chamber that has in it a large antiquity of timber, which seems to have been either a bedstead or a cider-press. "Our best room above is very long and low, of the exact proportion of a bandbox; it has hangings of the finest work in the world, those, I mean, which Arachne spins out of her own bowels; indeed, the roof is so decayed that, after a favourable shower of rain, we may, with God's blessing, expect a crop of mushrooms between the chinks of the floors. All this upper story has for many years had no other inhabitants than certain rats, whose very age renders them worthy of this venerable mansion, for the very rats of this ancient seat are grey. Since these had not quitted it, we hope at least this house may stand during the small remainder of days these poor animals have to live, who are now too infirm to remove to another; they have still a small subsistence left them in the few remaining books of the library. "I had never seen half what I have described, but for an old, starched, grey-headed steward, who is as much an antiquity as any in the place, and looks like an old family picture walked out of its frame. He failed not, as we passed from room to room, to relate several memoirs of the family, but his observations were particularly curious in the cellar. He showed where stood the triple rows of butts of sack, and where were ranged the bottles of tent2 for toasts in the morning; he pointed to the stands that supported the iron-hooped hogsheads of strong beer; then, stepping to a corner, he lugged out the tattered fragment of an unframed picture. 'This,' says he, with tears in his eyes, was poor Sir Thomas, once master of the drink I told you of; he had two sons-poor young masters !—that never arrived to the age of this beer; they both fell in this very cellar, and never went out upon their own legs.' He could not pass by a broken bottle, without taking it up to show us the arms of the family on it. He then led me up the tower, by dark, winding stone steps, which landed us into several little rooms, one above another; one of these was nailed up, and my guide whispered to me the occasion of it. It seems the course of this noble blood was a little interrupted about two centuries ago by a freak of the Lady Frances, who was here taken with a neighbouring prior; ever since which the room has been made up, and branded with the name of the adultery-chamber. The ghost of Lady Frances is supposed to walk here; some prying maids of the family formerly reported that they saw a lady in a fardingale through the keyhole; but this matter was hushed up, and the servants forbid to talk of it. "I must needs have tired you with this long letter: but what engaged me in the description was a generous principle to preserve the memory of a thing that must itself soon fall to ruin; nay, perhaps 2 Tent is the name of a kind of wine of a deep red colour, chiefly from Galicia or Malaga, in Spain. STANTON HARCOURT, OXFORDSHIRE. 185 some part of it before this reaches your hands. Indeed, I owe this old house the same gratitude that we do to an old friend, that harbours us in his declining condition, nay, even in his last extremities. I have found this an excellent place for retirement and study, where no one who passes by can dream there is an inhabitant, and even anybody that would visit me dares not venture under my roof. You will not wonder I have translated a great deal of Homer in this retreat; any one who sees it will own I could not have chosen a fitter or more likely place to converse with the dead. As soon as I return to the living, it shall be to converse with the best of them. I hope, therefore, very speedily to tell you in person how sincerely and unalterably I am, madam, yours," &c.3 CHAPEL, STANTON HARCOURT. This description of Stanton Harcourt is almost wholly fanciful. The old tower was erected about the time of Edward IV., and is fifty-four feet high. Below it is the chapel. Pope occupied the uppermost room; and as Dryden recorded Roscoe, ix. 105. A view of the Tower is given in the title-page to this volume. where parts of his Æneid were translated, and wrote the first lines of his translation on a window at his kinsman's house at Chesterton, Huntingdonshire, so Pope inscribed on a pane of red stained glass, in his lofty chamber at Stanton Harcourt, a notification that "IN THE YEAR 1718 ALEXANDER POPE FINISHED HERE THE FIFTH VOLUME OF HOMER." The glass has since been taken out of the casement, and is preserved at Nuneham Courtney, the seat of the noble family of Harcourt. Pope passed several months in this retreat, occupying his chambers in the old tower, and he was occasionally visited by Gay, from the neighbouring seat of Lord Harcourt at Cokethorpe. An incident of a touching and romantic character is related in one of these communications; and the contrast between the letters of Pope and those of Lady Mary cannot be better illustrated than by the story of the rustic lovers killed by lightning. The poet sent an account of the affecting occurrence from Stanton Harcourt: "I have a mind (he says) to fill the rest of this paper with an accident that happened just under my eyes, and has made a great impression upon me. I have just passed part of this summer at an old romantic seat of my Lord Harcourt's, which he lent me. It overlooks a common field, where, under the shade of a haycock, sat two lovers, as