"a dismal cirque Of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor."

These mysterious monuments, which in the day of the Venerable Bede were no less remarkable than Stonehenge, have been ravaged by time, but some sixty of them--their magic baffles an exact count--remain.

Grey Druid semblances, heathen to the core, owl-faced, monkey-faced, they stand in a great, ragged circle, enclosing a clump of firs.

Deeply sunken in the ground, they are of uneven height; some barely peep above the surface; the tallest rises more than seven feet; some lie p.r.o.ne; some bend sideways; all have an aspect of extreme antiquity, a perforated, worm-eaten look the reverse of prepossessing.

But our visit was ill-timed. If we had had the hardihood to climb up to that wind-swept waste at midnight, we should have seen those crouching goblins spring erect, join hands and gambol around in an ungainly ring, trampling down the thistles and shocking every church spire in sight. At midnight of All Saints they make a mad rush down the hillside for their annual drink of water at a spring below.

The antiquaries who hold that these strange stones were erected not as a Druid temple, nor as memorials of victory, nor for the election and inauguration of primitive kings, but for sepulchral purposes, rest their case largely on the Whispering Knights. This third group is made up of five stones which apparently once formed a cromlech and may have been originally covered with a mound. They are some quarter of a mile behind the circle,--a bad quarter of a mile I found it as I struggled across the rugged moor knee-deep in rank clover and other withering weeds. Just before me would fly up partridges with a startled whirr, hovering so near in their bewilderment that I could almost have knocked a few of them down with my parasol, if that had appealed to me as a pleasant and friendly thing to do. For this was a "cover,"

destined to give a few of Blake's and Sh.e.l.ley's countrymen some autumn hours of brutalising sport.

"Each outcry of the hunted hare A fibre from the brain doth tear.

A skylark wounded in the wing; A cherubim doth cease to sing."

The Five Knights lean close together, yet without touching, enchanted to stone in the very act of whispering treason against their ambitious chief. They whisper still under the elder tree, and often will a la.s.s labouring in the barley fields slip away from her companions at dusk to beg the Five Knights to whisper her an answer to the question of her heart. I walked back, having hit on a path, in company with a rustic harvester, whose conversation was confined to telling me five times over, in the stubborn, half-scared tone of superst.i.tion, that while the other elders are laden with white berries, this elder always bears red; and the collie wagged his tail, and the donkey wagged his ears, in solemn confirmation.

The wagonette gathered us in again, and soon we pa.s.sed, not far from the fine Elizabethan mansion known as Chastleton House, the Four-Shire Stone, a column marking the meeting-point of Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, and Worcestershire. Our route lay for a while in Gloucestershire. As our shy young driver refreshed our skeleton steed, which had proved a good roadster, with gruel, that favourite beverage of English horses, at Moreton-in-the-Marsh, another little grey stone town with open market-hall, we noted a building marked P. S. A. and learned it was a workingman's club, or something of that nature, and that the cabalistic initials stood for Pleasant Sunday Afternoon. We changed horses at Campden, did our duty by the inevitable cold joints, and drove up to Fish Inn, with its far outlook, and thence down into the fertile Vale of Evesham. We had not been ready to say with Richard II,

"I am a stranger here in Glostershire; These high wild hills and rough uneven ways Draw out our miles, and make them wearisome,"

but we found a new pleasure in the smiling welcome of gardened Worcestershire. The charming village of Broadway, beloved of artists, detained us for a little, and at Evesham, even more attractive with its beautiful bell-tower, its Norman gateway and cloister arch--pathetic relics of its ruined abbey--and with its obelisk-marked battlefield where fell Simon de Montfort, "the most peerless man of his time for valour, personage, and wisdom," we brought our driving-tour in the Midlands to a close.

OXFORD

Shakespeare's frequent horseback journeys from London to Stratford, and from Stratford to London, must have made him familiar with the county of Oxfordshire. He would have seen its northern uplands sprinkled over with white-fleeced sheep of the pure old breed, sheep so large that their mutton is too fat for modern palates: a smaller sheep, yielding inferior wool, is fast supplanting the original Cotswold. He would not have met upon the downs those once so frequent pa.s.sengers, the Flemish merchants with their trains of sumpter mules and pack-horses, bound for Chipping Campden or some other market where wool might be "cheapened" in the way of bargaining, for by Shakespeare's day the cloth-making industry in the valley of the Stroud Water, Gloucestershire, had attained to such a flourishing condition that the export of raw material was forbidden.

