| Transcript or Index | July 21st 1819
My dear Attica
How many thanks should I owe you if I gave you only one for every pleasant idea excited by your letter. Thanks are common coin, therefore I will try to give you some of those pleasant ideas back. In the first place I congratulate you on Mrs Porden’s better state – my Mother’s has not greatly amended but last week (for the first time) I left her bed chamber to see some of our Wharfdale’s beauties. Favored by a delicious summer evening, I accompanied a friend to Bolton Abbey, a ruin most nearly equal to Tintern Abbey in the elegant structure of its remaining arches, and the rich scenery round. A good carriage road took us thro’ the Duke of Devonshire’s park to the banks of the Strid which Wordsworth and Rogers have chosen as their theme. You remember the pretty legend of the Boy of Egremond, dragged into the gulf by his greyhounds which he led in a leash. We stood on this celebrated Strid which is formed by two rocks of table shape about a yard asunder, hanging over the river Wharf which rushes between them from a higher crevice among pointed crags. Though its fall is noisy and rapid, the rock bason which receives it is so deep as to conceal and exhaust its ferment. It goes on, dark, slow, and hideously deep, through its narrow channel till it spreads into a wide smooth current winding under high banks of broken limestone, fringed superbly with ancient trees. All round this romantic Strid which is still the favorite leap of rash boys and girls, the overflow of the Wharf has worn in the course of a hundred winters, some bold and picturesque hollows on the highest banks, where the whiteness of the rocks themselves is well contrasted by the thick black mop and purple water weeds which hang on them from thence we ascended to a moss:table prepared for travellers on an eminence, where a most extensive view opens over thickly wooded hollows, green slopes, and the gleamings of the Wharf lost at last under a misty chain of hills. Mr Kennion’s pencil will do more justice to this prospect than any pen unless it was Walter Scott’s who seems to me the Claude Lorraine of poetic landscape. Your Mazeppa’s wild horse ought to have been turned loose in Gordale and among the frightful chasms of Malhamdale. Lord Byron himself could not desire a fitter place for suicide and madness. But if he chose a good substantial misery , and a danger of the right immediate mind, he ought to come on the top of a loaded postcoach down Rumblesmoor or Otley. Shiver. Perhaps the view of this town as it was a few days ago would have been too comic for his gentlemanlyke [sic] melancholy. Under the market cross (a black square ragged building close to the Stocks) you must imagine about forty well clothed yeoman cavalry taking shelter from a summer shower under its ragged pediment which as it could only shelter the horses’ heads, obliged the riders to sit in such an attitude as so highly amused Frederic of Prussia when Attorney General Dunning threw his arms round his charger’s neck at a review. When you have laughed a little at the rear of this singular squadron, you may suppose the churchyard which overlooks the main street, thronged with the living row above row, under a canopy of pink, blue and white parasols. Great would be the horror of Lady Ann, the immortal Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery, who raised pastry Castles with the same hand which cuffed the seneschal of her own, if she could awake and see as your mind’s eye may, the descendants of her yeomen’s daughters in kid slippers and lilac sarsnets, and her yeomen themselves saving their jackets from a shower under the trophies of their grandsires. However, many of her humblest cottagers now write as well, and spell very like her Ladyship, if we mayjudge by her autographs in Skipton Castle. And we see by the inventory of her slashed satin gowns with facings of rabbit fur, her loose sleeves, and fringed upper bodices, that we, her successors, are not far from her style of dress. Her father Lord De Clifford would supply a dozen court dressmakers with the remnants of his taffeta robes and gold buttons; and at the Prince Regent’s last Ball, a lady dressed in them would have been equipped not much unlike a Belle of 1819. Mr Kennion will tell you what he thinks of Wharfedale; but unless he had entered the cottages, he can hardly give you an idea of the great transformation in the dress and economy of the natives. Under one of the thatched roofs and ivied walls of a cottage near Bolton, we found grecian couches covered with green silk, windows full of hothouse flowers under a gilt cornice and festooned draperies, with all the etceterasof velvet ottomans, fancy tables, and volumes of Byron and Scott in morocco. I hear from Scotland that the Bride of Lammermuir is not approved there and until Mama’s health was severely interrupted, I had hopes of reading the first copy at no great distance from Abbotsford. There is not a word in your letter of Mr Flaxman’s family. It is a poetical age since we heard from them, but Sitania is gone to gather musk roses and dip her peaseblossom in the honeydew of Surry or Devon. The fairy King was expected to visit Glasgow this spring, but he is too well acquainted with the antiquities of the North to be tempted by our valley. How many gems have you set in your chest? If you have any contributions this season, they must be from Counsellor Anyside about leases, ejectments, laws of administration, probates of wills; for we have been toiling through a mountain of musty papers. If you were here and had the chemical extract which renovates paper and effaces ink, what metamorphosis more strange than Ovid’s we should see among them! Leases into lyrics, ejectments into enigmas and probates into the prologues of tragedies, which they usually are when lawyers are busy. But do not imagine that they occupy as so much or so pleasantly as to prevent our wish for more papers. Any from you will always have a welcome from the Solicitor of Tabby Hall, who is now in full practice and boarding (for the convenience of his brother lawyers) under the roof of a lady, the very counterpart of good Mrs Dorothy who formerly changed her black damask petticoat into a robe for him. She is almost the only survivor of that useful and active race of housewives, one of whom (as your good Mother once laughed to hear) laid her hand on her husband’s throat “to help the Lord awa ‘wi him”. Mrs Porden said merrily that nobody knew how she might act in such circumstances herself – but our good friend here says she wishes she had an opportunity to shew. – I have seven letters to put into Mr K’s coat pocket, therefore I know you will excuse another shred of paper; but when the many coloured web of ideas comes to be arranged in London, you will at least find “the silver thread” which fastened us to our friends there is unbroken. Mention us most kindly to your good Papa, Mama, and sister.
I have made a little sketch of the Strid on which you may be poetical if you please when you see it; but I can do nothing now except in my professional way, as one of my predecessors, or rather 3 of them, did some years ago—one of the shortest conveyances ever seen in a lawbook—viz –
WE Of Skirbeck in the See
A. & W.B. Of Lincoln there to be
Do give & grant to thee Your perpetuity
Mr W.V. To have & hold in Fee
The Church & Rectory From the years seventeen hundred & ninety & three
For ever & Ay—e.
Yours faithfully
(as we lawyers always say)
AJ Vardill
Addressed: Miss Porden
Berners Street
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