And now to Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain, up the steep road from Amesbury taken by the coaches. Unless you can see Stonehenge in such an awful thunderstorm as Turner shows in his picture of it, or can come upon the place at dead of night either by moonlight, or in the blackness of a moonless midnight, you will fail to be impressed; unless you are a literary pilgrim and can be moved to sentiment, not by thoughts of the mythical human sacrifices offered up here by imaginary Druids, but by the last scenes in the tragedy of poor Tess. Then the place has an immediate human interest which otherwise it lacks in the immeasurably vast space of time dividing us from the period of its building and of the heaping up of the sepulchral barrows that make a wide circle round it on the Plain. Solitary, with nothing to give it scale, even the brakes that convey irreverent excursionists help to confer a dignity on the spot, when seen afar upon the ridge where this Mystery, sphinx-like, offers an insoluble riddle to arch?ologists of all the ages.

No one, despite the affected archaisms and the{197}
STONEHENGE
Image unavailable: THE GREAT SNOWSTORM OF 1836; THE EXETER ‘TELEGRAPH,’ ASSISTED BY POST-HORSES, DRIVING THROUGH THE SNOW-DRIFTS AT AMESBURY (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).
THE GREAT SNOWSTORM OF 1836; THE EXETER ‘TELEGRAPH,’ ASSISTED BY POST-HORSES, DRIVING THROUGH THE SNOW-DRIFTS AT AMESBURY (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).

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sham arch?ology, has described Stonehenge so impressively as that ‘wondrous boy’ Chatterton:—
A wondrous pyle of rugged mountaynes standes,
Placed on eche other in a dreare arraie,
It ne could be the worke of human handes,
It ne was reared up by menne of claie.
Here did the Britons adoration paye
To the false god whom they did Tauran name,
Lightynge hys altarre with greate fyres in Maie,
Roasteyng theire victims round aboute the flame;
Twas here that Hengyst dyd the Brytons slee,
As they were met in council for to bee.

Stonehenge was probably standing when the Romans came to Britain, and doubtless astonished them when they first saw it as much as any one else. Its surroundings were not very different then from now. A farmstead, with ugly blue-slated roof, which has appeared on the ridge of the down of late years, and possibly a road which did not exist in days of old: these alone have changed the aspect of the vast solitude in which the hoary monument stands. No hedges, no gates, never a sheep upon the meagre grass. As Ingoldsby says of Salisbury Plain, in general:—
Not a shrub, nor a tree, nor a bush can you see;
No hedges, no ditches, no gates, no stiles,
Much less a house or a cottage for miles.

This, saving that intrusive farmstead, still holds good here; and although every one is inevitably disappointed with Stonehenge, as first seen at a distance, looking so small and insignificant in the vastness of the bare downs in which it is set, the{200} place, and not the great stones merely, impresses by its sadness and utter detachment from the living world, its loves and hates and interests. The birds forget to sing in this loneliness, which is awful in winter and not less awful in the emptiness visible under the blue sky and blazing sun of summer. Just the situation in which Stonehenge is placed, you understand, not Stonehenge itself, gives these feelings. ‘Do not we gaze with awe upon these massive stones?’ asks the high-falutin guide-book compiler. No, indeed we don’t. It is a pity, but it can’t be done, and the average description of Stonehenge which sets forth the grandeur and stupendous size of these stones, is pumped-up fudge and flapdoodle of the damnablest kind, which takes in no one. It is not merely the Philistine who thinks thus, but even the would-be marvellers, and those of light and leading are disquieted by secret thoughts that, had we a mind to it, and if there was money in it, we could build a better and a bigger Stonehenge by a long way.

The earliest account of this mystic monument is found in the writings of Nennius, who lived in the ninth century. The first-comer is entitled to respect, and when Nennius tells us that Stonehenge was erected by the surviving Britons, in memory of four hundred and sixty British nobles, murdered here at a conference to which the Saxon chieftain, Hengist, had invited King Vortigern and his Court, we are bound to pay some attention to the statement, although to place implicit reliance upon it would be rash, considering the fact that Nennius wrote four hundred years after the event.{201}
Image unavailable: STONEHENGE (AFTER TURNER, R.A.).
STONEHENGE (AFTER TURNER, R.A.).

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WHO BUILT STONEHENGE?

But there are, and have been, many theories which profess to give the only true origin of these stone circles. An antiquary formerly living at Amesbury went to the beginnings of creation and held that they were erected by Adam. If so, it is to be hoped for Adam’s sake that he finished the job in the summer, or that if it occupied him in winter time, he had clothed himself with something warmer than the traditional fig-leaf, in view of the rigours of these Wiltshire Downs. It would be interesting also to have Adam’s opinion as to the comparative merits of Salisbury Plain and the Garden of Eden.

Then a tradition existed that Merlin, the sorcerer, arranged the circles. Those who do not think much of this view may take more kindly to the legend of our old friends the Druids, who, according to Dr. Stukeley and others, made this their chief temple; while, according to other views, the Britons before and after the Roman occupation, and the Romans themselves, were the builders. Then there are others who conceive this to have been the crowning-place of the Danish kings. The Saxons, indeed, appear to be the only people who have not been credited with the work; although, curiously enough, its very name is of Saxon derivation, and the earliest writers refer to it as ‘Stanenges,’ from Anglo-Saxon words meaning ‘the hanging-stones.’ That the Saxons discovered Stonehenge, and were puzzled by it as greatly as it must have excited the wonder of the Romans, hundreds of years before, seems obvious from this name they gave the lonely place. Ignorant as to its{204} use, they either saw in the upright stones and the imposts they carried a resemblance to a gallows, or else, not being themselves expert builders, marvelled that the great imposts should remain suspended in the air.

Much of the legitimate wonderment in respect of Stonehenge lies in the mystery of how the forgotten builders could have quarried and shaped these stones, and could have cut the tenons and mortice-holes that held the tall columns, and the flat stones above them, together. Camden, the old chronicler, has a ready way out of this puzzling question. Beginning with a description of this ‘huge and monstrous piece of work,’ he goes on to say that ‘some there are that think them to be no natural stones, hewn out of the rock, but artificially made out of pure sand, and, by some glue or unctuous matter, knit and incorporate together.’
THE ‘FRIAR’S HEEL’

Stonehenge is considered to have consisted, when perfect, of an outer circle of thirty tall stones, three and a half feet apart, and connected together by a line of imposts, in whose extremities mortice-holes were cut, fitting into corresponding tenons projecting from the upright stones. The height of this circular screen was sixteen feet. A second and inner circle consisted of smaller and rougher stones, some forty in number, and six feet in height. Within this circle, again, rose five tall groups of stone placed in an ellipse, each group consisting of two uprights, with an impost above. These stones were the largest of all, the tallest reaching to a height of twenty-five feet. They were named by Dr. Stukeley, impressively{205} enough, the Great Trilithons. Each of these five groups would appear to have been accompanied on the inner side by a cluster of three small standing stones, while a black flat monolith, called the ‘Altar Stone,’ o............