In this age of literary and multifarious pilgriming, it cannot be unacceptable to propose an excursion to a mansion dignified by its associations with such a name. Neither is it a slight recreation to him who has been confined for weeks and months within the dusky enclosures of London, to break his bounds and emerge into the breathing fields of Surry and Kent. The father of English poetry, and poet of English pilgrims, Chaucer himself, stands ready to accompany us for at least a small portion of our route: it was along the road on which we enter, that he conducted, ages ago, those pilgrims to the shrine of Canterbury who still live in his verses; and we may glance at the Tabard Inn whence they set forth, and indulge our fancy with the thought of their quaint equipments, while we betake ourselves to the modern hostelrie of the Elephant and Castle, and commit our persons to the modern comforts of an English coach. Alas! for the fickleness of a world which changes its idols almost as often and as easily as its fashions. Time was when we should have found this great highway strewn with devotees hurrying to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket. But now, though we might detect, no doubt, in the throng around us, the counterpart of each individual whom Chaucer committed to his living canvass; of the knight who loved chevalrie and the Frankelein who loved wine; of the young squire with his locks in presse, and the fair lady who
of her smiling was ful simple and coy,
Her gretest oathe nas but by Seint Eloy;
all as intent as of old upon objects not less fleeting, and changed in little but the fashion of their attire; now there is none so poor as to do reverence to the martyr-prelate for the sake of those merits which were once thought a sufficient covering for the sins of countless followers.
As the great eastern artery of London, the road which we have thus far followed begins to distribute its living mass into the successive provincial avenues which diverge from it, we find ourselves included in that portion of the throng, whom the pursuit of health or pleasure conducts toward Tonbridge.1 The high and level country which under the name of Downs2 forms the northern and western boundary of Kent, sinks by a sudden and steep declivity on its eastern edge; which edge the geologists tell us was once washed by a primeval ocean, and is still seamed by the ineffaceable traces of its currents and storms. For ourselves it forms a vantage-ground from which we seem to look at one glance over almost the whole of that fair province which stretches nearly to the continent, and lifts the white cliffs of Albion above the surges of the British channel. We think of the day when the standard bearer of the tenth legion bore the eagle of Cæsar to the shore amid the cries of the opposing Britons; and of the still more signal day when Augustine displayed the cross before the eyes of the softened and repentant Saxons. We think too of the beings with whose memories Shakspeare has peopled this portion of the Isle; of Lear and Cordelia, of Edgar, Gloster, and Kent; of that night of horrors upon the stormy heath, and that scene of unutterable tenderness and heart-break on the sands of Dover. Unbidden, as we gaze over the fair and varied prospect, the words of the same great dramatist rise to our lips, in his appropriation of the sentiments and language of the first conqueror of Britain:
Kent in the commentaries Cæsar writ,
Is termed the civilst place of all this isle;
Sweet is the country because full of riches,
The people liberal, active, valiant, wealthy.
But the riches of Kent must be spoken of with due limitations. Those geological changes and formations before alluded to, which have marked the track of wealth across the British islands by deposits of mineral coal, as clearly as if it had been traced in sunbeams, have bequeathed no such sources of sub-terrene affluence to Kent. Nor has nature been more than parsimonious (to say the least) with respect to the superficial qualities of its soil. We have only, however, to cast our eyes on a topographical chart of Kent, to see how beneficently these disadvantages are balanced by considerations of a different sort. Washed along a vast line of coast by the ocean, and bordered to an equal or greater extent by the Thames; penetrated by the navigable Medway, and watered by such fertilizing streams as the Eden and the Ton; traversed through its whole length by that ancient highway of Dover, which figured in the itineraries of the Romans, and which still conveys much of the ceaseless intercourse between England and the Continent; its coast studded with towers and harbors; its interior sprinkled with hamlets, parks, cities, and baronial residences; claiming, finally, to be the episcopal head and fountain of ecclesiastical dignity for the whole British empire; we can readily see how Kent may vindicate to itself the praise conveyed in the lines of Shakspeare as the abode of a liberal, active, valiant, and even wealthy people.
Nor is this flattering ascription of personal qualities unsupported by the facts of its local history. To the great Roman conqueror the inhabitants of this part of Britain opposed a resistance, which taught him, as he indirectly confesses, to look back with many a wistful glance toward the coast where he had left his transports, but ill-assured against the ocean or the enemy. Against the Norman conqueror, likewise, when all the rest of the island had yielded implicitly to his sway and to the substitution of feudal for native usages, the people of Kent still made good their old hereditary law of Gavelkind. More than once in after times, stung by oppression or inflamed by zeal, they have drawn together in a spirit of tumultuous resistance, and borne their remonstrances to the very gates of the national capital. Connecting this history and character with their maritime position, we are led to apply a remark which our American historian Prescott has generalized from the circumstances of a people not dissimilarly situated. The sea-board, says that admirable writer, would seem to be the natural seat of liberty. There is something in the very presence, in the atmosphere of the ocean, which invigorates not only the physical but the moral energies of man. Or as Wordsworth has expressed the same idea, with an extension of it, no less just than poetical, to another class of natural objects:
Two voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,
They were thy chosen music, Liberty!
It has already been said that our route lay toward Tonbridge. True, those celebrated wells lie somewhat beyond Penshurst, yet few pilgrims will fail to visit them; and it may be permitted to glance aside from our immediate object to glean a very few observations from the customs of this fashionable watering-place. But the American visitor must not expect to meet at a watering-place in England precisely that aggregate of circumstances which goes to form his idea of the pleasures and privileges of one in his own country. There are restraints imposed by the circumstances of these elder lands, their necessity more than their choice, which must still at first sight appear forbidding and superfluous to the inhabitant of a new one. The rigid barriers of ceremony; the appearance of studied isolation and exclusiveness; the monotonous movement of the great social machine, organized to its minutest details, and regulated through all its processes; these at first may lead the visitor from the New World to suppose that he has fallen upon some region of persevering formality, where all is frost and show, perpetual glitter and unmeaning barrenness. But pierce these formal barriers of etiquette, dissolve by the requisite appliances this superficial frost-work of the English circles, and none, it is believed, will have any just reason to complain of coldness and reserve. By the social barriers spoken of, are not meant the distinctions of rank in European society, or the conventional observances by which they are guarded, for these do not constitute in fact the points of repulsion by which a stranger is apt to be encountered. Still less do they mean those mental habits of suspicion, mystery and indirectness, which may infect communities as well as individuals. For these there is neither extenuation nor excuse. Rousseau has finely said: Le premier pas vers le vice est de mettre du mystere aux actions innocentes; et quiconque aime à se cacher, a tôt ou tard raison de se cacher. Un seul précepte de morale peut tenir lieu de tous les autres, cest celui-ci: Ne fais, ni ne dis jamais rien que tu ne veuilles que tout le monde voie et entende. Jai toujours regardé comme le plus estimable des hommes ce Romain qui voulait que sa maison fût construite de manière quon vît tout ce qui sy faisait. Whether the Englishman would be the first or the last to submit himself to this crucial test of living in a transparent house, we do not feel called upon to decide. The barriers, of which some justification has been attempted, are merely those formal observances by which society aims to protect itself from the intrusion of the unworthy and designing; which all must perceive to be in some degree necessary, even to personal independence; and which common-sense teaches us must be of greater extent and more rigorous application in a crowded capital than a country village, in an English Almacks than an American drawing-room. No one will deny that these barriers are high and strictly guarded in England; but it would be unreasonable to impute as a fault what is a dictate of prudence, or to infer that coldness and incivility must of course lurk under forms which have been manifestly imposed by the necessity of constant circumspection.