THE VILLAGE OF EYAM.

ERBYSHIRE has been long and deservedly celebrated for the variety and beauty of its scenery. No English county possesses these qualities in a more remarkable degree; for while the scenery in some districts is of the most luxuriantly pastoral character, in others it is wild and barren-presenting a total contrast-singularly impressive and magnificent. These very distinct characterisations sometimes closely combine, and we have the grandeur of rocky scenery coupled with the most luxuriant vegetation, as in Dove Dale, the beauties of which have been celebrated from the days when Izaak Walton fished there, with his friend Cotton, who sang The Wonders of the Peak,' and the beauties of the charming river Dove. A greater poet, who brought travelled experience to the scene, has also strongly testified to its charms. Byron in a letter to Moore asks him : -'Have you ever seen Dove Dale? there are some scenes in England equal to anything in Switzerland.' Moore afterwards lived at Ashbourne, within a mile or two of the Dale, for about two years, and while there wrote his most beautiful poem, Lalla Rookh.' The county is indeed a fit residence for a poet, for, like the poetic mind,

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"By turns 'tis soft, by turns 'tis wild '—

a character it assumes from the nature of its surface, which is singularly undulating, and at varied altitudes, so that a walk of a few miles may

not unfrequently display a change indicative in a very marked degree of varied temperature in the high and low-lands. Thus reaping may have been completed in the valleys, and the grain secured, while the corn is yet green on the mountains-the-husbandman there awaiting another month to ripen the harvest. The highest point is about Castleton, where the head of Mam Tor is frequently enveloped in clouds, and from the summit of which may be distinctly traced the geological character of the county, the eye detecting the series of plateaus which step by step stretch onward toward the low land in which the capital city of the county stands. This mountain range takes its rise near the village of Ashover, and is continued thence through the Peak of Derbyshire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland into Scotland, increasing in grandeur and sublimity in its course, and has been dignified by Camden and others with the appellation of the English Apennines.'

The visitor to Chatsworth, the Palace of the Peak,' is in the midst of the hill scenery which gives beauty to the county, and at the foot of the rocks which contribute to its grandeur some few miles distant in the district known as the High Peak.' From the terrace in front of this noble residence, or, better still, from the antique hunting tower on the hill above, the eye commands a view up the valley of the Derwent, where

'Deep and low the hamlets lie,'

of Pilsley, Hassop, and Baslow, sheltered on one side by the lofty ridge of mountains denominated Froggat Edge, whose sterile and rugged edges cut sharply against the sky, toward the village of Calver, where the hills meet on the other side of the Derwent, which runs rapidly along its stony bed with a sound beautifully realising Coleridge's lines:

A noise as of a hidden brook,

In the leafy month of June;

That to the listening woods all night,
Singeth a quiet tune.'

Beyond Calvert the mountains rapidly close in, until at Stoney Middleton they leave but a narrow gorge for the travellers who journey toward the Peak. Here the rocks have the appearance of perpendicular walls, and, in

some instances, the regular tower and turret-like forms they assume, have nearly as much the effect of an old castellated building when viewed from a distance, as the famed group of rocks on Stanton Moor, which go by the name of Mock Beggar Hall, from its similarity to a baronial residence, which might lead a beggar out of his path in quest of charity. Half way

up

Village of Eyam.

the dale,* a chasm in the rock leads by a steep ascent to the village of Eyam, which occupies the table-land on the summit of the cliffs, and above

Middleton Dale is not without its history and its legends: traces of Roman occupancy have been frequently discovered, and the bath is believed to have been originally established here by them. It is two degrees higher than the warmest springs at Matlock. The high perpendicular rock which forms the first grand opening to Middleton Dale is known as the Lover's Leap, from the circumstance of a love-stricken damsel of the name of Baddeley precipitating herself from the summit, in 1760, and falling from the fearful height comparatively uninjured, the shrubs and bushes catching her garments and breaking her fall. It was in passing through this dale in 1743 that the attention of Lord Duncannon was attracted by the beauty of the spar which his horse accidentally trod upon. He procured a larger piece, and had it formed into a vase by Mr. H. Watson of Bakewell, and thus originated a manufacture now extensively carried on of the beautiful fluor-spar, provincially known as Blue John.

