, who with the gallant and ill-fated
Surrey "preluded", in a more exact sense than it could be said of
Chaucer, "those melodious bursts that fill the spacious times of great
Elizabeth", was able to proclaim, in an epistle to "Mine own John
Poins":

[Illustration: MAIDSTONE, ALL SAINTS' CHURCH AND THE PALACE]

"I am here in Kent and Christendome,
Among the Muses where I read and rhyme".

Hither there comes, in Tennyson's "Queen Mary", to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the
younger, his man William, with news of "three thousand men on Penenden
heath all calling after you, and your worship's name heard into
Maidstone market, and your worship the first man in Kent". And Wyatt
sets out to lead a rising which will end on Tower Hill, and setting out,
looks back and cries:

"Ah, grey old castle of Allington, green field
Beside the brimming Medway, it may chance
That I shall never look upon you more".

"The brimming Medway."--the epithet is as just as Tennyson's descriptive
epithet almost invariably proves to be. For at Allington the Medway,
which from Aylesford Bridge to Allington Lock has dwindled to a narrow
stream, swells out into a broad expanse, where many boats can easily
move abreast. If the Cloisterham Weir of _Edwin Drood_ were really the
nearest weir on the Medway to Rochester, then Allington Lock would be
the place. But it has been pointed out on an earlier page that the
distances do not tally in the novel and in actuality, and Dickens may
have had in mind the weir on Snodland Brook.

The country round Maidstone abounds in the "happy valleys" portrayed in
the epilogue to the "Princess", with "grey halls alone among their
massive groves", and "here and there a rustic tower Half lost in belts
of hop and breadths of wheat". The gyres and loops of the Medway, too,
afford through the screen of woodlands and orchards "the shimmering
glimpses of a stream". To the credulous enthusiasm of an early
eighteenth-century native of Strood, that Anne Pratt who did for English
wild flowers what White of Selborne did for English wild birds,
"travellers who have beheld in other lands the various scenes of
culture--the olive grounds of Spain or Syria, the vineyards of Italy,
the cotton plantations of India, or the rose fields of the East--have
generally agreed that not one of them all equals in beauty our English
hop gardens". To Dickens himself such a panegyric of the Kentish hop
gardens would have scarcely seemed exaggerat