The approach to Ashbourne, when you have descended the hill, is not romantic, consisting as it does of the long squalid street of Compton, rich in “lodgings for travellers,” i.e. tramps; and with the little two-arched bridge, spanning the Henmore stream, lined with men and boys diligently occupied in doing nothing, with great zest and complete content.

The road at the end of Compton, which to all intents and purposes is Ashbourne, takes a puzzling right and left-angle turn; and there you are in the long street of the town, with the market-place, lining the side of a hill, and the “Green Man,” at one end, and the church at the other.

The town stands at a junction of roads that was once of considerable importance. Going forward to Manchester, there is a choice of routes; by way of Buxton, or by Leek, and thus the coaching traffic of Ashbourne was considerable.

Canning, in his Loves of the Triangles, a sly parody of Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s admired Loves of the Plants, celebrates Ashbourne and the “Derby Dilly” which ran through it:

Canning, who was a friend of the Boothbys of Ashbourne Hall, probably wrote this there.

The “Derby Dilly” was the current name for the “Diligence,” or light post-coach, that ran in those days between Manchester and Derby, through Ashbourne, and continued to run in this remote district long after railways had elsewhere displaced coaches. To understand the allusions in Canning’s verse, it is necessary to explain that these “diligences” afforded less accommodation than that of an ordinary coach. They carried no outsides, and three insides only, who sat on one seat, facing the horses. The peculiar defects of the “diligence,” from the point of view of the middle passenger, are obvious enough.

It was long thought that railways would never succeed in penetrating into the Peak district, and the “Derby Dilly” maintained its existence until 1858, when the impossible came to pass. Then also the strictly local mail-coach, the Manchester and Derby Mail, was withdrawn; its last journey being on Saturday, October 2nd, 1858.

But, indeed, these sixty miles between Derby and Manchester must needs be of a peculiar interest to the student of traffic and its growth, for it was in this district that the carrying firm of Pickford & Co. had its beginnings, so far back as three hundred years ago. It was some time early in the seventeenth century that the original firm of pack-horse carriers began, from whose descendants, the Pickfords, by purchase; or otherwise, acquired the business, about 1730. From pack-horses, the goods came at last to be carried by waggons, and about 1770 we find Matthew Pickford established at Manchester, with his scope of operations extending to London, to which his “Flying Waggon” travelled in the then unprecedented time of four days and a half; and so the already historic firm continued until 1817, when Joseph Baxendale was admitted to the old firm of Matthew and Thomas Pickford. He soon acquired control of the business and bought out the Pickfords, and although the name has ever since been retained, the firm still remains the property of his descendants.

Great fortunes have been made in the carrying business, and Baxendales, Suttons, and others have, almost unsuspected, amassed amazing wealth; but not every carrier was satisfied with his lot, and one, at least, saw a more excellent way. This was William Bass, who, about the middle of the eighteenth century, was a carrier between Burton-on-Trent, Ashbourne, and Derby. The greater part of his business was done in the carrying of Burton ale for Benjamin Printon, who had, a good many years earlier, begun brewing for the trade. He had started with three men, but the fame of his beer grew, and induced others to set up. Bass, impressed greatly with the increase of his carrying, caused entirely by the beer trade, planned a way to brew and carry his own beer, and accordingly set up as a brewer at Burton. There is no need to enlarge upon the history of the great firm of Bass & Co., probably now the largest firm of brewers in England, thus founded by William Bass, grandfather of the present head of the firm, Michael Arthur Bass, created Baron Burton in 1886.

William Bass very soon withdrew from the carrying business, which was left to other members of his family and eventually absorbed by the firm of Pickfords, in whose service there remained many years, until his death at an advanced age, a Michael Bass, great-uncle, I believe, of Lord Burton.

Ashbourne, although a town of four thousand inhabitants, is now a very quiet place, and there is little to stir the pulses, except the annual Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday game of football through the streets, between the rival “Uppards” and “Downards” ends. The goals are placed three miles apart at Sturston and Clifton mills, on the Henmore, and there the excited scrimmages in the water, and the consequent duckings, often ending in fights, seem to exhaust all the energies of Ashbourne until the next Shrovetide.

