Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI.
VISIT TO TONG CASTLE AND CHURCH—BOSCOBEL AND CHARLES'S OAK—CHANCES' GLASS-WORKS.
HAVING made so recently a walk among the muddy and sooty occupations of the brick-makers and nailers. I thought it would be an agreeable alternation for writer and reader to make the next excursion among rural and historical sceneries. So about the middle of November, on a day brimful of the rich glory of an autumn sun, Capern and myself mounted staff, and commenced our walk at the antique, interesting village of Shiffnal, which a traveller might think indigenous to Scandinavia both in name and aspect. But before he has walked half the length of one of its narrow and winding streets, he will find that the people speak English, and that the children are as young at five or ten as those of the most modern-looking town at the same age. Then there is a harmony in the whole aspect of the place which few villages of the same size present in these latter days. The great centre structure is the massive old church, evidently the growth of centuries, standing in a graveyard probably containing more inhabitants than the living population can number. It is truly an impressive old building, wearing its venerable antiquity with hardly a court plaster of modern improvement to cover a wrinkle. And all the buildings near and around seem to have assimilated their faces to its aged countenance. You do not see here, as elsewhere frequently, a gray-headed patriarch of eighty in boy's clothes decked with bright buttons of brass or steel. But the old church stands up among many companions of its younger years—among which are several half-timber houses with their black beams carved by the best carpenter's genius two centuries ago.
After an hour's walk about the church and village, we started for that celebrated hiding-place of Charles II, Boscobel. Passed Aston Hall, a comfortable-looking mansion, that showed a comely and happy face in the setting sun-light. Two splendid chesnut trees stand like sentinels in front of the house, and their leaves had drunk in so much sunshine that the green had turned halfway to gold. In the park, near the road, stood the most perfectly symmetrical oak I ever saw, and nature alone had made its toilet. There was no sign of the woodman's axe, or hedgebill, or any kind of artificial training. The whole contour of trunk and branches was all a connoisseur could wish or imagine. It resembled a head of red clover in full bloom. The base of the entourage was perfectly level, declining at no section of the circle Indeed, no head of clover was ever set upon its stem more centrally. The spread was full forty feet in diameter, the leaves were well tinted but few had fallen; so that it made a perfect picture for an artist. The park wall for half a mile was of apparently hewn red sandstone laid in mortar, which would now cost a guinea a yard in America. Indeed, sixty rods of it would buy a large farm in Illinois. The road led through pleasant scenery, and was in itself a striking feature of the landscape. On each side was a wall of shrubbery, lined with firs in their perennial dress, and other trees in their autumnal foliage, mingling all the tints of the three seasons in a happy blending. The wild rose and the hawthorn, having no flowers to show, festooned the hedges with a thousand necklaces of their red bead-berries, so that with the silver glimmerings of white birch and other leaves that shone brightly in the grouping, the whole decked out November with a cheery adornment.
We soon came to a little white village, at some distance back from the road, and when abreast of it found that it was only a house with seven gables, and of more ells and ends for men, and stables for horses of an indefinite number. It was a large educational establishment for training horses for the turf and chase. We were told that frequently more than twenty boys or pupil-teachers might be seen at once giving these high-bred animals morning lessons to fit them for their course of unproductive life. Near this training college was a large farm, belonging to Mr. Eyke, which seemed to have been very highly cultivated after the most improved methods. We noticed an unusual extent of land put to turnips. Field after field of them were being gathered, and acres covered as with great ant-heaps showed the luxuriant production of this root crop. These heaps were made with geometrical precision as to line and circumference, at but a few paces apart. We watched the process which was rather unusual. The turnips were first covered with dried fern leaves brought to the field in large wagon-loads; being a substitute for straw both as a matter of economy and of better material for the purpose. The whole was then covered with earth, dug up around the heap. A field of twenty acres covered with these little conical mounds makes a pleasant sight to man and beast, especially to the latter. We tarried so long at Shiffnal, and sauntered so slowly along the road afterwards, that it was nearly sun-down when we reached the little village of Tong. Finding it was still three miles to Boscobel, and that there was slight prospect of getting lodgings there for the night, we concluded that a bird in hand was worth two in the bush, and were glad to turn into "The Bell," the only inn the pair of Tongs have between them; for there are two villages of that name adjoining each other. We found it a very comfortable house, and the host intelligent and ready and able to give interesting information on many subjects of inquiry. Then, although it was a prim two-story brick building in front, it had been set to an unique old cottage house, which perhaps did the state some service in the day and extremity of Charles II, when he was in this neighbourhood. We had the parlour of this little cottage section of the establishment all to ourselves. It had but one window, but that was bowed around the whole of the west end of the room. Then there was a genuine brick pavement for the floor, and the broad beam overhead was but nine inches above the mantel-shelf at the chimney end. On it stood a platoon of well-polished brass candlesticks on each side of their colour-sergeant, which was an old-fashioned crimping machine, or a candlestick of the same height, with its conical extinguisher brought to a right angle with the upright tube, like the top joint of a Thames steamer passing under a bridge. I never saw one before of the kind, and thought it a very simple and admirable contrivance, and should like to see one of the old-fashioned grandmothers crimping her cap at it. In addition to flowers in the bow window, and the brass candlesticks standing on the mantel-piece, one whole side of the room was hung with brilliant parts of two or three harnesses, making a considerable show of silver-plated ornaments. In a word, it was as unique a room as an amateur of such characteristics could wish to meet with in any English wayside inn. So we enjoyed our tea-supper with a relish which our walk alone would not have given to it.
Having the whole evening on our hands, we sauntered out to see the village of Tong and its church by night. We soon overtook a roadful of the living victims of the shambles clattering along, in happy unconsciousness of their fate, to the butcher. What a happy provision in their nature that these honest-eyed, innocent creatures are never visited with thoughts of their future; that no presentiment of Smithfield, or of any other butcher's field of slaughter, ever troubles a moment of their short lives either in the pasture or on the road to the axe or the knife! It was an average detachment, consisting of well-fed sheep and young bullocks and heifers, the latter leading the way and always inclined to take the wrong one when a cross-road was reached. It was quite dark, but Capern caught a glimpse of several real Devonshire heifers leading the van. He knew they were Devonshires; he could tell them by their breath, and he dashed through the sheep to pull one of them by the ear "for auld lang syne." But the coy heifer, not gifted with the intuition he claimed to himself as a Devonshire man, declined his caressing pinch of the ear, and darted aside, giving the Devonian poet an admonitory switch with her tail. The drover, too, an intelligent young man, was proud of his Devonshires, and said his master. Sir Thomas Bowher, kept no other cattle on his estate.