It is not likely that his usual route would have given him the chance to refresh himself with Banbury cakes at Banbury and, profane player that he was, bring down upon himself a Puritan preachment from Ben Jonson's Zeal-of-the-land-Busy; but Shakespeare's way would almost certainly have lain through Woodstock. This ancient town has royal traditions reaching back to King Alfred and Etheldred the Redeless, but these are obscured for the modern tourist by the heavy magnificence of Blenheim Palace, the Duke of Marlborough's reward for his "famous victory." The legend of Fair Rosamund--how Henry II hid her here embowered in a labyrinth, and how the murderous Queen Eleanor tracked her through the maze by the clue of a silken thread--Shakespeare, like Drayton, could have enjoyed without molestation from the critical historian, who now insists that it was Eleanor whom the king shut up to keep her from interfering with his loves. Poor Rosamund! Her romance is not suffered to rest in peace here any more than was her fair body in the church of G.o.dstow nunnery. There she had been buried in the centre of the choir, and the nuns honoured her grave with such profusion of broidered hangings and burning tapers as to scandalise St. Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, who, on visiting the nunnery in 1191, gave orders that she be disinterred and buried "out of the church with other common people to the end that religion be not vilified." But after some years the tender nuns slipped those rejected bones into a "perfumed leather bag"

and brought them back within the holy pale. The dramatist, who seems to have done wellnigh his earliest chronicle-play writing in an episode of the anonymous "Edward III," may have remembered, as he rode into the old town, that the Black Prince was born at Woodstock. But whether or no he gave a thought to Edward III's war-wasted heir, he could hardly have failed to muse upon that monarch's poet, "most sacred happie spirit," Geoffrey Chaucer, whose son Thomas--if this Thomas Chaucer were indeed the poet's son--resided at Woodstock in the early part of the fifteenth century. And still fresh would have been the memory of Elizabeth's imprisonment in the gate-house during a part of her sister Mary's reign. It was here, according to Holinshed, on whom the burden of p.r.o.nouns rested lightly, that the captive princess "hearing upon a time out of hir garden at Woodstock a certaine milkemaid singing pleasantlie wished herselfe to be a milkemaid as she was, saieing that hir case was better, and life more merier than was hirs in that state as she was."

Charles I and the Roundheads had not then set their battle-marks all over Oxfordshire, and Henley, now famed for its July regatta as far as water flows, was still content with the very moderate speed of its malt-barges; but Oxford--I would give half my library to know with what feelings Shakespeare used to behold its sublime group of spires and towers against the sunset sky. This "upstart crow," often made to wince under the scorn of those who, like Robert Greene,--the red-headed reprobate!--could write themselves "Master of Arts of both Universities," what manner of look did he turn upon that august town

"gorgeous with high-built colleges, And scholars seemly in their grave attire, Learned in searching principles of art?"

Here in the midst of the valley of the Thames, Oxford had already kept for centuries a queenly state, chief city of the shire, with a university that ranked as one of the "two eyes of England." The university, then as now, was made up of a number of colleges which owned, by bequest and by purchase, a considerable portion of the county, though they by no means limited their estates to Oxfordshire.

Almost all those "sacred nurseries of blooming youth" which delight us to-day were known to the dust-stained traveller who put up, perhaps twice a year, perhaps oftener, at the Crown Inn, kept by John Davenant, vintner. Apart from the painfully modern Keble, a memorial to the author of "The Christian Year," and the still more recent roof-trees for dissent, Congregational Mansfield and Unitarian Manchester, what college of modern Oxford would be utterly strange to Shakespeare? Even in Worcester, an eighteenth-century erection on the site of the ruined Benedictine foundation of Gloucester College, search soon reveals vestiges of the old monastic dwellings. Not a few of the very edifices that Shakespeare saw still stand in their Gothic beauty, but in case of others, as University, which disputes with Merton the claim of seniority, boasting no less a founder than Alfred the Great, new buildings have overgrown the old. Some have changed their names, as Broadgates, to which was given, eight years after Shakespeare's death, a name that even in death he would hardly have forgotten,--Pembroke, in honour of William, Earl of Pembroke, then Chancellor of the University. Already venerable, as the poet looked upon them, were the thirteenth-century foundations of Merton, with its stately tower, its library of chained folios, its memories of Duns Scotus; and Balliol, another claimant for the dignities of the first-born, tracing its origin to Sir John de Balliol, father of the Scottish king, remembering among its early Fellows and Masters John Wyclif the Reformer; and Hart Hall, where Tyndale was a student, the Hertford College of to-day; and St. Edmund Hall, which has been entirely rebuilt. Another thirteenth-century foundation, St. Alban Hall, has been incorporated with Merton.

