CHAPTER XLII

BEING A POSTSCRIPT TO THE SECOND EDITION.

It almost necessarily follows that in a book such as this, which in brief compass attempts to take some account of every interesting or charming spot in a large tract of country, there must be certain omissions. To the stranger the survey may seem adequate; but it is a hundred to one that a reader whose home is in Sussex will detect a flippancy or a want of true insight in the treatment of his own village. Nor (rightly) does he sit silent under the conviction.

I find that, with the keenest desire to be just in criticism, I have been unfair to several villages. I have been unfair, for example, to Burpham, which lies between Arundel and Amberley and of which nothing is said; and more than one reader has discovered unfairness to East Sussex. For this the personal equation is perhaps responsible: a West Sussex man, try as he will, cannot have the same enthusiasm for the other side of his county as for his own. For me the sun has always seemed to rise over Beachy Head, the most easterly of our Downs.

The call for a second edition has however enabled me to set right a few errors in the body of the book, and in this additional chapter to amplify and fortify here and there. The result must necessarily be disconnected; but a glance at the index will point the way to what is new.

Concerning Aldworth in Tennyson's poetry (see page 12), there is the exquisite stanza to General Hamley:

"You came, and looked, and loved the view Long known and loved by me, Green Sussex fading into blue With one gray glimpse of sea."

"Green Sussex fading into blue"--it is the motto for every Down summit, South or North.

[Sidenote: SHELLEY AND TRELAWNY]

With reference to Shelley and Sussex, my attention has been drawn to an interesting account of Field Place by Mr. Hale White, the author of the Mark Rutherford novels, in an old _Macmillan's Magazine_. Says Mr. White, "Denne Park [at Horsham] might easily have suggested--more easily perhaps than any part of the country near Field Place--the well-known semi-chorus in the _Prometheus_ which begins

'The path through which that lovely twain Have passed, by cedar, pine, and yew, And each dark tree that ever grew Is curtained out from heaven's wide blue.'

The _Prometheus_, however, was written when Horsham was well-nigh forgotten"--by its author.

Owing to a curious lapse of memory, I omitted to say that Sompting, near Worthing, should be famous as the home of Edward John Trelawny, author of _The Adventures of a Younger Son_, and the friend of Shelley and Byron. In his Sompting garden, in his old age, Trelawny grew figs, equal, he said, to those of his dear Italy, and lived again his vigorous, picturesque, notable life. Sussex thus owns not only the poet of "Adonais," but the friend who rescued his heart from the flames that consumed his body on the shores of the Gulf, and bearing it to Rome placed over its resting place in the Protestant cemetery the words from the _Tempest_ (his own happy choice):--

"Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange."

The old man, powerful and capricious to the last, died at Sompting in 1881, within a year of ninety. His body was removed to Gotha for cremation, and his ashes lie beside Shelley's heart in Rome.

Among the wise men of Lewes I ought not to have overlooked William Durrant Cooper (1812-1875), a shrewd Sussex enthusiast and antiquary, who as long ago as 1836 printed at his own cost a little glossary of the county's provincialisms. The book, publicly printed in 1853, was, of course, superseded by Mr. Parish's admirable collection, but Mr. Cooper showed the way. One of his examples of the use of the West Sussex pronoun _en_, _un_, or _um_ might be noted, especially as it involves another quaint confusion of sex. _En_ and _un_ stand for him, her or it; _um_ for them. Thus, "a blackbird flew up and her killed 'n"; that is to say, he killed it.

[Sidenote: THE ANGEL'S FAN]

Among the Harleian MSS. at the British Museum is the account of a supernatural visitation to Rye in 1607. The visitants were angels, their fortunate entertainer being a married woman. She, however, by a lapse in good breeding, undid whatever good was intended for her. "And after that appeared unto her 2 angells in her chamber, and one of them having a white fan in her hand did let the same fall; and she stooping to take it upp, the angell gave her a box on the eare, rebukinge her that she a mortall creature should presume to handle matters appertayninge to heavenlie creatures."

[Sidenote: ROBERTSON OF BRIGHTON]

It was an error to omit from