which again rise the green hills. The situation of the village has been truthfully and happily described by Mary Howitt :

Among the verdant mountains of the Peak,
There lies a quiet hamlet, where the slope
Of pleasant uplands wards the north-winds bleak;
Below, wild dells romantic pathways ope:
Around, above it, spreads a shadowy cope
Of forest trees: flower, foliage, and clear rill
Wave from the cliffs, or down ravines elope;
It seems a place charmed from the power of ill
By sainted words of old;- -so lovely, lone, and still.'*

The enduring celebrity of this unpretending village, which attracts the foot of the pilgrim from afar, is due to its having been the centre of the ravages of the great plague of 1665-6, and the scene of the more than Roman fortitude, the Christian devotion and self-sacrifice, of its pastor, the Rev. William Mompesson, who by his influence and example confined the plague to this one spot, and tended, encouraged, and lived among his people, until God was pleased to stay' it.†

The plague was introduced into this remote district (according to Dr. Mead, who notes the circumstance in his Narrative of the Great Plague in London,) through the medium of a box of clothes sent to a tailor who resided there. The person who opened the box, from whence the imprisoned pestilence burst forth, was its first victim; and the whole of the family, with the solitary exception of one, shared the same fate. The disease spread rapidly, and almost every house was thinned by the contagion. The same roof, in many instances, sheltered at the same time both the dying and the dead. Short indeed was the space between health and sickness, and immediate the transition from the death-bed to the tomb.

These lines are from an exquisite little poem-The Desolation of Eyam,'-published in a small volume of verse by William and Mary Howitt nearly thirty years ago, when the gifted authors resided at Nottingham. The poem powerfully describes the ravages of the pestilence at Eyam, and the noble disinterestedness of its pastor.

The village has not wanted good or gifted ministers since the days of its renowned pastor. The Rev. Mr. Seward lived long here, and his accomplished daughter Anna Seward was born here, and yearly made a pilgrimage to her natal home. The Rev. P. Cunninghame succeeded Mr. Seward; he was a man of considerable poetic powers, and greatly devoted himself to bettering the condition of the cottagers around him.

Wherever symptoms of the plague appeared, so hopeless was recovery, that the dissolution of the afflicted patient was watched with anxious solicitude, that so much of the disease might be buried, and its fatal influence destroyed. In the churchyard, on the neighbouring hills, and in the fields bordering the village, graves were dug ready to receive the expiring sufferers, and the earth with an unhallowed haste was closed upon them, even whilst the limbs were yet warm.'* A clear idea of the ravages made here by this awful scourge may be gathered from the fact, that out of a population of three hundred and thirty persons who then inhabited Eyam, two hundred and fifty-nine fell victims to death.

When the pestilence first appeared, the clergyman, Mr. Mompesson, was residing here with his wife and two children. The alarmed villagers communicated the fearful fact at once to their minister and friend. After the first shock, he speedily made up his mind as to the proper course to pursue; he determined to confine the plague, if possible, to the bounds of his own parish, and to remain there with his flock, as a true pastor should, and thus literally become the priest, the physician, and the legislator of a community of sufferers.' He was at this time a young man, his wife was in her twenty-seventh year, and for her safety and for that of his two children he was deeply anxious; he therefore at once imparted the melancholy news to her, explained the determined nature of his own selfsacrifice, and urged her immediate flight with the children while life and health remained. But he addressed a spirit as bold as his own, as truly imbued with knowledge of Christian duty, as determined to act with fortitude and resignation to death. She sent her children to a temporary home of safety, but she refused to go herself; he whom she had sworn to love and cherish she would not desert in his hour of need; the marriage vow of consolatory companionship, till death doth part,' she would keep to the letter, and resolutely with Christian fortitude cast away all fear, and prepared for a duty, although it was rendered doubly repulsive by the terrors which surrounded it.

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These noble spirits by their example upheld the hopes of their poor parishioners; they flew not from their homes when their pastor showed his faith and determination; they trusted in him, and obeyed his behests;

* Rhodes's Peak Scenery, Pt. 1, 1818.