On the road from Warwick to Kenilworth, I thought
more of poor Pierce Gaveston than of Elizabeth and
her proud earls. Edward's gay favorite was tried at
Warwick, and beheaded on Blacklow hill, which we
passed soon after leaving the town. He was executed
in June; and I looked about on the lovely hills and
valleys that surround the place of his last moments,
and figured to myself very vividly his despair at this
hurried leave-taking of this bright world in its brightest
spot and hour. Poor Gaveston! It was not in
his vocation to die! He was neither soldier nor prelate,
hermit nor monk. His political sins, for which
he suffered, were no offence against good-fellowship,
and were ten times more venial than those of the
“black dog of Arden,” who betrayed and helped to
murder him. He was the reckless minion of a king,
but he must have been a merry and pleasant fellow;
and now that the world (on our side the water at least),
is grown so grave, one could go back with Old Mortality,
and freshen the epitaph of a heart that took life
more gayly.

As we approached the castle of the proud Leicester,
I found it easier to people the road with the flying
Amy Robsart and her faithful attendant, with Mike Lambourne,
Flibbertigibbet, Richard Varney, and the troop
of mummurs and players, than with the more real
characters of history. To assist the romance, a little
Italian boy, with his organ and monkey, was fording
the brook on his way to the castle, as if its old towers
still held listeners for the wandering minstrel. I
tossed him a shilling from the carriage window, and
while the horses slowly forded the brook, asked him
in his own delicious tongue, where he was from.

“Son' di Firenze, signore!”

“And where are you going?”

“Li! al castello.”

Come from Florence and bound to Kenilworth!
Who would not grind an organ and sleep under a hedge,
to answer the hail of the passing traveller in terms
like these? I have seen many a beggar in Italy,
whose inheritance of sunshine and leisure in that delicious
clime I could have found it in my heart to
envy, even with all its concomitants of uncertainty
and want; but here was a bright-faced and inky-eyed
child of the sun, with his wardrobe and means upon
his back, travelling from one land to another, and loitering
wherever there was a resort for pleasure, without
a friend or a care; and, upon my life, I could have
donned his velveteen jacket, and with his cheerful
heart to button it over, have shouldered his organ,
put my trust in i forestieri, and kept on for Kenilworth.
There really is, I thought, as I left him behind, no
profit or reward consequent upon a life of confinement
and toil; no moss ever gathered by the unturned
stone, that repays, by a thousandth part, the loss of
even this poor boy's share of the pleasures of change.
What would not the tardy winner of fortune give to
exchange his worn-out frame, his unloveable and
furrowed features, his dulled senses, and his vain
regrets, for the elastic frame, the unbroken spirits,
and the redeemable, yet not oppressive poverty of this
Florentine regazzo! The irrecoverable gem of youth
is too often dissolved, like the pearl of Cleopatra, in a
cup which thins the blood and leaves disgust upon
the lip.

The magnificent ruins of Kenilworth broke in upon
my moralities, and a crowd of halt and crippled ciceroni

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beset the carriage-door as we alighted at the outer
tower. The neighborhood of the Spa of Leamington,
makes Kenilworth a place of easy resort; and the
beggars of Warwickshire have discovered that your
traveller is more liberal of his coin than your sitter-athome.
Some dozens of pony-chaises and small, crop
saddle-horses, clustered around the gate, assured us
that we should not muse alone amid the ruins of
Elizabeth's princely gift to her favorite. We passed
into the tilt-yard, leaving on our left the tower in
which Edward was confined, now the only habitable
part of Kenilworth. It gives a comfortable shelter to
an old seneschal, who stands where the giant probably
stood, with Flibbertigibbet under his doublet for a
prompter; but it is not the tail of a rhyme that serves
now for a passport.

Kenilworth, as it now stands, would probably disenchant
almost any one of the gorgeous dreams conjured
up by reading Scott's romance. Yet it is one
of the most superb ruins in the world. It would scarce
be complete to a novel-reader, naturally, without a
warder at the gate, and the flashing of a spear-point
and helmet through the embrasures of the tower. A
horseman in armor should pace over the draw-bridge,
and a squire be seen polishing his cuiras through
the opening gate; while on the airy bartizan should
be observed a lady in hoop and farthingale, philandering
with my lord of Leicester in silk doublet and
rapier. In the place of this, the visiter enters Kenilworth
as I have already described, and stepping out
into the tilt-yard, he sees, on an elevation before him,
a fretted and ivy-covered ruin, relieved like a cloudcastle
on the sky; the bright blue plane of the western
heavens shining through window and broken wall,
flecked with waving and luxuriant leaves, and the
crusted and ornamental pinnacles of tottering masonry
and sculpture just leaning to their fall, though the
foundations upon which they were laid, one would
still think, might sustain the firmament. The swelling
root of a creeper has lifted that arch from its base,
and the protruding branch of a chance-sprung tree
(sown perhaps by a field-sparrow) has unseated the
key-stone of the next; and so perish castles and reputations,
the masonry of the human hand, and the
fabrics of human forethought; not by the strength
which they feared, but by the weakness they despised!
Little thought old John of Gaunt, when these rudelyhewn
blocks were heaved into their seat by his herculean
workmen, that, after resisting fire and foe, they
would be sapped and overthrown at last by a vine-ten-dril
and a sparrow!

