Page:A Literary Pilgrim in England.djvu/127

Rh with thyme and burnet ... nor are the nut-brown shepherdesses without their graces...."

He must have delighted in high places, like the top of Chalk Down, with its oaks "shorn by the south and south-west winds," reclining from the sixteen-miles-distant sea, and the top of Knoll Hill, near Kilmington and Maiden Bradley, that gave a prospect of the Fosse-way between Cirencester and Gloucester, forty miles off; also the Isle of Wight, Salisbury steeple, and the Severn sea. When he has to tell the story of a practical joke at Marlborough, he cannot omit to picture his young blades "walking on the delicate fine downs at the backside of the town." And what a pretty thing that is in the brief life of George Feriby, parson of Bishop's Cannings, near Devizes, "an excellent musician and no ill poet"!—how he entertained Queen Anne at Wansdyke, on the top of the down, with a pleasant pastoral, "his fellow songsters in shepherds weeds and bagpipes, he himself like an old bard," and King James "with carters singing with whips in their hands; and afterwards, a football play." Bishop's Cannings, he says, "would have challenged all England for music [bell-]ringing, and football play." He went everywhere. He went to Chitterne, which is not in any of the books, and remarks that tobacco-pipe clay is "excellent, or the best in England, at Chitterne, of which the Gauntlet pipes at Amesbury are made by one of that name." He heard the gossip of towns and villages, the dreams that came true at Broad Chalk and Amesbury. Everywhere to the last he had friends: his chief virtue, he said himself, was gratitude.