"The Nine-Men's Morris is filled up with mud; And the quaint mazes in the wanton green, For lack of tread, are undistinguishable."
At Lower Quinton stands an old manor-house of whose library--such is the whisper that haunts its folios--Will Shakespeare was made free. A happy picture that--of an eager lad swinging across the fields and leaping stiles to enter into his paradise of books.
We were well into Gloucestershire before this, that tongue of Gloucestershire which runs up almost to Stratford-on-Avon, and were driving on in the soft twilight, now past the old-time Common Fields with their furlongs divided by long balks; now over rolling reaches, crossed by low stone walls, of sheep-walk and water-meadow and wheat-land, with here and there a fir plantation or a hazel covert; now through a strange grey hamlet built of the native limestone. Our road was gradually rising, and just before nightfall we came into Chipping Campden, most beautiful of the old Cotswold towns. We had not dreamed that England held its like,--one long, wide, stately street, bordered by silent fronts of great stone houses, with here and there the green of mantling ivy, but mainly with only the rich and changeful colouring of the stone itself, grey in shadow, golden in the sun. Campden was for centuries a famous centre of the wool trade; the Cotswolds served it as a broad grazing-ground whose flocks furnished wool for the skilful Flemish weavers; its fourteenth century Woolstaplers' Hall still stands; its open market-house, built in 1624 midway of the mile-long street, is one of its finest features; its best-remembered name is that of William Grevel, described on his monumental brass (1401) as "Flower of the Wool-merchants of all England." He bequeathed a hundred marks toward the building of the magnificent church, which stood complete, as we see it now, in the early fifteenth century. Its glorious tower, tall and light, yet not too slender, battlemented, turreted, noble in all its proportions, is a Cotswold landmark. As we were feasting our eyes, after an evening stroll, upon the symmetries of that grand church, wonderfully impressive as it rose in the faint moonlight above a group of strange, pagoda-roofed buildings, its chimes rang out a series of sweet old tunes, all the more poignantly appealing in that the voices of those ancient bells were thin and tremulous, and now and then a note was missed.
