Stronghold Crusader Download Gratis
Akinlolu Bellotti
Sweet, secluded, shady Saxonholme! I doubt if our whole Englandcontains another hamlet so quaint, so picturesquely irregular, sothoroughly national in all its rustic characteristics. It lies in awarm hollow environed by hills. Woods, parks and young plantationsclothe every height and slope for miles around, whilst here andthere, peeping down through green vistas, or towering aboveundulating seas of summer foliage, stands many a fine old countrymansion, turreted and gabled, and built of that warm red brick thatseems to hold the light of the sunset long after it has faded fromthe rest of the landscape. A silver thread of streamlet, swift butshallow, runs noisily through the meadows beside the town and losesitself in the Chad, about a mile and a half farther eastward. Manya picturesque old wooden bridge, many a foaming weir and ruinouswater-mill with weedy wheel, may be found scattered up and down thewooded banks of this little river Chad; while to the brook, whichwe call the Gipstream, attaches a vague tradition of trout.
The hamlet itself is clean and old-fashioned, consisting of onelong, straggling street, and a few tributary lanes and passages.The houses some few years back were mostly long and low-fronted,with projecting upper stories, and diamond-paned bay-windowsbowered in with myrtle and clematis; but modern improvements havedone much of late to sweep away these antique tenements, and a finenew suburb of Italian and Gothic villas has sprung up, between thetown and the railway station. Besides this, we have a new church inthe medival style, rich in gilding and colors andthirteenth-century brass-work; and a new cemetery, laid out like apleasure-garden; and a new school-house, where the children aretaught upon a system with a foreign name; and a Mechanics'Institute, where London professors come down at long intervals toexpound popular science, and where agriculturists meet to discusspopular grievances.
At the other extremity of the town, down by Girdlestone Grange,an old moated residence where the squire's family have residedthese four centuries past, we are full fifty years behind ourmodern neighbors. Here stands our famous old "King's-head Inn," awell-known place of resort so early as the reign of Elizabeth. Thegreat oak beside the porch is as old as the house itself; and onthe windows of a little disused parlor overlooking the garden maystill be seen the names of Sedley, Rochester and other wits of theRestoration. They scrawled those autographs after dinner, mostlikely, with their diamond rings, and went reeling afterwards,arm-in-arm, along the village street, singing and swearing, andeager for adventures--as gentlemen were wont to be in those famousold times when they drank the king's health more freely than wasgood for their own.
Not far from the "King's Head," and almost hidden by the treeswhich divide it from the road, stands an ancient charitableinstitution called the College--quadrangular, mullion-windowed,many-gabled, and colonized by some twenty aged people of bothsexes. At the back of the college, adjoining a space of wasteground and some ruined cloisters, lies the churchyard, in the midstof which, surrounded by solemn yews and mouldering tombs, standsthe Priory Church. It is a rare old church, founded, according tothe county history, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, andentered with a full description in Domesday Book. Its sculpturedmonuments and precious brasses, its Norman crypt, carved stalls andtattered banners drooping over faded scutcheons, tell all ofgenerations long gone by, of noble families extinct, of gallantdeeds forgotten, of knights and ladies remembered only by the namesabove their graves. Amongst these, some two or three modest tabletsrecord the passing away of several generations of my ownpredecessors--obscure professional men for the most part, of whomsome few became soldiers and died abroad.
In close proximity to the church stands the vicarage, once thePriory; a quaint old rambling building, surrounded by magnificentold trees. Here for long centuries, a tribe of rooks have heldundisputed possession, filling the boughs with their nests and theair with their voices, and, like genuine lords of the soil,descending at their own grave will and pleasure upon the adjacentlands.
Picturesque and medival as all these old buildings andold associations help to make us, we of Saxonholme pretend tosomething more. We claim to be, not only picturesque but historic.Nay, more than this--we are classical. WE WERE FOUNDED BY THEROMANS. A great Roman road, well known to antiquaries, passedtransversely through the old churchyard. Roman coins and relics,and fragments of tesselated pavement, have been found in and aboutthe town. Roman camps may be traced on most of the heights around.Above all, we are said to be indebted to the Romans for thatinestimable breed of poultry in right of which we have for yearscarried off the leading prizes at every poultry-show in the county,and have even been enabled to make head against the exaggeratedpretensions of modern Cochin-China interlopers.
Such, briefly sketched, is my native Saxonholme. Born beneaththe shade of its towering trees and overhanging eaves, brought upto reverence its antiquities, and educated in the love of itsnatural beauties, what wonder that I cling to it with every fibreof my heart, and even when affecting to smile at my own fondprejudice, continue to believe it the loveliest peacefulest nook inrural England?
