Kitabı oku: «From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.», sayfa 6

St. Chad, hermit and bishop, came from Ireland as an apostle to Mercia in the seventh century. Among his first converts were the king's two sons, martyred for their faith. Even in these far distant days his tradition is revered, and on Holy Thursday the choristers of the cathedral yet go in procession to St. Chad's Well, bearing green boughs and chanting. A century or so ago, the well was adorned with bright garlands for this festival. The boy Addison, whose father was Dean of Lichfield, may have gathered daffodils and primroses to give to good St. Chad.

The ancient city has other memories. Farquhar set the scene of his "Beaux' Stratagem" there. Major André knew those shaded walks. In the south transept of the cathedral is the sepulchre of Garrick, whose death, the inscription tells us, "eclipsed the gaiety of nations and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure." It may be recalled that Hawthorne found it "really pleasant" to meet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's tomb in the minster, and that Scott asserts there used to be, in "moated Lichfield's lofty pile," a monument to Marmion, whose castle stood a few miles to the southeast, at Tamworth.

But the motor-car, full-fed with gasoline, would brook no further pause. As self-important as John Hobs, the famous Tanner of Tamworth whom "not to know was to know nobody," it stormed through Uttoxeter and on, outsmelling the breweries of Burton-on-Trent. Ducks, hens, cats, dogs, babies, the aged and infirm, the halt and the blind, scuttled to left and right. Policemen glared out at it from their "motor-traps" in the hedges. A group of small boys sent a rattle of stones against it. Rocester! Only three miles away were the ruins of the Cistercian Abbey of Croxden. We would have liked to see them, if only to investigate the story that the heart of King John is buried there, for we had never before heard that he had a heart; but while we were voicing our desire we had already crossed the Dove and whizzed into Derbyshire.

Dovedale was our goal. This beautiful border district of Derby and Staffordshire abounds in literary associations. Near Ilam Hall, whose grounds are said to have suggested to Dr. Johnson the "happy valley" in "Rasselas," and in whose grotto Congreve wrote his "Old Bachelor," stands the famous Isaak Walton Inn. The patron saint of the region is the Gentle Angler, who in these "flowery meads" and by these "crystal streams" loved to

 
"see a black-bird feed her young,
Or a laverock build her nest."
 

Here he would raise his

 
"low-pitched thoughts above
Earth, or what poor mortals love."
 

On a stone at the source of the Dove, and again on the Fishing-House which has stood since 1674 "Piscatoribus sacrum," his initials are interlaced with those of his friend and fellow-fisherman Charles Cotton, the patron sinner of the locality. In Beresford Dale may be found the little cave where this gay and thriftless gentleman, author of the second part of "The Complete Angler," used to hide from his creditors. At Wootton Hall Jean Jacques Rousseau once resided for over a year, writing on his "Confessions" and amusing himself scattering through Dovedale the seeds of many of the mountain plants of France. In a cottage at Church Mayfield, Moore wrote his "Lalla Rookh," and near Colwich Abbey once stood the house in which Handel composed much of the "Messiah."

We did not see any of these spots. The automobile would none of them. It whisked about giddily half an hour, ramping into the wrong shrines and out again, disconcerting a herd of deer and a pack of young fox-hounds, and then impetuously bolted back to Uttoxeter. There were antiquities all along the way, – British barrows, Roman camps, mediæval churches, Elizabethan mansions, – but the dusty and odoriferous trail of our car was flung impartially over them all.

We shot through Uttoxeter and went whirring on. A glimpse of the hillside ruins of Chartley Castle brought a fleeting sorrow for Mary Queen of Scots. It was one of those many prisons that she knew in the bitter years between Cockermouth and Fotheringay, – the years that whitened her bright hair and twisted her with cruel rheumatism. She was harried from Carlisle in Cumberland to Bolton Castle in Yorkshire, and thence sent to Tutbury, on the Derby side of the Dove, in custody of the unlucky Earl of Shrewsbury and his keen-eyed, shrewish-tongued dame, Bess of Hardwick. But still the poor queen was shifted from one stronghold to another. Yorkshire meted out to her Elizabeth's harsh hospitality at Sheffield, Warwickshire at Coventry, Leicestershire at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Derbyshire at Wingfield Manor and Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall, even at Buxton, where she was occasionally allowed to go for the baths, and Staffordshire at Tixall and here at Chartley. It was while she was at Chartley, with Sir Amyas Paulet for her jailer, that the famous Babington conspiracy was hatched, and anything but an automobile would have stopped and searched for that stone wall in which a brewer's boy deposited the incriminating letters, read and copied every one by Walsingham before they reached the captive.

