Bristol sailors bear no small part in the tales of English sea-daring and records of discovery. As early as 1480, Bristol merchants were sending out tall ships to search west of Ireland for "the Island of Brazil and the Seven Cities." Sixteen years later the Venetian mariner, John Cabot, probably accompanied by his son Sebastian--"shadow-seekers," the old Bristol tars would call them--had touched the coast of North America. On his return the "Great Admiral" clad himself in silk and was a notable figure in the Bristol streets. Phantasmal though it all seems in a retrospect of centuries, many are the men who have drawn the gaze in these ever-moving thoroughfares,--William Canynges, "Merchant Royal," whose trade with the north of Europe probably exceeded that of any other merchant in England; Thomas Norton, fifteenth-century alchemist and dreamer, who believed that he had discovered both the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life; Captain Thomas James, for whom James's Bay is named, he whose search for the Northwest Passage is one of the heroic chapters in the annals of the sea; the Reverend Richard Hakluyt, always deep in talk with some grizzled seaman; Captain Martin Pring, proud of the load of sassafras he had brought back from Cape Cod; Colston the philanthropist, the local saint. Mere literary folk would have been embarrassed by little enough attention as they went their quiet ways. What was Chatterton to the trading, shipbuilding, ship-lading town but a bright-eyed Blue-Coat boy? And how those hard-headed merchants would have chuckled over the eager scheme of three penniless young poets, Coleridge, Southey, and Lovell, for founding a community on the Susquehanna--a river of melodious name and delightfully far away--where no one should labour more than two hours out of the twenty-four!
I have been in Bristol several times, but I remember the workaday old city as I saw it first. It was September weather, and College Green was strewn with sallow leaves that flitted and whispered continually like memories of the past. A few fat sheep were in possession, together with a statue of Queen Victoria and a Gothic cross. On the south of the Green, once the burial-ground of the abbey, stands the cathedral, the older portion, in contrast with the new, looking black and rough and massy. The jewel of this building--which was one of the few abbey churches to profit by the Dissolution, in that Henry VIII was graciously pleased, establishing the bishopric of Bristol, to raise it to cathedral rank--is its Norman chapter-house, a rectangular chamber wonderfully enriched with stone carvings and diaper work and interlaced arcades. Among the bishops on whom the silvery lights from the Jesse window, the great east window of the choir, have fallen, are Fletcher, father of the dramatist, and Trelawney of Cornish fame. With a lingering look at the Norman archway known as College gate, whose elaborate mouldings are worn on the sea-wind side, but still distinct on the other, I crossed the Green to the Mayor's Chapel, a little Gothic church of peculiar beauty, with windows that are harmonies in glass, and with monuments, among which the burgess element is marked, so old and strange, yet so naïve and natural, that the valour, love, and grief of a far past seem but held in slumber there. If the marble figures rise and talk together on All Saints' Eve, it is a quaint but seemly assemblage.