There are picturesque corners in this town of Derby, so contemned by most writers, sufficient to make the fortune, in the pictorial way, of many another town. Derby, to an artist, at any rate, is a likeable place, and such an one is in sympathy with Boswell, who wrote in 1777:

“I felt a pleasure in walking about Derby. There is an immediate sensation of novelty, and one speculates on the way in which life is passed in it.”

Ancient and modern rudely jostle here, and the streets run on no regular plan. It is a provincial town turned industrial, and still surprised at the change: the any-shaped, no-shaped Market Place, where Boehm’s bronze statue of Michael Thomas Bass stands, remaining still in many ways that of an agricultural market town. But, nevertheless, there has been much pulling down and rebuilding. Among other places, the house where Joseph Wright—the celebrated painter “Wright of Derby”—lived, has disappeared, and modern business premises stand on the site. An iron tablet narrates the facts—but why? Such things do but advertise the shame and set a seal upon regret. Alas! there is no modern Joshua to bid time stand still—and for time to obey.

One of the pleasantest features of the town is the fine park called the Arboretum. Here an interesting relic of the plague that raged in 1665 is placed. This is the so-called “Headless Cross,” or Market Stone, removed from Friar Gate, where it served as a means of communication between the stricken townspeople and the countryfolk, bringing in provisions. The market folk, coming with their mouths filled with tobacco, as a disinfectant, placed the meat and vegetables and dairy-produce they had brought upon the ground and witnessed the inhabitants drop their money into the hollow in the stone, filled with vinegar. With these strict precautions it was hoped to escape infection.

All Saints’ Church, the most important of the several in the town, possesses a tall and very beautiful late Perpendicular tower, built about 1520, according to legend, by the bachelors and spinsters of Derby. Still further, according to legend, it used to be the custom for the bachelors to ring the bells whenever a young woman born in the town was married.

There is, unfortunately, no direct evidence that the tower really was the work of the bachelors and the spinsters. It was probably built from the money given by a wealthy townsman, Robert Liversage, a dyer by trade. A battered inscription, “Young men and maidens,” no doubt gave rise to the story. It is now generally believed, except by the humblest people, among whom tales of this romantic kind live longest, that the inscription was once simply the pious invitation, “Young men and maidens, old men and children, praise ye the Lord.”

A cathedral-like size and breadth of proportion mark this fine tower, the product of the last days of Gothic, rising to a height of 174 feet above the pavement; and the quite humble old houses of the narrow street do but serve to show it to further advantage. It is heavily buttressed at the angles, in a manner sufficient to have made Ruskin storm, had he ever occasion to write of it; for it was his theory that towers should stand starkly four-square, without the aid of buttresses. But what would Gothic architecture be without those essential features! Something new and strange.

The tower being so fine, of what nature was the body of the church? That we cannot know, for it was rebuilt in a classic style by Gibbs, in 1725, and has the appearance of a great pillared hall, very fine of its kind, and extraordinarily spacious. It was quite a new church, not more than twenty years old, when Prince Charlie attended mass here in the ’45. There are many fine monuments, chiefly from the older building, among them the elaborate memorial, with coroneted effigy, of the famous Bess of Hardwick, that scheming, matchmaking, imperious woman, four times wedded and widowed, whose passion for building and rebuilding rivalled that for forming matrimonial alliances. She is said to have erected her own monument, and it is likely enough she did. Her fourth marriage, in her fiftieth year, to the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, embittered the existence of that unhappy man. He was custodian of Mary Queen of Scots. The anxieties of that charge, and a sorry time of it with his wife, shortened his existence. “Two devils,” he described the Countess and the prisoned Queen, and it is likely enough he privately thought Queen Elizabeth, who was for always worrying him, a third. The quarrels of Earl and Countess were notorious, and the Bishop of Lichfield wrote him what was intended to be a comforting letter on the subject. The tenor of it ran that the case certainly was unfortunate, but, after all, this was the usual lot:

“Some will say in y^r L. behalfe tho’ the Countesse is a sharpe and bitter shrewe, and therefore likely enough to shorten y^r life if shee should kepe yow company: In deede my good Lo. I have heard some say sa; but if shrewdnesse or sharpnesse may be a just cause of sepacion between a man and wiefe, I thinke fewe men in Englande woulde keepe their wives longe; for it is a comon jeste, yet trewe in some sense, that there is but one shrewe in all the worlde, and so ev’y man hathe her, and so ev’y man might be rydd of his wife, that wold be rydd of a shrewe.”

Looking at that proud, arrogant, masterful face, upturned on the monument, you feel sorry, not only for the Earl, but for all who commerced with her.

Among the many of the Cavendish family who lie here are William, second Earl of Devonshire, and his wife and children. The Earl himself died in 1628, and he and his family were commemorated by a fearful monument, the effigies grotesquely misshapen and clad in what seem to be sheets. In 1877 the horrible thing was destroyed, but the statues themselves remain; the Earl himself, a shortened figure with wide mouth and a combined wistful, comical, and grotesque expression that puzzles the modern beholder with reminiscent feelings. Where, he asks himself, has he seen the like before? and presently the truth is borne in upon him, that the thing might well be a reproduction of the late Mr. Dan Leno.

St. Alkmund’s spire is a fine foil to the grand tower of All Saints’: its grace contrasting with it, as manly strength with feminine beauty. St. Mary’s, its next-door neighbour, the Roman Catholic church, is an unfortunate example of Gothic as understood in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it is only necessary to descend a little way, to the bridge crossing the Derwent, and then to look back, for distance to lend a peculiar enchantment to the scene. From the hump-backed bridge you see the bad details of its ill-informed Gothic abolished in a broad, comprehensive kindly haze of smoke issuant from the clustered chimneys of this slummy but picturesque quarter, and it stands up boldly in the view, with St. Alkmund’s spire on the left, as though inspired with the finest spirit of the fifteenth century. Equally kindly poplar trees, growing courageously from the Derwent banks, come in to aid the view. We will not look too curiously upon the Derwent itself, for although splashing weirs diversify it, factories of divers sorts line its course, and the water is polluted by them; and this, in short, is not the Derwent as understood by poets.

The bridge itself is small and old, and doubtless will in the not distant future give place to a new. Meanwhile it is weathered in a way that artists love, and there are some quite fine lamp-standards on it, designed in the days before gas. Their design and execution are unobtrusive: it is indeed quite a small achievement, and doubtless the smith who wrought these standards, a hundred and fifty years or so ago, did the work in the everyday course of his craft and thought no more about the matter. But he wrought better than he knew. They were not—those old fellows—self-conscious: they did not know they were artists, and did not do like their present-day descendants, stand admiringly before their work and call heaven and earth to witness the supreme artistry of it.