The more direct route from Ryde to Ventnor is by road, rail, or boat along the east coast. From the Newport line diverges the old Ventnor railway, at Brading sending off a branchlet for Bembridge, then holding on behind Sandown and Shanklin. Thus on this side are strung together the oldest and one of the youngest settlements of the Isle of Wight.

Brading, an hour’s walk from Ryde, seems an insignificant place now; but it claims to have been the ancient metropolis of the Island in days when St Helens was its chief port. Brading Harbour, still a tidal creek that at high water dignifies the landscape, once made a wider and deeper gulf, which guide-books of a century back describe as an inland lake set in woods. Time was, says Sir John Oglander, that boats came up to the middle of Brading Street, and in the haven below there would be choice of twenty good shipmasters to undertake any voyage. Then the harbour having become choked by unwholesome marshes, an attempt was made to embank them, in which work Sir Hugh Middleton of New River fame had a hand, and certain “ignorant Dutchmen” were brought over to put in practice the art to which they owed their own native soil. But the Dutchmen’s dykes broke down; and the land was not thoroughly reclaimed till our own time saw the enterprise accomplished by that “Liberator” Company of else evil renown.

Thus Brading came to be gradually stranded some mile or two inland. The townlet, that once sent two members to Parliament, has relics to show of its old dignity, its bull ring, its stocks, and its Norman Church, rich in monuments, notably the Oglander Chapel enshrining tombs of a family settled at Nunwell on Brading Down for many centuries, among them the effigy of that Sir John Oglander, whose memoranda have been so much drawn on by later writers. He tells how then “many score” of Oglanders lay in this oldest church of the Island, where the latest addition to the family chapel is a fine monument to his descendant of the Victorian age.

The churchyard contains more than one celebrated epitaph, such as that set to music by Dr Calcott—

and another on a child—

Here was buried “Jane the young Cottager,” whose humble name has been spread far by Legh Richmond, curate of this parish at the end of the eighteenth century. It is to be feared that his writings are not so well known to our generation as they once were in the religious world, for he belonged to that school of Evangelical saints, who dwelt more on “Gospel truths” than on “sound Church feeling”; and his long-spun deathbed scenes are hardly to the taste of readers who have learned to look for more piquant flavours in the literature of edification. But in the Isle of Wight, where Protestantism puts down its foot the more firmly for recent Catholic invasion, this kindly pastor’s “Annals of the Poor” still seem to find a sale, as they once did in many languages. Mr Boucher James goes so far as to say that “in a small way Legh Richmond did for the Isle of Wight what Walter Scott did for the Scottish Highlands,” by drawing tourists to seek out the scenes of his tracts. At all events he deserves the brass now placed to his memory in Brading Church.[2]

The much restored Church claims to represent that first erected on the same site by Wilfred, apostle of the Island. But another lion of Brading is older than its church, though unknown to Legh Richmond’s generation. This is the Roman villa, discovered a generation ago by Mr Hilton Price, Director of the Society of Antiquaries, which boasts itself to be the finest of such miniature Pompeiis in England. It stands about a mile to the south-west, near Yarbridge, the way being easily found, since direction posts are never wanting in the Isle of Wight where there is anything to pay for admission; and the tarred sheds that protect the remains stand conspicuous against a chalk cutting on the Downs. A score or so apartments have been unearthed, in some of which were found many relics of the Roman occupation, the most interesting part of the show being the tesselated pavements with their mosaic designs. There appear traces of two successive ownerships, and of the villa having been destroyed by fire, perhaps on the evacuation of Britain by the Roman troops. The complete building seems to have been composed of the Urbana, or master’s dwelling, the Rustica, or quarters for dependents, and the Fructuaria, store-houses and offices, arranged on three sides of a rectangle.

