Wild Wales | Page 8

at about six o'clock of a delightful
evening. We proceeded no farther on our journey that day, in order that
we might have an opportunity of seeing the cathedral.
Sallying arm in arm from the Station Hotel, where we had determined
to take up our quarters for the night, we crossed a bridge over the deep

quiet Nen, on the southern bank of which stands the station, and soon
arrived at the cathedral - unfortunately we were too late to procure
admission into the interior, and had to content ourselves with walking
round it and surveying its outside.
It is named after, and occupies the site, or part of the site of an immense
monastery, founded by the Mercian King Peda, in the year 665, and
destroyed by fire in the year 1116, which monastery, though originally
termed Medeshamsted, or the homestead on the meads, was
subsequently termed Peterborough, from the circumstance of its having
been reared by the old Saxon monarch for the love of God and the
honour of Saint Peter, as the Saxon Chronicle says, a book which I
went through carefully in my younger days, when I studied Saxon, for,
as I have already told the reader, I was in those days a bit of a
philologist. Like the first, the second edifice was originally a monastery,
and continued so till the time of the Reformation; both were abodes of
learning; for if the Saxon Chronicle was commenced in the monkish
cells of the first, it was completed in those of the second. What is at
present called Peterborough Cathedral is a noble venerable pile, equal
upon the whole in external appearance to the cathedrals of Toledo,
Burgos and Leon, all of which I have seen. Nothing in architecture can
be conceived more beautiful than the principal entrance, which fronts
the west, and which, at the time we saw it, was gilded with the rays of
the setting sun.
After having strolled about the edifice surveying it until we were weary,
we returned to our inn, and after taking an excellent supper retired to
rest.
At ten o'clock next morning we left the capital of the meads. With
dragon speed, and dragon noise, fire, smoke, and fury, the train dashed
along its road through beautiful meadows, garnished here and there
with pollard sallows; over pretty streams, whose waters stole along
imperceptibly; by venerable old churches, which I vowed I would take
the first opportunity of visiting: stopping now and then to recruit its
energies at places, whose old Anglo-Saxon names stared me in the eyes
from station boards, as specimens of which, let me only dot down

Willy Thorpe, Ringsted, and Yrthling Boro. Quite forgetting everything
Welsh, I was enthusiastically Saxon the whole way from
Medeshamsted to Blissworth, so thoroughly Saxon was the country,
with its rich meads, its old churches and its names. After leaving
Blissworth, a thoroughly Saxon place by-the-bye, as its name shows,
signifying the stronghold or possession of Bligh or Blee, I became less
Saxon; the country was rather less Saxon, and I caught occasionally the
word "by" on a board, the Danish for a town; which "by" waked in me
a considerable portion of Danish enthusiasm, of which I have plenty,
and with reason, having translated the glorious Kaempe Viser over the
desk of my ancient master, the gentleman solicitor of East Anglia. At
length we drew near the great workshop of England, called by some,
Brummagem or Bromwicham, by others Birmingham, and I fell into a
philological reverie, wondering which was the right name. Before,
however, we came to the station, I decided that both names were right
enough, but that Bromwicham was the original name; signifying the
home on the broomie moor, which name it lost in polite parlance for
Birmingham, or the home of the son of Biarmer, when a certain man of
Danish blood, called Biarming, or the son of Biarmer, got possession of
it, whether by force, fraud, or marriage - the latter, by-the-bye, is by far
the best way of getting possession of an estate - this deponent neither
knoweth nor careth. At Birmingham station I became a modern
Englishman, enthusiastically proud of modern England's science and
energy; that station alone is enough to make one proud of being a
modern Englishman. Oh, what an idea does that station, with its
thousand trains dashing off in all directions, or arriving from all
quarters, give of modern English science and energy. My modern
English pride accompanied me all the way to Tipton; for all along the
route there were wonderful evidences of English skill and enterprise; in
chimneys high as cathedral spires, vomiting forth smoke, furnaces
emitting flame and lava, and in the sound of gigantic hammers, wielded
by steam, the Englishman's slave. After passing Tipton, at which