My father's name was John Arbuthnot. Sprung from the Arbuthnotsof Montrose, we claim to derive from a common ancestor with thecelebrated author of "Martinus Scriblerus." Indeed, the first ofour name who settled at Saxonholme was one James Arbuthnot, son toa certain nonjuring parson Arbuthnot, who lived and died abroad,and was own brother to that famous wit, physician and courtierwhose genius, my father was wont to say, conferred a higherdistinction upon our branch of the family than did those RoyalLetters-Patent whereby the elder stock was ennobled by His mostGracious Majesty King George the Fourth, on the occasion of hisvisit to Edinburgh in 1823. From this James Arbuthnot (who, beingborn and bred at St. Omer, and married, moreover, to a French wife,was himself half a Frenchman) we Saxonholme Arbuthnots were thedirect descendants.
Our French ancestress, according to the family tradition, was ofno very exalted origin, being in fact the only daughter and heiressof one Monsieur Tartine, Perruquier in chief at the Court ofVersailles. But what this lady wanted in birth, she made up infortune, and the modest estate which her husband purchased with herdowry came down to us unimpaired through five generations. In thesubstantial and somewhat foreign-looking red-brick house which hebuilt (also, doubtless, with Madame's Louis d'ors) we, hissuccessors, had lived and died ever since. His portrait, togetherwith the portraits of his wife, son, and grandson, hung on thedining-room walls; and of the quaint old spindle-legged chairs andtables that had adorned our best rooms from time immemorial, somewere supposed to date as far back as the first founding andfurnishing of the house.
It is almost needless to say that the son of the non-juror andhis immediate posterity were staunch Jacobites, one and all. I amnot aware that they ever risked or suffered anything for the cause;but they were not therefore the less vehement. Many were the signsand tokens of that dead-and-gone political faith which these loyalArbuthnots left behind them. In the bed-rooms there hung prints ofKing James the Second at the Battle of the Boyne; of the RoyalMartyr with his plumed hat, lace collar, and melancholy fatal face;of the Old and Young Pretenders; of the Princess Louisa Teresia,and of the Cardinal York. In the library were to be found all kindsof books relating to the career of that unhappy family: "YeTragicall History of ye Stuarts, 1697;" "Memoirs of King James II.,writ by his own hand;" "La Stuartide," an unfinished epic in theFrench language by one Jean de Schelandre; "The Fate of Majestyexemplified in the barbarous and disloyal treatment (by traitorousand undutiful subjects) of the Kings and Queens of the Royal Houseof Stuart," genealogies of the Stuarts in English, French andLatin; a fine copy of "Eikon Basilike," bound in old red morocco,with the royal arms stamped upon the cover; and many other volumeson the same subject, the names of which (although as a boy I waswont to pore over their contents with profound awe and sympathy) Ihave now for the most part forgotten.
Most persons, I suppose, have observed how the example of asuccessful ancestor is apt to determine the pursuits of hisdescendants down to the third and fourth generations, inclining thelads of this house to the sea, and of that to the bar, according asthe great man of the family achieved his honors on shipboard, orclimbed his way to the woolsack. The Arbuthnots offered noexception to this very natural law of selection. They could nothelp remembering how the famous doctor had excelled in literatureas in medicine; how he had been not only Physician in Ordinary toQueen Anne and Prince George of Denmark, but a satirist andpamphleteer, a wit and the friend of wits--of such wits as Pope andSwift, Harley and Bolingbroke. Hence they took, as it wereinstinctively, to physic and the belles lettres, and werenever without a doctor or an author in the family.
My father, however, like the great Martinus Scriblerus, was bothdoctor and author. And he was a John Arbuthnot. And to carry theresemblance still further, he was gifted with a vein of roughepigrammatic humor, in which it pleased his independence to indulgewithout much respect of persons, times, or places. His tongue,indeed, cost him some friends and gained him some enemies; but I amnot sure that it diminished his popularity as a physician. Peoplecompared him to Abernethy, whereby he was secretly flattered. Someeven went so far as to argue that only a very clever man couldafford to be a bear; and I must say that he pushed this conclusionto its farthest limit, showing his temper alike to rich and poorupon no provocation whatever. He cared little, to be sure, for hisconnection. He loved the profession theoretically, and from ascientific point of view; but he disliked the drudgery of countrypractice, and stood in no need of its hardly-earned profits. Yet hewas a man who so loved to indulge his humor, no matter at whatcost, that I doubt whether he would have been more courteous hadhis bread depended on it. As it was, he practised and grumbled,snarled at his patients, quarrelled with the rich, bestowed histime and money liberally upon the poor, and amused his leisure bywriting for a variety of scientific periodicals, both English andforeign.
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