constant as ever were found in romance, beneath a spreading beech. The name of the one (let it sound as it will) was John Hewet; of the other, Sarah Drew. John was a well-set man, about five-and-twenty, Sarah a brown woman of eighteen. John had for several months borne the labour of the day in the same field with Sarah; when she milked, it was his morning and evening charge to bring the cows to her pail. Their love was the talk, but not the scandal of the whole neighbourhood; for all they aimed at was the blameless possession of each other in marriage. It was but this very morning that he had obtained her parents' consent, and it was but till the next week that they were to wait to be happy. Perhaps this very day, in the intervals of their work, they were talking of their wedding-clothes; and John was now matching several kinds of poppies and field-flowers to her complexion, to make her a present of knots for the day. While they were thus employed (it was on the last of July), a terrible storm of thunder and lightning arose, that drove the labourers to what shelter the trees or hedges afforded. Sarah, frighted and out of breath, sank on a haycock, and John (who never separated from her) sate by her side, having raked two or THE RUSTIC LOVERS KILLED BY LIGHTNING. 187 three heaps together to secure her. Immediately there was heard so loud a crack as if heaven had burst asunder. The labourers, all solicitous for each other's safety, called to one another: those that were nearest our lovers, hearing no answer, stept to the place where they lay; they first saw a little smoke, and after, this faithful pair ;John, with one arm about his Sarah's neck, and the other held over her face, as if to screen her from the lightning. They were struck dead, and already grown stiff and cold in this tender posture. There was no mark or discolouring on their bodies, only that Sarah's eyebrow was a little singed, and a small spot between her breasts. They were buried the next day in one grave, in the parish of Stanton Harcourt, in Oxfordshire; where my Lord Harcourt, at my request, has erected a monument over them. Of the following epitaphs which I made, the critics have chosen the godly one: I like neither, but wish you had been in England to have done this office better; I think 'twas what you could not have refused me on so moving an occasion. "When Eastern lovers feed the fun'ral fire, I. "Think not, by rig'rous judgment seiz❜d, IL "Live well, and fear no sudden fate: Alike 'tis justice, soon or late, Mercy alike to kill or save. Virtue unmov'd can hear the call, And face the flash that melts the ball. "Upon the whole, I can't think these people unhappy. The greatest happiness, next to living as they would have done, was to die as they did. The greatest honour people of this low degree could have, was to be remembered on a little monument; unless you will give them another that of being honoured with a tear from the finest eyes in the world. I know you have tenderness; you must have it; it is the very emanation of good sense and virtue; the finest minds, like the finest metals, dissolve the easiest." This letter was originally sent to Martha Blount, who pro bably echoed the poet's tenderness and praised his sentimentalism. Lady Mary replied in a characteristic style: "I must applaud your good nature, in supposing that your pastoral lovers (vulgarly called haymakers) would have lived in everlasting joy and harmony, if the lightning had not interrupted their scheme of happiness. I see no reason to imagine, that John Hughes and Sarah Drew were either wiser or more virtuous than their neighbours. That a well-set man of twenty-five should have a fancy to marry a brown woman of eighteen, is nothing marvellous; and I cannot help thinking that, had they married, their lives would have passed in the common track with their fellow-parishioners. His endeavouring to shield her from a storm was a natural action, and what he would certainly have done for his horse, if he had been in the same situation. Neither am I of opinion that their sudden death was the reward of their mutual virtue. You know the Jews were reproved for thinking a village destroyed by fire more wicked than those that had escaped the thunder. Time and chance happen to all men. Since you desire me to try my skill in an epitaph, I think the following lines perhaps more just, though not so poetical as yours: "Here lies John Hughes and Sarah Drew; Perhaps you'll say, what's that to you? 4 The letter to Miss Blount, describing the fatal accident, is dated Aug. 6, and in it Pope says he met the funeral of the unfortunate couple the evening he arrived at Stanton Harcourt. The letter to Lady Mary is not dated till Sept. 1, and in this he describes the accident as having happened "just under his eyes." But further, the poet, when publishing his letters in 1737, inserts this same description under date of Aug. 9, and heads it, "From Mr. Gay to Mr. F" He had then quarrelled with Lady Mary; he would not acknowledge her as a correspondent, nor even leave the letter, as in other instances, without a name; but he dexterously insinuated an insult, by wishing her to believe that he had sent her as original the copy of a letter written by Gay to Fortescue. The same motive, we suspect, led him to prefix the Duke of Buckingham's name to the letter describing the gothic mansion. |