CALNE 209 



XXXV 



Calne (whose name be pleased to pronounce 

 " Carne ") is not a pleasing place. Once the seat of 

 a cloth-making industry, it has seen its trade utterly 

 decay, and is only now regaining something of its 

 commerce in the very dijQferent staple of bacon-curing. 

 One does not contemn Calne on account of its mis- 

 fortunes, but it must always have been a slipshod 

 place. " Calne," according to Hartley Coleridge, 

 who described his father's three years' residence there, 

 " is not a very pretty place. The soil is clayey and 

 chalky ; the streams far from crystal ; the hills bare 

 and shapeless ; the trees not venerable ; the town 

 itself irregular, which is its only beauty. But there 

 were good, comfortable, unintellectual people in it." 

 With all of which one may agree ; save that the 

 "irregularity" of the town is now rather sluttish 

 than beautiful. As for the people, we are but 

 travelling the road, and Calne is only an incident 

 on our way — the people of it something less to 

 ourselves, resembling, in fact, x, an unknown quantity. 



The outskirts of Calne are not prepossessing, nor 

 does the long, stony street of mean characterless stone 

 houses that leads to the centre of the little town 

 alter the stranger's view. Calne, in fact, lying so near 

 Bowood, long the seat of the Marquises of Lansdowne, 

 and being their property, wears an abject, servile 

 look. All that makes life worth living is at lordly 

 Bowood ; only that which is mean and commonplace 

 is left to Calne. It seems (although one's prejudices 



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