A short mile off the road, two miles below Petersfield, is the charmingly-situated village of Buriton. It is reached by a winding lane turning off the high-road, beside a finger-post and two ugly modern cottages. Hop-fields and maltings border the lane, which suddenly, at one of its turns, discloses the village, tucked away in the sheltered lower slopes of the rolling South Downs, clothed in places with short grass, and in others bald and showing the white chalk; while just above the village are woodlands of tall elm and branching oak, vociferous with rooks. These “hangers,” as hillside woods are locally termed, are a special feature of this part of Hampshire, and are not to be found in anything like this profusion in any other part of the county. They form the loveliest setting imaginable to an old-world village of this character, and it is difficult to say at what season of the year such a place as Buriton, backed with its woods, is most beautiful. Spring finds the forest trees bare and black, with waving branches scraping, like wizard fingers, gnarled and crooked, the leaden skies of moist February and windy March; and with April comes the stirring of the sap that sets off every little twig with the fairy-like pale green buds of future leaves, until a distant view of the hanger seems clothed in a tender emerald mist. Spring passes and leaves the hillside trees clothed with a thick coat of summer foliage that forms the best of backgrounds to the red roofs of the village; and when leafy summer mellows into russet autumn the hanger is one mass of brilliant colour; gorgeous reds and yellows and tints of dull gold. When November fades away in mists and midnight frosts into Christmastide and the bleak days of January, when days draw out and “the cold begins to strengthen,” as the country folk say, then the hanger is etched black and solemn against the snow-powdered downs, and you can discern every high-perched homestead of the rooks, swinging in the topmost branches of the tallest trees, and looking twice their actual size by this adventitious juxtaposition of black and white.

And, indeed, Buriton is as cheerful in winter’s frosts as in summer’s heat. The village itself is commendably old-fashioned and typically English of the eighteenth century. True, a post and telegraph office stands in the village street, but that is the only anachronism: for the rest, it is a picture by Caldecott come to life. Caldecott saw in his mind’s eye a characteristically English village of the time of the Georges, and he crystallized his vision in many tinted drawings. Here, then, is such a village in very truth, with its ancient church fronting an open space in the village street, where a broad horse-pond, fed by a trickling rill, reflects the ivied church tower in summer, and in winter-time bears the shouting, red-faced urchins who come sliding upon its surface as merrily as English boys have done from time immemorial. Fronting the other side of the pond is the old farm-house of Mapledurham, stuccoed, ’tis true, and plebeian enough to a casual observer, but bearing traces of antiquity in its gables, whence Tudor windows peep from out the handiwork of the modern plasterer, and thereby indict him for an artless fellow, with never a soul above contracts and cheap utility.

Behind the church, in midst of rick-yards and their pleasing litter of fragrant straw, stands Buriton Manor House, a solid, staid, and comfortable four-square building of mellowed red brick, frankly unornamental, and therefore pleasing. Built in the days of Queen Anne, you can yet scarce imagine (being a Londoner, and used to the grime of the eighteenth-century houses of the capital), as you stand in front of it, these cleanly walls to be so old. Yet there are brilliant lichens upon the bricks that are not the growth of yesterday, and the cumbrous sashes of the tall plain windows are not of the fashion of to-day. Some windows, too, are blank and bricked up; reminiscences, these, of the days of the window-tax, days when the light of heaven was appraised by the Inland Revenue authorities, and to be bought at a price in coin of the realm. So here, in very truth, is the Manor House of Caldecott’s fancy, and of Washington Irving’s picture-like prose.

And here lived, for a time, Edward Gibbon, the historian, whose birthplace we passed at Putney; and it is for this personal interest, for this hero-worshipping object, that I have turned aside from the high-road to visit Buriton. Gibbon, you will say, is a quaint figure for the hero-worshipper to admire outside his stately pages of Roman History, and I have no mind to deny your contention. He was, indeed, a humorous figure of a man, the more so, doubtless, because he was so supremely unconscious of the whimsical figure he cut before his contemporaries. The difference between the majestic swing and rounded periods of his literary style, and his personal appearance and his private habits of thought, is scarce less than ludicrous. Gibbon was, in fine, exceedingly human, and his person was almost grotesque. Do you, I wonder, conceive in that luminous optic, the “mind’s eye,” when thinking of the man who wrote the stately prose of the “Decline and Fall,” the figure of a little snub-nosed gentleman, with a square head, a prodigious development of chins, and a wagging paunch? Surely never. Yet this was the appearance of the man, and portraits and caricatures of him all agree in showing this great literary figure of last century’s close as a very whimsical-looking human figure indeed.

It cannot with certainty be said whence Gibbon derived his singular appearance. Not (one would say) from either his father or his mother, who were both, to judge from their portraits, very comely persons. But if neither his face nor his figure would have served to make Gibbon’s fortune, certainly his agreeable manners stood him in good stead; and although Boswell describes him, in ferociously unfriendly terms, as “an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow,” of the race of “infidel wasps and venomous insects,” he seems to have been in good favour with polite society. But then Bozzy’s mind had room for only one hero.

He was not (curiously enough) at all eager in the early part of his career to be recognized for his literary abilities, for, when a young man, he was solicitous to be known as a good figure in polite society. Thus when, in 1762, we find the French Ambassador, the Duc de Nivernais, giving him introductions to the foremost French writers of the time, we hear him complaining that the Duke treated him “more as a man of letters than as a man of fashion.” He was, indeed, very human! This quality (or defect?) is seen again in a letter, still extant, in which he says, years later, upon his determination not to stand again for Parliament:—“A seat in Parliament I can only value as it is connected with some official situation of emolument.” Does that not endear him to you at once, who live in these Pharisaical times, when men seek election to the House on the score of philanthropy, of patriotism, of service to mankind; on any ground, in fact, but the fundamental consideration of self-interest?

