X. CROSSMOUNT 417

built in the seventeenth century, no vestige remaining of Plantagenet Calais); it has no wooden houses, which mark the essential French civic style, but only brick or chalk ones, with, originally, most of them, good indented Flemish stone gables and tiled roofs. True French roofs are never tiled, but slated, and have no indented gables, but bold dormer windows rising over the front, never, in any pretty street groups of them, without very definite expression of pride. Poor little Calais had indeed nothing to be proud of, but it had a quaint look of contentment with itself on those easy terms; some dignity in its strong ramparts and drawbridge gates; and, better than dignity, real power and service in the half-mile of pier, reaching to the low-tide breakers across its field of sand.¹

¹ [In place of the brief passage “Sunset ... begun,” the MS. has the following passage:-

“I may perhaps be allowed-per amor mio, as Polissena asks, and for love of Calais also-to keep here one of the verses of the Don Juan diary of 1835, which, as we are somewhat now on the question of style, is a useful example of the steady principle I learnt from Byron of writing verse straightforward, so that it would pass into reasonable prose if the reader should be that way minded.

‘There is a monument beneath the wall

Of Calais, as you pass along the pier,-

A plain, unsculptured low memorial;

Yet pass not by it, stranger. It is dear-

A thing most precious in the sight of all

Who dwell upon the deep. There lie not here

The bones of those whose names thereon you see;

But ‘tis a tomb for such as have no tomb,

Memory of those who have no memory,

Nor even a burial place, except the gloom

And ceaseless roll of the relentless sea,

For whom no hymn was sung, except the boom

Of waves innumerable, and the roar

That their grave makes along their native shore.’

The second line would be mended by putting ‘towards’ for ‘along,’ which does not properly distinguish the pier from the quay; and I must modify the statement of the third line that the monument is ‘low’-for it is a black marble obelisk-shaped tablet. The gilded names on it are of some sailors who were drowned in trying to take the crew off a wreck; many a nameless one must have been lost since then. Of our own too memorable loss lately, in such duty-let me say from old Calais quay, that surely in England a perfect Lifeboat service might be organized of veteran sailors whose brave deaths would not leave young wives desolate, nor orphan children at the breast.”

For “per amor mio,” see “The Peace of Polissena” in Christ’s Folk, Vol. XXXII. p. 264. For the verse here quoted, see Vol. II. p. 397.]

XXXV. 2D

[Version 0.04: March 2008]