Salisbury spire and the distant city come with the welcome surprise of a Promised Land after these bleak downs. Even three miles away the unenclosed wilds are done, and we drop continuously from Three Mile Hill, down, down, down to the lowlands on a smooth and uninterrupted road, to where the trees and the houses can be distinguished, nestling around and below the graceful cathedral, a long way yet ahead. It is coming thus with that needle-pointed spire, so long and so prominently in view, that the story of its having been built to its extraordinary height of 404 feet for the purpose of guiding the strayed footsteps of travellers across the solitudes of Salisbury Plain may readily be believed.

Salisbury wears a bland and cheerful appearance, and has an air of modernity that quite belies its age. Few places in England have so well-ascertained an{166} origin. We can fix the very year, six hundred and eighty years ago, when it began to be, and yet, although there is the cathedral to prove its age, with the Poultry Cross, and very many ancient houses happily still standing, it has a general air of anything but medi?valism. This curious feeling that strikes every visitor is really owing to the generous and well-ordered plan on which the city was originally laid out; broad streets being planned in geometrical precision, and the blocks of houses built in regular squares.

That phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch, thought Salisbury ‘a very desperate sort of place; an exceedingly wild and dissipated city’—a view of it which is not shared by any one else. I wish I could tell you to which inn it was that he resorted to have dinner, and to await the arrival of Martin. A coaching inn, of course, for Martin came by coach from London. But whether it was the ‘White Hart,’ or the ‘Three Swans’ (which, alas! is no longer an inn), or the ‘King’s Arms,’ or the ‘George,’ is more than I or any one else can determine.
NEW SARUM

Salisbury is by no means desperate or dissipated, even though it be market-day, and although itinerant cutlery vendors may still sell seven-bladed knives, with never a cut among them, to the unwary. It is true that Mr. Thomas Hardy has given us, in On the Western Circuit, a picture of blazing orgies at Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting merry-go-rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better than they ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he should have{167} been; and it is true that by ‘Melchester’ this fair city of Salisbury is meant; but you can conjure up no very accurate picture of this ancient place from those pages. The real Salisbury is extremely urbane and polished, decorous and well-ordered. It is graceful and sunny, and has, in fact, all the sweetness of medi?valism without its sternness, and affords a thorough contrast with Winchester, which frowns upon you where Salisbury smiles. One need not waver from one’s allegiance to Winchester to admit so much.

Salisbury is still known in official documents as ‘New Sarum.’ It is, nevertheless, of a quite respectable antiquity, its newness dating from that day, 28th April 1220, when Bishop Poore laid the foundation-stone of the still existing cathedral. There are romantic incidents in the exodus from Old Sarum on its windy height upon the downs, a mile and a half away, to these ‘rich champaign fields and fertile valleys, abounding with the fruits of the earth, and watered by living streams,’ in this ‘sink of Salisbury Plain,’ where the Bourne, the Wylye, the Avon, and the Nadder flow in innumerable runlets through the meads.

Old Sarum was old indeed. Its history strikes rootlets deep down into the Unknown. A natural hillock upon the wild downs, its defensible position rendered it a camp for the earliest aboriginal tribes, who, always at war with one another, lived for safety’s sake in such bleak and inhospitable places when they would much rather be hunting and enjoying life generally in the sheltered wooded vales{168} and fertile plains. These tribes heaped up the first artificial earthworks that ever strengthened this historic hill, and they were succeeded during the long march of those dim centuries by Romans, Saxons, and Danes. The Romans, with their unerring military instinct, saw the importance of the hill, and added to the simple defences they found there. They called the place Sorbiodunum, and made it a great strategic station. The Saxons strengthened the fortifications in their turn, and at the time of the Norman Conquest a city had grown up under the shelter of the citadel.

In its deserted state to-day, the site of Old Sarum vividly recalls the appearance presented by an extinct volcano, the conical hill rising from the downs with the su............