Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 147.djvu/254

For those who have been there, the Lincolnshirefens have a strange fascination. The miles and miles of perfectly level fields, all in a high state of cultivation, the dykes and waterways crossing the land in every direction, and the robust and resolute appearance of the people, combine to make the fen country one of the most attractive in England. An old writer of the twelfth century, Henry of Huntingdon, said, “This fennie countrie is passing rich and plenteous, yea, and beautiful to behold.” What he wrote then holds good to-day. Kingsley sang its praises in his charming “Prose Idylls”; and from time immemorial people have recorded their impressions, always deep and always fresh. Dr Stukeley, a Lincolnshire man and a true lover of the fen district, says, “It looks like the Garden of Eden in summer-time. I have often considered and admired the length and breadth and depth of their canals, the vastness of their gates and sluices. But all things necessary for the comfort of life are here in great plenty, and visitants ever go away with a better opinion of it than they bring.” It had been, as Kingsley says, ‘“in the old days haunted by millions of wild-fowl,—now and then a skein of geese paddle hastily out of sight round a mud cape, or a single cormorant flaps along close to the water towards his fishing-ground. Even the fish are shy of haunting a bottom which shifts with every storm. Innumerable shrimps are almost the only product of the shallow barren sea. Beside all is silence and desolation, as of a world waiting to be made.” This was in the far-distant past, before the arrival of the bold fenman, “the man of the marshes,” the Viking of Canute’s conquest, and the refugee of William’s conquest—the men to whose descendants, mixing with “Vermuyden’s Dutchmen,” Huguenots after St Bartholomew, and Scotch prisoners employed by Cromwell on the dykes after the battle of Dunbar, we may attribute that strong Calvinistic element which has endured for three centuries, and attribute, too, that sturdy independence and self-help which drove them of old out of Boston town to seek their fortunes, first in Holland, and then in Massachusetts. Perhaps the centre of interest is Boston, sometimes called the capital of the fems. It is distinctly a place with a history,—a history such as few English towns can boast of, and a history that has received but scant attention. Not that it teaches any extra-ordinary lessons perhaps, but there is something pathetic about it. There is a feeling of regret for the grand times when it was the third port in the kingdom (King John’s time), and ranked next after London. And there is the faint reflection of the glory of the other Boston.

We hear so much of Boston in the United States, of its culture and its commerce, and its great men, that the quiet market-town in Lincolnshire seems to be quite overlooked, and indeed neglected. It has dropped these two hundred years into a quiet, easy-going, phlegmatic sort of existence, neither increasing nor decreasing to any great extent, but pursuing an even, industrious, and, at times, prosperous course; giving vent now and