As the tired herd moved too slowly for us, we made our way gently through them and walked on to the village. We found it fast asleep in the dark, with scarcely a light to be seen at eight o'clock. The gate of the churchyard was open, however, and we felt our way up the walk with a staff, and traced out the contour of the old church up as far as the roof. Its windows had no speculation in their cold and silent eyes; and one could hardly fancy that the departed spirits of the slumbering families entombed within those walls would wish to visit by night that still and solemn darkness. Still our nature is human in spite of philosophy, and we had to confess to each other a little of the old boyhood feeling about ghosts as we put our faces to the windows and tried to recognize objects within. After making a walk through the village without meeting man, woman, child, or dog, we returned to "The Bell." On our way we witnessed a phenomenon which we should have missed if we had remained indoors for the evening. We found ourselves, apparently, midway between two vast burning prairies. Their red and rising flames seemed to be approaching us from the east and west. Both horizons were lighted half-way up the heavens with the lurid waves, which arose and fell and twisted and crested themselves with the fleecy clouds. The sight was really sublime when invested with the fancy that we were between two vast prairie fires gradually nearing each other and consuming the intervening space. But it was only the nightly performance of the Eastern and Western Lights of the two black countries of Staffordshire and Shropshire. The two great armies of furnaces and forges were apparently drawn up in lines vis à vis, but not in hostile array. It was a mere field-night of their practice; and all the parks of their heavy ordnance fired only blank cartridges into the heavens. Still, no performance at Aldershott or Vincennes could equal the spectacle which we witnessed from the green border-land between these two regions of fire and smoke that seem marching against each other with all their unlimbered artillery and lighted matches by night.
In good season next morning we set out on our day's walk and exploration. The weather was beautiful, and all the scenery was rich with the golden glory of autumn. We went first to Tong Castle, a large, turreted, Tudor-like mansion, standing back from the road about a third of a mile. It seemed at first sight from this distance a misnomer to call it a castle in a fortified sense or position, for it apparently stood in a great and level meadow flanked with park trees. But as we approached we found that it was girdled by a water-wall more insurmountable in its day than a steep and lofty precipice of rock. A little artificial river had been brought from a long way off in a channel that deepened and widened as it neared the castle. Whether nature had helped the work or not, it must have been a prodigious undertaking and achievement in its day. Two rivers seemed to have been united before the west front of the building, forming a crescent basin or bay deep enough, when full, to float a frigate. The water had just been drawn off, and loads of fish of almost every name and size known to inland rivers had been taken. Pike or pickerel as large as the stoutest floppers caught in Lake Ontario had been left stranded and splashing in the mud. Although the castle must have once been nearly surrounded by one or two artificial rivers, we found the channel on the south side for a long distance not only dry, but overgrown with trees which must have been a century old. Some of the grandest beeches I ever saw lined the walks above this deep ravine. And several of the largest trunks were fluted and twisted like some of the pillars in Durham Cathedral. At the head of the ravine and almost on a level with the bottom of it was a little stone cabin set into the side of the declivity, and called the "Hermitage." The cell had two apartments, and a tall man could scarcely stretch himself on the floor of either except diagonally. Here a fanatic, by name Smith, lived invisible for several years, and tested all the romance of a hermit's life in this damp, dark, miserable hole, when he emerged into the broad light of the sun and into the sight and companionship of his fellow-men. But he was succeeded in the tenancy of this wretched place by a poor weakly man with a wife and several children, who when lying down must have covered every square foot of the floor of both apartments. Here the poor man died, and was lifted up from among his pale and sickly children and carried to the common hermitage of the grave, and had as large space allotted to his last sleep as the lord of Tong Castle occupies in the churchyard.
The gateway of the park is one of the most elaborately carved works of the kind that I ever saw. The pillars and façade on each side must have cost the sculptor several years of assiduous labour. The cords and their tassels were done to the life. And a bee-hive, with bees as lightly winged as they can be in stone, are good specimens of carving. But, what was as useful as interesting, the old castle preceding the present structure was literally lithographed with every tower and turret by the chisel in the face of one wing of the wall that flanks the gateway. George Durant bought the castle and estate of the Pierrepont family in 1764, it is said out of the loot of Havannah, embracing a vast amount of ladies' jewelry, plate, and other private personalties which proved that British wars in the West as well as in the East Indies, were carried on pretty much on the same footing. But, as no property in the world is so apt to take to itself wings and fly away so suddenly and so far as possessions thus won, this Durant realized much of the natural experience of such riches. One night a wing of the castle was blown up by gunpowder, it was always supposed, by one of his own sons. Still, he must have been a man of cultivated taste, as the grounds, walks, and trees of the park, and a great variety of picturesque embellishments amply prove. The Earl of Bradford is now the owner of the estate, and the castle has become the summer residence of two Wolverhampton gentlemen who occupy it by turns.
Tong Church! Did one in five hundred of all the Americans who have visited Haddon Hall in Derbyshire ever visit this village Westminster Abbey of all the Verons? It is doubtful. It is even possible that I am the first and only American who ever saw it. Even a man well read in the general history of the country will be astonished on entering this miniature cathedral, for such it is and looks in its interior and exterior aspects. In the first place, it is doubtful if any other village or provincial church in England contains within its walls so many beautiful and costly monuments to the memory of so many noble families as this little Westminster. You see here how and when these various families intersected with each other in wedlock and interweaved the new branches they put forth as the result of the union. Here you may read their histories, their graces, and virtues if you can decipher monumental Latin. The first and probably oldest tomb is that of Sir Fowke de Pembrugge (Pembroke?), who died in 1408, not quite a century before America was discovered. He was the last of his long line who owned Tong Castle and reigned lord of the manor. The Haddon Hall Vernon, Sir William, married his daughter and heiress and her inheritance at Tong. He died in 1460, as an inscription on his brass tomb opposite the pulpit affirms. A little further on toward the later centuries we see how and when another family was grafted into the Pembrugge-Vernon stock, or that of the On-Stanley-on branch of English aristocracy. Sir Thomas Stanley married a Vernon and died in 1576. Few monuments even in Westminster Abbey equal the tomb of this member of the Stanley family. He lies side by side with his Lady Margaret, and both effigies are as lifelike as the best sculptor could make them in marble. His hair is black, and face, form, and armour are vividly human in appearance. The imagery, embracing symbols of every device and significance that the artist thought might illustrate the life and virtues of his subject, are exquisitely carved. Indeed, if any mercenary standards may be applied to such works, such a monument would now cost at least £10,000 to produce it On every hand stand these tombs wrought in marble, brass, or alabaster, erected to commemorate the different lords of Tong Castle and Manor. What may be taken for the "Henry Seventh's Chapel" of this little Westminster is the "Golden Chapel" built by Sir Henry Vernon for his tomb and memory. He and his lady lie in effigies on their backs with devotional aspect, as if their marble lips were petrified in the middle of a prayer. He died in 1515; and yet hardly any feature of this beautiful little chapel has been defaced by time or man. Its delicate ornamental work is bright and radiant with its original gilding.