The fourteenth-century colleges, too, would have worn a weathered look by 1600,--Exeter and Oriel and Queen's and New. The buildings of Exeter have been restored over and over, but the mediaeval still haunts them, as it haunted Exeter's latest poet, William Morris, who loved Oxfordshire so well that he finally made his home at Kelmscott on the Upper Thames. Oriel, which, as Shakespeare would have known, was Sir Walter Raleigh's college, underwent an extensive rebuilding in the reign of Charles I. To Oriel once belonged St. Mary Hall, where Sir Thomas More studied,--a wag of a student he must have been!--and now, after an independence of five hundred years, it is part of Oriel again. Queen's, named in honour of Philippa, the consort of Edward III, has so completely changed its outer fashion that George II's Queen Caroline is perched upon its cupola, but by some secret of individuality it is still the same old college of the Black Prince and of Henry V,--the college where every evening a trumpet summons the men to dine in hall, and every Christmas the Boar's Head, garnished with the traditionary greenery, is borne in to the singing of an old-time carol, and every New Year's Day the bursar distributes thread and needles among its unappreciative masculine community with the succinct advice: "Take this and be thrifty."

New College, unlike these three, has hardly altered its original fabric. If Shakespeare smiled over the name borne by a structure already mossed and lichened by two centuries, we have more than twice his reason for smiling; indeed, we have one excuse that he had not, for we can think of Sydney Smith as a New College man. Old it is and old it looks. The very lanes that lead to it, grey and twisted pa.s.sages of stone, conduct us back to the mediaeval world. The Virgin Mary, the Archangel Gabriel, and, no whit abashed in such high company, Bishop Wykeham, the Founder, watch us from their storm-worn niches as we pa.s.s under the gateway into the majestic quadrangle. Here time-blackened walls hold the gaze enthralled with their ancientry of battlements and b.u.t.tresses, deep-mullioned windows and pinnacle-set towers. Beyond lie the gardens, still bounded on two sides by the ma.s.sive masonry, embrasured, bastioned, parapeted, of the old City Wall,--gardens where it should always be October, drifty, yellow, dreamy, quiet, with wan poplars and aspens and chestnuts whispering and sighing together, till some grotesque face sculptured on the wall peers out derisively through ivy mat or crimson creeper, and the red-berried hollies, old and gay with many Christmases, rustle in rea.s.suring laughter. Meanwhile the rooks flap heavily among the mighty beeches, whose tremendous trunks are all misshapen with the gnarls and k.n.o.bs of age.

Of the fifteenth-century foundations, All Souls, "The College of All Souls of the Faithful Departed," and especially of those who fell in the French wars, retains much of its original architecture; in the kitchen of Lincoln, if not in the chapel, Shakespeare would still find himself at home; and for him, as for all the generations since, the lofty tower of Magdalen rose as Oxford's crown of beauty. Magdalen College is ancient. The very speaking of the name (Maudlin) tells us that, all the more unmistakably because Magdalen Bridge and Magdalen Street carry the modern p.r.o.nunciation. But Magdalen College, with its springing, soaring grace, its surprises of delight, its haunting, soul-possessing loveliness, has all the winning charm of youth. Its hundred acres of lawn and garden, wood and park, where deer browse peacefully beneath the shade of giant elms and where Addison's beloved Water Walks beside the Cherwell are golden with the primroses and daffodils of March and blue with the violets and periwinkles of later spring, are even more tempting to the book-f.a.gged wanderer than Christ Church Meadow and "Mesopotamia." It is hard to tell when Magdalen is most beautiful. It has made the circle of the year its own. On May Day dawn, all Oxford, drowsy but determined, gathers in the broad street below to see--it depends upon the wind whether or no one may hear--the choir chant their immemorial hymn from the summit of the tower. When the ending of the rite is made known to the mult.i.tude by the flinging over of the caps,--black mortar-boards that sail slowly down the one hundred and fifty feet like a flock of pensive rooks,--then away it streams over Magdalen Bridge toward Iffley to gather Arnold's white and purple fritillaries, and, after a long and loving look at Iffley's Norman Church, troops home along the towing-path beside the Isis.