From Brading the central line of downs runs westward for half-a-dozen miles to the valley of the Medina. On the height known as Ashey Down, a stone pyramid, erected as a sea-mark, makes one of the favourite view-points, looking over half the Island and across the Solent to Portsmouth. Further along, below a crest marked by Saxon burrows, Arreton has a fine prospect upon the valley of the Yar to the south. This is one of the Island’s show villages, where excursion coaches stop to let their passengers see the Church with its medley of Gothic features, and the grave of the “Dairyman’s Daughter,” another of Legh Richmond’s heroines, lying at peace among warriors and knights of old. The old manor-house of this scattered village bears marks of bygone dignity; but destruction has come upon Knighton, which a century or so back could still be called the stateliest hall of the Island.

In the Dairyman’s Daughter, Legh Richmond turns his thoughts from heaven to earth to give a description of what one surveys from the Ashey Down sea-mark; one may omit some final features which have altered since his day, as well as the moral drawn by the good clergyman from the fact that so “much of the natural beauties of Paradise still remain in the world.”

This river Yar, not to be confounded with its namesake on the other side of the Island, rises in the southern downs that bound the prospect over its valley. At Brading, it finds a gap through the northern heights, beyond which it winds sluggishly into that shrunken harbour. Above the left side stands St Helens, with its wide green and fringe of leafy lanes, having moved up from a lower site, where an ivied fragment of the old church shows its whitewashed face to the sea as a beacon. The sandy spit here has also been turned to use for golf-links, that helped yachting to make the fortune of Bembridge. The Island seems now in a fair way of being half laid out in golf grounds, but these were the first, or among the first, which, though small, had the advantage of a mild climate to invite enthusiasts in winter, when elsewhere red balls would be necessary for their absorbing pastime. Links for ladies are a later addition, on the opposite side of the river, that the eyes of neither sex may be distracted from a foursome to what might become a twosome game of life.

Bembridge itself, linked to St Helens by a ferry boat, nestles very prettily on the wooded point opposite. The nucleus of nautically named inns and cottages is much overlaid by hotel and lodging-house accommodation, and by villas whose owners declare Bembridge to be the Island’s pleasantest spot. One of its chief attractions, after golf, is the view of shipping in the Solent mouth; but it has some pretty spots on land, such as the avenue running inland from the bathing beach. To the south it is sheltered by the Foreland, the most easterly point, over which we may hold by mounting lanes, or take a rough path round the shore, tide permitting, that has also to be considered in boating about the dangerous Bembridge Ledges roughening the sea at low water.

Thus we pass on to the curve of Whitecliff Bay, where the chalk of the Downs is broken by an expanse of Eocene beds, making for the geologist a foretaste

of that more glowing transformation scene shown in Alum Bay at the Island’s western end. The Culver Cliffs at this end are protected by a fort which has masked the Hermit’s Hole, a cave once used by smugglers. On the other side of Bembridge is a small fortress, now so far behind the times that it was lately advertised as suitable for a private residence or an hotel.

Beyond Whitecliff Bay, the cliffs curve into the block of Bembridge Down, crowned by a modern fort that has usurped the originally more conspicuous site of Lord Yarborough’s monument, now neighboured by a Marconi Telegraph Station. On the southern slope are the tiny Norman Church and decayed manor-house of Yaverland, which makes a scene in the Dairyman’s Daughter. Here we have come round to Sandown Bay, the largest and openest in the Island, reached byroad and rail from Brading through the gap at Yarbridge.

Sandown stands in a break of the cliffs, behind the centre of its bay, compared of course to the Bay of Naples by those who never saw Vesuvius. With its hotels, rows of smart lodging-houses, batteries of bathing-machines, esplanade, arcade, and other very modern features, this seems one of the most growing places in the Island; and I trust Sandown will not take it amiss to be described as perhaps the most commonplace resort here, or at least the most like the ordinary Saturday-to-Monday. Its strong point is wide, firm sands for children, and, on a common behind the town, excellent golf-links for their elders, about the height known as “Majuba Hill,” the views from which are complained of by votaries as interfering with strict attention to their game. The summer season of this bathing-place is so prosperous that some day its esplanade and Shanklin’s may stretch out to meet along the couple of miles of cliff walk separating them. As link between them springs up Lake, with its sumptuous “Home of Rest,” and its headquarters of Isle of Wight cricket, behind the cliff descent at Littlestairs.