At Weston we jumped the Trent again and pounded on to Stafford, the shoemakers' town, where we came near knocking two bicyclists into a ditch. They were plain-spoken young men, and, addressing themselves to the chauffeur, they expressed an unfavourable opinion of his character. Stafford lies half-way between the two coal-fields of the county. Directly south some fifteen miles is Wolverhampton, the capital of the iron-manufacturing district. We remembered that Stafford was the birthplace of Isaak Walton, but it was too late to gain access to the old Church of St. Mary's, which has his bust in marble and, to boot, the strangest font in England. We climbed the toilsome heights of Stafford Castle for the view it was too dark to see, and then once more delivered ourselves over to the champing monster, which spun us back to Shrewsbury through a weird, infernal world flaring with tongues of fire.

THE HEART OF ENGLAND – WARWICKSHIRE

A few miles to the northwest of Coventry lies the village of Meriden, which is called the centre of England. There on a tableland is a little pool from which the water flows both west and east, on the one side reaching the Severn and the British Channel, on the other the Trent and the North Sea. "Leafy Warwickshire" is watered, as all the world knows, by the Avon. The county, though its borders show here and there a hilly fringe, and though the spurs of the Cotswolds invade it on the south, is in the main a fertile river-basin, given over to agriculture and to pasturage. The forest of Arden, that once covered the Midlands, is still suggested by rich-timbered parks and giant trees of ancient memory. On the north, Warwickshire tapers up into the Staffordshire coal-fields and puts on a manufacturing character. The great town of this district is Birmingham, capital of the hardware industries.

It was from Birmingham that we started out on our Warwickshire trip. We had but a hasty impression of a well-built, prosperous, purposeful town, but if we had known at the time what masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were to be seen in the Art Gallery we would have taken a later train than we did for Nuneaton. Here we bade farewell to railways, having decided to "post" through the county. Our automobile scamper across Staffordshire had left us with a conviction that this mode of travel was neither democratic nor becoming, – least of all adapted to a literary pilgrimage. We preferred to drive ourselves, but the English hostlers, shaking their stolid heads, preferred that we should be driven. It was only by a lucky chance that we had found, in the Lake Country, a broad-minded butcher who would trust us on short expeditions with "Toby" and a pony-cart. After all, it is easier to adapt yourself to foreign ways than to adapt them to you, and the old, traditional, respectable method of travel in England is by post. The regular rate for a victoria – which carries light luggage – and a single horse is a shilling a mile, with no charge for return, but with a considerable tip to the driver. In out-of-the-way places the rate was sometimes only ninepence a mile, but in the regions most affected by tourists it might run up to eighteenpence. So at Nuneaton we took a carriage for Coventry, a distance, with the digressions we proposed, of about twelve miles, and set out, on a fair August afternoon, to explore the George Eliot country.

Our driver looked blank at the mention of George Eliot, but brightened at the name of Mary Anne Evans. He could not locate for us, however, the school which she had attended in Nuneaton, but assured us that "Mr. Jones 'ud know." To consult this oracle we drove through a prosaic little town, dodging the flocks of sheep that were coming in for the fair, to a stationer's shop. Mr. Jones, the photographer of the neighbourhood, proved to be as well versed in George Eliot literature and George Eliot localities as he was generous in imparting his knowledge. He mapped out our course with all the concern and kindliness of a host, and practically conferred upon us the freedom of the city.