Gibbon lived and wrote in the days when the literary patron still existed, and although the historian was a man of some pretensions in his own county, and on his ancestral acres at Buriton, yet he found the powerful friendship of Holroyd, afterwards first Earl of Sheffield, most useful, not only in literature, but in his career as a Member of Parliament. The almost lifelong friendship between the two was manifested even in death, for Gibbon sleeps, not in the Abbey, nor among his fathers at Buriton, but in the Sheffield vault at Fletching, in Sussex.

The mind of this singular man was, indeed, not apt to run in the direction of ancestor-worship, and old acres represented only so much money to him when, a year after the publication of his History, he sold the estate. Years before, in his father’s time, he held the captaincy of a battalion of Hampshire Militia (a sort of bachelor Sir Dilberry Diddle), and thus he says of himself in the “Memoirs,” in a manner unconsciously humorous:—“I for two and a half years endured a wandering life of military servitude.” Thus seriously did he look upon the perfunctory drilling of yeomen; the pleasant field-days between Portsmouth and Petersfield, and the Sunday church-parades, in which the militia, gorgeous in sky-blue coats with red facings; in white breeches with black gaiters; with astonishing hats and careful perukes finished off daintily with pigtails and black silk ribbons, bore a gallant part, exciting the admiration of the ladies, and the scornful animosity of those sober bachelors who belonged neither to the Militia, the Fencibles, nor to that doughty body of men, the Petersfield Cavalry; all good men and true, ready to shed their last drop of blood for their country, in the unlikely event of an invasion; but, meanwhile, none the less averse from a little parade of pomp and circumstance and the showing off of fine feathers. They were gaudy and most remarkable figures, these old militia-men, and the modern “Saturday afternoon soldier” is to them as a London sparrow is to a peacock for comparison. Neither is there any adequate compare between the work done by these old fellows and the modern amateur soldier. Gibbon and his contemporaries may have boasted of their “military servitude,” and the historian may have profoundly believed the statement, that hints more than it really expresses—“The captain of Hampshire grenadiers was not useless to the historian of the Roman Empire;” but their services were more to the eye than to practical efficiency, and they would have resented, even to the laying down of their firelocks, the hard work which a battalion of Cockney rifle volunteers endures with cheerfulness.

But Gibbon grew tired of his military exploits; and presently, when the militia were disbanded, his father sent him travelling on the Continent. It was at Rome, amid the ruins of the Capitol, that, in 1764, he conceived the first idea of his great work, but it was not until 1788 that the final volume was issued, after years of incredible toil and research.

Whatever the popularity of Gibbon may be now, a hundred years after his death, certainly his “Decline and Fall” had an extraordinary run when it first appeared. The entire impression was exhausted in a few days; a second and third edition were scarce adequate to the demand, and it was said at the time that “the book was on every table and on almost every toilet.” From that day to this there have been well-nigh twenty editions, some of them consisting of as many as fourteen volumes, and, as a sign of Gibbon’s sometime popularity, it may be mentioned that the entries under his name in the British Museum catalogue number about a hundred and twenty.

Not many pilgrims make their way to Buriton for Gibbon’s sake, yet were you to turn aside from the high-road, you would find the place interesting beyond expectation. Lying perdu among the hills, although so near the traffic of the outer world, it is, and has ever been, but rarely visited by the stranger, and has thus come to retain a distinct and individual character.Push open the old wrought-iron gates of the churchyard and look around. The church itself is just a typical building, with some few special features. It has, of course, been restored, but the fury of the restorer has been wreaked with greater effect elsewhere, and he has come to Buriton in a manner comparatively mild and harmless. He has left even the fine Decorated window of the south chapel, and has not cast out all the memorials of the dead and used their shattered fragments for mending the village street—as he has been known to do elsewhere. You can, in fact, discover the names of some of Gibbon’s ancestors upon the walls, and not all the original encaustic tiles have been thrown away. Prodigious!

But others have (truth to tell) been less fortunate. Poor cadavers! laid to rest within the church, with storied ledger-stones above, decently recounting both virtues they had and had not, they have been ruthlessly removed, and as the stranger paces round the exterior of the church, he walks upon their memorials, laid end to end, to form a solid footpath for the good folks o’ Sundays. The frosts of winter crack them; the nailed boots of the rustics wear down the well-cut inscriptions that date from the seventeenth century to within a few generations of ourselves; and they will presently be worn quite away.

Here—stop and look—is the epitaph of one, a considerable fellow in his day, a barrister of the Middle Temple. Here is his coat-of-arms, and here his panegyric, writ, doubtless, by loving hands, and cut, most certainly, by an artist in his mortuary craft. Ha! barrister, where are your fees, your brief-bag, your writs of escheat and fi fa? Would you could arise and with all your former eloquence denounce the paltry fellows who have filched your gravestone for the paving of a churchyard path, whereon the casual clodhopper thumps his ponderous way and the meditative tourist pauses to moralize, and with the ferrule of his walking-stick scrapes away the dirt that hides your identity.

Where this solemn paving was used to be, are spread now, over the nave of the church, coloured tiles that wear a neat and cleanly, but distressingly secular, look. You might be pacing the tiled hall of a suburban villa, rather than the House of God. “But one must live,” the restoring architect will tell you. The greater the cost of his commission the larger will be the amount from his five-percentage; so, out go the old stones and in come the patent tiles, while that gentleman pockets his money and sets off to fresh fields and pastures new.

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