Road from Bath to Bristol.—Cornu-Ammonis.—Bristol.—Exchange.—Market.—Cathedral.—The Brazen Eagle.—Clifton.—Bristol-Wells.—Anecdote of Kosciusko.
From Bath to Bristol is three leagues; the road crosses the river Avon by an old bridge, and continues for some way along its banks, or at little distance from them. Half a league from Bath is the house wherein Fielding is said to have written Tom Jones; it stands by the way side, in a village called Twyverton, and I did not look at it without respect. We had a fine view of the river winding under a hill which is covered with old trees, and has a mansion on its brow, opposite to which, on our side the water, was the largest and finest meadow I have seen in England, in which an immense herd was feeding, as in a savannah. A little dirty town, called Keynsham, stands about half way. I noticed the Cornu-Ammonis built up in the walls of many of the houses, or, if it happened to be a fine specimen, placed over the door-way, as an ornament. This, I find, has given rise to a fabulous legend, which says that St Keyna, from whom the place takes its name, resided here in a solitary wood full of venomous serpents, and her prayers converted them into these stones, which still retain their shape. Beyond this there is a fantastic building, more like a castle than any thing else: I could neither guess for what it was intended, nor of what it was built. It proved to be the stables belonging to a great house on the opposite side of the road, from which there is a subterranean passage, and the materials were the scoria from some neighbouring iron-works, with which I soon perceived that the walls by the road side were capt: for this it is excellently adapted, as nothing will vegetate upon it, and it is undecomposable by the weather. Here we once more approached the river, which was now a dirty stream, flowing through wide banks of mud. Bristol was presently in sight,—a huge city in the bottom, and extending up all the adjoining hills, with many steeples, one of which inclines so much from the perpendicular, that I should be sorry to live within reach of its fall,—and the black towers of many glass-houses rolling up black smoke. We entered through a gate of modern and mean architecture into a street which displayed as much filth, and as much poverty, as I have seen in any English town. Here, for the first time, I saw something like a public fountain, with a painted statue of Neptune above it, which is as little creditable to the decency of the magistrates as to the state of arts in the city. The entrance into Bristol is, however, the worst part of it. We crossed the bridge, where there is a fine opening, and full in view a modern church and spire, so beautifully proportioned, and therefore so fine, that you do not at first perceive that the whole building is perfectly plain and unornamented.
D. was awaiting my arrival. He had secured our places for Exeter in to-morrow's coach, and I lost no time in seeing what he, as being acquainted with the place, thought most worthy to be seen. The exchange, a fine edifice, about half a century old, was opposite to the inn-door at which the stage had stopped: its inclosed square is exceedingly beautiful, more so than any thing of the kind which I have seen elsewhere:—yet, it seems, the citizens choose to assemble in the street, in front, where some friend to the city, in old times, erected four brazen tables, on which his town's-folk might count out their money in their public dealings. On one of these a man was selling newspapers, on another a cage of goldfinches was exposed to sale. Behind the exchange is the market, which is even finer than that of Bath. It contains three market-houses, to which cheese, butter, pork, poultry, &c. are brought by women from the country. The shambles stand in another part; and another is appropriated for vegetables, secured from the weather by a range of slated sheds. I never saw, even at a fair, a busier or more crowded scene, and every thing was going on with that order and dispatch which characterize this extraordinary nation.
We crossed a wooden draw-bridge over the bed of a river, where the ships were lying on a bed of mud, and the water was not wider than a common street gutter: it was full of small craft; the view on one side extended down the river into the country: there was the bustle of business along the quays and in the streets; one church tower of singular beauty was in sight, and the whole scene was fine and rememberable. The cathedral stands in a place with old trees in front; it is a poor building,—excepting Chester, the least interesting in England. The entrance is disfigured by a door-way in the very worst style of modern architecture. A fine cross, which formerly stood in the square, has been sold by the corporation to a gentleman, who has re-erected it at his country-seat, and thus rescued it from destruction! This was about thirty years ago; the person who told me this, said he did not remember it, but had often in his childhood eaten it in gingerbread. Instead of ascending, you descend into this church, by several steps; the pavement is therefore necessarily damp, and, what is truly abominable, stinks of the abominations which are, in contempt of all decency, committed against the doors, and find their way down.
