Cheshire Gleanings. By William A. Axon. (Tubbs, Brook, and Chrystal,
Manchester; Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., London.)—Cheshire Gleanings does not answer to its title so well as the " Lancashire Gleanings" of the same writer. Some of the sketches, though they are all fairly interesting, have the very slightest connection with the county of Chester, and others none whatever. One, which raises expectation, is entitled " Tennyson's Northern Cobbler,' a Cheshire Man ;" but when the reader gets to the end of it, he finds that the title means precisely the reverse,—that Tennyson picked up the tradition which he has woven into the poem in his native Lincoln. shire. All Mr. Axon has to say upon the aubjeot is that a similar tradition exists in Cheshire. The sketch called " Sion y Boddiau" has no more to do with the County Palatine than with the country of Palestine ; and it seems rather hard on the reader who wants to know something about Cheshire to have imposed on him the thrice- told story of Dr. Moffat's life, merely because that divine happened in his early youth to work a short time as a gardener at High Leigh. Then, because the Beauty of Buttermere, celebrated by Wordsworth, was tricked into a marriage with a bigamous scoundrel from Mottram- in-Longendale, we get all her history and a long quotation from Wordaworth's poem into the bargain. Mr. Axon asks and answers the very unnecessary questions—" Did Harold die at Chester ?" and " Was Marat a teacher at Warrington ?" It might almost with equal relevancy be asked if the Man with the Iron Mask was imprisoned in Knutaford Gaol, and if the " Leiters of " Junius" were written on the banks of the Dee. The best thing in the book is the account of the Mystery and Miracle Plays, with which, in the olden times, the citizens of Chester were wont to be entertained during Whit Week. These plays were performed by the various trade companies. Those called mysteries were dramatic re- presentations of scenes of Biblical history, or of matters intended to symbolise one or other mysteries of the Christian faith ; while the miracle dramas were founded on the saintly legends of the Church of Rome. Mr. Axon quotes a curious proclamation made by William Newell, " Clarke of the Pendice," in the twenty-fourth of Henry VIII., which sets forth in quaint and homely phrase the motive and justification of those who adopted this method of bringing religion home to the people. The opening sentence—which is surely the longest in the English language—begins thus :—" For as much as ould tyme, not only for the augmentation and increase of the body and catholick faith of our Saviour, Jean Christ, and to exert the minds of common people to good devotion and holsome doctrine thereof, bat also for the oommonwelth and prosperity of this clay, a play and declara- tion of divers storyes of the Bible, beginning with the creation and fall
of Lucifer, and ending with the generall judgment of the world, to be declared and played in Whitsome weeko, was devised and made by one Sr. Henry Francis, somtym moonck of this monestery dissolved, who abtayning and gat of Clement, then bushop of Rome, a 1000 dayes of pardon, and of the bushop of Chester at that tyme 40 dayes of pardon, granted from thensforth to every person resorting in
peaceble manner with good devotion, to hear and see the said playas from tyme to tyme, as oft as they shall be played within the Bayed citty." And much more of the same sort ; for the foregoing citation is only about one half of this portentous sentence. The parts assigned "to the craftsmen and occupations of the Bayed citty " were sometimes quaintly congruous. Thus, the tanners did the Fall of Lucifer ; the drapers the Creation and Murder of Abel ; " the good symple water leaders and drawers of Deey " acted the story of the Flood; the tappers and linendrapers that of Balaam and his Ass, and, it is satisfactory to know, " set it out lively ;" the bakers set forth the Last Supper ; and to the cooks fell " the Harrowing of Hell." Some of the stage directions were as primitive as the times with which they dealt, and are realistic enough to have been drawn up by the Zola of the period. In the drama on the Fall of Man the following " direction " is given :—" Then Adam and Eve shall stand naked, and not be ashamed." In the "Harrowing of Hell" the worst sinners are rascally brewers and innkeepers who make their ale and sell "small cuppes, moneye to wyn." The ideal heaven of that age was probably a state of existence in which people maid get drunk every night without having headache next morning. It is hard to realise that only three and a half centuries—equal to five consecutive lives of three-score-years-and.ten—separate us from the twenty-fourth of Henry VIII., miracle plays and monks, monasteries and mysteries, witchcraft and diablerie, the despotism of the Tudors, and the dawn of the Reformation. When we grow impatient with the slowness of the world's progress, we should remember that though the days may seem long the ages are short. We have said enough to show that Mr. Axon's book, though it contains some irrelevant and even trivial matter, has also mach that Csestrians and antiquaries will find interesting.
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