Nuneaton was as placidly engaged in making hats and ribbons as if the foot of genius had never hallowed its soil, and went its ways, regardless while we peered out at inns and residences mirrored in George Eliot's writings. The school to which Robert Evans' "little lass" used to ride in on donkeyback every morning, as the farmers' daughters ride still, is The Elms on Vicarage Street, – a plain bit of a place, with its bare walls and hard forms, to have been the scene of the awakening of that keen intelligence. We were duly shown the cloak-closet, to reach whose hooks a girl of eight or nine must have had to stand on tiptoe, the small classrooms, and the backyard that served as a playground. The educational equipment was of the simplest, – but what of that? Hamlet could have been "bounded in a nutshell," and here there was space enough for thought. A Nuneaton lady, lodging with the caretaker during the vacation, told us with a touch of quiet pride that her husband had known "Marian Evans" well in their young days, and had often walked home with her of an evening from the rectory.

As we drove away toward that rectory in Chilvers Coton, the parish adjoining Nuneaton on the south, we could almost see the little schoolgirl riding homeward on her donkey. It is Maggie Tulliver, of "The Mill on the Floss," who reveals the nature of that tragic child, "a creature full of eager and passionate longing for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away, and would not come near to her; with a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it."

Chilvers Coton, like Nuneaton, has no memories of its famous woman of letters. The only time we saw her name that afternoon was as we drove, two hours later, through a grimy colliery town where a row of posters flaunted the legend:

ASK FOR GEORGE ELIOT SAUCE

But in the Chilvers Coton church, familiar to readers of "Scenes from Clerical Life," is a window given by Mr. Isaac Evans in memory of his wife, not of his sister, with an inscription so like Tom Tulliver's way of admonishing Maggie over the shoulder that we came near resenting it:

 
"She layeth her hands to the spindle."
 

But we would not flout the domestic virtues, and still less would we begrudge Tom's wife – not without her share of shadow, for no people are so hard to live with as those who are always right – her tribute of love and honour. So with closed lips we followed the sexton out into the churchyard, past the much visited grave of "Milly Barton," past the large recumbent monument that covers the honest ashes of Robert Evans of Griff, and past so many fresh mounds that we exclaimed in dismay. Our guide, however, viewed them with a certain decorous satisfaction, and intimated that for this branch of his craft times were good in Chilvers Coton, for an epidemic was rioting among the children. "I've had twelve graves this month already," he said, "and there" – pointing to where a spade stood upright in a heap of earth – "I've got another to-day." We demurred about detaining him, with such pressure of business on his hands, but he had already led us, over briars and sunken slabs, to a stone inscribed with the name of Isaac Pearson Evans of Griff and with the text:

 
"The memory of the just is blessed."
 

As we stood there, with our attendant ghoul telling us, in rambling, gossipy fashion, what a respectable man Mr. Isaac Evans was, and how he never would have anything to do with "his sister for years, but after she married Mr. Cross he took her up again and went to her funeral," – how could we force out of mind a passage that furnishes such strange commentary on that graven line?

"Tom, indeed, was of opinion that Maggie was a silly little thing. All girls were silly… Still he was very fond of his sister, and meant always to take care of her, make her his housekeeper, and punish her when she did wrong… Tom, you perceive, was rather a Rhadamanthine personage, having more than the usual share of boy's justice in him – the justice that desires to hurt culprits as much as they deserve to be hurt, and is troubled with no doubts concerning the exact amount of their deserts."

It is in this parish of Chilvers Coton that George Eliot was born, in a quiet brown house set among laden apple-trees, as we saw it, with a bright, old-fashioned garden of dahlias, sweet peas, and hollyhocks. The place is known as South Farm or Arbury Farm, for it is on the grounds of Arbury Priory, one of the smaller monasteries that fell prey to Henry VIII, now held by the Newdigate family. We drove to it through a park of noble timber, where graceful deer were nibbling the aristocratic turf or making inquisitive researches among the rabbit warrens. Robert Evans, of Welsh origin, was a Staffordshire man. A house-builder's son, he had himself begun life as a carpenter. Adam Bede was made in his likeness. Rising to the position of forester and then to that of land agent, he was living, at the time of his daughter's birth, at Arbury Farm, in charge of the Newdigate estate. Three or four months later he removed to Griff, an old brick farmhouse standing at a little distance from the park, on the highroad. Griff House passed, in due course of time, from the occupancy of Robert Evans to that of his son, and on the latter's death, a few years ago, was converted into a Dairy School "for gentleman-farmers' daughters." Pleasant and benignant was its look that August afternoon, as it stood well back among its beautiful growth of trees, – cut-leaf birch and yellowing chestnut, Cedar of Lebanon, pine, locust, holly, oak, and yew, with a pear-tree pleached against the front wall on one side, while the other was thickly overgrown with ivy. Geraniums glowed about the door, and the mellow English sunshine lay softly over all. This was a sweet and tender setting for the figure of that ardent wonder-child, – a figure imagination could not disassociate from that of the sturdy elder brother, whose presence – if he were in affable and condescending mood – made her paradise.