There are seventeen of such monuments in the chancel, around the pulpit, and in this Golden Chapel, several of which are of the highest rank of sculpture. The inscriptions are also of an order of merit far above the average standard of epitaphic literature. The tomb of the youngest bears a proud tribute to the blue blood of the Norman. Elizabeth Pierrepont dies at the age of eleven, "the pride of her parents, the joy of her family, the only daughter of Gervaise Pierrepont, Esq., Lord of the Manor of Tong, the grandson of Robert Pierrepont, Earl of Kingston, a gallant soldier who fell a victim to his loyalty in defending King Charles I from his rebellious subjects. He was a descendant of Robert Pierrepont, a companion in arms of William the Conqueror, and whose family is still extant in Normandy."
The foregoing is a sample of historical information that these monuments impart to the reader. See how much of it is condensed in this tribute to a girl who died at the age of eleven. It would give additional interest to the thoughtful reader of these "testimonals to departed worth" if he could really believe that it was recognized and respected in the lifetime of the deceased. Here they are all brave, pure, generous, and good. Here are two of the eight lines dedicated to William Skeffington, one of the old county names:
He died in 1550, and his monument stands on the left of the altar. On the right is that of his mother. Lady Davnsay, honoured with the same number of lines, one of which is—
"An esquire he was right hardye in the fealde,
And faithful to his prince in quiet tyme of peace."
"An ere to Blind, a lyme to Lame she was."
Sir William Vernon, once Military High Chancellor of England, and his Lady Margaret, and a family of twelve children have their figures engraven in brass plates set into a marble slab, all begging mercy instead of bragging of their virtues and riches and honours to living men. They appear to have been a devotional family in their day and way. Every visiter at Haddon Hall must remember the rude words cut deep into the stone over the right postern: "God save the Vernons!"
Here Sir William says:
"God be praised for his mercies."
Lady Vernon:
"Jesus, son of David, be merciful unto us."
First child:
"Lord. I have lifted up my soul to thee."
Second child:
"Son of God, remember me."
Third child:
"I have put my trust in the Lord, and he will deliver me."
Fourth child:
The epitaph of Sir Thomas Stanley is supposed to have been written by Shakespeare, who was not ten years old when that nobleman died. The evidence upon which this impression was founded is not very clear; perhaps it comes from some affinity to the sentiment and diction of "The cloud-capp'd towers" and so forth of the great poet. The half of the epitaph inscribed on the front of the monument reads thus:"Jesus, son of Mary, of thy pity be merciful unto us."
"Not Monumental Stone preserves our fame,
Nor Skye-aspiring Pyramids our name,
The memory of him for whom this stands
Shall outlive Marble and Defacer's Hands;
When all to Tyme's Consumption shall be given,
Stanley for whom this stands shall stand in Heaven."
The Great Bell hung on the rudest frame in the tower is a rival in size and weight to the Big Tom of Lincoln, or the mellow thunderer of Westminster. It never could have been turned on its eccentric axis without throwing down the steeple. It was the gift of the Henry Vernon who built the Golden Chapel; and as the Latin inscription around the upper rim reads, "Caused this bell to be made 1518 to the praise of Almighty God, of the Blessed Mary, and of Saint Bartholomew."
The master of the village school, who had made the antiquities of the Church his study, accompanied us and described them with the lively interest of an amateur. He had collected a little history of them, and deciphered and translated inscriptions which would cost even the best of scholars much time and trouble to make out. These, and extracts from Dugdale and other early authors he had transcribed in a manuscript book, which he generously loaned to me for the notice I wished to make of the building and its monuments. He took us to his school, which was a great stone martin-box standing on four posts, with a stairway at one end ascending to the door. The room was full of children, rural, ruddy, and happy as birds, and looked as much surprised on seeing such strangers step suddenly on to their perch. Our visit to this little village, which we seemed to have stumbled upon by accident, was very enjoyable and gave us the satisfaction of an unexpected discovery.
From Tong we continued our walk to the chief point of interest we had in view when we left home; or Boscobel. The weather continued fine, and we made our way first by cross-roads and by-paths, and then over meadow and pasture fields, until we came in sight of a green mound wearing a crest of tall lime trees. From this we had our first sight of that house so celebrated in English history and so vitally connected with the life-and-death crisis in the experience of Charles II. As we approached it, we saw "Charles's Oak" a few rods distant in a meadow adjoining the garden. It is a thrifty middle-aged tree, perhaps of two centuries' growth, and may have come from an acorn of that monarch of the forest that sheltered Charles. This, then, was Boscobel, the scene of such romance, heroism, loyalty, and other noble qualities as will always command admiration even from those who condemn the cause in which such virtues are exercised. This was the theatre of a drama that makes a dating-event in the life of a nation. About break of day on Thursday morning. Sept. 4th, 1651, a small party on horseback rode up softly and silently to the White Ladies, a monastic mansion of the Giffard family, about half a mile from Boscobel. All the night long they had spurred their jaded horses along cross-roads and by-roads from the disastrous battle at Worcester. Cromwell's troopers were scouring the country, cutting down or capturing the fugitives. Scotch and English. One of these bands was close upon the heels of this flying party, "My kingdom for a covert, for a cave!" might well have been the cry of that man of the longest locks and of fretted and blood-stained insignia of royalty. Not a moment was to be lost in finding a hiding-place for the tired and hunted King. Colonel Roscarrock sent a servant boy of the house to Boscobel for William Penderel, and another was sent for Richard his brother, who lived near at Hobbal Grange. They were two of five sturdy yeomen brothers, real hearts of English oak, men which "such another island" would not buy from their religion and their king, both of which were equally obnoxious to the Puritans. In a few minutes they were brought into the parlour by the Earl of Derby, who was one of the party, and introduced by him to their unfortunate sovereign, or rather inversely. The Earl pointed to Charles and said to William, "This is the King; thou must have a care of him, and preserve him as thou didst me." For the Earl of Derby had already tested the hospitality and security of Boscobel as a hiding-place, and it was he who recommended it to the King as they rode from St. Martin's Gate, Worcester, on the eve of that fatal battle. The Earl had raised a force in Lancashire in support of the royal cause, but he had been routed in an engagement with the Roundheads at Wigan. With the remnant of his troop he set out to join the royal army at Worcester, chased and harassed by Cromwell's bands which were scouring the country. When in this vicinity he heard of Boscobel, and here found a hiding and resting covert for a breathing space of time. He had tested William Penderel's fidelity and the security of a little apartment which had been constructed on purpose for concealing hunted persons, such as Popish priests when outlawed. To this refuge he had commended the King, and to it they had journeyed all night long from Worcester. Whilst waiting for the arrival of the two Penderels, the King had been advised to rub his hands on the back of the chimney and then his face with them in order to disguise himself. Some one also cut off his long locks, and "His Majesty," says Thomas Blount, one of his faithful followers, "having put off his blue ribbon, buff coat, and other princely ornaments, put on a noggen coarse shirt of Edward Martin's, who lived in the house, and Richard Penderel's green suit and leather doublet, but had not time to be so exactly disguised as he was afterwards; for both William and Richard Penderel did advertise the company to make haste away, in regard there was a troop of rebels commanded by Colonel Ashenhurst quartered at Cotsall, but three miles distant; some of which troop came to the house within half an hour after the company were gone."
