plitting, however, matters nothing, for, as the other Wiltshire Avon has claimed so much notice in our chapter on Chalk

stated, does not come within our survey. Even eliminating this, it may fairly be said that the Bristol Avon, as the world usually designates it, is no mean river above its tidal ways, and washes no mean cities. Indeed, from the beautiful old town of Bradford, where the river leaves its native county-a town that boast

before leaving its native county, this more sluggish Avon has gathered into its bosom all the waters of North-West Wilts. Obscure streams most of them, one or two bursting from the Chalk of the Marlborough Downs, but, heading the wrong way, s

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in its profusion of fine country houses of great traditions, from the Tudor to the Georgian age. Nor is this a mere accident, but for a good reason which stands out for those who know anything of Old England. It is worth noting, too, of this North Wilts Avon, that it is from all these accessories, and from its association with such scenes and memories, rather than from any particular charms of its own beyond such as are inseparable from any combination of water, meadow, and woodland, that its merit arises. Further, that almost at the moment it leaves Wiltshire it leaves the purely arcadian behind it; and, as it drops down through scenes beyond me

bury nor the Bristol Avon have such a familiar ring as that one of Shakespeare, the mouth

uncommon claim to notoriety; for of all the rivers of its type and class, the re

CKWATER BY THE

rresistibly to those-and they are many, nay, almost a multitude-who know it. The wider expanse of water at Guy's Cliff, the beautiful stretch above which Warwick Castle rises so superbly, are as familiar to almost as large a public as the reaches of the Thames at Windsor. Stratford, also, with its two bridges, and the stately church wherein lies Shakespeare's dust, all casting shadows on the widened surface of the river, is a scene of even more world-wide note. No river of secondary size in England has so many places of distinction upon its banks. Rising at Naseby, skirting Rugby, and washing Leamington, Warwick, and Stratford, is a fine record for the upper part of a single river. This is the group of names with which the world chiefly associates the Avon; but the world knows much less of its lower half, which is far the most natura

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are not as those which come from the Black Mountains or from the Wiltshire Downs. But such waters as these are for dreaming on in the full flush of summer, for catching the moods of summer skies, or doubling the splendour of autumn woods; for reflecting the ruddy glow of old brick bridges, the moist and lichen-covered walls of old brick mills. And after all this peace comes now and again in delightful contrast those interludes in which the Avon so often rejoices: the white rush of the water over a long sloping weir of rugged stones, a fine s

th; the great humpy mass of Bredon Hill seems to lie right athwart the vale, while in the no remote distance the amazingly bold peaks of the Malverns look like some range of Welsh mountains that have strayed eastward and lost their way. The people of Evesham, like those of Warwick and Stratford, have widened and beautified the Avon as it washes the foot of the green slopes on which the noble belfry of Abbot Lichfield, barely finished at the Dissolution, alone marks the site of the once splendid Abbey. Between Stratford and Evesham the long ridge of Edgehill, where the first great battle of the Civil War was fought, rises away to the south, and the villages by inference or evidence associated with Shakespeare's life are all about the stream. The Avon has already passed by many scenes characterist

f architectural beauty are as a whole surpassed in no part of England. Cleeve Prior and Abbot's Cleeve, Norton, Cropthorne, Birlingham and the Combertons, Elmley Castle and Bredon, will occur at once to any one who knows the Avon, with their wealth of half-timbered black and white buildings, in which th

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of architectural treasures-churches, manor-houses, and cottages-are clustered along its banks. Nor had any river in En

n Simon-de-Montfort heard his last Mass in the Abbey church and fell that same day upon the banks of Avon. Charles and Rupert, Maurice and Massey, Essex, Waller, and Cromwell himself knew the Lower Avon as well as a modern general commanding on Salisbury Plain knows the Avon of South Wilts, and in grimmer fashion. Its mouth was dyed crimson with Lancastrian blood at Tewkesbury in the last sanguinary battle in the Wars of the Roses, and Tewkesbury itself was taken and retaken no less than eleven times in the wars of King and Parliament. And then inseparable from the story of the Avon is that of the three

OF THE T