Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/572

 (one hundred and fifty giant vessels, with nineteen thousand soldiers, eight thousand sailors, two hundred galley slaves, and two thousand brass cannon) set sail towards England. Not one half of the vessels ever returned to Spain. East Tilbury Church lost its tower at the southwest angle, from the battering of the Dutch vessels when they burnt our fleet in the Medway—a shame and disgrace that required much blood to wipe out. The ancient ferry was at Tilbury, and here Claudius is supposed to have crossed the Thames to follow the Britons into Kent. The old Roman road, at Higham Causeway, can still be traced. At Little Thurrock, close by Tilbury, there is a field in which are curious passages and caverns cut in the chalk. Some people call them "Dane's Holes," and think they were places of retreat; others term them Cynobelin's gold mines; while a few believe them to have been ancient British granaries. West Tilbury (twenty-four miles from London) has a church with a wooden spire, the tower having fallen from the blows of time or of Dutch cannon. St. Chad, a Saxon bishop, mentioned by the Venerable Bede, who converted the Saxons of Essex in 630, had his episcopal see here. Gathering together a flock of the servants of Christ, he taught them to observe the discipline of a regular life, as far as those rude people were then capable.

A coast of low sandy downs, trenched with water-courses, and resounding with the booms of heavy guns—that is Shoeburyness, where the great guns are tried and the armour-plates tested. There are the furrows of a Danish camp round the headland (take care of the cannon-balls), and Roman arms have been also found hard by, so Romans must have camped near where our Artillery do now. There is an old Essex tradition that under Maplin sands lies buried an ancient city. From the headland of Shoeburyness to beyond St. Osyth's Point the coast is a dreary succession of low, flat, aguish marshes, broad sandy shoals or flat swamps, and green seaweed-blackened cliffs, within the sea wall of mournful sandy plains, haunted by sea-fowl and lined by the creeks of the Blackwater. Mr. Walcott has painted a picture of this part of Essex, which is quite a bit of Ruysdael in words. "Essex," he says, "is like a large ship at anchor; there is a wild misty light in the neutral-tinted landscape; a silent repose in those wide motionless plains, dreary and spacious, ever struggling with the ocean for existence (land and sea of one colour), subject to inundations by waves, which are again constrained by man to retire, dykes, and walls, and whistling reeds, and the only sign of habitation is—

Braintree, to which the crow next skims, was a great station for pilgrims bound, in the time of Erasmus, to the shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, in Norfolk. No doubt the ordinary professional pilgrim was rather a scurvy, thievish, lying fellow; but amongst the devout bands were people of all ranks and classes, and even Henry the Eighth, when young, plodded there barefoot from Bursham.

CHOPS.

writer on the art of cooking begins a treatise on broiling with a somewhat apposite parable. He supposes Antonio to have met his friend Bassanio on the Rialto, or somewhere else in the city, and in the fulness of his heart to have asked him home to dine, at Belmont Villa. Just, however, as the cab drives up to the door, it suddenly strikes him that Portia having dined with the youngsters in the nursery, at two o'clock, it is just possible that the gastronomical resources of the establishment are at a low ebb, and that a cold mutton bone is hardly the thing to put before a guest, who behaved as handsomely as Bassanio did when Antonio got into the unhappy scrape with the Jews. The first greetings over, a secret council, composed of Antonio, Portia and Nerissa, is held in the passage to consider what they can scramble together for dinner. Poor Portia is ready to cry with vexation, Nerissa calls forth her most acid expression of countenance, and at last the unhappy Antonio is petrified by hearing that it is absolutely impossible to give their guest anything for dinner but—chops. There is nothing for it, therefore, but to return to poor Bassanio, who is fidgetting hungrily on the drawing-room sofa, and murmur something in his ear to the effect that Portia is unhappily in delicate health—indeed, she never quite recovered from the fright that horrid Jew gave her, that Nerissa's temper is none of the sweetest, and that the neighbourhood is singularly ill-supplied with good butchers. So Bassanio is taken up to the best bedroom to wash his hands, the largest-wheeled hansom on the rank is brought to the door, and in twenty minutes more the two friends are comfortably seated in the cosiest box in the coffee-room of the Cock, in Fleet-street. Antonio has entirely regained his equanimity, and answers the queries of the head waiter, to whom they were both well-known in their bachelor days, by ordering—chops, the bare mention of which during the proceedings of the domestic conclave had frozen the very marrow in Antonio's bones, and curdled every drop of blood in his veins.

To a foreigner, Antonio's behaviour would have appeared in the highest degree absurdly inconsistent; but to ourselves it presents nothing either absurd or anomalous. The chop, as we all know, is the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the best and the worst of British dishes.

Who that has ever been a bachelor, or a sojourner at the sea-side, does not know the lodging-house chop—the drab, thin, leathery, tasteless, greasy morsel of flesh, fried in its own fat in a dirty frying-pan, and reminding