Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/185

 been taken, and she had secretly and unobserved torn off a piece of the bed-curtain. Enquiries were made, suspicion fell on Wild Darell of Littlecot, and stern men came searching the old house. Darell was seized, but the judge was bribed, and the proof was insufficient. The murderer escaped the sword of justice. But Heaven, however, he could not escape; for he soon afterwards fell, while leaping a stone stile in hunting—still railed "Darell's death place"—and broke his neek.

Over the downs outside Marlborough, the crow skims for a moment to Badbury camp, alights with a sidelong waft to pick up a stray tradition. It was in this great double ring of ditch and rampart, with a fifty foot fall and an area of two thousand feet, that the Britons held out for a whole day against the Saxons. At sunset, the Saxons, with a last tremendous rush, stormed the camp, and, crashing in with their axes, conquered the last British stronghold in Wiltshire.

The crow now drifts into Marlborough, that quiet scholastic town, so sheltered by the great bluffs of chalk that gird it round. That handsome red brick building, now the college, has quite a history of its own. The central part of it is a fragment of the "Great House" built by Sir Francis Seymour, a grandson of the Protector, who was created Baron Seymour, by Charles the First, during the Rebellion; for Marlborough was a royal town, and had its rubs in those times. In 1643, Sir Neville Poole seized the great house, and held it with his men in buff, for the parliament. The year before, Wilmot had stormed and burnt the town, and sent John Franklin, the popular member, and several of the leading townsmen, prisoners to Oxford. In 1641, Charles himself came and held his quarters at Marlborough Castle. In Queen Anne's time the Earl and Countess of Hertford kept house here, and enternained many of the great writers. Pope, bitter and invalided, came here and wrote verses, and Thomson of the Seasons was staying here while he wrote his Spring. The other sections of his great composite poems were written at Richmond and in London.

A tradition of the old posting days still lingers in Marlborough. In 1767, the year before the great Karl of Chatham, stricken down by age and infirmities, resigned his place in the cabinet, the great orator, seized with gout on the road to London, was compelled to remain at the Castle Inn at Marlborough. Wilkes tells us of his eagle eye, the fascination of his glance, and the unquenchable fire in his glowing words. The haughty and imperious old statesman remained shut up in his room here for many weeks, and we picture to ourselves the proud old man with the attributes Wilkes describes, terribly testy at the delay, and chafing at the vexatious disease, and the fuss of over-servile landlords and over-zealous country Ollapods. Although so proud that he never transacted business but in grand official costume, it was not the first time the earl had given audiences in bed. During this visit, which must have set Marlborough talking, everybody who travelled on the great west road was astonished to find the town overflowing with footmen and grooms in the earl's livery. What a retinue! It was fit for a king. The fact was, it was only a trick of the old proud earl, who insisted that during his stay every waiter, stable boy, and odd man at the Castle Inn, should wear his livery.

Beyond Marlborough, across the downs are the great Druidic temple of Avebury, the Devil's Den, and the mysterious artificial hill of Silbury. Avebury, the centre of all Druidic tradition, is older than even Stonehenge. At Avebury there are twenty-eight acres covered by Celtic graves, and huge Druidic stones. From the adjacent hill you see them strewing the ground everywhere, like flocks of sheep; and in the distance down the last ridge of the downs, towards Bowood and Savernake Forest, runs the waving line of the Wansdyke, the old rampart frontier of the Belgæ. In 1740 two avenues of two miles in length led to the central Avebury circle of one hundred unhewn stones, enclosing two more double concentric circles. They were then supposed to be emblems of the serpent, which was a symbol of the sun. Six hundred of these stones have been destroyed, built up in walls, and hedges, and cottages. Only about a dozen now remain in their old places. The old church of Avebury stands near these relics of a forgotten superstition, and triumphs over their decay.

Theorists in Indian Celtic mythology have gone stark-staring mad about these stone circles, older than Stonehenge. "A temple of the sun, obvious to the meanest capacity," cries one. "Temple of the sun be hanged, learned idiot," writes another; "this is a Druid cathedral, a patriarchal temple built ages before the mere stone-rings of Cornwall, the hallowed altars of Dartmoor, or the processional avenues of Britany." "Incompetent blockhead," screams a third. "Why, Silbury Hill was the Druid's Ararat, and these stones are emblems of Noah's Ark and the patriarchal altars!" But the strangest winged hippogriff of a hobby-horse that ever trod Cloudland is ridden by Mr. Duke, who contends that Wiltshire was treated by the Druids as the ground plan of a vast planetarium or astronomical map. These same Druids, who worshipped the god of thunder and adored the oak and the mistletoe, laid out the whole range of downs in planetary regions, in which the sun and planets were represented on a meridional line from north to south—a position from which the ancients believed the planets had started at the beginning and would return at the end of the world, when they had run their course. The earth itself was represented by Silbury Hill; the sun and moon by the great circles of Avebury, Avebury being a Phœnician word for "the mighty ones." The ecliptic by the avenues, or the Serpent. Venus by a stone circle at Winterbourne Basset; Mercury by Walker's Hill; Mars by an earthwork at Harden, in the Vale of Pewsey; Jupiter by Casterley Camp on the edge of