Henry Chettle

“ Chettle seems to have followed the literary career usual in his time; he composed many dramas alone [290] or in collaboration; he was perpetually borrowing money from the notorious Henslowe, and he was occasionally lodged in Her Majesty's prisons. In 1595 he published his "Piers Plainnes seaven yeres prentiship," [291] in which we find, mingled together, Sidney's Arcady, Greene's romantic heroes, and the customary incidents of picaresque novels. The scene is laid in Tempe; there are Menalcas and Corydons; there are sheep who are poetically invited by their keeper to eat their grass ”

“ Chetwynd was educated at Westminster, from which he was elected to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1708, and was appointed resident at Genoa in 1708, through the influence of his brother Walter, who was a member of the whig administration and had powerful parliamentary connections after his succession to the great estate of Ingestre. In 1712, after the accession of Harley and St. John to power, Chetwynd was recalled from Genoa, but in 1714 he was elected M.P. for Stafford, again through the influence of his brother, and in 1717 he became a junior lord of the admiralty in the whig administration. ”

“ Every one knows the result of the fatal fight fought within sight of Chester walls, when most of the knights and squires, the flower of Cheshire chivalry, lay dead on the stricken field. Woeful was the day for Cheshire men. Henry captured the Baron of Kinderton and Sir Richard Vernon, and beheaded them. Even some who fought on the King’s side fell in battle, including Sir John Calveley and Sir John Massey. Moreover, the stern Henry was wroth against the county, and every man felt that his head was in jeopardy. ”

“ He could say no more.
“Come, don't you turn soft for a word or two,” said Cheetham. “You'll wear all this out in time. Go to the office. I have something to say to you.”
The something was said. It amounted to this—“Stand by me and I'll stand by you.”
“Well, sir,” said Henry, “I think I must leave you if the committees refuse my offer. It is hard for one man to fight a couple of trades in such a place as this. But I'm firm in one thing: until those that govern the unions say 'no' to my offer, I shall go on working, and the scum of the trades sha'n't frighten me away from my forge.” ”

“ The town is first mentioned in 1223, when William de Longespée leased the benefit of the markets, fairs and hundred of Cheltenham to the men of the town for three years; the lease was renewed by Henry III. in 1226, and again in 1230 for ten years. A market town in the time of Camden, it was governed by commissioners from the 18th century in 1876, when it was incorporated; it became a parliamentary borough in 1832. Henry III. in 1230 had granted to the men of Cheltenham a market on each Thursday, and a fair on the vigil, feast and morrow of St James. ”

“ If the Atlantic voyage be counted, as it certainly may, even with the ocean in a fairly good humour, an emphatic zero in the sum of one’s better experience, the American traveller arriving at this venerable town finds himself transported, without a sensible gradation, from the edge of the new world to the very heart of the old. It is almost a misfortune perhaps that Chester lies so close to the threshold of England ”

“ The only relic of the associations of the earls of Chester's family with Coventry lie in the Cheylesmore manor house, to the south-east of the city. The house itself is mostly modern, but there are fragments of ancient buildings—a chimney-shaft—incorporated with it. It is most likely that the Black Prince, who gave—say the annals—the ostrich feathers to Coventry, and prince Henry, afterwards Henry V., sojourned in the ancient dwelling at Cheylesmore. ”

“ If the romantic be measured by its hostility to our modern notions of convenience, Chester is probably the most romantic city in the world. This arrangement is endlessly rich in opportunities for amusing effect, but the full charm of the architecture of which it is so essential a part must be observed from the street below. Chester is still an antique town, and mediæval England sits bravely under her gables. Every third house is a "specimen"—gabled and latticed, timbered and carved, and wearing its years more or less lightly. ”

“ He entertained Henry the Second at Chester Castle when Henry made an expedition against the Welsh, the troops encamping on Saltney marshes. Henry the Second had high views of the duties of kingship, and was always busily occupied at home or in his continental dominions. But Cheshire saw little or nothing of his son Richard, greatest of all Crusaders, for he spent the greater part of his reign seeking adventures abroad, and left his people to take care of themselves. ”

