STA STONEHENGE. this world passeth away. When, forty years ago, the English people were overhauling their rotten boroughs, the most salient example of the whole system, the reductio ad absurdum under which chiefly it broke down, was that an old tree near this spot had for more than a century sent two members to Parliament! Septennially-or at every election-the two candidates drove out to the spot, taking a returning officer and two nominators; the bribery act was read, and they were formally nominated to the Infinite Silences and the sheep, if any happened to be near; the sheep bleated and the tree boughed their assent; the officer made up the certificates, pocketed his comfortable fees, and the five repaired to dinner in a Salisbury hotel-all of which was plainly proved at the TANDING on the top of the highest and most beautiful spire in England-that of Salisbury Cathedral-one may see on the plain, at about nine miles' distance, a strange circle of white stones; or, standing on the top of one of those stones, one may see the spire, gleaming like a column of flame, against the sky; and in either case he will feel a sense of mystery stealing over him, as it may perhaps be felt nowhere else on earth. If one could read the history written in the dust of Salisbury Plain, or gauge the spiritual formations that stretch between the cromlechs of Stonehenge and that cathedral in the distance, he would probably hold the key to the story of every race that lives or has lived. The geologist can show that the vast plain was once the bed of a sea; but who can tell us of that vast sur-time, and, indeed, not denied. "Old Sarum" ging sea of humanity-mingled of streams confluent from all the fountains of races-which once swept and raged with storms and battles over this serene landscape, on whose solitudes the sun now looks so peacefully down? Sauntering near Old Sarum this morning I picked up a little piece of carved stone, which had evidently been part of a cornice, and had no doubt that I held in my hand one of the last bits of that ancient cathedral built on this spot 760 years ago. Of that cathedral, which formed the centre of the city of Old Sarum, the sun even yet traces the extensive outline amidst the waving corn; but the mansions and streets of that once populous city are not even traceable in the dust. Few cities have ever so utterly perished from the earth. Truly the fashion of $ SARUM STONE. thus became politically a by-word, and, indeed, is occasionally referred to now in Parliament as a case not unlikely to be paralleled unless the coming redistribution of seats shall more fully than it promises represent the changes that have been wrought in England by that archinnovator-Steam. And yet Lord Macaulay's famous New Zealander, sitting on the last half-crumbled arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's, would hardly be a more significant object than the parliamentary radical holding up Old Sarum to ridicule. From this hill, the centre of the perished city, and from the fortress, whose very débris has been nearly all caten as grass and bread by man and brute, Briton and Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman, successively commanded the whole district, and for ages kept Southwestern England in subjection. The Romans, when they first entered the country, found it a famous strong hold, and they chose it as the key to the country, surrounding it with a vast fosse, and making it the point of divergence for six military roads, with which they intersected the entire neighborhood. King Alfred drew a wider circle around it. The Normans completed the fortress, and built a wall around the city, inclosing a space of 16,000 feet in diameter. Nearly all of these more ancient works are yet traceable, though the comparatively modern works are not. which have long passed, but which still continue, like Old Sarum, to sway the living interests of the fruitful valleys to which the real power has emigrated. Salisbury Cathedral is externally one of the most impressive I have ever seen. A double cross in ground-plan, purely Gothic in style, it rises with pyramidal definiteness to the top of its spire, which rises to the height of 400 feet, and is even spiritual in its lightness and beauty. The whole building might well have inspired Coleridge's felicitous description of a cathedral as "frozen music." The spire is more recent than the rest of the church, which formerly ended in a great lantern. The simplicity of the inside is quite astonishing. One may wander, however, for a long time about its cloisters But even seven centuries ago, though the generations seem indiscriminately warlike, one age differed from another. In the time of King John the people of Old Sarum began to feel that their city had been built on a site selected with reference to war alone. When they began to think of cultivating the soil their the very finest in Europe-and its chaptereyes looked yearningly toward the neighboring house, and find many points of singular intervalley, with the beautiful Avon shining through est. On a window in the Lady Chapel is a fine it almost as far as the eye could reach. And copy of Sir Joshua Reynolds's picture of the Resat last, in obedience to their longing, the first urrection. The most interesting monuments are stone of the cathedral of New Sarum, or Salis- those which were transferred from the cathedral bury, was laid (A.D. 1220) by Henry III., and of Old Sarum, the most curious of these being after this a single generation witnessed the en- one on which is the figure of a boy dressed in tire removal of the city and its inhabitants from pontificals. In early times a boy was annually the fortified hill to the peaceful valley. In the elected by the Romish Church to be a bishop, time of Henry VII. the county jail and a "chant- in honor of the patron of children, St. Nicholas ry" in the cathedral were alone the active relics -whose name has gradually become