"They trotted along and sat down together, with no thought that life would ever change much for them. They would only get bigger and not go to school, and it would always be like the holidays; they would always live together and be fond of each other… Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of those first years would always make part of their lives. We could never have loved this earth so well if we had had no childhood in it."

We forgave, as we lingered in that gracious scene, "the memory of the just." For all Tom's virtues, he had given Maggie, though she was her father's darling and had no lack of indulgent love about her, the best happiness of her childhood. Across the years of misunderstanding and separation she could write:

 
"But were another childhood's world my share,
I would be born a little sister there."
 

We had even a disloyal impulse of sympathy for these kinsfolk of genius, who must needs pay the price by having their inner natures laid bare before the world, but we checked it. Our worlds, little or large, are bound to say and believe something concerning us: let us be content in proportion as it approximates the truth.

Our road to Coventry ran through a mining district. Every now and then we met groups of black-faced colliers. Robert Evans must often have driven his daughter along this way, for in her early teens she was at school in the City of the Three Spires, and later on, when her widowed father resigned to his son his duties as land agent, and Griff House with them, she removed there with him to make him a new home. The house is still to be seen in Foleshill road, on the approach from the north; but here the star of George Eliot pales before a greater glory, the all-eclipsing splendour, for at Coventry we are on the borders of the Shakespeare country.

Stratford-on-Avon lies only twenty miles to the south, and what were twenty miles to the creator of Ariel and Puck? Surely his young curiosity must have brought him early to this

 
"Quaint old town of toil and trouble,
Quaint old town of art and song."
 

The noble symmetries of St. Michael's, its companion spires of Holy Trinity and Grey Friars, the narrow streets and over-jutting housetops, the timber-framed buildings, the frescoed walls and carven window-heads, all that we see to-day of the mediæval fashion he must have seen in fresher beauty, and far more; yet even then the glory of Coventry had departed. From the eleventh century, when Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and his Countess of beloved memory, the Lady Godiva, built their magnificent abbey, of which hardly a trace remains, the city had been noted for its religious edifices. Its triple-spired cathedral of St. Mary, – existing to-day in but a few foundation fragments, – its monasteries and nunneries and churches of the various orders formed an architectural group unmatched in England. Coventry was conspicuous, too, for civic virtues. As its merchants increased in riches, they lavished them freely on their queenly town. The Earl in his now crumbled castle and the Lord Abbot had hitherto divided the rule, but in 1345 came the first Mayor. It was while the Rose-red Richard sat so gaily on his rocking throne that Coventry celebrated the completion of its massive walls, three miles in circuit, with twelve gates and thirty-two towers. In the middle of the fifteenth century it received a special charter, and Henry VI declared it "the best governed city in all his realm." It was then that the famous guilds of Coventry were at their height, for its merchants had waxed wealthy in the wool trade, and its artisans were cunning at cloth-making.

As we stood in St. Mary's Hall, erected toward the end of the fourteenth century by the united fraternities known as the Holy Trinity Guild, we realised something of the devotional spirit and artistic joy of those old craftsmen. The oak roof of the Great Hall is exquisitely figured with a choir of angels playing on their divers instruments. In the kitchen —such a kitchen, with stone arches and fine old timber-work! – another angel peeps down to see that the service of spit and gridiron is decorously done. The building throughout abounds in carved panels, groined roofs, state chairs of elaborate design, heraldic insignia, portraits, grotesques, and displays a marvellous tapestry, peopled with a softly fading company of saints and bishops, kings and queens.

