Before turning away from the Solent, we may take a look at its northern shores, and the mainland ports making gateways of the strait and island that serve their populations as playground.

Cowes lies opposite Southampton, with which it has direct communication up the long inlet of Southampton Water, the least expeditious passage to the Island, but the pleasantest in fine weather, most of the hour’s voyage being by that wooded arm of the Solent, where on one side stretch the heaths and copses of the New Forest’s Beaulieu corner; while the other is broken by the mouths of the Hamble and of the Itchen. Between these creeks, stands conspicuous the Netley Hospital, said to be the longest building in England, overshadowing Netley Castle, adapted as a modern mansion, and the picturesque old ruins of Netley Abbey, fallen to be a junketing resort for Southampton. The Royal Victoria Hospital, a name well earned by the late Queen’s interest in it, was built for soldiers invalided in the Crimean War, and became to our army what the Haslar Hospital, at Gosport, is to the navy. Netley Bay is now headquarters of the Motor-Yacht Club, housed in an ex-Admiralty yacht.

Too many of the Isle of Wight passengers who embark or land at Southampton Pier, know not what a mistake they make in hurrying on without a look at one of the most interesting old towns in England, which from the railway or the docks may appear to be no more than one of its most prosperous ports. The Northam and Southam of early days have here grown into a still growing municipality, whose lively streets imbed some most notable fragments of the past, now reverently preserved. The largest portion of the walls is a stretch of curious archways facing the west shore, behind which filthily picturesque slums have been cleared away and replaced by a pile of model lodging-houses that our era of sanitation puts in bold contrast with the Middle Ages. These Arcades, as they are called, seem to have been the defensible entrances to a line of mansions, very eligible for their period. Behind, beside the spire of Southampton’s oldest church, is a Tudor house said to have accommodated Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn on their brief honeymoon. The oldest of the houses on the sea front, by the “King’s Quay” as it used to be called, is believed to have been tenanted by King John, perhaps by Henry III; and among the many King John’s lodges and King John’s palaces scattered over England, this seems to have the best right to the honour thus claimed for it.

Further on, near the end of the pier, is the West Gate, under which Henry V.’s men-at-arms and archers clanked out on their way to Agincourt.

Such a floating city as Shakespeare saw here in his mind’s eye, would seem but a hamlet beside the streets of craft from all the world that now crowd Southampton docks. Behind them, near the foot of High Street, is a building which, if tradition lie not, may boast itself the oldest house in England, for, stable as it is now, it sets up to be a remnant of King Canute’s residence, who on the shore hereabouts, perhaps enacted his famous scene of commanding the waves, more effectually restrained by the heroes of modern industry; but on that oft-told tale Leslie Stephen drily remarks, “that an anecdote is simply the polite name of a lie.”

From the Quay quarter, what a well-known novelist styles the “brightest, airiest, lightest, prettiest High Street in England,” leads up to the Bargate, imposing survival of mediÆval architecture, with which Southampton is proud to hamper her busy main thoroughfare, long after prosaic Londoners have banished their obstructive Temple Bar. The long street, hence known as “Above Bar,” goes out between pleasant parks, then as a lordly avenue that begins one of the finest high-roads in the kingdom, running on to Winchester. As this avenue is approached, on the left stands a building that should be viewed with grateful respect by all conscientious tourists and their guides, since it is the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey maps. Further on, beside the road, is reached Southampton Common, one of the prettiest natural parks and playgrounds at the gate of any great town, seeming to be, what indeed it is, a half cleared bit of the New Forest.

The woods of the New Forest come within a few miles of Southampton, which has other pleasant scenes about its salubrious site on a gravelly spit projecting between the Itchen and the Test, angling streams of fame. Its sea-front on the West Bay is hardly an admirable point unless at high water, as it more often shows a green expanse of slime and malodorous weed that by no means ladet zum Baden, fit rather for the paddling of adventurous mud larks. But the citizens, more ingenious than Canute, catch the elusive tide in a basin that makes an excellent open-air swimming bath. The strong smell of seaweed is offensive to some strangers, who may comfort themselves by considering it as wholesome: had this rubbish bank been German, it would probably be utilised for some sort of Kur, with a three weeks’ course of sanatory sniffs, and a Nach-kur of whey treatment in the Isle of Wight. Southampton had once indeed a chalybeate spa of its own, to which its Victoria Rooms seems a monument.