"Richard Penderel conducted the King out at a back door, unknown to most of the company, except some of the lords and Colonel Roscarrock, who waited on his Majesty into the back side, and there with sad hearts took leave of him."
It must indeed have been an affecting moment for both parties. They mounted their horses, and rode off northward with the view of joining General Leslie, who was retreating with the main body of the Scotch horse. But they were soon intercepted in front and rear, and the Earl of Derby, Lord Talbot, and several others were captured. The former was tried and executed at Bolton in the following month. Richard Penderel took the King into an adjacent wood belonging to Boscobel, called Spring Coppice, while his brothers William, Humphrey, and George acted as scouts, watching all approaches and signs of danger and reporting to the concealed fugitive from time to time whether the coast were clear or clouded. It was about sunrise when he was conducted into the obscurest part of the coppice, "when," says Blount, "the heavens wept bitterly at these calamities; insomuch that the thickest tree in the wood was not able to keep his Majesty dry, nor was there anything for him to sit on; wherefore Richard went to Francis Yates's house (a trusty neighbour who married his wife's sister), where he borrowed a blanket, which he folded and laid on the ground for his Majesty to sit on. At the same time Richard spoke to the goodwife Yates to provide some victuals and bring it into the wood at a place he appointed her. She presently made ready a mess of milk and some butter and eggs, and brought them to his Majesty in the wood; who being a little surprised to see the woman (no good concealer of a secret) said cheerfully to her, 'Good woman, can you be faithful to a distressed Cavalier?' She answered, 'Yes, sir. I will dye rather than discover you;' with which answer his Majesty was well satisfied."
All the day long he lay wet and cold in this concealment, listening for the tread and tramp of his eager and relentless pursuers, who were scouring the country round for him. As the night came on he resolved to make his way into Wales, where he could better elude his hunters, taking brave and faithful Richard Penderel with him as guide. Before they set out on the long foot journey. Richard took him into his house at Hobbal Grange, where his old mother gladly assisted in giving the King a proper outfit for his flight. They turned him into a stout wood-chopper, carrying a wood-bill in his hands, and ostensibly looking for a job in that line of labour. Wil. Jones was the name he assumed, probably thinking it would serve him best in Wales. After taking a little refreshment, the best the old mother and young wife could set out upon their three-legged table, the two started about nine o'clock, resolved to go as far as Madeley that night, a place within a mile of the Severn. Richard had a trusty friend residing in this village by the name of Woolf. Before reaching his house they met with a serious and dangerous mishap. On passing Evelin Mill, Richard accidentally let a gate clap to loudly, whereupon the miller, who was a loyalist and had served noble refugees from the Worcester battle with him, rushed out and shouted, "Who is there?" Richard not knowing the miller's politics, dashed off with the King over a little brook which they were obliged to wade through. This made walking painful to the King, as his shoes were filled with water and gravel. The night was very dark, and, as he oftentimes pleasantly remarked, he would have lost his guide had it not been for the rustling of Richard's calfskin breeches. They arrived at Woolf's house in Madeley about midnight, and Richard knocked them up from their beds. The daughter came first to the door, and without a moment's hesitation as to her loyalty, he told her the King was there, who was immediately welcomed to their fireside. After some refreshment, they resolved themselves into a committee of ways and means, and discussed the best mode of escape. The Parliamentary bands guarded the Severn at various points, and some of these troopers had quartered recently at Woolf's house. It had no place of concealment that could be trusted, and the King was in greater danger than at Boscobel. So as it was very unsafe for him to lie down to sleep in the house, they took him into the barn, and made him a bed on the hayloft. There he continued all next day, while Richard and Woolf kept guard and watch. The latter sent a trusty servant to coast up and down the Severn, to see if it might be crossed without danger, but he found that not only all the bridges were secured but all the boats seized, and the strictest watch kept up along the river to intercept the royal fugitive and his companions. Thus the way to Wales was thoroughly barred against him. The only alternative left was to retrace his steps to Boscobel. So, when darkness settled down again upon hunted and hunters, he was taken again into Woolf's house and prepared for his return journey. A part of this preparation was to discolour his hands more fully with walnut tree leaves, which Mrs. Woolf rubbed upon them until they looked more like a real woodman's. At about eleven o'clock, when all was still and dark, the King and Richard stole out of the back door and stepped off into the night with low-whispered thanks to the host of the farm-house at parting
They reached the wood at Boscobel about three o'clock on the morning of Saturday, and there Richard left his charge whilst he went stealthily to reconnoitre about the house to see if it was free from soldiers and other dangers. He found in it another fugitive guest, Colonel William Carlis, who, Blount says, "had seen the last man killed at Worcester, and who had made his way to Boscobel for concealment, as he resided in the neighbourhood and was an old acquaintance of William Penderel." Richard told him who was waiting in the wood for shelter and safety, and he and the two brothers went out and found the King sitting on the root of a tree, and conducted him into the house, where, says Blount, in his simple narrative, "He did eat bread and cheese heartily, and William Penderel's wife made his Majesty a posset of thin milk and small beer, and got ready some warm water to wash his feet, not only extreme dirty but much galled with travel. The Colonel pulled off his Majesty's shoes, which were full of gravel, and stockens which were wet, and there being no other shoes in the house that would fit his Majesty, the good wife put some hot embers in those to dry them, whilst his Majesty's feet were washing and his stockens shifted."
And now comes the most touching scene in this bitter experience, and I wonder no painter has made it a subject for his canvas. After the long night walk from Madeley with soaked shoes full of gravel, the Boscobel house was deemed unsafe even for an hour's sleep in a garret bed. So, after his bread and cheese, the King was conducted back into the wood, where William and Richard helped the two wearied and hunted fugitives up into "a thick-leafed oak," and raised up to them some more bread and cheese. They also brought a cushion for the King to sit on, "And the Colonel humbly desired his Majesty (who had taken little or no rest the two preceding nights) to seat himself as easily as he could in the tree and rest his head on the Colonel's lap, who was watchful that his Majesty should not fall, and in this posture his Majesty slumbered away some part of the day, and bore all these hardships and afflictions with incomparable patience."
