Hospital loads the shore with all its costly ugliness. If we have not, perhaps, yet reached the height of Continental profanity which has turned the Convent of Cordova into barracks, and St. Bernard's Monastery at Clairvaux into a prison, and the Church of Cluny into racing stables, we yet seem to delight to place side by side with the noblest conceptions that ever rose in beauty from English ground, our modern abortions. There is not a cathedral town whose minster-square is not disgraced by some pretentious shed. And now Government not only invades the country, but chooses above all, the better to display our folly, that place which the old Cistercian monks had for ever made sacred by the loveliness of faith and work.
Hythe is only a little village, but as its name shows, once the port of the New Forest.[1] The Forest, however, has now receded from it, and in this chapter we shall see nothing of its woods. The district, however, is too important in an historical point of view to be omitted. The walk, even though it is not over wild moors and commons, is still very beautiful. True English lanes will lead us by quiet dells, with glimpses here and there through hedgerow elms of the blue Southampton water, down to the shore of the Solent.
So, leaving Hythe[2] and going southward, skirting Cadlands
- ↑ In the Rolls of Parliament, vol. i. p. 125, A.D. 1293, 21st Edward I., is an account of a vessel, the All Saints, "de Hethe juxta Novam Forestam," which, laden with wine from Rochelle, was wrecked and plundered on the Cornish coast.
- ↑ A little beyond Hythe is a good example of Mr. Kemble's test (see the Saxons in England, vol. i., Appendix A, p. 481) for recognizing the Ancient Mark. To the north lies Eling, the Mark of the Ealingas, and in regular succession from it come the various hursts, holts, and dens, now to be seen in Ashurst, Buckholt, and Dibden. The last village has a very picturesque