This old seaport has had notable sons, from Isaac Watts, whose statue in the park looks down on a flower-bed visited by busy bees, to Charles Dibdin, whose nautical songs were not so well adapted to the restraint of angry passions. If all tales be true, its oldest celebrity is that Bevis of Hampton, whose story, indeed, inconvenient critics father upon a twelfth century French romance; and it has certainly been told in several languages: so far off as Venice, this widely popular hero is found figuring as a sort of local Punch. But for the confusion of all who doubt his Hampshire origin, the name Bevis Mount still preserves on the Itchen bank the memory of a stronghold he threw up here against the Danes; and who was he if not Bevis of Hampton? The story also gives him a connection with the Isle of Wight; so, as we began with dull history, let us draw towards an end with a taste of what, one fears, must count rather as fiction, perhaps expanded about some core of legendary fact.

Sir Bevis of Hampton was one of the favourite romances of the feudal age; and his adventures were familiar to John Bunyan’s unregenerate youth, if little known to the Southampton boys who in our time pass the sixth standard, however well versed they may be in our own “penny dreadful” literature. Yet Ivanhoe, Pathfinder, and the Three Musketeers rolled into one, would make a tame hero beside Sir Bevis. As became a hero, he had difficulties to contend with all along, the first being an unnatural mother who, one grieves to say, was a Scottish princess. Married to Guy, Earl of Southampton, whose name suggests some connection with the still more famous lord of Warwick, she preferred a foreign prince, Sir Murdour, a name that gives plain hint of his nature, as well as a dim anticipation of David Copperfield’s tyrant.

Guy being betrayed by his wife and slain by her paramour when Bevis was only seven years old, the wicked pair’s next object would naturally be to get rid of a child who might avenge his father. With a fortunate want of wisdom often shown by the bad characters of romance, the mother did not see to this business herself, but charged it on Saber, the child’s uncle, by whom he had been reared; then the kind Saber, as proof of compliance, sent her his nephew’s princely garments sprinkled with the blood of a pig, while he kept the boy safe and sound, disguised as a shepherd. But Bevis had too high a spirit to await the opportunity of revenge promised by his uncle when he should come to manhood. Feeding his sheep on the downs, he became so infuriated by the sounds of revelry in which his mother and her new husband sought to drown the memory of their crime, that he burst into the hall, knocking down the porter who would have shut him out, unpacked his young heart of its indignation before the whole company, and with three blows of a “mace” laid his stepfather senseless before them all. Thus did this seven-year-old princeling show a resolution that might well put Hamlet to shame; and as he was so terrible with a stick, we may guess what feats he would perform when it got to sword-play.

The guilty mother was so much displeased by such conduct, that she punished her precociously brave child by sending him to be sold for a slave in heathen lands. Thereby he came into the hands of a Saracen king named Ermyn, whose daughter, Josyan, at once fell in love with the young captive, according to the romantic precedent followed in such cases down to the days of Pocahontas. Ermyn, too, recognising the boy’s quality at a glance, proposed to make him his heir and son-in-law on condition of his abjuring Christianity. But the heroes of old were as orthodox as gallant. Bevis, though not yet in his teens, lifted up such a bold testimony against the errors of Mahound, that the king saw well to drop the subject, and for the present took him on as page, promising him further advancement in the course of time. Still no amount of friendly intercourse with unbelievers could shake the youngster’s faith. He had reached the age of fifteen, when certain Saracen knights rashly ventured to touch on his religion, whereupon he slew them all, some sixty or so, with remarkable ease. Ermyn forgave him for this once, and Josyan with kisses and salves soon cured him of his wounds; then, in return for their kindness, he obligingly rid them of a fearful wild boar that had long been the terror of the country.