Shakespeare may himself have heard, if he chanced to be pa.s.sing through on St. John Baptist's Day, the University sermon preached from the curiously canopied stone pulpit well up on the wall in a corner of one of the quadrangles, while the turf was sweet with strewn rushes and all the buildings glistening with fresh green boughs. But even in midwinter Magdalen is beautiful, when along Addison's Walk the fog is frosted like most delicate enamel on every leaf and twig, and this white world of rime takes on strange flushes from the red sun peering through the haze.

Of the six Tudor foundations, Trinity occupies the site of Durham College, a thirteenth-century Benedictine inst.i.tution suppressed by Henry VIII; St. John's, closely allied to the memory of Archbishop Laud, is the survival of St. Bernard College, which itself grew out of a Cistercian monastery; Brasenose, a.s.sociated for earlier memory with Foxe of the "Book of Martyrs" and for later with Walter Pater, supplanted two mediaeval halls; and Jesus College, the first to be founded after the Reformation, endowed by a Welshman for the increase of Welsh learning, received from Elizabeth a site once held by academic buildings of the elder faith. Only Corpus Christi, where Cardinal Pole and Bishop Hooker studied to such different ends, although it is, as its name indicates, of Catholic origin, rose on fresh soil and broke with the past, with the mediaeval educational tradition, by making regular provision for the systematic study of Latin and Greek.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TOWER, MAGDALEN COLLEGE]

The great Tudor foundation was Christ Church, built on the sacred ground where, in the eighth century, St. Frideswide, a princess with a p.r.o.nounced vocation for the religious life, had erected a nunnery of which she was first abbess. The nunnery became, after her death, a house of canons, known as St. Frideswide's Priory. Cardinal Wolsey brought about the surrender of this priory to the king, and its prompt transfer to himself, some fifteen years before the general Dissolution. His ambition, not all unrealised, was to found as his memorial a splendid seat of the New Learning at Oxford to be called Cardinal's College. He had gone so far as to erect a magnificent hall, with fan-vaulted entrance and carved oak ceiling of surpa.s.sing beauty, a kitchen ample enough to feed the t.i.tans, "The Faire Gate" and, in outline, the Great Quadrangle, for whose enlargement he pulled down three bays of the Priory church, when his fall cut short his princely projects. His graceless master attempted to take over to himself the credit of Wolsey's labours, subst.i.tuting the name of King Henry VIII's College, but on creating, a few years later, the bishopric of Oxford, he blended the cathedral and college foundations as the Church and House of Christ. The cathedral fabric is still in the main that of the old Priory church. Of the several quadrangles, Canterbury Quad keeps a memory of Canterbury College, which, with the other Benedictine colleges, Gloucester and Durham, went down in the storm.

Christ's Church--"The House," as its members call it--is the aristocratic college of Oxford. n.o.blemen and even princes may be among those white-surpliced figures that flit about the dim quads after Sunday evensong. Ruskin's father, a wealthy wine-merchant of refined tastes and broad intelligence, hesitated to enter his son as a gentleman commoner at Christ's lest the act should savour of presumption. Yet no name has conferred more l.u.s.tre on "The House" than that of him who became the Slade Professor of Fine Arts, waking all Oxford to n.o.bler life and resigning, at last, because he could not bear that the university should sanction vivisection.

Wadham College, though the lovely garden with its h.o.a.ry 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 hang Upon 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

"throes That nature's fragile vessel doth sustain In 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 G.o.dfather 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 a.s.semblage 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 f.a.gots undismayed, spake the never-forgotten words: "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley. We shall this day light such a candle, by G.o.d'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 pa.s.s, 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 cla.s.s of theological reformers who have a peculiar aversion to stained gla.s.s. 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 pa.s.sed 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 mediaeval 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 a.s.semblage.

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 b.u.t.tonhole. 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."