Among the Coventry artists, that gladsome throng of architects, painters, weavers, goldsmiths, and silversmiths who wrought so well for the adornment of their city, John Thornton is best remembered. It was he who made – so they say at Coventry – the east window of York minster, and here in St. Mary's Hall he placed superb stained glass of harmoniously blended browns. We could fancy a Stratford boy with hazel eyes intent upon it, conning the faces of those English kings to whom he was to give new life and longer reigns. Henry VI holds the centre, thus revealing the date of the window, and near him are Henry IV and Henry V, Lancastrian usurpers to whose side the partial dramatist has lured us all. It was to join their forces at Shrewsbury that he sent Falstaff marching through Coventry with his ragged regiment, whose every soldier looked like "Lazarus in the painted cloth." Richard II is conspicuous by his absence, but in writing his tragedy the young Shakespeare remembered that Coventry was the scene of the attempted trial at arms between Bolingbroke and the Duke of Norfolk. The secret cause of the combat involved the honour of Richard, and he, not daring to trust the issue, threw "his warder down," forbade the duel, and sentenced both champions to

 
"tread the stranger paths of banishment."
 

But Shakespeare's Coventry, like Shakespeare's London, was largely a city of ruins. Broken towers and desolate courts told of the ruthless sweep of the Reformation. The cloth trade, too, was falling off, and even that blue thread whose steadfast dye gave rise to the proverb "True as Coventry blue" was less in demand under Elizabeth than under Henry VIII. Yet though so much of its noble ecclesiastical architecture was defaced or overthrown, though its tide of fortune had turned, the city was lovely still, among its most charming buildings being various charitable institutions founded and endowed by wealthy citizens. That exquisite timber-and-plaster almshouse for aged women, Ford's Hospital, then almost new, may have gained in mellow tints with time, but its rich wood-work, one fretted story projecting over another like the frilled heads of antiquated dames, row above row, peering out to see what might be passing in the street beneath, must have delighted the vision then as it delights it still. I dare say Will Shakespeare, saucy lad that he was, doffed his cap and flashed a smile as reviving as a beam of sunshine at some wistful old body behind the diamond panes of her long and narrow window. For there she would have been sitting, as her successor is sitting yet, trying to be thankful for her four shillings a week, her fuel, her washing, and her doctoring, but ever, in her snug corner, dusting and rearranging the bits of things, – cups and spoons, a cushion or two, Scripture texts, – her scanty salvage from the wreck of home. That the pathos of the old faces enhances the picturesqueness of it all, those eyes so keen to read the book of human life would not have failed to note.

Coventry would have had for the seeking heart of a poet other attractions than those of architectural beauty. It was a storied city, with its treasured legend of Lady Godiva's ride – a legend not then vulgarised by the Restoration addition of Peeping Tom – and with its claim to be the birthplace of England's patron saint, the redoubtable dragon slayer. A fourteenth-century poet even asserts of St. George and his bride that they

 
"many years of joy did see;
They lived and died in Coventree."
 

It had a dim memory of some old-time slaughter – perhaps of Danes – commemorated in its play of Hock Tuesday. Coventry was, indeed, a "veray revelour" in plays and pageants, and if nothing else could have brought a long-limbed, wide-awake youth to try what his Rosalind and Celia and Orlando found so easy, a holiday escapade in the Forest of Arden, we may be all but sure the Corpus Christi Mysteries would have given the fiend the best of the argument with conscience. It is not likely, however, that it had to be a runaway adventure. That worshipful alderman, John Shakespeare, was himself of a restless disposition and passing fond of plays. He would have made little, in the years of his prosperity, of a summer-day canter to Coventry, with his small son of glowing countenance mounted on the same stout nag. Later on, when debts and lawsuits were weighing down his spirits, the father may have turned peevish and withheld both his company and his horse, but by that time young Will, grown tall and sturdy, could have trudged it, putting his enchanting tongue to use, when his legs, like Touchstone's, were weary, in winning a lift from some farmer's wain for a mile or so along the road. But by hook or by crook he would be there, laughing in his doublet-sleeve at the blunders of the "rude mechanicals" – of the tailors who were playing the Nativity and of the weavers on whose pageant platform was set forth the Presentation in the Temple. Robin Starveling the Tailor, and his donkeyship Nick Bottom the Weaver, were they not natives of Coventry? And when the truant – if truant he was – came footsore back to Stratford and acted over again in the Henley Street garden, sweet with June, the "swaggering" of the "hempen home-spuns," did not his gentle mother hide her smiles by stooping to tend her roses, while the father's lungs, despite himself, began to "crow like Chanticleer"?