Ashbourne has a good many claims to notice. Among them is that of possessing a Grammar School which has twice, through bad management, been reduced to one scholar. According to Cotton, fellow-angler with Izaak Walton, the town held an invidious distinction in his day, being famed for the best malt and notorious for the worst ale in England. Prominent among its features is the church of St. Oswald, “the Pride of the Peak.” It is not near the Peak, but that is immaterial, nor is it, as George Eliot says, “the finest mere parish church in the kingdom”; but it is, at any rate, an exceedingly large and very beautiful building, with a graceful spire rising to a height of 212 feet. Boswell styled it “one of the largest and most luminous churches that I have seen in any town of the same size.” The church was built in the Early English period, as the dedication plate, still existing, proves. There are many very beautiful and interesting monuments here, but none—not even that of Penelope Boothby—more beautiful than the modern stained-glass window erected to one of the Turnbull family. It is a fine piece of varied colouring, notably in the gorgeous blue of the angel’s robe.

The old lords of Ashbourne, the Cokaynes and the Boothbys are represented plentifully in epitaphs and chiselled stone and marble in the north transept. For more than two centuries—from 1372 to 1592—the Cokaynes ruled, and after them came the Boothbys, for two hundred and fifty years. The Cokayne monuments are very fine, although Ruskin will only allow them to be blundering journeyman attempts at imitating Italian workmanship of the same date. They look, however, very grim old knights and dames who thus lie in stark effigy, in rows, the knights in their chain or plate armour, the dames in their horned or butterfly head-dresses, when compared with the effigy of little Penelope Boothby, the only child of the last of the Boothbys of Ashbourne Hall.

The epitaph reads

An inscription beneath runs in English: “I was not in safety, neither had I rest, and the trouble came.” This is repeated in Latin, French, and Italian.

The white marble effigy, showing the child lying on a mattress, one of the most simple and yet most beautiful examples of monumental sculpture, is the work of Thomas Banks, R.A., and is perhaps the most celebrated piece of sculpture in England. I do not know why Sir Brooke chose to express his sorrows chiefly in Italian. Long inscriptions in that language appear on the marble, carefully translated in one of the books for which he was responsible:

The love Sir Brooke Boothby bore his little daughter is reflected in many ways. He wrote and printed a considerable volume, Sorrows Sacred to the Memory of Penelope; but he was something by way of a literary gent and nursed his grief for the purpose of increasing his output; and even then his tearful cantos made but a few pages, so he filled out the book with other literary exercises. But he did not sell his book: he did not do as did our own modern What’s-his-Name, who wrote a poem on the death of his wife and sold it to an editor.

Even more famous than the celebrated monument to Penelope Boothby is the portrait of her painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1788, and familiar to most people in the engravings after it. The original picture was bought at auction, at the Windus sale of 1859, by the Earl of Dudley, for eleven hundred guineas, and in 1885 it was bought by Mr. Thwaites for no less than £20,000. It was the direct inspiration of Sir John Millais’ equally famous “Cherry Ripe,” painted as a portrait of the little Miss Ramage, who had gone to a fancy-dress ball in the character of Penelope.

The inspiration of the monument itself has been very marked. The “Sleeping Children” by Chantrey in Lichfield Cathedral is due to Mrs. Robinson, the mother of them, asking Sir Francis Chantrey, whom she had commissioned, to base his work on the monument to Penelope. The sculptor accordingly visited Ashbourne and made a sketch from the work of Thomas Banks.

Lichfield then speedily became the object of the hatred and jealousy of the Ashbourne people, who heard with bitter feelings that the group by Chantrey was even better than the figure they so prided themselves upon. So far back as 1829, a visitor told how “the venerable matron that shows the monument” in Ashbourne church said, in reply to a remark that Chantrey’s sculpture was the finer, “Humph! the like of that’s what I hear every day. Hang that fellow Chanty, or Canty, or whatever you call him! I wish he had never been born.”

Ashbourne Hall, the old home of the Boothbys, is now an hotel. It sheltered Prince Charles in 1745, and in the other bedrooms his chief officers quartered. Their names were chalked at the time upon the doors, and the chalk was afterwards painted over carefully in white paint by some Boothby eager to preserve memories of the historic occasion, but no traces of them are now to be seen.