These petty exploits had made merely the work of our hero’s ’prentice hand; the time was now come for him to be dubbed a knight, presented on the occasion with a marvellous sword called “Morglay,” and the best horse in the world, by name “Arundel.” Ermyn had soon need of a peerless champion. Bradmond, King of Damascus, was demanding Josyan’s hand, with threats to lay waste the land if his suit were refused; but a lad of mettle like Bevis, of course, found no difficulty in laying low that proud Paynim and all his host. Josyan was so lost in admiration of such prowess, that she proposed to her Christian knight after a somewhat unmaidenly fashion; but Bevis would give her no encouragement till, for his sake, she professed herself ready to renounce the Moslem faith.

But when the king heard how his daughter was being converted to Christianity, his patience came to an end. Not daring to use open violence against the invincible youth, he sent him on an embassy to King Bradmond, his late adversary, who at the point of Bevis’ sword had lately sworn to be Ermyn’s vassal, and was now commanded, on his allegiance, to secure the bearer of the sealed letter which Bevis carried to his own destruction. The author of Hamlet may have taken another hint from this incident. But our impetuous knight needed no treacherous credentials to get him into trouble. At Damascus he found a crowd of Saracens worshipping an idol, which his sound principles moved him to knock over into the mud with proper contempt: the Mohammedans, whatever their doctrinal shortcomings might be, were, as a matter of fact, strongly set against idolatry, but Christian minstrels allowed themselves a poetical license on such points. King Bradmond and all his men, backed by the fanatical population of Damascus, were odds too great even for a pious hero. Bevis, fairly overpowered for once, was thrown into a dungeon with two ravenous dragons to keep him company. It was only a matter of some twenty-four hours’ combat for him to kill the dragons with the butt-end of a staff that came to his hand; but hunger proved a sorer enemy. Now we have the two most familiar lines of this long poem, as quoted in King Lear—

At the end of seven years, he escaped by something like a miracle, and after visiting Jerusalem, rode off to Josyan, whom he found still faithful to him at heart, though formally the bride of an outrageous heathen, the King of Mounbraunt. To his castle Bevis proceeded, not without blood-curdling adventures on the way, and introduced himself as a poor palmer, welcomed for the sake of her Christian lover by Josyan, though she did not recognise him so soon as did his good horse Arundel, that in its vehement excitement at his voice outdoes the fidelity of Argus; then his springing on its back without touching a stirrup reveals him like the bending of Ulysses’ bow. Having got the king out of the way by means of a somewhat unchivalrous fib, Bevis and Josyan eloped together, meeting encounters which showed how little his long imprisonment had unsteeled the paladin’s sinews. His first feat was to kill a brace of lions at one blow; and next he fell in with a giant named Ascapard who, wounded all over his thirty feet of length, was glad to save his life by becoming Bevis’ page.

It was now high time for our hero to be turning homewards. Several years back, before his imprisonment, he had casually fallen in with one of his cousins, sent to search him out and bring him to the immediate assistance of his uncle Saber, who had fled to the Isle of Wight for refuge from the tyrant Murdour. As the first stage of his journey, Bevis proceeded by sea to Cologne, where the bishop happened to be another uncle of his, so he took the opportunity to have Josyan and Ascapard christened, the latter behaving most irreverently under the rite, so as to play the part of a mediÆval gargoyle in the edifying story. The bishop, for his part, used the opportunity of having such a champion at hand to destroy a fiery dragon that infested the country; and in return for this service of some little difficulty, equipped Sir Bevis with a hundred knights, at the head of whom he landed in Hampshire, leaving Josyan at Cologne with Ascapard in attendance.