Santaof the city which had so shortly before been claus. The visitor notes the tombs of Bishop crowded with life; but in the next reign Le- Jewell and of John Bampton, founder of the land went there and found that only "a chap- Bampton Lectures, and lingers with veneration pelle of Our Lady was yet standing and main- before those of the Herberts, to whom literature tayned," and that there was "not one house, is so deeply indebted. One of the most interneither within old Saresbyri or without, inhab-esting is that of Henry, Earl of Pembroke, who ited." It is not wonderful, then, that, visiting it in 1868, the most striking sight I saw was a flock of sheep, on the backs of two or three of which, as they grazed, starlings were quietly perched! The birds were paying for their pleasant roost by picking ticks from the sheeps' backs. The old tree I found to be itself a kind of cathedral; and the bit of cornice inscribed with a lesson concerning many institutions in many lands, reared in and adapted to ages did so much toward the exploration of the antiquities of Wiltshire. He was an enthusiast about Stonehenge, of which he had a model in his garden, built by the famous architect Inigo Jones. He also had old Stukeley as a resident in his house, that he might devote himself more completely to exploring this region. The chapter-house is, like nearly every chapter-house, circular; and it is not a little remarkable that in this part of the European cathedral-the place of initiation-there should still survive the old Druidic form, the circle. But there are few chapter-houses that are so rich in interest as this. In the carvings of the niches near the floor there is very quaint work, representing nearly all of the Old Testament history. Some are rather ludicrous. In one God is represented resting after creation in the form of an aged man whose head has fallen one side with fatigue, and looking with distress upon the world, which he holds in his hand; in another Joseph's feet and legs as far as the knee are seen held by his brother's hand-the rest of him is down in the pit. But amidst these grotesques one now and then finds a sculpture of marvelous beauty, as in a representation of Abraham tenderly embracing Isaac on the altar with one arm, while his knife is raised by the other, and hardly yet arrested by the angel. On the keystones of the surrounding are some good carvings of the chief characters of the time when it was built-king, queen, monk, nun, and so on; and among these the face of a student in a condition of religious ecstasy. Apart from its cathedral, Salisbury, with its interminable gable-fronts and red Dutch tiles, is an interesting old city. An old and elaborately-carved "cross" stands in the centre of a space called the Poultry Market. Back of this, and immediately to the right in the accompanying picture, the reader will observe a quaint old gable-front with a cross on top. This is an old hostelry, where Catholic pilgrims who came up to the cathedral in old times were lodged. After their time it became a famous resort for gallants. Old Pepys slept there in 1668, and found a "silken bed and very good diet," followed by a bill that made him "mad." There is also in the city an old apartment called the "Halle," in which a merchant of the seventeenth century was wont to entertain other merchants. It shows carvings in wood worthy of the attention of the artist of to-day. In it is a stained window representing the merchant VOL. XXXVIII.-No. 224.-12 POULTRY MARKET CROSS. "Underneath this marble hearse Lies the subject of all verse, Time shall throw a dart at thee!" From a row of eager cabmen who stood near the railway station in Salisbury I called to one who did not seem to want me, but, having deposited some one, was about driving off. Having bargained with him to take me to Stonehenge-eighteen miles (there and back) for nine shillings--he confided to me that he was not in the habit of driving himself; he superintended and sent out coaches and horses to others. This morning he had been suddenly called upon to take from a hotel to the station an individual afflicted with delirium tremens. "What kind of man was that?" "Oh, a gentleman-not a tradesman, but a real gentleman." The word "gentleman," as spoken by the lower classes in England, never has a moral but only technical meaning, and would be used concerning a thief if he had moved in respectable society and done no work. The desire, also, of this superintendent of coaches not to be confused with the class of drivers of coaches was one among many illustrations which I have met with in England of a fact often overlooked -namely, that the terms and boundaries of classes in the upper stratum of English society are not more definite than those which are preserved in the lower stratum.* I soon found that my coachman was a "character." He had been for the greater part of his life keeper of Lord Somebody's stud, and an eminent jockey for the same nobleman in steeplechases. "Do not a great many accidents happen in steeple-chases?" I asked. "Yes, Sir, a goodish few." "Have you ever met with many ?" "Me? Oh, I always came off well. I got my ankle broke once; afterward a rib broke; and then again a shoulder out of joint. I was always very lucky, Sir, very." "Other jockeys must fare badly, then," I remarked. "Yes, Sir, a goodish few gets killed; and most gets crippled for life." Just then we came in sight of the race-course, over which horses were being led and trotted to familiarize them with the ground previous to the coming races. The sight acted on my companion like a taste of blood on a tame tiger, and he lashed his poor horse until I had to interfere. minority-that his friends became alarmed for his health and induced him to visit Australia. The mansion was designed by Holbein, and built by Inigo Jones. It has many fine old pictures and war-trophies, the latter won by the ancestors of the house from the French at St. Quentin. But