During the wars with Napoleon, Ashbourne enjoyed a phenomenal prosperity; for, owing largely to its situation in the midst of England, rendering access to the sea rather a long business, the Government made the little town a place where, by 1804, two hundred captured French officers were stationed, on parole. They are said to have spent £30,000 a year in this place. The worst of which they had to complain was their enforced idleness and the obligation to be within bounds at nine o’clock in the evening. They were, in any case, not supposed to go beyond one mile from the town, and if they were late the penalty was a fine of one guinea, to be given to the informer. General Roussambeau was one of the most distinguished of these prisoners. One day he rode far beyond bounds, to Matlock, to meet Lord Macartney and General Boyer. He met them, and with them a humorous person who joked with him at breaking bounds. The Frenchman, incensed at this, promptly sent him a guinea, the informer’s fee, on his return to Ashbourne; whereupon, not willing for the Frenchman to have the last word, the humorist in haste informed the authorities in London, who at once removed Roussambeau to Yaxley, in Huntingdonshire.

But Dr. Johnson is the great figure at Ashbourne. Here he for many years used to visit Dr. Taylor, at the great brick house, still standing, opposite the old Grammar School. It is named simply, and yet arrogantly, “The Mansion.” Tradition tells that the frontage was designed by an Italian architect: probably the dullest dog in his profession, if the solid, stolid, uninspired elevation is the measure of his capabilities. But how beautiful is the garden front, with its two gabled wings and the odd, but distinguished, pavilion between! This unusual feature, containing what is known as the “Octagon Room,” is said to have been built by Dr. Taylor for the purpose of entertaining George the Third.

Dr. Taylor was one of a kind peculiar to the eighteenth century and the first few years of the nineteenth. Low reforming people have so altered the complexion of affairs that his sort are now well-nigh impossible. He was the ideal squarson; with an estate of his own and all manner of pickings from the Church of England, including the rectory of St. Margaret, Westminster, a prebendal stall in the Abbey, and the rectory of Market Bosworth. He was also a Justice of the Peace. He lived in a style befitting these dignities and the emoluments that derived from most of them, and rarely went out without his post-chaise, four horses, and two postilions.

The tie between Taylor and Dr. Johnson was that of early school-friendship and of a continued acquaintance at Oxford, although, to be sure, when they went up to the University, Taylor as a rich man went of course to Christ Church, and Johnson, equally of course, to Pembroke.

One of Taylor’s hobbies was that of making cascades in his garden, from the Henmore. The observer of to-day who regards the exiguous trickle of that stream with a doubtful eye is of opinion that it must have been ill striving to make cascades out of it, if the flow were no greater then than now. Another hobby was farming, and Dr. Johnson, in his correspondence with Mrs. Thrale, tells how he kept a great bull whose like, he boasted, was not to be found elsewhere in Derbyshire. He was so proud of his bull that he generally, with considerable pains, managed to lead up to the subject of it at table. One day, however, a man called upon Dr. Taylor, on the subject of hiring a farm, and was shown the famous bull, and to Dr. Taylor’s mortification declared he had seen one still larger. He does not seem to have succeeded in hiring that farm, and a year later, Dr. Johnson is found writing to Mrs. Thrale, “We yet hate the man who had seen a bigger bull.”

In 1776 Johnson introduced his friend Boswell to Dr. Taylor, and the next year that hero-worshipper was invited, on the instance of Dr. Johnson, to make a longer stay. He remained a fortnight. At his departure for the north he hired a post-chaise at the still-existing “Green Man” inn, which has absorbed the “Black’s Head” since then and added the name of that extinct house to its own. Boswell describes the landlady of the “Green Man” as a “mighty civil gentlewoman.” Indeed she was! She gave him a humble curtsey, and an engraving of her house, upon which she had written: “M. Kilingley’s duty waits upon Mr. Boswell, is exceedingly obliged to him for this favour; whenever he comes this way, hopes for the continuance of the same. Would Mr. Boswell name this house to his extensive acquaintance, it would be a singular favour conferred on one who has it not in her power to make any other return but her most grateful thanks and sincerest prayers for his happiness in time and in blessed eternity. Tuesday morn.” There does not seem to have been an “Amen” at the end of this, but it is certainly a “felt want.”

The gallows sign of the house boldly straddles the narrow street, with the “Green Man” sign pendant from it, and a huge “Black’s Head,” with glaring eyes and a gaudily painted turban, above.