Sandown Pier has met with rough handling from winter waves, to which, however, the enterprising town will not give in so easily as did King Canute, whose renowned object-lesson against pride, according to legend, had its scene not far off, across the Solent. The railway station, which stands some way back from the sea, is a junction of lines to Newport, Ventnor, and Ryde, so that Sandown visitors can easily reach more picturesque corners of the Island, or can soon gain the Downs framing the green valley of the Yar. Up this valley the first station is Alverston, near a knoll known as Queen’s Bower, from the tradition that upon it Isabella de Fortibus watched the chase in what was then Bordwood Forest. Near the next station, on an eminence beside the river, stands up the ancient fane of Newchurch, a parish that, in spite of its name, is old enough to have once included both Ryde and Ventnor in its ample bounds. Then by Harringford Station below Arreton Down, the line comes to Merston Junction, there forking north and south.

In old days Sandown, then known rather as Sandham, was distinguished by a “castle,” which has given place to less imposing but more formidable modern forts, serving as models for sand-engineering to the troops of children encamped here in summer. Its only other historical association seems to be as retreat of the notorious John Wilkes in his old age, cheered by more gentle pursuits than might be expected of a so unedifying demagogue. He was given to rearing pigeons, as well as to collecting books and china, at his Sandown “Villakin,” a sort of tawdry miniature of Horace Walpole’s show, to which the owner’s notoriety attracted many visitors. One describes him as walking about his grounds “in Arcadian costume,” raking up weeds with a hoe and destroying vipers. He complained that the pigeons he got from England, Ireland, and France always took the first chance of flying home, so that he had almost given up pigeon-keeping, “when I bethought myself to procure a cock and hen pouter from Scotland: I need not add that they never returned.” This cockney bitterness against North Britons, it will be remembered, made a common subject between Dr Johnson and the ex-Lord Mayor, when Boswell had his wish of bringing them together. Wilkes showed one visitor a pond in the garden stocked with carp, tench, perch, and eels, because, he said, fish could not be had by the seaside. Here he also employed himself in writing the memoirs which he had the decency to destroy. The toothless old rip, with one foot in the grave, bragged how his squinting eye had done great execution with the pretty farmers’ daughters at Newport market: well known is his boast, that, monster of ugliness as he was, he could “talk away his face,” so as to be only a quarter of an hour behind the handsomest man. Another story is that when, on his last crossing of the Solent, the vessel was becalmed, he jocularly affected to take this as a presage of death, since he had never been able to live in a calm; but his retreat at Sandown seems to have been quiet enough for Cowper or Hannah More.

If, to set off against that ribald sojourner of its neighbour’s, Shanklin wanted to boast a notorious character, it was a generation ago the headquarters, as perhaps rather it would prefer to forget, of one of the most audacious criminals of our time, whose life, so far as I know, has never been written, unless in criminal calendars. His real name, it appears, was Benson, which does not figure in the Dictionary of National Biography, though it deserves a place there beside Claude Duval’s and George Barrington’s; while I am mistaken if it were not qualified by nationality. On this side of the Channel he called himself a Frenchman; but he spoke French and English equally well, as would hardly have been the case, had he not passed his youth in England. He was certainly a Jew, of typically Jewish aspect. His adventurous career would make a theme for the pen that chronicled Jonathan Wild’s; and if I offer a sketch of it, faute de mieux, it is because I had the advantage of knowing him. He did me the honour of trying to make me one of his dupes, in which enterprise, I am glad to say, he succeeded less well than in other cases; and I did not care to cultivate an acquaintance which he pressed upon me. But with a little help from hearsay and surmise, I believe I can supply an outline of his history, wrapped as it was in clouds of deceit.

He was, I am told, the son of a prosperous Jewish tradesman established at Paris, who had means to put him in a position of respectability, if not of wealth, “instead of which,” young Benson from his youth took to knavery like a duck to the water. I have heard that in early life he had been connected with the French or the Belgian press; and he showed some familiarity with journalism, which he sought to turn to account in his swindling schemes. That part of his life, indeed, lies in deep shadow, which might be cleared up by research among police dossiers of the continent.