“ They were the names of two brothers. One is well known to you. It is that of the African explorer of whom this gentleman was just speaking. I mean the Earl of Chetney. The other was the name of his brother. Lord Arthur Chetney.”
The men at the table fell back as though a trapdoor had fallen open at their feet.
“Lord Chetney?” they exclaimed, in chorus. They glanced at each other and back to the American, with every expression of concern and disbelief.
“It is impossible!” cried the Baronet. “Why, my dear sir, young Chetney only arrived from Africa yesterday. ”

“ And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of their job he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street below, "Hoo-Hoo! Hello, sweetheart!"
There was nothing vicious in it, Chet would have come to the aid of beauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with a blue shirt as clean, and a shave as smooth, and a haircut as round as Chet Ball's has no meanness in him. ”

“ And Miss Kate began to read in her clear young voice, there in the sunshine and scent of the centuries-old English garden.
It marked an epoch in Chet's life—that letter. It reached out across the Atlantic Ocean from the Chester Ball of his Chicago days, before he had even heard of English gardens.
Your true lineman has a daredevil way with the women, as have all men whose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman. He could shinny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open his tool kit, wield his pliers with expert deftness, and climb down again in record time. ”

“ But in so far as beauty of structure is beauty of line and curve, balance and harmony of masses and dimensions, I have seldom relished it as deeply as on the grassy nave of some crumbling church, before lonely columns and empty windows where the wild flowers were a cornice and the sailing clouds a roof. ”

“ Lord Chesterfield liked and respected him, and wrote with admiration in one of his letters to the Countess of Suffolk of the manner in which Chenevix tried to restrain his wit by saying that 'death was too serious a thing to jest upon' (Lord Chesferfield's Correspondence, ed. Lord Mahon, iii. 87) . When Lord Chesterfield returned to England, Chenevix shared his fortunes when in opposition, and when, in 1745, his patron was appointed lord-lieutenant of Ireland, Chenevix, who had taken his D.D. degree at Cambridge in 1744, accompanied him as principal domestic chaplain. ”

“ Once, it was long ago, the shop had belonged to the Egsons, but speculation had swamped them. Then Cheevers. as he occasionally reminded them, rescued them. As the business spread, Mr. Cheevers took himself more and more seriously. He joined every available committee. He spoke in public whenever he had the chance, and sometimes when he had not. The affairs of his suburb were deep in his heart. One day, possibly, he might rise to higher things; but only to his wife, who was a good woman, did he darkly hint of his ambition. ”

“ Either way we would never get back: no leaky hull would ever let us make the trip home!"
Chet was right: Harkness knew it in a moment. He knew the folly of what he would have done, yet knew, too, that desperate measures were needed and needed quickly. The eyes of a devil had held his own from the darkness of the rocks, and the same rock wall came close to where they stood. He was in command; it was up to him—
he moment of indecision ended as a mass of viscous fluid splashed heavily against the ship. ”

“ But when Mr Rainscourt insisted that the heart of the deceased should be embalmed, and directed it to be enshrined in an urn of massive gold, then all Cheltenham began to think that he was sincere,—at least all the ladies did; and the gentlemen, married or single, were either too wise or too polite to offer any negative remark, when his conduct was pronounced to be a pattern for all husbands. ”

“ Chet saw them dead ahead; he saw the out-thrust heads, each ending in a great suction-cup, the row of disks that were eyes blazing above, and the gaping maw below. He altered their course not a hair's breadth as he bore down upon them, while the monsters swelled prodigiously before his eyes. And the thunderous roar from astern came with never a break, while the ship itself ceased its trembling protest [179] against the sudden blast and drove smoothly on and into the waiting beasts. ”