Under an assumed name, so grown and sun-tanned that his own mother treated the stranger politely, he now introduced himself into the house of Sir Murdour, undertaking to serve him against Saber, but playing a trick on him in the way of carrying off his best horses and arms to the enemy. Before coming to an end with that caitiff, however, Bevis had to return to Cologne to rescue Josyan from certain perils she had got into through her devotion to him; then at last they both joined his uncle in the Isle of Wight. The local Macbeth’s fate now drew to its fifth act. In vain he summoned to his aid both a Scotch and a German army. When he had to do with such prodigies of strength as Bevis and Ascapard, Murdour could expect nothing but to be overthrown, captured, and boiled into hounds’ meat in a great caldron of pitch, brimstone, and lead, as duly befell at Carisbrooke. His wicked wife, hearing how it had fared with him, very properly threw herself from the top of a high tower. His triple army had no more fight in them after the death of their leader, and the delivered citizens of Southampton hailed with joy their true lord, who at last thought himself entitled to wed Josyan after so long and chequered a courtship.

But the author of this long poem is not yet out of breath, and he still takes his hero through what may be called an appendix of adventures, in which Bevis once more goes abroad. King Edgar’s son so much admired Arundel’s form in a horse-race at court, that he tried to steal this peerless steed, and was kicked to death in the stable for his pains. The angry father was for having the horse’s master hanged; but the barons got him off with exile. While wandering homeless, his wife presents him with twin sons, as fresh hostages to their troubled fortune. Ascapard now turns unfaithful, and steals Josyan from him to restore her to her Saracen husband; but after a separation of seven years or so all comes right again, unbelievers and traitors are duly slain as they deserve, and Bevis meets no further check in his triumphant career of baptising heathen lands in blood, if not otherwise. Meanwhile, in his absence, King Edgar spitefully did him further wrong by confiscating the family estate, which the nephew had handed over to Saber. This injury must be redressed by a visit of Bevis to London, where his exploits seem hardly historical. He had now two sturdy sons to back him up, and these being chips of the old block, they easily contrived to kill sixty thousand people in a battle fought about Cheapside and Ludgate Hill, which brought the king to a reasonable mood.

In short, one of Bevis’ sons won the crown of England, with the hand of its heiress; the brother was provided with a kingdom abroad; and Bevis himself returned to another of his foreign dominions, to live happily ever afterwards till, at a good old age, he, Josyan, and Arundel died within a few minutes of each other, the knight and his true lady sumptuously buried in a church, where even his dead body continued to work miracles.

Have I said enough to persuade strangers that they are wrong in not stopping at Southampton on a visit to the tourist-haunted Island? To Americans this port should be of special interest, as hence sailed the Mayflower and the Speedwell, freighted with the hopes of a New England, but the smaller vessel proving unseaworthy, the adventurers, all packed on board the Mayflower, finally embarked at Plymouth, which thus gets credit for the departure of an expedition that really set out from Delft Haven, winged by the parting charge of its large-minded pastor. I had the pleasure of recommending a stay at Southampton West to Mr W. D. Howells, who in a recent book owns to having enjoyed it; and indeed there is more to be seen and enjoyed in or about Southampton than at many places better famed in the tourist world.

On the west side of Southampton Water, through outskirts of the New Forest, is soon reached the Boldre River, near the mouth of which stands Lymington, a town before mentioned as pier of the shortest crossing to the Island, at its Yarmouth end, where it has been proposed to make a tunnel from the spit on which Hurst Castle rises. Of Lymington there is not much else to be said, but that it has a look of having come down in the world, its trade of shipbuilding not being what it once was, though the estuary still makes a station for yachts. From the open sea it is separated by flats, that were utilised as salterns. The scenery in the background is more taking, where the edge of the New Forest plantations is soon reached over the heathy swells of Sway Common.

Westward, the crumbling cliffs of the coast are fringed by groups of hotels and lodging-houses growing along Christchurch Bay to Highcliffe Castle, which was recently selected as Kur-ort for the Kaiser, who here seems to have profited by the mild air and by the views of the Isle of Wight that are the chief attraction of this shore. He may also have admired the prospect on Hengistbury Head, which some stories make the scene of the first German invasion of England. Then beyond the mouth of the Stour and Avon, are reached the purlieus of Bournemouth, where the Island drops out of sight.

