The interest of St. Albans and its surroundings is not easily to be compressed into a few pages. Everywhere are memories, and in most places visible remains, wherewith to fortify imaginations not of a robust order. The walls of Roman Verulamium yet remain in fragmentary condition, to south and west of the Abbey, and close by them stands the village of St. Michael’s, in whose church, sadly spoiled by the late Lord Grimthorpe’s restoring zeal, is the statue of the great Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, whose genius was probably keen enough to have made him capable of writing Shakespeare’s plays: although, despite the contentions of fanatics to the contrary, he did nothing of the sort. The ruins of his father’s and his own house of Gorhambury are still visible a mile away, in the park, and close to the great ugly eighteenth-century classic mansion of Gorhambury, seat of the present Earl of Verulam.

To seek Gorhambury on some thymy morning in May, when the pink horse-chestnuts are in bloom, when the air is moist with recent rain and suppressed heat, and a blue haze settles over the wooded landscape, is delightful. Then the scene of the great Chancellor’s pride, and of his despairing retirement, is beautiful indeed. The “wisest, wittiest, meanest of mankind” was housed sufficiently well, as the porch, the best-preserved portion of the building, shows. It is a typical Elizabethan Renaissance building, with panels of marble, and terra-cotta medallion heads of Roman Emperors; but it looks so small and toylike. Propped though it be with brickwork and iron rods, it cannot much longer survive, and the elaborate shield of the royal arms, the defaced statues and shattered columns are surely falling from picturesque into complete ruin. Apart from the chief group of crumbling walls there stands a poor old battered one-legged and headless statue, said to represent Henry the Eighth, but unrecognisable, scored amazingly with the penknives and the initials of generations of Toms, Dicks, and Harrys. The scene of past pomps and vanities is scarcely mournful, as some might find it; the sight of it makes history live again as human experience, not as we read it in the dulled pages of historical exercise.

A field-path across the pleasant water-meadows of the river Ver leads from Gorhambury to Prae Mill House and so on to the road again, and thence to Redbourne, a sleepy village with a sleepy railway-station, fringed with meadows where donkeys and ponies graze and ducks and geese march and countermarch aimlessly, their inevitable later association with green peas and sage-stuffing happily hidden from them. Redbourne is one of those “bourne” places which, without adequate reason, appears to discard the final “e.” According to an emphatic inhabitant, “we spell it with a hen, without a he at the hend.” Through the village and out again upon the broad highway, we come presently to Friar’s Wash, once a water-splash across the road, now a tiny row of cottages and a wayside inn, the “Chequers,” standing beside the little river Ver where the old road of pre-Telford days goes off to the right. Flamstead (i.e. Verlamstead) church on the hilltop, its characteristic Hertfordshire spirelet, with the appearance as though the greater portion had subsided through the roof, looks down upon the quiet scene. Beyond comes Markyate.

Markyate Street, as it is how, is a wayside village, with a number of more or less decayed coaching and drovers’ and waggoners’ inns in its narrow street. The lovely old mansion of Markyate Cell, beyond, standing removed from the dusty road, in its beautiful park, owes its name to the spot having once been the hermit’s cell of one Roger, a monk of St. Albans, who, returning from pious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was confronted by three angels, who there and then laid the vocation of hermit upon him, and conducted him to this spot, where he lived ever after: not altogether happy, for he suffered constant persecution from the Devil, who, according to Roger’s own account, tried once to drown him, and once set light to his hood. Had he ceased praying, there can be no doubt the worst would have befallen him; but he continued, unmoved, under these most alarming circumstances, and the Enemy was foiled.

After a while in this solitude, a “holy virgin,” Christina by name, came from Huntingdon and settled near by the equally holy Roger, who afforded her religious instruction, until he was called away from this vale of tears, when his body was laid in St. Albans Abbey. Christina established the Benedictine Convent of Markyate Cell, and became first Prioress of it in 1145. The mansion that now stands on the site in the wooded park is a veritable dream of peace and beauty; but there are hiding-holes in it, which sufficiently prove, if proof were wanted, that not always was peace and security the dominant note.

At one mile before Dunstable we leave Hertfordshire and enter Bedfordshire. It was a standing joke with all the coach-guards to ask their passengers “What comes after Herts?” and to answer, before their victims had time to reply, “Beds, if the Herts are serious enough.” Fortunately, even the weakest jokes that would be anÆmic enough by the fireside seem quite robust in the fresh air; and the tedium of a long journey was such that even this wretched specimen was not usually resented.

Dunstable’s long and very broad chief street was until quite recently a pleasant gravelled stretch of road, but since fast motor-cars have come in crowds upon the highway, the townsfolk, in an attempt to save themselves from the dust they raise, have been obliged to resort to the expedient of treating the thoroughfare with a tarry preparation; with the result that the dust nuisance has not been thoroughly abolished, and instead of the old, cleanly-looking surface there is an ugly, coaly-looking way, smelling abominably.

Of Dunstable, or “Dunstaple” as it was formerly written, you may read more fully in the Holyhead Road; but attention may here be drawn to the old seal of the town, in which one of the once favourite punning allusions is found: here in a double-barrelled form, the representation of a horseshoe standing both for the mythical stable of the legendary robber, Dun, and for a staple, or hasp.

And so at last, through Dunstable town and out by the deep cutting that carries the road on the level, through the chalk downs, we come to Hockliffe, where the Holyhead Road goes off by itself, straight ahead, and the Manchester and Glasgow Road turns sharply to the right, continuing henceforward an independent course.

To compare small things with greater, Hockliffe was to the coaches to and from the north-west of England very much what Rugby Junction is now. Onward swept the coaches for Coventry, Birmingham, and Holyhead, while the traffic for Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow bore away to Woburn.