His first notable coup in England seems to have been during the Franco-Prussian War, when he flew at such high game as the very Lord Mayor. A French town had been burned by the Prussians. While this disaster was still fresh on our news sheets, there burst into the Mansion House a voluble gentleman professing to be the mayor of that town, come to throw himself on the generosity of the great English nation. Our sympathetic Lord Mayor handed out a thousand pounds; and it was whispered at the time that this plausible guest carried off also the heart of his lordship’s daughter. The clever trick ended in detection, arrest, and two years’ imprisonment; then by way of varying the monotony of Newgate, Benson tried to set fire to his cell, but succeeded only in burning himself about the spine, so as to be henceforth a helpless cripple. There were some who surmised that he made the most of this injury as helping out his disguise of deceit; but I never saw his slight figure unless as recumbent on a couch, or carried like a child in the arms of a big Frenchman, who passed as his valet, being really one of the swindling gang of which Benson was the brain. His crippled state was put down to a railway accident.

After his release from Newgate comes a period of obscurity, from which he emerges about 1875 as living in some style at Shanklin, with a London pied À terre in Cavendish Square, a brougham, and everything genteel about him. It was at this time I made his acquaintance. He then passed under the name of Yonge, with some explanation which I forget; but he confided to me and to others how he was really the Count de Montague, a Frenchman engaged in conspiring for the Empire, business that was to account for the seclusion in which he lived. This struck me as dubious: in those days, before dynamite outrages, one could conspire at the pitch of one’s voice in the middle of Piccadilly without anyone caring to interfere. Moreover, in writing to me, he signed himself De Montagu, whereas, for a more favoured friend, he decorated the name with a final e. It took little Sherlock Holmes’ faculty to detect that a French nobleman ought to know how to spell his own name; but I am glad to say that from my first sight of the “Count,” I distrusted a gentleman whose dress and manners seemed too fine to be true. He never deceived me by his pretensions; and his overdone elegance served to set others on their guard. Indeed, like Joseph Andrews, he might have passed for a nobleman with one who had not seen many noblemen.

For not being taken in by him, I have perhaps to thank my deficiencies. His chief accomplishment, it seems, was playing the piano like an angel, which left me cold, while it drew tuneful flies into his web of treasons and stratagems. Some women were much taken by his feline manners, which on others produced such a feeling of repulsion as was my experience. One family became so captivated as to act as his social sponsors in the Isle of Wight, where he was received with open arms. If I remember right, it was a house belonging to this family which he tenanted; and rumour went that his admiring landlady’s eyes were hardly opened even by the exposure that cost her dear. Several writers for the press were brought into relations with him through a well-known author, who has to confess that he allowed his honesty to be deceived. When urged to search closer into Benson’s antecedents, he was content to let himself be put off with audacity. “Go to the French Ambassador!” exclaimed that plausible knave; but no such inquiry was carried out; and his most solid credentials were from a London bank, that knew nothing of him but his having a considerable balance to draw upon.

How he got the means to figure thus as a wealthy foreigner, I know not; but I have a good guess as to a main aim of his schemes which never came to light. At this time he was concerned in founding a periodical which was to champion religion, loyalty, honesty, and other causes he professed to have at heart. He knew very little about the higher walks of the press; and his design wavered between a newspaper and a half-crown monthly. In the latter form the organ financed by him did appear, soon to be eclipsed. Its name and short history are best forgotten. The pious founder, not being so ready with his pen as with his tongue, proposed to me to write an article on certain money-market matters, the tone and facts of which article were to be dictated by him. He was such a shallow knave that he did not take the precaution of carefully testing my likelihood to be a fit tool in his hands; and at my first interview with him, he took for granted that I knew nothing of French; then, by the way in which he and his valet parlez-voused to each other before my face, I soon got a suspicion they were not master and servant.

