Various

“ It was the year 520 A.D. Exactly one hundred years had elapsed since the last Roman soldiers left Britain a prey to their enemies. But what a different Britain it was now. It is true the enemy were in the land, and held the greater part of it, but the Britons were no longer helpless or hopeless. From the towers of Camelot Arthur led forth an army full of confidence and eager for the fray; he led them beyond the bounds of Gladerhaf, for he would not that this beloved land should be soiled by the heathen’s tread. ”

“ Fair features in woman are not irremediably spoiled by accident of cut and scar, or through waste of fever and pain: the lovely lines survive, and the soul beneath breathes unspeakable subtle beauty in smile of the eye and play of emotion on the eloquent face. Such is it with fair Calder dale—a region of poetry and romance, of legendary rock and historic hall, of mountain and glen, of shaw and burn, of daisied meadow and ferny dell. ”

“ Pentecost had come, and a chapter of the order of the Knights of the Round Table was held as usual at Camelot. The knights were assembled in the great hall of the Castle. Anon a cracking and crying as of thunder was heard, and they thought the palace would break asunder. In the midst entered a sunbeam more clear by seven times than ever they saw day. Then the knights beheld each other fairer than they had ever seen them before, and no knight might speak a word for a great while, and each man looked on the other as they had been dumb. ”

“ Besides, sir, I do not see why that should be imputed to him as a crime which we all so irresistibly feel and practise; we all make a greater exertion in the presence of new men than old acquaintance; it is undoubtedly true that Garrick divided his attention among so many, that but little remained to the share of an individual: like the extension and dissipation of water into dew, there was not quantity united sufficiently to quench any man’s thirst; but this is the inevitable state of things; Garrick no more than any other man could unite what was in their nature incompatible. ”

“ Born in humble, though not needy circumstances, unable to complete his education and to obtain an Oxford degree by the res angusta domi, he came to London to fight the battle of life, his only weapon being his pen, and he won the day against all difficulties, the cold indifference of the rich, the jealousies of his equals and contemporaries, and the heart-breaking and niggardly doles of the London publishers. ”

“ Truth never dwells in the court of kings, and the drawing-rooms of the well-to-do are no fitter for its shrine, for the men and women there are royalties divested of respect and state-trappings; they are over-pampered humanities for the most part: to be much in their company you must compromise the divinest part of you—your convictions—and it is by pursuing conviction that the soul flies heavenward. ”

“ The days in which our lot is cast are days of doubt and difficulty—days when ancient landmarks are being removed, and the beaten tracks so effaced as almost to be indiscernible. So that we may well stand, like the traveller in the metaphor, to see and ask for the old paths, for the good way, amid the clouds of scepticism and unbelief which gather athwart our pathways ”

“ The tall chimneys are rising in the busy centres of trade, but occasionally we shelter under an oak or a yew-tree whose youth was fanned by less smutty winds; railway whistles have scared the nightingale, but the lark still carols anear human dwellings; graylings no longer leap the river-weir, but the waters sing and gleam as they glide seaward down the hushed moonlit glens.
The Calder, one of the most picturesque of northern rivers, rises near Cliviger Dene, in Lancashire, and enters the county of York through a wild gorge at Todmorden. ”

“ And when outraged honour and insulted pride made him desert the Yorkist cause, which he had served and supported for years, and range himself with those whom he had most injured and who most hated him, he fell as easy a victim to the same man’s charmed sword. And Edward did prove himself strong enough to reign alone. No man was better fitted for his age and his circumstances; and this is shown by his popularity, vigorous even during Warwick’s life and while growing under his shade. Victor everywhere and at all times, Edward had won the heart of the nation even before he gained the throne. ”

“ WITH Arthur perished the bright gleam of hope for the British race, but the Saxons did not as yet advance farther westward, and it was not till the seventh century that Gladerhaf became Somerset. That he was buried at Glastonbury men knew, but the exact spot remained a secret from all, and so the record of Arthur’s life and labours became a myth on which the earliest and latest British poets alike have loved to dwell and idealise, till men scarce believed that he had any existence save in the realms of romance. ”

“ If you travel through the whole world, well, you may find cities without walls, without literature, without kings, moneyless, and such as desire no coin; which know not what theatres or public halls or bodily exercise mean; but never was there, nor ever shall be, any one city seen without temple, church, or chapel, without some God or other, which useth no prayers, nor oaths, no prophecies and divinations, no sacrifices either to obtain good blessings, or to avert heavy curses and calamities. ”

“ But if Christian belief accepts a future state and the immortality of the life (commonly called the soul) of man, then I say, that the Christian who denies the gift of prophecy to be inherent in mankind [15] is really as dead to spiritual life as if he were a materialistic member of a scientific society of the nineteenth century, or a Parisian enclycopædist of the eighteenth.
Again, if Christianity be a heaven-descended revelation, its foundations must be rooted deep in the spiritual world and should be full of correspondences. The material universe is full of them. ”

“ As the eye takes a loftier and farther sweep the rugged contour and massive forms of forest-clad and moorland-capped mountains may be seen to wear much the same aspect they wore in the primal historic days of Roman and Celt. The conquests of commerce over both material and mental difficulties are apparent almost everywhere on the lowlands, for which all sensible and right-thinking minds are grateful, plain and anti-poetical as the outward signs may be in the jumble of viaduct and railway station, of factory and shop. ”