the modern pilgrim goes there not to see the rusty relics of dead feuds, but to see the place where Inigo Jones wrought and Stukeley studied, and-above all-where Sir Philip Sidney imagined and wrote his "Arcadia." For it was amidst these iron memorials of an "age of chivalry" that was past that Sidney's fine spirit caught the tints of a chivalry that can never pass away-amidst these peaceful plains and by the gentle Avon that he dreamed of an Arcadia happier than any in the past, by being civilized and knowing its own happiness. It is a beautiful spot to be forever associated with that exquisite vision. The Sidneys lived themselves at a charming place in Kent called "The Knolls;" but a sister of Sir Philip's having At last we saw the mysterious blanched married Earl Pembroke, the noble knight continually yearned toward Wilton House, where bor are 'lower,' 'middle,' and 'upper' ranks: slaves "Down among the people that live by manual lahe passed much of his time. This sister was of toil, a well-to-do grade, an aristocracy; serfs, capihardly less accomplished than her famous broth-talists, theologians, artists, poets, generals; an infler, and was extremely beautiful. The portrait of her recently shown in the National Portrait Exhibition at Kensington, and the family traditions concerning her virtues, render it certain that there was ample justification for the epitaph which "rare Ben Jonson" with rarest felicity wrote upon her: nite sea of humanity, which looks like a monotonous expanse only because we are so far off as not to mark the individuality that clothes each momentary wave. .... Brute force is cut off from skill of hand by as wide an interval as the selling of groceries is cut off from the writing of diplomatic dispatches. In one sphere of life 158. a week more or less makes as great a dif ference as £10,000 a year makes in another.'-Fraser's Magazine, March, 1-68. stones gleaming on the plains ahead of us; and calves they might be able to obtain for each soon I was wandering and meditating amidst | twice as much as it was worth! The grim huthe strange "circles" of the earliest British morist of Chelsea could not find much differtemple if temple it be. My ex-jockey was ence between this species of prayer and one he fruitful of explanations. "That stone you are had heard somewhere in a chapel where the sitting on was the haltar on which the sacri- preacher prayed, substantially, in Carlyle's verfices was hoffered," he said, profoundly. "And sion, "O Lord, Thou hast plenty of treacle; this was the main hentrance. 'Ere the wictim's send us down a continued stream of it!" That blood trickled down. Some folks thinks as the Druids were supposed to have a particular they were 'uman wictims," he added, with a power over herds, which were prolific or barren shudder. Mr. Carlyle told me that when he accordingly as their owners were blessed or and Emerson visited Stonehenge, many years cursed by the priests, is known to us; but it ago, they took a local "antiquarian" along with detracts considerably from the romance of the them, and his revelations amounted to about hallowed spot to think that such prayers as the same as those gratuitously vouchsafed by those of the Tartars were once offered in it. my jockey. Emerson, however, thought there However, it is now conceded that those who was something in the old man, who divided the worshiped at Stonehenge adored the sun. The stones into "sacrificial" and "astronomical," stone, sixteen feet high, and about two hunand placing the philosopher upon one of the dred yards from the temple, called "the Friar's former, pointed him to an "astronomical," and Heel"-a stone thrown at the devil, according bade him notice that its top ranged with the to the legend-is not only set exactly at that sky-line; which being conceded, he stated that point toward the northeast where the sun rises at the summer solstice the sun rises exactly at the summer solstice, exactly over its top, but over the top of that stone; and at the Druid- has been set in a place where the ground has ical temple at Abury there is a stone in the been scooped so as to bring its top, as seen from same relative position. "I was," said Mr. the altar, precisely against the horizon. It is Carlyle, in giving me some account of the visit, thus plainly an astronomical stone. Every "somewhat disappointed in Stonehenge at first. year people go out on the 21st of June to see But I found in subsequent reading that in early the sun rise above this stone; and that it does days the now closely-shaven plain on which it with absolute exactness admits now of no quesstands was covered with a dense forest; and tion. Concerning the Tartar temple it may be the roads traceable from the entrances must said, that while it would be natural for worshiphave reached out for many miles to every point ers to connect the sun with the fruitfulness of of the horizon, which must certainly have been their flocks, the more we search for temples or impressive." He also told me that he had monuments resembling Stonehenge in other found, in the volume of some old traveler, an countries the more difficult is it found to assign account of a very similar stone temple in the any particular locality as their origin, so variheart of a forest, discovered (as a living insti- ous are the quarters in which they are found. tution) in Tartary. Dean Stanley saw a similar one a few miles The said traveler went into the Tartar Stone-north of Tyre. Fergusson found one at Sarhenge and listened to the prayers of the people, which consisted of petitions to the gods that they would bless their herds to such extent that every cow should that year bear two calves instead of one; and that in selling the chee in India. And now there lies before me Mr. Squier's remarkable account of Peruvian temples (in Harper's Magazine for May, 1868), which henceforth it will be impossible to dissociate from these relics of the pre-historical Old |