This unaffected description presents a picture which an eminent artist might paint to the life. The imagination does it involuntarily. Who cannot see it? The rising sun throws it into vivid perspective. In the encircling arms of the oak, on its gnarled shoulders, are nestled the two men. Remember the garb of Charles—the coarse noggen shirt of Martin the servant, and Richard Penderel's leather doublet, his face still begrimed with soot, and his hands stained with walnut leaves by goodwife Woolf at Madeley. Not two consecutive hours of sleep had closed his eyes since the morning of that disastrous battle at Worcester. Two nights long he had been walking in the cold and rain, wet and wearied. There he now sits in the tree with his head in his companion's lap, who is kepeing his eyes and ears open to every sight and sound, though both are heavy and longing for rest. "To be or not to be perchance to dream." The outlawed King is dreaming now; a painter would catch the dream playing upon that pallid cheek. Why not catch it? The world would recognize and interpret it. Not one of all the pictures that have been painted of "Charles Stewart" would produce such an impression.
When the night came on with "the blanket of the dark," the fugitives returned to the house, and William Penderel put the King to rest in that large square chest at the lid of which we now stood. It is a kind of false apartment several feet square, with an eye seemingly closed to the lower lid, but admitting a little light and just a glimpse of the outside world to the inmate. It is a kind of hollow notch over a buttery or some culinary apartment, with only an entrance on the top through one of the floor-boards, which makes such close joint with the rest that no one would suspect that it was not nailed as fast to the joist as they. Here William Penderel had put the Earl of Derby on his retreat to Worcester. Here doubtless he had concealed many other fugitives before the Earl; for it was built for the express purpose of hiding the hunted. The King found this place of rest and concealment both easier and safer than the oak, and he began to breathe freer from alarm. Says the same historian," His Majesty, esteeming himself in some better security, permitted William Penderel to shave him, and cut the hair of his head as short at the top as the scissors would do it, but leaving some about the ears according to the mode of the country. The King bade William burn the hair which he cut off, but William was only disobedient in that, for he kept a good part of it, wherewith he has since pleasured some persons of honor, and is kept as a civil relique."
But his sense of rest and safety was of short duration. On the very day that he was thus taken into the Boscobel house, Humphrey, one of the sturdy brothers, went to Shiffnal, only four or five miles distant, and there met "a Colonel of the rebels" who had just come from Worcester in pursuit of the King, and had heard that he had been at the White Ladies. As Humphrey lived in the immediate neighbourhood of that place, the Colonel examined him very closely, threatening the penalty denounced against any one who should harbour or conceal the King, and offering a reward of a thousand pounds for discovering him. But the stout-hearted yeoman stood fast to his loyalty, which braved threats and spurned a thousand pounds in his poverty as easily as a thousand farthings. So the Colonel could make nothing of him. But he might make all he wished of some one else with such threats and bribes. When Humphrey told the King on his return of his adventure at Shiffnal, he began to feel himself in an unsafe position, even with such faithful men around him. That night, however, he enjoyed the luxury of sleeping on a pallet laid upon the floor of the secret apartment; and the old mother of the family, whom he called My Dame Joan, had served up some chickens for his supper, "a dainty he had not lately been acquainted with." The next day was Sunday, and he ventured out into the little arbour now standing, as it did then, on a mound in the garden. Here he sat and read, while the Penderel brothers were holding watch and ward at all the approaches to the house. In the meantime John had been sent to Moseley, about five miles from Boscobel, to apprise Lord Wilmot of the King's whereabouts and condition. But he had changed his quarters from Moseley to Bentley near Walsall, where he was the guest of Colonel Lane. It had already been arranged that he should go as a servant or companion to Jane Lane to Bristol, as she had obtained a pass from "the rebels" to make a journey to that seaport. Mr. Whitgreaves, the host at Moseley, went on with John to Bentley, and there it was planned that the King should be brought to that house of refuge and take Lord Wilmot's place on the saddle with Jane Lane.
On the same Sunday night, therefore, the King, being too footsore to walk, was mounted upon Humphrey's old mill-horse, taken from the pasture, "with a pitiful old saddle and a worse bridle." The stout-hearted honest Penderels—William, John, Richard, Humphrey, and George—and their brother-in-law, Francis Yates, made his bodyguard, each with a wood-bill or pikestaff on his shoulder, and some of them with pistols in their pockets. Two marched before, one on each side of the horse, and two at a little distance behind, determined to do or die in the King's defence should he be waylaid and attacked. It was near midnight when they set out on this hazardous march, and it was very dark and rainy. The old mill-horse was a lank, hard-boned, rough-going beast, and the King complained that "it was the heaviest dull jade he ever rode on." Humphrey, the owner, who was walking by his side, defended his faithful beast, it is said, in the smart rejoinder: "My liege! can you blame the horse to go heavily when he has the weight of three kingdoms on his back?" At Penford Mill, about two miles from Moseley, on the advice of his guides, the King dismounted, and they proceeded the rest of the way by a private and safer path, and reached the appointed meeting-place in a little grove near the house. Here the Penderels left their royal charge in the hands of Lord Wilmot and the others waiting to receive him. William, the special hero of the band of brothers, with Humphrey and George, had fallen back and were returning to Boscobel with the horse, unknown to the King and without waiting to be thanked by him for a devotion and loyalty seldom equalled by any other example in English history. The other brothers, on coming up to the company awaiting him in the grove, and while he was kissing Lord Wilmot on the cheek, were also retiring without apparently expecting or wishing a word of thanks from the sovereign they had served so faithfully. But before they had got beyond hearing, he called them back and said: "My troubles make me forget myself: I thank you all." And he gave them his hand to kiss.
Blount's quaint and simple description of Charles's dress and appearance, when thus transferred to Lord Wilmot and his host at Moseley, presents a closing picture in these dissolving views of his personality. "His Majesty's attire was then a leather doublet, a pair of green breeches, and a jump coat (as the country calls it) of the same green, a pair of his own stockens with the tops cut off, because embroidered, and a pair of stirrop stockens which were lent him at Madeley, a pair of old shoes, cut and slashed to give ease to his feet, an old grey, greasy shirt of the coarsest linnen, his face and hands made of a reechy complexion by the help of the walnut tree leaves." He only remained one night at the Moseley house, and there ran into the most imminent peril of capture; for several soldiers bolted in, but found all the doors so open and free, that they were deceived by this show of unconsciousness of fugitives, and left again without searching the apartments. The host, Mr. Whitgreaves, acted the innocent so naturally, and threw open his doors with such an easy and serene face, that he saved his sovereign from the fate of Charles I. From Moseley the King was conducted by night to Colonel Lane's at Bentley, and from thence escaped to France via Bristol, by that expedient which painters have so often portrayed on canvas.
