Hallecks New English Literature | Page 4

Great Britain abounds.
Whenever an author is studied, his birthplace should be located on the literary map. Baedeker's Great Britain will be indispensable in making an itinerary. The Reference List for Literary England is sufficiently comprehensive to enable any one to plan an enjoyable literary pilgrimage through Great Britain and to learn the most important facts about the places connected with English authors.
The following suggestions from the author's experience are intended to serve merely as an illustration of how to begin an itinerary. The majority of east-bound steamships call at Plymouth, a good place to disembark for a literary trip. From Plymouth, the traveler may go to Exeter (a quaint old town with a fine cathedral, the home of Exeter Book,) thence by rail to Camelford in Cornwall and by coach four miles to the fascinating Tintagel (King Arthur), where, as Tennyson says in his _Idylls of the King_:--
"All down the thundering shores of Bude and Bos, There came a day as still as heaven, and then They found a naked child upon the sands Of dark Tintagil by the Cornish sea, And that was Arthur."
Next, the traveler may go by coach to Bude (of which Tennyson remarked, "I hear that there are larger waves at Bude than at any other place. I must go thither and be alone with God") and to unique Clovelly and Bideford (Kingsley), by rail to Ilfracombe, by coach to Lynton (Lorna Doone), and the adjacent Lynmouth (where Shelley passed some of his happiest days and alarmed the authorities by setting afloat bottles containing his _Declaration of Rights_), by coach to Minehead, by rail to Watchet, driving past Alfoxden (Wordsworth) to Nether-Stowey (Coleridge) and the Quantock Hills, by motor and rail to Glastonbury (Isle of Avalon, burial place of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere), by rail to Wells (cathedral), to Bath (many literary associations), to Bristol (Chatterton, Southey), to Gloucester (fine cathedral, tomb of Edward II), and to Ross, the starting point for a remarkable all day's row down the river Wye to Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth), stopping for dinner at Monmouth (Geoffrey of Monmouth).
After a start similar to the foregoing, the traveler should begin to make an itinerary of his own. He will enjoy a trip more if he has a share in planning it. From Tintern Abbey he might proceed, for instance, to Stratford-on-Avon (Shakespeare); then to Warwick, Kenilworth, and the George Eliot Country in North Warwickshire and Staffordshire.
Far natural beauty, there is nothing in England that is more delightful than a coaching trip through Wordsworth's Lake Country (Cumberland and Westmoreland). From there it is not far to the Carlyle Country (Ecclefechan, Craigenputtock), to the Burns Country (Dumfries, Ayr), and to the Scott Country (Loch Katrine, The Trossachs, Edinburgh, and Abbotsford). In Edinburgh, William Sharp's statement about Stevenson should be remembered, "One can, in a word, outline Stevenson's own country as all the region that on a clear day one may in the heart of Edinburgh descry from the Castle walls."
If the traveler lands at Southampton, he is on the eastern edge of Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Dorchester in Dorsetshire being the center. The Jane Austen Country (Steventon, Chawton) is in Hampshire. To the east, in Surrey, is Burford Bridge near Dorking, where Keats wrote part of his Endymion, where George Meredith had his summer home, and where "the country of his poetry" is located.
In London, it is a pleasure to trace some of the greatest literary associations in the world. We may stand at the corner of Monkwell and Silver streets, on the site of a building in which Shakespeare wrote some of his greatest plays. Milton lived in the vicinity and is buried not far distant in St. Giles Church. In Westminster Abbey we find the graves of many of the greatest authors, from Chaucer to Tennyson. London is not only Dickens Land and Thackeray Land, but also the "Land" of many other writers. We may still eat in the Old Cheshire Cheese, where Johnson and Goldsmith dined.
Those interested in literary England ought to include the cathedral towns in their itinerary, so that they may visit the wonderful "poems in stone," some of which, _e.g_., Canterbury (Chaucer), Winchester (Izaak Walton, Jane Austen), Lichfield (Johnson), have literary associations. For this reason, all of the cathedral towns in England have been included in the literary map.
REFERENCE LIST FOR LITERARY ENGLAND:
Baedeker's Great Britain (includes England and Scotland).
Baedeker's London and its Environs.
Adcock's Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London.
Lang's Literary London.
Hutton's Literary Landmarks in London.
Lucas's A Wanderer in London.
Shelley's _Literary By-Paths in Old England_.
Baildon's Homes and Haunts of Famous Authors.
Bates's _From Gretna Green to Land's End_.
Masson's In the Footsteps of the Poets.
Wolfe's A Literary Pilgrimage among the Haunts of Famous British Authors.
Salmon's Literary Rambles in the West of England.
Hutton's A Book of the Wye.
Headlam's _Oxford (Medieval Towns Series)_.
Winter's