Pointing to
the church, he indicated the place of the Byron vault. "I was the last
man," he said, "that went down into it before he was buried there. I was a
young fellow then, and curious to see what was going on. The place was
full of skulls and bones. I wish you could see my son; he's a clever lad,
only he ought to have more of the _suaviter in modo_." Thus, with the
garrulity of wandering age, he prattled on, but his mind was clear and his
memory tenacious and positive. There is a good prospect from the region of
Hucknall-Torkard Church, and pointing into the distance, when his mind had
been brought back to the subject of Byron, my aged interlocutor described,
with minute specification of road and lane,--seeming to assume that the
names and the turnings were familiar to me,--the course of the funeral
train from Nottingham to the church. "There were eleven carriages," he
said. "They didn't go to the Abbey" (meaning Newstead), "but came directly
here. There were many people to look at them. I remember all about it, and
I'm an old man--eighty-two. You're an Italian, I should say," he added. By
this time the sexton had come and unlocked the gate, and parting from Mr.
Callandyne we presently made our way into the Church of St. James, locking
the churchyard gate to exclude rough and possibly mischievous followers. A
strange and sad contrast, I thought, between this coarse, turbulent place,
by a malign destiny ordained for the grave of Byron, and that peaceful,
lovely, majestic church and precinct at Stratford-upon-Avon which enshrine
the dust of Shakespeare....

The sexton of the Church of St. James and the parish clerk of
Hucknall-Torkard was Mr. John Brown, and a man of sympathetic
intelligence, kind heart, and interesting character I found him to
be,--large, dark, stalwart, but gentle alike in manner and feeling, and
considerate of his visitor. The pilgrim to the literary shrines of England
does not always find the neighboring inhabitants either sympathetic with
his reverence or conscious of especial sanctity or interest appertaining
to the relics which they possess; but honest, manly John Brown of
Hucknall-Torkard understood both the hallowing charm of the place and the
sentiment, not to say the profound emotion, of the traveler who now beheld
for the first time the tomb of Byron. The church has been considerably
altered since Byron was buried in it, 1824, yet it retains its fundamental
structure and its ancient pecul