As we stood by the open lid of the oaken box in which the hunted King was secreted in the Boscobel house. I could not but think of analogous experiences in the lives of some of his enemies when it came their turn to fly before him. Whilst looking down into that square hole, where he lay wearied in fitful sleep with his head against one wall and his feet against the other, it was easy and natural for the thought to dart across the ocean to the cave's mouth in the West Rock, at New Haven. In the tortuous recesses of those vaulted rocks, night after night and week after week, three of the judges that condemned Charles I to death hid themselves, while soldiers of the Restoration were hunting after them, as Cromwell's bands hunted Charles II up and down England. If the book is still extant, no better place could be found than Boscobel for reading "Style's Judges."[1] It would show proofs of devotion and self-sacrifice for the outlawed, hunted, hungry Whalley, Goffe, and Dickinson as brave, unswerving, and unselfish as the loyalty of the Penderels to their fugitive sovereign. It would disclose the same expedients for their security; how one stout-hearted woman had a false floor made, or two floors for her garret so deep between the joists that the three men might lie in it by night and day if need were; how she strewed the upper floor with reeds, and wiled away the soldiers from their frequent search; how the fugitive judges, when they transferred their hiding-place to the cave, were startled on the first night by two fiery eyes that glared at them more fiercely than any human pursuers could do, but felt relieved when they found that it was a panther instead of one of the soldiers of Charles II. I am sure that book would now have a wide reading in England, if republished here; for it is full of that romance of adventure, heroism, and fidelity which few modern novels present in their fictitious experiences.
Capern essayed to descend through the trap door into this apartment, but although many ladies had squeezed through the narrow passage, in all the amplitude of the late fashion, he, being less compressible, though not "more fat than bard beseems," stuck midway, and wriggled up again with some difficulty. I had to rally him a little on a sesquipedality that would have lost Charles his kingdom and life. The house seems to have remained unchanged for two centuries, just as it was when it served as such a hiding-place for him in his desperate extremity. The large dining-room is wainscoted with oak, older than the one in which he slept with his head on Colonel Carlis' lap. The different scenes of his experience here are engraven in the black marble facing of the fireplace, and make well-executed pictures. In one he is represented in the tree with several troopers dashing about in search of him. In another he is on the old mill-horse on his way to Moseley, guarded by the Penderels with their axes and hedge-bills. A portrait of him, in all his long locks and royal robes, hangs over the mantel-piece, giving him a somewhat unhappy expression, as affected either by a presentiment or memory of his sharp troubles. In another apartment is the portrait of Cromwell himself, making him look as if he had just come out of the battle of Worcester and was regarding it as "a crowning mercy," which would have been more grateful to him if he had caught Charles. The old servant who showed us the various apartments facetiously remarked that he always locked the door between the two portraits at night lest they should get together and have a falling out with each other. The arbour in which Charles sat and read on that memorable Sunday, stands on a mound several feet high in the garden, and looks as if it might have been half a century old when he occupied it. The tree called "Charles's Oak" must not only have come from a scion or acorn of the one in which he hid, but must be many rods nearer the house than the original, which was evidently in the middle of a dense wood or grove, and probably half-way between the Boscobel house and the White Ladies. The house is now owned by a family of maiden ladies residing in Derbyshire, by the name of Evans, who appreciate all its historical interest and preserve it for the public.
Having spent an hour at this corner milestone of English history, we continued our walk through Brewood, stopping to see the large church in that snug little town, which has a long and respectable history of its own. It is really an edifice worth not only stopping, but going some distance, to see; for it ranks for size, architecture, and lofty spire with the first class of provincial churches. It contains many ancient monuments of the leading families of the district, such as the Giffards, Fowkes, and Moretons. Brewood became a market town in 1221, under a patent given to Bishop Cornhill, of Lichfield, and ever since that day it has had a continuous population of all ages, who have said their prayers under different religious regimes, and been recognized as a Christian community. It is enough to inspire a feeling akin to awe to walk the main street of such a little country town, and feel that you are treading in the footsteps of twenty human generations. Brewood has made its mark as an educational centre. A free grammar school was founded here by Dr. Knightley in the reign Elizabeth, who with a small sum of money planted here an acorn, which has produced a goodly tree of knowledge, from which many distinguished men have fed their minds to much growth and power. Among these Bishop Hurd, of Worcester, Dr. Beddoes, of Bristol. Sir E. Littleton, and others may be numbered. Rev. William Budworth, Dr. Johnson's friend, was one of the head-masters of this school.
On our way to the Spread Eagle station, where we were to take the train for Birmingham, we came out upon the famous Watling Street, that great road of the Romans. The construction of this solid highway must have been a powerfully civilizing work to the British tribes in England. And it is the only one of that hardy and industrial soldiery left on the island as a work of present utility. It was doubtless made by them to supplement the rivers for penetrating, subduing, and civilizing the country. From London on the Thames and Uriconium on the Severn, the helmeted road-makers of the Roman legions evidently began this great thoroughfare; linking by it camp to camp until they met somewhere perhaps in Staffordshire or Warwickshire. The solidity and permanent character of this road illustrate Roman firmness and strength. It was not a corduroy road, such as the people of our Western States would make over their prairies and swamps. It was made to last for ages, as deep, compact, and solid as if it had been one of the ways leading out of Rome itself. Our host of The Bell, at Tong, said he had taken up a section of it at Oaken Gates, and found it like quarrying the solid rock itself. Many of the slabs of stone laid down were from three to four feet in length and two in depth. These were covered with rubble or broken bits of stone from the same quarry, and must have made a roadway as solid and as perfect as the best city streets of the present day. If the great governments and nations of Christendom could utilize their standing armies as Rome did, or set them to work upon roads, harbours, drainage, ship channels, and the like, the toiling myriads who have to support them would feel the burden lightened. Certainly, the officers of the Roman legions, who superintended these utilitarian works, had as much right to magnify their order and assert its dignity as the same rank of officers in modern armies. The day, let us hope, will come when the latter will be as proud of having perforated Central Africa or Asia with a Watling Street as with a pathway of fire and blood.
We reached the Spread Eagle station just a minute before the train for Birmingham arrived; an accidental coincidence, for we had no Bradshaw with us, and knew not how long we should have to wait at this point. This was one of our most enjoyable walks in the green border-land of the Black Country, and we returned home much richer in satisfaction than we had anticipated; for neither of us had heard anything of Tong church and its monuments.