Clinging against the outer wall, on that side of the
castle overlooking the meadow, which was overflowed
for the aquatic spots of Kenilworth, stands an antique
and highly ornamental fireplace, which belonged,
doubtless, to the principal hall. The windows on
either side looking forth upon the fields below, must
have been those from which Elizabeth and her train
observed the feats of Arion and his dolphin; and at all
times, the large and spacious chimney-place, from the
castle's first occupation to its last, must have been the
centre of the evening revelry, and conversation of its
guests. It was a hook whereon to hang a revery, and
between the roars of vulgar laughter which assailed
my ears from a party lolling on the grass below, I contrived
to figure to myself, with some distinctness, the
personages who had stood about it. A visit to Kenilworth,
without the deceptions of fancy, would be as
disconnected from our previous enthusiasm on the
subject as from any other scene with which it had no
relation. The general effect at first, in any such spot,
is only to dispossess us, by a powerful violence, of the
cherished picture we had drawn of it in imagination;
and it is only after the real recollection has taken root
and ripened—after months, it may be—that we can
fully bring the visionary characters we have drawn to
inhabit it. If I read Kenilworth now, I see Mike
Lambourne stealing out, not from the ruined postern
which I clambered through, over heaps of rubbish,
but from a little gate that turned noiselessly on its
hinges, in the unreal castle built ten years ago in my
brain.

I had wandered away from my companion, Miss
Jane Porter, to climb up a secret staircase in the wall,
rather too difficult of ascent for a female foot, and
from my elevated position I caught an accidental view
of that distinguished lady through the arch of a Gothic
window, with a background of broken architecture and
foliage—presenting, by chance, perhaps the most fitting
and admirable picture of the authoress of the
Scottish Chiefs, that a painter in his brightest hour
could have fancied. Miss Porter, with her tall and
striking figure, her noble face (said by Sir Martin Shee
to have approached nearer in its youth to his beau
ideal of the female features than any other, and still
possessing the remains of uncommon beauty), is at all
times a person whom it would be difficult to see without
a feeling of involuntary admiration. But standing,
as I saw her at that moment, motionless and erect, in
the morning dress, with dark feathers, which she has
worn since the death of her beloved and gifted sister,
her wrists folded across, her large and still beautiful
eyes fixed on a distant object in the view, and her
nobly-cast lineaments reposing in their usual calm and
benevolent tranquillity, while, around and above her,
lay the material and breathed the spirit over which she
had held the first great mastery—it was a tableau
vivant which I was sorry to be alone to see.

Was she thinking of the great mind that had evoked
the spirits of the ruins she stood among—a mind in
which (by Sir Walter's own concession) she had first
bared the vein of romance which breathed so freely
for the world's delight? Were the visions which
sweep with such supernatural distinctness and rapidity
through the imagination of genius—visions of which
the millionth portion is probably scarce communicated
to the world in a literary lifetime—were Elizabeth's
courtiers, Elizabeth's passions, secret hours, interviews
with Leicester—were the imprisoned king's
nights of loneliness and dread, his hopes, his indignant,
but unheeded thoughts—were all the possible circumstances,
real or imaginary, of which that proud castle
might have been the scene, thronging in those few
moments of revery through her fancy? Or was her
heart busy with its kindly affections, and had the
beauty and interest of the scene but awakened a thought
of one who was most wont to number with her the
sands of those brighter hours?

Who shall say? The very question would perhaps
startle the thoughts beyond recall—so elusive are even
the most angelic of the mind's unseen visitants?

I have recorded here the speculations of a moment
while I leaned over the wall of Kenilworth, but as I
descended by the giddy staircase, a peal of rude
laughter broke from the party in the fosse below, and
I could not but speculate on the difference between
the various classes whom curiosity draws to the spot.
The distinguished mind that conceives a romance
which enchants the world, comes in the same guise
and is treated but with the same respect as theirs.
The old porter makes no distinction in his charge of
half-a-crown, and the grocer's wife who sucks an
orange on the grass, looks at the dark crape hat and
plain exterior—her only standards—and thinks herself
as well dressed, and therefore equal or superior to the
tall lady, whom she presumes is out like herself on a
day's pleasuring. One comes and goes like the other,
and is forgotten alike by the beggars at the gate and
the seneschal within, and thus invisibly and unsuspected,
before our very eyes, does genius gather its golden
fruit, and while we walk in a plain and common-place
world, with commonplace and sordid thoughts

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and feelings, the gifted walk side by side with us in a
world of their own—a world of which we see distant
glimpses in their after-creations, and marvel in what
unsunned mine its gems of thought were gathered!