It is, as I have elsewhere mentioned, a part of the service of the English Church to read a portion of the Scriptures, one chapter from the Old Testament, and another from the New. In common parochial churches, the whole of the service is performed by the officiating priest, and he does this in his desk: but, in cathedrals, one of the minor priests takes this part of the duty, and performs it in the middle of the choir: here the bible is usually placed upon the outspread wings of a brazen eagle, the handsomest of all their church ornaments. Such an eagle they had in this cathedral, and a remarkably handsome one it was; but last year the dean and chapter thought proper to sell it, for the sake of applying the paltry sum which it would produce as old brass in ornaments for the altar.—So the eagle went as the cross had gone before it. There happened to be a man in the city whose humour it is to attend service whenever it is performed in this cathedral: on week days this is considered by the priests as a mere matter of form; and having few or none to attend them, they omit parts of the liturgy, and hurry over the rest, to get through their task as speedily as possible. During many years it had been the main business of this person to watch them, and endeavour to bring them to a sense of their duty; for which purpose he wrote to them whenever he found them offending, and also to the dean and to the bishop, calling upon them to interfere, and see that the service of the church was duly performed. He missed the eagle, enquired for it, traced it to the brazier's, and rescued it from the furnace. Here was a fine subject for his zeal! He wrote a circular letter to all the bishops, of which they took no notice; offered the eagle again to the cathedral at the price which he had paid for it, which they refused, being, as might have been expected, obstinate in their misconduct—and, lastly, put it up to sale,[32] in the hope that it might be purchased for some other church, and not utterly desecrated. What has been its fate I know not; but it seems that the respect which the English pay to their cathedrals is confined to the buildings, and does not extend to any thing in them. At one time all the monumental figures and inscriptions were cut in brass:—a large collection of these, which were taken up from another cathedral while it was repaired, have gone the way of the eagle, and been cast into candlesticks and warming-pans.
The monuments in the church are numerous; that nearest the entrance is the finest and the most remarkable, as being Mrs Draper's, the Eliza of Sterne and of the AbbÉ Raynal. The rhapsody about her, in the latter's work, is as excellent a specimen of every thing that is absurd, as it would be easy to find even in his Histoire Philosophique. Some parts of the architecture are beautiful in their kind. At a little distance from the church is a Saxon gateway: the upper part is in admirable preservation—the bottom has been corroded by a practice as indecent as it is sacrilegious—the more to be regretted, as this is one of the finest specimens of the style.
The views in the neighbourhood of this city are singularly pleasing. The adjoining village of Clifton was once the most beautiful village in England, and may now be said to be the finest suburb. Here too, as well as at Bath, is the dismal sight of streets and crescents which have never been finished, the most dolorous of all ruins. It stands upon a hill above the river, which runs between high rocks and a hanging wood; a scene truly magnificent, and wanting nothing but clearer water; the stream consists of liquid mud, and the banks are hideous unless the tide be full, for the tide rises here not less than forty English feet. The beauty of this scene is yearly diminishing; the rocks which formerly rose so immediately from the river side, as only to allow room for a path, are used as quarries. The people of Bristol seem to sell every thing that can be sold. They sold their cross,—by what species of weight or measurement I know not,—they sold their eagle by the pound, and here they are selling the sublime and beautiful by the boat-load! One grand crag which has been left untouched shows what mischief has already been done. There is a cavern near the summit of this, of which the arch appeared remarkably fine as we looked up to it from the side of the river.