By no means prepossessed in his favour by the ease with which he reckoned on catching me, I refused to enlist myself as literary bravo in affairs quite beyond my scope. He did find a more subservient scribe to write such an article as he had outlined, which the publisher refused to print as libellous; then Benson was for bringing an action against the firm by way of advertisement for his organ, now launched with a great flourish of trumpets. This was at a time when certain papers had done more or less good service, to themselves and the public, by exposing scandals in the financial world. On that example, I believe Benson aimed at gaining a character for audacious honesty, then using it to rig the money-market to his own profit quo cumque modo, or to levy blackmail in a manner since perfected by certain “financial” papers that are the disgrace of our journalism.

I never understood why he took some pains to enlist me as his accomplice, or could imagine that he had found in me a congenial spirit. More than once he asked me to his house in the Isle of Wight; but it proved well that I never accepted any hospitality from him. To oblige my friend the editor, whose only fault in the matter was a generous trustfulness, I did write for his organ on subjects in my own line; but my misgivings held me back from personal intercourse with the proprietor. The last time I saw him was at a dinner party, some way out of London, given to make him acquainted with the staff of his literary enterprise. He had now come to whispering that he was no less than a prince, who for certain reasons preferred to be incognito; and some of us needy scribblers were much impressed by his condescension. He pressed on me the honour of having a lift back to town in his carriage, which I accepted very unwillingly, so strong had grown my suspicions. On our drive, I remember, the main drift of his conversation was contempt for the company we had just left; and he abused the host for asking the like of him to meet such outsiders; but I did not respond to the flattery implied in such confidences, with which once more he seemed inviting me to intimacy. I congratulated myself on my reserve, when next week a reward of £1000 was offered for the arrest of this pseudo-prince, set in his true light by a notorious trial that followed in the spring of 1877, after he had been run to earth in Scotland, somewhere about the Bridge of Allan.

This was known as the Turf Frauds case; but I forgot the precise details of the ingenious swindle which Benson, along with several accomplices, was convicted of practising on a French lady, the Comtesse de Goncourt. As ringleader, and as formerly convicted of forgery, he was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. In the course of the trial, it came out that he had managed to corrupt some of the minor officials of Newgate, and to keep up relations outside, by whose help this cripple had plotted a daring escape. Then, his fate being decided, he sought to gain some remission of his punishment by turning informer on another set of accomplices; and the public was amazed, not to say dismayed, to learn that several of the detective inspectors of Scotland Yard had been in this scoundrel’s pay, hobnobbing with him as his guests, and serving warnings on him instead of the warrants entrusted to them. The story is too long to tell that came out in a three weeks’ sensational trial at the end of the same year. One or two of the accused detectives got off in a cloud of suspicion; but the others, as well as a solicitor who had been leagued with them, convicted chiefly on Benson’s evidence, were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, from which a couple of ex-inspectors emerged to start in the shady profession of private inquiry agents.

I am not sure if Benson served his full term in England; but it was many years afterwards that I heard of him as having again got into trouble in Switzerland. This time, he must have come off easily, for when three or four more years had passed, he is seen seeking fortune in the New World. Here his last trick was as ingenious and bold as his first appearance at the Mansion House. A great singer, Madame Patti if I mistake not, was eagerly expected at the Opera House of Mexico City. A few days in advance of her, came to the Iturbide Hotel a polite gentleman giving himself out as her agent. This was Benson, who, having sold all the boxes and stalls, made off with his plunder in a special train, and managed to get out of the country, but was arrested, I understand, in New York, to be held for extradition. It is probable that Mexican penal servitude has terrors even for habituÉs of Newgate and Dartmoor. At all events, poor Benson, in despair, committed suicide by throwing himself over a landing in his prison. So ended my would-be host in the Isle of Wight, where he entertained worthier guests than me, not to speak of his train of friendly detectives.

