William Winter - Gray Days and Gold in England and Scotland

The MM Co.

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YORK CATHEDRAL

GRAY DAYS AND GOLD
IN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND

BY

WILLIAM WINTER

New Edition, Revised, with Illustrations

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1896

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1892,
By MACMILLAN AND CO.

Illustrated Edition,
Copyright, 1896 ,
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

TO
Augustin Daly
REMEMBERING A FRIENDSHIP
OF MANY YEARS
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

This book, containing description of my Gray Days in England and Scotland, has, in a miniature form, passed through several editions, and it has been received by the public with exceptional sympathy and abundant practical favour. Its publishers are, therefore, encouraged to present it in a more opulent style, and with the embellishment of pictorial illustrations. Its success,and indeed the success which has attended all my books,is deeply gratifying to me, the more so that I did not expect it. My sketches of travel were the unpremeditated creations of genial impulse, and I did not suppose that they would endure beyond the hour. If I had anticipated the remarkably cordial approbation which has been accorded to my humble studies of British scenery and life, I should have tried to make them better, and, especially, I should have taken scrupulous care to verify every date and every historic statement set forth in my text. That precaution, at first, I did not invariably take, but as my mood was that of contemplation and reverie, so my method was that of the dreamer, who drifts carelessly from one beautiful thing to another, uttering simply whatever comes into his thoughts. In preparing the text for this edition of Gray Days, however, and also in preparing the text of Shakespeare's England for the pictorial edition, I have carefully revised my sketches, and have made a studious and conscientious endeavour to correct every mistake and to remove every defect. The chapters on Clopton and Devizes have been considerably augmented, and the record of Shakespearean affairs at Stratford-upon-Avon has been continued to the present time. A heedless error in my chapter on Worcester, respecting the Shakespeare marriage bond, has been rectified, and in various ways the narrative has been made more authentic, the historical embellishment more complete, and, perhaps, the style more flexible and more concise.

Eight of the papers in this volume relate to Scotland. My first visit to that romantic country was made in 1888, and was limited to the lowlands, but since that time I have had the privilege of making several highland rambles, and, in particular, of passing thoughtful days in the lovely island of Iona,one of the most interesting places in Europe,and those readers who may care to keep me company beyond the limits of this work will find memorials of those wanderings and that experience in my later books, called Old Shrines and Ivy and Brown Heath and Blue Bells.

W. W.

July 15, 1896.

This book, a companion to Shakespeare's England, relates to the gray days of an American wanderer in the British islands, and to the gold of thought and fancy that can be found there. In Shakespeare's England an attempt was made to depict, in an unconventional manner, those lovely scenes that are intertwined with the name and the memory of Shakespeare, and also to reflect the spirit of that English scenery in general which, to an imaginative mind, must always be venerable with historic antiquity and tenderly hallowed with poetic and romantic association. The present book continues the same treatment of kindred themes, referring not only to the land of Shakespeare, but to the land of Burns and Scott.

After so much had been done, and superbly done, by Washington Irving and by other authors, to celebrate the beauties of our ancestral home, it was perhaps an act of presumption on the part of the present writer to touch those subjects. He can only plead, in extenuation of his boldness, an irresistible impulse of reverence and affection for them. His presentment of them can give no offence, and perhaps it may be found sufficiently sympathetic and diversified to awaken and sustain at least a momentary interest in the minds of those readers who love to muse and dream over the relics of a storied past. If by happy fortune it should do more than that,if it should help to impress his countrymen, so many of whom annually travel in Great Britain, with the superlative importance of adorning the physical aspect and of refining the material civilisation of America by a reproduction within its borders of whatever is valuable in the long experience and whatever is noble and beautiful in the domestic and religious spirit of the British islands,his labour will not have been in vain. The supreme need of this age in America is a practical conviction that progress does not consist in material prosperity but in spiritual advancement. Utility has long been exclusively worshipped. The welfare of the future lies in the worship of beauty. To that worship these pages are devoted, with all that it implies of sympathy with the higher instincts and faith in the divine destiny of the human race.

Many of the sketches here assembled were originally printed in the New York Tribune, with which journal their author has been continuously associated, as dramatic reviewer and as an editorial contributor, since August, 1865. They have been revised for publication in this form. Part of the paper on Sir Walter Scott first appeared in Harper's Weekly, for which periodical the author has occasionally written. The paper on the Wordsworth country was contributed to the New York Mirror. The alluring field of Scottish antiquity and romance, which the author has ventured but slightly to touch, may perhaps be explored hereafter, for treasures of contemplation that earlier seekers have left ungathered. [This implied promise has since been fulfilled, in Brown Heath and Blue Bells, 1895.]

The fact is recorded that an important recent book, 1890, called Shakespeare's True Life, written by James Walter, incorporates into its text, without credit, several passages of original description and reflection taken from the present writer's sketches of the Shakespeare country, published in Shakespeare's England, and also quotes, as his work, an elaborate narrative of a nocturnal visit to Anne Hathaway's cottage, which he never wrote and never claimed to have written. This statement is made as a safeguard against future injustice.

W. W.

1892.

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Transcriber's Note: Page numbers link to the top of the page and show the illustrated header. Chapter names link to the chapter heading, below the header.