denote: 1763--John Wilkes]

One of the most beautiful places on one of the most beautiful rivers in
the world is Medmenham on the Thames, hard by Marlow. In the awakening
of spring, in the tranquillity of summer, or the rich decline of
August, the changing charm of the spot appeals with the special
insistence that association lends to nature. Medmenham is a haunted
place. Those green fields and smiling gardens have been the scenes of
the strangest idyls; those shining waters have mirrored the fairest of
frail faces; those woods have echoed to the names of the light nymphs
of town and the laughter of modish satyrs. It was once very lonely in
its loveliness, a ground remote, where men could do and did do as they
pleased unheeded and unobserved. Where now from April to October a
thousand pleasure-boats pass by, where a thousand pleasure-seekers land
and linger, a century and a half ago the spirit of solitude brooded,
and those who came there came to a calm as unvexed and as enchanting as
the calm of Avallon. They made strange uses of their exquisite
opportunity. They profaned the groves whose very winds breathed peace;
they polluted the stream that a poet would have found sacred. The
remains are there of a Cistercian abbey, the ruins of a ruin, twice
fallen into disuse and decay. It was a ruin in the eighteenth century
when a member of Parliament, who was also a baronet and a Chancellor of
the Exchequer, took it into his evil head to repair it. Under the care
of Sir Francis Dashwood it was restored for a new and altered life.
The abbey rose again, and once again was associated with a brotherhood
of monks. But where the quiet Cistercians had lived and prayed a new
{47} brotherhood of St. Francis, named after their founder, devoted
themselves to all manner of blasphemy, to all manner of offence. In a
spot whose beauty might well be expected to have only a softening
influence, whose memories might at least be found exalting, a handful
of disreputable men gathered together to degrade the place, and, as far
as that was possible, themselves, with the beastly pleasures and
beastly humors of the ingrained blackguard.

The Hell-Fire Club was dead and gone, but the spirit of the Hell-Fire
Club was alive and active. The monks of St. Francis were worthy pupils
of the principles of the Duke of Wharton. They sought to make their
profligacy, in which they strove to be unrivalled, piquant by a parody
of the religious ceremo