Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/259

 I

, the ancient British Palladour,

(as Drayton sang it), was, and is, in itself the city of a dream. Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints. its magnificent apsidal Abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions—all now ruthlessly swept away—throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless landscape around him can scarcely dispel. The spot was the burial-place of a king and a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints and bishops, knights and squires. The bones of King Edward "the Martyr," carefully removed hither for holy preservation, brought Shaston a renown which made it the resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe, and enabled it to maintain a reputation extending far beyond English shores. To this fair creation of the great Middle-Age the Dissolution was, as historians tells us, the death-knell. With the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in a general ruin; the Martyr's bones met with the fate of the sacred pile that held them, and not a stone is now left to tell where they lie.

The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain; but, strange to say, these qualities, which were noted by many writers in ages when scenic beauty is said not to have been unappreciated, are passed over