" THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL CARTED AWAY. "
LT0 amp BDITOR OP raw "OplOTATO11-1 Sin,—I think, after all, it seems clear that it was Southey who talked of the sublime and -beautiful being carted away as he saw the quarriers a century figo at their mischievous work in the Avon Gorge. I have this from an old friend whose father, the most accurate of men, always used to quote the words as a saying of Southey's. "Selling the sublime and beautiful by the cartload," appears to have been the exact phrase.
Southey was born in Bristol, where his father had a haber- dasher's shop "at the sign of the Hare," in Wine Street. As a boy, I am sorry to say, the young Southey used to grub up roots of the bee orchis, which then grew at the foot of the Gully, and take them to die (in pots, I think) at his aunt's house in College Green. As a man he had a strong affection for Bristol, and in a curious letter written from Xeswiek in 1827 he writes :—" I live in hopes of having a steam carriage which will enable me to transport myself and family at reasonable cost. When this is effected, which is likely to be in a. very few years (I), we will mount the vehicle some day when the water boils and steer for my native city, which I should like my children to see." It is perhaps worth noting that Burke also—to whom we owe the happy verbal association of the beautiful and the sublime—knew the Avon Gorge well, and the recollection of his own enjoyment of the "serene air" on our "lofty rooks," and the sight of the gulls below "that skim the mud of your
river when it is exhausted of its tide," supplied him with a famous passage in the speech he made to the citizens of Bristol on the declaration of the poll in 1774.
It is perhaps right to add that a correspondent has kindly called my attention to a paragraph from Punch for August 31st, 1844, which speaks of the authorities here "selling their splendid scenery at about twopence the hundred-weight." "The beauties of nature," it goes on, "are being rapidly carted away to repair the roads, ravines are being knocked down without reserve to the highest bidder."
The "struggle between Nature and the Town Council" of which Punch spoke more than sixty years ago, and the destruction which Soutbey lamented even farther back, still go on, and it is truer than ever in our own day that Nature is getting decidedly the worst of it." The Spectator lure always cared about the disappearance of things beautiful, and its readers who know anything of the sublimity of our river scenery here will be aware that its destruction is a matter of national, and not merely local, concern.—I am, Sir, Ste., GEORGE IL LEONARD,
Chairman of the Bristol Kyrie Society. University College, Bristol.
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