Returning to Cavendish Bridge, and crossing it, we enter Derbyshire, whose people have long been unjustly made the subject of the old folk-rhyme:

The tolls levied at Cavendish Bridge long remained at an almost prohibitive figure. The crossing of the Trent, before the bridge was completed in 1771 at a cost of £3,333, was by means of a ferry-barge, large enough to take vehicles, and the fare for a post-chaise was half-a-crown, which remained the charge for the bridge, as Bray in his tour of 1776 notes.

Although the bridge was long since freed, the toll-house stands, and on it may still be seen the old notice-board which it seems to have been nobody’s business, in particular, to remove. I am grateful for the fact, for it enables the following particulars to be gleaned:

And so forth, through the various classes of traffic, ending with:

The Trent, broad and strong, borders the road for the half-mile between the bridge and the village of Shardlow, where the Trent and Mersey Canal runs across the way, and the “Holden Arms,” a church built in the unsatisfactory Gothic of 1838, the “Navigation,” the “Dog and Duck,” and the “Old Crown” inns are huddled; together with a fine old red-brick mansion dated 1686, and bearing the initials R.B.L.

It is but seven miles onward to Derby, and the town has grown so greatly, and is still growing with such giant strides, that it has sent out, as it were, along the road, all manner of subtle indications of its advance; together with some not so subtle, in the shape of dusty roads and horrible houses. For the worst side of Derby is obtruded upon the London road. You do not come into all this kind of thing at once. It is a sort of gradual declension. First you notice an uncomfortable something indefinable, then the hedges begin to be worn and ragged, and at last disappear altogether. Then you pass a bend in the road—and there—ah! me—is the inevitable electric tramway, with the conductor and driver of the waiting car, in the usual uniform modelled on that of a ship’s petty officer.

But there are two or three things on the way that demand notice. Nowhere can there be another neighbourhood so prodigal in “astons” as this. Here, on the road itself, is Alvaston; to the right is Elvaston, and scattered here, there, and everywhere are Ambaston, Admaston, Chellaston, Breaston, and Osmaston; with one village simply “Aston” unadorned.

The very similar names of Alvaston and Elvaston are productive of infinite trouble to the Post Office and others; but the places are very different from one another. Alvaston is a place of modern suburban development; but Elvaston, lying a mile off to the right of the road, and approached only by difficult byways, is very rural. Hidden away there, stands Elvaston Castle, seat of the Earl of Harrington, that unconventional peer who conducts (or until lately did conduct) a fruit-shop at the corner of Craig’s Court, Charing Cross.

I love the House of Lords and the hereditary principle. Vulgar Radicals declare the Peers a collection of epileptic degenerates, company-promoters, guinea-pigs, touts for wine-merchants, and grinders of the faces of the poor, and point out that many of its members have been in gaol, and others ought to be; and that some (none quite recently) have been hanged, and others have been in inebriate asylums, and will be again; but I should be sorry to see them abolished. They afford so interesting a spectacle, are so superb an anachronism, and provide such engrossing scandals for readers of the newspapers that the public—and the newspaper proprietors—will not easily be persuaded to part with them at the suggestion of the Gideons of the Radical party. We love the romance of the House of Lords; and for this reason we dislike to see its constituent members selling fruit, or, like Lord Londonderry, Lord Dudley, or Lord Durham, selling coals. Lord Tennyson sold milk, and that revolted many: an ennobled poet dealing in dairy produce is an anachronism, and the owner of an historic title entering into business and exercising all the arts of the commercial man while clinging to the privileges of his station is a thing that no one can look upon without sorrow.

Elvaston Castle is an odd place. Exploring in these byways, the wayfarer comes suddenly to it, as into a courtyard, where the church, with its tall pinnacled tower, stands to one side and the mansion on the other, with the courtyard itself littered like the approach to a farm. Tall piers stand on either side, crested with snarling demi-lions holding flaming grenades.

For centuries the estate has been in the Stanhope family, created Earls of Harrington in 1742, and is placed amid very beautiful gardens, greatly improved about the middle of last century by Charles, fourth Earl, who married Maria Foote, the actress, and wrought many wonderful things here; forming that lake which the great Duke of Wellington declared to be the only natural artificial sheet of water he had ever seen. The place looks strangely romantic and wild.

An astonishing story is told of an ancestress of the Earl of Harrington. A Stanhope of olden times died young, and his widow, like those other brilliant Royalist dames at Corfe Castle and Brampton Bryan, held Elvaston during a siege by the Parliamentary forces in 1643, commanded by Sir John Gell. In the end, the besiegers wore out the little defending band at Elvaston, and Sir John Gell, after the manner of the conquering heroes of that time, did what havoc he could about the place. He made a woeful wreck of the beautiful garden, demolished a magnificent monument Lady Stanhope had erected to the memory of her husband, and at last—insisted upon her marrying him! She naturally refused so preposterous an idea—and then quite as naturally agreed to wed this terrific wooer, who literally had stormed his way to her heart. He was very masculine: there can be no doubt whatever of his gender; and if it be true that, above all things, a woman loves a manly man, she had, in Sir John Gell, an ideal mate, for, as the poet says:

and what a way this Roundhead knight had with him!

But Derby town is advancing upon Elvaston, and will shortly be upon it, and the place is in consequence not being maintained in its old style. Some day, possibly, the Midland Railway may come and cut it up. Already it has abolished Osmaston Hall, and made the rest of the way into Derby a grimy, smoke-laden purlieu.