing, not even a crowd, could be got
up with any success out of London. The people
of the town had, however, never seen such a crowd,
as either waited in Hereford over the musical festi-
val, for the Palmerstonian feast of reason, or
crowded in on the following morning from every
point of the railway compasses. As usual, the first
symptoms of local delirium were ezbibited by the
hotel keepers, who, as each successive vehicle
poured out its contingent at their doors on Friday
evening, frantically assured the visitors that they
bad no room, "not if you offered a guinea a bed ;"
a guinea for a bed being obviously the climax of
the impossible in the imagination of primitive
Hereford Bonifaces. I had the misfortune myself to
enoonuter an unhappy host who was in an ad-
vanced stage of the local epidemic on my first
arrival, but it is only justice to Hereford to add
that I received ample compensation for his rude-
ness in the courteous readiness with which the
hostess of another and better hostel—l may
name it, the "Green Dragon"—made impos-
sibilities possible by providing comfortable
accommodation for myself and other representa-
tives of the London press. This lady's recognition
of our function and its importance is the more to
be commended, as at the very moment the strangers
were being "taken in" the large vestibule of the
hotel was crowded with gay company starting for
the ball, andi all most emphatically ordering their
rooms to be kept for them " until after Lord Pal-
merston had gone." There was little sleep, of
course, to be had that night. The rising genera-
tion were rehearsing their squibs, the visitors
who had to walk the streets kept up
a spiteful concert for the annoyance of
the more fortunate who had obtained shelter,
and equipages of all sorts rattled perpetually up and
down, with company going to or coming from the
balL

Hereford having been up all night, found little
inconvenience in being astir early in the morning.
The shopkeepers who bad responded to the mu-
nicipal appeal for flags were busy placing their
banners on the outer walls ; the volunteers
were mustering in the High Town, and
forming martial groups round imaginary camp
fires, preparatory to the skilful manifesta-
tions of photographic " Pousty," whose magic
lantern could be seen dominating the situa-
tion ; and the militia were more quietly forming
their lines in obedience to objurgation. such as
only militia officers know how to address to their
men. If ere,also, was the market, and mighty trade,
which cares nothing for inaugurations or visiting
notabilities, and has rather a contempt for holidays
and statuary, was going on in it as merrily as if the
corporation had not ordained a solemn festival in
which the statue of • dead statesman was to be
publicly " unveiled" by the oldest and most popular
living one.
It having been arranged that Lord Palmerston
was to make his descent on the town from the
Welsh Marches, or, in plainer prose, was to come
in by the Abergavenny road, I made my way with
some difficulty to the toll-gate, which formed the
only defence of Hereford against the incursions of
the Welsh, and which, by the way, did not bear
the slightest resemblance to the arch of Titus,
either in elevation or decoration, and there! found
• group discussing the knotty point of whether
the Premier should be asked for toll on his entry
or not. One gentleman thought he ought to
give • " zuvverin," another suggested that
he should be let in free, but the pikeman
himself decided that his lordship was to be
dealt with like "any other man," lie (the pikenian)
being, like all pikemen, moruee and misanthropic,
only regretting that "this statty bother" would
stop the traffic for a whole market day. About here
the houses of the more ancient town of Hereford
seemed to have all settled down in a sort of sedi-
ment, leaving the more modern erections to effer-
vesce gaily over the main streets. There was one
fine Elizabethan mansion at the corner which good
taste and money liberally employed bad "restored,"
not cathedral fashion, but bond fide, and it would
almost convert a partisanl of stuccoes' Belgravia to
the olden style, tone how charmingly several bevies
of ladies looked in: the spacious bay windows of
this brave old house, with its quaint wo.den frame-
work, its projecting upper stories, its fluttering ban-
ners, and its "cloth of arras " hung out over its
various balconies, in honour of the coming guests.
Immediately outside the toll-gate the streets began
to melt away into mellow green fields, studded here
and there with picturesque elms, under which
nestled very ancient, but still fresh and re-
spectable-looking cottages with lattaced windows,