His statue stands in the little shrine above the cliff; his arms lie in Warwick Castle; and in the cave over our head is carved a Saxon inscription, which the learned interpret into this: “Cast out, thou Christ, from thy servant this burden.”
We pass on by Rock Mill, haunted of many kingfishers; by Emscote Bridge, where the Avon is joined by the Leam, and where Warwick and Leamington have reached out their arms to each other till they now join hands; by little gardens, each with its punt or home-made boat beside the river steps; by a flat meadow, where the citizens and redcoats from Warwick garrison sit all day and wait for the fish that never bites; and suddenly, by the famous one-span bridge, see Warwick Castle full ahead, its massy foundations growing, as it seems, from the living rock, and Cæsar’s glorious tower soaring above the elms where Mill Street ends at the water’s brink. Here once crossed a Gothic bridge, carrying the traffic from Banbury. Its central arches are down now; but the bastions yet stand, and form islets for the brier and ivy, and between them the stream swirls fast for the weir and the ancient mill, by which it rushes down into the park. We turn our canoe, and with many a backward look paddle back to the boat-house at Emscote.
Evening has drawn in, and still we are pacing Warwick streets. We have seen the castle; have gazed from the armory windows upon the racing waters, steep terraces, and gentle park below; have climbed Guy’s Tower and seen far beneath us, on the one side, broad cedars and green lawns where the peacocks strut; on the other, the spires,
[Illustration: CÆSAR’S TOWER, WARWICK CASTLE]
towers, sagged roofs, and clustering chimneys of the town; have sauntered down Mill Street; have marvelled in the Beauchamp Chapel as we conned its gorgeous tombs and canopies and traceries; have loitered by Lord Leycester’s Hospital and under the archway of St. James’s Chapel. Clearly we are but two grains of sand in the hour-glass of
[Illustration: The Hospital of Robert Earl of Leycester Warwick]
this slow mediæval town. Our feet, that will to-morrow be hurrying on, tread with curious impertinence these everlasting flints that have rung with the tramp of the Kingmaker’s armies, of Royalist and Parliamentarian, horse and foot, drum and standard, the stir of royal and episcopal visits, of mail-coach, market, and assize. But meanwhile our joints are full of pleasant aches and stiffness, our souls of lofty imaginings. As our tobacco smoke floats out on the moonlight we can dwell, we find, with a quite kingly serenity on the transience of man’s generations; nay, as we sit down to dinner at our inn we touch the high contemplative, yet careless, mood of the gods themselves.