I tasted their famous medicinal water which rises at the foot of these rocks; it is tepid, and so completely without any medicinal flavour, as to be excellent water. In cases of diabetes it possesses some virtue; for consumption, which it is usually prescribed for, none whatsoever. Several unhappy patients, who had been sent here to die at a distance from home, were crawling out upon the parade as if to take their last gasp of sunshine. It was shocking to see them, and it is shocking to hear how thoroughly the people here regard death as a matter of trade. The same persons who keep the hotels furnish the funerals; entertain patients while they are living, and then, that they may accommodate them all through, bury them when they die. There came here a young man from the North, dying, with his sister to attend him. The disease sometimes, when it assumes its gentlest form, seems to terminate suddenly; and one morning, when the sister rose to breakfast and enquired for him, she found he was dead. He had expired during the night; the people of the house said they thought they might as well not disturb her, so they had laid out the body, dressed it in the shroud, measured it for the coffin, and given all the orders—to take all trouble off her hands. You will think it scarcely possible that this scene of disease and death should be a place of amusement, where idlers of fashion resort to spend the summer, mingle in the pump-room and in the walks with the dying, and have their card-parties and dances within hearing of every passing bell.
Half a century ago Bristol was in size the second city in England. Manchester now holds that rank, and several other towns have outstripped it in population. There is less mercantile enterprise here than in any other trading English city: like the old Italians, the Bristol merchants go on in the track of their fathers, and, succeeding to enormous fortunes, find the regular profits so great that they have no temptation to deviate from the beaten way. The port is therefore yielding its foreign trade to bolder competitors; but it will always remain the centre of a great commerce with the Welsh coast, with Ireland, and all those inland counties which communicate with the Severn, a river navigable into the very heart of the kingdom.
There is in the streets nothing like the bustle of London, nor like the business of Liverpool on the quays. The quay, however, is still a busy as well as a striking scene, and remains a noble monument of the old citizens, who made it in the thirteenth century. On one side, the shipping, the bridges, the church-towers, and the neighbouring hill, which overlooks the town of which it now makes a part, form a fine picture; on the other, there is the cathedral with the old trees in its front, and the distant country. A third view has a wider foreground, with cranes and trees, and piles of goods intermingled, shipping of larger size, a fine row of houses upon a high terrace on the opposite side, and apart from them the church of St Mary Redclift, which is the finest parochial church in the kingdom, and is indeed far more beautiful than the cathedral. It is remarkable also, on this account, that it is the place wherein certain poems were said to have been found, attributed to a priest in the fifteenth century, which have occasioned as great a controversy as the Granada Relicks, and with as little reason. It is now admitted that they were the production of Chatterton, the son of the sexton of the church, who poisoned himself at the age of eighteen, and is considered by the English as the most extraordinary genius that has ever appeared among them.
A few years ago, when Kosciusko came to this city on his way to America, great marks of honour were shown him, and many presents made him, both by the municipality, and by individuals.—Among others, an honest gingerbread-baker thought, as he was going to sea, nothing could be more acceptable to him than a noble plum-cake for the voyage: he made him the very best which could be made, and a valiant one it was. It was as big as he could carry; and on the top, which was as usual covered with a crust of sugar, was written in coloured sugar-plums—To the gallant Kosciusko. With this burthen the good man proceeded to the house of the American consul, where Kosciusko was lodged, and enquired for the general. He was told that he was lying on the sofa (for his wounds were not at that time healed,) and was too much fatigued and too unwell to see any one. "Oh!" said the gingerbread-baker, "he won't be angry at seeing me, I warrant, so show me the way up;" and pushing the servant forward, he followed him up stairs into the room. When however he saw the great man whom he was come to honour, lying on a couch, with his countenance pale, painful, and emaciated, yet full of benevolence, the sight overpowered him; he put down his cake, burst into tears like a child, and ran out of the room without speaking a single word. Having set out on my return, a natural impatience hurries me forward; I should else regret that I have not procured letters to Bristol, and allowed myself sufficient time to see thoroughly a city which contains many interesting objects of curiosity, and of which the vicinity is so exceedingly beautiful.
