Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/187

 announce the number and quality of the prisoners. He drew up his men on Roundway Hill, with all Wiltshire and Gloucestershire spreading in a blue mist before him. Wishing to prevent the town from joining Wilmot, Waller, "out of pure gayety," left his advantage, his firm reserve, his well flanked cannon, and his fortress hill, and bore down on Wilmot. Haslerig's cuirassiers made the first charge at Sir John Byron's regiment, but they were worsted by the cavaliers, and driven back. Then Wilmot broke the other divisions one by one, and hurled them back, a rabble of wounded men and frightened horses, towards the Cornish foot that now broke from the town and attacked the puritan pikemen and musketeers, turning their own cannon upon them. The flight was terrible over the hills, and the pursuit arduous; many rolled down into the valley and perished. Oliver's Castle and the Wansdyke saw many a death grapple. The rout was complete. The Cornishmen were relentless. The puritans lost nearly two thousand men, slain or prisoners, and Waller fled to Bristol, leaving his guns, ammunition, and baggage. That defeat was the cause of great heart-burnings between Waller and Essex, Waller thinking himself betrayed and deserted by Essex, who had let Wilmot march unimpeded from Oxford; Essex, reproaching the poet with unsoldierly neglect and want of courage in letting himself be beaten by a mere handful of men without cannon—men, too, against whom he had never led a single charge in person.

A long swift flight, and the crow is in pleasant Somersetshire. Passing high over grand old church towers and snug homesteads, he furls his wings at the foot of the Mendip Hills, and descends on the cathedral towers of Wells. In the hall of the bishop's palace, the last abbot of Glastonbury was tried for refusing to surrender his abbey to Henry the Eighth. It was a mock trial, worthy of the tyrant; for the abbot was accused of appropriating the church plate; and although acquitted, was seized on his return to Glastonbury, dragged to the top of the Tor, and there put to death. This is the same proud abbot who is said to have defied the king, who had threatened to burn his kitchen, by building that strange edifice still to be seen at Glastonbury: square without, octagonal within, and with a pyramidical roof supporting a pierced lantern to let out heat and vapour. "I will build such a kitchen," said the abbot, "that all the wood in the royal forests will not suffice to burn it." Modern antiquaries, however, unfortunately have proved the building to be far older than Whiting.

A short flight to Glastonbury Abbey brings the crow to congenial ruins, shattered pillars, and ruined arches. Yonder is Wearyall Hill, where the monkish legends say that Joseph of Arimathea rested after his long pilgrimage from the Holy Land. Here, planting his thorn staff in the ground, he decided to abide: the green meadows, the swelling hills, and the pleasant orchards of Somersetshire soothing his wearied spirit. In the abbey gardens, a graft from the saint's staff still grows, and flowers at Christmas—proof of its miraculous origin.

It was at Glastonbury that, in Henry the Second's time, was discovered the supposed grave of King Arthur. Here in Avalon, girt by marshes, they found the hero in a rude oak coffin, sleeping beside his guilty but repentant queen, whose long yellow hair crumbled to dust when a monk snatched at it. The bones were deposited in a magnificent shrine, by Edward the First, and placed before the high altar.

Glastonbury was a great place for saints. St. Patrick and St. Benedict were abbots at Avalon, and to the doubtful saint—St. Dunstan—in some crypt here as he worked as a smith, constructing cross and chalice for holy uses, the Devil appeared one day at the half door in the shape of a beautiful woman. It was here that the saint waited till he had got his tongs red hot, and then made a rush and caught the tempter by the nose.

Now, the crow rises for a further flight, turns his head westward, and strikes out across the broad green pastures for Sedgemoor and the borders of sunny Devonshire.

the earlier part of last year, public attention was for a short time devoted to the Russian settlements in North America. The course of politics at home happened not to run over smoothly just at that time, so there was little inclination to inquire into the affairs of other countries. Usually eager to criticise, and that sometimes with scant charity, the actions of our friends on the other side of the Atlantic, a strange reticence seemed then to prevail among us. With the exceptonexception [sic] of a few leading articles in the London papers, Russian America was transferred to the United States, without one murmur of assent or disapproval from this country. While thus in England little interest was felt in the question, in America it was far different. There, it was taken up as a party question, and treated as most party questions are. The natural advantages and disadvantages of the country, were alternately exaggerated by either side. While the friends of Mr. Seward described it as a paradise of fertility, his opponents declared it to be "the fag end of creation." In spite of the ridicule and satire which beset his every step, Mr. Seward carried his point. On the 30th of October, 1867, Russian America, or Alaska, was formally transferred to the United States. So little was really known of the resources of the country at that time, that those who spoke so strongly, to use no harsher word, for or against its acquisition, must have relied more on their imagination than on fact. Indeed, very little is known about it, even now; but the information that has come to light in the interim, has shown that truth lay between the opposing parties. If Alaska be not "an Elysian field," it is certainly not "a worn-out colony."