Foolish city, to have kept no record of those visits of the yeoman's son, that dusty youngster with the dancing eyes! When royal personages came riding through your gates, you welcomed them with stately ceremonies and splendid gifts, with gay street pageants and gold cups full of coin. Your quills ran verse as lavishly as your pipes ran wine. You had ever a loyal welcome for poor Henry VI; and for his fiery queen, Margaret of Anjou, you must needs present, in 1456, St. Margaret slaying the dragon. Four years later, though with secret rage, you were tendering an ovation to her arch enemy and conqueror, Edward IV. Here this merry monarch kept his Christmas in 1465, and nine years later came again to help you celebrate the feast of St. George. For Prince Edward, three years old, your Mayor and Council, all robed in blue and green, turned out in 1474, while players strutted before the child's wondering eyes, while the music of harp and viol filled his ears, and the "Children of Issarell" flung flowers before his little feet. His murderer, Richard III, you received with no less elaborate festivities nine years later, when he came to see your Corpus Christi plays. But it was to you that his supplanter, Henry VII, repaired straight from the victory of Bosworth Field, and you, never Yorkist at heart, flew your banners with enthusiastic joy. His heir, Arthur, a winsome and delicate prince, you greeted with unconscious irony, four years before his death, by the blessings of the Queen of Fortune. You summoned the "Nine Orders of Angels," with a throng of "divers beautiful damsels," to welcome Henry VIII and the ill-omened Catherine of Aragon in 1510. They were sumptuously entertained at your glorious Priory, for whose destruction that graceless guest, the King, was presently to seal command. But before its day of doom it sheltered one more royal visitor of yours, the Princess Mary, who came in 1525 to see the Mercers' Pageant. In 1565, the year after Shakespeare's birth, you fêted with all splendour Queen Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, and in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, you spread the feast for King James, the first of the Stuarts. But you have forgotten your chief guest of all, the roguish youngster munching his bread and cheese in the front rank of the rabble, the heaven-crowned poet who was to be more truly king-maker than the great Warwick himself.

Our first seeing of the name of Warwick in Warwickshire was over a green-grocer's shop in Coventry. The green-grocer was all very well, but the sewing-machine factories and, worse yet, the flourishing business in bicycles and motor-cars jarred on our sixteenth-century dream. I am ashamed to confess how speedily we accomplished our Coventry sightseeing, and how early, on the day following our arrival, we took the road again. We set out in our sedate victoria with high expectations, for we had been told over and over that the route from Coventry to Warwick was "the most beautiful drive in England." For most of the distance we found it a long, straight, level avenue, bordered by large trees. There were few outlooks; clouds of dust hung in the air, and gasoline odours trailed along the way. We counted it, as a drive, almost the dullest of our forty odd, but it was good roading, and the opinion of the horse may have been more favourable.

Five miles brought us to Kenilworth, about whose stately ruins were wandering the usual summer groups of trippers and tourists. Its ivies were at their greenest and its hollies glistened with an emerald sheen, but when I had last seen the castle, in a far-away October, those hollies were yet more beautiful with gold-edged leaves and with ruby berries. Then, as now, the lofty red walls seemed to me to wear an aspect, if not of austerity, at least of courtly reserve, as if, whoever might pry and gossip, their secrets were still their own. In point of fact, the bewitchments of Sir Walter Scott have made it well-nigh impossible for any of us to bear in mind that in the ancient fortress of Kenilworth King John was wont to lurk, spinning out his spider-webs, that Simon de Montfort once exercised gay lordship here, and here, in sterner times, held Henry III and Prince Edward prisoners; that these towers witnessed the humiliation of the woful Edward II, and that in these proud halls the mirth-loving Queen Bess had been entertained by the Earl of Leicester on three several occasions prior to the famous visit of 1575. On her first coming our poet was a prattler of two – if only Mistress Shakespeare had kept a "Baby Record"! – and I am willing to admit that the event may not have interested him. When her second royal progress excited Warwickshire, he was a four-year-old, teasing his mother for fairy stories, and peeping into the acorn-cups for hidden elves, but hardly likely to have been chosen to play the part of Cupid while