This is but an ugly story to tell of such a pretty place as Shanklin, an older and a choicer resort than Sandown, favoured by visitors both in winter and summer, and with a good share of permanent residents attracted by its charms. As in the case of Lynton and Lynmouth, Shanklin has a double character. By the sea has sprung up a new bathing-place with a smart esplanade, showy pier, a disfiguringly convenient lift to the top of the cliff, and everything spick and span. The old Shanklin behind offers a contrast in its nucleus of embowered cottages, and its irregular High Street hugging an inland hollow, about which villas are half-buried in blooming gardens and clumps of foliage, like the huge myrtles that enclose the little parsonage near the churchyard in its grove of gravestones. But for some rawer rows of houses stretching out towards the cliff, upper Shanklin has lost little of the charm that struck Lord Jeffrey,

when he described the village as “very small and scattery, all mixed up with trees, and lying among sweet airy falls and swells of ground which finally rise up behind the breezy Downs 800 feet high, and sink down in front to the edge of the varying cliffs which overhang a pretty beach of fine sand, and are approachable by a very striking wooded ravine which they call the Chine.”

An earlier visitor was Keats, who is understood to have written his Lamia in a cottage, not now standing, about the opening rechristened “Keats’ Green” in honour of this sojourn, when, to tell the truth, he wrote of the Isle of Wight as “but so, so,” though he admired the coast from Shanklin to Bonchurch, as well he might. Longfellow, who wrote an inscription for a fountain near his hotel, called Shanklin “one of the quietest and loveliest places in the kingdom,” with which, indeed, his acquaintance had not been exhaustive.

Shanklin and Sandown, the most growing resorts of the Island of late years, love one another like Liverpool and Manchester, like Ramsgate and Margate, like St Paul’s and Minneapolis, and other pairs of too near rivals for popularity. Careful parents may prefer Sandown as a place where their youngsters will find nothing to fall off; but poetic and artistic souls will give their vote for Shanklin, which has chalybeate springs and elaborate baths as attraction, as well as beautiful surroundings. Its beauty spot par excellence is, of course, the Chine above mentioned, which makes one of the shows of the Island. The Chines, so named here and on the opposite mainland coast—but in one part of Hampshire Bunny is a less romantic title for them—are deep, irregular ravines carved out by streams of water upon cliffs of soft clay or sand, often sheltering a profusion of tangled vegetation, or again, as at Bournemouth, revealing the frame of naked nature. The Shanklin Chine, in the former variety, is by many judged the prettiest, as it is perhaps the best known to visitors. A description of it may be borrowed from Black’s Guide to the Isle of Wight.

But even without its Chine, Shanklin would have a right to be proud of itself. It lies at the corner of the southern range of Downs that separate it from Ventnor and the Undercliff. Open and airy walks may be taken on these heights; or less arduous strolls by the leafy knolls and hollows on their flanks. One favourite ramble is to Cook’s Castle, an artificial ruin

upon a wooded brow commanding a fine view, whence it is a short mile to Wroxall, the next station on the railway as it bends inland, to find nothing for it but a tunnel through the heights that shelter Ventnor.

From the bottom of Shanklin Chine, when the tide is out, one can follow the coast round the fissured crags of Dunnose, on which a cliff-walk is always open. Thus is reached Luccombe Chine, a modestly retiring scene, not so easily found, since there is no charge for admission; but well worth finding. Beyond this one enters the tangled wilderness of the Landslip, through which winds a path for Bonchurch. But here we come within the purlieus of Ventnor, and round to the “Back of the Island.”

From the heights at this corner, one looks down upon the scene of one of the saddest of naval disasters in our day, recorded in churchyards that show the tombs of so many young lives. Off Dunnose was lost, in 1878, the training ship Eurydice, with her company of hearty and hopeful lads. I well remember how that Sunday afternoon the March wind blustered on the northern heights of London. But under the lee of the Undercliff, the homeward bound sailors hailed it as a favouring breeze; then with ports open and under all plain canvas, the Eurydice spanked on round Dunnose, passing out of shelter of the Downs, to be taken aback by a snow squall, that threw her on her beam-ends before the men could shorten sail. Many of them must have been drowned as they rushed to struggle up on deck, from which others were swept away, blinded by the snow, or drawn down in the vortex of the sinking vessel. Three or four came to be picked up, an hour later, by a passing collier, and only two lived to tell the amazement of their sudden wreck, whose victims had much the same fate as those of the Royal George.