tremity. The Church from its Churchyard looks down into the very River, which is fenced from it by a brick wall. The Ouse flows here, you cannot without study tell in which direction, fringed with gross reedy herbage and bushes; and is of the blackness of Acheron, streaked with foul metallic glitterings and plays of colour. For a short space downwards here, the banks of it are fully visible; the western row of houses being somewhat the shorter, as already hinted: instead of houses here, you have a rough wooden balustrade, and the black Acheron of an Ouse River used as a washing-place or watering-place for cattle. The old Church, suitable for such a population, stands yet as it did in Cromwell’s time, except perhaps the steeple and pews; the flagstones in the interior are worn deep with the pacing of many generations. The steeple is visible from several miles distance; a sharp high spire, piercing far up from amid the willow-trees. The country hereabouts has all a clammy look, clayey and boggy; the produce of it, whether bushes and trees, or grass and crops, gives you the notion of something lazy, dropsical, gross.—This is St. Ives, a most ancient Cattle-market by the shores of the sable Ouse, on the edge of the Fen-country; where, among other things that happened, Oliver Cromwell passed five years of his existence as a Farmer and Grazier. Who the primitive Ives himself was, remains problematic; Camden says he was ‘Ivo a Persian’;—surely far out of his road here! From him however, Phantasm as he is (being indeed nothing,—except an ancient ‘stone-coffin,’ with bones, and tatters of ‘bright cloth’ in it, accidentally ploughed up in this spot, and acted on by opaque human wonder, miraculous ‘dreams,’ and the ‘Abbot of Ramsey’),[1] Church and Village indisputably took rise and name; about the Year 1000 or later;—and have stood ever since; being founded on Cattle-dealing and the firm Earth withal. Ives or Yves, the worthy Frenchman, Bishop of Chartres in the time of our
- ↑ His Legend (De Beato Yvone, Episcopo Persâ), with due details, in Bollandus, Acta Sanctorum, Junii, tom. ii, (Venetiis, 1742), pp. 288-92.