“ As I strolled beside its vast indented base one evening, and felt it, above me, rear its grey mysteries into the starlight while the restless human tide on which I floated rose no higher than the first few layers of street-soiled marble, I was tempted to believe that beauty in great architecture is almost a secondary merit, and that the main point is mass—such mass as may make it a supreme embodiment of vigorous effort. ”

“ Bird, however, still owed £10 10s. on 12 March 1602, and Henslowe noted, ‘He is cleere of all debtes & demaundes except theis debtes and such stocke & covenentes as I maie clayme & challendge of him by reason of his coniunction with the companie’. [498] Whether the playwrights reaped any benefit may be doubted. The tendency to a rise of prices which showed itself in 1599 was hardly maintained. Some of them were still impecunious enough. The company had, on more than one occasion to redeem a play which the unfortunate Chettle had pawned with one Bromfield, a mercer ”

“ We are far from liking London well enough till we like its defects: the dense darkness of much of its winter, the soot on the chimney-pots and everywhere else, the early lamplight, the brown blur of the houses, the splashing of hansoms in Oxford Street or the Strand on December afternoons.
There is still something that recalls to me the enchantment of children—the anticipation of Christmas, the delight of a holiday walk—in the way the shop-fronts shine into the fog. ”

“ I also blame myself for not mentioning one or two circumstances that have occurred since your departure; but I really felt frightened.”
“Has Romney made an attempt to see you again?” asked Chetwynd.
“More than once,” she replied. “He annoys me dreadfully. When my father is with me, he keeps out of the way; but I cannot always have a protector at my side. This is one reason why I have resolved to go into service. I shall be secure from my tormentor.”
“I hope he won't trouble you much longer,” remarked Chetwynd.
Just then a knock was heard at the door. ”

“ He couldn't even ask for some more of the creamed potatoes without choking up—with her all the time using her eyes on him, and telling him how a great rough man like him scared 'poor little me.' Chet's tan bleaches out a mite by the end of winter, but she kept his face exactly the shade of that new mahogany sideboard I got, and she told him several times that he ought to go see a throat specialist right off about that choking of his. ”

“ The strange figures in the mosaic pictures, bending with the curve of niche and vault, stare down through the glowing dimness; the burnished gold that stands behind them catches the light on its little uneven cubes. St. Mark’s owes nothing of its character to the beauty of proportion or perspective; there is nothing grandly balanced or far-arching; there are no long lines nor triumphs of the perpendicular. ”

“ The day of my departure at length arrived. Clerval spent the last evening with us. He had endeavoured to persuade his father to permit him to accompany me and to become my fellow student, but in vain. His father was a narrow-minded trader and saw idleness and ruin in the aspirations and ambition of his son. Henry deeply felt the misfortune of being debarred from a liberal education. He said little, but when he spoke I read in his kindling eye and in his animated glance a restrained but firm resolve not to be chained to the miserable details of commerce. ”

“ The eighteenth-century vessels were the old 'wooden walls' of England, big sailing ships called 'three deckers', with three rows of guns pointing outwards from their sides. There is a model of one of them, the Royal George, over the inner door of Vernon Park Museum.
Robert Clive was the son of a Shropshire squire, and was educated at the little school in the Cheshire village of Allostock. Clive went to India and became a soldier. The English and French were fighting for the mastery of India, and it is to Clive's victories that we owe in a great measure our Indian Empire. ”

“ From this little tower, or, better still, from various points farther along the island-shore, even to look is to be immersed. Before you stretches the huge expanse of the upper river, with its belittled cliffs, now mere black lines of forest, dull as with the sadness of gazing at perpetual trouble, eternal danger. Anything more horribly desolate than this boundless livid welter of the rapids it is impossible to conceive, and you very soon begin to pay it the tribute of your own suddenly-assumed suspense, in the impulse to people it with human forms. ”

“ They had it at last—had what was to be had in an old house where many, too many, things had happened, where the very walls they touched and floors they trod could have told secrets and named names, where every surface was a blurred mirror of life and death, of the endured, the remembered, the forgotten. ”