The Glass Works of the Messrs. Chance constitute one of the most remarkable establishments in the world, both for extent and character of their operations and productions. They embrace a small, compact town of edifices difficult to represent in any familiar simile. If seen from a certain distance by moonlight, when quiet and smokeless, they might look to an imaginative eye like a great nest of cathedrals and Turkish mosques. You have all the features of both, with a little exercise of the fancy. Clustering in the moonlight, you will see lofty brick spires tapering all the way but not to a point; towers and turrets of all dimensions; conical domes elongated at the top into a chimney, and other characteristics of the two classes of architecture. These buildings cover a territory of about twenty-four acres. The main street, that divides the domed and steepled town in two nearly equal parts, is the railway. This again is intersected by a canal, with its landings in the middle of the works; which have about a score boats of their own for transportation of the raw material and its wonderful productions when ready "for home and exportation." This may serve to convey some idea of the establishment when cold and silent. But when all aglow with its fiery industries, it presents a scene which Virgil and Dante would have described in terms and figures unsuited to modern conceptions or facts. As every man who pretends to have once been a boy was a bubble-blower in his childhood, whether he has seen the real process or not, he can understand how glass is made into such infinite shapes and uses. And boys, fresh from the sport of making and floating in the air their tinted globes, ought to have the clearest idea of the whole matter. It will be easy for them to see in their minds twenty-four boys standing in a circle, each with a long-stemmed tobacco pipe in a bowl of soapsuds, blowing up bubbles one after the other. Well, they will see that picture to the life in one section of these great works. But here the soapsuds are red-hot and more too. The bowls are made of the Stourbridge fire-clay, and hold about two tons of the liquid, which is called metal. The pipes are iron, nearly as long as a fishing-rod. The bubbles they blow are perfectly marvellous. They weigh about thirty pounds each, and are from five to six feet in length. The whole operation seems like magic. Nothing in the working of other metals is like these strange manipulations. That is not the word for them, either, for the mouth seems to have more to do in the matter than the hand. Here are a score of men dipping their pipes into those terrible pots, taking up a ball of the red metal, and then blowing and twirling the bubble until it becomes a cylinder as long as a two-bushel bag of wheat. What a lung-power must be brought to bear upon the thousands of cylinders inflated here in a week! The human breath forced through all those iron pipes, if put in one volume, ought to be enough to propel a ship of the line across the Atlantic Few artisans could have trained the measurement of the eye to such fine precision as these glass-blowers. To take up to an ounce the exact quantity of metal, then to blow and twirl it into a cylinder that shall not vary a hair's breadth from the requisite thickness and diameter, is a remarkable, almost unparalleled feat of skill.
The operations in making the "crown" glass are the most strange and stirring. Whatever else suggested the name, it might well have come from the process itself. To have recourse to very common similes, divested of all technical terms, a mass of the molten metal about the size and form of a gourd is formed, with the rod in the stem. It is then thrust into a blazing oven whose month is terrible to front, and which would serve the men who attempted it as Nebuchadnezzar's furnace mouth did his servants, if they did not wear a shield before their faces. The red gourd shell is thrust into this roaring oven, and turned rapidly by the long iron stem. This motion soon opens a hole through the butt end of the shell, and it expands to a new size and shape at every revolution in the flame. Now it is a Scotch cap; the next half-minute it is a sailor's tarpaulin hat, very squat, mostly crown with but little brim. A few more turns, and it is all crown, whizzing around like a large circular saw without teeth. The stem is then detached, and it is lifted into an annealing oven and placed on its edge in an iron frame which holds a great number of them upright, seemingly as thick as herrings in a barrel, yet without touching each other. This is just a glance at the process of making "crown glass," and whoever sees it must think of a hat crown when he remembers the operation.
I wonder how many well-instructed men and women in a thousand, excluding children, have the slightest idea that all the panes of glass in their windows were once as round as the body of a hat box. So it is, but few can make it a real, tangible fact without seeing the process. These cylinders average about four feet in length and two feet and a half in circumference. They are slit in the middle from end to end by what may be called a long-handled knife with a diamond blade or point. Then they go to the fattening furnace or oven where the heat is carefully graduated to their delicacy, and gently opens and lays them flat upon a large, solid even table of glass. On this the wavy or wrinkled plate is ironed or mangled out to a perfect surface by a wooden roll or block called a "polissoir." The manager of one of the departments of this great establishment, who is its "Ministre pour les Affaires Etrangeres," took me next into what might be called the cutting-up lofts. My time was too short to ask many questions and see all the operations and extent of the works. I have said they covered the area of twenty-four acres. But this is only the foundation surface, and only one third of real space covered by the multifarious manipulations. Most of the buildings are three and more stories in height; so if all the area occupied were brought down to one dead level, it would doubtless make sixty acres. And I should think full five acres of this extent were occupied by these cutting lofts. Here are racks seemingly interminable and numberless, filled with plates of glass of all shapes and sizes, or what may be called glass slabs, many of them with broken corners, and rough-looking in dimensions. Along the whole length of each loft on both sides run the cutting benches, all manned by a battalion of workers, each with his rule and diamond-pointed knife, cutting up the sheets into panes of various sizes, making the most and best out of each. And here I learned a fact which illustrates the closer economy in utilizing odds and ends than once prevailed. The ten thousand little bits left over from this pane-cutting are made into slides for stereoscopic views, and find a large market for that use. Thus a scrap of glass from which a piece three inches by one can be cut is worked into a slide for the camera. In no other establishment in the world can one get such a full idea of the infinite uses which glass is made to serve as in these immense works. The artistic department, perhaps, will generally excite the greatest curiosity and admiration. This may be divided into two sections. One contains an acre of sheets of every tinting which all the rainbows or all the flowers that ever arched or graced the earth could supply. Indeed, the sight of them serves as a lesson in useful knowledge. After all one remembers of flower shows, he feels himself truly surprised here, that so many tints and shades can be taken or formed from "the bridge of colours seven." This is the raw material that goes abroad, in every direction and to every distance, to be worked up in cathedral, church, chapel, and college, and other ornamental windows. Really the stock in store of this stained glass is so vast, that one might wonder why it should be sold by the square foot instead of the square rod. To estimate it by the foot seems almost like computing the national debt of Great Britain in milreis.
