THE BATH ROAD 



45 



his whole days in totting up his accounts, drawing up 

 amateur legal documents to the utter confusion of his 

 legal advisers, giving away estates in order that these 

 documents may be heard in court, reading philosophy, 

 cultivating strawberries and trout with the aid of a 

 Dutch gardener (the strawberries not the trout), smoking 

 tobacco, and finally dying in his bed, comfortable and 

 orthodox. Mr. Hall does indeed take pity on his hero 

 and permits him, with many graceful excuses, the senti- 

 mental license of running away with his neighbour's 

 wife (the injured husband, as is customary, coming in 

 for no consideration whatever) ; but at best his hero is 

 but a dowdy sort of Elizabethan Edgar Ravenswood, 

 attired in a gray jerkin, with an elderly Lady Hunger- 

 ford for a Lucy Ashton. 



Now all this is very sad, and bad, and mad — at least 

 it will make most people feel so if their cherished 

 illusions are thus ruthlessly shattered. In the present 

 instance however it does not seem to me that the 

 romance of private history has been deprived of a 

 lawful possession, or that the wicked Wild Darrell of 

 our youth, " the tall man of ferocious aspect," has been 

 turned for good and all into an agricultural goody- 

 goody. Nevertheless in an age when documentary 

 evidence is considered everything, and all other kind of 

 evidence as nothing at all, Mr. Hall's defence of Darrell 

 must command respect, for it is a defence based entirely 

 on a series of Darrell papers lying in the Record Office, 

 which have been carefully edited, and give us as inter- 

 esting a glimpse into Elizabethan country society as can 

 have been got for some time. The cry of documentary 

 evidence is not however one at which I stand instantly 

 abashed, because I know that not only have documents 

 relating to issues wherein the honour of families has 

 been at stake been frequently tampered with in public 

 collections, but have been found, on search being made, 

 to have vanished off the face of the earth. Who sup- 

 poses for instance that in our Record Office is to be 