“ Is it more improbable that remains of Mithraism should exist in Scotland than in other parts of Britain accessible to Roman influences? The improbability lies the contrary way. Why should there be more folly in seeking for traces of Paganism than in seeking for traces of Christianity among the earlier antiquities of Britain? The reproach surely rests with those who in such cases formulate extreme opinions as to the universal presence or absence of one of these religious elements, and refuse to see anything that antagonises their enthusiasms or prejudices. ”

“ When the shadows of the gloaming steal over the world, it is an eerie sight to watch the mists of autumn as they creep up the gorge and curl round the rocks, and the spectator may almost realise that he is gazing upon some weird and enchanted land. ”

“ Not far to the east are the walls of what once was a magnificent banqueting-hall, but there the devastation wrought by the hand of time is so extensive that it is almost impossible to decide which was the upper end of it, and where were the servants’ seats and the entrance to the buttery and the kitchen. As for the chapel, two chambers were shown to the members of the congress, but so many objections were found to each that they were inclined to believe that it could never be found except by farther excavations. ”

“ R.—Garrick was a clever fellow, Dr. J.; Garrick, take him altogether, was certainly a very great man.
J.—Garrick, sir, may be a great man in your opinion, as far as I know, but he was not so in mine; little things are great to little men.
R.—I have heard you say, Dr. Johnson——
J.—Sir, you never heard me say, David Garrick was a great man. You may have heard me say that Garrick was a good repeater of other men’s words,—words put into his mouth by other men; this makes but a faint approach towards being a great man. ”

“ On the conclusion of the inspection of the castle, the Dean of Durham, Dr. Lake, gave, in the nave of the cathedral, a short résumé of its history and a glance at its chief associations. This he did with great skill and taste, touching on the successive eras through which the monastery had passed before it was crowned by the present majestic structure—one which no less an authority{140} than Dr. Freeman had declared to be the finest church in Christendom, except the cathedral of Pisa, and scarcely inferior even to that. ”

“ Solitude is essential to prophecy. A man cannot commune with heaven in the busy haunts of men. Nature is{210} the presence-chamber of the Deity. Every man of sensibility knows this; and the prophet most of all men feels the pith and central depth of Pope’s fine line, and that he must reach prophecy “Looking through Nature up to Nature’s God.” Society demands that you sacrifice your convictions constantly to good manners. Social convention contaminates noble originality and high principle. ”

“ Freeman and Clark profess for one another, their views are often very contradictory, as, for instance, on Norwich Castle, on the character of pre-Conquest keeps, on the earthworks at Lincoln, and on Richard’s Castle.
But while it is necessary to sound a note of warning, it is almost ungrateful to criticise a work which will be recognised as indispensable to every student of English history in the middle ages. Few studies could throw more light on the social life of the two centuries succeeding the Norman Conquest. ”

“ The committee of the Royal Archæological Institute, who indexed the returns obtained in 1875, divided maces into two classes, great and small, but the proper and better division is into mayors’ maces and sergeants’ maces, though the two nearly correspond. I define as a great mace, or mayor’s mace, one whose raison d’être is to be carried before the mayor in procession, and to be displayed beside him in church or in court. The great mace is the insignia of the mayor. The sergeants’ maces are the insignia of the sergeants-at-mace ”

“ The prolonged labours of “Castle Clark” have long been familiar to antiquaries, and no archæological meeting at any spot that could boast a castle has seemed complete without the presence of “the great master of military architecture,” as Mr. Clark has been justly termed by Professor Freeman: to whom, by the way, these volumes are dedicated, as having been issued “at his suggestion.” It has long been a matter of natural regret that the valuable results of Mr. Clark’s researches should have been so widely scattered as to render them, for practical purposes, inaccessible to the student. ”

“ Sir,—The following passage from the pen of the greatest critic of modern times, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, seems rather to militate against the argument in a former number of the Antiquarian Magazine, that the portrait of Milton there spoken of might have been painted by the poet himself: “It is very remarkable that in no part of his writings does Milton take any notice of the great painters of Italy, nor, indeed, of painting as an art, whilst every other page breathes his love and taste for music. ”

“ From the spot where I write, looking out at the antique lattice, I see the long sweep of the valley with its wide openings and gorge-like ravines stretching through the heart and the solitude of the everlasting hills, and though smoke blackens and mill mars the landscape, there is a loveliness about the contour of high heath-clad cliff, about the green waving woods musical with bird carol and summer breeze, about the sun-bright waters winding and narrowing miles away to a silver streak, which the accidents of trade and material civilisation have very far from irretrievably ruined. ”

“ Just as, ever on the same principle, I see in the use of weal (wall) —a word etymologically derived from vallum—for a stone wall (murus) , an indication that the Teutonic rovers, struck by a phenomenon to them so strange as a fortification even of earth, formed for themselves, out of vallum, a word denoting a barrier irrespective of its material, so I contend that they formed for themselves, from a phenomenon so strange as that castrum which faced them on the border of “the Saxon shore,” the word ceaster by which to denote a walled enclosure, irrespective of its size. ”

“ A new nobility, the mushroom growth of an hour, sprang up to sun itself in his smiles, to help him in the pursuit of pleasure, to increase the attractions of peace and of a Court. The commercial towns, and especially London, were pleased with a monarch who enriched them by his magnificent and sumptuous expenditure, and who gave a more liberal encouragement to commerce than they had known before. ”

“ Now Garrick, we are sure, was never hanged, and in regard to his being a great man, you must take the whole man together. It must be considered in how many things Garrick excelled in which every man desires to excel, setting aside his excellence as an actor, in which he is acknowledged to be unrivalled; as a man, as a poet, as a convivial companion, you will find but few his equals, and none his superior. ”