On the other side, between Lymington and Southampton Water, extends to the Solent a heathy projection of the New Forest, not so much known to strangers as it deserves. The centre of interest here is the ruined Beaulieu Abbey, from the materials of which Henry VIII. is said to have built Hurst Castle, while its foundation is the one good deed recorded of King John, and that wrung out of him with as much pain as was Magna Charta. The legend goes that this graceless king, bearing a grudge against the Cistercian Order, had persuaded or compelled its abbots to attend a parliament at Lincoln, where he threatened to fling them under the feet of wild horses. But at night he was terrified by a dream: brought to trial before a nameless judge, with the churchmen he had menaced for witnesses against him, he found himself condemned to a severe scourging at their hands, like his father’s chastisement for the death of Thomas À Becket. And lo! when he awoke, the lashes had left no visionary smart. So he saw wise to make expiation for the sacrilege he had meditated; then his repentance took the established form of building and endowing a Cistercian Abbey at Beaulieu. The remains still make a hoary show by the Beaulieu River, further down which Buckler’s Hard was once a building place of men-of-war; and at the mouth was an old ferry to the Island. There is not much traffic now about this muddy shore, near which, towards Lymington, Sowley Pond takes rank as the largest Hampshire lake. The Solent, here locked in by the Isle of Wight, has the aspect of a great lake in views that Cobbett took to bear out the title Bellus locus, vernacularly corrupted into Bewley. And, as I have given a catalogue of novels dealing with the Island, let me mention an excellent one, Mr A. Marshall’s Exton Manor, which clearly has for its scene this edge of the New Forest.

The chief Solent ferry is, of course, at Portsmouth, whereof tourists might do well to see more than is seen from the railway line to its pier, the main knot of Isle of Wight communications, while by Gosport and Southsea, on either side of the town, are alternative crossings to Ryde. Portsmouth is not so rich in antiquities as Southampton, its most notable buildings being the fine modern Church of Portsea, one of the grandest town-halls in England, and the largest Naval Barracks in the world; but it is an ancient place, interesting as our chief marine arsenal, which in case of war might become a Sebastopol or a Port Arthur. Like Plymouth, it is rather a group of towns, Portsmouth, Portsea, and Southsea, run together beside the wide inlet of the harbour, on the other side of which stands Gosport. Naturally it has a marked naval flavour, strongest on the Hard, familiar to so many generations of Jacks and Sues, behind which the narrow main street of Landport makes such a lively scene of a Saturday night. Off Gosport Hard is moored the old Victory, whose deck no Briton can tread without pride, nor would a generous enemy be unmoved on the spot where “mighty Nelson fell,” and in the gloomy cockpit where he died. Portsmouth has for another shrine the birthplace of Charles Dickens, at No. 387 Commercial Road, Landport, now cared for as public property and containing a collection of relics. Walter Besant was also a native, who has celebrated the scenes of his boyhood in Celia’s Arbour.

The great sight is the Dockyard, over which all visitors who can glory in the name of Briton are conducted by its garrison of Metropolitan Police; but foreigners must bring special credentials for admission. A visit to the enceinte of fortifications cannot be recommended, as these are of a modestly retiring disposition, and make a purposed blank on the faithful Ordnance Survey maps. Beyond the fort-crowned Downs behind, some fine country may be reached by tram; but the scenery of the low island on which Portsmouth has its site, too much consists of bastions, barracks, prisons, and other useful, but unlovely institutions.

Southsea, the moral West End of Portsmouth, which is at its east end, holds out most attractions to tarrying strangers. It seems a favourite place of residence or sojourn for retired or idle officers of both services, who enjoy the stir of parades and regimental bands, and the view of the Solent always alive with yachts, steamers, and men-of-war; but it is not so well adapted for a quiet family bathing-place, unless to the taste of nursery maids, who here would be well off for red-coated and blue-jacketed “followers.” A special feature is the wide Common cutting off the houses from the sea-front, with its gay piers and long esplanade leading round the modernised walls of Southsea Castle. Hence let us take our last gaze upon the wooded shores of the Isle of Wight, where, four or five miles off across the Solent, Ryde steeple stands up as the starting-point of our arm-chair tour, now to be ended, I trust, with the reader’s gratuity of good-will towards his cicerone.