The other is the department in which the working artistry of the establishment is carried on. This is its Royal Academy, where more paintings are produced and exhibited in a year than in the National Gallery in London. They are done on glass instead of canvas, but are none the less artistic for that. The Raphael or Michael Angelo of this great studio has a salon by himself, in which he develops into outline and shape his conceptions. Here he passes before his eye all that Adam saw and named, and more too—all things that bloom and breathe with sweet odours in Nature's realm: the flowers of every zone; the birds of every land and plumage; every beast from the elephant to the winged mouse; every fish from the whale to the minnow of the thinnest brook; human histories reaching back to the holiest hours of Eden; pictures and dreams of angels. These fields the artist-in-chief hunts up and down with his pencil for sketches which his well-trained corps in the painters' gallery are to reproduce on their glass-canvas. The pictures they produce in a year would make a Fine Arts Exhibition which would compete favourably with the portrait galleries of large cities. The popular taste and demand for these artistic windows are constantly increasing at home and abroad; perhaps more, proportionately, in foreign and even half-civilized countries than in Great Britain or America. Oriental princes and nabobs delight in this kind of ornamentation, especially in the hottest countries, where the glare of the sun most needs tempering. The windows for the salon cabin of the state barge of the Pacha of Egypt, especially, were perhaps as fine specimens of glass painting as the establishment ever produced.
A full and minute description of all the operations and productions of these great works would fill a volume; I can only notice a few salient facts and features. The Chances stand in a more than industrial relation to the community at home and abroad. They are great educators of taste and pleasant and beautiful perceptions. They popularize high art, carrying the people on from where Wedgwood left them to more refined ideals of beauty. And one thing they are doing in this department which the community should appreciate. They are taking, I will venture to say, lifting, glass-painting from the old ecclesiastical groove in which it has run for so many centuries. Instead of those grotesque anachronisms which have covered the cathedral and church windows for so many ages—instead of apostles, saints, martyrs, and mitred bishops standing on the tips of perpendicular soles, apparently with the rim of a copper basin around their heads, and in robes which would have astonished Peter or Paul, the Chances are giving us forms and scenes that belong to actual human life and history; making men show their manhood to the fulness of truth, being, and act. In thus secularising the art, as some may call it, they have elevated it to a higher standard for sacred and religious portraiture; and I am confident that this effect will be discernable in many of the future painted windows which will supersede those now centuries old in English cathedrals and churches.
The Light-house department of the works will fill the visiter with wonder. For the manufacture of these great sea-lanterns is one of the specialities of the establishment which, perhaps more than any other, distinguishes it from works of the like character in this and other countries. Here you see all the working sciences and mechanical forces co-operating in busy harmony in producing these beacon and guide lights for benighted ships. Not one in a hundred men well-read in other sciences can conceive what subtle and delicate principles, laws, and combinations are brought to bear in perfecting the lenses and prisms and in adjusting the focus of each so as to produce the aggregate and required result of the whole. Here you see these beautiful structures at every stage of their building Many of them are complete, ready for being mounted upon their sea-beaten pedestals on "a wild and rock-bound coast." An oriental or ancient fancy might take them to be the crystal crowns of huge giants stalking over the earth with their heads in the clouds. In seeing so many fully or nearly completed, it was pleasant to think that they were not to supersede but to supplement those now shedding out their lustre upon the sea; that these grand lanterns were not only to be hung up on the rocky capes and cliffs of foreign coasts never before lighted, but to be added to the number now surrounding these home islands, to be a tiara of stars shining like the light of great hopes to the tempest-tost sailors in the blackest night. Some of these lanterns are thirty feet high and twelve in diameter, and will throw the glow and glare of their light full thirty miles out upon the sea. The cost of one of the first order is about £2,000; that shown in the Great Exhibition of 1862 was marked £3,000.
The Chances are as celebrated for the production of optical glass as for light-house lenses. In the exhibitions of 1851 and 1855 they exhibited discs of twenty-nine inches in diameter, the largest ever produced at that time. Both were purchased by the French Government for £1,000 each. There are from 1,500 to 2,000 hands employed in these works, representing such a combination of science, genius, skilled and varied industry as perhaps no other establishment in the world can present. For, although they are called Glass Works, when you enter the light-house department, you have ironworks on a great scale in minute ramification. In the buildings in which a common-sized lumber-yard of boards is made up into boxes for the exportation of glass to America or other foreign countries, you have wood-works of equal extent. Thus artisans of most mechanical crafts are employed in the different departments-workers in glass, brass, iron, and wood, and artists who would paint landscapes and portraits on canvas as well as glass of a high order of genius.
A working force of 1,700 men, women, and children, employed in one establishment, represents the population of a considerable town. The provision made for the religious and intellectual education of this army of employés is thoughtful, generous, and admirable, and worthy of all imitation. One of the edifices of these twenty-four acres of buildings is the school-house, in which about 500 children are taught the solid, useful branches of English education. I was struck with a large printed bill put up in the very gateway of the works, setting forth the views and wishes of the proprietors in regard to this important question, which is now exciting so much interest in England. On reading it. I begged a copy, which will make the most useful page in this volume to large manufacturers who may read it. There is also a library of 2,000 volumes for the people of the works and their families, and an experienced surgeon is employed to look after their physical well-being. The following is the announcement of the Messrs. Chance to their employés:
"Glass Works. November, 1867."An examination of the boys, girls, and young persons employed in the various departments of our glass works, shows that many of them, of both sexes, do not possess that knowledge of the rudiments of education which every person, at least, in this neighbourhood, who is old enough to work, ought, by this time, to have acquired.
"We have therefore resolved, in future, (1) to discountenance the employment of boys and girls in our works who do not possess at the time of seeking employment a fair acquaintance with the elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic, with the addition of freehand drawing for the ornamental department; and (2) to open an additional day school for glass-house boys, and an additional evening school for girls and young women.
"In the case of glass-house boys who have at their disposal a great deal of leisure time, we expect all of them, under eighteen years of age, to attend the day school at least three times each week for the present, and in the case of all other young persons, of both sexes, whose elementary education is defective, we expect the boys to attend the evening school three times in each week, for at least six months in the year; and girls and women for such longer period as may appear to us to be desirable.
"It is our purpose to impose a fine of sixpence per week upon glass-house boys who absent themselves from school without sufficient cause, and not longer to employ any whose conduct is reported by the master to be bad, or whose attendance is not kept up with regularity.
"We propose to hold an examination of all our young people from time to time, and to institute a system of rewards for those whose attendance, good conduct, and progress merit such distinction.
"We shall be glad to find our intentions in this matter fully appreciated by those whose welfare is to be thereby affected, and to know that those whose education is in a satisfactory condition will still give a regular attendance on the schools and classes, both for the sake of their own progress, and as an example to those whose education is not in so satisfactory a state.
"CHANCE BROTHERS & Co."
- ↑ "A History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I" (1794), by Ezra Stiles. (Wikisource contributor note)